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By Root 548 0

French fried potatoes. No, he had a beer and I drank white wine. Maw, it was only a glass. I won’t be joining the AA when I get home. Oh, he went back to the hotel for his nap. Good thing he didn’t know I was going shopping for bras and lingerie, because that’s the only time he’ll come with me. They get him a chair, and he sits there smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary, watching the women come and go. Maw, would you rather he was like your poor cousin Cyril? No, he’s not a homosexual. How could he be? A member of our esteemed family. He’s just a fifty-five-year-old bachelor who still lives with his mother and subscribes to every bodybuilding magazine in print, and was asked to stop hanging around the YMHA swimming pool when all those schoolkids were there. I beg your pardon. Okay, he wasn’t asked. That was gossip. He simply stopped going. But, in my opinion, we’ve all done him enormous psychological damage by making him pretend he’s something he isn’t. No, you’re wrong there. Barney thinks he’s very witty. He happens to like him. They’ve been out to dinner together more than once. How about that? Tonight? There’s a tap-dancer appearing at a club in Pigalle who Barney wants to see. Yes, Maw. He’s a hockey fan and he likes tap-dancing, do you think I should get a divorce? Now I really really have to hang up, we’re just on our way out. Barney sends love to you and Daddy. No, I’m not making it up. He asked me to say that. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

8

“Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Radio-Canada. Can I help you?”

“Please connect me with ‘Artsworld.’ ”

“ ‘Artsworld’ here. Beth Roberts speaking.”

“I’d like to talk to Miriam Greenberg.”

“Hello.”

“Hi, Miriam. It’s Barney Panofsky. Remember me?”

“Oh.”

“I just happen to be in Toronto and I was wondering if you were free for lunch tomorrow?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Dinner, then?”

“I’m busy.”

“I heard your interview with Mailer and I think you put all the right questions to him.”

“Thanks.”

“Say, what about drinks at five o’clock?”

“Barney, I don’t go out with married men.”

“Drinks, for Christ’s sake. It’s not a federal offence. I just happen to be right across the street in the bar at The Four Seasons Motor Hotel.”

“Please don’t be difficult.”

“Some other time, then?”

“Sure. Maybe. No. But thanks for calling.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon at my desk in my cottage in the Laurentians, where the night before I watched an old black-and-white movie on TV with a brooding, more than somewhat prickly Chantal for company. Operation Hellfire, directed by Hymie Mintzbaum in 1947, starred John Payne, Yvonne de Carlo, Dan Duryea, and George Macready. The story opens two weeks before D-Day on an American army camp in England. Major Dan Duryea, a graduate of the school of hard knocks, is fed up with Sergeant John Payne, a lazy playboy heir to a department-store fortune, and orders him parachuted into occupied France to contact a group of partisans led by somebody code-named Hellfire. Hellfire turns out to be Yvonne de Carlo, and she and Payne take an instant dislike to each other. Everything changes, however, after Payne, shooting from the hip, rescues her from the torture cellars of Gestapo man George Macready, who has just ripped off her blouse. Together, on D-Day Plus Two, sweethearts Payne and de Carlo blow up a troop train bound for the beaches of Normandy. And when Duryea and his battle-weary troops march into St-Pierre-sur-Mer, prepared for another costly struggle, they find it has already been liberated by Payne, who is swilling champagne with de Carlo on the village square, surrounded by admiring peasants. “I thought you’d never get here,” says Payne with a wink for de Carlo. The end.

I want to make something absolutely clear. I did not invite Chantal out for the weekend. She took me by surprise, arriving in time for dinner on Saturday, laden with goodies she had picked up at the Pâtisserie Belge on Laurier Avenue: pâté de foie gras, thick slices of baked ham, a quiche lorraine, containers of beet and potato salads, cheeses, a baguette,