Barney's Version (17 page)

Hello, hello. Reb Leo Bishinsky is in the news again.
MOMA
is mounting a retrospective, which will next travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, world-class at last. Leo's photograph in
The Globe and Mail
reveals that he now wears a rug — made out of his collection of the pubic-hairs-of-celebrated-models, from the look of it. He is bare-chested, beaming, embraced by his twenty-two-year-old mistress, a veritable Barbie doll, her arms entwined round his huge, hairy, pastrami-barrel belly. I miss Leo. I really do. “Before I start work in the morning,” Leo confided to the
Globe
's reporter, “I venture out into the surrounding woods and listen to the trees.”

The
Globe
's page three yields even richer ore.

Forget Abelard and Héloïse. Never mind Romeo and Juliet. Or Chuck and Di. Or Michael Jackson and the Beverly Hills orthodontist's number-one son. This morning's
Globe
offers an all-Ontario twisteroo on such poignant tales of romance. A guy named Walton Sue got married yesterday, thereby, according to the
Globe
's reporter, “adding another act to the almost Shakespearean tale of love, money, and family feuding in which he and his wife have been cast as unlikely protagonists.” Walton Sue, who has been physically and mentally disabled since he was hit by a car fifteen years ago, has now married wheelchair-bound Ms. Maria DeSousa, who suffers from cerebral palsy. They were wed in a “secret” ceremony in Toronto's Old City Hall courthouse attended by more media than family, wrote the
Globe
reporter.

Sue's problem was that his father, who strongly objected to the marriage, controlled his $245,000 settlement from the accident. But the day before yesterday a lawyer had Sue declared incapable of
managing his property, thus shifting control of the money to the Public Guardian and Trustees of Ontario, which enabled Sue and Ms. DeSousa to move into an apartment for the disabled.

I'm not poking fun at this couple, to whom I wish a hearty
mazel tov
. My point is that I think being mentally disabled gives Sue a better shot at a happy marriage than I ever had, and I speak as a veteran who has struck out three times. The last time wed to a woman “whom age cannot wither, nor custom stale,”
²⁴
but who ultimately adjudged me unworthy of her, which was an understatement. Miriam, Miriam, my heart's desire.

Were my first wife still alive, I would invite her, The Second Mrs. Panofsky, and Miriam to a bang-up lunch at Le Mas des Oliviers — a symposium on the conjugal failings of Barney Panofsky, Esquire. Cynic, philanderer, boozer, player piano. And murderer as well, perhaps.

Le Mas des Oliviers, my favourite restaurant here, provides proof that this troubled, divided city still has its redeeming values. Its salvation, the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers. In Montreal they do not jog or nibble a quick salad after their noonday squash game, a disease money-driven Toronto suffers from. Instead, they congregate at Le Mas for three-hour lunches, digging into generous portions of
côtes d'agneau
or
boudins
, washed down with bottles of St. Julien, followed by calls for cognac and cigars. This is where contending lawyers, and judges as well, meet to settle their disputes amicably, but only after they have regaled each other with the day's most salacious gossip. There are more mistresses than wives to be seen. The Tory party's Québécois godfather accepts tributes at his usual table, his manner munificent. Provincial cabinet ministers who can render fat highway contracts to the deserving hear out supplicants at other tables. I sometimes frequent the Jewish sinners' round table, Irv Nussbaum presiding, my transgressions forgiven, or mentioned only in the hope of provoking laughter.

I brought Boogie here the day before I wedded The Second Mrs. Panofsky.

Boogie, had he survived until now, would be seventy-two years old, possibly still wrestling with that first novel that was going to astonish the world. That's rotten of me. Vengeful. But years have passed since I expected he would ring my doorbell, if not tomorrow then the day after. “Have you read Lovecraft?”

Long gone are the nights when I would waken with a start at four a.m. to drive out to my cottage on the lake on a crazed hunch. Banging open the front door, shouting Boogie's name, unavailingly, and then retreating to the dock, staring into the waters where I had last seen him.

“I met him only that one time, at your wedding,” Miriam once said, “and I'm sorry to say I thought he was pathetic. Don't look at me like that, please.”

“I'm not.”

“I know we've been through what happened that last day on the lake a hundred times. But I still feel you're holding something back. Did the two of you quarrel?”

“No. Certainly not.”

The pleasures of my cherished cottage in the mountains, some seventy miles north of Montreal, have diminished somewhat over the years. True, after they put in the six-lane Laurentian Autoroute in the sixties, it took me an hour, rather than the best of two, to reach it. But unfortunately the autoroute has also made the lake accessible to commuters, as well as the computer-literate who maintain offices in their cottages. Peeling off the autoroute, I no longer approach my retreat on a treacherous loggers' road, gearing down for protruding rocks and avoiding the deepest holes, my scraped muffler system in need of annual renewal. I don't regret the fallen trees that sometimes blocked my path, but I do miss the risky one-lane wooden bridge over the Chokecherry River, its rushing waters menacingly high during the spring run-off. It was displaced long ago by a proper steel-and-concrete bridge. And the loggers' road, widened in the late fifties, is now paved and ploughed in winter. We have also benefited from political progress. This jewel of a lake, which I still think of as Lake Amherst, was renamed Lac Marquette in the seventies by the Commission de Toponymie, which is in charge of cleansing
la belle province
of the conqueror's place-names. And where once only
canoes and sailboats could be seen on a twenty-three-mile lake, our summers are now polluted by flotillas of powerboats and water-skiers. Fighter planes from the
NATO
base in Plattsburgh sometimes pass overhead, rattling windows. We also suffer the occasional transatlantic jumbo jet on a flight path for Mirabel airport and there are three tycoons who fly in for weekends in their own little seaplanes. But back in the old days I recall our then-pristine waters disturbed only once by an airplane. It was one of those damn water bombers that were being tested in 1959, I think it was, and it roared in on the lake, gulping up God knows how many tons of water, and lifted off to drop its load on some distant mountain. Why, when I first came out here there were only five cottages on the lake, including mine, but they now number more than seventy. To my amusement, I have come to fill the quaintsy office of the old codger of the lake, invited to neighbours' cottages to regale their children with tales about the days when the speckled trout were plentiful and we were without electricity or telephones, never mind cable
TV
or satellite dishes.

I stumbled on my Yasnaya Polyana by accident. Invited out to a friend's cottage on another lake one weekend, back in 1955, I took a wrong turn and found myself on a loggers' road that came to an abrupt stop at what appeared to be an abandoned lodge high on a hill overlooking the lake. There was a FOR SALE sign with an agent's name banged into a post on the sinking porch. The front door was locked and the windows were boarded up, but I managed to pry one open and climb inside, scattering squirrels and field mice. The lodge, I discovered, had been built as a fishing retreat by a Bostonian in 1935, and had been on the market for ten years, which didn't surprise me, considering the appalling shape it was in. But I was smitten on first sight, and acquired it, and the surrounding ten acres of meadow and woods, for an astonishingly cheap ten thousand dollars. For the next four years, I camped out there in a sleeping-bag just about every weekend in summer, making do with paraffin lamps and delicatessen, mouse traps laid down everywhere, quarrelling with the slo-mo local contractors who were making it habitable. I installed a gas generator in my third year, but didn't get round to having the cottage winterized, or putting up the outbuildings and boat-house until Miriam and I were
married. I maintain the elaborate tree-house, where the kids used to play, to this day. For my grandchildren, perhaps.

Agitated, I now began to stride up and down my living-room floor. Somebody was coming to interview me at eleven, but I could no longer remember who. Or why. I had left myself a Post-it note, but now I couldn't find it. Yesterday, seated in my Volvo, preparing to turn into Decarie, I was suddenly at a loss as to how to gear down to third. Pulling over to the curb, I rested, then rammed the clutch home, and practised shifting gears.

Wait. I've got it. The young woman coming to see me is the hostess of “Dykes on Mikes,” on McGill University's student radio, and is working on a Ph.D. thesis about Clara. This will not mark the first time I have been interrogated about her. There have been visits, or letters of inquiry, from feminists as far afield as Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Cape Town, and that city in Germany where Hitler led the march on Parliament. You know, the British prime minister with the umbrella was there. Peace in our time is what he promised. Damn damn damn. It's the city where they have the famous beer festival. Pilsner? Molson's? No. It sounds like the name of the little people in
The Wizard of Oz
. Or like that painting
The Shout
²⁵
by … by Munch.
Munich
. Anyway, my point is, the martyred Saint Clara's admirers are legion, and have two things in common: they take me for an abomination and fail to understand that Clara intensely disliked other women, whom she considered rivals for the male attention she thrived on.

Hanging over my mantelpiece to this day is one of Clara's overcrowded, tortured pen-and-ink drawings. It depicts a gang-rape of virgins. An orgy. Gargoyles and goblins at play. The chortling satyr drawn in my image clutches a nude Clara by the hair. She is on her knees and I am forcing myself into her open mouth, taking advantage of her scream. I have been offered as much as $250,000 for this charming tableau, but nothing could make me part with it. Appearances to the contrary, I'm really a sentimental old coot.

And now I prepared myself for a visit from what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed a feminazi. Probably wearing a nose-stud and nipple-rings
and knuckle-dusters. A German army
WWII
helmet. Shit-kicker boots. Instead, I opened my door to an awfully demure young thing, a mere wisp of a girl, chestnut hair not crewcut but flowing, smiling sweetly she was, wearing granny glasses, a Laura Ashley dress, and dainty pumps. She immediately endeared herself to me by admiring the photographs of tap-dance immortals which line my walls: Willy “Pickaninny” Coven, creator of the Rhythm Waltz; Peg Leg Bates, caught in mid-flight; The Nicholas Brothers, of Cotton Club fame; Ralph Brown; the young James, Gene, and Fred Kelly in their bellhop uniforms, photographed at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1920; and, of course, the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, shown wearing his top hat, white tie, and tails,
circa
1932. Ms. Morgan set up her tape recorder and produced a sheaf of questions, softening me up with the usual — “How did you meet Clara?” “What attracted you to her?” et cetera et cetera — before she fired her first missile. “In all the accounts I have read, it seems that you were indifferent to Clara's great gifts as a poet and a painter, and did nothing to encourage her.”

Amused, I tried to get a rise out of Ms. Morgan. “Let me remind you of what Marike de Klerk, wife of South Africa's former prime minister, once said in church: ‘Women are unimportant. We're here to serve, to heal the wounds, to give love —' ”

“Oh, you're such a card,” she said.

“ ‘If a woman inspires a man to be good,' said Madame de Klerk, ‘he is good.' Let's say, if only for argument's sake, that Clara failed to fill that office.”

“And you failed Clara?”

“What happened was inevitable.”

Clara was terrified of fire. “We live on the fifth floor,” she said. “We wouldn't have a chance.” Unexpected knocks on our hotel-room door made her freeze, so friends learned to announce themselves first. “It's Leo,” or “It's the Boogieman. Put all your valuables into a bag and pass them through the door.” Rich food made her vomit. She suffered from insomnia. But, given sufficient wine, she would sleep, a mixed blessing because that prompted nightmares from which she would waken trembling. She didn't trust strangers and was even more suspicious of friends. She was allergic to shellfish, eggs, animal fur,
dust, and anybody indifferent to her presence. Her periods brought on headaches, cramps, nausea, and vile temper. She endured lengthy attacks of eczema. She kept a plugged earthenware jug under our window, a bellarmino, filled with her own urine and fingernail clippings, to throw back evil spells. She feared cats. Heights scared her. Thunder petrified her. She was frightened of water, snakes, spiders, and other people.