Barney's Version (36 page)

“Don't you remember?” she asked, sending her tongue darting into my ear. “A gentleman is never in …”

“A hurry,” I shot back triumphantly.

“Bang on. Now give me your hand. There! Like that! Oh yes,
s'il vous plaît
!”

Which is exactly when, alone in my hotel room, my dentures soaking in a glass on my bedside table, I reached down to grab myself. At my decrepit age, the only answer is usually self-service. Certainly it would ease me into sleep at last, but it wasn't to be the case. No sir. For at that moment, in my mind's eye, Mrs. Ogilvy slapped my hand
away. “And just what do you think you're doing? Insidious street urchin. Presumptuous jewboy. You get right back into your smelly clothes, which I'm sure you bought wholesale, and get out of here.”

“What have I done wrong this time?”

“Dirty old man. Did you mistake me for a common tart who can be picked up in a bar? What if Miriam had walked in right then and seen what had become of you in your dotage? Or one of your grandchildren?
Dégoûtant
is what you are.
Méchant
. Tonight you will memorize Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind' and recite it for me in class first thing Monday morning.”

“It was Keats.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

Miriam came to me in my dreams, armed with one of her charge sheets. “You'd like to think you were being kind to Hymie, standing up for his rights, but I know you so well. Too well.”

“Please, Miriam.”

“The truth is you fed him all that food and drink because you never forgave him for not telling you that it was Boogie's original story. You were being vengeful as always.”

“No.”

“You never forgave anybody anything.”

“And you,” I hollered, wakening. “And you?”

I rose early, as I am wont to do no matter what time I fall asleep, suffering from the previous night's sins: head throbbing, eyes scratchy, sinuses blocked, throat raw, lungs hot, limbs underwater heavy. I made the usual resolutions, showered, slipped my mint-fresh chompers into place, if only to restore the shape of my collapsible jaw before shaving, and then dialled room service, using that foolproof technique for having a hotel breakfast brought up in a hurry. Something I had learned from Duddy Kravitz.

“Good morning, Mr. Panofsky.”

“What's so good about it? I ordered breakfast three-quarters of an hour ago and you gave me your word I would have it within twenty minutes.”

“Who took your order, sir?”

“How in the hell would I remember who took my order, but it was for a freshly squeezed orange juice, poached eggs, rye toast, prunes,
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
.”

A pause, then she said, “I can't find a record of your order, sir.”

“I'll bet you're all illegal immigrants down there.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Just see I don't have to call down again for a third time.”

Twelve minutes later my breakfast order was there, the waiter offering profuse apologies for the delay. I knocked back my orange juice with my garlic, blood pressure, cholesterol, anti-inflammatory, enjoy-a-good-daily-dump, and Vitamin-C pills, and then checked out my stocks in the
Journal
. Merck was up a point and a half, Schlumberger was holding steady, American Home Products had slipped a notch, Royal Dutch had gained two points, and the rest were idling.
The New York Times
obit page yielded neither friend nor foe. Then the phone rang. It was that smarmy
BBC
-
TV
producer, who collected blank receipts from taxi drivers and probably pocketed all the mini–jam jars at his hotel breakfast table. Calling from the lobby. Christ, I had forgotten all about him. “I thought you said ten-thirty,” I said.

“No, eight-thirty, actually.”

I had run into him a couple of days earlier in the Polo Lounge, where he told me he was making a documentary about the Hollywood blacklist. In a mood to bullshit, I had bragged about all the blacklisted types I had met through Hymie in London in 1961, and I agreed to be interviewed in the hope that Mike might see it. No, because I liked the idea of being asked to pontificate.

Seated under the hot lights, squinting, simulating deep thought, I said, “Senator McCarthy was an unprincipled drunk. A clown. True enough, but now that the witch-hunt is long past, I do believe he can be seen, with hindsight, as the most perspicacious and influential film critic ever. Never mind Agee.” Then, remembering to pause for effect, I dropped my sandbag. “He certainly cleaned out the stables, as it were.”

“I dare say,” said the Beeb's presenter, “I've never heard it put quite like that before.”

Seemingly groping for words, obviously troubled, I hesitated before I ventured, “My problem is I had considerable respect for The Hollywood Ten as people, but not as writers of even the second rank. That driven bunch invested so much integrity in their foolish, guilt-ridden politics that they had none left for their work. Tell me, did Franz Kafka need a swimming-pool?”

That won me a tight little laugh.

“I don't like saying it, but for the
BBC
,
veritas
. The truth is, much as I detested Evelyn Waugh's politics, I would happily take one of his novels to bed rather than watch a rerun of one of their sentimental, knee-jerk liberal films on late-night
TV
.”

Gabble, gabble, gabble. Then, pausing to light my first Montecristo of the day, pulling on it, removing my reading glasses, I looked directly into the camera, and said, “Let me leave you with a couple of pertinent lines from W. B. Yeats. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.' So it was, I fear, in those days.”

My
shtick
done, the grateful producer thanked me for my original thoughts. “Super stuff,” he said.

The phone rang, which startled me, because nobody knew I had driven out to the cottage the day before. It was Kate, of course. “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Intuition. A hunch. But when we talked Wednesday night you didn't say a thing about going away. Then I phoned Solange and she also had no idea where you were. The doorman —”

“Kate, I'm sorry.”

“— had to let her into your apartment. I was going crazy with worry here.”

“I should have phoned. You're right.”

“You shouldn't be moping around there anyway. It's no good for you.”

“I'll be the judge of that, darling.”

“There's nothing for you in Montreal any more. Michael's in London. Saul's in New York. It's not like you're King Lear and none of
your children will have you. You could move in with us tomorrow. I'd take care of you.”

“I'm afraid I'm too set in my ways to answer to anybody. Even you, Kate. Besides, my friends are still here. However, I promise to come for a visit soon. Maybe next weekend.”

But then I would be obliged to sit through one of Gavin's endless perorations on the need for income-tax reform. He would tell me the plot of the last movie he had seen. Following Kate's instructions he would take me to a game at Maple Leaf Gardens, simulating enthusiasm.

“Hey, you know what I found in a drawer here? An exercise book with some of your grade-five compositions.”

“Sell the cottage, Daddy.”

“I can't, Kate. Not yet.”

The truth is, I retreat to the cottage in the Laurentians, the scene of my alleged crime, from time to time, wandering, drink in hand, through empty rooms that once resonated with Miriam's laughter and the happy squeals of our children. I go through photo albums, sniffling like an old fool. Miriam and I on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Or on the terrace of the Colombe d'Or, where I told her about that time with Boogie and Hymie Mintzbaum. Miriam seated on our bed, serene, nursing Saul. I play her favourite Mozart. I sit here, tears sliding down my cheeks, coddling her old garden shoes. Or sniffing that nightgown of hers I hid when she was packing. Imagining that this is how they will find me. An abandoned husband. Dead of heartbreak. Her nightie pressed to my
schnozz
.

“What's that the old Jew is clutching,” asks Professor Blair Hopper né Hauptman, “the number of his Swiss bank account, written on an old rag?”

“Oh, my poor love, forgive me,” she pleads, sinking to her knees, holding my cold hand to her cheek. “You were right. He's a
shmuck
.”

Then I rise from the dead, like what's-her-name, that sexpot,
⁵⁶
ostensibly drowned in the bathtub, in that movie with Kirk Douglas's son, the boy as ugly as the father, only I'm not wielding a knife.
Final
Attraction
.
⁵⁷
Rising, my voice quavering, I say, “I forgive you, my darling.”

Don't knock self-pity. There's a lot to be said for it. Certainly I enjoy it. But, on occasion, the accusatory voice of The Second Mrs. Panofsky, who also lived with me here, intrudes on my reveries:

“I don't please you, do I, Barney?”

Looking up from my book, frowning, clearly indicating that I have been interrupted, I say, “Of course you do.”

“You despise my parents, who never did you any harm. It was you, wasn't it?”

“It was me what?”

“Who sent my poor mother that letter on Buckingham Palace stationery, I don't know how you got it, saying she was being considered for an
OBE
on the New Year's Honours List, for her charitable good works.”

“I did no such thing.”

“She waited by the window for the postman every morning and finally had to cancel the party she had planned in her honour. I hope you were pleased to humiliate her like that.”

“It wasn't me. I swear.”

“Barney, I want you to give us a chance. I want you to tell me what I could do to make you happy.”

“I'mhappyI'mhappy.”

“Then why don't you ever talk to me?”

“Correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't that what we're doing right now? Talking.”

“I'm talking, you're listening, sort of. You haven't even put down your book.”

“There. It's down. Now what?”

“Oh, go to hell, why don't you?”

I had hoped for some solitude here, but, after I was charged, cars used to park outside, and people would get out to stare at the murderer's house. Powerboats would cut their outboards offshore, and
bastards would stand up to snap photographs. But in the early days of my second marriage, I did, in fact, manage the occasional escape from my wife.

“Darling, I don't think you want to come up this weekend. The black flies are at their worst. Never mind the mosquitoes after this rain. You go to the Silverman wedding. Make my apologies, and I'll get Benoit to come to attend to the leaky roof.”

My father, recently obliged to retire from the Montreal police force, intruded on the odd weekend. “I could get a job in security somewheres with my top-notch experience, but those
chazerim
took away my gun licence.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Why? Why? Because my name is Panofsky, that's why.”

So Izzy phoned the high-ranking officer in the Quebec Provincial Police who had once been his driver. “Weeks went by and I couldn't get him on the phone. But finally I swung it, eh? Finally I knew how to get him, you know. I had a girlfriend call up, you see, I made her say she's the operator, long distance from Los Angeles, and human curiosity, you know, you're not expecting it, well he answered. I said, listen, you goddamn horse's ass, you know if I call the Pope, I says, I can get him quicker than you. Oh, he says, Panofsky, you know, I'm busy. I says don't give me that horseshit, you weren't busy when I knew you. I says I don't want no favours. But look, every greaseball in town's got a permit, and I'm looking for a job in security and I'd feel naked without a gun. So he comes through for me. So now it's okay, I kept two revolvers, my favourites. I got a snub-nose, beautiful, and a Tiger. I got that and I got two automatics, and I'm leaving one here for you in the drawer of your bedside table, eh?”

“What in the hell for?”

“Somebody breaks in, you're in the middle of nowheres here, you fucken air-condition him.”

Most weekends, rather than endure my silence, The Second Mrs. Panofsky would invite her parents out, or other undesirables. So, in self-defence, I established some summer rituals. I would disappear for an hour or two with my snorkel and flippers, plunging into the lake and swimming underwater, searching for schools of perch. Protesting
that I never got any exercise and was putting on too much flab, every Saturday morning, rain or shine, I filled my backpack with a couple of salami sandwiches, some fruit, a bottle of Macallan, a Thermos of coffee, a book, and set out in my spruce
⁵⁸
canoe, a latter-day voyageur, for the mountain on the opposite shore, belting out “Mair-zy Doats” or “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo …”

The mountain, still listed on the map as Eagle Head in those days, has long since been renamed Mont Groulx, after the rabidly racist Abbé Lionel Groulx, who is such a hero to the separatists here. Climbing to a clearing on the top, I would settle into the shade of the little lean-to I had built, wash down my lunch with Macallans, and read until I fell asleep.

On my return to the cottage, usually nicely sodden, I sometimes managed to avoid the dinner party, as well as the games of charades or Scrabble that followed, pleading a headache. Because joining the family at the table I would inevitably quarrel with my father-in-law, who would announce, for example, that Richard Nixon had done himself credit in his kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow.

“Daddy would like to put you up for membership at Elmridge.”

“Why, that's awfully good of him, but the gesture would be wasted on me. I don't golf.”