Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [168]
We ate Chinese takeout that night. Lukewarm. Gluey. “Isn’t Daddy clever?” said Miriam.
The children, sensing bad vibes, ate with their heads lowered. But after they went to bed, Miriam and I shared a bottle of champagne, and made love, and laughed about our luncheon quarrel. “I know you,” she said. “I’ll bet you never returned the toaster, but threw it in the nearest wastebin and only pretended you got a refund.”
“I swear on the heads of our children that I returned the toaster, as instructed by my housekeeper.”
The following evening, a Thursday, I came down with the flu, couldn’t go to the hockey game, and had to watch it on TV, bundled up on the sofa. Guy Lafleur, intercepting an errant Boston pass behind his own blue line, swept over centre ice, his hair flying, as a roaring rocked the Forum. “Guy! Guy! Guy!” Lafleur weaved round two defencemen, decked the goalie, and was just about to go to his backhand … when Miriam started in on me again. “I do not need your permission to free-lance.”
“How could he miss an open net like that?”
“I wasn’t born to pick up your socks and wet towels, and drive kids to the dentist, and do the household chores, and to pretend you’re out when you don’t want to take a phone call.”
“The period will be over in three minutes.”
As Milbury tripped Shutt behind the net, Miriam stepped immediately in front of the TV set. “Attention must be paid,” she said.
“You’re right. You don’t need my permission.”
“And I apologize for that crack about the mink coat. You didn’t deserve that.”
Damn damn damn. I had gone out and bought her one that very morning. On St. Paul Street. “How much for that shmata?” I asked.
“Forty-five hundred. But we can forget the tax, if you pay me in cash.”
I’d taken off my wristwatch and set it down on his counter. “I’m prepared to pay three thousand dollars,” I said, “but this offer is only good for three minutes.”
We stood there, staring at each other, and when the three minutes were over, he’d said, “Don’t forget your watch.”
“I’ll take it, I’ll take it.”
Fortunately, the coat was still hidden in my office cupboard. I could return it. “You never should have made that crack about a mink coat,” I said to Miriam. “I was deeply insulted at the time. I’d never do a thing like that.”
“I said I was sorry.”
So Miriam resumed work for CBC Radio, doing the occasional interview with authors who had hit the road to peddle their books. I did nothing to encourage her but, of course, tree-hugger, refuser of non-biodegradable plastic bags Herr Professor Blair Hopper né Hauptman did. “Who were you talking to for so long on the phone?” I asked one evening.
“Oh, Blair heard my interview with Margaret Laurence and called to say how impressed he was. What did you think?”
“I was planning to listen to the tape tonight.”
“Blair says if I did a set of ten with Canadian writers, he is sure he could find a publisher for it in Toronto.”
“There aren’t ten, and anything can be published in Toronto. Sorry. I never said that. Hey, do McIver. Remind him about the time he read at George Whitman’s bookshop in Paris. Ask him where he steals his ideas. No. They have to be his own. They’re so prosaic. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I’m going to listen to the tape right after dinner.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
It was Miriam who insisted that Michael continue his studies at LSE.
“He’ll come back from London a snob. What’s wrong with McGill?”
“Mike needs to get away from us for a while. You’re a bully and I’m too caring. A Jewish mama, in spite of myself.”
“Mike said that? How dare he?”
“I said that. You cast too long a shadow. You take too much pleasure in demolishing him in argument.”
“LSE?”
“Yes.”
To come clean, I had barely made it out of high school, just