Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [21]
“I don’t want a real writer. I want you, darling. It’s from an original story I bought years ago.”
“I can’t leave here just like that.”
“I’ve already booked you on a first-class flight leaving Toronto tomorrow.”
“I’m in Montreal.”
“What’s the difference? It’s all Canada, isn’t it?”
Outside, it was fifteen degrees below zero, and another cleaning lady had quit on me. There were mouldy things sprouting in my fridge. My apartment stank of stale tobacco and sweaty old shirts and socks. In those days I usually started my morning with a pot of black coffee fortified with cognac, and a stale bagel I had to soak in water and heat up in an oven encrusted with grease. I was then already divorced from The Second Mrs. Panofsky. I was also a social pariah. Adjudged innocent by the court but condemned as a murderer, incredibly lucky to walk, by just about everybody else. I had taken to playing childish games. If the Canadiens won ten in a row, or if Beliveau scored a hat trick on Saturday night, there would be a postcard from Boogie on Monday morning, forgiving me my red-hot outburst, those harsh words I swear I didn’t mean. I tracked down and wrote or phoned mutual friends in Paris and Chicago and Dublin and, you know, that artsy desert pueblo–cum–Hollywood shtetl in Arizona, favoured by short producers in cowboy boots, with those health-food restaurants where you can’t smoke and everybody pops garlic and vitamin pills with their daily fibre. It’s not far from where they made the atom bomb, or from where D. H. Lawrence lived with what’s-her-name. Santa something.14 But nobody had seen or heard from Boogie, and some resented my inquiries. “What are you trying to prove, you bastard?” I visited Boogie’s old haunts in New York: The San Remo, The Lion’s Head. “Moscovitch,” said the bartender in The San Remo, “he was murdered somewhere in Canada, I thought.”
“The hell he was.”
At the time, I was also having my problems with Miriam, who would change everything for me: then, now, and forever. She was still vacillating. Moving to Montreal to marry me would mean giving up her job with CBC Radio. Furthermore, to her mind, I was a difficult man. I phoned her. “Go ahead,” she said, “London will be good for you and I need some time alone.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I can’t think with you here.”
“Why not?”
“You’re devouring me.”
“I want you to promise that if I’m in London for more than a month you’ll fly over for a few days. It won’t be a hardship.”
She promised. So why not, I thought. The work wouldn’t be rigorous. I needed the money desperately and all Hymie required was sympathetic company. Somebody to sit at the typewriter and guffaw at his one-liners, while he worked the phone, striding up and down, honking, chatting up bimbos, agents, producers, or his analyst: “I just remembered something significant.”
Hymie’s film turned out to be one of his iffy patchwork-quilt projects, the financing stitched together by pre-selling distribution to individual territories: the U.K., France, Germany, and Italy. His once curly black hair had faded grey as ash, and he was now given to cracking his knuckles and picking at the fat of his palms with his thumbnails, rendering the flesh painfully raw. He had shed his Reichian analyst for a Jungian, whom he visited every morning. “She’s incredible. A magus. You ought to see her yourself. Great tits.”
Hymie now suffered from insomnia, chewed tranquillizers, and did the occasional line. He had been through an LSD session with the then-modish R. D. Laing. His problem was that nobody in Hollywood was in need of his services any more. His phone calls to most agents and studio executives in Beverly Hills went unanswered or were returned some days later by an underling, one of whom actually asked Hymie to spell his name. “Call me back, sonny,” said Hymie, “when your voice has changed.” But, as promised, we did whoop it up together in that suite Hymie had taken in the Dorchester, where he was encouraging