Barney's Version (53 page)

Years ago, luxuriating in my undeserved happiness with Miriam and the kids, I feared for the anger of the gods. I was convinced something dreadful lay in wait for me. An avenging monster who would rise out of the bathroom drain like an invention of Stephen King's. Now I knew. The monster was me. I was the destroyer of my loving refuge from “the world of telegrams and anger.”

In those days I was still obliged to simulate enthusiasm for the
dreck
that enriched me, suffering mediocre, functionally illiterate actors, hack writers, no-talent directors, and
TV
executives at lunches in New York or L.A. It was degrading. A sewer. But until I cheated, I was blessed with a sanctuary. Miriam. Our children. Our home. Where I was never required to be deceitful. But it was with apprehension that I now turned my key in the front-door lock, dreading discovery. So I took preventive measures at the office, calling in Gabe Orlansky and Serge Lacroix for a meeting. “Remember that girl who played the investigative reporter from the
Globe
in a recent
McIver
episode? I think her name was Lorraine Peabody, but I could be wrong.”

“Yeah. So?”

“I want her written into a couple more episodes.”

“She can't act.”

“You can't write and you can't direct. Do as I say.”

Chantal lingered behind. “What is it?” I asked.

“Whoever would have thought —”

“Thought what?”

“Nothing.”

“That's better.”

“I was mistaken about you. You're no different than the others here. You don't deserve a woman of Miriam's quality. A dirty old man is what you are.”

“Get out.”

My heart hammering, I arranged to meet Lorraine for lunch at one of those quaintsy, tourist-trap restaurants in Old Montreal, where nobody knew me. “Look here,” I said, “what happened the other night was an aberration. You are not to write to me, phone, or ever attempt to contact me again.”

“Hey, it was no big deal. Relax. We shared a fuck, that's all.”

“I assume our casting people have been in touch with you.”

“Yes, but if you think that's why I —”

“Of course not. However, there is something you must do for me in return.”

“I thought I wasn't supposed to contact —”

“As soon as we leave here, I'm driving you to Dr. Mortimer Herscovitch's office, where you are going to have a blood test.”

“You're kidding me, tiger.”

“You do as I say and there will be more work for you. If not, not.”

Guilt-ridden, I swung wildly between remorse and aggression. When bolstered by too much to drink, I concluded that I hadn't behaved that badly and it was Miriam who was at fault. How dare she suspect I would be without blemish. Impervious to temptation. Guys weren't like that. Guys tended to stray on occasion and I was a guy too. I deserved a medal, not obloquy, for having cheated only once in thirty-one years. Besides, it meant nothing to me. I still don't remember how I got from Dink's to her apartment. I was giving her a lift home, that's all. I didn't want to be invited in for a nightcap. I was helplessly drunk and didn't ask that bitch to come on to me in the first place. Young women have no business tempting respectable old family men by dressing like hookers. I'd been taken advantage of and now I was not going to wear a hair shirt or go in for self-flagellation. Considering the behaviour of the other guys at Dink's, I was the very apogee of rectitude. Miriam was lucky to have a husband like me.
Tender. Loving. A wonderful provider. In that mood, I would stumble home from Dink's and start quarrels over picayune matters. “Must we eat chicken again tonight?”

“You won't eat fish, and red meat is bad for you.”

“So's white wine. It killed James Joyce.”

“Then open a bottle of red, if you prefer.”

“There's no need to snap at me.”

“But you're the one who's …”

“Yeah, sure. It's always me.”

Saul phoned me at the office. “I want to know why Mummy was crying this afternoon.”

“It was nothing, Saul. Honestly.”

“That's not what she seems to think.”

I was losing it. My wife. My children.

“Barney, I want to know why you're turning up here drunk every night.”

“Am I now obliged to account for how many drinks I've had before dinner?”

“You're not going to like this, but I'm afraid that at your age you can no longer handle it the way you used to. You come home in such an unspeakable mood that to tell you the truth I'd rather eat alone,” she said.

Miriam turned away from me in bed that night and wept quietly. I wanted to die. The next morning I seriously considered charging across Sherbrooke Street against a red light. I would be hit by a car and rushed to the Montreal General in an ambulance. Miriam would sit by my side in intensive care, holding my hand, forgiving me everything. But I chickened out. I waited for the light to turn green.

Correction. These meandering memoirs do have a point after all. Over the wasting years I have levered free of many a tight spot leaning on a fulcrum of lies large, small, or medium-sized. Never tell the truth. Caught out, lie like a trooper. The first time I told the truth led to my being charged with murder. The second time cost me my
happiness. What happened is that Miriam, as achingly beautiful as I had ever known her, came into my study on a Saturday afternoon, carrying a tray with a pot of coffee and two cups and saucers. She set the tray on my desk and sat down on the leather armchair opposite, and said, “I want to know what happened while I was in London.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Tell me. Maybe I can help.”

“Honestly, Miriam, I —”

“The way you cough in bed these nights. Those cigars. Are you hiding something from me and the children that Morty Herscovitch told you?”

“I haven't got lung cancer yet, if that's what you mean.” And that's when I broke down and told her what had happened. “I'm so sorry. I'm absolutely miserable. It meant nothing to me.”

“I see.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“It never would have happened if you weren't available,” she said, and then she went to pack a suitcase.

“Where are you going?”

“I don't know.”

“Please, Miriam. We have a life.”

“Had. And I'm grateful for it. But before you can corrupt it any further and I end up hating you —”

“We can work this out. Please, my darling.”

But there was no point, because Miriam was twelve-years old again. Looking me in the eye it was her father she saw. Humping factory girls. Trolling downtown bars.

“Why do you put up with him?” Miriam had asked.

“What should I do?” her mother had answered, bent over her sewing machine.

Miriam would not be so helpless. “I need some time alone,” she said to me.

“I'll do anything you want. I'll sell the business and we'll retire to a villa in Provence or Tuscany.”

“Then what will you do all day, a man with your energy? Build model airplanes? Play bridge?”

She reminded me of the last time I had promised to ease up with a hobby. I had hired a contractor to build a state-of-the-art workshop on our country property, and equipped it with a complete set of Black & Decker tools. I made one lopsided bookcase, cutting my hand with a power saw, requiring fourteen stitches, and had used the workshop for storage ever since.

“We'll travel. I'll read. We'll manage, Miriam.”

“Barney, you only pretend to hate your production company. The truth is you love the deal-making and the money and the power you enjoy over the people who work for you.”

“I could go to my bank and help them with an employees' buyout. Miriam, you can't leave me over a stupid one-night stand.”

“Barney, I'm weary of pleasing everybody. You. The children. Your friends. You've been making all the decisions for me ever since we married. I'd like to make some decisions of my own, good or bad, before I'm too old.”

Once Miriam had moved into a bachelor apartment in Toronto, and resumed full-time work for
CBC
Radio, she sent Saul round to pack and collect her things.

“Whoever would have thought it would come to this,” I said, offering my son a drink.

“You miserable old bastard, I'm glad she left you. You never deserved a woman of such quality. The way you treated her. How you took her for granted. Shit shit shit. Now you have to show me which of all these books and records are hers.”

“Take whatever you want. Pack the lot. Now that I've raised a family of ungrateful children, and my wife has abandoned me, I'm not going to need a big house like this any more. I think I'll sell out and move into an apartment downtown.”

“We had a family. A real family. And you fucked it up and I'll never forgive you for that.”

“I'm still your father, you know.”

“There's nothing I can do about that.”

Kate pleaded with Miriam, unavailingly, to forgive me my embarrassing lapse, and Mike refused to take sides. I flew to Toronto every weekend and took Miriam out to dinner, and made her laugh, and
began to suspect that she was enjoying this second courtship as much as I was. “We're having such a good time together. Why don't you fly home with me?”

“And ruin everything?”

So I risked another tactic. I told Miriam that if she wanted a divorce, she would have to make the arrangements, I would have nothing to do with it, but she could have whatever she wanted. I would sign anything her lawyers presented me with. Meanwhile, I added, we still had a joint bank account, and she must continue to use it as she saw fit. Instead, humiliating me, she allowed that she had drawn ten thousand dollars on the account, which she considered a loan, but she had also written to the bank, returning her chequebooks and volunteering that her signature was no longer valid for our account.

“What are you going to live on, for Christ's sake?”

“My salary.”

“You're no longer a young woman, you know.”

“But you have already made that abundantly clear, haven't you, darling?”

Mike phoned: “I want you to know we've invited Mummy to come over and stay with us for a while, but that invitation holds good for you too.”

Kate said: “She starts on a story about a trip you made together to Venice and Madrid, and then she bursts into tears. Hang in there, Daddy. Keep plugging away.”

Friends tried to cheer me up. Women Miriam's age, they assured me, often did squirrelly things before they settled down. Be patient, she would soon come home. The Nussbaums were foolish enough to invite me to dinners, providing a sparkly widow or divorcée whom I insulted gratuitously. “My wife never found it necessary to dye her hair, and she is still beautiful. Mind you, I suppose the loss of beauty is not something that ever troubled you.”

O'Hearne reported at Dink's: “Your Second Mrs. Panofsky took the news well. She hopes the divorce costs you a fortune. And that it brings on a stroke or a heart attack.”

“God bless her. Oh, incidentally, I'm thinking of committing another murder.”

Blair was the candidate. I had phoned Miriam to say I would be arriving in Toronto late Friday night. “I can't see you this Saturday, Barney,” she said. “I promised to go to North Carolina with Blair for the weekend. He's presenting a paper at Duke.”

I had Chantal phone Duke's Department of Canadian Studies, pretending to be Blair's secretary, saying he had mislaid the paper with his hotel reservations. Where was he staying? The Washington Duke Hotel. Next I insisted Chantal phone the Washington Duke to ask for a confirmation of Professor Hopper's reservations. “We have a single room booked for Dr. Hopper and another for Mrs. Panofsky,” said the clerk.

“Feel better?” asked Chantal.

I invited Solange out to dinner. “What can she see in that prick?” I asked.

“I'll bet he doesn't correct or contradict her at dinner parties. Possibly he is considerate rather than ill-tempered. Maybe he makes her feel cherished.”

“But I love Miriam. I need her.”

“What if she doesn't need you any more? It happens, you know.”

Six months passed before she moved in with Blair Hopper né Hauptman, and I thought I would go out of my mind. Imagining them in bed together, that bastard daring to fondle her breasts. One drunken night in our empty Westmount house, I swept crockery off the kitchen shelves, tore pictures off the walls, overturned tables, smashed chairs against the floor until the legs broke off, and took out our
TV
with one swing of a floor lamp. I knew how much of Miriam's love and thoughtfulness had gone into the acquisition of even the tiniest item in our home, and I hoped the racket I was making, destroying what she had put together, could be heard even in that sin-bin she was sharing with Blair in Toronto. The next morning with rue my heart was laden. I collected some of her favourite pieces, hoping they had not been splintered beyond repair, and hired a furniture restorer to mend them. “Do you mind if I inquire as to what transpired here?” he asked.

“Break-in. Vandals.”

I moved into this downtown apartment, but couldn't bring myself
to sell the house at once, just in case. I could not abide the idea of strangers in what had once been our bedroom. Or some mod-con yuppie bitch installing a microwave oven in the kitchen where Miriam had baked croissants to perfection, or cooked
osso buco
even as she helped Saul with his homework and kept an eye on Kate banging pots together in her playpen. I certainly wasn't going to tolerate a dentist, or a stockbroker, tramping on the living-room carpet on which we had made love more than once. Nobody was going to taint our bookshelves with the collected works of Tom Clancy or Sidney Sheldon. I didn't want some oaf playing Nirvana at ten thousand decibels in the room where Miriam had retired to the
chaise longue
at three a.m. to nurse Kate, while she listened to Glenn Gould, the sound turned down low so as not to waken me. I had no idea what to do with a basement closet full of skates and hockey sticks and crosscountry skis and boots. Or the white wicker bassinet that had seen Miriam through three pregnancies. Or Mike's abandoned attempt at making his own electric guitar.