Barney's Version (48 page)

“Then if I were you, I'd stop baiting him. He's far more intelligent than you think, but he's too polite to be rude to you.”

“I feel invaded.”

“Because he's so kind?”

“Intrusively so.”

Blair was contaminating my Yasnaya Polyana. Our ten lakeside acres. After crazy Clara, following the crap I went through with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, my trial and subsequent disgrace, the dipshit
TV
business I hated but that continued to earn me big bucks, Miriam was my winning lottery ticket. My redeemer. My
MVP
award. Imagine, if you can, the Boston Red Sox actually winning a World Series, or Danielle Steele taking the Nobel Prize, and you'll have some idea of how I felt when Miriam agreed, against all odds, to marry me. But my epiphany was tainted by fear. Surely the gods on Olympus had taken down my number for remedial action.

— Get Panofsky. Crash his next Air Canada flight.

— Hmmm.

— Or what would you say to testicular cancer. Snip, snip. Off with his balls.

Having avoided Morty Herscovitch for years, I now went for annual check-ups, lest I be blindsided by lesions in my lungs. Hoping to placate a vengeful Jehovah, I became a big contributor to charities, tempted to wave my receipts heavenwards whenever we were threatened by thunder or lightning. I started to secretly fast on Yom Kippur. I expected my children to be born deaf and dumb, with no arms, or Down's syndrome, and when this turned out not to be the case, it only served to heighten my forebodings. Something creepy-crawly was waiting for me out there. I knew it. I counted on it. Unknown to Miriam, I had five thousand dollars in cash socked away in a locked drawer. Money I would use to pay off drug-crazed burglars who could break into our place any night of the week.

Once school was out, I packed Miriam and the kids off to our cottage on the lake, and I would join them on weekends and sleep over on Tuesday nights. Driving out however late on a Tuesday
or Friday night, I knew all the cottage lights would be blazing. Miriam would be waiting on the balcony, Saul snoozing in her arms and Mike playing with his Lego at her feet. They would all come running as I opened the car door, Miriam to be embraced and the kids to be flung into the air, squealing, caught just in the nick of time.

Mornings when I was in attendance, Miriam was free to plunge into the lake before breakfast and swim to the far shore of the bay. I would sit on the balcony with the kids, sipping black coffee, delighted at how proficient she was at the crawl, watching her swim back toward me,
coming home
. I would meet her on the shore with a towel, rubbing her dry, lingering in places permissible only to Barney Panofsky, Esq. But now Blair, an even more expert swimmer, joined her. Once on the far shore, he would scramble to the crest of the highest projecting rock to dive back into the lake, not doing a belly flop
à la
Panofsky, but barely raising a ripple.

Wednesday night I took an urgent call from Serge Lacroix, that
Cahiers du Cinéma
aficionado who was directing a
McIver of the RCMP
episode for me. Serge's notion of art was to cross-cut from our bare-chested male lead sinking to a polar bear rug with his lady love … to a close shot of a tumescent jackhammer breaking concrete … or, God help us … to a gasoline pump ejaculating into a car's tank. Watching his rushes made me heave with laughter, but his call meant I would have to spend Thursday in town.

Now when I started on this true story of my wasted life, I resolved to tell even those things that were still deeply embarrassing to me so many years later, so here goes. I contrived to set a trap for my ostensibly faithful, but possibly smitten, wife and her handsome
SS
admirer. Wednesday night I announced that I was going to take the kids with me to Montreal, assuring a dubious Miriam that they would not be a nuisance but would have fun hanging out with me on the set. Then, early Thursday morning, as Miriam and Blair Hopper né Hauptman, surely related to war criminals, were enjoying their morning swim, I grabbed Miriam's delicate kitchen scale off a counter, scooted upstairs, fished her tube of vaginal jelly out of our bathroom cupboard, set it on the scale, and noted its exact weight.
Still in my James Bond mode, I plucked a hair out of my head and laid it on the container that held her diaphragm. At the breakfast table downstairs, I sang out: “I'm not sure what time I'll get back tonight, but I promise to phone just before I leave town in case you need anything.”

Sent for by an hysterical Serge to pronounce on budgetary dilemmas, and to settle down a troubled cast, I was so ill-tempered that I only exacerbated the problems. Our
soi-disant
male lead did not take kindly to my telling him in front of the crew, which was unforgivable, that unless he stopped camping on camera he would be replaced. Then I told that no-talent bimbo who was our female lead that there was more to acting, even in such a piece of shit, than jiggling her tits, and she fled the set in tears.

As I continued to lash out boorishly on all sides, I visualized a sweat-soaked Miriam and Blair experimenting with positions never dreamed of in the
Kama Sutra
. I was overcome by dread.
Déjà vu
all over again, as Yogi Berra once put it. Well, not quite. Same cottage, but a different cast. And this time, fortunately, I lacked a gun. Finally, at six p.m., I called the cottage. I counted fourteen rings before Miriam, obviously loath to be roused from a post-coition nap, or interrupted while posing for yet another pornographic photograph, answered the phone. “We won't be able to leave here for another hour,” I said.

“You sound awful. What's wrong, darling?”

“Be there eight-thirty the earliest,” I said, hanging up. Then I rounded up the kids and started for the cottage immediately. If they were intending to shower together, I planned to catch them in the act.

Animals
.

Mike and Saul, sensitive to my mood, were moxy enough to pretend to doze all the way back to the lake. “You're to tell Mummy you had a terrific time. Right?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

No sooner did I pull up, bounding out of the car, ready for mayhem, than Miriam was at my side, glowing, greeting me with a hug. “You'll never guess what we've done,” she said.

Brazen bitch. Whore of Babylon. Jezebel
.

Taking me by the hand, she led me to my tractor parked in the back. “Remember you were going to pay Jean-Claude to cart it to the dump and buy a new one?”

“Yeah. So?”

She made me sit in the saddle and handed me the key, Blair smiling his modest “aw shucks” smile all the while. I turned the key, pumped the pedal, and the motor hummed.

“Blair worked on it all afternoon. He cleaned the spark plugs, changed the oil filter, and did God knows what else, and just listen to it now.”

“You must be careful not to flood it in the future, Mr. Panofsky.”

“Well, yeah. Thank you. But I really must go to the john now. Excuse me.”

Locking our bathroom door, I opened the cupboard under the sink and found my hair still in place on her diaphragm container. And there was no detectable weight loss in Miriam's tube of vaginal jelly.
But what if he had jumped her, and she didn't use either, and I was now going to be the father of his child? Probably a vegetarian. Certainly a subscriber to
Consumer Reports. No, no. Still troubled, but also more than somewhat guilt-ridden, I replaced the kitchen scale, lifted a bottle of champagne out of the kitchen fridge, and brought it to the dining-room table.

“What's the occasion?” asked Miriam.

“The redemption of my tractor. Blair, I don't know how we ever got on without you.”

With hindsight, I guess I shouldn't have uncorked a second bottle, and a bottle of Châteauneuf to go with Miriam's
osso buco
, and then the cognac. Refusing the cognac, Blair primly covered the proffered snifter with his hand. “Aw, come on,” I said.

“I hope I'm not failing a test of my masculinity,” he said. “The truth is I'd be sick if I had another drop to drink.”

Then, inevitably, he launched into his daily Vietnam sermon, excoriating Nixon, Kissinger, and Westmoreland. In no mood to acknowledge that I had no time for that bunch either, I said, “Sure it's a dirty war, but Blair, don't you feel just a wee bit guilty, a man of conscience like you, allowing this war to be fought largely by blacks and
rednecks and working-class kids out of the inner cities while your middle-class ass is safe in Canada?”

“Do you think it's my duty to be out there napalming babies?”

Miriam changed the subject, and then a real imbroglio threatened. Blair's sister, it turned out, a storefront lawyer in Boston, also headed an organization that sought employment for the deaf, the blind, and the wheelchair-bound. Rather than allow that this was truly admirable, I protested, “Yeah, but they would be doing able-bodied men out of jobs. I can see it now. Our house is on fire and they can't find it because they're blind. Or I'm in intensive care, whimpering, ‘Help, help! Nurse, nurse! I'm dying.' But she can't hear me because she's a deaf-mute.”

His last night with us, “Uncle” Blair built my enchanted kids a bonfire, and I sat on the porch fulminating, nursing a Rémy Martin and pulling on a Montecristo. Watching them out there on the shore, toasting hot dogs and marshmallows, I hoped that sparks would start a forest fire and that Blair, wanted as a pyromaniac in “The Fourth Reich,” would be led away in handcuffs. No such luck. Strumming on that bloody guitar of his, Blair was teaching my kids Woody Guthrie ballads (“This Land Is Your Land,” and other lefty daydreams), Miriam joining in. My family, the
mishpocheh
Panofsky, only two generations removed from the
shtetl
, transmogrified into an old Norman Rockwell
Saturday Evening Post
cover. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Blair was gone before I came down for breakfast the next morning and that, I figured, would be the last I'd ever see of him. But then the postcards began to trickle in from Toronto, individual cards addressed to Mike and Saul, inviting them to become pen pals. Picking them up at the village post office, my first thought was to dump them in a rubbish bin, but I feared Miriam might find out. So I produced them at the dining-room table to cries of delight from my treacherous children. Quislings, both of them. And those of you too young to know who Quisling was can look it up under — under — you know the country next to Sweden. Not Denmark, the other one.
⁷³
“Of course
you must answer him, kids,” I said. “But the cost of the postage stamps will come out of your allowances.”

“I don't believe what I'm hearing,” said Miriam.

“I haven't finished yet. Tonight I'm taking everybody to Giorgio's for dinner.”

“And tell me, Père Goriot, will the kids have to pay for their own burgers and fries, and eat up at record speed, so that you can get home in time to catch the first inning of the ball game?”

Then Blair sent Miriam a copy of an article he had written for the
American Exile in Canada
, which she attempted, unavailingly, to hide from me, as even she was embarrassed.

Suppose Canada, Blair ventured, was forced by the masses of its people to assert independence “by nationalizing U.$. owned industry and ending the free reign of U.$. investment. The inevitable U.$. invasion would be tough, brutal, and blood-letting.” But, Blair figured, Canada would win:

Didn't that prick know that the last time the Americans had descended on Montreal, Lt.-Gov. Guy Carleton had fled, the city had capitulated, and a spokesman for the
habitants
, Valentin Juatard, had greeted the Yanqui pigs as brothers, saying, “Our hearts have always desired union and we have always received the troops of the Union as our own.”