Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [112]
“Hey, aren’t you glad to see me?” she asked.
“Of course I am.”
But I pointedly did not open a bottle of champagne. Instead, I fetched a glass of Aligoté.
“I’ll set the table,” she said.
I explained that a movie directed by an old friend of mine would start on TV at eight, and I wanted to eat in front of the set. “Oh, how charming,” she said. “I’ll try not to talk.”
I resisted joining her on the sofa, but settled into an easy chair at a safe distance with a bottle of Macallan and a Montecristo Number Four. Afterwards, I heard myself saying, “Chantal, I’m really glad to have you here, but I want you to sleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms tonight.”
“Has my mother spoken to you about us?”
“Certainly not.”
“Because I’m no longer a child and this is none of her business.”
“Chantal, my dear, this isn’t right. I’m a grandfather and you’re not even thirty yet.”
“I just happen to be thirty-two years old.”
She looked so glowingly young, so fetching, that I decided if she refused to sleep upstairs and slid into bed with me instead, I would not protest. I’m weak. I could do so much and no more. She glowered at me and then disappeared upstairs, and the next thing I heard was the slam of her door. Damn damn damn. When King David was old he was warmed in his bed by nubile young women, so why wasn’t I entitled as well? Pouring myself a hefty drink, I thought, possibly I should go upstairs to comfort her. But I didn’t do it, proud of myself for once, and anticipating praise from Solange. I didn’t get to sleep until four a.m., and when I got up at noon Chantal had already driven off without leaving me a note. And that evening Solange phoned: “She gave up her weekend to drive all the way out to your place to help you with next month’s budgets and all you wanted to do was watch TV and booze. What did you say to her, you bastard? She hasn’t stopped crying since she got here and she doesn’t want to work for you any more.”
“You know something, Solange. I’ve had it up to here with women. Including you. Especially you. And now I’m seriously thinking of moving in with Serge.”
“I want to know what you said to hurt her.”
“You just tell her I expect her in my office at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
9
I last saw Hymie Mintzbaum on my most recent trip to Hollywood, only a few months ago. There to peddle a pilot, I was suddenly overcome by the itch to try my liver-spotted hand at screenplay-writing again. So I stupidly went to pitch a screwy idea of mine to the young squirt who now runs the studio. Shelley Katz, a grandson of one of the founding fathers, passes for a maverick in Beverly Hills. Instead of tooling up and down the canyons in a Rolls or Mercedes, his birthright, Shelley’s signature is a souped-up 1979 Ford pick-up truck, its creatively dented fenders, I suspect, the work of somebody in the studio art department. Shelley would probably have said to him, “What I’m after is a realistic redneck-type look as in a story set in some pisspoor town in, say, northern Vermont. Some rust would be a nice touch. Good man. I want you to know your work is appreciated. We’re a family.”
Parking valets at the Dôme and Spago’s earn fifties for reporting the Ford pick-up’s arrival in the lot to a number of relevant agents and producers (“It’s here, and he’s inside, just. No, I’m not phoning anybody else. Honestly.”), enabling them to hurry over to pay obeisance, maybe earn a chance to shmooze a little, plug a project.
“Our hero,” I said to Shelley, “is a latter-day Candide figure.”
“Candide?”
“You know, Voltaire.”
“Which is it?”
This is not to suggest that Shelley is a functional illiterate, but, rather, one of the industry’s new Wunderkinder. Had I dropped the name of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, or the Submariner, he would have nodded knowledgeably, allowing that we were both scholarly types. The young today. Christ Almighty. Privileged beyond compare. Born too late to remember