Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [119]
My shtick done, the grateful producer thanked me for my original thoughts. “Super stuff,” he said.
10
The phone rang, which startled me, because nobody knew I had driven out to the cottage the day before. It was Kate, of course. “How did you know I was here?” I asked.
“Intuition. A hunch. But when we talked Wednesday night you didn’t say a thing about going away. Then I phoned Solange and she also had no idea where you were. The doorman —”
“Kate, I’m sorry.”
“— had to let her into your apartment. I was going crazy with worry here.”
“I should have phoned. You’re right.”
“You shouldn’t be moping around there anyway. It’s no good for you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, darling.”
“There’s nothing for you in Montreal any more. Michael’s in London. Saul’s in New York. It’s not like you’re King Lear and none of your children will have you. You could move in with us tomorrow. I’d take care of you.”
“I’m afraid I’m too set in my ways to answer to anybody. Even you, Kate. Besides, my friends are still here. However, I promise to come for a visit soon. Maybe next weekend.”
But then I would be obliged to sit through one of Gavin’s endless perorations on the need for income-tax reform. He would tell me the plot of the last movie he had seen. Following Kate’s instructions he would take me to a game at Maple Leaf Gardens, simulating enthusiasm.
“Hey, you know what I found in a drawer here? An exercise book with some of your grade-five compositions.”
“Sell the cottage, Daddy.”
“I can’t, Kate. Not yet.”
The truth is, I retreat to the cottage in the Laurentians, the scene of my alleged crime, from time to time, wandering, drink in hand, through empty rooms that once resonated with Miriam’s laughter and the happy squeals of our children. I go through photo albums, sniffling like an old fool. Miriam and I on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Or on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or, where I told her about that time with Boogie and Hymie Mintzbaum. Miriam seated on our bed, serene, nursing Saul. I play her favourite Mozart. I sit here, tears sliding down my cheeks, coddling her old garden shoes. Or sniffing that nightgown of hers I hid when she was packing. Imagining that this is how they will find me. An abandoned husband. Dead of heartbreak. Her nightie pressed to my schnozz.
“What’s that the old Jew is clutching,” asks Professor Blair Hopper né Hauptman, “the number of his Swiss bank account, written on an old rag?”
“Oh, my poor love, forgive me,” she pleads, sinking to her knees, holding my cold hand to her cheek. “You were right. He’s a shmuck.”
Then I rise from the dead, like what’s-her-name, that sexpot,56 ostensibly drowned in the bathtub, in that movie with Kirk Douglas’s son, the boy as ugly as the father, only I’m not wielding a knife. Final Attraction.57 Rising, my voice quavering, I say, “I forgive you, my darling.”
Don’t knock self-pity. There’s a lot to be said for it. Certainly I enjoy it. But, on occasion, the accusatory voice of The Second Mrs. Panofsky, who also lived with me here, intrudes on my reveries:
“I don’t please you, do I, Barney?”
Looking up from my book, frowning, clearly indicating that I have been interrupted, I say, “Of course you do.”
“You despise my parents, who never did you any harm. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“It was me what?”
“Who sent my poor mother that letter on Buckingham Palace stationery, I don’t know how you got it, saying she was being considered for an OBE on the New Year’s Honours List, for her charitable good works.”
“I did no such thing.”
“She waited by the window for the postman every morning and finally had to cancel the party she had planned in her honour. I hope you were pleased to humiliate her like that.”
“It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“Barney, I want you to give us a chance. I want you to tell me what I could do to make you happy.”
“I’mhappyI’mhappy.”
“Then why don’t you ever talk to me?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong. But isn’t that