Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  Sue’s problem was that his father, who strongly objected to the marriage, controlled his $245,000 settlement from the accident. But the day before yesterday a lawyer had Sue declared incapable of managing his property, thus shifting control of the money to the Public Guardian and Trustees of Ontario, which enabled Sue and Ms. DeSousa to move into an apartment for the disabled.

  I’m not poking fun at this couple, to whom I wish a hearty mazel tov. My point is that I think being mentally disabled gives Sue a better shot at a happy marriage than I ever had, and I speak as a veteran who has struck out three times. The last time wed to a woman “whom age cannot wither, nor custom stale,”24 but who ultimately adjudged me unworthy of her, which was an understatement. Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire.

  Were my first wife still alive, I would invite her, The Second Mrs. Panofsky, and Miriam to a bang-up lunch at Le Mas des Oliviers — a symposium on the conjugal failings of Barney Panofsky, Esquire. Cynic, philanderer, boozer, player piano. And murderer as well, perhaps.

  Le Mas des Oliviers, my favourite restaurant here, provides proof that this troubled, divided city still has its redeeming values. Its salvation, the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers. In Montreal they do not jog or nibble a quick salad after their noonday squash game, a disease money-driven Toronto suffers from. Instead, they congregate at Le Mas for three-hour lunches, digging into generous portions of côtes d’agneau or boudins, washed down with bottles of St. Julien, followed by calls for cognac and cigars. This is where contending lawyers, and judges as well, meet to settle their disputes amicably, but only after they have regaled each other with the day’s most salacious gossip. There are more mistresses than wives to be seen. The Tory party’s Québécois godfather accepts tributes at his usual table, his manner munificent. Provincial cabinet ministers who can render fat highway contracts to the deserving hear out supplicants at other tables. I sometimes frequent the Jewish sinners’ round table, Irv Nussbaum presiding, my transgressions forgiven, or mentioned only in the hope of provoking laughter.

  I brought Boogie here the day before I wedded The Second Mrs. Panofsky.

  Boogie, had he survived until now, would be seventy-two years old, possibly still wrestling with that first novel that was going to astonish the world. That’s rotten of me. Vengeful. But years have passed since I expected he would ring my doorbell, if not tomorrow then the day after. “Have you read Lovecraft?”

  Long gone are the nights when I would waken with a start at four a.m. to drive out to my cottage on the lake on a crazed hunch. Banging open the front door, shouting Boogie’s name, unavailingly, and then retreating to the dock, staring into the waters where I had last seen him.

  “I met him only that one time, at your wedding,” Miriam once said, “and I’m sorry to say I thought he was pathetic. Don’t look at me like that, please.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know we’ve been through what happened that last day on the lake a hundred times. But I still feel you’re holding something back. Did the two of you quarrel?”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  The pleasures of my cherished cottage in the mountains, some seventy miles north of Montreal, have diminished somewhat over the years. True, after they put in the six-lane Laurentian Autoroute in the sixties, it took me an hour, rather than the best of two, to reach it. But unfortunately the autoroute has also made the lake accessible to commuters, as well as the computer-literate who maintain offices in their cottages. Peeling off the autoroute, I no longer approach my retreat on a treacherous loggers’ road, gearing down for protruding rocks and avoiding the deepest holes, my scraped muffler system in need of annual renewal. I don’t regret the fallen trees that sometimes blocked my path, but I do miss the risky one-lane wooden bridge over the Chokecherry River, its rushing waters menacingly high during the spring run-off. It was displaced long ago by a proper steel-and-concrete bridge. And the loggers’ road, widened in the late fifties, is now paved and ploughed in winter. We have also benefited from political progress. This jewel of a lake, which I still think of as Lake Amherst, was renamed Lac Marquette in the seventies by the Commission de Toponymie, which is in charge of cleansing la belle province of the conqueror’s place-names. And where once only canoes and sailboats could be seen on a twenty-three-mile lake, our summers are now polluted by flotillas of powerboats and water-skiers. Fighter planes from the NATO base in Plattsburgh sometimes pass overhead, rattling windows. We also suffer the occasional transatlantic jumbo jet on a flight path for Mirabel airport and there are three tycoons who fly in for weekends in their own little seaplanes. But back in the old days I recall our then-pristine waters disturbed only once by an airplane. It was one of those damn water bombers that were being tested in 1959, I think it was, and it roared in on the lake, gulping up God knows how many tons of water, and lifted off to drop its load on some distant mountain. Why, when I first came out here there were only five cottages on the lake, including mine, but they now number more than seventy. To my amusement, I have come to fill the quaintsy office of the old codger of the lake, invited to neighbours’ cottages to regale their children with tales about the days when the speckled trout were plentiful and we were without electricity or telephones, never mind cable TV or satellite dishes.

  I stumbled on my Yasnaya Polyana by accident. Invited out to a friend’s cottage on another lake one weekend, back in 1955, I took a wrong turn and found myself on a loggers’ road that came to an abrupt stop at what appeared to be an abandoned lodge high on a hill overlooking the lake. There was a FOR SALE sign with an agent’s name banged into a post on the sinking porch. The front door was locked and the windows were boarded up, but I managed to pry one open and climb inside, scattering squirrels and field mice. The lodge, I discovered, had been built as a fishing retreat by a Bostonian in 1935, and had been on the market for ten years, which didn’t surprise me, considering the appalling shape it was in. But I was smitten on first sight, and acquired it, and the surrounding ten acres of meadow and woods, for an astonishingly cheap ten thousand dollars. For the next four years, I camped out there in a sleeping-bag just about every weekend in summer, making do with paraffin lamps and delicatessen, mouse traps laid down everywhere, quarrelling with the slo-mo local contractors who were making it habitable. I installed a gas generator in my third year, but didn’t get round to having the cottage winterized, or putting up the outbuildings and boat-house until Miriam and I were married. I maintain the elaborate tree-house, where the kids used to play, to this day. For my grandchildren, perhaps.

  Agitated, I now began to stride up and down my living-room floor. Somebody was coming to interview me at eleven, but I could no longer remember who. Or why. I had left myself a Post-it note, but now I couldn’t find it. Yesterday, seated in my Volvo, preparing to turn into Decarie, I was suddenly at a loss as to how to gear down to third. Pulling over to the curb, I rested, then rammed the clutch home, and practised shifting gears.

  Wait. I’ve got it. The young woman coming to see me is the hostess of “Dykes on Mikes,” on McGill University’s student radio, and is working on a Ph.D. thesis about Clara. This will not mark the first time I have been interrogated about her. There have been visits, or letters of inquiry, from feminists as far afield as Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Cape Town, and that city in Germany where Hitler led the march on Parliament. You know, the British prime minister with the umbrella was there. Peace in our time is what he promised. Damn damn damn. It’s the city where they have the famous beer festival. Pilsner? Molson’s? No. It sounds like the name of the little people in The Wizard of Oz. Or like that painting The Shout25 by … by Munch. Munich. Anyway, my point is, the martyred Saint Clara’s admirers are legion, and have two things in common: they take me for an abomination and fail to understand that Clara intensely disliked other women, whom she considered rivals for the male attention she thrived on.

  Hanging over my mantelpiece to this day is one of Clara’s overcrowded, tortured pen-and-ink
drawings. It depicts a gang-rape of virgins. An orgy. Gargoyles and goblins at play. The chortling satyr drawn in my image clutches a nude Clara by the hair. She is on her knees and I am forcing myself into her open mouth, taking advantage of her scream. I have been offered as much as $250,000 for this charming tableau, but nothing could make me part with it. Appearances to the contrary, I’m really a sentimental old coot.

  And now I prepared myself for a visit from what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed a feminazi. Probably wearing a nose-stud and nipple-rings and knuckle-dusters. A German army WWII helmet. Shit-kicker boots. Instead, I opened my door to an awfully demure young thing, a mere wisp of a girl, chestnut hair not crewcut but flowing, smiling sweetly she was, wearing granny glasses, a Laura Ashley dress, and dainty pumps. She immediately endeared herself to me by admiring the photographs of tap-dance immortals which line my walls: Willy “Pickaninny” Coven, creator of the Rhythm Waltz; Peg Leg Bates, caught in mid-flight; The Nicholas Brothers, of Cotton Club fame; Ralph Brown; the young James, Gene, and Fred Kelly in their bellhop uniforms, photographed at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1920; and, of course, the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, shown wearing his top hat, white tie, and tails, circa 1932. Ms. Morgan set up her tape recorder and produced a sheaf of questions, softening me up with the usual — “How did you meet Clara?” “What attracted you to her?” et cetera et cetera — before she fired her first missile. “In all the accounts I have read, it seems that you were indifferent to Clara’s great gifts as a poet and a painter, and did nothing to encourage her.”

  Amused, I tried to get a rise out of Ms. Morgan. “Let me remind you of what Marike de Klerk, wife of South Africa’s former prime minister, once said in church: ‘Women are unimportant. We’re here to serve, to heal the wounds, to give love —’ ”

  “Oh, you’re such a card,” she said.

  “ ‘If a woman inspires a man to be good,’ said Madame de Klerk, ‘he is good.’ Let’s say, if only for argument’s sake, that Clara failed to fill that office.”

  “And you failed Clara?”

  “What happened was inevitable.”

  Clara was terrified of fire. “We live on the fifth floor,” she said. “We wouldn’t have a chance.” Unexpected knocks on our hotel-room door made her freeze, so friends learned to announce themselves first. “It’s Leo,” or “It’s the Boogieman. Put all your valuables into a bag and pass them through the door.” Rich food made her vomit. She suffered from insomnia. But, given sufficient wine, she would sleep, a mixed blessing because that prompted nightmares from which she would waken trembling. She didn’t trust strangers and was even more suspicious of friends. She was allergic to shellfish, eggs, animal fur, dust, and anybody indifferent to her presence. Her periods brought on headaches, cramps, nausea, and vile temper. She endured lengthy attacks of eczema. She kept a plugged earthenware jug under our window, a bellarmino, filled with her own urine and fingernail clippings, to throw back evil spells. She feared cats. Heights scared her. Thunder petrified her. She was frightened of water, snakes, spiders, and other people.

  Reader, I married her.

  Given that I was a horny twenty-three year old at the time, it wasn’t because Clara was such a sexual wildcat. Our romance, such as it was, was not enriched by abandon between the sheets. Clara, the compulsive flirt and dirty-talker, turned out to be as prudish with me, in any event, as the mother she professed to abhor, denying me what she denigrated as my “thirty seconds of friction” time and again. Or enduring them. Or did her utmost to stifle any joy we might have salvaged out of our increasingly rare and frustrating couplings. After all these years, it’s her admonitions that I remember.

  “I want you to scrub it with soap and hot water first, and then don’t you dare come inside me.”

  She condescended to fellate me once, and was immediately sick to her stomach in the sink. Humiliated, I dressed in silence, quit the room, and tramped along the quais as far as the Place de la Bastille and back again. On my return, I discovered that she had packed a suitcase and was sitting on the bed, hunched over, shivering, in spite of wearing layers of her shawls. “I would have been gone before you got back,” she said, “but I’m going to need money for another room somewhere.”

  Why didn’t I let her go, while I could still have managed it with impunity? Why did I take her in my arms, rocking her even as she sobbed, undressing her, easing her into bed, stroking her until she slipped her thumb into her mouth and began to breathe evenly?

  I sat by her bedside for the remainder of the night, chain-smoking, reading that novel about the Golem of Prague, by what’s-his-name, Kafka’s friend, and early in the morning I went to the market to fetch her an orange, a croissant, and a yogurt for breakfast.

  “You’re the only man who ever peeled an orange for me,” she said, already working on the first line of the poem that is now in so many anthologies. “You’re not going to throw me out, are you?” she asked in her little girl’s Mother-may-I-take-a-step voice.

  “No.”

  “You still love your crazy Clara, don’t you?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  Exhausted as I was, why didn’t I give her money right then, and help her move into another hotel?

  My problem is, I am unable to get to the bottom of things. I don’t mind not understanding other people’s motives, not any more, but why don’t I understand why I do things?

  In the days that followed, Clara couldn’t have been more contrite, docile, ostensibly loving, encouraging me in bed, her simulated ardour betrayed by her tense, unyielding body. “That was good. So wonderful,” she’d say. “I needed you inside me.”

  Like fuck she did. But, arguably, I needed her. Don’t underestimate the nursing sister longing to leap out of somebody even as cantankerous as I am. Looking after Clara made me feel noble. Mother Teresa Panofsky. Dr. Barney Schweitzer.

  Scribbling away here and now at my roll-top desk at two in the morning in twenty-below-zero Montreal, pulling on a Montecristo, trying to impose sense on my incomprehensible past, unable to pardon my sins by claiming youth and innocence, I can still summon up in my mind’s eye those moments with Clara that I cherish to this day. She was an inspired tease, and could make me laugh at myself, a gift not to be underestimated. I loved our moments of shared tranquillity. Me, lying on our bed in that box of a hotel room, pretending to read, but actually watching Clara at her work table. Fidgety, neurotic Clara totally at ease. Concentrating. Rapt. Her face cleansed of its often-disfiguring turbulence. I was inordinately proud of the high esteem others, more knowledgeable than I, had for her drawings and published poems. I anticipated a future as her guardian. I would provide her with the wherewithal to get on with her work, liberated from mundane concerns. I would take her back to America and build her a studio in the countryside with northern light and a fire escape. I would protect her from thunder, snakes, animal fur, and evil spells. Eventually, I would bask in her fame, playing a dutiful Leonard to her inspired Virginia. But, in our case, I would be ever watchful, safeguarding her against a mad walk into the water, her pockets weighed down with rocks. Yossel Pinsky, the Holocaust survivor who would become my partner, had met Clara a couple of times, and was skeptical. “You’re not a nice man any more than I am,” he said, “so why try? She’s a meshugena. Ditch her before it’s too late.”

  But it was already too late.

  “I suppose you want me to have an abortion,” she said.

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. “Let me think.” I’m twenty-three years old, is what I thought. Christ Almighty. “I’m going out for a walk. I won’t be long.”

  She was sick again in the sink while I was out and, on my return, she was dozing. Three o’clock in the afternoon and Clara, the insomniac, was in a deep sleep. I cleaned up as best I could and an hour passed before she got out of bed. “So there you are,” she said. “My hero.”

  “I could speak to Yossel. He would find us somebody.”

  “Or he could manage it
himself with a coat-hanger. Only I’ve already decided I’m going to have the baby. With you or without you.”

  “If you’re going to have the baby, I suppose I should marry you.”

  “Some proposal.”

  “I’m only mentioning it as a possibility.”

  Clara curtsied. “Why, thank you, Prince Charmingbaum,” she said, and then she hurried out of our room and down the stairs.

  Boogie was adamant. “What do you mean, it’s your responsibility?”

  “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

  “You’re crazier than she is. Make her have an abortion.”

  That evening I searched for Clara everywhere, and finally found her seated alone at La Coupole. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ve decided to marry you,” I said.

  “Gee whiz. Wow. Don’t I even get to say yes or no?”

  “We could consult your I Ching, if you like.”

  “My parents won’t come. They would be mortified. Mrs. Panofsky. Sounds like a furrier’s wife. Or maybe the owner of a clothing store. Everything wholesale.”

  I found us a fifth-floor apartment on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, converted from four chambres de bonne, and we were married at the mairie in the Sixième. The bride wore a cloche hat, a ridiculous veil, an ankle-length black wool dress, and a white ostrich-feather boa. Asked if she would take me as her lawfully wedded husband, a stoned Clara winked at the official, and said, “I’ve got a bun in the oven. What would you do?” Boogie and Yossel were both in attendance and there were gifts. A bottle of Dom Perignon, four ounces of hashish implanted in knitted blue booties from Boogie; a set of six Hôtel George V sheets and bath towels from Yossel; a signed sketch and a dozen diapers from Leo; and an autographed copy of Merlin, featuring his first published story, from Terry McIver.