Barney's Version

by Mordecai Richler

  BOSWELL: “But is not the fear of death natural to man?”

  JOHNSON: “So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away thoughts of it.”

  My first job, a harbinger of sins against good taste to come, was in vaudeville, or what the odious Terry McIver would surely call “commedia dell’arte, where P —— was initiated in mimeticism.” Put plainly, I was hired to sell ice cream and chocolate bars and peanuts in the Gayety Theatre, patrolling the aisles with my tray. Then Slapsy Maxsy Peel came to MC the show that starred Lili St. Cyr; and I got my first break. “Hey, peckerhead,” said Maxsy, “how would you like to earn two bucks a performance?”

  So, whenever Slapsy Maxsy was scheduled to make his first appearance of the show on stage, I would zip up to the balcony and, before he could get a word out, cup my hands to my mouth, and holler, “Hello, shmuck.”

  Seemingly startled, Slapsy Maxsy would glare at the balcony and shout back, “Hey, kid, why don’t you put your hands in your pockets and get a grip on life?” Then, responding to the guffaws in the orchestra seats, he would move on to lambaste people in the first row.

  Morty Herscovitch checked me out last week and was delighted to proclaim, “You’ve shrunk almost half an inch since last year.” Next he blew me a kiss and rammed his gloved finger up my arse.

  “You won’t find any truffles there,” I said.

  “We’re going to have to get it trimmed one of these days. The sooner the better. Remember Myer Labovitch?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. Room Thirty-nine. Big in the AZA. First guy to come to school wearing a zoot suit. He flew to Zurich yesterday. Kidney transplant. They buy them in Pakistan. Costs a fortune, but what the hell? You know what’s coming soon to your neighbourhood health centre? Heart transplants from pigs. They’re working on it in Houston right now. Now tell me, what will the Lubavitcher Rebbe say to that, eh, Barney?”

  I was Morty’s last patient of the day, but even as we retired to his office, shmoozing, a raging Duddy Kravitz whacked open the door and burst in on us, shedding his cashmere topcoat and white silk scarf, revealing a snazzy tux. Dismissing me with a perfunctory nod, he turned on Morty. “I need a disease.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s for my wife. Look, I’m in a terrible hurry and she’s waiting in my car. It’s a Jag. Latest model. You ought to get one, Barney. You pay cash, you can knock them down. She’s in tears.”

  “Because she hasn’t got a disease?”

  Duddy explained that his millions notwithstanding, never mind his donations to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the art museum, the Montreal General Hospital, McGill, and his whopper of an annual cheque to Centraid, he was still unable to crack Westmount society to his wife’s satisfaction. But tonight, en route to the museum’s Strawberry and Champagne Ball, “They usually seat us at a table in the bleachers,” he said, “I had a brain wave. There has to be a disease out there not yet spoken for, something for which I could register a charitable foundation, organize a ball at the Ritz, fly in some bigname ballet dancer or opera singer to perform, who cares the cost, and everybody would have to turn out. But it’s a tough call. Don’t tell me. I know. Multiple sclerosis has already been nabbed. So has cancer. Parkinson’s. Alzheimer’s. Liver and heart diseases. Arthritis. You name it, it’s gone. So what I need is some disease still out there, something sexy I could start a charity for, and appoint the governor general, or some other prick, honorary patron. You know, like Sister Kenny, or was it Mrs. Roosevelt, and the March of Dimes. Polio was terrific. Something kids get tugs at the heartstrings. People are suckers for it.”

  “What about AIDS?” I suggested.

  “Where have you been living? That’s long gone. Now there’s that thing that women get, you know, they eat like pigs, then stick two fingers down their throat and vomit it out, what’s that called?”

  “Bulimia.”

  “It’s disgusting, but if Princess Diana has got it, it could have lots of appeal for Westmount types. Goddamn it,” said Duddy, glancing at his watch. “Come on, Morty. I’m running late. Any minute now she starts her blowing-on-the-horn routine. She’s driving me crazy. Hit me with something.”

  “Crohn’s disease.”

  “Never heard of it. Is it big?”

  “Maybe two hundred thousand Canadians suffer from it.”

  “Good. Now you’re talking. So tell me about it.”

  “It’s also known as ileitis or ulcerative colitis.”

  “Explain it to me in laymen’s terms, please.”

  “It leads to gas, diarrhoea, rectal bleeding, fever, weight loss. You suffer from it you could have fifteen bowel movements a day.”

  “Oh, great! Wonderful! I phone Wayne Gretzky, I say, how would you like to be a patron for a charity for farters? Mr. Trudeau, this is D.K. speaking, and I’ve got just the thing to improve your image. How would you like to join the board of a charity my wife is organizing for people who shit day and night? Hey there, everybody, you are invited to my wife’s annual Diarrhoea Ball. Listen, for my wife it has to have some class. I want you to come up with a winner by nine o’clock tomorrow morning, Morty. Good to see you, Barney. Sorry your wife left you. Is it true it was for a younger guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re into that now. The libbers. One night you help them with the dishes and the next they go back to college to get a degree and soon enough they’re being shtupped by some kid. Barney, you want hockey or baseball tickets, I’m your man. Call me and we’ll have lunch. There she goes. Beep beep beep.”

  I had just finished my drink, and was heading for bed, when Irv Nussbaum phoned to ask if I’d seen the latest opinion poll on the referendum. “We’re sliding,” he said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  All the same, Irv was euphoric. “But there are bound to be more anti-Semitic incidents any day now. I feel it in my bones. Terrific!” Irv had just returned from one of those United Jewish Appeal feel-good tours to Israel. “I met this guy named Pinsky there who claimed he knew you in Paris when you didn’t have a pot to piss in. He said you did some deals together. Hey, if that’s the case, I’ll bet they weren’t so kosher.”

  “They weren’t. What’s Yossel up to these days?”

  “Something to do with diamonds. I ran into him at Ocean, maybe the most expensive restaurant in Jerusalem. He was swilling champagne with one of those new young Russian immigrants. Some tootsie she was. A blondie. And he drove off in a Jaguar, so he has to be earning a living. Oh, he said to ask if some guy you both used to know — Biggie or Boogie, I forget — owed you as much money as he owed him.”

  “Had he heard from Boogie recently?”

  “Not for donkey’s years, he said. He gave me his card. He’d like to hear from you.”

  Couldn’t sleep. Consumed with guilt because I had lost contact with Yossel years ago. Was it that he was no longer useful? Is that the kind of shit I had become?

  Damn damn damn. Had I suspected I would survive to such an advanced age, sixty-seven, I would prefer to have earned a reputation as a gentleman, rather than a ruffian who had made his fortune producing crap for TV. I would like to have become a man like Nathan Borenstein, the retired GP Doctor Borenstein must be in his late seventies now, what my daughter, Kate, calls a cotton top, round-shouldered, wearing trifocals, and seldom seen without the silvery-haired, petite Mrs. Borenstein, probably the same age, on his arm. I have arranged to sit immediately behind them at the symphony concert series at Place des Arts, the seat next to mine empty these days but held on to, just in case. When the house lights dim, he links arms with Mrs. Borenstein, ever so discreetly, and later he frees himself, opens his copy of the score, and follows the performance with the benefit of a pocket flashlight, nodding pleasurably or biting his lips as the occasion demands. The last time I saw them together was at the Montreal Opera Company’s presentation of The Magic Flute. As usual, I kept an eye on Borenstein, applauding an aria when he did and abstaining wh
en he did.

  Overdressed, bejewelled women, who have benefited from rhinoplasty, ultrapulse carbon-dioxide laser treatment, abdominoplasty or liposuction, prevail at Place des Arts. These days, according to Morty Herscovitch, some of them also go in for soya-oil breast implants. You nibble a nipple and what do you get? Salad dressing.

  I collect little snippets of information about the Borensteins. Her eyesight, I have heard, is failing, so he reads aloud to her after dinner. They have three children. The oldest son, a doctor, is with Médecins sans Frontières, serving in Africa, wherever the fly-bitten children with bloated bellies can be found. There is a daughter, who is a violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and a son, who is a physicist at the — the — not Tel Aviv, but the other city in Israel. Not Jerusalem either. At the something institute in the not–Tel Aviv, not-Jerusalem city. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It begins with an “H.” The Herzl Institute.34 No. But something like that. What does it matter?

  Once, following a concert at Place des Arts, I dared to approach the Borensteins. They were standing outside, seemingly irresolute. It was pouring. Thunder. Lightning. A flash summer storm. “Sorry to intrude, Doctor,” I said, “but I’m just going to fetch my car out of the garage. May I offer you a lift?”

  “Why, that’s very kind of you, Mr … ?”

  “Panofsky. Barney Panofsky.”

  Then I saw Mrs. Borenstein stiffen and squeeze her husband’s arm. “We’ve already ordered a taxi,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, embarrassed.

  On the first page of this ill-starred manuscript, I suggested that I was a social pariah because of the scandal I would carry to my grave like a humpback. But, to come clean, following my acquittal there were men, WASPy types, reeking of old money, once given to dismissing me with the most cursory of nods, who now stood me drinks at the Ritz. “Good for you, Panofsky.” Or slapped me on the back and sat down, uninvited, at my table in the Beaver Club. “In my humble opinion, you struck a blow for the good guys.” Or asked me to join them for a game of noonday squash at the MAAA. “And I’m not your only admirer there.”

  Some of their haughty wives, who had hitherto found me disagreeable, coarse, a sour and unattractive man, now got a charge out of my presence. They flirted shamelessly, my mean origins forgiven. Imagine. A kike with a passion for something else besides money. A real murderer moving amongst us. “You mustn’t take offence, Barney, but I associate your people with white-collar crime, not acts of, well, you know.” I found these women were most aroused when I acknowledged rather than denied the heinous deed. I learned a good deal about Upper Westmount civilization and its discontents. The wife of a partner in McDougal, Blakestone, Corey, Frame and Marois told me, “I could walk into the Ritz nude and Angus wouldn’t even blink. ‘You’re late,’ is all he would say. Oh, incidentally, Angus will be in Ottawa overnight on Tuesday, if that suits you, and I’m game for anything but the missionary position. I’ve read about the alternatives, of course. I’m a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club.”

  But I was, and remain, anathema to the quality. Fortunately, they are few in number in Montreal.

  The Borensteins attend the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, every summer, and I was once seated not too far from them in The Church restaurant. Mrs. Borenstein was flushed, and I’m willing to swear the old man, his hand under the table, was flirting with his wife of something like fifty years. I summoned the waiter and asked him to send them a bottle of Dom Perignon, but only after I had left, and not to say where it came from. Then I strolled out into the rain, feeling deeply sorry for myself and cursing Miriam who had abandoned me.

  I dislike most people I have ever met, but not nearly so much as I am disgusted by the Rt. Dishonourable Barney Panofsky. Miriam understood. Once, following an all-too-characteristic drunken rage on my part, which led, inevitably, to my seeking sustenance from a bottle of Macallan, she said, “You hate those TV shows you produce, and you’re filled with contempt for just about everybody who works on them. Why don’t you give it up before it gives you cancer?”

  “And what would I do then? I’m not even fifty yet.”

  “Open a bookshop.”

  “That wouldn’t keep me in Havanas and XO cognac and first-class travel to Europe for the two of us. Or pay college fees. Or leave anything for the children.”

  “I don’t want to end my days with a sour old man, full of regrets for a wasted life.”

  And, in the end, she didn’t, did she? Instead, she is wasting herself on Herr Doktor Professor Save-the-Whales, Stop-the-Seal-Hunt, Wipe-Only-With-Recycled-Paper, Hopper né Hauptman, who has dropped the second “n” in his original family name lest people discover he was related to the Lindbergh kidnapper, and possibly even Adolf Eichmann, if you scrutinized his family history.

  Enough.

  Dr. Borenstein is the subject of today’s sermon. Given that he is a gentleman of impeccable taste, imagine my consternation when I saw him, and Mrs. Borenstein, sitting in the fourth row for Terry McIver’s reading from Of Time and Fevers in the Leacock Auditorium last Wednesday night. I had to be there, hiding in the last row. I hadn’t heard that pretentious fraud read from his work since that disastrous evening, on the other side of the moon, in George Whitman’s bookshop. But what was such a cultured couple doing there among all those CanCult groupies?

  Terry was introduced by Professor Lucas Bellamy, author of Northern Rites: Essays on Culture and Place in Post-Colonial Canada, who began his halting, ten-minute panegyric by saying Terry McIver needed no introduction. Terry’s prizes were cited. The Governor General’s Award for Literature. The Canadian Authors’ Association Medal of Merit. His Order of Canada. “And,” the professor concluded, “if there is any justice, the Nobel Prize in the not-too-distant future. For the truth is, if Terry McIver weren’t a Canadian he would be internationally celebrated instead of overlooked by the cultural imperialists in New York and the snobs who rule the London literary roost.”

  Before launching into the reading, Terry announced that he had, along with a number of other writers, endorsed a statement opposing the use of clear-cutting and supporting the protection of British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound. Clear-cut logging, he said, led to species loss. It was estimated that one hundred species a day go extinct because of human impact on the environment, which also contributes to global warming — a prospect I would have thought was to be welcomed as a blessing in our country. “Biodiversity is our living legacy,” he proclaimed to applause, and then he asked everybody to sign a petition that the ushers would pass around. I had come with Solange, my regular companion now, who would soon be joining me in the pensioners’ ranks, but continued to wear short dresses more appropriate to a woman of Chantal’s age. I feared they made her look foolish, which grieved me, as I held her in such high regard, but I didn’t dare say a word. Solange had done me proud as a TV director, but still longed to be on camera, playing romantic leads. I didn’t allow her to stay on for the book signing, hurrying her out of the hall and taking her to dinner at L’Express. “Why did you sign that dumb petition they were passing around?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t dumb. Animal life is threatened everywhere.”

  “Yours and mine, too. But you know something? You’re right. I worry, in particular, about the possible loss of hyenas, jackals, cockroaches, deadly snakes, and sewer rats.”

  “Couldn’t you wait until I finished my dinner?”

  “What if, due to our negligence, they all went the way of the dinosaurs?”

  “Like you?” she asked, and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart’s desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she’s missing. No, don’t.

  “Hello, hello, I’m still here,” said Solange, waving her hand in front of my face.

  “Are you going to buy his book?”

  �
��Yes.”

  “But Solange, my dear, there are no pictures.”

  “If this is going to be one of your endearing all-actresses-are-idiots nights, go ahead, be my guest.”

  “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You see, I knew McIver in Paris and have seen something of him since.”

  “But you’ve already told me that more than once,” she said, troubled.

  “We don’t like each other.”

  “What are you most jealous of, Barney, his talent or his good looks?”

  “Oh, you are clever. But that will require some thought. Now, tell me, speaking as a bona fide pepper, a pure laine frog, probably descended from les filles du roi, how are you going to vote in the referendum?”

  “I’m seriously thinking of voting Yes this time. There are some in the PQ who are really racist, which is abhorrent to me, but for more than a hundred years this country has exhausted itself, and been held back trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Of course it’s risky, and it won’t be easy, but why shouldn’t we have our own country?”

  “Because it would destroy mine. Your ancestors were stupid. They should have sold Quebec and kept Louisiana.”

  “Barney, you’re a mess. Drinking the way you do at your age. Pretending that Miriam will come back.”

  “And what about you? After all these years you still haven’t thrown out Roger’s clothes. That’s sick, you know.”

  “Chantal says your behaviour in the office is more objectionable than ever. People dread the days you turn up. And Barney,” she said, reaching for my lizardy hand, “you’re coming to a time of life when it could be dangerous for you to be living alone.”

  “What’s eating you, Solange? Spit it out.”

  “Chantal says that last Thursday you dictated a letter to be sent to Amigos Three and when you came in on Monday you dictated the same letter all over again.”

  “So I was forgetful once. I was probably hung over.”

  “More than once.”