Barney's Version (18 page)

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.

Making the arrangements for the wedding, I finally got a peek at Clara's passport, and was startled to discover the name on it was Charnofsky. “Don't worry,” she said. “You caught yourself a blue-blood
shiksa
. But when I was nineteen I ran off with him and we were married in Mexico. My art teacher. Charnofsky. It only lasted three months, but it cost me my trust fund. My father disinherited me.”

Once we moved into our apartment, Clara began to stay up into the early-morning hours, scribbling in her notebooks or concentrating on her nightmarish ink drawings. Then she slept in until two or three in the afternoon, slipped out of our apartment, and was not seen again until evening, when she would join our table at the Mabillon or Café Sélect, her manner delinquent.

“As a matter of interest, Mrs. Panofsky, where were you all afternoon?”

“I don't remember. Walking, I suppose.” And then, digging into her voluminous skirts, she would say, “I brought you a gift,” and would hand me a tin of
pâté de foie gras
, a pair of socks, and, on one occasion, a sterling silver cigarette lighter. “If it's a boy,” she said, “I'm going to call him Ariel.”

“Now that comes trippingly off the tongue,” said Boogie. “Ariel Panofsky.”

“I vote for Othello,” said Leo, his smile sly.

“Fuck you, Leo,” said Clara, her eyes hot, suffering one of her unaccountable but increasingly frequent mood changes. Then she
turned on me. “Maybe Shylock would be most appropriate, all things considered?”

Surprisingly, once Clara was over her morning sickness, playing house together turned out to be fun. We shopped for kitchenware and bought a crib. Clara made a mobile to hang over it and painted rabbits and chipmunks and owls on the walls of our nursery. I did the cooking, of course. Spaghetti bolognese,
the pasta strained with a colander
. Chopped chicken liver salad. And, my
pièce de résistance
, breaded veal chops garnished with potato latkes and apple sauce. Boogie, Leo with one or another of his girls, and Yossel often came to dinner, and once even Terry McIver, but Clara refused to tolerate Cedric, who had failed to appear at our wedding. “Why not?” I asked.

“Never mind. I just don't want him here.”

She also objected to Yossel.

“He has a bad aura. He doesn't like me. And I want to know what you two are up to.”

So I settled her on the sofa and brought her a glass of wine. “I've got to go to Canada,” I said.

“What?”

“I'll only be gone for three weeks. A month at most. Yossel will bring you money every week.”

“You're not coming back.”

“Clara, don't start.”

“Why Canada?”

“Yossel and I are going into the cheese-export business together.”

“You're joking. The cheese business. It's too embarrassing. Clara, you were married in Paris, weren't you? Yes. To a writer or a painter? No, a cheese fucking salesman.”

“It's money.”

“You would think of that. I'll go crazy all alone here. I want you to get me a padlock for the door. What if there's a fire?”

“Or an earthquake?”

“Maybe you'll do so well with the cheese that you'll send for me in Canada and we could join a golf club, if they have them there yet, and invite people in to play bridge. Or mah-jongg. I'm not becoming
a member of any synagogue ladies fucking auxiliary and Ariel's not going to be circumcised. I won't allow it.”

I managed to register a company in Montreal, open an office, and hire an old school friend, Arnie Rosenbaum, to run it, all within three febrile weeks. And Clara grew accustomed, even seemed to look forward to, my flying to Montreal every six weeks, providing I returned laden with jars of peanut butter, some Oreos, and at least two dozen packs of Lowney's Glosette Raisins. It was during my absences that she wrote, and illustrated with ink drawings, most of
The Virago's Verse Book
, now in its twenty-eighth printing. It includes the poem dedicated to “Barnabus P.” That touching tribute which begins,

I was in Montreal, hustling, and Clara was into her seventh month, when Boogie tracked me down in my room at the Mount Royal Hotel early one morning.

“I think you had better answer it,” said Abigail, the wife of my old school friend who managed our Montreal office.

“Yes.”

Boogie said, “You better grab the first flight back.”

I landed at oh whatever in the hell that airport was called before it became de Gaulle
²⁶
at seven a.m. the following morning, and made right for The American Hospital. “I'm here to see Mrs. Panofsky.”

“Are you a relative?”

“Her husband.”

A young intern, contemplating his clipboard, looked up and regarded me with sudden interest.

“Dr. Mallory would like to have a word with you first,” said the receptionist.

I took an instant dislike to Dr. Mallory, a portly man with a fringe of grey hair who radiated self-regard and had obviously never treated a patient worthy of his skills. He invited me to sit down and told me that the baby had been stillborn, but Mrs. Panofsky, a healthy young woman, would certainly be able to bear other children. His smile facetious, he added, “Of course I'm telling you this because I take it you are the father.”

He seemed to wait on my response.

“Yes.”

“In that case,” said Dr. Mallory, flipping his colourful braces, his riposte obviously rehearsed, “you must be an albino.”

Taking in the news, my heart thudding, I delivered Dr. Mallory what I hoped was my most menacing look. “I'll catch up with you later.”

I found Clara in a maternity ward with seven other women, several of whom were nursing newly born babes. She must have lost a good deal of blood. Pale as chalk she was. “Every four hours,” she said, “they attach clamps to my nipples and squeeze out the milk like I was a cow. Have you seen Dr. Mallory?”

“Yes.”

“ ‘You people,' he said to me. ‘You people.' Brandishing that poor, wizened dead thing at me as if it had slid out of a sewer.”

“He told me I could take you home tomorrow morning,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice was. “I'll come by early.”

“I didn't trick you. I swear, Barney. I was sure the baby was yours.”

“How in the hell could you be so sure?”

“It was just once and we were both stoned.”

“Clara, we seem to have an attentive audience here. I'll come for you tomorrow morning.”

“I won't be here.”

Dr. Mallory was not in his office. But two first-class airplane tickets to Venice and a confirmation slip for reservations at the Gritti Palace sat on his desk. I copied the number of the hotel reservation slip, hurried over to the nearest Bureau de Poste, and booked a call to the Gritti Palace. “This is Dr. Vincent Mallory speaking. I wish to cancel tomorrow night's reservations.”