Barney's Version (26 page)

But I was, and remain, anathema to the quality. Fortunately, they are few in number in Montreal.

The Borensteins attend the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, every summer, and I was once seated not too far from them in The Church restaurant. Mrs. Borenstein was flushed, and I'm willing to swear the old man, his hand under the table, was flirting with his wife of something like fifty years. I summoned the waiter and asked him to send them a bottle of Dom Perignon, but only after I had left, and not to say where it came from. Then I strolled out into the rain, feeling deeply sorry for myself and cursing Miriam who had abandoned me.

I dislike most people I have ever met, but not nearly so much as I am disgusted by the Rt. Dishonourable Barney Panofsky. Miriam understood. Once, following an all-too-characteristic drunken rage on my part, which led, inevitably, to my seeking sustenance from a bottle of Macallan, she said, “You hate those
TV
shows you produce, and you're filled with contempt for just about everybody who works on them. Why don't you give it up before it gives you cancer?”

“And what would I do then? I'm not even fifty yet.”

“Open a bookshop.”

“That wouldn't keep me in Havanas and
XO
cognac and first-class travel to Europe for the two of us. Or pay college fees. Or leave anything for the children.”

“I don't want to end my days with a sour old man, full of regrets for a wasted life.”

And, in the end, she didn't, did she? Instead, she is wasting herself on Herr Doktor Professor Save-the-Whales, Stop-the-Seal-Hunt, Wipe-Only-With-Recycled-Paper, Hopper né Hauptman, who has dropped the second “n” in his original family name lest people discover he was related to the Lindbergh kidnapper, and possibly even Adolf Eichmann, if you scrutinized his family history.

Enough.

Dr. Borenstein is the subject of today's sermon. Given that he is a gentleman of impeccable taste, imagine my consternation when I saw him, and Mrs. Borenstein, sitting in the fourth row for Terry McIver's reading from
Of Time and Fevers
in the Leacock Auditorium last Wednesday night. I had to be there, hiding in the last row. I hadn't heard that pretentious fraud read from his work since that disastrous evening, on the other side of the moon, in George Whitman's bookshop. But what was such a cultured couple doing there among all those CanCult groupies?

Terry was introduced by Professor Lucas Bellamy, author of
Northern Rites: Essays on Culture and Place in Post-Colonial Canada
, who began his halting, ten-minute panegyric by saying Terry McIver needed no introduction. Terry's prizes were cited. The Governor General's Award for Literature. The Canadian Authors' Association Medal of Merit. His Order of Canada. “And,” the professor concluded, “if there is any justice, the Nobel Prize in the not-too-distant future. For the truth is, if Terry McIver weren't a Canadian he would be internationally celebrated instead of overlooked by the cultural imperialists in New York and the snobs who rule the London literary roost.”

Before launching into the reading, Terry announced that he had, along with a number of other writers, endorsed a statement opposing
the use of clear-cutting and supporting the protection of British Columbia's Clayoquot Sound. Clear-cut logging, he said, led to species loss. It was estimated that one hundred species a day go extinct because of human impact on the environment, which also contributes to global warming — a prospect I would have thought was to be welcomed as a blessing in our country. “Biodiversity is our living legacy,” he proclaimed to applause, and then he asked everybody to sign a petition that the ushers would pass around. I had come with Solange, my regular companion now, who would soon be joining me in the pensioners' ranks, but continued to wear short dresses more appropriate to a woman of Chantal's age. I feared they made her look foolish, which grieved me, as I held her in such high regard, but I didn't dare say a word. Solange had done me proud as a
TV
director, but still longed to be on camera, playing romantic leads. I didn't allow her to stay on for the book signing, hurrying her out of the hall and taking her to dinner at L'Express. “Why did you sign that dumb petition they were passing around?” I asked.

“It wasn't dumb. Animal life
is
threatened everywhere.”

“Yours and mine, too. But you know something? You're right. I worry, in particular, about the possible loss of hyenas, jackals, cockroaches, deadly snakes, and sewer rats.”

“Couldn't you wait until I finished my dinner?”

“What if, due to our negligence, they all went the way of the dinosaurs?”

“Like you?” she asked, and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate.
Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't
.

“Hello, hello, I'm still here,” said Solange, waving her hand in front of my face.

“Are you going to buy his book?”

“Yes.”

“But Solange, my dear, there are no pictures.”

“If this is going to be one of your endearing all-actresses-are-idiots nights, go ahead, be my guest.”

“Sorry. I shouldn't have said that. You see, I knew McIver in Paris and have seen something of him since.”

“But you've already told me that more than once,” she said, troubled.

“We don't like each other.”

“What are you most jealous of, Barney, his talent or his good looks?”

“Oh, you are clever. But that will require some thought. Now, tell me, speaking as a
bona fide
pepper, a
pure laine
frog, probably descended from
les filles du roi
, how are you going to vote in the referendum?”

“I'm seriously thinking of voting Yes this time. There are some in the
PQ
who are really racist, which is abhorrent to me, but for more than a hundred years this country has exhausted itself, and been held back trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Of course it's risky, and it won't be easy, but why shouldn't we have our own country?”

“Because it would destroy mine. Your ancestors were stupid. They should have sold Quebec and kept Louisiana.”

“Barney, you're a mess. Drinking the way you do at your age. Pretending that Miriam will come back.”

“And what about you? After all these years you still haven't thrown out Roger's clothes. That's sick, you know.”

“Chantal says your behaviour in the office is more objectionable than ever. People dread the days you turn up. And Barney,” she said, reaching for my lizardy hand, “you're coming to a time of life when it could be dangerous for you to be living alone.”

“What's eating you, Solange? Spit it out.”

“Chantal says that last Thursday you dictated a letter to be sent to Amigos Three and when you came in on Monday you dictated the same letter all over again.”

“So I was forgetful once. I was probably hung over.”

“More than once.”

“Morty Herscovitch checks me out once a year. I'm shrinking, he says. If I live to be ninety, you'll be able to carry me around in your handbag.”

“Chantal and I have talked it over, and should your health deteriorate you can always move in with us. We'll close off a section of the
apartment with a steel mesh fence, the way people do for pet dogs they carry in the back of their station wagons. And we'll throw you the occasional latke.”

“I'll move in with Kate first.”

“Don't you dare even think of that, you bastard. She's had her troubles and now she's happily married. The last thing in the world she needs is you.”

“It would be foolish of you to vote Yes. I don't want you to do it.”

“You don't want me to? How dare you! What would you do if you were young and French Canadian?”

“Why, I'd vote Yes, of course. But neither of us is young and stupid any more.”

When I dropped her off at her apartment on Côte-des-Neiges, Solange lingered at the car door. “Please don't carry on drinking now. Go straight home to bed.”

“That's exactly what I'm going to do.”

“Oh, sure, and you're willing to swear to it on the heads of your grandchildren.”

“Honestly, Solange.”

But, unable to face my empty apartment, my bed without Miriam, I drove on to Jumbo's, hoping to run into Maître John Hughes-McNoughton, or Zack. Instead, I was lumbered with Sean O'Hearne, who settled heavily on to the bar stool next to mine, his eyes bright with drunken malice. “Bring Mr. P. a drink,” he said, between wheezes.

“You know something, Sean? I've been looking for you. Got something that might interest you.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“Your guys dug up my garden, you sent divers down into the lake again and again, you took samples of everything in the cottage, looking for traces of blood, just like you'd seen cops do on
TV
. But, dimwit that you are, you never asked how come my chainsaw was missing.”

“Bullshit. You never had one, Mr. P. Because if there was any hard labour to be done on your estate, you hired goys like me to do it. That's how it's always been with your lot.”

“Then how come there was an empty hook on my garage wall?”

“Empty hook, my ass. You can't take the piss out of me, Mr. P.”

“What if I told you I went through a trunk of old tax papers in the cottage last weekend and found a bill for one chainsaw, dated July 4, 1959?”

“I'd say you were a fucken liar.”

The others in the bar were watching the late news on
TV
. The daily referendum round-up. They guffawed when The Weasel filled the screen, indulging in death-rattle jokes that were now the common lot of Anglophones.

“So where is that chainsaw now?”

“Where I dropped it. Four hundred feet deep somewhere, rusting, and of no use to you after all these years.”

“You trying to tell me you had the guts to cut him up?”

“Sean, now that you're so thick with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, why don't you marry her? I'll continue the alimony payments. I'm even willing to provide a dowry.”

“No way a guy like you could butcher a man. And there was no blood anywhere. So stop fucking with me, asshole.”

“Sure there was no blood, because I could have butchered him far out in the woods. Don't forget I had a day alone at the cottage before you pricks had the good sense to charge me.”

“You've got a sick sense of humour, you know that, Mr. P.? Hey, look, there he is. Their fucken saviour.”

It was a seething Dollard Redux who was filling the screen now. Don't be intimidated by threats, he said. No matter what they say today, after a Yes vote the rest of Canada will come to the table on bended knees.

“I suppose,” said O'Hearne, “that you and the rest of your tribe will be moving to Toronto the day after. But what about guys like me? Stuck here.”

“As a matter of fact, I'm now thinking of voting Yes myself.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.”

“For more than a hundred years this country has been held back trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Are you prepared for another century of adolescent bickering, or should we settle the matter once and for all?”

I still wasn't ready to contend with my bed without Miriam, so I left my car where it was, turned my coat collar up against the punishing wind, a harbinger of the six months of winter to come, and began to wander the once-vibrant downtown streets of the dying city I still cherished. Past boarded up stores. Signs in foundering Crescent Street boutiques that read
CLOSING DOWN SALE
or
EVERYTHING MUST GO
. Squatters had appropriated the crumbling building that had once been the art-deco York Theatre. Some lout had spray-painted
FUCK YOU, ENGLISH
on the window of a second-hand bookshop. Every lamp-post on St. Catherine Street was adorned with both
OUI
and
NON
placards. Scruffy, shivering teenagers with sleeping-bags were camped outside the Forum, where the tickets would go on sale in the morning for a Bon Jovi concert. A greasy, bearded old man, wild-eyed, muttering to himself, and wheeling a supermarket cart before him, was rummaging through a wastebin, searching for empty cans that could be redeemed. A plump rat skittered out of the lane behind an Indian restaurant.

MacBarney hath murdered sleep.

Back in my bed, I tried one remedy after another, unavailingly. Tonight when I reached for Mrs. Ogilvy, sliding my hands under her sweater, attempting to unhook her filigreed bra, she whacked me a good one across the face. “How dare you,” she said.

“Then why did you rub your tits against my back in the kitchen?”

“Why, I never. Do you think I'm so frustrated, a ravishing woman like me — getting it every afternoon in the gym from Mr. Stuart, Mr. Kent, and Mr. Abercorn, though not necessarily in that order — that I'd stoop to seducing a little Jeanne Mance jewboy wanker with dirty fingernails?”

“You left your bedroom door open.”

“Yes. And you couldn't control your bladder even then. Had to make peepee. Only fourteen years old and already suffering from prostate problems. Probably cancer.”

And still sleep wouldn't come. So I set the spool of my life on rewind, editing out embarrassments, reshooting them in my mind's eye … and that Monday afternoon in 1952 as I entered my hotel on the rue de Nesle, the concierge rapped on her cubicle window, slid
open the glass, and sang out:
“Il y a un pneumatique pour vous, Monsieur Panofsky.”

Clara was expecting me for dinner. Well, why not? I stopped at the nearest Nicolas and bought a bottle of St. Émilion, a favourite of hers. Discovering her in a deep sleep on our bed, an empty bottle of sleeping-pills on the floor, I immediately propped her upright, supporting her, walking her up and down, until the ambulance came. After they had pumped out her stomach, I sat by her bedside, stroking her hand. “You saved my life,” she said.