Barney's Version (38 page)

Can you tell I'm wearing a toupee, if you didn't know me from before, I mean?”

“Would you like to stay the night, Norman?”

“I've already booked into a motel.”

“That was hardly necessary.”

“One, I couldn't be sure you'd be here, or that you'd be welcoming. Two, I'm travelling with a young woman, you wouldn't care for her, but it's my business, if you don't mind?” Then his tears yielded to giggles. “Doreen reads Archie comics. She listens to rock music in the car and pops her bubble gum. It drives me crazy. We have to book into a motel with a
TV
six-thirty prompt every evening so that she can catch
Jeopardy!
I'm ashamed to undress in front of her, a skinny old man like me. Pardon me for asking, but do you have varicose veins yet?”

“Some.”

“Barney, Barney, I don't know who I am or what I'm doing any more. I sit on the toilet weeping and I turn on the taps so she won't hear me. I'm worried sick about Flora, my daughter must hate me, and one day they'll catch up with me, and I'll end up in prison with common criminals. So how are you these days, I haven't even asked?”

“Have you spent all the money?”

“I think two hundred thousand dollars so far, possibly less. What does it matter?”

“Are you willing to return what's left?”

“I took only what was rightfully mine.”

“Answer my question.”

“Answer his question. I'm not going to prison.”

“If you were willing to return what's left, I could go to New York and talk to the board. I'll offer to make good whatever is missing, providing they agree to drop any charges, which I'm sure they would do.”

“How could I let you do such a thing?”

“I'm rich, Norman.”

“He's rich. Maybe I should have gone into
TV
, producing crap for the unwashed.”

“Norman, you're beginning to sound like your uncle Chaim,
alav ha-sholem
.”

“I appreciate your offer. Honestly I do. But Flora would never have me back. How can I blame her? And I wouldn't dare show my face to old friends again,” he said, rising abruptly from his chair. “Say, you wouldn't happen to have any nibbles here you could spare? Cashews or chocolates, or whatever? I promised to bring her something, but now everything will be closed.”

“Sorry. No. Norman, I want you to come back here for breakfast, and we can talk some more. I'm serious about making up the missing money. I could also talk to Flora.”

“Peanut butter maybe? Some sliced bread?”

“Sorry, I don't come here that often any more. Hey, I could do with some fresh air. Why don't you leave your car here and I'll drive you back to the motel.”

“It's only a couple of miles from here, maybe three. I'm perfectly capable.”

I should have insisted.

Bored, I picked up my office phone in time to hear our receptionist say, “Good afternoon. Totally Unnecessary Productions Limited.”

“May I speak to Barney Panofsky, please?”

“Who's calling?”

“Miriam Greenberg.”

“If you are an actress, Mr. Panofsky prefers that you send a letter.”

“Will you just tell him that Miriam Greenberg is on the line, please?”

“I will see if he's available.”

“Miriam, are you in Montreal?”

“Toronto.”

“What a coincidence. I'm going to be in Toronto tomorrow. How about dinner?”

“You're impossible, Barney. I'm calling because your gift arrived yesterday.”

“Oh.”

“How dare you be so familiar.”

“You're right. I shouldn't have done it. But I happened to see it in Holt Renfrew's window and I thought of you immediately.”

“I've sent it back.”

“Oh, to my office?”

“Don't worry.”

“I said I apologize.”

“This has got to stop. It's not as if I've ever done anything to encourage you.”

“I think we should meet and talk this over.”

“There's nothing to talk about.”

“You needn't be so angry.”

“What sort of woman do you think I am?”

“Oh, you'd be amazed. Miriam, Miriam, the truth is I think about you all the time.”

“Well stop. I happen to be going out with someone.”

“
You're not living together, are you?
”

“What business could that be of yours?”

“I'm being a nuisance. I realize that. So why don't we meet for lunch and —”

“I've already told you —”

“— Wait. Lunch. Just once. And if you decide you don't want to see me again, well, that's it.”

“Honestly?”

“I swear.”

“When?”

“You tell me and I'll be there.”

“Wednesday. We can have a meal-in-a-bowl on the Park Plaza Roof.”

“No. Downstairs. The Prince Arthur Room.”

Last night I made a big mistake. I reread some of the crap I've written in what I've come to grandly consider my very own
Apologia pro Vita Sua
, with a tip of my chapeau to Cardinal Newman. Digressions, or
what I prefer to think of as Barney Panofsky's table talk, abound. But Laurence Sterne got away with it, so why not me? Count your blessings. Readers don't have to wait until the end of volume three before I'm even born. Something else. It doesn't take me six pages to cross a field, as it would if this had been written by Thomas Hardy. I rein in my metaphors, unlike John Updike. I am admirably succinct when it comes to descriptive passages, unlike P. D. James, a writer I happen to admire. A P. D. James character can enter a room with dynamite news, but it is not to be revealed until we have learned the colour and material of the drapes, the pedigree of the carpet, the shade of the wallpaper, the quality and content of the pictures, the number and design of the chairs, whether the side tables are bona fide antiques, acquired in Pimlico, or copycat from Heal's. P. D. James is not only gifted, but also obviously a real
baleboosteh
, or chatelaine. She is also endearing, which is not my problem, and brings me to yet another digression. Or character flaw acknowledged.

Lying on my lonely sofa at night, boozing as I channel-surf, I keep a pair of binoculars within easy reach on my coffee table. I need them as I watch “probing”
CBC
-
TV
interviews with yacky political pundits, economists, newspaper editors, sociology or psychology mavins, and other certified idiots. Why? Because these interviews are usually conducted in what purports to be a library, the shelves behind the blabber laden with books. Say it's the celebrated author of that seminal study of five thousand Canadians that has revealed (hello, hello) that the rich are happier than the poor, and less prone to suffer from malnutrition. Or, still better, a sexologist, whatever that is, who ventures that serial rapists are often loners who were sexually abused as children or at least come from dysfunctional families. Whichever, I immediately whip out my binocs to study the titles on the bookshelves. If there's anything there by Terry McIver, I flick off my
TV
and sit down to compose a letter to the
CBC
questioning their expert's intelligence and taste.

Slept badly last night, wakened at five a.m., and had to wait until six-thirty for my morning newspapers.

Good one in today's
Globe and Mail
. Eldfriede Blauensteiner, a Viennese widow, is in deep doo-doo. Seems she used to run regular ads in the lovelorn columns of the Austrian press:

The Kraut Mrs. Lonelyhearts is also a bleached blonde who wears blue-tinted glasses, and was hooked on the roulette wheels and blackjack tables of Baden. Lots of lonely old guys, mostly pensioners, answered her ads, and she screened them for their assets. The police say her earnings from bank accounts, property, and cash left to her in altered wills ran into millions. Her favoured
modus operandi
was to add a soupçon of diabetic medicine to her victim's food and drink over a period of months. This inevitably led to death, ostensibly from natural causes. So far honeybunch has confessed to four murders, but the police suspect there are more skeletons in her closet, so to speak. I am reminded of the character Charlie Chaplin played in that last film of his,
Monsieur What's-his-name
,
⁵⁹
wherein he wasted all those widows, and I wonder if Eldfriede was inspired by the same idiotic reasoning. Namely, what do a few useless old lives matter compared to the world's horrors?

In my favour, I never seriously considered accidentally drowning, or poisoning, The Second Mrs. Panofsky, although our breakfasts together were descents into hell. Thoughtful beyond compare, my gabby missus habitually shared what she could remember of her last night's dreams, which was plenty, with our morning coffee. One morning in particular is imprinted on my sometimes iffy memory now and forevermore. To recap. The night before, two tickets to the hockey game riding in my breast pocket, I met John Hughes-McNoughton, who was to be my companion, at Dink's. John was already blasted, and Zack Keeler was there, also well into it: “Hey, Barney, do you know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”

“I'm not interested.”

“It's because the sheep can hear the sound of a fly being unzipped.”

Saul, whose opprobium I am obliged to suffer, takes a dim view of my being a hockey nut. “At your age,” he said recently, “it is no longer appropriate for you to still be a jock-sniffer.”

But I never got to the game. And when Dink's closed at two a.m., John, Zack, and I stepped into the ear-tingling cold, snow swirling in the wind, not a taxi in sight, and shuffled on to a blind pig on Mc-Tavish Street, our overcoats steaming in the sudden gust of warmth.

Understandably, I was in agony the next morning when The Second Mrs. Panofsky joined me at the breakfast table in her quilted pink dressing-gown. Ducking behind the
Gazette
, opening it at the sports section, I read:
Big Jean Beliveau led the —

“I had the most troubling dream about you last night.”

—
Canadiens to a —

“Yoo hoo. I said I had the —”

“I heard you.”

—
to a convincing 5 to —

“I was sixteen years old again, but I can't understand how come in my dream I was still wearing my hair in a pigtail, tied with that velvet ribbon from Saks Fifth Avenue my aunt Sarah gave me maybe a month before she had to go in to be scraped out, you know, for her hysterectomy. They cut out the poor woman's uterus, and the next thing you know she's hired a private detective to follow Uncle Sam everywhere. The worst she found out was that when he was supposed to be at Rabbi Teitelbaum's Talmud class, he was actually playing pinochle in the back room of the Broadway Barbershop on St. Viateur. You know, next door to where Reuben's Best Kosher Butcher-shop used to be, my mother swore by his chickens. Reuben was such a card. My mother would take me with her, I was only ten, he would say, ‘How come a beauty like you isn't married yet?' Anyway, it was certainly incongruous, my still wearing a pigtail in my dream, and I haven't figured it out yet, but at that age I was already going to a hairdresser, Mr. Mario's Salon, on Sherbrooke near Victoria. That reminds me, did you pick up the lampshade at Grunwald's yesterday? It's only the third time I asked you and you promised. You forgot again? You had more important things to think of? Yeah, sure. But if I said there was no single-malt whisky left in the house,
fat chance
, you
would have dropped everything and shot down to the liquor commission. I was Mr. Mario's favourite. Such beautiful natural curls, he used to say, I ought to pay
you
for doing your hair. He died three years ago, no four, cancer of the testicles is how it started.”