Barney's Version Read online

  “Why don’t you fly over and haunt our house for a while?”

  “Because in the London I remember best the obligatory first course in even the most stylish restaurant was grey-brown Windsor soup, or a grapefruit with a maraschino cherry sitting in the middle like a nipple, and most of the people I used to hang out with there are dead now, and about time too. Harrods has become a Eurotrash temple. Everywhere you turn in Knightsbridge there are rich Japs shooting movies of each other. The White Elephant is kaput, so is Isow’s, and L’Étoile ain’t what it used to be. I have no interest in who’s banging Di or whether Charles is reincarnated as a tampon. The pubs are intolerable, what with those noisy slot-machines and pounding jungle music. And too many of our people there are something else. If they’ve been to Oxford or Cambridge, or earn more than a hundred thousand pounds a year, they are no longer Jewish, but ‘of Jewish descent,’ which is not quite the same thing.”

  I’ve never really been rooted in London, but I was once there in the fifties for three months, and another time in 1961 for a stay of two, missing the Stanley Cup playoffs. Mind you, that was the year the heavily favoured Canadiens were eliminated in six games, in the semifinals, by the Chicago Black Hawks. I still wish I had caught the second game, in Chicago, which the Hawks won 2–1, after fifty-two minutes of overtime. That was the night referee Dalton McArthur, that officious bastard, penalized Dickie Moore, in overtime, for tripping, enabling Murray Balfour to pot the winning goal. An outraged Toe Blake, then our coach, charged onto the ice to bop McArthur one, and was fined $2,000. I had flown over to London in ’61 to work on that co-production with Hymie Mintzbaum that led to such a nasty fight, resulting in our being estranged for years. Hymie, born and bred in the Bronx, is an Anglophile, but not me.

  You simply can’t trust the British. With Americans (or Canadians, for that matter) what you see is what you get. But settle into your seat on a 749 flying out of Heathrow next to an ostensibly boring old Englishman with wobbly chins, the acquired stammer, obviously something in the City, intent on his Times crossword puzzle, and don’t you dare patronize him. Mr. Milquetoast, actually a judo black belt, was probably parachuted into the Dordogne in 1943, blew up a train or two, and survived the Gestapo cells by concentrating on what would become the definitive translation of Gilgamesh from the Sin-Leqi-Inninni; and now — his garment bag stuffed with his wife’s most alluring cocktail dresses and lingerie — he is no doubt bound for the annual convention of cross-dressers in Saskatoon.

  Once again Mike told me that I could have their garden flat. Private. With my own entrance. And how wonderfully dreadful it would be for his children, who had adored Friday the 13th, to get to know their grandfather. But I hate being a grandfather. It’s indecent. In my mind’s eye, I’m still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I’ve been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I’m no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.

  On one of my recent annual visits to Mike and Caroline, I arrived laden with gifts for my grandchildren and Her Ladyship (as Saul, my second-born son, has dubbed her), my pièce de résistance reserved for Mike: a box of Cohibas, acquired for me in Cuba. It pained me to part with those cigars, but I hoped it would please Mike, with whom I had a difficult relationship, and it did delight him. Or so I thought. But a month later one of Mike’s associates, Tony Haines, who also happened to be a cousin of Caroline’s, was in Montreal on a business trip. He phoned to say he had a gift from Mike, a side of smoked salmon from Fortnum’s. I invited him to meet me for drinks at Dink’s. Pulling out his cigar case, Tony offered me a Cohiba. “Oh, wonderful,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me. They were a birthday gift from Mike and Caroline.”

  “Oh, really,” I said, lumbered with another family grievance to nurse. Or cherish, according to Miriam. “Some people collect stamps, or bookmatch covers,” she once said, “but with you, my darling, it’s grievances.”

  On that visit Mike and Caroline settled me into an upstairs bedroom, everything mod, from Conran or The General Trading Company. A bouquet of freesias and a bottle of Perrier on my bedside table, but no ashtray. Opening the bedside-table drawer, searching for something I could use, I blundered on a pair of torn pantyhose. Sniffing them, I recognized the scent at once. Miriam’s. She and Blair had shared this bed, contaminating it. Yanking back the sheets, I searched the mattress for tell-tale stains. Nothing. Har, har, har. Professor Limp Prick couldn’t cut the mustard. Herr Doktor Hopper né Hauptman probably read aloud to her in bed instead. His deconstructionist pensées on Mark Twain’s racism. Or Hemingway’s homophobia. All the same, I retrieved a canister of pine spray from the bathroom and fumigated the mattress, and then remade the bed after a fashion before climbing back into it. Now the sheets were riding up on me, a maddening tangle. The room stank of pine scent. I opened a window wide. Freezing cold it was. An abandoned husband, I was obviously destined to perish of pneumonia in a bed once graced by Miriam’s warmth. Her beauty. Her treachery. Well now, women of her age, suffering hot flushes and confusions, sometimes unaccountably begin to shoplift. If she were arrested, I would refuse to be a character witness. No, I would testify that she had always been light-fingered. Let her rot in the slammer. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire.

  Mike, bless him, is filthy rich, which he atones for by still wearing his hair in a ponytail and favouring blue jeans (Polo Ralph Lauren’s, mind you), but, happily, no earrings. Or Nehru jackets any longer. Or Mao caps. He’s a property baron. Owner of some choice houses in Highgate, Hampstead, Swiss Cottage, Islington, and Chelsea, which he accumulated before inflation hit, and converted into flats. He’s also into some things offshore, which I’d rather not know about, and deals in commodity futures. He and Caroline live in modish Fulham, which I remember before the DIY-trained yuppies invaded. They also own a dacha high in the hills of the Alpes-Maritimes, not far from Vence, a vineyard running down its slopes. In three generations, from the shtetl to the makers of Château Panofsky. What can I say?

  Mike is a partner in a restaurant for the smart set. It’s in Pimlico, called The Table, the chef ruder than he is talented, which is de rigueur these days, isn’t it? Too young to remember Pearl Harbor, or what happened to the Canadians taken prisoner at — at — you know, that impregnable outpost in the Far East. Not the one where the dawn comes up like thunder, no, but the place where the Sassoons struck it rich. Singapore? No. The place like the name of the gorilla in that film with Fay Wray. Kong. Hong Kong. And, look, I know that Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and I remember who wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Came to me unbidden. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was written by Frederic Wakeman8 and the movie starred Clark Gable and Sydney Greenstreet.

  Anyway, too young to remember Pearl Harbor, Mike invested heavily in the Japanese market in the early days and dumped everything at the propitious moment. He rode gold through the OPEC scare, whipping his stake past the finishing line, doubling it, and made another killing speculating in sterling in 1992. He had bet on Bill Gates before anybody had heard of E-mail.

  Yes, my first-born son is a multimillionaire with both a social and a cultural conscience. He’s a member of a trendy theatre board, a promoter of in-your-face plays wherein top people’s leggy daughters feel free to pretend to shit on stage and RADA guys simulate bum-fucking with abandon. Ars longa, vita brevis. He’s one of the more than two hundred backers of the monthly Red Pepper magazine (“feminist, antiracist, environmentalist, and internationalist”); and, not without a redeeming sense of humour, he has added my name to the subscription list. The most recent issue of Red Pepper includes a full-page ad, an appeal for donations by London Lighthouse, which features a photograph of a sickly young woman, her staring eyes rimmed with dark circles, looking into a hand-held mirror.

  “SHE TOLD HER HUSBAND THAT SHE WAS HIV+. HE TOOK IT BADLY
.”

  What was the poor bastard supposed to do? Take her to dinner at The Ivy to celebrate?

  In any event, as Mr. Bellow has already noted, more die of heartbreak. Or lung cancer, speaking as a prime candidate.

  True, Mike shops for shiitake mushrooms, Japanese seaweed, Nishiki rice, and shiromiso soup at Harvey Nichols’ Food Hall, but, emerging on Sloane Street, he always remembers to buy a copy of The Big Issue from the bum lurking there. He owns an art gallery in Fulham that has proven itself, as it were, having twice been charged with obscenity. He and Caroline make a point of buying works by as-yet-unknown painters and sculptors who are, in Mike’s parlance, “on the cutting edge.” My up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art son is into gangsta rap, information highways (as distinct from libraries), “dissing,” quality time, Internet, all things cool, and every other speech cliché peculiar to his generation. Mike has never read The Iliad, Gibbon, Stendhal, Swift, Dr. Johnson, George Eliot, or any other now-discredited Eurocentric bigot, but there isn’t an overpraised “visible minority” new novelist or poet whose book he hasn’t ordered from Hatchard’s. I’ll wager he never stood for an hour contemplating Velásquez’s portrait of that royal family,9 you know the one I mean, in the Prado, but invite him to a vernissage that promises a crucifix floating in piss or a harpoon sticking out of a woman’s bleeding arsehole, and he’s there with his chequebook. “Oh,” I said, determined to keep our transatlantic phone call going, “I don’t mean to pry, but I do hope you’ve spoken to your sister recently.”

  “Watch it. You’re beginning to sound just like Mom.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “There’s no point in phoning Kate. She’s either just rushing out, or in the middle of a dinner party, and can’t talk now.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Kate.”

  “Come on, Dad. As far as you’re concerned, she can do no wrong. She was always your favourite.”

  “That’s not true,” I lied.

  “But Saul phoned yesterday to ask what I thought of his latest diatribe in that neo-fascist rag he writes for. Hell, it had only arrived in that morning’s mail. He’s incredible, really. It took him fifteen minutes to bring me up to date on his imaginary health problems and work difficulties, and then to denounce me as a champagne socialist and Caroline as a penny-pincher. Who’s he living with these days, may I ask?”

  “Hey, I see the British are up in arms, because calves are being shipped to France, where they’re confined to crates instead of being booked into the Crillon. Has Caroline joined the demos?”

  “You can do better than that, Dad. But do come and see us soon,” said Mike, his voice stiffening, and I guessed that Caroline had just floated into the room, glancing pointedly at her wristwatch, unaware that I was paying for the phone call.

  “Sure,” I said, hanging up, disgusted with myself.

  Why couldn’t I have told him how much I love him, and what pleasure he has given me over the years?

  What if this were to be our last conversation?

  “But death, you know,” wrote Samuel Johnson to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “hears not supplications, nor pays any regard to the convenience of mortals.”

  And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

  2

  We have all read too much in literary journals about the unjustly neglected novelist, but seldom a word about the justly neglected, the scratch players, brandishing their little distinctions, à la Terry McIver. A translation into Icelandic, or an appearance at a Commonwealth arts festival in Auckland (featuring a few “writers of pallor,” as the new nomenclature has it, as well as an affirmative-action mélange of Maori, Inuit, and Amerindian good spellers). But, after all these years as a flunk, my old friend and latter-day nemesis has acquired a small but vociferous following, CanLit apparatchiks to the fore. That scumbag is ubiquitous in Canada these days, pontificating on TV and radio, giving public readings everywhere.

  It was through that self-promoting bastard’s father, who is also traduced in Of Time and Fevers, that I met Terry in the first place. Mr. McIver, sole prop. of The Spartacus Bookshop on St. Catherine Street West, was the most admirable, if innocent, of men. A scrawny Scot, bred in the Gorbals, he was the illegitimate son of a laundry woman and a Clydeside welder who fell at the Somme. Mr. McIver would urge books on me by Howard Fast, Jack London, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Edgar Snow, and the Russian, you know, Lenin’s laureate, what’s-his-name? Anathema to Solzhenitsyn. Come on, Barney. You know it. There was a splendid movie made in Russia about his memoirs of childhood. Hell, it’s on the tip of my tongue. First name Max — no, Maxim — surname like a goyische pickle. Maxim Cornichon? Don’t be ridiculous. Maxim Gherkin? Forget it. Gorky. Maxim Gorky.

  Anyway, the bookshop had to be negotiated like a maze, towering stacks of second-hand books here, there, and everywhere, that could be sent tumbling if you didn’t mind your elbows, as you followed Mr. McIver’s slapping slippers into the back room. His sanctuary. Where he sat at his roll-top desk, elbows peeking out of his ancient, unravelling cardigan, conducting seminars on the evils of capitalism, serving students toast and strawberry jam and milky tea. If they couldn’t afford the latest Algren or Graham Greene, or that first novel by that young American, Norman Mailer, he would lend them a brand-new copy, providing they promised to return it unsoiled. Students demonstrated their gratitude by pilfering books on their way out and selling them back to him the following week. One or two even dipped into his cash register, or stiffed him with a bad cheque for ten or twenty dollars, never turning up at the bookshop again. “So you’re going to Paris,” he said to me.

  “Yes.”

  This, inevitably, led to a lecture on the Paris Commune. Doomed, like the Spartacist League in Berlin. “Would you mind taking a parcel to my son?” he asked.

  “Of course not.”

  I went to pick it up at the McIvers’ airless, overheated apartment that evening.

  “A couple of shirts,” said Mr. McIver. “A sweater Mrs. McIver knitted for him. Six tins of sockeye salmon. A carton of Player’s Mild. Things like that. Terry wants to be a novelist, but …”

  “But?”

  “But who doesn’t?”

  When he retreated to the kitchen to put on the tea kettle, Mrs. McIver handed me an envelope. “For Terence,” she whispered.

  I found McIver in a small hotel on the rue Jacob and, amazingly, we actually got off to a promising start. He flipped the parcel onto his unmade bed, but slit open the envelope immediately. “You know how she earned this money?” he asked, seething. “These forty-eight dollars?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Babysitting. Coaching backward kids in algebra or French grammar. Do you know anybody here, Barney?”

  “I’ve been here for three days and you’re the first person I’ve talked to.”

  “Meet me at the Mabillon at six and I’ll introduce you to some people.”

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Meet me downstairs, then. Hold on a minute. Does my father still run those ad hoc symposiums for students who laugh behind his back?”

  “Some are fond of him.”

  “He’s a fool. Eager for me to be a failure. Like him. See you later.”

  Naturally I was sent an advance copy of Of Time and Fevers, compliments of the author. I’ve struggled through it twice now, marking the blatant lies and most offensive passages, and this morning I phoned my lawyer, Maître John Hughes-McNoughton. “Can I sue somebody for libel who has accused me, in print, of being a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence, and probably a murderer as well?”

  “Sounds like he got things just about right, I’d say.”

  No sooner did I hang up than Irv Nussbaum, United Jewish Appeal capo di tutti capi, phoned. “Seen this morning’s Gazette? Terrific news. Big-time drug lawyer was shot dead in his Jaguar, outside his mansion on Sunnyside last night, and it’s splashed
all over the front page. He’s Jewish, thank God. Name’s Larry Bercovitch. Today’s going to be a hummer. I’m sitting here going through my pledge cards.”

  Next, Mike rang with one of his hot stock-market tips. I don’t know where my son gets his inside market information, but back in 1989 he tracked me down at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I was in Hollywood at the time for one of those television festivals, where they even have an award, rather than an electric chair in place, for the director of the “most brilliant” commercial. I had not come in quest of prizes but in search of markets for my rubbish. Mike said, “Buy Time shares.”

  “No ‘hello.’ No ‘How are you, Daddy dear?’ ”

  “Phone your broker as soon as I hang up.”

  “I can’t even read that magazine any more. Why should I invest in it?”

  “Will you please do as I say?”

  I did, and bastard that I am, I was already anticipating the satisfaction I would squeeze out of dropping my bundle and blaming him for it. But a month later both Warner and Paramount pounced, the shares more than doubling in value.

  I’m running ahead of myself. Filling my peddler’s office that evening in Beverly Hills, I was obliged to take two functionally illiterate NBC-TV executives to dinner at La Scala; and mindful of Miriam’s parting admonition, I was resolved to be civil. “You should send somebody else to L.A.,” she had said, “because you’re bound to end up having too much to drink and insulting everybody.” And now, into my third Laphroaig, I espied Hymie Mintzbaum at another table with a bimbo young enough to be his granddaughter. Following that brawl in London, whenever Hymie and I ran into each other here or there over the years, at the international stations of the show-business Cross (Ma Maison, Elaine’s, The Ivy, L’Ami Louis, et cetera, et cetera), we acknowledged each other’s presence with no more than a nod. I would occasionally see him, accompanied by a fawning starlet wannabe, and pick up his gravelly voice drifting over tables in one restaurant or another. “As Hemingway once said to me …” or “Marilyn was far more intelligent than most people realized, but Arthur wasn’t right for her.”