Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [134]
Izzy, drunker than I imagined, embraced me, kissing me on both cheeks, his eyes welling with tears again. “I want you to hang in there, Barney. Get as much as you can while the going is good.”
“You’re a disgusting old man,” I said, disengaging myself.
Izzy shuffled over to his stairs, paused, and turned to me once more. “Jeez. The garage doors. It’s her car. The Duchess of Outremont is back. See you around, kid.”
Ten days later he died of a heart attack on a massage-parlour table.
15
On a sweet summer evening in 1973 I was out to dinner with a radiant Miriam, by then the mother of our three children, and like everybody else in those days we were caught up in a heated discussion of the televised Watergate hearings, which we had watched all afternoon. “The tapes are going to do him in,” she said. “He’s going to have to resign.”
“The hell he will. He’s a survivor, that bastard.”
Of course she was right, as usual. And I, as usual, brought her my office problems. “I never should have commissioned Marty Klein to write those scripts.”
“I hate to say I told you so.”
“But his wife’s pregnant and he left the CBC to come to me. I can’t fire him.”
“Then promote him. Make him executive producer, or vice-president in charge of ashtrays. Anything. So long as he doesn’t write.”
“I couldn’t do a thing like that,” I protested.
It took me three days, as usual, to absorb Miriam’s advice, and then I did exactly as she had suggested, pretending it was my idea. Other couples used to joke about us. We would go to a party and end up in a corner, or sitting together on the stairs, gabbing away, ignoring everybody else. Then some gossip wound its way back to Miriam. She was out to lunch with one of her so-called girlfriends, then embroiled in an ugly divorce action, and she was told, “I thought Barney had eyes only for you. At least that’s what people say. Now please don’t be angry with me, but, speaking from experience, I don’t want you to be the last to know. Dorothy Weaver, you don’t know her, saw him at the Johnsons’ cocktail party last Wednesday. And there was your devoted husband coming on to a woman. Chatting her up. Whispering in her ear. Massaging her back. They left together.”
“I know all about that.”
“Thank God, because the last thing I want to do is upset you.”
“Oh dear, I’m afraid that woman was me, and we went on to the Ritz from there, to drink champagne, and afterwards, now don’t you repeat this, but I agreed to go home with him.”
The two of us were out to dinner at La Sapinière in Ste-Adèle. As Miriam perused the menu, I brought a flush to her cheeks, sliding my hand under the table to stroke her silken thigh. Oh, happy days! Oh, nights of rapture! Leaning over to nibble her ear, I suddenly felt her stiffen. “Look out,” she said.
Yankel Schneider, of all people, had just entered the restaurant with a couple of friends, only this time he didn’t stop at our table to insult me, his anger justifiable. Nevertheless, he put Miriam and me in mind of our last encounter with him at our make-or-break lunch at the Park Plaza in Toronto. That lunch that had started out as a disaster. Me, making such a fool of myself. With hindsight, however, we were now able to laugh at what had since become a cherished part of our personal history. A story, albeit an edited version, our children had come to love.
“And then what happened?” Saul might ask.
“Tell them, Miriam.”
“Certainly not.”
But that evening in Ste-Adèle, Yankel’s presence still filled me with guilt. Sneaking glances at him, I did not see the man in his early forties but, instead, the ten-year-old schoolboy whose life I had made such a misery. “I still don’t understand why I tormented him like that. How I could behave so abominably.”
Sensing my distress, Miriam reached for my hand.
O, Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire. Without her, I am not only alone but also incomplete. In our halcyon days I could share everything with her, even my most shameful moments, of which there are too many to haunt me in my dotage. Take this one, for instance. On that day that was ruined