Barney's Version (15 page)

“I can't. I'm naked.”

“Tell me where it is.”

“No. You mustn't.”

“Goddamn it, Clara.”

“Shit. Fuck.” Gathering her blanket round her as best she could, still whimpering, even as the gendarmes grinned at each other, she fished her passport out of the bottom of a suitcase, showed it to them, and locked the suitcase again.

“They saw my coozy, those filthy bastards. They were staring at it.”

I ran into Terry that afternoon at the Café Bonaparte, where I had gone to play the pinball-machine. My initial bond with Terry stemmed from the fact that we were both Montrealers. Me, off Jeanne Mance Street in the city's old working-class Jewish quarter,
and Terry out of the marginally better-off,
WASP
y Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, where his father had scraped together a mean living out of a second-hand bookshop that specialized in Marxist texts. His mother had taught in an elementary school until parents protested they didn't want their children watching documentaries about life on a communal farm in Ukraine, rather than Bugs Bunny cartoons.

If most of us were broke, Terry was destitute. Or so it seemed. There were days when his diet was limited to a baguette and a
café au lait
. He wore drip-dry shirts, which he rinsed in his hand basin and hung out to dry overnight. A girl he knew, who was lodged at the
cité universitaire
, used to cut his hair for him. Terry survived by writing six-hundred-word articles for
UNESCO
that were distributed free to newspapers round the world. For thirty-five dollars he would churn out an erudite piece commemorating the centennial of a famous writer's birth, or the fiftieth anniversary of Marconi's first wireless message across the Channel, or Major Walter Reed's discovery that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes. He was barely tolerated by our bunch, as I may have mentioned earlier, so if there was a party anywhere, the word that bounced from café to café was “For God's sake, don't tell Terry.” Terry, the pariah. But I grew perversely fond of him and took him out to dinner once a week in a restaurant I favoured on the rue de Dragon. Clara never joined us. “He's the most
dégoûtant
person I have ever laid eyes on,” she said, “totally
déraciné
, a
frondeur
. And, furthermore, he has a bad aura and is constantly directing elementals at me.” But then she didn't care for Yossel either. “He gives me the chills. He stinks of all the world's evil.”

Terry intrigued me. The rest of us, blithely unselfconscious, didn't brood over whatever our ages were at the time: twenty-three, or twenty-seven, or whatever. We didn't think in terms of life spans. Or, put another way, shells had not yet begun to land close to the trench. Terry, however, was aware that he was young and experiencing his “Paris period.” His life was not his to enjoy and spend recklessly, like Onan's seed. It was a responsibility. A trust. Like a black-and-white drawing in a child's colouring book that was his to crayon, filling it in
with the utmost autobiographical care, mindful of future criticism. So he appeared to relish rather than endure penury, a rite of his literary passage. Dr. Johnson had known worse. So had Mozart. Everything he did and heard was fodder for his journals, the entries twisted, as I discovered too late.

Terry, who mocked his parents' politics, nevertheless inherited some of their prejudices, inveighing against all things American. He despaired of Coca-Cola culture. The New Rome. “Remember the night,” he said, “Cedric took us out to celebrate his signing a contract for his novel, being so damned ostentatious about his new affluence. I didn't want to rain on his fanfaronade, the clash of those Nubian cymbals, so I was mute at the time, which you, no doubt, ascribed to envy. But the truth is Scribner's had just sent back the first three chapters of my novel-in-progress with a flattering letter and a caveat. Alas, there was negligible interest in matters Canadian. Would you consider resetting your novel in Chicago? Hugh MacLennan, whom I hold in no high regard, was right in this instance: ‘Boy meets girl in Winnipeg. Who cares?' And how are things going with the unpredictable Clara these days?”

“She would have joined us for dinner, but she wasn't feeling well.”

“You needn't prevaricate with me. I don't suffer from your compulsion to be approved of, surely an appurtenance of your Jeanne Mance Street heritage. But what I don't fathom is why you persist in trailing after Boogie like a poodle.”

“You're such a prick, Terry.”

“Come now. You worship that mountebank. You have even acquired some of his gestures.” Terry — having scored, he felt — leaned back and regarded me with a condescending smile.

Terry's initial publication was in
Merlin
, one of the little magazines current in Paris at the time. “Paradiso” was insufferably poetic, Joycean,
written
, and sent us chortling to our dictionaries to look up words: didynamia, mataeology,
chaude-mellé
, sforzato.

I am now a collector of sorts of Canadiana, my special interest the journals of early travellers to Lower Canada, and dealers regularly send me catalogues. I recently espied the following entry in one of them:

One night an exuberant Terry caught up with me at the Café Royal St-Germain. “George Whitman read my story,” he said, “and has asked me to read at his bookshop.”

“Why, that's terrific,” I said, feigning enthusiasm. But I was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.

Boogie insisted on accompanying Clara and me to the bookshop opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral. “Unmissable,” said Boogie, obviously stoned. “Why, in years to come people will ask, where were you the night Terry McIver read from his
chef-d'oeuvre
? Less fortunate men will be bound to say, I was cashing in my winning Irish Sweepstakes ticket, or I was screwing Ava Gardner. Or Barney will be able to boast he was there the night his beloved Canadiens won yet another Stanley Cup. But I will be able to claim I was present on the night literary history was being made.”

“You're not coming with us. Forget it.”

“I shall be humble. I will gasp at his metaphors and applaud each use of
le mot juste
.”

“Boogie, I want your word that you're not going to heckle him.”

“Oh, stop being such a
kvetch
,” said Clara. “You're not Terry's mother.”

Folding chairs had been provided for forty, but there were only nine people there when Terry began to read, a half-hour late.

“I believe Edith Piaf is opening somewhere on the Right Bank tonight,” said Boogie,
sotto voce
, “otherwise there would surely have been a better turnout.”

Terry was in mid-flight when a bunch of Letterists barged into the bookshop. They were supporters of
Ur, Cahiers pour un dictat
culturel
, which was edited by Jean-Isador Isou. The redoubtable Isou was also the author of
A Reply to Karl Marx
, a slender riposte that was peddled to tourists by pretty girls on the rue de Rivoli and outside American Express — tourists under the tantalizing illusion that they were buying the hot stuff. The Letterists believed that all the arts were dead and could be resurrected only through a synthesis of their collective absurdities. Their own poems, which they usually recited in a café on the Place St-Michel, consisted of grunts and cries, incoherent arrangements of letters, set to an antimusical background and, for a time, I was one of their fans. And now, as Terry continued to read in a monotone, they played harmonicas, blew whistles, pumped the rubber bulb of a klaxon, and, hands cupped under armpits, made farting noises.

Deep down, I'm a homer. I root for the Montreal Canadiens and, when they were still playing ball in Delormier Downs, our Triple-A Royals. So I instinctively sprang to Terry's defence.
“Allez vous faire foutre! Tapettes! Salauds! Petits merdeurs! Putes!”
But this only served to spur on the rowdies.

A flushed Terry read on. And on. And on. Seemingly in a trance, his fixed smile chilling to behold. I felt sick.
Hold the phone
. Yes, I was truly concerned for him, but, bastard that I am, I was equally relieved that he hadn't drawn a crowd. Or won acclaim. Afterwards, I told Boogie and Clara I would catch up with them at The Old Navy, but first I was taking Terry out for a drink. Before we parted, Boogie startled me by saying, “I've heard worse, you know.”

Terry and I met at a café on the boulevard St-Michel, and sat on the terrace, the only people there, a couple of Canucks who didn't mind the cold. “Terry,” I said, “those clowns were out for blood and wouldn't have behaved any differently had Faulkner been reading there tonight.”

“Faulkner is overestimated. He won't endure.”

“All the same, I'm sorry for what happened. It was brutal.”

“Brutal? It was absolutely wonderful,” said Terry. “Don't you know that the first performance of Mozart's
Marriage of Figaro
was booed in Vienna and that when the Impressionists first showed their work they were laughed at?”

“Yeah, sure. But —”

“ ‘ … you ought to know,' ” he said, obviously quoting somebody, “ ‘that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.' ”

“And just who said that, may I ask?”

“William Blake wrote that in a letter to the Reverend John Trusler, who had commissioned some watercolours from him and then criticized the results. But what did you think, not that it matters?”

“Who could hear in all that racket?”

“Don't be evasive with me, please.”

Sufficiently irritated by now to want to crack his carapace of arrogance, I knocked back my cognac and said, “All right, then. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

“You're pathetic, Barney.”

“Right. And you?”

“I'm surrounded by a confederacy of dunces.”

That prompted a laugh from me.

“Now why don't you just settle the bill, because after all it was you who invited me, and move on to wherever you're meeting your oafish Trilby and foul-mouthed Paphian?”

“My foul-mouthed what?”

“Harlot.”

The Second Mrs. Panofsky once observed that in the absence of heart there was a knot of anger swirling inside me. And now, my blood surging, I leapt up, lifted Terry out of his chair, and smashed him hard in the face, his chair toppling over. Then I stood over him, crazed, fists ready to fly. Murder in my heart. But Terry wouldn't fight back. Instead he sat on the pavement, smirking, nursing his bleeding nose with a handkerchief. “Good night,” I said.

“The bill. I haven't got enough money on me. Settle the bill, damn you.”

I threw some franc notes at him, and was just about to flee when he began to tremble and sob brokenly. “Help me,” he said.

“What?”

“ … my hotel …”

I managed to get him to his feet and we started to walk, his teeth chattering, his legs rubbery. We had only gone a block when he
began to shake. No, vibrate. He sank to his knees and I held his head, as he vomited again and again. Somehow or other, we made it back to his room on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts. I got him into bed, and when he started to tremble again, I piled whatever clothes I could find on top of his blankets. “It's the flu,” he said. “I'm not upset. This has nothing to do with my reading. You're not saying anything.”

“What should I say?”

“There's no doubting my talent. My work will last. I know that.”

“Yes.”

Then his teeth began to chatter at such a rate I feared for his tongue. “Please don't go yet.”

I lit a Gauloise and passed it to him, but he couldn't handle it.

“My father can hardly wait for me to fail and to join him in misery.”

He began to weep again. I grabbed the wastepaper basket and held his head, but for all his heaving he could bring up nothing but a string of green slime. As soon as the retching stopped, I brought him a glass of water. “It's the flu,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I'm not upset.”

“No.”

“If you tell any of the others you saw me like this, I'll never forgive you.”

“I won't say a word to anybody.”

“Swear it.”

I swore it, and sat with him until his body stopped jerking, and he fell into a troubled sleep. But I had been a witness to his cracking and that, dear reader, is how you make enemies.

I'm determined to be fair. A reliable witness. The truth is, Terry McIver's novels, including
The Money Man
, in which I fill the large role of the acquisitive Benjy Perlman, are untainted by imagination. His novels are uniformly pedestrian, earnest, as appetizing as health food, and, it goes without saying, devoid of humour. The characters
in these novels are so wooden they could be used for kindling. It is only in Terry's journals that fantasy comes into play. Certainly the Paris pages are full of invention. A sicko's inventions. Mary McCarthy once observed that everything Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “but.” The same can be said of Terry's journals.

Following, a sampler. Some pages from the journals of Terry McIver (Officer of the Order of Canada, Governor General's Award winner), as they will soon appear in his autobiography,
Of Time and Fevers
, published by the group, Toronto, which gratefully acknowledges the assistance of mediocrity's holy trinity: the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto Arts Council.