Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “Not yet.”

  “I wake up, I’m sweating. I go to sleep, I’m sweating. For ten days I don’t shit. I think I’m being followed everywhere. One day I’m supposed to be getting into my patrol car, I start to turn the door handle and I freeze right there. It takes my partner and another guy to uncurl my fist from the handle. And I can’t stop shaking. Aw, cops. Uneducated. On the take. Who cares what they go through? You been following Watergate? Sure you have. Well, lookit, now each and every one of those fuckers comes out with his book. Best sellers. Movie rights. The works. But what happened to the honest cop who was responsible for them being caught in the first place? You never hear about him. Just a little nigger, lucky if he was taking home two-fifty a week, and he spots the tape on the door and blows the whistle. Now you and I know niggers and how lackadaisical they are about their work. Look at Willie Davis when we had him in the outfield here. If a ball was hit right at him, O.K., but he wasn’t going to chase after it under a hot sun. Like it was pussy or chitlins. No suh. But this little nigger, he blows the whistle, and maybe John Dean, now that he’s made his fortune, slips him two hundred bucks.” McMaster shrugged. “Hey, have you caught the new picture at the Pussycat yet?”

  The Pussycat was a downtown porn cinema.

  “No. Why?”

  “Just asking,” McMaster said, smirking.

  So he discovered Office Party was playing at the Pussycat. Among its featured players, Esty Blossom.

  Shit shit shit. At an age when other Jewish mothers, sprouting moustaches, were past vice-presidents of ORT or delivering meals-on-wheels or convening fashion shows for the Hospital of Hope, his mother was up there on the big screen blowing men half her age.

  Office Party must have been made at least a year earlier, because now Esther was out of skin flicks, having graduated to women’s lib. The Movement. To begin with, Joshua heard that the harridans on the extreme edge of the movement had greeted his mother’s conversion with glee. Esther, the exploited one. The reformed sex-object. Obliged by coarse producers to cavort nude on screen for their profit until, betrayed by her body, she was cast aside. The girls were overjoyed. Salt of the earth, his mommy. Badly used for years by a punch-drunk husband, a hoodlum usually on the lam. Neglected by what they described in their magazine as her famous and affluent son, that vastly overrated sexist journalist and TV commentator, Joshua Shapiro. Oh yes, they were congratulating themselves on their prize catch, this living metaphor for male chauvinist abuse, until the afternoon they took themselves to Ottawa to demonstrate for abortion-on-demand. Out there on Parliament Hill, all those truculent ladies without makeup or bras, their armpits defiantly hairy, placards held high, scorn in their eyes, Esther to the fore. Fighting Esther, charged with love for the cause and her new-found sisters. Alas, little did the sisters grasp that Esther was an experienced scene-stealer. A real pro. Only when the television cameras began to pan toward her did she whip out her placard from under her fringed poncho. The cameraman froze. Timorous but socially conscious MP’s who had grudgingly ventured out of the House to reason with the ladies stared, aghast. An alert RCMP constable started toward her, on the double. Esther, glorying in the attention, leaped up and down, brandishing her placard:

  SMELLY IT MAY BE

  BUT MY CUNT BELONGS TO ME

  9

  NOW THAT THEY HAD CONVERTED TO CELSIUS, WAKING on wintry mornings in Montreal, roused to the strident morning newscast by his digital clock radio, Joshua could no longer figure out how cold it was outside. The bouncy announcer, charged with cheer, cried out that it was two above, or nine below, but even though Teddy, the family mathematician, had explained the conversion formula to him again and again, he simply couldn’t be bothered. He preferred to stand by the open window and guess how insufferably cold it really was out there. The kids were finding him increasingly grumpy. What they didn’t grasp was that he was also becoming paranoid. Imagining that he was being followed on his nightly walks. Last night he even thought that he had seen McMaster.

  Once, when he could readily have agreed that thirty was old, it had been his life’s ambition to write something that would last. A page. A paragraph. A sentence, even. Now aged forty-seven and counting, as sportswriters were fond of saying, he stood tall for his morning piss and noticed, much to his chagrin, that looking down he couldn’t quite see his very own penis. It was hidden below his obtruding belly. He resolved to diet. His new ambition, as serious as the earlier one, was to be so flat of stomach come his forty-eighth birthday that he would be able to look down in the morning and see it. Good morning, big boy.

  It was just after 7 a.m. Joshua heard doors slam, feet pounding up and down the stairs, as Teddy searched for his gym shoes and Susy rattled the bathroom door, pleading with Alex to come out of the shower. Alex would have already brought in the Gazette and had his first phone call of the day. He will prepare his lunch, exactly to his taste, and forget it on the kitchen counter. Getting out of bed, Joshua reflected that, all things considered, he was glad to be a family man. Everything would be perfect, he thought, if only Pauline were here.

  “… among those awarded the Order of Canada today,” the radio newscaster announced in a booming voice, “was Montreal tycoon Isaac Singer.…”

  Izzy Singer, O.C. Imagine; Izzy had at last squeezed a booby prize out of all that frenetic effort. Joshua laughed aloud, remembering.

  1967. The Grey Cup game. A game Joshua had covered for Sports Illustrated, cleverly combining the assignment with an Annual Day of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society, a reunion he all but ruined for everybody, having impetuously invited Izzy Singer to join them.

  In those days, of course, Izzy no longer drove his battered Ford V-8 down St. Urbain, chasing after the ice-truck, peddling refrigerators. A millionaire since 1960, Izzy was by that time a veritable merchant prince. He rode herd over shopping centers he owned in Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. Condominiums in Florida. A fast-food chain that ran from sea to sea. Office towers in Toronto, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Oil leases in the Northwest Territories. Forests in the Maritimes. Mineral rights in northern British Columbia. The option on seas of prairie grain. And much more, a sprawling empire he bestrode not as a proud colossus but like a worried ant.

  Izzy, Izzy.

  Joshua had nothing in common with him but Room 42, FFHS, and a memory that would not allow him to despise Izzy as did Seymour and the others. At Izzy’s twelfth birthday party his mother had insisted that he play the violin for the boys, who sat there smirking, waiting to see what fumble-fingers, who couldn’t even make the class softball team, could do. Izzy stood there – pale, thin, trembling – playing some gypsy air scratchily. His mother beaming, his aunts bubbling, until their pride was betrayed by a stream of hot piss darkening Izzy’s trousers, spreading in a tell-tale puddle round his shiny new pair of shoes.

  And then in 1967, out of nowhere it seemed, Izzy invited him to lunch at Ruby Foo’s, a roadhouse that served sickly sweet liberal Jewish Chinese food, his notion of heaven. “Even with all my accountants dreaming up things, those shmocks,” he said, “I’m paying five thousand dollars a week tax. That’s two hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year. I’ve had drinks with your father-in-law at the Rideau Club. Nice guy.”

  A compact, bristling little man, an arctic owl, with large shell-rimmed glasses and blank brown eyes, Izzy knew enough to wear a Savile Row suit, shirts that had been tailored for him on Jermyn Street, and shoes made especially to fit his tiny feet. Ostensibly, the perfect prosperity package. But his onyx cufflinks were just a mite too large, and the initials woven into the breast pocket of his shirt too prominent. Izzy, of St. Urbain born, was still pissing in his pants as he played. He now also suffered from a most disconcerting facial twitch, his right cheek doing an all-but-perpetual dance. “I haven’t got any friends here any more,” he said. “I can’t afford it. I’m invited to a party, the minute I come through the door, somebody has come round offering me a deal. They phone me at home too, before I’
ve even brushed my teeth. You need a good dentist? Hershorn. The best. Tell him I sent you, you won’t have to wait three weeks for an appointment. Really, Joshua, you ought to have them capped, all those spaces between look bad. Especially on TV. Hey, we really made something of ourselves, you and me. You and I. Which?”

  “Me,” Joshua said.

  “You’re wearing a nice jacket. British. Cashmere. The best. I have four.”

  “If you’re so disgustingly rich, Izzy, why don’t you retire?”

  “Because money’s like a soufflé, you’ve got it, you’ve got to keep a constant eye on the oven, either it keeps rising or it flattens. Inflation. I hear you don’t fuck around, you’re faithful to your wife. That’s a plus. Me too, I’m faithful. I mean, you’re going to be screwing other women all the time like that crazy Seymour, you can bring home the syph. How many times a week do you still fuck? Average?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Ha ha. We fuck on the average three times. More on vacation. Becky bought a copy of The Joy of Sex, we’re still making sensual discoveries. Joshua, come back to my office with me, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Izzy’s office occupied a floor in one of the city’s new office towers.

  “I believe in coming right to the point,” he said. “No shmoozing. I’d like to get into the Senate. If you whispered that in your father-in-law’s ear, I wouldn’t complain. I’m a big contributor to the Liberals. He must know that. So?”

  “Ask him yourself,” Joshua said angrily and, eager to change the subject, he muttered that he was leaving in the morning for the Grey Cup weekend in Ottawa, to be followed by the Annual Day of the Mackenzie King Memorial Society.

  “Gee, I never see any of the old bunch,” Izzy said wistfully.

  “Would you like to come?” Joshua asked, trapped.

  “O.K. Done. How many tickets do you need for the game? I’ll pay.”

  “Izzy, we’ve already got our tickets.”

  “Yeah, but where? With my muscle, it would be the owner’s box.”

  In Ottawa, Joshua felt he could not really avoid lunch with his father-in-law at his home in Rockcliffe. Their relationship was still rather stiff in those days, so he was startled to hear the senator say, after the briefest exchange of pleasantries, “It’s time I told you how very pleased I am that you married Pauline. I want to apologize for my churlish behavior on your first visit here. It was inexcusable.”

  “I could have been more polite myself.”

  They both laughed, recalling the things they had said to each other, and Joshua felt himself suffused with the beginning of a warm regard for his father-in-law. What promised to be a kinship, two men bound together by their love for Pauline.

  “There’s something I want you to know. I’m transferring the family cottage on Lake Memphremagog to your name and Pauline’s. Why should you be troubled by death duties when the time comes?”

  “I’d rather,” Joshua said, intent on earning points, “that you just put it in Pauline’s name.”

  “As you like,” the senator said, obviously relieved.

  In his mind’s eye, Joshua saw the cot in the maid’s room. With the rubber sheet.

  “I’d be most grateful,” the senator said, “if you could all manage to come out and visit me next summer. I’d like to see my grandchildren out there.”

  They talked about Jane Austen, Dr. Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and then the senator revealed a taste, surprising to Joshua, for the novels of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. They discovered they shared an enthusiasm for Bath. The senator told him that he had once met Isadora at a party in Haut-de-Cagnes, but she had cut him. “I suppose,” he said, “she realized what a boring old stick I was.”

  Emboldened, Joshua asked him about his meeting with Izzy Singer.

  “Yes, I remember,” he said, amused, “he phoned me out of the blue to say he was an old friend of yours.”

  Joshua blanched.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve had a long experience of the type. I got the idea quickly enough. But I was curious, and I asked him to join me for drinks at the Rideau, knowing how much that would please him. He’s an amazing fellow. Commendably forthright. He wants to be appointed to the Senate.”

  “Did he offer you money?” Joshua asked, ashamed.

  “Some directorships,” he said, averting his eyes. “You know, I can’t imagine why a man of his flair and accomplishment would want to get into the Senate.”

  “There’s some chance, then?”

  “None whatsoever. He wants it too badly. That will never do in Ottawa.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “I think he should be allowed to try. He shouldn’t be denied that.”

  “Noblesse oblige.”

  “Oh, come now, that’s a bit rich. I’m merely tolerated these days. An aging ornament. You’d be surprised how little influence I have.”

  Joshua got out of his taxi outside the National Press Club, badly in need of a drink, troubled by his meeting with the senator. The streets of Ottawa were icy, bitterly cold, but, for all that, a parade was in progress. Desperately high-spirited westerners come to town to see their American imports, NFL rejects to the man, do battle with the East’s imports for Canada’s national football trophy, the Grey Cup. The Saskatchewan Rough Riders vs. the Hamilton Ti-Cats. Paunchy men on horseback, their faces seared red by the wind, yodeled at passing secretaries huddled into their fur collars. Yahoo.

  Back at the Chateau Laurier, the grizzled, middle-aged bellhops had broken out in rakish Grey Cup boaters. More westerners in high heels and Stetsons milled about, many of them reeling. All the unanchored lobby furniture had been removed. Joshua showed his room key to the man guarding the elevator, entitling him to ascend, and he was soon joined by his colleagues in the Mackenzie King Memorial Society. Seymour, Max Birenbaum, Bobby Gross, Leo Friedman, Jack Katz, Eli Seligson, and Morty Zipper of the Montreal contingent. Joshua told them, somewhat defiantly, that they were to be joined by Izzy Singer, but not until early Saturday morning.

  “Shit,” Seymour said, “now you’ve gone and done it. While George Reed is making his run, he’ll be counting the gate and figuring out how many hot dogs are being sold.”

  “Cool it,” Joshua pleaded.

  “You don’t know the half of it. I ran into him in Florida once. Izzy Singer relaxing. Poolside. You know what he was doing? He was sitting there, with a notebook in his hand, marking his three kids for diving, on a scale of one to ten, with a prize for the winner.”

  The out-of-towners began to trickle in. Mickey Stein, now a professor of social studies at Harvard; Benjy Zucker, a dean at UCLA; and Larry Cohen, a deputy minister at Consumer Affairs. Lennie Fisher and AI Roth had flown in from Toronto.

  Izzy arrived in time for breakfast the following morning, catching up with the boys at their table in the Chateau dining room. His cheek dancing, he threw a clutch of game tickets on the tablecloth. “You know what scalpers are asking for those seats?”

  Nobody knew where to look. They buttered toast or stared glumly at their newspapers. Except for Lennie Fisher, who leaped up to find a chair for Izzy.

  “Oh, will you sit down and shettup,” Joshua said to Izzy. “We’ve all had a late night.”

  “I’ve had champagne sent to your room for tomorrow night. A case. Dom Perignon. I also brought a side of smoked salmon with me.”

  “Sit down,” Joshua said.

  “I thought we were going to have us a ball here. What’s the matter with everybody?”

  Izzy’s deerstalker hat matched his brown cashmere coat. His binoculars had been made in Germany, the best. A Nikon in a soft leather case was suspended from his shoulder. He also carried a Hudson’s Bay blanket and a pillow in a celluloid case.

  “I’m going to get you laid,” Seymour said, his smile menacing. “After dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I thought,” Izzy said, his voice wobbly, “there were no girls at these dinners.”

  “
There are no girls,” Joshua assured him.

  “I swear,” Seymour said, “that when she’s finished with you, your tongue will be hanging out. Your cock will be raw and bruised. We’ll have to carry you all the way back to Montreal.”

  Izzy’s seats were better than theirs, but the boys accepted them grudgingly, only Lennie Fisher acknowledging his largesse. “I was at Becky’s last show,” he said. “I think her work is marvelous.”

  Izzy’s wife, Becky, sculpted. She made pieces out of fish bones. In an interview with the Gazette, arranged by Izzy (a major advertiser), she had said, “My children, bless their hearts, couldn’t be more understanding. If my atelier door is closed, they walk about on tiptoe. I don’t think Leonard Woolf himself could have been more patient than my husband.”

  A bitterly cold wind cut across the frozen playing field, the Ti-Cats jumping up and down on the sidelines. One-two-three-four. Between exercises they blew on their reddening fingers and stamped their feet together.

  Then the Rough Riders trotted onto the field, their partisans in the stadium roaring. Izzy tugged at Joshua’s sleeve. “I’ve got to pee.”

  “Turn right at the top of the stairs.”

  “But it won’t come if there are other people there.”

  “Then wait.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Izzy, I’m running out of ideas.”

  “Come on,” Lennie Fisher said. “I’ll take you back to the hotel. We’ll keep the taxi waiting and we’ll be back before they even kick off.”

  On the field, they watched a milling group of scrawny girls in green-and-white tights, their teeth chattering, their noses running. The Riderettes. Pimply sex kittens of the prairie. Fortunately, a thoughtful bandmaster had provided them with woolies, sadly loose-fitting, to wear over their stockings. The girls bobbed up and down, running in place, to keep warm. Suddenly, a TV camera came into play, the drums went boom, and the intrepid girls, after one last wipe of the nose with chapped hands, flashed radiant smiles and began to strut across the frozen field.