Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [126]
“Oh, to my office?”
“Don’t worry.”
“I said I apologize.”
“This has got to stop. It’s not as if I’ve ever done anything to encourage you.”
“I think we should meet and talk this over.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You needn’t be so angry.”
“What sort of woman do you think I am?”
“Oh, you’d be amazed. Miriam, Miriam, the truth is I think about you all the time.”
“Well stop. I happen to be going out with someone.”
“You’re not living together, are you?”
“What business could that be of yours?”
“I’m being a nuisance. I realize that. So why don’t we meet for lunch and —”
“I’ve already told you —”
“— Wait. Lunch. Just once. And if you decide you don’t want to see me again, well, that’s it.”
“Honestly?”
“I swear.”
“When?”
“You tell me and I’ll be there.”
“Wednesday. We can have a meal-in-a-bowl on the Park Plaza Roof.”
“No. Downstairs. The Prince Arthur Room.”
13
Last night I made a big mistake. I reread some of the crap I’ve written in what I’ve come to grandly consider my very own Apologia pro Vita Sua, with a tip of my chapeau to Cardinal Newman. Digressions, or what I prefer to think of as Barney Panofsky’s table talk, abound. But Laurence Sterne got away with it, so why not me? Count your blessings. Readers don’t have to wait until the end of volume three before I’m even born. Something else. It doesn’t take me six pages to cross a field, as it would if this had been written by Thomas Hardy. I rein in my metaphors, unlike John Updike. I am admirably succinct when it comes to descriptive passages, unlike P. D. James, a writer I happen to admire. A P. D. James character can enter a room with dynamite news, but it is not to be revealed until we have learned the colour and material of the drapes, the pedigree of the carpet, the shade of the wallpaper, the quality and content of the pictures, the number and design of the chairs, whether the side tables are bona fide antiques, acquired in Pimlico, or copycat from Heal’s. P. D. James is not only gifted, but also obviously a real baleboosteh, or chatelaine. She is also endearing, which is not my problem, and brings me to yet another digression. Or character flaw acknowledged.
Lying on my lonely sofa at night, boozing as I channel-surf, I keep a pair of binoculars within easy reach on my coffee table. I need them as I watch “probing” CBC-TV interviews with yacky political pundits, economists, newspaper editors, sociology or psychology mavins, and other certified idiots. Why? Because these interviews are usually conducted in what purports to be a library, the shelves behind the blabber laden with books. Say it’s the celebrated author of that seminal study of five thousand Canadians that has revealed (hello, hello) that the rich are happier than the poor, and less prone to suffer from malnutrition. Or, still better, a sexologist, whatever that is, who ventures that serial rapists are often loners who were sexually abused as children or at least come from dysfunctional families. Whichever, I immediately whip out my binocs to study the titles on the bookshelves. If there’s anything there by Terry McIver, I flick off my TV and sit down to compose a letter to the CBC questioning their expert’s intelligence and taste.
Slept badly last night, wakened at five a.m., and had to wait until six-thirty for my morning newspapers.
Good one in today’s Globe and Mail. Eldfriede Blauensteiner, a Viennese widow, is in deep doo-doo. Seems she used to run regular ads in the lovelorn columns of the Austrian press:
Widow, 64, 1 metre 65 cm, would like to share the quiet autumn of her life with a widower. I am a housewife, gardener, nurse, and a faithful companion.
The Kraut Mrs. Lonelyhearts is also a bleached blonde who wears blue-tinted glasses, and was hooked on the roulette wheels and blackjack tables of Baden. Lots of lonely old guys, mostly pensioners, answered her ads, and she screened them for their assets. The police say her earnings from bank accounts, property, and cash left to her in altered wills ran into millions. Her favoured modus operandi was to add a soup