Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [170]
On our return to Montreal, among the plethora of messages on our answering machine, there were three from Blair. Could we join him for lunch at the University Club next Wednesday. “You go,” I said to Miriam.
Kate said, “How come you’re so sanguine about Mom meeting Blair so often?”
“Kate, don’t be foolish. This marriage is a rock.”
8
Hold it. This is not to suggest for a minute that Miriam was having an affair with Blair Hopper né Hauptman. She enjoyed his company, that’s all. Possibly she was flattered by his attentions, but there was nothing in it. I’m the one who is responsible for the break-up of our marriage. I failed to respond to minatory signals sufficiently loud to alert a village idiot. And I sinned.
Wolves, I read somewhere, establish territorial rights to their domain, warning off trespassers, by pissing along its borders. I did something similar. I was amazed that a woman as intelligent and beautiful as Miriam would marry somebody like me. And so, fearful of losing her, I made her my prisoner, methodically alienating the friends she had made before we met. Whenever she had former CBC colleagues to dinner at our place I behaved abominably. My truculence was not entirely unjustified. Charged with virtue, those intellectual mice from the People’s Network tended to condescend to me as a money-grubbing TV shlock-meister, even as they selflessly protected us from the cultural vandals to the south. Maybe this cut too close to the bone. In any event, I replied by ridiculing the Canadian-content quotas for radio and TV, a licence for mediocrity (a profitable chunk of it supplied by me, as Miriam pointed out mischievously); and I accused them, à la Auden,75 of having hung their arses on a pension years ago. The worst case was Miriam’s former producer Kip Horgan, a cultivated and irreverent man, a drinker, who was disconcertingly capable of puncturing my sharpest digs with a witticism of his own. Had he not enjoyed such a rapport with Miriam, we could have become chums. Instead, I loathed him. One night after he finally staggered out of our house, the last guest to quit a dinner party, Miriam turned on me: “Did you have to sit there yawning for the last hour?”
“Were you and Kip lovers?”
“Barney, you amaze me. It was before we had even met.”
“I don’t want him coming here for dinner again.”
“And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe you were twice married before we got together.”
“Yeah, but you’re a keeper.”
That did not earn me a dimple on her cheek. Miriam was not amused, but distracted. “Kip told me that Martha Hanson — she was no more than a script reader in my time, and not that good at it — is going to be appointed head of Radio Arts.”
“So?”
“In future I will have to submit any ideas I have to her.”
Another evening we flicked on the CBC-TV National News just as a new young woman correspondent was reporting from London. “I don’t believe it,” said a distressed Miriam, “it’s Sally Ingrams. I gave her her first job.”
“Miriam, don’t tell me you’d like to be a television reporter.”
“No. I don’t think so. And I’m sure that Sally will be very good at it. It’s just that it sometimes bothers me that everybody I used to know seems to be doing interesting things now.”
“Don’t you think giving birth to and bringing up three wonderful children is an interesting thing?”
“Usually I do, but there are days when I don’t. It doesn’t command much respect these days, does it?”
As long as our children were still living at home, in unending need of Miriam’s support, our little tiffs were rare, usually culminating in hugs and laughter, and we continued to be passionate lovers. But in these days of rampant sexual self-advertisement, I remain unfashionably committed to reticence, so I will say no more than that I did things in bed with Miriam I never did with anybody else, and I believe it was the same for her. After the last of our brood quit the nest, we celebrated our new-found middle-aged freedom by treating