Barney's Version (37 page)

“Frankly speaking,” said my mother-in-law, “it's the social connections you could make there, seeing as you never enjoyed the advantages we take for granted. Mr. Bernard's son is a member and so is Harvey Schwartz.”

“We often make up a threesome,” said my father-in-law.

“Look what it's done for Maxim Gold, and he doesn't golf either. When he came over from Hungary as a boy, he could hardly speak a word of English.”

The odious Gold, incomparably rich now, ran a drug company, plasma its hottest seller. “Frankly speaking,” I said, “I would not want to belong to a club that has accepted the likes of Maxim Gold, who buys and sells blood for a profit. And furthermore,” I added, smiling my most gracious smile at my father-in-law, “I fail to understand grown
men, otherwise mature, wasting an afternoon trying to hit a little white ball into a hole. It's enough to make you despair of humankind, don't you think?”

“He's kidding you, Daddy.”

“Well now, I can take a jest as well as the next chap. But at least, out there in the fresh air —”

“Unpolluted by cigar smoke,” said my mother-in-law, fanning herself.

“— savouring what Mother Nature Bountiful has bestowed on us, we don't indulge in fisticuffs as do the hooligans who play hockey. What say you to that, Barney?”

I am emotionally tied to this cottage, which resonates with so many memories. Take this one, for instance.

One summer night only two years ago, there I was, seated on my rocking-chair on the wraparound balcony. Pulling on a Montecristo, sipping cognac, I was luxuriating in the remembrance of family good times past, when I was disturbed by the crunching of tires on the gravel approach road. It's Miriam, I thought, my heart leaping. Miriam come home. Then a Mercedes-Benz sports car jolted to a stop immediately before me, and out stumbled a
GQ
fashion plate, his smile tentative. A scrawny little old man, seemingly unaware of how ridiculous he looked. It was a distraught Norman Charnofsky, long since retired from
NYU
, what was left of his once pewter hair no longer to be seen. Norman was sporting a toupee. “Well I'll be goddamned” was all I could manage.

“I came here because I want you to hear my side of the story. I feel I owe you that much.”

Poor, innocent, sweet-natured Norman, shrunken now but still unable to control his crying jags, as it turned out. His incongruous lounge-lizard outfit was redeemed by a gravy stain on his trousers.

“Before you start,” I said, “I want you to know that I've been in touch with your wife.” And then I invited him into the living room.

“You've been in touch with Flora. You think I don't worry about her?”

Norman began by reminding me of our meeting at the Algonquin all those years ago, on the other side of the moon, when I signed over
the rights to Clara's work, which we had both considered to be without commercial value. But to Norman's astonishment and mine, as Clara's reputation soared, that coffee-table book of her ink drawings began to sell in the thousands year after year, and her widely translated
The Virago's Verse Book
was reprinted again and again. The Clara Charnofsky Foundation, inaugurated as a loving but seemingly futile gesture, started to bank millions. To begin with, its office was that tiny den in Norman's apartment where, seated under a bare lightbulb, he answered correspondence on his portable typewriter in the early-morning hours, maintaining scrupulous records of money spent on stationery, postage, typewriter ribbons, paper-clips, and carbon paper. Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper, but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end, not an answering machine with a ho ho ho message. In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your
TV
on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn't a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings, and extractions — one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager offered to pay her cleaning bill and sent over drinks, and she didn't sue for a kazillion dollars, claiming “loss of enjoyment of life.” If the restaurant was Italian it still served something called spaghetti, often with meatballs. It was not yet pasta with smoked salmon, or linguini in all the colours of the rainbow, or penne topped with a vegetarian steaming pile that looked like dog sick. I'm ranting again. Digressing. Sorry about that.

The foundation's office, once an airless den, had yielded years ago to a five-room suite on Lexington Avenue, with a staff of eight, not counting legal advisers or its portfolio manager, who had performed stock-market miracles. Millions were accumulated not only by dint of royalties and shrewd investments, but also through endowments left to the foundation. After it all became too much for Norman to handle, he had appointed two African-American feminists to the board of
directors: Jessica Peters, whose poetry was published in both
The New Yorker
and
The Nation
, and Dr. Shirley Wade, who lectured on “cultural studies” at Princeton. The two formidable sisters brought in an abrasive historian, Doris Mandelbaum, author of Herstory from
Boadicea to Madonna
.

It was Ms. Mandelbaum who led the initial boardroom rebellion, pointing out that it was a typical male power move, some might even say “an oxymoron, gender-wise,” that the chairperson of the board of a feminist foundation should be a man, of the nuclear-family persuasion, his only claim to that office that he was a relative of Clara's, herself a martyr to male chauvinist insentience. An embarrassed Norman readily agreed to step down as chairperson, and was replaced by Dr. Shirley Wade. But Norman continued to keep an eye on things, sifting through the foundation's accounts. At a 1992 board meeting, his manner characteristically timorous, he nevertheless questioned a junket the sisters had made to a literary conference in Nairobi, with a stopover in Paris, charging it to the foundation.

“I suppose if we had gone to Tel Aviv, you wouldn't have questioned the trip.”

Next Norman had the audacity to query the legitimacy of lunches at The Four Seasons, Le Cirque, Lutèce, and The Russian Tea Room, also charged to the foundation.

“But I imagine it would have been kosher, so to speak, if we had met to discuss foundation business over chitlins in some greasy spoon in Harlem.”

“Please,” said Norman, flushing.

“We've had enough of your tripping on penis-power here, Norm.”

“The truth is we're all weary of your patronizing manner —”

“— and your sexual hangups —”

“— and your racism.”

“How can you accuse me of — Didn't I appoint you and Shirley to the board?”

“
Oy vey
,
bubele
, but it made you feel good inside, didn't it? It warmed your
kishkas
.”

“You could go home and tell your wifey, we've got
schvartzes
on the board now.”

As a consequence of an emergency board meeting, held in Norman's absence at La Côte Basque a year later, he was sent a registered letter dismissing him from the board of The Clara Charnofsky Foundation, which would now be known as The Clara Charnofsky Foundation for Wimyn.

“Goddamn it, Norman, why didn't you get a lawyer and throw the lot of them out?”

“Sure, and then they would write a letter to the
Times
condemning me as a racist.”

“So what?”

“So they would have been right, don't you see? I've discovered that I am a racist, and so are you, only I acknowledge it now, they did that much for me. I'm also sexually prejudiced. A hypocrite. I used to wear an
AIDS
ribbon on my jacket lapel to classes in
NYU
, but you know what? I stopped going to that Italian restaurant on 9th Street, Flora and I were regulars for years; some of the waiters are gay, suddenly very gaunt, and what if one of them cut his finger peeling potatoes in the kitchen, and thought nothing of it?

“Those women forced me to take a good look at myself. I had to admit it did make me feel good inside, noble even, to appoint two African-Americans to the board, and deep down what I expected from them was gratitude. You know I once told them Shamir was an abomination to me, and I was for a Palestinian state, and it's true, but was that the real reason, or was I intent on ingratiating myself with them? Hey, Charnofsky is a nice Jew. He doesn't break the arms of Arab kids on the West Bank. Jessica once taunted me at a board meeting, come clean, she said, if I saw her three sons walking toward me on, say, 46th Street, wouldn't I cross to the other side of the street for fear of being mugged? They've all got those flat-top haircuts, but one of them has a scholarship to Juilliard, and the other two are at Harvard. It's raining, they hail a taxi, it shoots right past them. And if I were driving a taxi maybe I'd do the same. You too. Jesse Jackson cracks a joke about Hymietown and everybody has a fit, but I've heard you call them
shvartzes
, and I'll bet had your daughter married one you wouldn't have cracked open a bottle of champagne. I also have to say that both Jessica Peters and Shirley Wade are far more intelligent
than I am. But instead of being pleased — There I go again.
Being pleased
,” he said, banging his fists against his forehead. “What right have I to react like that to an African-American's superior intelligence? None whatsoever. But at the time I was secretly resentful. After all these years I was still only an associate professor at
NYU
, I said to myself, but Shirley's a full professor at Princeton only because of ‘affirmative action.' Yeah, sure. But Shirley and Jessica are both witty and fast. I hardly dared open my mouth at board meetings, I was so intimidated, they could cut you down with a quip just like that.

“Listen to this. When they voted themselves an annual retainer of thirty thousand dollars for attending board meetings and other duties, I fought it like crazy, but boy oh boy was I ever thrilled. I could taste it. The money. But Jessica, with that smile of hers, she says, why, Norman, if you're so offended, you could always waive your retainer. No, I couldn't do that, I said, terrified, because it would appear I was being critical of my respected colleagues. It might be interpreted as a moral judgment.

“You want to hear something even more shameful about me? Jessica is not only brilliant, but she is also a beauty, and has a reputation for sleeping around. Now I have never made love to a black woman. What am I talking about? I'm sixty-three years old and I'd never done it with anybody but Flora. I could die and I wouldn't know if I was missing out because it was a lot better with somebody else. Anyway, at board meetings I would catch myself sneaking glances at Jessica's breasts, or her crossed legs, and she knew, you bet your life she knew. She would be sitting there in that short skirt, if it ended any higher, never mind, expounding brilliantly about Henry James or Twain, doing riffs, throwing out ideas I hadn't been able to come up with in thirty years of teaching, and I would have an erection. I used to order lunch for those board meetings from the restaurant downstairs, and one day it's chicken pieces and potato salad, and Shirley is about to serve me a quarter of breast when Jessica stays her hand, and says, I think it's the dark meat that Norman fancies, and the two of them are into those belly laughs, and I'm red in the face. Oh, I'm so ashamed. I'm such a pig. And Doris, yes Doris, I couldn't stand her teasing, but she was right about me. I wouldn't want my daughter moving in with
another woman. The truth is I don't really feel comfortable even sitting in a room with a lesbian or homosexual. Why? I'll tell you. Like Doris said, I'm insecure about my masculinity. If I were lying in bed with my eyes closed, and it was a man who was sucking me off — pardon me for talking like this — but would I know the difference? Wouldn't I come just the same? I think something like that and I'm just about sick to my stomach with fear. But I'll bet it would be the same for you, if it were a man doing it, and that's why you make jokes about fags, but not me any more.

“Okay. Enough of that. No more stalling, Norman. What you are really dying to ask is why I, quote, stole, unquote, the money. Well, it wasn't stealing, it was taking what I deserved. No. Less than I deserved. Look here, if not for me who ever would have heard of Clara Charnofsky? Did you publish her poems at your own expense? Did you
shlep
that privately printed book from publisher to publisher, in those days I was like dirt to them, and wasn't I the one who wrote all those begging letters to book reviewers? What would an agent have charged? Ten per-cent I think it is, or maybe fifteen. The foundation was my idea, nobody else's. Millions sitting there, earning interest day in and day out, all because of me. And every year we fork out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, fellowships, you name it, and do you think I ever once had a thank-you note? Forget it. So I added up all the hours I had put in over the years, and I reckoned I was worth fifty dollars an hour, which is less than a fucking plumber charges these days, never mind a lawyer, and it came to seven hundred and fifty thousand. They can call it stealing, or embezzlement, or fraud, I don't give a shit, I was entitled. Hey, you want a laugh? I'll give you one. Pour me another drink.”

“I think you've had quite enough, Norman.”

“He thinks I've had quite enough. Coming from you, that's a hot one,” he said, holding out his glass.

I poured him a short one and added lots of water.

“I went to Lutèce for lunch. They fit me in, the table next to where the waiters were coming and going, and I didn't know what to order or which wine with what. You like caviar? I've been reading about it for years in novels, but it's so salty. I don't understand the fuss.