Barney's Version (22 page)

Obviously some hanky-panky had been anticipated, because my bride died wearing her most alluring, all-but-diaphanous, black chiffon nightgown, a gift from me. There was no note. I poured myself a huge vodka, gulped it down straight, and then called the police and the American embassy. Clara's body was removed to be stored in the morgue until Mr. and Mrs. Chambers of Gramercy Park and Newport could fly over to take possession.

On my return to the Hôtel de Nesle, the concierge rapped on the window of her tiny cubicle and slid open the slot. “Ah, Monsieur Panofsky.”

“Oui.”

A thousand apologies. A
pneumatique
had come for me on Wednesday, but she had forgotten to tell me. It was from Clara, insisting that I come to dinner. It was important that we “talk.” I sat down on the stairs and wept.

Finally practical considerations intruded. Could a suicide, even an unintended one, be buried in a Protestant cemetery? I had no idea.

Damn damn damn.

Then I remembered the story, possibly apocryphal, that Boogie had told me about Heine. Even as he lay on his deathbed, wasted, in a morphine-induced trance, a friend urged him to make his peace with God. Heine is supposed to have replied, “
Dieu me pardonnera. C'est son métier
.”

But I didn't count on it in my case. Still don't.

Tossing and turning in bed last night, I was finally able to conjure up the luscious Mrs. Ogilvy of cherished memory, in a stimulating fantasy of my own invention.

Here's how it goes:

An outraged Mrs. O. rebukes me in front of the class, clipping me on the head with a rolled copy of
The Illustrated London News
. “You will report to me in the medical room immediately after classes.”

A visit to the dreaded, tiny medical room, equipped with a cot, usually means a strapping. Ten of the best on each hand. I turn up promptly at 3:35 p.m. and a seemingly irate Mrs. Ogilvy locks the door behind me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demands.

“I don't know why I'm here. Honestly.”

She slashes the cellophane wrapper off a package of Player's Mild with a flick of a long red fingernail, pulls out a cigarette, and lights up. She exhales. She rids her lips of a tobacco particle with a slow movement of her wet tongue, and then glares at me. “I sat down on my desk top and began to read aloud the opening pages of
Tom Brown's School Days
, and that's when you dropped your pencil on the floor, accidentally on purpose, so that you could peek up my skirt.”

“That's not true.”

“Then, as if that weren't sufficiently disgusting on your part, you began to rub your roger right in the middle of my
Highroads to Reading
class.”

“I did not, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

“I swear,” she says, flinging her cigarette to the floor and rubbing her heel into it, “I shall never grow accustomed to how they persist in overheating rooms in the dominions.” She unbuttons her blouse and sheds it. She is wearing a filigreed black bra. “Come here, boy.”

“Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

“And you're absolutely bursting with filthy thoughts right this very minute.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, yes you are, young man. The proof's in the pudding.” And she undoes the buttons of my fly and reaches inside for me with
incredibly cool fingers. “Just look at your roger now. Obviously you have no respect for your social superiors. Are you ashamed, Barney?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”

She continues to rake me with those long red fingernails and I start to leak just a little.

“Now if this were a lolly,” she says, “I might be tempted to give it a darling little lick. Oh well, waste not, want not.” She clears the crown with a flick of her tongue, and immediately another little blob bubbles out. “Oh dear,” says Mrs. Ogilvy, regarding me severely, “we don't want the train to leave the station prematurely, do we?” Then she steps out of her skirt and panties. “I want you to now rub that against me right down here.
Mais, attendez un instant, s'il vous plaît
. The motion should not be from side to side, but up and down, actually.”

I attempt to oblige.

“You haven't got it quite right yet, damn you. Like you were having trouble striking a match. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly she begins to shudder. And then, grabbing me by the back of the head, she lowers both of us on to the cot. “Now you can pop it inside me, like a good boy, and up and down you ride. Like a piston. Ready! Steady! Go!”

Actually these three pages represent my first and only attempt at writing fiction, my brief creative flowering prompted by Boogie, who was convinced I was capable of churning out what our bunch used to call a
DB
³¹
for the Traveller's Companion Series. Boogie wheeled me into Maurice Girodias's office on the rue de Nesle one afternoon. “You are looking at the next Marcus Van Heller,” he said. “He's got two terrific ideas. One is called
Teacher's Pet
,” he said, improvising, “and the other
The Rabbi's Daughter
.”

Girodias was intrigued. “I'll have to see twenty pages before I can commission you,” he said. But I never got beyond page three.

I lingered late in bed this morning until I was wakened by the postman.

Registered letter.

I can count on hearing from The Second Mrs. Panofsky by registered mail at least twice a year: once, on the anniversary of Boogie's disappearance, and again, today, on the anniversary of my discharge by the court, adjudged innocent, but guilty as hell in her mind. This morning's missive was admirably succinct for a change. It read in its entirety:

Inevitably, I run into The Second Mrs. Panofsky from time to time. Once I caught sight of her in the lingerie department of Holt Renfrew, where I like to browse. On another occasion, at the takeout counter in The Brown Derby, where she was loading up on sufficient quantities of kishka, roast brisket, chopped liver, and potato salad to feed a bar mitzvah party, but which I knew was for herself alone. Most recently, I encountered her in the Ritz dining room, where, to jump ahead in my story, I had taken Ms. Morgan to dinner, if only to continue our discussion of those committed, possibly not irretrievably, to the Sapphic persuasion. The Second Mrs. Panofsky was with her cousin, the notary, and his wife. Her own plate wiped clean of gravy with chunks of bread, she now picked up her fork and began to spear morsels of meat and potatoes off their plates. She glared at us, of course, taking note of the bottle of Dom Perignon floating in a bucket at our tableside. Their bill settled, she contrived to pass by our table, where she stopped, smiled menacingly at Ms. Morgan, then turned to me and inquired, “And how are your grandchildren these days?”

“Don't look back,” I said, “or you might turn into a pillar of salt.”

The Second Mrs. Panofsky, while never svelte, even as a bride, but once pleasingly
zaftig
to give her her due, had taken long ago to
alleviating her continuing sorrow at the table. Out of necessity, she now wears tentlike caftans to accommodate a girth that would do credit to a sumo wrestler. She walks with difficulty, breathing hard, favouring a cane. She puts me in mind of Garrick's description of Sam Johnson's Tetty at fifty: “ … very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected in both her speech and general behaviour.” I'm told she has few friends left, but does enjoy an intimate relationship with her
TV
set. I like to visualize her in the Hampstead mansion I paid for, supine on the sofa, devouring Belgian chocolates out of a bucket as she watches one soap opera or another, dozing before she settles into dinner, using a shovel rather than a knife and fork, and then sinking to the sofa again before her
TV
set.

At breakfast, I dutifully went through
The Gazette
and
The Globe and Mail
, doing my best to keep up with the comedy we're living through in Canada's one and only “distinct society.”

Such is the panic here these days that those prescient, young, middle-class Jewish couples who decamped to Toronto in the eighties, escaping not only endless tribal hassle but also overbearing, intrusive parents, are now at risk. Many of them are getting urgent phone calls from their ageing mamas and papas. “Herky, I know she isn't crazy about us, your wonderful wife, the shopper, but thank God you have that spare bedroom, because we're moving in next Wednesday until we can find an apartment in your neighbourhood. Remember, Mama can't stand rock music, you'll have to speak to your children, God bless them, and if you must smoke while we're there, it will have to be on the back porch. But we won't get in anybody's way. Herky, are you there? Herky, say something.”

The latest opinion polls indicating a dead heat in the referendum, Dink's now reverberates with whistling-past-the-graveyard banter. One of the regulars, Cy Tepperman, a clothing manufacturer, anticipating a boycott of his goods in the rest of Canada, has said, “I'm seriously thinking of having ‘Made in Ontario' labels sewn into my jeans,
just in case those bastards win.” The
Gazette
columnist Zack Keeler can be counted on, as usual, for puerile jokes. “Have you heard that the Newfies are for the Yes side? They think it will take two and a half hours less to drive to Ontario if Quebec separates.”

Ms. Morgan, of “Dykes on Mikes,” told me on the morning of her first visit to my apartment that she intended to vote in favour of independence. “They're entitled to their own country. They
do
form a distinct society.”

“I could take you to lunch.”

“You're old enough to be my grandfather.”

“Next question, please.”

“Had the baby Clara miscarried been born white, would you still have abandoned her?”

“Divorced her, you mean. Well now, that's an interesting question. I might have been foolish enough to think it was mine.”

“But you are deeply prejudiced against Afro-Americans.”

“The hell I am.”

“I have been in touch with Ismail ben Yussef, whom you knew under his slave name, Cedric Richardson, and he claims you have taken to sending him abusive letters.”

“I'm willing to swear on the heads of my grandchildren that he's lying.”

She reached into a folder and passed me a Xerox of a letter, which was an appeal on behalf of something called The Elders of Zion Foundation to establish mugging fellowships for black brothers. “This is absolutely disgraceful,” I said. “It's in the worst possible taste.”

“But isn't that your signature at the bottom of the page?”

“No.”

She sighed heavily.

“For years now Terry McIver — that racist — that
misogynist
— has been sending people abusive letters and signing my name to them.”

“Come off it.”

“And if you want respectable men not to stare at your charming bosom, why don't you wear a bra, so that your nipples don't protrude. It's disconcerting, to say the least.”

“Now look here, Mr. Panofsky, I've already been pinched or grabbed by enough men tripping on penis power, so cut out the funny stuff right now. The reason why gay women frighten you is because you are terrified of what this would mean to the quote, normal, unquote patriarchal, authoritarian system based on women's submission to men.”

“I don't mean to pry,” I said, “but what do your parents think about your being a lesbian?”

“I prefer to think of myself as a humansexual.”

“Then we have something in common.”

“Did you agree to this interview just to poke fun at me?”

“Why don't we continue this discussion at lunch?”

“You can go straight to hell,” she said, gathering her things together. “If not for you, Clara would be alive today. Terry McIver told me that.”

Paris 1952. Grudgingly surfacing from yet another vodka stupor only a few days after Clara's death, unsure of my whereabouts, it seemed that I was being summoned by something between a scratching and a knocking at my door, wherever it was. Go away, I thought. But the knocker persisted. Boogie again, perhaps. Or Yossel. My well-intentioned nurses. Go away, I thought, turning to the wall.

“Mr. Panofsky. Mr. Panofsky, please,” pleaded a voice unfamiliar to me. A supplicant's voice.

“Fuck off, whoever you are. I'm not well.”

“Please,” came the whiny voice again. “I will stand here until you open the door.”

Five p.m. I rose from the sofa, broken springs twanging, stumbled into the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. Maybe it was somebody who wanted to take the apartment off my hands. I had advertised it in the
International Herald-Tribune
. So I hastily gathered up soiled laundry, empty bottles, and plates with uneaten frankfurters or egg remnants on them, and dumped them into the nearest drawer.
Careful not to trip over packed cartons containing her things, I opened the door to a small, tubby stranger, with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke beard, wearing horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his sad brown spaniel's eyes. I took him to be in his early fifties. He wore a woollen winter coat with a Persian lamb collar and a homburg, which he promptly removed to reveal a black yarmulke fastened to his flowing grey hair with a bobby pin. His coat was unbuttoned and I saw that the fat of his tie had been neatly rent with scissors. “What do you want here?” I asked.

“What do I want here? But I'm Charnofsky,” he said. “Chaim Charnofsky,” he repeated, as if that explained everything.