Barney's Version (28 page)
Authors: Mordecai Richler
“You're digging yourself a deep hole, Arnie.”
“Francine once went to deliver some documents to you and she says she caught you wearing a silly straw hat, dressed like the Jack of Hearts, she said, wearing tap-dance shoes. Ha, ha, ha. Fred Astaire, look to your laurels. Whoop-de-do, here comes Gene Kelly Panofsky. Boy, did we ever have a laugh at your expense! So up yours, you
putz
from way back, I can't tell you how glad I am to be finished here.” And he was gone.
Charging out of my office in a rage, in pursuit of Arnie, I all but collided with Hugh Ryan. “This is all your fault, Hugh. You're fired. You're finished here today.”
“I have no idea what you're burbling about, but methinks somebody has had one too many.”
“I won't have you tormenting Arnie any more. Clean out your desk and get out.”
“What about my contract?”
“You'll get six months' salary, and that's it.
Bonjour la visite
.”
“In that case, you'll be hearing from my lawyer.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. What had I done? I could manage without Arnie, that peckerhead, but I couldn't do without my prized goyische bank connection. In my mind's eye, I saw demand notes surfacing on my desk first thing in the morning. Loans being called in. Maybe government auditors sent over to rake through my files. “What's everybody staring at?” I demanded.
Heads lowered.
“Hitler here is thinking of cutting staff. Downsizing.
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So if anybody here wants a job elsewhere, now's the time to make your move.
You're dispensable. Every last one of you. Like Kleenex. Have a nice day.”
Feeling wretched, deeply embarrassed by my unforgivable outburst, I made straight for Dink's, in search of sustenance.
“Hard day at the office, darling?” asked John Hughes-McNoughton.
“You know something, John? You're not nearly as witty as you think. Especially when you've been boozing all day. Like now,” I said, and moved on to the Ritz bar.
It must have been eight o'clock when I staggered out of there, slid into a taxi, and drove to Arnie's apartment in the wilds of Chomedy. Abigail answered the door. “You dare to come here?” she hissed, aghast.
“To see him, not you,” I said, brushing past her.
“It's Shit-face, Arnie. For you.”
Arnie switched off the
TV
. “I went to see my lawyer this afternoon and anything you have to say should be said to him. Because in Lazar's opinion, I have a good case for damages. Unfair dismissal.”
“But you quit.”
“You fired him first,” said Abigail. “He's got that in his notes.”
“Anybody mind if I sit down?”
“Sit.”
“Arnie, I did not fire you today. I called you in to say I was firing Hugh,” I said, emphasizing the “H.”
“Oh, my God,” said Arnie, rocking his head in his hands.
“Don't start snivelling. This has already been too long a day for me.”
“Did you?”
“What?”
“Fire Hugh?”
“Yes.”
“About time,” said Abigail.
“Have you got anything to drink here?”
Arnie hurried over to a cupboard. “We've got some peach brandy left over from Craig's bar mitzvah. Wait. There's something left in this bottle of Chivas.”
“He doesn't drink Chivas. He drinks â how would I know? I'm all mixed up. I don't know what I'm saying. I'll get you a glass.”
“So what happens now?” asked Arnie, rocking, his hands squeezed between his legs.
“Well, you said some very harsh things to me today.”
“But I was going crazy in there. I take it back. Everything. I want you to know I've always admired you for the great things you've accomplished. You're my mentor.”
“I'm going to die,” said Abigail.
“Arnie,” I said, gulping down the heel of the Chivas left in the bottle, “you can now do one of two things. You can quit with a year's salary or come back to work tomorrow morning. Discuss it with the mother of your children.”
“Tell him you want Hugh's job and Hugh's salary.”
“I want Hugh's job and his salary.”
“I heard her. The answer is no.”
“Why?”
“Arnie, you've heard my offer. Discuss it with Abigail and then let me know,” I said, getting up.
“You shouldn't drive in your condition,” said Arnie. “Wait one minute. I'll drive you.”
“I came in a taxi. You could call me another one right now, Arnie, please.”
No sooner did Arnie disappear into the kitchen than Abigail said, “
My casserole. The Pyrex dish
. If he finds them missing, he'll blame our cleaning lady.”
“But I haven't finished the kasha yet,” I said.
Oct. 23, 1995
Dear Barney,
To each his own albatross.
From the day of your arrival in Paris, touchingly gauche, ill-educated, pushy, it was abundantly clear to me (and others
I could name) that you were consumed with envy for my talent. Nay, obsessed is what you were, ingratiating yourself by feigning friendship. I was not fooled. But I took pity on you and watched, amused, as you wormed your way into the affections of The Motley Crew, not too proud to fill the office of unpaid factotum. Clara's meal ticket. Boogie's poodle. With hindsight, of course, I reproach myself for having been so indulgent, because, had I not introduced you around, poor Clara Charnofsky would be alive today, and so would Boogie, the latter, alas, a larger loss to drug dealers than the world of letters. Since then, as an observer of
la condition humaine
, I have sometimes wondered how you continued to function after being responsible for two untimely deaths. Sleep cannot come easy.
I have heard that your maternal grandfather was a junk dealer, so it strikes me as altogether fitting, a symmetry of sorts, that you have subsequently become wealthy as a purveyor of
TV
trash to the
hoi polloi
. I was not surprised, given your vengeful nature, that you considered it droll to title an especially prurient series
McIver of the RCMP
. Neither was I astonished to see you suffering at the Leacock Auditorium when I recently read to a sell-out audience. But, fool that I am, I believed that there was some calumny that even you would not stoop to. Congratulations, Barney. Your latest maledictory gesture caught me unawares. Which is to say I have read your son's vicious attack on
Of Time and Fevers
in the
Washington Times
. Poor sclerotic Barney Panofsky. So depraved in the years of his decrepitude that he has to enlist his son where he fears to tread.
Although I never deign to respond to, or even read, reviews of my work (most of them flattering, I might point out), I did feel obliged to write to the literary editor of the
Washington Times
to point out that Saul Panofsky's diatribe had been inspired by his father's personal animus.
Sincerely,
TERRY McIVER
What follows appears to be yet another digression. It isn't. I'm making a point. Mr. Lewis, our class master in Room 43,
FFHS
, delighted in reciting Henry Newbolt's stirring “Drake's Drum” to us.
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll
quit the port o'Heaven,
An' drum them up the
Channel as we drummed
them long ago.
However, according to today's
New York Times
, Newbolt (surprise, surprise) was a phony. He scribbled patriotic doggerel, yes, but avoided military service in the Boer War, protesting that it was his role to boost national morale at home. The legend of Drake's drum was fraudulent, his invention. Actually, the poet, self-advertised as the embodiment of Victorian virtues, enjoyed a lifelong relationship with his wife and her cousin, screwing his wife in London and her cousin on alternate nights in the country. W. H. Auden once wrote:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Well maybe yes and maybe no. But I've never known a writer or a painter anywhere who wasn't a self-promoter, a braggart, and a paid liar of a coward, driven by avarice and desperate for fame.
Hemingway, that bully, his built-in shit-detector notwithstanding, concocted his First World War record on his typewriter. That old
sweetie, Lewis Carroll, beloved by generations of children, wasn't the guy you wanted to babysit your ten-year-old daughter. Comrade Picasso sucked up to the Nazis during the occupation of Paris. If Simenon actually screwed ten thousand women, I'll eat my straw boater. Odets ratted on old friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Malraux was a thief. Lillian Hellman lied outrageously. Lovable old Robert Frost was actually one mean son of a bitch. Mencken was a rabid anti-Semite but not as bad as that notorious plagiarist T. S. Eliot, or many more I could name. Evelyn Waugh was a social climber and Frank Harris probably died a virgin. Jean-Paul Sartre's Resistance record was iffy and later he became an apologist for the Gulag. Edmund Wilson was a tax cheat and Stanley Spencer a boor. T. E. Lawrence did not read every book in the Bodleian. The closest Marco Polo ever got to The Middle Kingdom was most likely the Piazza San Marco. Why, if the facts were known, I'll bet it would turn out old Homer had 20/20 vision.
I had lit out for the cultural territories, going to Paris, hoping to be enriched by associating with the pure of heart, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and came home determined not to have anything to do with writers or painters again.
Except for Boogie.
Following my departure, the Boogieman was reported to have been seen in Istanbul, Tangier, and that island off the coast of Spain. Not Majorca, but the other one. Crete? Don't be stupid. The one that was ruined by the hippies.
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Anyway, the first letter I got from Boogie, in 1954, two years after I returned to Montreal, came from a Buddhist monastery in what used to be called Formosa,
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but is now named something else, just like Coke has been reborn Coke Classic. Fuck it. At my age, I'm not obliged to keep up any more. I scan the movie ads, promoting films starring this or that surly toy boy and tit-enhanced starlet, each one scoffing ten million dollars a shot, and I have no idea who they are. Fact. Once women who had become stars of the silver
screen had to don dark glasses and a headscarf in order to pass unrecognized on the street, but now all they have to do is get dressed. While I'm at it, I have no idea what “snogging” means, or “whingeing,” or why young trendies started the grazing shtick in restaurants. I'm not online and never will be.
Boogie wrote:
Mankind, manifestly imperfect, is still riding the evolutionary cycle. In the far future, if only for the sake of convenience, the genitals of both men and women will rise to where our heads are now, and our increasingly redundant noggins will sink to where our genitals once rested. This will enable young and old to lock into each other without tiresome romantic foreplay or the inevitable struggle with buttons or zippers. They will be able to “only connect,” as Forster advised, while waiting for a traffic light to change, or lining up before the supermarket cashier, or on a synagogue bench or church pew. “Fucking,” or the more genteel “love-making,” will be known as “a header,” as in, “Walking down Fifth Avenue, I sniffed this fetching chick, and threw her a header.”
The flip side of this cultural refinement is that the brothel, or cat-house, will yield to the library as the forbidden place where sinners meet to tryst (unzipping or lowering panties, to converse grammatically) under constant threat of closure by the antiliteracy squad. And the new social disease will be intelligence. Remember, you read it here first.
Terry returned to Montreal a year after I did to wind up his father's estate, the old man's bookshop becoming a pizza parlour, and â this is amazing, truly amazing â the first time we ran into each other, on Stanley Street, we actually embraced, delighted by our chance encounter, and retreated to the Tour Eiffel for a celebratory drink, fostering the illusion that we had once been bosom buddies, survivors of those two loosy-goosy years together on the Left Bank. We shared an hour or more of remember this and, damn it, don't forget that. The evening we all went to that Charles Trenet concert and ended up eating onion soup in Les Halles. Or, hey, how about the time Boogie
sat down to the piano in that bar in Montmartre, letting on that he was Cole Porter, and earning all of us rounds of free drinks. Then we got into
de haut en bas
riffs about the provincial city we had deigned to return to, and how St. Catherine Street, Montreal's main stem which we now recognized as all-but-total sleaze, had once seemed a crossroads of the world to us. My God, I thought, I never realized what a good fellow McIver was, and I'm sure he felt the same about me that afternoon. I promised to call him, if not tomorrow then the day after, and he assured me he would do the same. But he didn't, and I didn't. Too bad. Because had either of us come through I think we could have become friends. It was a road not taken. But not the only one in my life. Hell, no.
Onwards. Leo Bishinsky was back in New York, established in a Village loft, and already the subject of unreadable reviews in
recherché
art journals. And Cedric Richardson's splendid first novel had been published to ecstatic reviews. I sent him an unabashed fan letter, which he did not acknowledge. That hurt. Considering that we had once been more than friends. That we shared a bond of sorts.
“You people,” he said to me. You people. Brandishing that poor, wizened dead thing at me as if it had slid out of a sewer
.
Next thing I knew, Cedric's photograph was on the front page of
The New York Times
. Bloody, his nose broken, he was being held by two smirking, fat-assed Kentucky state troopers. He had taken part in an attempt to register twelve black children in an all-white school and had been caught up in the flying bricks and fisticuffs that ensued. Ten whites had also been arrested in the riot.