Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [171]
Mike got married and Saul moved to New York. And one night before we made love in that parador overlooking Granada, I said, “I think you’ve forgotten your diaphragm.”
“It’s no longer necessary, but of course you’re still capable of having children, aren’t you?”
“Oh, Miriam, please.”
“Do you envy Nate Gold?”
Nate, who had divorced his wife of thirty years to marry a woman twenty years his junior, could now be seen pushing a stroller with an eighteen-month-old babe in it down Greene Avenue.
“I think he looks foolish,” I said.
“Don’t knock it, darling. It has to be rejuvenating.”
One afternoon after Kate got married in Toronto, I came home early from the office to find a McGill syllabus on the dining-room table. “What’s this for?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of registering for some courses. Anything wrong with that?”
“Of course not,” I said, but later that night, fearful of coming home to an empty house while she was sitting in a lecture hall, I stupidly launched into one of my anti-academic harangues. I insisted that Vladimir Nabokov was right when he told his students at Cornell that D. Phil. stood for “Department of Philistines,” and went on to say that the most gifted people I knew had never been to university.
“What about your children?”
“There are exceptions to every rule. Take Boogie, for instance. He was at Harvard.”
“I doubt they’ve put a plaque in place to commemorate that.”
We could never agree about Boogie and I didn’t share Miriam’s reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven’t mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. “Take it down, darling,” she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.
The day after my ill-advised anti-academic rant, I found the McGill syllabus in our kitchen garbage pail. “Miriam,” I said, “I feel terrible. Go back to McGill if that’s what you want. Why not?”
“Never mind. It was just a passing whim.”
One day we were a newly married couple, joy unconfined, and the next, it seemed, we had two grandchildren in London. Miriam could never bring herself to throw out the clothes Mike, Saul, and Kate had worn when they were kids. Neither would she let me get rid of our library of torn and crayoned Dr. Seuss books. But as she was assigned an increasing number of radio jobs she was less often depressed, more like her old self. Unfortunately, as the years passed, I dealt ineptly with her infrequent dark periods, arriving at Dink’s earlier in the day and staying on later than usual. I would come home to one of Miriam’s elaborately prepared dinners, a feast for two, and then boorishly fall into a drunken sleep on the living-room sofa, shaken gently awake by Miriam in time for bed. “Solange invited me to go with her to the Théâtre de Nouveau Monde tonight, but I said no. I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“I’m so sorry. Honestly, darling.”
One afternoon I was seated on my usual stool at Dink’s, gabbing away to a couple of young women Zack had brought in, when Betty gave me the eye. “Miriam just came in.”
“Where?”
“She came in, turned around, and left.”
“Didn’t she see I was here?”
“Yes.”
“Tempus edax rerum,” said Hughes-McNoughton.
“John, you’re a horse’s ass.”
I hurried home to find Miriam in a state. “I got into a dress you favour and went to Dink’s to surprise you, thinking it would give you pleasure if I had a drink with you there for once, and then the two of us could go out to dinner. Then I saw you chatting up those two women, young enough to be your daughters. I wasn’t jealous. I was just sad.”
“You don’t understand. Zack brought them in. I was just being polite.”
“I’m soon going to be sixty. Maybe you’d like me to get a face-lift.”
“Miriam, for