Barney's Version (41 page)

The two of us were out to dinner at La Sapinière in Ste-Adèle. As Miriam perused the menu, I brought a flush to her cheeks, sliding my hand under the table to stroke her silken thigh. Oh, happy days! Oh, nights of rapture! Leaning over to nibble her ear, I suddenly felt her stiffen. “Look out,” she said.

Yankel Schneider, of all people, had just entered the restaurant with a couple of friends, only this time he didn't stop at our table to insult me, his anger justifiable. Nevertheless, he put Miriam and me in mind of our last encounter with him at our make-or-break lunch at the Park Plaza in Toronto. That lunch that had started out as a disaster. Me, making such a fool of myself. With hindsight, however, we were now able to laugh at what had since become a cherished part of our personal history. A story, albeit an edited version, our children had come to love.

“And then what happened?” Saul might ask.

“Tell them, Miriam.”

“Certainly not.”

But that evening in Ste-Adèle, Yankel's presence still filled me with guilt. Sneaking glances at him, I did not see the man in his early forties but, instead, the ten-year-old schoolboy whose life I had made such a misery. “I still don't understand why I tormented him like that. How I could behave so abominably.”

Sensing my distress, Miriam reached for my hand.

O, Miriam, Miriam, my heart's desire. Without her, I am not only alone but also incomplete. In our halcyon days I could share everything with her, even my most shameful moments, of which there are
too many to haunt me in my dotage. Take this one, for instance. On that day that was ruined for me, because I had read in the
Gazette
that McIver had won the Governor General's Award for fiction, I sent him a note.
An anonymous note
. Some lines from Dr. Johnson's
The Vanity of Human Wishes
:
⁶³

Once I was not only an unredeemed sadist, given to ridiculing a classmate with a stammer, but on occasion a coward, and also a petty thief. When I was a boy one of my chores was to deliver and collect our sheets from the Chinese laundry on Fairmount Street. One afternoon the stooped old man ahead of me, bearded, wearing a yarmulke, didn't notice that he had dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor as he paid for his laundry. I covered it with my shoe immediately, retrieving it once he had shuffled out of the shop.

In fifth grade, I was the one who wrote
FUCK YOU, MISS HARRISON
on the blackboard, but it was Avie Fried who was expelled from school for a week as a consequence. Our principal, Mr. Langston, summoned me to his office. “I am obliged to strap you, young man, because I know you were aware Fried was the culprit. However, I do admire your pluck for declining to snitch on a classmate.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, extending my hand, palm upward.

I have many more claims to obloquy. It was not an accident that at Sheila Ornstein's Sweet Sixteen party, up there in the higher reaches of Westmount, I knocked over a lampstand and shattered a Tiffany shade. I did it because I detested them for being rich. Sure, but I was indignant when, maybe five years ago, ruffians broke into my Laurentian cottage and not only stole my
TV
set, among other movables, but also shat on my sofa. I am an impenitent rotter to this day, a malevolent man, exulting in the transgressions of my betters.

Case in point.

I understand why our most perspicacious men of letters object to the current trend in biography, its mean practitioners revelling in the carve-up of genius. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit. I'm a sucker for studies of those who, in the words of that friend of Auden's (not MacNeice, not Isherwood, the other guy) “ … travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”
⁶⁵
But took no prisoners
en route
,
now that the facts are known
. Say, the story of T. S. Eliot having his first wife locked up in the bin, possibly because she had written some of his best lines. Or a book that delivers the dirt on Thomas Jefferson, who kept slaves and provided the prettiest one with an unacknowledged child. (“How is it,” asked Dr. Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) Or reveals that Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and a compulsive fucker of white women. Or that Admiral Byrd, one of my boyhood heroes, was actually a smooth-talking liar, a terrible navigator, an air traveller so frightened of flying that he was frequently drunk while others did the piloting, and a man who never hesitated to take unearned credit. Or tells how F.D.R. cheated on Eleanor. Or that J.F.K. didn't really write
Profiles in Courage
. Or how Bobby Clarke slashed Kharlamov across the ankles, taking out the better player in that first thriller of a hockey series against the incredible Russians. Or that Dylan Thomas was a
shnorrer
born. Or that Sigmund Freud faked some of his case notes. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And, in any event, my feelings are licensed by no less a moralist than Dr. Johnson, who once pronounced on the uses of biography to Edmond Malone, a Shakespeare scholar:

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony. I realize that I — who took The Second Mrs. Panofsky's rambling conversation to be an abomination — have consumed hundreds of pages, piling digression upon digression, to avoid getting to that seminal weekend in the Laurentians that all but destroyed my life, rendering unto me my reputation as a murderer, which is believed by some to this day. So coming up at last, the lowdown. Exit Boogie. Enter Sergeant-Detective Sean O'Hearne. And I'm willing to swear that what follows is the truth. I am innocent. Honestly. So help me God, as they say.

Wait. Not quite yet. I'll get to the cottage (Boogie, O'Hearne, Second Mrs. P., et cetera et cetera) in a jiffy. I promise. But right now it's time for “By Special Request.” Miriam's hour. Damn. There seems to be something wrong with my radio. Weak what-do-you-call-thems maybe. You know, the thingamajigs that provide the juice. I can only hear her when I turn the volume way up. Everything's going on the blink here. Last night it was my
TV
. The volume fading in and out again. When I finally got it adjusted, I was interrupted by a pounding on the door. It was the downstairs neighbour's son. “Are you not answering your phone, Mr. Panofsky?”

“Of course I'm answering my phone. What's your problem, Harold?”

“My mother was wondering if you'd mind turning your
TV
down.”

“Your mother must have very sensitive hearing, but, okay, I'll turn it down.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, Harold. One minute.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Trick question. If your radio was going dead, what would you suspect was the problem? It's not a plug-in, but one of those you carry from room to room …”

“A portable.”

“That's what I said, isn't it?”

“I guess you ought to check out your batteries.”

Harold gone, I poured myself a couple of fingers of Cardhu, and looked into what late movies were available on
TV
. Burt Lancaster in
The Crimson Pirate
.
The Silver Chalice
with Paul Newman and Virginia Mayo.
FBI Girl
with Cesar Romero, George Brent, and Audrey Totter. No, thanks, but sleep wouldn't come. So I dredged up my trusty Mrs. Ogilvy out of the mists, recalling the Sunday she had borrowed somebody's Austin sedan and invited me to go on a picnic in the Laurentians. To my amazement, my mother had actually prepared food for us. Unspeakable concoctions of her own invention. Combination banana and oozy boiled-egg sandwiches and other two-deckers, these filled with sardines and peanut butter. “Remember, be a nice, polite boy,” she said.

“Sure thing,” I said, dumping the sandwiches in the back lane.

Mrs. Ogilvy, an iffy driver, managed to jump the sidewalk in her attempt to park. She was wearing that two-sizes-too-small, sleeveless summer dress that buttoned down the front. Tires squealing as she hit the brakes for red lights, stalling more than once, jolting to starts, we did eventually make it safely into the countryside. “Did you bring your bathing costume?” she asked.

“I forgot.”

“My goodness, so did I.”

She reached out to fondle me, the Austin swerving into the wrong lane.

“It's Mr. Smithers's car, don't you know? He lent it to me in the hope that I might acquiesce, and go for a drive with him some moonlit night, but nothing would entice me into the back seat for that one. He suffers from pyorrhoea.”

We settled on a blanket in a clearing in the woods and she opened up her picnic hamper. Gentleman's relish. Fish paste. Oxford marmalade. Scones. Two pork pies. “Now we're going to play a game. I want you to lean against that tree, with your
derrière
to me, and count to
vingt-cinq en français
. Then I'm going to hide some sweeties on me,
bonne-bouche
chockies with ambrosial centres, and then you can root for them, and lap them up. On your mark, get set, go. But no peeking.”

As I anticipated, I turned around to find her spread nude on the blanket, the chocolates positioned exactly where I suspected. “Hurry. They're beginning to melt and it's getting
très
tickly.”

Bracing myself as she began to buck and moan, gradually subsiding, I was finally able to pull back and wipe my mouth with my wrist. To my astonishment, she raised her legs, delivering a sharp blow to my chin with her knee. “You know, and I know, that none of this ever happened. Prevaricator. You made this up, you little wanker, sullying the good name of a perfectly respectable schoolteacher … born and bred in London, a survivor of the Blitz, our finest hour, only to be shipped to this callow dominion, this
tiefste Provinz, where they use tea bags
. … You invented this because you are suffering the
dégringolade
of old age, and hoped to rouse yourself sufficiently to trickle a drop or two of spunk on your sheets. Crikey, it's become so rare you ought to have it bottled. You fabricated this picnic —”

“The hell I did. You took me on a —”

“Quite. But you got no further than groping me in your greedy, inexperienced manner before that rustic — that
habitant
— speaking that patois that passes for French here, came to say we were trespassing. You made up the rest, because no woman worth her salt will even give you a look any more, you filthy-minded, shrinking, liver-spotted,
sunken-bellied old Jew, now almost a deaf-mute, if the truth were known. You concocted this salacious story because you are still procrastinating, and would scribble anything rather than get to the truth of what happened at the cottage. Now out of bed with you for one of your pathetic little pees that couldn't fill an eyedropper. Poor Boogie.”

I never lost touch with Boogie, who would send me cryptic little postcards from wherever he was. Marrakesh. Bangkok. Kyoto. Havana. Cape Town. Las Vegas. Bogotá. Benares:

Or a note from that city in Kashmir, whatever it's called,
⁶⁶
where the druggies stop to refuel. When I was a boy, I had a map pinned to my bedroom wall on which I traced the path of the Allied armies in Europe after D-Day. Now I kept a globe in my office so that I could follow the progress of my friend the latter-day pilgrim through his own Slough of Despond. His short stories appeared infrequently in the
Paris Review
,
Zero
, and
Encounter
. Inevitably, Boogie settled into a loft in the Village and became a regular at The San Remo and The Lion's Head. Women sought him out. Among them, to the amazement of onlookers one evening, Ava Gardner. He commanded the attention — no, something approaching reverence — of the young as well as beautiful women, by his silence, broken only when he made one of his rare pronouncements. One evening, for instance, when Jack Kerouac's name came up, he muttered, “Energy isn't enough.”

“It's not writing,” I said. “It's typing.”
⁶⁷

Boogie was also disdainful of Allen Ginsberg. Once, when I just
happened to be there, a beguiling young woman, out to make an impression, made the mistake of reciting the opening lines of
Howl
to him:

Boogie responded, “The best minds? Names, please.”

“I don't understand.”

“Isaiah Berlin? No, too old. Surely not Mr. Trocchi?”

Among Boogie's regular drinking companions were Seymour Krim and Anatole Broyard. He was the polar opposite of Hymie Mintzbaum, never dropping a name, but then a letter might turn up from Cuba, addressed to Boogie c/o The Lion's Head, and it was from Ernest Hemingway. Or John Cheever could come by and take him to lunch. Or Norman Mailer or William Styron might pass through, and they would sit with him or, if he wasn't around, inquire about his whereabouts. Billie Holiday, after her disastrous last cabaret tour of France and Italy, turned up looking for him. Mary McCarthy came. So did John Huston. His legend flowered after an excerpt from his novel-in-progress appeared in the
New American Review
, but I knew he had written it in Paris something like ten years earlier. All the same, Boogie gradually acquired the reputation as author of the greatest modern American novel yet to be written. The editors of some of the most distinguished publishing houses in New York came a-courting, armed with chequebooks. One of them once dispatched a limousine to drive Boogie to a meticulously engineered dinner party in Southampton, only to discover that he had gone to visit a girlfriend in Sag Harbor instead, the car arriving at the publisher's dacha without him, adding to Boogie's mystique. Another editor took him to lunch at The Russian Tea Room. Oozing flattery, he asked, “Would it be possible to see more of your novel?”