Barney's Version (6 page)

“Too bad,” said Hymie.

Hymie, blacklisted at the time, was shooting a French
film noir
under a pseudonym in Monte Carlo, an Eddie Constantine flick, Boogie and I working as extras. He called for another Dom Perignon, instructed the waiter to leave the Courvoisier
XO
bottle on the table, and asked for olives, almonds, fresh figs, a plate of crevettes, some pâté with truffles, bread, butter, smoked salmon, and anything else you've got for nibbles there.

The sun, which had been warming us, began to sink behind the olive-green hills, seemingly setting them alight. A donkey-drawn wagon, led by a grizzly old geezer wearing a blue smock, passed clip-pity-clop below the terrace's stone retaining wall, and we caught the scent of its cargo of roses on the evening breeze. The roses were bound for the perfumeries in Grasse. Then a fat baker's boy puffed by our table, one of those huge wicker baskets of freshly baked baguettes strapped to his back, and we could smell that too. “If she's waiting for somebody,” said Hymie, “he's shamefully late.”

The woman with the gleaming hair seated alone two tables to our left appeared to be in her late twenties. Somebody's gift package. Her fine arms bare, her linen shift elegant, long bare legs crossed. She was sipping white wine and smoking a Gitanes, and when she caught us sneaking glances at her, she lowered her eyes, pouted, and reached for the book in her straw shoulder bag,
Bonjour tristesse
,
¹¹
by Françoise Sagan, and began to read.

“Do you want me to invite her over to join us?” asked Boogie.

Hymie scratched his purply jaw. He made a face, wrinkling his forehead. “Naw. I think not. If she joined us, it could spoil everything. Gotta make a phone call. Back in a couple of minutes.”

“He's beginning to bug me,” I said to Boogie. “As soon as he gets back, I think we ought to split, man.”

“No.”

Hymie, back soon enough, began to drop names, a failing I cannot tolerate. Hollywood manna. John Huston, his buddy. Dorothy Parker, big trouble. The time he had worked on a screenplay with that stool-pigeon Clifford Odets. His two-day drunk with Bogie. Then he told us how his commanding officer had summoned all the air crews to a briefing in a Nissen hut before they took off on their first mission. “I don't want any of you girls faking mechanical trouble three hundred miles short of the target area, dropping your bombs on the nearest cow patch, and dashing for home. Gosh darn it. Holy smoke. You would be failing Rosie the Riveter, not to mention all those 4-
F
hymies raking it in on the black market stateside and fucking the girls you left behind. Better shit yourselves than try that story on me.” Then he added, “Three months from now, two thirds of you will be dead. Any stupid questions?”

But Hymie survived, demobilized with some fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, most of it won at the poker table. He made straight for Paris, moving into the Ritz, he said, and not drawing a sober breath for six months. Then, down to his last three thousand dollars, he booked passage on the
Île de France
, and lit out for California. Starting as a third-assistant director, he bullied his way up the ladder, intimidating studio executives, who had served with honour in the War Bond drives on the home front, by wearing his flight jacket to dinner parties. Hymie churned out a
Blondie
, a couple of Tim Holt westerns, and one of Tom Conway's
The Falcon
series, before he was allowed to direct a comedy featuring Eddie Bracken and Betty what's-her-name? You know, like the stock-market brokers. Betty Merrill Lynch? No. Betty Lehman Brothers? Come off it. Betty like in those ads. When la-de-da speaks, everybody listens.
Hutton. Betty Hutton
. He was once nominated for an Academy Award, was three times divorced, and then the House Un-American Activities Committee caught up with him. “This sleaze-bag Anderson, my comrade,” he said, “a five-hundred-dollar-a-week screenwriter, was sworn in by the committee and told them he used to come to my house in Benedict Canyon to collect weekly Party dues. How was I to know he was an
FBI
agent?”

Surveying our table, Hymie said, “There's something missing.
Garçon, apportez-nous des cigares, s'il vous plaît
.”

Then a Frenchman, obviously past it, well into his fifties, pranced onto the terrace. He was sporting a yachting cap, his navy-blue blazer with the brass buttons tossed over his shoulder like a cape: he had come to claim the young woman who sat two tables to our left. She rose to greet him, a butterfly disturbed, with a flutter of delight.

“
Comme tu es belle
,” he cooed.

“
Merci, chéri
.”

“
Je t'adore
,” he said, stroking her cheek with his hand. Then he called peremptorily for the waiter,
le roi le veut
, flashed a roll of francs bound with a gold clasp, and settled the bill. The two of them drifted toward our table, where she obliged him to stop, indicating the remnants of our feast with a dismissive wave of her hand, saying, “
Les Américains. Dégueulasse. Comme d'habitude
.”

“We don't like Ike,” said the Frenchman, tittering.

“
Fiche-moi la paix
,” said Hymie.

“
Toi et ta fille
,” I said.

Stung, they moved on, arms around each other's waist, and strolled toward his Aston-Martin, the old man's hand caressing her bottom. He opened the car door for her, settled in behind the wheel, slipped on his racing driver's gloves, made an obscene gesture at us, and drove off.

“Let's get out of here,” said Hymie.

Piling into Hymie's Citroën, we sped to Hauts-de-Cagnes, Hymie and Boogie belting out synagogue songs they remembered as we charged up the all-but-perpendicular hill to Jimmy's Bar on the crest, and that's when my mood began to curdle. Wintry is my soul's season. And that evening, perfect but for my fulminating presence, my heart was laden with envy. For Hymie's war experiences. His charm. His bankroll. For the effortless manner in which Boogie had been able to establish rapport with him, their joshing now often excluding me.

Years later, shortly after the murder charges against me had been dismissed, and Hymie was home again, now that the blacklist was a nightmare past, he insisted that I recuperate at the beach house he had rented for the summer in the Hamptons. “I know you don't want
to see anyone, in your mood. But this is just what the doctor ordered. Peace and quiet. Sea. Sand. Pastrami. Divorcées on the make. Wait till you taste my kasha. And nobody will know anything about your troubles.”

Peace and quiet. Hymie. I should have known better. The most generous of hosts, he furnished his beach house with wall-to-wall guests almost every night, most of them young and all of whom he set out to seduce. He would regale them with stories of the great and near-great he claimed to have known. Dashiell Hammett, a prince. Bette Davis, misunderstood. Peter Lorre, his kind of guy. Ditto Spence. Passing from guest to guest, he would illuminate them like a lamp-lighter. He would whisper into the ear of each young woman that she was the most gorgeous and intelligent on Long Island, and confide in each of the men that he was uniquely gifted. He wouldn't allow me to brood in a corner, but literally thrust me on one woman after another. “She's wildly attracted to you.” Going on to introduce me, saying, “This is my old friend Barney Panofsky and he's dying to meet you. He doesn't look it, I know, but he just got away with the perfect crime. Tell her about it, kid.”

I took Hymie aside. “I know you mean well, Hymie, but the truth is I'm committed to a woman in Toronto.”

“Of course you are. You think I don't hear you coming on like a pimply teenager on the phone after I've gone to bed?”

“Are you listening in on the extension in your bedroom?”

“Look, kid, Miriam's there, and you're here. Enjoy.”

“You don't understand.”

“No, it's you who don't understand. When you get to be my age, what you regret is not the times you cheated a little, but the times you didn't.”

“It's not going to be like that with us.”

“I'll bet when you were a kid you clapped hands for Tinkerbell.”

Early every morning, rain or shine, Hymie, who was then being treated by a Reichian analyst, would trot out to the dunes and let out primal screams sufficiently loud to drive any sharks lingering in the shallows back to sea. Then he would start on his morning jog, accumulating a gaggle of everybody else's children
en route
, proposing
marriage to eleven-year-old girls and suggesting to nine-year-old boys that they stop somewhere for a beer, eventually leading them to the local candy store for treats. Back at the beach house, he would make both of us salami omelettes garnished with mounds of home fries. Then, immediately after breakfast, still hoarse from his dune therapy, Hymie, who was connected to the world outside by his phone, would put in a call to his agent: “What are you going to do for me today, you
cacker
?” Or he would get a producer on the line, cajoling, pleading, threatening, honking phlegm into his handkerchief, lighting one cigarette off another. “I've got it in me to direct the best American film since
Citizen Kane
, but I never hear from you. How come?”

I was often wakened in the early-morning hours by Hymie hollering into the phone at one or another of his former wives, apologizing for being late with an alimony payment, commiserating over an affair that had ended badly, or shouting at one of his sons, or his daughter in San Francisco. “What does she do?” I once asked him.

“Shop. Get pregnant. Marry, divorce. You've heard of serial killers? She's a serial bride.”

Hymie's children were a constant heartache and an endless financial drain. The son in Boston, a Wiccan, and proprietor of an occult bookshop, was writing the definitive book on astrology. When not contemplating the heavens, he was given to writing bad cheques on Earth, which Hymie had to make good. His other son, a wandering rock musician, was in and out of expensive detox clinics, and had a weakness for hitting the road in stolen sports cars which he inevitably smashed up. He could phone from a lock-up in Tulsa, or a hospital in Kansas City, or a lawyer's office in Denver, to say there had been a misunderstanding. “But you mustn't worry, Dad. I wasn't hurt.”

Not yet a father myself, I deigned to lecture him. “If I ever have children,” I said, “once they reach the age of twenty-one, they're on their own. There has to be a cut-off point.”

“The grave,” he said.

Hymie supported a
shlemiel
of a brother who was a Talmudic scholar, and his parents in Florida. Once, I found him weeping at the kitchen table at two a.m., surrounded by chequebooks, and scraps of
paper on which he had made hurried calculations. “Anything I can do?” I asked.

“Yeah. Mind your own business. No, sit down. Do you realize that if I had a heart attack tomorrow, there would be twelve people out on the street, without a pot to piss in? Here. Read this.” It was a letter from his brother. He had finally caught up with one of Hymie's movies on late-night television: prurient, obscene, meretricious, and an embarrassment to the family's good name. If he must make such trash, couldn't he use a pseudonym? “Do you know how much money he's in to me for, that
momzer
? I even pay his daughter's college fees.”

I was not good company. Far from it. Waking in a sweat at three a.m., convinced I was still wasting away in that slammer in St-Jérôme, denied bail, a life sentence my most likely prospect. Or dreaming that I was being weighed again by that somnolent jury of pig farmers, snow-plough men, and garage mechanics. Or, unable to sleep, grieving for Boogie, wondering if the divers had messed up, and if, against all odds, he was still tangled in the weeds. Or if his bloated body had surfaced in my absence. But an hour later my concern would yield to rage. He was alive, that bastard. I knew it in my bones. Then why hadn't he shown up at my trial? Because he hadn't heard about it. He was on one of his retreats in an ashram in India. Or he was in a heroin-induced stupor in a hotel in San Francisco. Or he was in that Trappist monastery on Big Sur, trying to kick, studying his list of the names of the dead. Any day now I would get one of his cryptic postcards. Like the one that once came from Acre:

The day after my release from prison, I had driven out to my cottage on the lake, jumped into my outboard, and covered every inch of the shoreline as well as the adjoining brooks. Detective-Sergeant O'Hearne had been waiting for me on my dock. “What are you doing here?” I'd demanded.

“Walking in the woods. You were born with a horseshoe up your ass, Mr. P.”

Late one night Hymie and I sat on the deck, the two of us sipping cognac. “You were such a bundle of nerves when we first met,” he said. “Sweating anger and resentment and aggression under that assumed hipster's carapace. But who would have guessed that one day you would get away with murder?”

“I didn't do it, Hymie.”

“In France you would have got off with a slap on the wrist.
Crime passionnel
is what they call it. I swear I never thought you'd have the guts.”

“You don't understand. He's still alive. Out there somewhere. Mexico. New Zealand. Macao. Who knows?”

“According to what I've read, afterwards there was never any money withdrawn from his bank account.”

“Miriam found out that there were three break-ins into summer cottages on the lake in the days following his disappearance. That's how he probably found some clothes.”

“Are you broke now?”

“My lawyer. Alimony. Neglected business affairs. Sure I'm broke now.”