Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [186]
I’m not giving up on this scribbling, just because McIver has let me down. Instead I’m rededicating these all-but-finished confessions anew. They are now for my loved ones: Miriam, Mike, Saul, and Kate. Solange and Chantal. But not Caroline.
On my last visit to Mike and Caroline in London, I can remember being served a vegetarian dinner one evening: artichoke, followed by ratatouille, assorted cheeses, and organically grown fruit. When Caroline came round with the decaffeinated coffee, I pulled out my cigar case, lit a Montecristo, and offered one to Mike. “Sorry it isn’t a Cohiba this time,” I said, testing.
As Mike lit up, Caroline slid out of her chair, ever so discreetly, to open a window.
“But I’m sure you enjoyed that box of cigars, didn’t you?”
“Damn right I did.”
Provoked, I went on to say, “Let’s get into the cognac now, you and me, and tell sad tales about when we were still a family, carnivores born and bred, and your kid brother, that naughty boy, was dealing in pot at Selwyn House.”
“Mike can’t tolerate cognac,” said Caroline.
“Oh, just a little one, an ounce,” said Mike, who tended to measure out drinks precisely with a little chrome cup, “if only to keep Dad company.”
“And then you’ll be up at four in the morning, your heart hammering, and I won’t get any sleep either.”
The next morning, long after Mike had left the house at exactly 8:06, as was his habit, for the twenty-four-minute drive to his office, I sneaked downstairs, hung over, treading tippytoe, determined to grab a taxi that would take me to Bloom’s for some salt beef and latkes, when Caroline waylaid me. She had missed out on her yoga class to prepare a beneficial brunch for the old reprobate: freshly squeezed carrot juice, steamed broccoli, and a tossed green salad. “It’s rich in iron,” she said.
Trapped but defiant, I spiked my carrot juice with a couple of fingers of vodka. This earned me one of Caroline’s patented reproachful looks. “Isn’t it a bit early, Barney?” she asked, the “even for you” left unstated, but dangling in the hostile air between us.
“It’s fucking eleven o’clock,” I said.
I’m not a total boor. I never say “fucking” to proper young women. But I liked to make her wince and maybe register that for all her pur sang heritage and aristo connections and la-de-da education she had married into a coven of jumped-up Jews. The non-U descendants of the fusgeyers, hooligans who hiked out of their shtetls singing:
Geyt, yidelech, in der vayter velt;
in kanada, vet ir ferdinen gelt.
Go, little Jews, into the wider world;
in Canada, you will earn a living.
It was perverse on my part. Churlish. I know, I know. Especially when you consider that Caroline is such an intelligent woman, attractive, a faithful wife so far as I can make out, and a good mother. She adores Mike. But what irked me was that like some women who knew my story, she would rather not be left alone with her father-in-law, in case what they whispered about me was true. So that morning I taunted her with it. “Caroline, my dear, now that we know each other so well, why don’t you come right out with it and ask me if I did it?”
She rose abruptly from the table, collecting dishes, putting the kitchen counter between us, and beginning to sponge imaginary stains. “All right, then. Did you?”
“No.”
“There we are, then.”
“But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”
Later, I heard Mike and Caroline quarrelling.
“Is he so pathetically naïve,” she asked, “that he thinks he can shock me by saying ‘fuck’?”
“Couldn’t we discuss this tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. Next week. He’s a tyrant.” Then she told him about our little contretemps in the kitchen. “He brought it up. I didn’t. He said it wasn’t true, but then he added, with that teasing smile of his, ‘But I would say that, wouldn’t I?’ ”
“Only he knows for sure.”
“That