Barney's Version (29 page)

As for me, following my retreat from Paris and the artistic wankers I had wasted my time with there, I resolved to make a fresh start in life. What was it Clara had once said? “When you go home, it will be to make money, which is inevitable, given your character, and you'll marry a nice Jewish girl, somebody who shops …” Well, I'll satisfy her ghost, I thought. From now on, it was going to be the bourgeois life for Barney Panofsky. Country club. Cartoons scissored out of
The New Yorker
pasted up on my bathroom walls.
Time
magazine subscription. American Express card. Synagogue membership. Attaché case with combination lock. Et cetera et cetera.

Four years had passed, and I had graduated from dealing in cheese, olive oil, antiquated
DC-3S
, and stolen Egyptian artifacts, but was still brooding about Clara, guilt-ridden one day, defiant the next. I went out and bought myself a house in the Montreal suburb of Hampstead. It was perfection. Replete with living-room conversation pit, fieldstone fireplace, eye-level kitchen oven, indirect lighting, air-conditioning, heated toilet seats and towel racks, basement wet bar, aluminum siding, attached two-car garage, and living-room picture window. Admiring my acquisition from the outside, satisfied that it would make Clara spin in her grave, I saw what was wrong, and immediately went out and bought a basketball net and screwed it into place over the garage double doors. Now all that was missing was a wifey and a dog called Rover. By this juncture, sitting on $250,000 in the bank, I sold off my agencies, netting even more
mazuma
, registered the name Totally Unnecessary Productions Ltd., and rented offices downtown. Then I set out in quest of the missing piece in my spiteful middle-class equation, the jewel in Reb Barney's crown, so to speak. After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Yes. But, in order to acquire Mrs. Right, I had first of all to prove myself a straight arrow.

So I decided to infiltrate the Jewish establishment, set on qualifying as a pillar or at least a cornice. For openers, I volunteered to work as a fund-raiser for United Jewish Appeal, which explains how late one afternoon I actually found myself sitting in the office of a suspicious but hot-to-trot clothing manufacturer. Certainly I had come to the right place. A Man-of-the-Year plaque hung on the wall behind tubby, good-natured Irv Nussbaum's desk. So did a pair of bronzed baby shoes. There was an inscribed photograph of Golda Meir. In another photograph Irv was shown presenting a Doctor of Letters scroll to Mr. Bernard Gursky on behalf of the Friends of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. A model of an eighteen-foot yacht that Irv maintained in Florida was mounted on a pedestal: the good ship
Queen Esther
, after Irv's wife, not the biblical Miss Persia. And photographs of Irv's obnoxious children were here, there, and everywhere. “You're kind of young for this,” said Irv. “Usually our fund-raisers are, well, you know, more mature men.”

“A guy can't be too young to want to do his bit for Israel.”

“Care for a drink?”

“A Coke would be nice. Or a soda water.”

“How about a Scotch?”

“Darn it. It's too early in the day for me, but you go right ahead, please.”

Irv grinned. Obviously, contrary to reports, I wasn't a boozer. I had passed a test. So now I submitted to a crash course of dos and don'ts.

“I'm going to trust you with just a few cards to begin with,” said Irv. “But listen up. Rules of the game. You must never visit your target in his office, where he is king shit and you're just another
shmuck
looking for a handout. If you run into him in the synagogue, you can butter him up with Israel's needs, but it's no good putting the touch on him there. Bad taste. Money-changers in the temple. Use the phone to schedule a meeting, but the time of day you get together is of the utmost importance. Breakfasts are out, because maybe his wife wouldn't let him bang her last night, or he didn't sleep because of heartburn. The ideal time is lunch. Pick a small restaurant. Tables far apart. Some place you don't have to shout. Make it eyeball to eyeball. Shit. We've got a problem this year. There's been a decline in the number of anti-Semitic outrages.”

“Yeah. Isn't that a shame,” I said.

“Don't get me wrong. I'm against anti-Semitism. But every time some asshole daubs a swastika on a synagogue wall or knocks over a stone in one of our cemeteries, our guys get so nervous they phone me with pledges. So, things being how they are this year, what you've got to do is slam-dunk your target about the Holocaust. Shove Auschwitz at him. Buchenwald. War criminals thriving in Canada to this day. Tell him, ‘Can you be sure it won't happen again, even here, and then where will you go?' Israel is your insurance policy, you say.

“We will provide you with the inside info on your target's annual income, and if he starts to cry, saying he's had a bad year, you say bullshit and read him numbers. Not the numbers on his tax returns. The real numbers. You tell him now that we've got that fucker Nasser to contend with, his pledge has to be bigger this year. And if he turns out to be a hard nut, a
kvetcher
, you slip in that everybody at Elmridge, or
whatever country club he belongs to, will know exactly how much he pledged, and that his order books could suffer if he turns out a piker. Hey, I understand you've gone into television production. You need help with casting, Irv's your man.”

Help with casting? A babe in the show-biz woods that swarmed with ferrets, conmen, and poisonous snakes, I even needed help tying my shoelaces in those days. I was bleeding, no, haemorrhaging money. My first pilot, the idea sold to me by a hustler who claimed he had a co-credit on a
Perry Mason
episode, was for a projected series about a private eye “with his own code of honour.” A sort of Canadian son of Sam Spade. The pilot, directed by a National Film Board hack, starred a Toronto actor (our Olivier, his agent said, who turned down Hollywood offers on principle) who could be counted on to be drunk before breakfast, while the woman cast as his Girl Friday was, unbeknownst to me, a former mistress of his who broke into sobs whenever they had to do a scene together. The result was so unbelievably awful I didn't dare show it to anybody, but I've got it on a cassette now and play it back for laughs whenever I'm feeling depressed.

I proved to be such an adroit fund-raiser that Irv invited me to his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party, a dinner dance for the quality held in private rooms at Ruby Foo's, black tie, everybody there except me good for a minimum twenty-thousand-dollars-a-year
UJA
bite, never mind the bond drive, and other community appeals for vigorish. And that's where I met the virago who would become my second wife. Damn damn damn. Here I am, sixty-seven years old, a shrinking man with a cock that trickles, and I still don't know how to account for my second marriage, which now sets me back ten thousand dollars a month before adjustments for inflation, and to think that her father, that pompous old bore, once feared
me
as the fortune-hunter. Looking back, in search of anything that would justify my idiocy, pardon my sins, I must say I was not the real me in those days but an impersonator. Pretending to be the go-getter Clara had damned. Guilt-ridden. Drinking alone in the early-morning hours, fearful of sleep, which was invaded by visions of Clara in her coffin. The coffin, as ordained by Jewish law, was made of pine, holes drilled into it, so that the worms might fatten on that too-young corpse as soon as possible. Six
feet under. Her breasts rotting. “ … you'll be able to entertain guys at the United Jewish Appeal dinner with stories about the days you lived with the outrageous Clara.” Bingeing on respectability, I was now determined to prove to Clara's ghost that I could play the nice middle-class Jewish boy better than she had ever dreamed. Hey, I used to stand back, observing myself, as it were, sometimes tempted to burst into applause in celebration of my own hypocrisy. There was the night, for instance, when I was still caught up in the lightning one-month courtship of the time-bomb who would become The Second Mrs. Panofsky, taking her to dinner at the Ritz, drinking far too much as she continued to yammer about how she would do up my Hampstead respectability trap with the help of an interior decorator she knew. “Will you be able to drive me home,” she asked, “ … in your condition?”

“Why,” I said, bussing her on the cheek, and improvising on a script that could only have been produced by Totally Unnecessary Productions Ltd., “I could never forgive myself if you were hurt in an accident, because of my ‘condition.' You're far too precious to me. We'll leave my car here and take a taxi.”

“Oh, Barney,” she gushed.

I shouldn't have written “ ‘Oh, Barney,' she gushed.” That was rotten of me. A lie. The truth is I was an emotional cripple when I met her, drunk more often than not, punishing myself for doing things that went against my nature, but The Second Mrs. Panofsky had sufficient vitality for the two of us, and a comedic flair, or sparkle, all her own. Like that old whore Hymie Mintzbaum of blessed memory, she possessed that quality I most admire in other people — an appetite for life. No, more. In those days a determination to devour all matters cultural, even as she could now wolf her way through the counter in the Brown Derby without pause. The Second Mrs. Panofsky didn't read for pleasure, but to keep up. Sunday mornings she sat down to
The New York Times Book Review
, as though to an exam that had been set for her, noting only those books likely to be discussed at dinner parties, ordering them promptly, and careering through them at breakneck speed:
Dr. Zhivago
,
The Affluent Society
,
The Assistant
,
By Love Possessed
. The deadliest sin, so far as she was concerned, was time-wasting, and I was accused of it again and again, squandering
hours on nobodys encountered in bars. Shooting the breeze with superannuated hockey players, boozy sports columnists, and smalltime conmen.

On a three-day junket to New York we stayed at the Algonquin, booked into separate bedrooms, which I insisted on, eager to play by what I took to be the rules. I could have happily passed that interlude wandering aimlessly, drifting in and out of bookshops and bars, but she was locked into a schedule that would have required a fortnight for a normal person to fill. Plays to be monitored afternoon and evening:
Two for the Seesaw
,
Sunrise at Campobello
,
The World of Suzie Wong
,
The Entertainer
. Between times her check-list included forced marches to out-of-the-way craft shops and jewellery designers recommended by
Vogue
. Footsore, she was still among the first through the doors of Bergdorf Goodman when it opened in the morning, hurrying on to Saks, and those places on Canal Street, known only to the
cognoscenti
, where Givenchy's new “bag” dresses could be bought on the cheap. Flying down to New York, she wore an old outfit that could be dumped into her hotel-room wastepaper basket as soon as she acquired her first new one. Then, on the morning of our scheduled flight home, she tore up incriminating sales receipts, retaining only those that obliging salesladies had fabricated for her, say a bill for $39.99 for a $150 sweater. Boarding the plane, she wore only God knows how many sets of underwear, and one blouse over another, and then she clowned her passage past the Montreal customs inspector, flirting with him
en français
.

Yes, The Second Mrs. Panofsky was an exemplar of that much-maligned phenomenon, the Jewish-American Princess, but she succeeded in fanning my then-dying embers into something resembling life. When we met she had already served a season on a kibbutz and graduated from McGill, majoring in psychology, and was working with disturbed children at the Jewish General Hospital. They adored her. She made them laugh. The Second Mrs. Panofsky was not a bad person. Had she not fallen into my hands but instead married a real, rather than a pretend, straight arrow, she would be a model wife and mother today. She would not be an embittered, grossly overweight hag, given to diddling with New Age crystals and consulting
trance-channellers. Miriam once said to me, Krishna was licensed to destroy, but not you, Barney. Okay, okay. The truth, then.

“You're far too precious to me,” I gushed. “We'll leave my car here and take a taxi.”

“Oh, Barney,” she said, “are you ever full of shit tonight.”

Oh, Barney, you bastard
. When I try to reconstruct those days, failing memory is an enormous blessing. Vignettes wash over me. Embarrassing incidents. Twinges of regret. Boogie flew in from Las Vegas, moderately successful at the tables for once, to be my best man. He met my bride a couple of days before the ceremony was to take place and the two of us went out to dinner, on a night I should have been at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, watching the Canadiens beat the Leafs 3–2, taking a 3–1 lead in the Stanley Cup Finals. Some game I missed. Down one–zip going into the third period, the
bleu, blanc, et rouge
potted three goals in just over six minutes: Backstrom, McDonald, and Geoffrion.

“Don't go through with it, Barney, please,” said Boogie. “We could drive to the airport as soon as we finish our cognacs and catch the first plane to Mexico or Spain or wherever.”

“Aw, come on,” I said.

“I can see that she's attractive. A luscious lady. Have an affair. We could be in Madrid tomorrow. Tapas on those narrow streets running off the Plaza Mayor.
Cochinillo asado
at Casa Botín.”

“Goddamn it, Boogie, I can't leave town during the Stanley Cup Finals.” And, with a heavy heart, I went on to show him my two tickets in the reds for the next game in Montreal.
The game that was being played on my wedding night
. If the Canadiens won, it would mean our fourth straight Stanley Cup, and, just this once, I was hoping that they'd lose, so that I could postpone our honeymoon and take in what would surely be the final and winning game. “Do you think she'd mind,” I asked, “if, after the dinner, I slipped out for an hour and maybe caught the third period in the Forum?”