Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [107]
— Boogie, I didn’t mean it. Not one word. I don’t know what got into me.
— Hey, we’re buddies from way back, he says, embracing me. Good thing you’re such a bad shot.
— Right.
Back to the real world. Knee-slapper of a story in this morning’s Gazoo that I must clip and mail to the enchanting Ms. Morgan of “Dykes on Mikes.”
FEMINIST OUTRAGE AT CHAIN GANGS FOR WOMEN
Male convicts in Alabama, who were put in leg irons last year, manacled together to put in twelve-hour shifts on the highways, cutting and trimming the roadsides, had petitioned the governor to say that their punishment amounts to sexual discrimination. In response, the Alabama Corrections Commissioner said, “There’s no real defence for not doing the females.” He has instructed the warden of the Julia Tutwiler State Prison for Women at Wetumpka, near Montgomery, to start a chain gang for women within three weeks. But they will not labour on the highways. Instead they will work on prison property, planting vegetable gardens, mowing grass, and picking up litter.
Still guilt-ridden after all these years, the subject I’ve been trying to avoid until now is my disastrous honeymoon in Paris with The Second Mrs. Panofsky, its cafés haunted for me by memories of Clara, my mood tainted by my longing for Miriam. Compounding matters, a photograph of Clara was on display in the window of La Hune. She was shown seated at a table in the Mabillon and, if you looked closely, the group included Boogie, Leo Bishinsky, Hymie Mintzbaum, George Plimpton, Sinbad Vail, Cedric Richardson, and me. Only a year later Cedric joined students from Agricultural and Technical College in a sit-in at a lunch counter in a variety store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Then, in 1963 I think it was, Cedric quit Martin Luther King in favour of Malcolm X, and was next rumoured to have gone to ground somewhere in Chicago, not yet accompanied everywhere by his Fruits of the Loom51 bodyguards, or whatever the Prophet Elijah’s thugs were called. I’m running ahead of myself again.
The photograph in La Hune was mounted atop a pile of Clara’s recently translated poems, which, if memory serves for once, had already gone into its sixth edition in the United States. By this juncture, The Virago’s Verse Book had been published in sixteen other languages and, to my astonishment, the foundation created by Norman Charnofsky was coining it in. And then, honouring Clara’s proclivities, Norman appointed a couple of black feminists to the board of directors, setting the seeds of his ruin in place.
I had suspected a small Left Bank hotel might not suit The Second Mrs. Panofsky, so I booked us into the Crillon instead. A good thing, too, because she was still brooding about our fiasco of a wedding night, understandably so.
I should point out that, prior to our honeymoon, the only time The Second Mrs. Panofsky and I had spent together were those three frenetic days in New York when I hardly saw her as she flitted from here to there. We had yet to get beyond groping each other, until, squirming free, she’d call, “Time out,” settling her breasts back into her bra and tugging her skirt back over her knees. “Whew! That was close.” We made love for the first time on our bed in the Crillon, where I was surprised to discover she was not a virgin.
Taking The Second Mrs. Panofsky to Paris was a mistake. True, I was now able to afford all those fine restaurants I used to pass in 1951: Le Grand Véfour, Lapérouse, La Tour d’Argent, La Closerie des Lilas. But seated on the terrace of the Café de Flore, my bride in her finery and me in my good suit, watching the unkempt young stroll past hand in hand, I felt too much like the rich tourists Clara and I used to poke fun at when we were together. It made me ill-tempered. “Couldn’t you put that damn guidebook away while we sit here?”
“I’m embarrassing you?”
“Yes.”
“Like with the bidet?”
“You didn’t have to ask the maid. I could have told you what it was for.”
“Can you speak Hebrew?”
“No.”