Barney's Version Read online

  The phone rang and of course it was Kate. “I tried your line maybe five times last night. The last call must have been at one o’clock. Where were you?”

  “Darling, I appreciate your concern. Honestly I do. But I’m not your child. I’m your father. I was out.”

  “You have no idea how I worry about you all alone there. What if, God forbid, you had a stroke and couldn’t come to the phone?”

  “I’m not planning on it.”

  “I was on the verge of calling Solange to ask her to see if you answered your door.”

  “Maybe I should phone you every night after I come in.”

  “Don’t worry about waking me. You could leave a message on our answering machine, if we’re asleep.”

  “Bless you, Kate, but I haven’t even had breakfast yet. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Tonight. Are you having fried eggs and bacon in spite of your promise?”

  “Stewed prunes. Muesli.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet.”

  I’m rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life and, to come clean, there are only insults to avenge and injuries to nurse. Furthermore, at my age, with more to remember and sort out than there is to look forward to, beyond the infirmaries waiting in the tall grass, I’m entitled to ramble. This sorry attempt at — at — you know, my story. Like Waugh wrote about his early years. Or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Or Mark Twain in that Life on the what’s-it-called River book. Christ Almighty, I soon won’t even be able to remember my own name.

  You strain spaghetti with a colander. Mary McCarthy wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit or Shirt. Whichever. Walter “Turk” Broda was the goalie for the Toronto Maple Leaf team that won the Stanley Cup in 1951. Stephen Sondheim it was who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story. I’ve got it. I didn’t have to look it up. The Mississippi, Life on.

  To recap. This sorry attempt at autobiography, triggered by Terry McIver’s calumnies, is being written in the dim hope that Miriam, reading these pages, will be overwhelmed by guilt.

  “What’s that book you’re so absorbed in?” asks Blair.

  “Why, this critically acclaimed best-seller is the autobiography of my one true love, you inadequate little shmuck on tenure.”

  Where was I? Paris 1951 is where. Terry McIver. Boogie. Leo. Clara, of blessed memory. Nowadays when I open a newspaper I turn to the Dow Jones first and then to the obits, checking the latter page for enemies I have outlasted and icons no longer among the quick.

  Nineteen ninety-five got off to a bad start for boozers. Peter Cook and a raging Colonel John Osborne both gone.

  Nineteen fifty-one. Quemoy and Matsu, if anybody can find those pimples on the China Sea now,17 were being shelled by the Commies, a prelude, according to some, to an invasion of what was then still called Formosa. Back in America everybody was still scared by The Bomb. Something of a jackdaw, I still own the Bantam paperback of How to Survive an Atomic Bomb:

  Written in question-and-answer form by a leading expert, this book will tell you how to protect yourself and your family in case of atomic attack. There is no “scare talk” in this book. Reading it will actually make you feel better.

  Rotarians were digging A-bomb fall-out shelters in their backyards, laying in supplies of bottled water, dehydrated soups, sacks of rice, and their collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books and Pat Boone records18 to help while away the contaminated weeks. Senator Joe McCarthy and his two stooges, Cohn and Schein, were on a rampage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were for it, and just about everybody liked Ike for ’52. In not-yet-querulous Canada Inc., instead of a prime minister we were being managed by an avuncular CEO, Louis St. Laurent. In Quebec, my cherished Quebec, the thuggish Maurice Duplessis was still premier, riding herd over a gang of thieves.

  Mornings, waking late, our bunch could usually be found at the Café Sélect or the Mabillon, gathered at the table where Boogie a.k.a. Bernard Moscovitch presided, reading the International Herald-Tribune, starting with Pogo and the sports pages, monitoring how Duke Snider and Willie Mays had performed the night before. But Terry never joined us. If Terry was to be seen at a café table, he would be seated alone, annotating his Everyman’s Library edition of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Or scribbling a rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre’s lead essay in the latest issue of Les Temps modernes. Even in those days Terry appeared not to be worried that, as MacNeice put it,19 “not all the candidates pass.” No sir. Terry McIver was already sitting for his portrait as the handsome young artist fulfilling his manifest destiny. He was intolerant of frivolity. A rebuke to the rest of us, time-wasters that we were.

  One evening, strolling down the boulevard St-Germain-des-Prés, bound for a bottle party Terry hadn’t been invited to, I caught a glimpse of him maybe half a block ahead, slowing his pace, hoping I’d ask him to join us. So I stopped to look at the books in the window of La Hune, until he faded into the distance. Late another night, a far from sober Boogie and I, ambling down the boulevard Montparnasse, searching café terraces for friends from whom we might cadge a drink or a roach, came upon Terry at the Café Sélect, writing in one of his notebooks. “I’ll bet you ten to one,” I said, “that the covers of his notebooks are numbered and dated out of consideration for future scholars.”

  Terry, a man of daunting integrity, naturally took a dim view of Boogie. For a much-needed five hundred dollars, Boogie had churned out a steamy novel for Maurice Girodias’s Traveller’s Companion Series. Vanessa’s Pussy was dedicated to the unquestionably constant wife of the Columbia professor who had failed Boogie in a course on Elizabethan poetry. The dedication read:

  To the lubricious Vanessa Holt,

  in fond memory of priapic nights past

  Boogie had thoughtfully sent copies of Vanessa’s Pussy to his professor and Columbia’s arts-faculty dean, as well as to the editors of The New York Times Book Review and the book pages of the New York Herald-Tribune. But it is difficult to know what any of them made of it because Boogie had written the novel under a pseudonym: Baron Claus von Manheim. A disdainful Terry returned his complimentary copy unread. “Writing,” he said, “is not a job, it’s a calling.”

  Be that as it may, such was the success of Vanessa’s Pussy that Boogie was promptly commissioned to deliver more. The rest of us, eager to help out, gathered at the Café Royal St-Germain, long since displaced by Le Drugstore, to improvise sexual epiphanies that could be savoured in a gym, underwater, or taking advantage of all the artifacts available in an equestrian’s tack room or a rabbi’s study. Terry, naturally, eschewed these late-night seminars, appalled by our salacious laughter.

  Boogie’s second Traveller’s Companion opus, by the Marquis Louis de Bonséjour, proved him to be a man ahead of his time, a literary innovator, who intuited karaoke, interactive TV, computer porn, CD-Roms, Internet, and other contemporary plagues. The virile hero of Scarlet Lace, blessed with monstrous equipage, went unnamed, which is not to say he was anonymous. Instead, wherever his name should have appeared, there was a blank space, enabling the reader to fill in his own name, even as one of his gorgeous, sex-inflamed conquests, enjoying multiple orgasms, called out, “———, you wonderful man,” in gratitude.

  It was Clara, a compulsive dirty-talker, who contributed the most imaginative but outlandish pornographic ideas to Boogie, which was surprising, considering what I then took to be her problems. We had, by this juncture, begun to live together, not as a consequence of any deliberate choice on our part but having casually slipped into it, which is the way things were in those days.

  Put plainly, what happened is that late one night Clara — suffering from le cafard, she said — announced that she simply couldn’t face her hotel room again, because it was haunted by a poltergeist. “You know that hotel was a Wehrmacht brothel during the war,” she said. “It must be the spirit of the girl who died there, fucked God knows how many times through every possible orifice.” Then, only after she had harvested sym
pathetic looks from the rest of us at the table, did she giggle and add, “Lucky thing.”

  “Where will you sleep, then?” I asked.

  “Bite your tongue,” said Boogie.

  “On a bench at the Gare de Montparnasse. Or under the Pont Neuf. The only clocharde in town who graduated magna cum laude from Vassar.”

  So I took her back to my room, where we passed a celibate night, Clara sleeping fitfully in my arms. In the morning she asked me to be a sweetheart and fetch her canvases and drawings and notebooks and suitcases from Le Grand Hôtel Excelsior on the rue Cujas, assuring me that I would have to tolerate her only for a couple of nights, until she found a more agreeable hotel. “I’d come along to help you,” she said, “but Madame Defarge,” which is what she called the concierge, “hates me.”

  Boogie grudgingly agreed to accompany me to the hotel. “I hope you know what you’re getting into,” he said.

  “It’s only for a couple of nights.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  “And you?”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  Drugs is what we were talking about. Boogie had graduated from hashish to horse. “We should try everything,” he said. “Kvetchy Jewish princesses before they go home to marry doctors. Arab boys in Marrakesh. Black chicks. Opium. Absinthe. The mandrake root. Magic mushrooms. Stuffed derma. Halvah. Everything on the table and under. We only get to go around the block once. Except for Clara, of course.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Miss Chambers of Gramercy Park and Newport is into reincarnation. It comes with her trust fund. Didn’t you know that much about her?”

  Clara’s things included, among other items, a two-volume edition of The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, a water pipe, a dictionary of Satanism, a stuffed owl, several volumes on astrology, palmistry charts, a deck of tarot cards, and a framed portrait of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666, wearing the headdress of Horus. But the concierge wouldn’t let us remove anything until I had paid her 4,200 francs in overdue rent. “Money disgusts me,” said Clara. “Yours. Mine. It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth talking about.”

  It would be inaccurate to describe Clara as tall. Long is what she was. Skinny enough for a rib count. Her hands constantly in movement, adjusting her shawls, smoothing her skirts, brushing back her hair, peeling the labels off wine bottles. Her fingers were nicotine-and ink-stained, her nails broken or bitten to the quick. Ears the shape of teacup handles protruded from her hair — “It’s the colour of shit,” she said. “I hate it” — that cascaded to her narrow waist. She had only the faintest of eyebrows, her huge black eyes lit with intelligence. And scorn. And panic. She was sickly pale, which she emphasized by applying full moons of rouge to her cheeks and by wearing orange, green, or purple lipstick, depending on her mood. Her breasts, she felt, were too full for her figure. “With jugs like these,” she said, “I could nurse triplets.” She complained that her legs were too long and scrawny, and her feet too large. But for all her disparaging remarks about her appearance, she could never pass a café mirror without pausing to admire herself. Oh, her rings. I forgot to mention her rings. A topaz. A blue sapphire. And, her favourite, an ankh.

  Years before it became modish, Clara wore loose, beaded, ankle-length Victorian dresses and high-button shoes, retrieved from the flea market. She also draped herself in shawls, the colours often conflicting, which struck me as odd, considering she was a painter. Boogie dubbed her “The Conversation Piece,” as in “Sauve qui peut. Here comes Barney and The Conversation Piece.” And, to come clean, I enjoyed that. Couldn’t write. Didn’t paint. And even then I was not a likeable man. Already a sour, judgmental presence. But suddenly I had acquired a distinction of sorts. I had become an intriguing fellow. I was nutty Clara’s keeper.

  Clara was a compulsive toucher, which annoyed me once we had begun to live together. She was given to collapsing into laughter against other men’s chests at café tables, stroking their knees. “If Grouchy wasn’t here with me, we could go somewhere and fuck now.”

  Memory test. Quick, Barney. Names of the Seven Dwarfs. Grouchy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc. I know the names of the other three. Got them right just last night. They’ll come to me. I’m not going to look them up.

  Clara especially enjoyed teasing Terry McIver, which I approved of heartily. Ditto Cedric Richardson, long before he won celebrity as Ismail ben Yussef, scourge of Jewish slave-traders past and slumlords present, and nemesis of ice-people everywhere.

  Keeping track of what became of everybody is what sustains me in my dotage. It’s amazing. Mind-boggling. The scheming Leo Bishinsky coining millions with his japes on canvas. Clara, who despised other women, enjoying posthumous fame as a feminist martyr. Me, stricken with limited notoriety as the chauvinist pig who betrayed her, a possible murderer to boot. The unspeakably boring novels of Terry McIver, that pathological liar, now on university courses throughout Canada. And my once-beloved Boogie out there somewhere, bruised beyond belief, unforgiving, fulminating. He had picked up my copy of Rabbit, Run, and, startling me, said, “I can’t believe you read such shit.”

  Grouchy, Sneezy, Soc … Snoopy? No, you idiot. That’s the dog in Pogo. I mean Peanuts.

  Onwards. These days I come across an account of Ismail ben Yussef’s latest pronouncement to be quoted in Time and instead of being outraged I find myself chuckling at the photograph of Cedric sporting a fez, dreadlocks, and a caftan coloured like a rainbow. Once, I actually wrote him a letter.

  Salaam, Ismail:

  I am writing to you on behalf of The Elders of Zion Foundation. We are raising money to establish mugging fellowships for black brothers and sisters in everlasting memory of three young bloodsucker kikes (Chaney,20 Goodman, and Schwerner), who ventured into Mississippi in 1964 to register black voters and, as a consequence, were murdered by a gang of ice-people. I trust we can count on your contribution.

  Possibly you could also help me with a philosophical conundrum. I happen to agree with Louis Farrakhan’s aperçu that the ancient Egyptians were black. As further evidence, let me cite Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Anticipating Sheik Anta Diop’s claim that civilization’s cradle was black, he wrote of the Sphinx: “ … its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s … [and] the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect … the lips are thick …”

  But, holy cow, if the ancient Egyptians were black, then so was Moses, a prince in Pharaoh’s court. And then it follows that the slaves whom Moses liberated were also black, or he would have stuck out like the proverbial “n—— in the woodpile,” and the notoriously contrary Israelites would have complained, “Listen here, have we sunk so low that we’re going to wander through a desert for forty years led in circles by a shvartzer?”

  So, assuming that Moses and his tribe were black, what perplexes me is that when the undeniably eloquent Farrakhan denounces my people, is it possible that, unbeknownst to him, he is in fact just another self-hating Jew, like Philip Roth?

  I look forward to your reply, bro, not to mention your cheque, and enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

  Allah Akbar!

  Your old friend and admirer

  BARNEY PANOFSKY

  I’m still waiting for a reply.

  (Rereading this old letter of mine recently, I suffered one of my frequent attacks of spiritual voice-mail: Miriam, my conscience, tripping me up again.)

  If I could turn the clock back, it would be to those days when Miriam and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We made love in the woods and on a kitchen chair, after quitting a tedious dinner party early, and on hotel-room floors and trains, and once we were nearly caught at it in a bathroom at the Sha’ar Hashomayim synagogue at one of Irv Nussbaum’s fund-raising dinners. “You could have been excommunicated,” she said. “Just like Spinoza.”

  One memorable afternoon, we did it on my office carpet. Miriam had arrived unexpectedly, comin
g straight from her obstetrician, pronounced fit, six weeks after she had given birth to Saul. She locked the door, shed her blouse, and stepped out of her skirt. “I was told that this is where you audition actresses.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said, simulating shock, “what if my wife happens to drop by?”

  “I am not only your wife,” she said, tugging at my belt, “and the mother of your children. I’m also your whore.”

  Bliss was it to be alive when we would be wakened by children in their pyjamas tumbling helter-skelter into our bedroom and leaping onto the bed.

  “Mommy’s got nothing on.”

  “Neither has Daddy.”

  How could I have failed to pick up the early distress signals, rare as they were? Once, on her return from what I had hoped would be a fun dinner with her former CBC Radio producer, Kip Horgan, that meddling bastard, she seemed distracted. She began to straighten picture frames on the walls and plump up sofa cushions, always a bad sign. “Kip’s disappointed in me,” she said. “He thought I’d never settle for being a housewife.”

  “That’s not what you are.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t you get upset now.”

  “Let’s go to New York for the weekend.”

  “Saul is still running a fever —”

  “Ninety-nine and a sixteenth?”

  “— and you promised to take Mike to the hockey game on Saturday night.” Then, out of nowhere, she added, “If you’re going to leave me, I’d rather you did it now, before I’m old.”

  “Can I have ten minutes to pack?”

  Later, we worked out that Kate was probably conceived that night. Damn damn damn. If Miriam’s gone, it is surely due to my insensitivity. Mea culpa. All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgments. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself. And now, my letter to Cedric in hand, I could hear her say, “Sometimes what you find funny is actually nasty, calculated to wound.”