Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [158]
Mornings when I was in attendance, Miriam was free to plunge into the lake before breakfast and swim to the far shore of the bay. I would sit on the balcony with the kids, sipping black coffee, delighted at how proficient she was at the crawl, watching her swim back toward me, coming home. I would meet her on the shore with a towel, rubbing her dry, lingering in places permissible only to Barney Panofsky, Esq. But now Blair, an even more expert swimmer, joined her. Once on the far shore, he would scramble to the crest of the highest projecting rock to dive back into the lake, not doing a belly flop à la Panofsky, but barely raising a ripple.
Wednesday night I took an urgent call from Serge Lacroix, that Cahiers du Cinéma aficionado who was directing a McIver of the RCMP episode for me. Serge’s notion of art was to cross-cut from our bare-chested male lead sinking to a polar bear rug with his lady love … to a close shot of a tumescent jackhammer breaking concrete … or, God help us … to a gasoline pump ejaculating into a car’s tank. Watching his rushes made me heave with laughter, but his call meant I would have to spend Thursday in town.
Now when I started on this true story of my wasted life, I resolved to tell even those things that were still deeply embarrassing to me so many years later, so here goes. I contrived to set a trap for my ostensibly faithful, but possibly smitten, wife and her handsome SS admirer. Wednesday night I announced that I was going to take the kids with me to Montreal, assuring a dubious Miriam that they would not be a nuisance but would have fun hanging out with me on the set. Then, early Thursday morning, as Miriam and Blair Hopper né Hauptman, surely related to war criminals, were enjoying their morning swim, I grabbed Miriam’s delicate kitchen scale off a counter, scooted upstairs, fished her tube of vaginal jelly out of our bathroom cupboard, set it on the scale, and noted its exact weight. Still in my James Bond mode, I plucked a hair out of my head and laid it on the container that held her diaphragm. At the breakfast table downstairs, I sang out: “I’m not sure what time I’ll get back tonight, but I promise to phone just before I leave town in case you need anything.”
Sent for by an hysterical Serge to pronounce on budgetary dilemmas, and to settle down a troubled cast, I was so ill-tempered that I only exacerbated the problems. Our soi-disant male lead did not take kindly to my telling him in front of the crew, which was unforgivable, that unless he stopped camping on camera he would be replaced. Then I told that no-talent bimbo who was our female lead that there was more to acting, even in such a piece of shit, than jiggling her tits, and she fled the set in tears.
As I continued to lash out boorishly on all sides, I visualized a sweat-soaked Miriam and Blair experimenting with positions never dreamed of in the Kama Sutra. I was overcome by dread. Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra once put it. Well, not quite. Same cottage, but a different cast. And this time, fortunately, I lacked a gun. Finally, at six p.m., I called the cottage. I counted fourteen rings before Miriam, obviously loath to be roused from a post-coition nap, or interrupted while posing for yet another pornographic photograph, answered the phone. “We won’t be able to leave here for another hour,” I said.
“You sound awful. What’s wrong, darling?”
“Be there eight-thirty the earliest,” I said, hanging up. Then I rounded up the kids and started for the cottage immediately. If they were intending to shower together, I planned to catch them in the act.
Animals.
Mike and Saul, sensitive to my mood, were moxy enough to pretend to doze all the way back to the lake. “You’re to tell Mummy you had a terrific time. Right?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
No sooner did I pull up, bounding out of the car, ready for mayhem, than Miriam was at my side, glowing, greeting me with a hug. “You’ll never guess what we’ve done,” she said.
Brazen