Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [172]
“Should I start dyeing my hair? What do I have to do to please my husband, the lounge lizard?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“Am I?”
And then, not for the first or the last time, she lapsed into a denunciation of her father. The philanderer. The cheater. The murderer of her mother. After all these years, her father’s promiscuity remained an obsession of Miriam’s. The first betrayal she had known, perhaps. I had learned to tolerate her outbursts. I didn’t think it mattered. Certainly not to us. Shmuck.
I had to slip out of bed early the next morning to catch a flight to Toronto and when I got back that night Miriam wasn’t there. She had left a note on the dining-room table:
Darling,
I’m flying to London tonight to visit Mike and Caroline and the kids. I apologize for being hysterical last night, so please don’t misunderstand. It’s just that I can do with a break and so can you. If you come home early enough you are not to go to Mirabel to fetch me. Please, darling. I won’t be away for more than a week. I love you.
MIRIAM
P.S. You are not to go to Schwartz’s to eat smoked meat and fries every night. It’s bad for you. I’ve left some things in the fridge.
I opened the fridge to find a pot of spaghetti meat sauce, a pot of leek and potato soup, a roast chicken, a meat loaf, a bowl of potato salad, and a cheese pie. Feeling sorry for myself, I ate in front of the TV set and went to bed early. Miriam phoned at seven a.m. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. I feel like a little girl playing hooky. I should do things like this more often.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. Caroline is taking me to Daphne’s for lunch, so I’ve got to get ready now. Will you be home this evening?”
“Of course. I had the spaghetti for breakfast and I think I’ll have the roast chicken and the cheese pie for dinner.”
“I’ll phone you later. Kiss kiss. Goodbye for now.”
I don’t want to talk about what happened that night. It wasn’t my fault. I was drunk. It meant nothing to me. Damn damn damn. The one evening I would give a year of my life to take back, I lingered at Dink’s past the old farts’ hour into the time when the raunchy singles begin to trickle in. Zack, who had once worked for, you know, that newspaper about money. Not The Wall Street Journal. The Canadian one. The Financial Report or Post. Whichever.76 Spaghetti is strained with a … Hell, I got it right before. The Seven Dwarfs are called Doc, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grouchy, and the other two. Lillian Hellman did not write The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit. Or Shirt. Fuck it.
Zack, who had once worked for a money newspaper, was telling me about his first encounter with Duddy Kravitz: “I was sent out to interview new young Montreal millionaires for a feature we were doing. One rich white-bread WASP after another protested that they were certainly not millionaires, even on paper, and anyone who suggested as much was slandering them. They told me about their mortgages and bank loans and the problems they had coming up with school fees. The French-Canadian brokers I spoke to were no more forthcoming. Anglophone bankers discriminated against them. The big investors wouldn’t trust their portfolios to anybody named Bissonette or Turgeon. They think we’re stupid. It’s a struggle, they said. They couldn’t sleep because of the money they owed. Then I went to interview Kravitz, reconciled to even louder protests of penury. Instead, Kravitz beamed at me. ‘Boy, am I ever a millionaire. Maybe three times over. You think I’m bragging? Let me show you some documents. Hey, did you bring a photographer?’ I’ve had time for him ever since, no matter what other people say. Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Come on. One for the road.”
“Okay. But just one.”
That’s when she sashayed into Dink’s, the bimbo who ruined my life, snuggling onto the bar stool next to Zack, who immediately began to chat her up. I can’t even remember her name any more, but she was a bleached blonde, wearing a tight sweater and a mini-skirt. Reeking of perfume, maybe thirty