Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [127]
In my favour, I never seriously considered accidentally drowning, or poisoning, The Second Mrs. Panofsky, although our breakfasts together were descents into hell. Thoughtful beyond compare, my gabby missus habitually shared what she could remember of her last night’s dreams, which was plenty, with our morning coffee. One morning in particular is imprinted on my sometimes iffy memory now and forevermore. To recap. The night before, two tickets to the hockey game riding in my breast pocket, I met John Hughes-McNoughton, who was to be my companion, at Dink’s. John was already blasted, and Zack Keeler was there, also well into it: “Hey, Barney, do you know why Scotsmen wear kilts?”
“I’m not interested.”
“It’s because the sheep can hear the sound of a fly being unzipped.”
Saul, whose opprobium I am obliged to suffer, takes a dim view of my being a hockey nut. “At your age,” he said recently, “it is no longer appropriate for you to still be a jock-sniffer.”
But I never got to the game. And when Dink’s closed at two a.m., John, Zack, and I stepped into the ear-tingling cold, snow swirling in the wind, not a taxi in sight, and shuffled on to a blind pig on Mc-Tavish Street, our overcoats steaming in the sudden gust of warmth.
Understandably, I was in agony the next morning when The Second Mrs. Panofsky joined me at the breakfast table in her quilted pink dressing-gown. Ducking behind the Gazette, opening it at the sports section, I read: Big Jean Beliveau led the —
“I had the most troubling dream about you last night.”
— Canadiens to a —
“Yoo hoo. I said I had the —”
“I heard you.”
— to a convincing 5 to —
“I was sixteen years old again, but I can’t understand how come in my dream I was still wearing my hair in a pigtail, tied with that velvet ribbon from Saks Fifth Avenue my aunt Sarah gave me maybe a month before she had to go in to be scraped out, you know, for her hysterectomy. They cut out the poor woman’s uterus, and the next thing you know she’s hired a private detective to follow Uncle Sam everywhere. The worst she found out was that when he was supposed to be at Rabbi Teitelbaum’s Talmud class, he was actually playing pinochle in the back room of the Broadway Barbershop on St. Viateur. You know, next door to where Reuben’s Best Kosher Butcher-shop used to be, my mother swore by his chickens. Reuben was such a card. My mother would take me with her, I was only ten, he would say, ‘How come a beauty like you isn’t married yet?’ Anyway, it was certainly incongruous, my still wearing a pigtail in my dream, and I haven’t figured it out yet, but at that age I was already going to a hairdresser, Mr. Mario’s Salon, on Sherbrooke near Victoria. That reminds me, did you pick up the lampshade at Grunwald’s yesterday? It’s only the third time I asked you and you promised. You forgot again? You had more important things to think of? Yeah, sure. But if I said there was no single-malt whisky left in the house, fat chance, you would have dropped everything and shot down to the liquor commission. I was Mr. Mario’s favourite. Such beautiful natural curls, he used to say, I ought to pay you for doing your hair. He died three years ago, no four, cancer of the testicles is how it started.”
With a trembly hand, I lowered my coffee cup and lit a Monte-cristo Number Four.
“Have you ever heard of emphesyma, I wonder?”
“You were saying?”
“It must be worse than a hysterectomy, for a man I mean, losing his testicles, never mind what it meant to Gina, his wife, poor dear. You name a