Barney's Version (27 page)

“Your hero.”

“Yes.”

Then her putrefying corpse floated up at me, the eye sockets empty, worms feeding on her bosom, and Cantor Charnofsky pounded on my door again. “You going to piss in bed at your age?” he asked.

Roused, I recognized it was time for one of my pinch-it-trickle-and-shake-it pees, and then padded back to bed.

Four-thirty a.m. Sinking, my eyes lit with joy at the sight of Boogie looming large before me. “I knew you'd turn up eventually,” I said, “but where have you been all these years?”

“Petra. New Delhi. Samarra. Babylon. Papua. Alexandria. Transylvania.”

“I can't begin to tell you the trouble you've caused me. Never mind. Miriam, the Boogieman is here. Would you set another place at the table, please?”

“How can I? I don't live here any more. I left you.”

“No, you didn't.”

“Don't you remember?”

“
You're spoiling my dream
.”

Then I made a bad turn. And The Second Mrs. Panofsky intruded. Running for her Honda again, tears flying, shrieking, “What are you going to do?”

“I'm going to kill him is what I'm going to do.”

O Lord, I have so much to answer for, but not yet. Please, pretty please.

Which is when the phone began to ring. Ring and ring and ring.
Something bad has happened. Miriam. The kids
. But it was a tearful
Solange. “Serge has been beaten up by a bunch of goddamn gaybashers.”

“Oh, no.”

“He was cruising in Parc Lafontaine. He needs stitches. I think his arm is broken.”

“Where is he?”

“Here.”

“Why isn't Peter looking after him?”

Peter, a talented set designer, was Serge Lacroix's companion. They shared a converted loft in Old Montreal, and I joined them there for dinner on occasion. Walls painted purple. Mirrors everywhere. I don't know how many Persian cats on the prowl.

“If Peter had been here, this never would have happened. He's on a film location in British Columbia.”

“I'm coming right over.” I hung up and dialled Morty Herscovitch's home number. “Morty, I'm sorry to waken you, but my ace director has been hurt in an accident. I'm going to take him to the General, but I don't want him waiting in emergency for two hours, only to be finally looked at by some intern who hasn't been to sleep for the last thirty-six hours.”

“Not the General. I'll meet you at the Queen Elizabeth in half an hour.”

Rather than drive, I took a taxi to Solange's apartment. Serge's scalp was torn, his swollen left eye was all but closed, and he was cradling a clearly broken wrist.

“What were you doing whoring in that park at your age? You know how dangerous it is.”

“I thought you came here to be helpful,” said Solange.

Morty, who was waiting for us at the Queen Elizabeth, sewed eighteen stitches into his scalp, had him
X
-rayed, and attended to his wrist cast. Then he took me aside. “I want him to have a blood test while he's here, but he says no.”

“Leave it to me.”

Later I took Solange and Serge back to my apartment. I put Serge to bed in my spare bedroom. “Now are you going to be a good boy or do I have to lock my bedroom door before I go to sleep?”

He smiled and squeezed my hand, and I retreated to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of champagne for Solange. “I want you to stop fooling around with Chantal,” she said.

“You're imagining things.”

“She doesn't understand what a hooligan you are. And she is easily hurt.”

I opened the fridge. “We have a choice. There's a tub of chopped liver. I could heat up some kasha knishes. Or I could grudgingly share this tin of caviar with you.”

Shades of Mrs. Ogilvy.

Story in this morning's
Gazette
about a pretty music teacher in Manchester, now forty-one years old, who has been charged, twelve years after the fact, with seducing boys, aged thirteen to fifteen, in a youth orchestra. An alleged victim, whose memory was enhanced after attending a two-day child-abuse workshop, told the judge how he had been taken advantage of after a violin lesson, when he was a mere fourteen years old. “Penelope lay down on her bed and pulled me down beside her. She unbuttoned her blouse and invited me to fondle her breasts. I undid her jeans. She was wearing red satin knickers. She put her hand inside my trousers. I had oral sex with her for twenty minutes. Afterward she served me tea, with chocolate digestives, and told me, ‘You are a naughty boy.' ”

In a separate incident, following a Christmas drinks party, another allegedly abused boy said, “Penelope took off her knickers at the edge of the bed. She lay back, undid her shirt, closed her eyes, and there was a free-for-all.”

The judge ruled that it would be unfair to proceed with a trial, because the alleged incidents had taken place so long ago, and it would be difficult to trace witnesses and evidence that would back up the teacher's denial of the charges. He ordained that it was clear that the boys had not suffered psychological damage but had been willing participants and had “thoroughly enjoyed the activities.” However, he
stopped short of noting that, on balance, Penelope had surely done more than Yehudi Menuhin to encourage musical appreciation among the young. Penelope lost interest in the boys once they reached the age of fifteen. Unfortunately this also proved to be the case with Mrs. Ogilvy. That cruel blow was only somewhat mollified by my new relationship with Dorothy Horowitz. Dorothy, who was my age, would never allow me to venture beyond groping on the family's plastic-covered sofa, or on a bench in Outremont Park, and even this activity was blighted by forcibly proscribed zoning laws. Dorothy would withdraw her hand, as if touched by fire, when I directed it to the pulsating root of my ardour, considerately unbuttoned, and popping like Punch out of its box.

Nineteen forty-three that was. Field Marshal von Paulus's army had already been decimated at Stalingrad, the Americans had taken Guadalcanal, and I had that pin-up of Chili Williams in a two-piece polka-dot bathing suit tacked to my bedroom wall. My mother had begun to mail jokes to Bob Hope and Jack Benny, as well as one-liners to Walter Winchell, and my father was already a uniformed member of Montreal's finest. Izzy Panofsky, the only Jew on the police force. The pride of Jeanne Mance Street.

In the here and now in my apartment in The Lord Byng Manor I zipped through breakfast, and decided to take advantage of the fact that the family living in the apartment immediately downstairs from me, the McKays, were at their weekend cottage on Lake Memphremagog. I rolled back my living-room carpet and pulled the curtain that hid my embarrassing but necessary full-length mirror. Next I donned my top hat, tails, and trusty Capezio taps, and shoved Louis Armstrong's rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird” into my
CD
player. Remembering to tip my topper to the good folks in the balcony, resting my cane on my shoulder, I loosened up with a Round-the-Clock Shuffle, eased into a satisfying Brush, followed by a really swell Cahito, before I risked a Shim Sham and collapsed in the nearest chair, panting.

Hello, shmuck
, I thought. And I resolved yet again to cut back on Montecristos, medium-fats on rye, single malts, that delicious beef-marrow
³⁵
hors d'oeuvre
they serve at L'Express,
XO
cognac, marbled rib
steaks at Moishe's, caffeine, and everything else that was bad for me now that I could afford it.

Where was I? Nineteen fifty-six. Long back from Paris. Clara dead but not yet an icon; Terry McIver's first novel published, when literature would have been better served had he been interrupted in mid-flight by a gentleman from Porlock; and Boogie, high on horse more often than not, writing to me whenever his need was dire. I didn't begrudge him the money, but it was a hardship, as I had just begun to test the polluted waters of
TV
production, struggling, never settling a bill until Final Notice. Compounding my troubles at the time, I had stupidly resumed my affair with Abigail, and oh my God she was now hinting at leaving Arnie for me, maybe bringing their two kids along with her.

Hold the phone. Somewhere in my Noter's Write Book I've got something very apropos to that time and the problem I fumbled so badly. It was written by Dr. Johnson in 1772, when he was sixty-three years old: “My mind is unsettled and my memory confused. I have of late turned my thoughts with very useless earnestness upon past incidents. I have yet got no command over my thoughts; an unpleasing incident is almost certain to hinder my rest.”

What follows is an unpleasing incident, and how it began. One day, my accountant, the vile, ineffable Hugh Ryan, sent Arnie to the head office of the Bank of Montreal with a sealed envelope that he said contained a certified cheque for fifty thousand dollars. But when the bank manager opened the envelope, he found photographs of naked boys and an invitation to a candlelit dinner at Arnie's place. A distraught Arnie came to see me at Dink's. “There's something you don't know. Every morning before I report for work I stop at the men's room to vomit. I'm suffering from shingles now. Abigail and I are watching
Bonanza
on
TV
and suddenly I begin to sob. It's nothing, I say. Yeah. Some nothing. Barney, I'm your friend, and he isn't. We go way back, you and me. When you couldn't do your trigonometry exam, who passed you the answers? I was a whiz at math even then. I've been jiggling numbers for you for how many years now? I could go to prison for it, do I mind?
Fire the son of a bitch
. I could do his job with one hand tied behind my back.”

“Arnie, I don't doubt your abilities. But do you go salmon fishing on the Restigouche with Mackenzie of the Bank of Montreal?”

“I could never put a worm on a hook, it disgusts me.”

“Do you know how much I've got at risk in development deals? I could go under just like that. Arnie, I've got to hold onto him for another year. Max.”

“I shout at my kids. The phone rings, I jump like somebody was shooting a gun at me. I wake up at three o'clock in the morning from imaginary quarrels with that Jew-baiter. I'm so restless in bed poor Abigail can't get any sleep, so one night a week she has to catch up. Wednesdays she cooks up a storm and takes it with her to a girlfriend's house in Ville St. Laurent. She spends the night with Rifka Ornstein. I don't blame her. She comes home refreshed.”

“How much do I pay you, Arnie?”

“Twenty-five thousand.”

“Starting next week I'm going to make it thirty.”

When Abigail arrived promptly at eight Wednesday night, I delivered my rehearsed speech. “Of course it was never like this for me before, but we must sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Arnie and the children. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I had hurt them and neither could a woman of your rare beauty and intelligence and integrity. We will always have our memories. You know, like Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in
Brief Encounter
.”

“I never go to British movies. It's their funny accents. Who can understand how they speak English?”

“Nobody can take away the magic we shared, but we must be brave.”

“You know something? If my hands were free, I'd clap. But I made you braised brisket and kasha. Here,” she said, shoving it at me. “Choke on it.”

Once she had gone, slamming the door, I heated up the brisket, which was wonderfully moist if a tad too salty. But the kasha was perfect. What, I wondered, if we cut out the fucking and she continued to cook for me? Naw. She wouldn't buy that.

Later that guilt-ridden night, pulling on a Montecristo, I surprised myself, resolving to finally do right by Arnie, and put an end to his
office miseries. I woke up the next morning bent on self-sacrifice, a determined man glowing with virtue. Slipping into a soft-shoe shuffle, I belted out, “Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”
³⁶
Then, immediately following a long liquid lunch at Dink's, which served to bolster my resolve, I summoned Arnie to my office.

“What's wrong?” he asked, his lower lip trembling.

“Sit down, Arnie, old pal of mine,” I said, beaming beneficently. “I've got news for you.”

Arnie lowered himself on to the edge of a chair. Rigid. Sweaty. Treating me to a whiff of the stench of fear. “I've thought over our problems here,” I said, “and I've come to the only possible conclusion. Fasten your seat belt, Arnie, I'm firing Hugh.”

“Like hell you are,” he hollered, shooting out of his chair, spittle beginning to fly. “I quit.”

“Arnie, you don't understand. I'm —”

“Oh yeah? Well wipe that smirk off your face. You've made your choice, and me, I've got my pride, I've made mine.”

“Arnie, listen to me, please.”

“Don't think for a minute I don't know what's behind all this. Judas. You propositioned my wife. You tried to make it with the mother of my children. She didn't stay the night with Rifka yesterday, but came home before midnight and confessed it to me. You caught her by surprise
in my kitchen, at Craig's bar mitzvah party
, for Christ's sake, and rubbed against her, you bastard. She wouldn't have you and now I'm paying the price. You're laughing. You find that funny?”

“Sorry. I couldn't help myself,” I said, my giggles uncontrollable now.

“You're in need of a laugh? Good. Because I've got a real hee-haw for you. There isn't a person here who isn't looking for a job somewhere else. Big shot. Whoremaster. You think you're David Selznick, but they call you Hitler and sometimes Dean Martin behind your back. Not because of your good looks — don't worry, you're so fucken ugly — but because you're a drunkard like him. What are you anyway? Nothing squared. Your father is a cop on the take and your
mother was a laughing-stock from day one. She got that letter from Hedda Hopper that time, with the autographed photo —
it was printed, her signature
— but your mother showed it to everybody on the street, they didn't know where to look.”