Barney's Version (5 page)

“But?”

“But who doesn't?”

When he retreated to the kitchen to put on the tea kettle, Mrs. McIver handed me an envelope. “For Terence,” she whispered.

I found McIver in a small hotel on the rue Jacob and, amazingly, we actually got off to a promising start. He flipped the parcel onto his unmade bed, but slit open the envelope immediately. “You know how she earned this money?” he asked, seething. “These forty-eight dollars?”

“I have no idea.”

“Babysitting. Coaching backward kids in algebra or French grammar. Do you know anybody here, Barney?”

“I've been here for three days and you're the first person I've talked to.”

“Meet me at the Mabillon at six and I'll introduce you to some people.”

“I don't know where it is.”

“Meet me downstairs, then. Hold on a minute. Does my father still run those ad hoc symposiums for students who laugh behind his back?”

“Some are fond of him.”

“He's a fool. Eager for me to be a failure. Like him. See you later.”

Naturally I was sent an advance copy of
Of Time and Fevers
, compliments of the author. I've struggled through it twice now, marking the blatant lies and most offensive passages, and this morning I phoned my lawyer, Maître John Hughes-McNoughton. “Can I sue somebody for libel who has accused me, in print, of being a wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence, and probably a murderer as well?”

“Sounds like he got things just about right, I'd say.”

No sooner did I hang up than Irv Nussbaum, United Jewish Appeal
capo di tutti capi
, phoned. “Seen this morning's
Gazette
? Terrific news. Big-time drug lawyer was shot dead in his Jaguar, outside his mansion on Sunnyside last night, and it's splashed all over the front page. He's Jewish, thank God. Name's Larry Bercovitch. Today's going to be a hummer. I'm sitting here going through my pledge cards.”

Next, Mike rang with one of his hot stock-market tips. I don't know where my son gets his inside market information, but back in 1989 he tracked me down at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I was in Hollywood at the time for one of those television festivals, where they even have an award, rather than an electric chair in place, for the director of the “most brilliant” commercial. I had not come in quest of prizes but in search of markets for my rubbish. Mike said, “Buy
Time
shares.”

“No ‘hello.' No ‘How are you, Daddy dear?' ”

“Phone your broker as soon as I hang up.”

“I can't even read that magazine any more. Why should I invest in it?”

“Will you please do as I say?”

I did, and bastard that I am, I was already anticipating the satisfaction I would squeeze out of dropping my bundle and blaming him for it. But a month later both Warner and Paramount pounced, the shares more than doubling in value.

I'm running ahead of myself. Filling my peddler's office that evening in Beverly Hills, I was obliged to take two functionally illiterate
NBC
-
TV
executives to dinner at La Scala; and mindful of Miriam's parting admonition, I was resolved to be civil. “You should send somebody else to L.A.,” she had said, “because you're bound to end up having too much to drink and insulting everybody.” And now, into my third Laphroaig, I espied Hymie Mintzbaum at another table with a bimbo young enough to be his granddaughter. Following that brawl in London, whenever Hymie and I ran into each other here or there over the years, at the international stations of the show-business Cross (Ma Maison, Elaine's, The Ivy, L'Ami Louis, et cetera, et cetera), we acknowledged each other's presence with no more than a
nod. I would occasionally see him, accompanied by a fawning starlet wannabe, and pick up his gravelly voice drifting over tables in one restaurant or another. “As Hemingway once said to me …” or “Marilyn was far more intelligent than most people realized, but Arthur wasn't right for her.”

Once, in 1964, Hymie and I actually got to exchange words.

“So Miriam didn't take my advice,” he said. “She finally married you.”

“We happen to be very happy together.”

“Does it ever start unhappily?”

And that night, twenty-five years later, there he was again. He nodded. I nodded. Hymie had obviously endured a face-lift since I had last seen him. He now dyed his hair black and wore a bomber jacket, designer jeans, and Adidas. As luck would have it, we all but collided in the men's room. “You damn fool,” he said, “when we're dead it will be for a long time and it won't matter that the film we did in London was from Boogie's original story.”

“It mattered to me.”

“Because you were consumed with guilt?”

“After all these years, the way I look at it is Boogie was the one who betrayed me.”

“That's not the way most people see it.”

“He should have turned up at my trial.”

“Rising from the grave?”

“Flying in from wherever.”

“You're incorrigible.”

“Am I?”

“Prick. You know what I'm doing now? A film-of-the-week for
ABC
-
TV
. But it's a very exciting script and could lead to big things. I'm with a Freudian analyst these days. We're working on a sensational script together and I'm fucking her, which is more than I ever got from any of the others.”

Back at my table, one of the young executives, his smile reeking of condescension, said, “You know old Mintzbaum, do you?”

The other one, shaking his head, said, “For Christ's sake, don't encourage him to come to our table, or he'll start to pitch.”

“Old Mintzbaum,” I said, “was risking his life in the Eighth Army Air Force before you were born, you smug, insufferably boring little cretin. As for you, you cliché-mongering little shit,” I added, turning to the other one, “I'll bet you pay a personal trainer to time your laps in your goddamn swimming-pool every morning. Neither of you is fit to shine old Mintzbaum's shoes. Fuck off, both of you.”

Nineteen eighty-nine that was. I'm jumping all over the place. I know, I know. But seated at my desk these endgame days, my bladder plugged by an enlarged prostate, my sciatica a frequent curse, wondering when I will be due for another hip socket, anticipating emphysema, pulling on a Montecristo Number Two, a bottle of Macallan by my side, I try to retrieve some sense out of my life, unscrambling it. Recalling those blissful days in Paris, in the early fifties, when we were young and crazy, I raise my glass to absent friends: Mason Hoffenberg, David Burnett, Alfred Chester, and Terry Southern, all dead now. I wonder whatever became of the girl who was never seen on the boulevard Saint-Germain without that chirping chimpanzee riding her shoulder. Did she go home to Houston and marry a dentist? Is she a grandmother now and an admirer of Newt? Or did she die of an overdose like the exquisite Marie-Claire, who could trace her lineage back to Roland?

I dunno. I just dunno. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as E. M. Forster
¹⁰
once wrote. Anyway, those, those were the days. We had not so much arrived in the City of Light as escaped the constraints of our dim provincial origins, in my case the only country that declared Queen Victoria's birthday a national holiday. Our lives were unstructured. Totally. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and screwed whoever was available whenever it was possible, surviving on three dollars a day. Except for the always elegantly dressed Cedric, a black American who was the beneficiary of a secret source of funds about which the rest of us
speculated endlessly. Certainly it wasn't family money. Or the pathetic sums he earned for stories published in the
London Magazine
or
Kenyon Review
. And I dismissed as a canard the rumour rife among some other Left Bank black Americans that, in those days of crazed anti-communism, Cedric received a monthly stipend from the
FBI
, or
CIA
, to inform on their activities. Whatever, Cedric wasn't hunkered down in a cheap hotel room but ensconced in a comfortable apartment on the rue Bonaparte. His Yiddish, which he had acquired in Brighton Beach, where his father worked as an apartment-building janitor, was good enough for him to banter with Boogie, who addressed him as the
shayner
Reb Cedric, the
shvartzer gaon
of Brooklyn. Ostensibly without racial hang-ups, and fun to be with, he went along with Boogie's jest that he was actually a pushy Yemenite trying to pass as black because it made him irresistible to young white women who had come to Paris to be liberated, albeit on a monthly allowance from their uptight parents. He also responded with a mixture of warmth and deference whenever Boogie, our acknowledged master, praised his latest short story. But I suspected his pleasure was simulated. With hindsight, I fear that he and Boogie, constantly jousting, actually disliked each other.

Make no mistake. Cedric was truly talented, and so, inevitably, one day a New York publisher sent him a contract for his first novel, offering him a $2,500 advance against royalties. Cedric invited Leo, Boogie, Clara, and me to dinner at La Coupole to celebrate. And we did whoop it up, happy to be together, going through one bottle of wine after another. The publisher and his wife, said Cedric, would be in Paris the following week. “From his letter,” said Cedric, “I gather he thinks I'm one dirt-poor spade, living in a garret, who will jump at his invitation to dinner.”

This led us into jokes about whether Cedric could order chitlins at Lapérouse, or turn up barefoot for drinks at Les Deux Magots. And then I made my gaffe. Hoping to impress Boogie, who could usually be counted on for the invention of our most outlandish pranks, I suggested that Cedric invite his publisher and his wife to dinner at his apartment, where the four of us would pretend to be his hired help. Clara and I would cook, and Boogie and Leo, wearing white shirts
and black bow-ties, would serve at table. “I love it,” said Clara, clapping hands, but Boogie wouldn't have it.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I fear our friend Cedric here would enjoy it too much.”

An ill wind passed over our table. Cedric, feigning fatigue, called for the bill, and we dispersed separately into the night, each one troubled by his own dark thoughts. But, within days, the episode was forgotten. Once again we took to gathering in Cedric's apartment late at night, after the jazz clubs had closed, digging into his stash of hashish.

Those days not only Sidney Bechet, but also Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were playing in small
boîtes de nuit
which we frequented. Lazy spring afternoons we would pick up our mail and some gossip at Gaït Frogé's English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, or saunter over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to gawk at the graves of Oscar Wilde and Heinrich Heine, among other immortals. But dying, a blight common to earlier generations, did not enter into our scheme of things. It wasn't on our dance cards.

Each age gets the arts patrons it deserves. My bunch's benefactor was Maurice Girodias né Kahane, sole prop. of Olympia Press, publishers of the hot stuff in the Traveller's Companion Series. I can remember waiting for Boogie more than once on the corner of the rue Dauphine as he ventured into Girodias's office on the rue de Nesle, lugging last night's twenty-odd pages of porn, and, if he were lucky, coming away with maybe five thousand sustaining francs, an advance against a stroke-book to be delivered as soon as possible. Once, to his amusement, he collided with the vice squad, the men in trenchcoats from La Brigade Mondaine (The Worldly Brigade), who had barged in to seize copies of
Who Pushed Paulo
,
The Whip Angels
,
Helen and Desire
, and Count Palmiro Vicarion's
Book of Limericks
:

When Titian was mixing rose madder,

His model was poised on a ladder.

“Your position,” said Titian,

“Inspires coition.”

So he nipped up the ladder and 'ad 'er.

On a whim, or just because a motorcycle ride was suddenly available, we would take off for a few days in Venice, or bum a ride to the
feria
in Valencia, where we could catch Litri and Aparicio and the young Dominguín in the Plaza de los Toros. One summer afternoon, in 1952, Boogie announced that we were going to Cannes to work as film extras, and that's how I first met Hymie Mintzbaum.

Hymie, built like a linebacker, big-featured, with black hair curly as a terrier's, brown eyes charged with appetite, big floppy ears, prominent nose misshapen, twice-broken, had served with the American Army Air Force 281st Bomber Group, based in Ridgewell, not far from Cambridge, in 1943; a twenty-nine-year-old major, pilot of a
B
-17. His gravelly voice mesmerizing, he told Boogie and me — the three of us seated on the terrace of the Colombe d'Or in St–Paul-de-Vence, that summer of '52, into our second bottle of Dom Perignon, every flute laced with Courvoisier
XO
, Hymie's treat — that his squadron's brief had been daylight precision bombing. He had been in on the second raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearings factory in which the Eighth Air Force had lost 60 out of the 320 bombers that had set out from East Anglia. “Flying at twenty-five thousand feet, the temperature fifty below zero, even with heated flying suits,” he said, “we had to worry about frostbite, never mind Goering's personal squadron of
ME
-109s and
FW
-190s, circling, waiting to pick off stragglers. Do either of you young geniuses,” he asked, the designation “geniuses” delivered in italics, “happen to know the young woman seated in the shade there, second table to our left?”

Young geniuses
. Boogie, that most perspicacious of men, couldn't handle liquor, it made him sloppy, so he didn't grasp that we were being patronized. Obviously Hymie, who was pushing forty at the time, felt threatened by the young. Clearly my manhood, if not Boogie's, was in question, as I had never been bloodied in combat. Neither was I old enough to have suffered sufficiently through the Great Depression. I hadn't cavorted in Paris in the good old days, immediately after its liberation, knocking back martinis with Papa Hemingway at the Ritz. I hadn't seen Joe Louis floor Max Schmeling in the first round and couldn't understand what that meant to a yid coming of age in the Bronx. Or caught Gypsy Rose Lee stripping at
the World's Fair. Hymie suffered from that sour old man's delusion that anybody who had come after him was born too late. He was, in our parlance, a bit of a drag. “No,” I said. “I have no idea who she is.”