Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [144]
“I married a fishwife.”
“You want a divorce? Be my guest. But it will be on my terms, you bastard,” she said, and off she went again, grinding gears, narrowly missing a tree.
Yabba dabba doo. Barney Panofsky, you were born with a horseshoe up your ass. I decided to put off phoning Hughes-McNoughton until later, but I wasn’t going to need a hooker or a private detective any more. Nosirreebob. Composing myself, looking, I hoped, appropriately stern, I started inside to confront Boogie. He was already downstairs, unshaven, a scrawny sight in his boxer shorts, lifting a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan, and two glasses, out of the bar. “It’s cooler down here, isn’t it?”
“You screwed my wife, you son of a bitch.”
“I think we should have a drink before we get into this.”
“I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”
“It’s too early to eat,” he said, pouring both of us stiff ones.
“How could you do this to me?”
“I did it to her, not you. And if you had phoned before leaving Montreal, this embarrassing business could have been avoided. I think I’ll go for a swim.”
“Not yet, you won’t. So it’s my fault, is it?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. You’ve been shirking your conjugal duties. She said it was seven months since you last made love to her.”
“She told you that?”
“Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers.”
“She came into my room with a tray,” he said, pouring us another drink, “and sat down on my bed in that short nightie. Now it was already awfully humid, so I could hardly blame her, but I suspected there was a message in there somewhere. A subtext. Skoal.”
“Skoal.”
“I laid my book aside. John Marquand’s Sincerely, Willis Wayde. Now there’s a novelist who is sadly underrated. Anyway, following a forced exchange of niceties (Hot, isn’t it? I’ve heard so much about you. It’s so good of you to put up with me in my condition, et cetera et cetera), and an awkward silence or two — I’d really like to go for a swim. May I borrow your snorkel and flippers?”
“Goddamn it, Boogie.”
He poured us another drink and we both lit up Montecristos. “I guess we’re going to have to fix our own lunch today,” he said. “A votre santé.”
“Sure. Now get on with it, please.”
“And then, unbidden as it were, she began to tell me about the problems you two were having, hoping for some good advice. You preferred the bar-room companionship of losers to home most evenings, and on the rare occasions you deigned to come straight home from the office, you didn’t talk to her but read a book at the table. Or The Hockey News, whatever that is. If she had other couples in to dinner, old friends of hers, you ambushed them. If they were of the right, you argued that it was the Soviets who had won World War Two, and that one day Stalin would be recognized as the man of the century. But if they were of the left, you claimed there was scientific evidence to prove blacks were of inferior intelligence and too highly sexed; and you praised Nixon. Whenever you joined her parents for a sabbath dinner, you whistled at the table, an offence to her mother. She married you over the objections of her father, a distinguished intellectual, and then what? You neglect her in bed and she discovers that you are keeping a mistress in Toronto. Say, I happen to know there are some devilled eggs in the fridge. What do you think?”
So we moved to the kitchen table, taking the bottle and our glasses with us. “L’chaim,” he said.
“L’chaim.”
“I must say, she is given to verbosity. In full flow, there was no stopping her, and I fear my mind had begun to drift. But the next thing I knew, she leaned over to remove my tray and I caught a glimpse of her pleasing bosom. She sat down on my bed again, and began to sniffle, and I felt obliged to take her in my arms to comfort her, and still she didn’t stop her prattling. I began to stroke her here and then there, and her protests, a kind of cooing, struck me as an invitation. ‘You mustn’t.’ ‘We ought to stop right now.’ ‘Oh please, not there.’ And then, pretending that she wasn