Barney's Version (57 page)

The hard-fought referendum of October 30, 1995, did not disgrace
la belle province
's time-honoured election traditions. I watched the proceedings on
TV
with the rest of the gang at Dink's. It was a squeaker all right: NO to independence, 50.57: YES, 49.43. But within days we learned that it wasn't quite so close. The scrutineers, all of them appointed by our separatist government, had rejected something like 80,000 ballots, just about all of them from strongly federalist
ridings. The ballots were adjudged unacceptable because the X was too dark, or too faint or crooked, or exceeded the perimeters of the square.

When I was in seventh grade Mrs. Ogilvy once turned her dynamite bum to our class and wrote on the blackboard:

None of the above answers apply. The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule. Buoyed by this thought, I hurried home, and had just poured myself a nightcap when the phone began to ring. It was Serge Lacroix. He had to see me urgently.
⁸⁶

Something like six months earlier, after sitting through a
McIver of the RCMP
episode that Serge had directed, I had turned to Chantal and said, “I don't believe this. We've got to dump him. Would you fire him this afternoon, please?”

“Do it yourself.”

But coward that I am, I couldn't, not after all those years he had been with me. So I procrastinated, even as his work deteriorated further. But now that he had insisted on a twelve o'clock meeting in my office, surely to plead for more money, making things easier for me, I decided to act, with Chantal as my witness. “Sit down, Serge. What can I do for you?”

“I'll come right to the point. Your friend Dr. Herscovitch established that I was
HIV
-positive after my little adventure in Parc Lafontaine. And now I have been diagnosed as suffering from full-blown
AIDS
.”

“Oh, shit, Serge, I'm so sorry.”

“I'm still capable, but I would understand if you wanted to be released from our contract.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Chantal, “Barney asked me to rewrite your contract only yesterday. He wants you to be cut in for a percentage of the syndication gravy.”

“Retroactively?” I heard myself ask, glaring at Chantal and wishing that I had bitten my tongue instead.

“Yes. As you like,” she said.

“I need some advice, Barney.”

So the three of us went to lunch at Le Mas.

“What about Peter?” I asked.

“He seems to be one of the lucky ones. I think he's immune. Barney, there's an insurance broker in New York who buys life policies from guys like me. I make him beneficiary and he advances me seventy-five per cent of the capital due on my death. What do you think?”

“You don't need to traffic with such bloodsuckers. Tell me how much you want and I'll lend it to you. Isn't that what you were just about to suggest, Chantal?”

“Yes.”

After Serge left, Chantal lingered behind, and we continued to drink.

“You know something, Barney? You're not such a bad guy.”

“Oh yes I am. You don't know the half of it. My sins are legion. So I've got to put some points on the board while there's still time.”

“Have it your way.”

“Christ, I'll soon know more dead people than live ones. Why don't you marry Saul?”

“For sure, when it comes to knowing what's best for me, it's a toss-up. You or my mother.”

“I don't like to see you quarrelling with Solange.”

“Why don't you marry her, Barney?”

“Because Miriam will come home one of these days. I'm willing to bet on it. Hey, for a guy named after a character in a comic strip I haven't done too badly, wouldn't you say?”

“Barney, there's something I've always wanted to ask you.”

“Don't.”

“Did you really murder that guy all those years ago?”

“I think not, but some days I'm not so sure. No, I didn't. I couldn't have.”

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days my recall is painfully perfect. Today I seem to be pumping on all cylinders, so I'd better get down on paper what I've been avoiding until now before I expunge it again. I didn't lie about those last two days
⁸⁷
with Boogie, but neither did I tell everything. The truth is, the Boogieman who came to me to kick his habit was no longer the friend I revered. Over the wasting years all those drugs he ingested, not to mention time and fevers, had scrambled his head, burning away his individual beauty.
⁸⁸
He was, for instance, no longer generous about other writers, except for McIver — “He showed some promise” — but that was proffered only to needle me. Something else. On one of my forays into his favoured New York watering-holes, following his disappearance, I discovered that he had latterly come to be regarded as a man who promised better than he paid.

When we pulled up in front of my house in Hampstead, so that he could shoot up one more time, he said, “You must be rich now.”

“Boogie, don't make me laugh. I'm heavily in debt. I never should have gone into
TV
production. If not for the commercials and crapola industrial documentaries I'm obliged to do, I'd be dead in the water.”

Boogie was amused by our split-level home and The Second Mrs. Panofsky's flair with its furnishing. The enormous mirror shot through with gold flake. The collection of porcelain cats perched on
the mantelpiece. The sterling silver tea set and cut-crystal whisky decanter on the sideboard. “There's something missing,” he said.

“What?”

“Cellophane covers for the lamp shades.”

Surprising myself, I rose to the defence of The Second Mrs. Panofsky. “I happen to like what she's done here,” I lied.

Boogie sauntered over to a bookcase, plucked out my copy of Clara's
The Virago's Verse Book
and, with his expert eye, immediately found two lines that didn't scan, and read them aloud with unseemly pleasure. “A woman from bloody
Life
magazine came to interview me. ‘What was Clara like in those days when she was in her creative mode?' she asked. Crazy, I said. A compulsive shoplifter. Everybody's screw. ‘What is your favourite or most germane Clara Charnofsky anecdote?' Oh, go away.
Fiche le camp. Va te faire cuire un oeuf
. ‘When did you decide to make communications your field of endeavour?' Well, I'll be damned. ‘Do you resent not being world-renowned like Clara?' Go away. ‘With all due respect, I think you suffer from low self-esteem.' Shit. I still can't understand why you married Clara.”

“How come you never married?”

“Didn't I?”

“You did?”

“Take off your tie and knot it round my arm.”

It took three bloody probes before he was finally able to drive the syringe into the vein, and then he dozed on the ride out to the lake, moaning, muttering incomprehensible complaints against what I imagined to be intolerable dreams. He slid into sleep again at our dining-room table and I put him to bed. I drove to Montreal the next morning, had far too much to drink, and when I returned to the cottage earlier than expected a day later I found the Boogieman in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky.

“It's your fault,” said a giggly Boogie. “You were supposed to phone before you left town.”

My hysterical wife, seated at the wheel of her Buick, hollered, “Some friend. What are you going to do about him?”

“Oh, I'm going to kill him is what I'm going to do, and then maybe I'll come after you and your mother.”

“Fuck you,” she shrieked and, hitting the accelerator, she raced down the driveway, her rear tires spitting pebbles. Boogie and I got into the Macallan.

“I ought to knock your teeth out,” I said, but my manner was playful.

“Only after I've had a swim. Oh, she asked a lot of questions about Clara. You know, on reflection, I think I was no more than a convenient
deus ex machina
. She wanted to get even with you for that woman you're keeping in Toronto.”

“One minute,” I said. I hurried into my bedroom and returned with my father's old service revolver, which I set down on the table between us. “Scared?” I asked.

“Couldn't that wait until I've done some snorkelling?”

“You could do me a service, Boogie.”

“Like what?”

“I want you to agree to be a co-respondent in my divorce. All you have to do is testify that I came home to my beloved wife and found you in bed with her.”

“Why, you planned this, you bastard.”

“No, I didn't. Honestly.”

“You set me up.”

“I didn't. But possibly it's time you came through for me once.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I can't remember how many times I bailed you out with cheques over the years.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“Payment in advance, was it?”

“Shit.”

“What if I took money from you because that's all you've got to give?”

That crackled in the air between us for a bit before I answered in a voice not my own, “I had to borrow on your behalf, Boogie.”

“This is getting to be very interesting.”

“
In vino veritas
.”

“Don't tell me they taught you Latin in that high school of yours.”

“Boy, was that ever a cheap shot.”

“No. You're the el cheapo here. You're the old friend who has been keeping accounts, not me.”

“Have it your way. But now that we're into it, do you mind telling me whatever happened to that novel of yours the world was waiting for?”

“Are you inquiring as a friend or an investor?”

“Both.”

“I'm still working on it.”

“Boogie, you're a fraud.”

“I've let you down.”

“You were once a writer, and a damn good one, but now you're just another druggie with pretensions.”

“I've failed in my duty to you. I was supposed to amaze the world so that one day you could brag, ‘If not for my help …' ”

“You're pathetic.”

“Oh, no. I'll tell you what's pathetic. Pathetic is a man so empty that he needs somebody else's achievements to justify his own life.”

I was still struggling to recover from that hit when he smiled and said, “And now if you don't mind, I'm going for a swim.”

“I want to know why you can no longer pick up anybody else's novel without sneering at it.”

“Because what's being published and praised today is second-rate. And I've still got standards, unlike —”

“Here, you want to read a real writer,” I said, and I threw my copy of
Henderson the Rain King
at him.

“Leo Bishinsky used to say, ‘How can you tolerate that know-nothing kid from Montreal?' ”

“And you no doubt pointed out that we were friends.”

“I took you in hand and educated you, for Christ's sake. I put the right books in your hands. And look what you've become. A
TV
hustler. Married to a rich man's vulgar daughter.”

“Not so vulgar that you didn't bang her last night.”

“Yeah, but she's not the only wife of yours I had in bed. Clara, I said, what do you see in him? A breadwinner, she said. But I'll give her this much. She made a great career move dying so early.”

“Boogie, maybe I ought to punch you out after all. That was fucking nasty.”

“But true,” he said.

I couldn't handle any more. I was too frightened. So, natural coward that I am, I retreated into humour. I scooped up the gun and aimed it at him. “Will you testify?” I demanded.

“I'll think it over on my swim,” he said, rising shakily to fetch my snorkelling equipment and flippers.

“You're too drunk to swim, you damn fool.”

“You come too.”

Instead, I fired that shot well over his head. But I only raised my gun hand at the last minute. So if I wasn't guilty of murder in fact, I was by intent.

“What's wrong?” asked Chantal.

“I can't remember where I parked my car, and don't look at me like that. It could happen to anybody.”

“Let's go,” she said.

It wasn't on Mountain Street. Pardon me, rue de la Montagne. Or on Bishop.

“Somebody has stolen it,” I said. “Probably one of your mother's separatist buddies.”

We tried de Maisonneuve, formerly Dorchester Boulevard.
⁸⁹
“What's that?” she asked, pointing.

“If you blab to Solange, you're fired.”

Saturday afternoon I was just drifting off to sleep when Solange phoned. “What time are you picking me up tonight?” she asked.

“Am I? What for?”

“The game.”

“Ah, I think maybe I'll give it a skip tonight.”

“
The hockey game?
”

“You know something? I've had enough of hockey. Besides, I'm very tired.”

“It could be the last time we'll ever see Gretzky play.”

“Big deal.”

“I don't believe this.”

“You want the tickets? Take Chantal.”

Ten days later, according to Chantal, I dictated the same letter to her for the third time in a week. Leaving the office, I'm told I automatically reached into my pocket and pulled out a key, but didn't know what it was for.

“What are you staring at?” asked Chantal.

“Nothing.”