Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [23]
“He probably hasn’t noticed yet. It’s not like I ever scored a hat trick or the winning goal in overtime.”
“Why marry him when I’m still available?”
“Did he say I had agreed to marry him?”
“I didn’t. I swear. I said I hoped that you would —”
“Why don’t the two of us meet for lunch tomorrow, while I give him some typing to do?”
Lunch? They were gone for four hours, and when Miriam finally tottered into our hotel room, she was flushed and slurring her words, and had to lie down. I had booked us into The Caprice for dinner, but couldn’t get her out of bed. “Take Hymie,” she said, turning over and starting to snore again.
“What did you talk about for so long?” I asked Hymie later.
“This and that.”
“You got her drunk.”
“Eat up, boychick.”
Once Miriam had flown back to Toronto, Hymie and I resumed our carousing. Hell for Hymie wasn’t other people, as Camus had it,15 but being without them. When I would quit our table at The White Elephant or The Mirabelle, pleading fatigue, he would move on to another table, uninvited but making himself welcome by dazzling the company with anecdotes about bankable names. Or he would slide over to the bar, chatting up whatever woman was seated alone there. “Do you know who I am?”
One night it still chills me to remember, Ben Shahn turned up at The White Elephant with a group of admirers. Hymie, who owned one of Shahn’s drawings, took that as licence to intrude upon his table. Pointing a finger at Shahn, he said, “Next time you see Cliff, I want you to tell him for me that he’s a dirty rat.”
Cliff, of course, was Odets, who had babbled to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names.
Silence settled like a shroud over the table. Shahn, unperturbed, raised his glasses to his forehead, peering quizzically at Hymie, and asked, “And who shall I say gave me the message?”
“Never mind,” said Hymie, shrinking before my eyes. “Forget it.” And retreating, he seemed momentarily befuddled, old, unsure of his bearings.
Finally, several months later, the day came when I sat with Hymie in a Beverly Hills screening room and watched the titles and credits of our film roll past. Startled, I read:
FROM AN ORIGINAL STORY BY BERNARD MOSCOVITCH.
“You bastard,” I hollered, yanking Hymie out of his seat, shaking him, “why didn’t you tell me it was from a story by Boogie?”
“Touchy touchy,” he said, pinching my cheek.
“Now, as if I didn’t have enough to handle, people will say I’m exploiting his work.”
“Something bothers me. If he was such a good friend, and he’s still alive, why didn’t he show at your trial?”
In response, I reached back and managed to crunch Hymie’s twice-broken nose for a third time, something I had longed to do ever since he had taken Miriam out for that four-hour lunch. He countered by pumping his knee into my groin. We carried on pounding each other, rolling over on the floor, and it took three men from the unit to untangle us, even as we went on cursing each other.
4
Poetry comes naturally to the Panofskys. Take my father, for instance. Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky departed this vale of tears in a state of grace. Thirty-six years ago today he died of a heart attack on the table of a massage parlour in Montreal’s North End, immediately after ejaculating. Summoned to claim my father’s remains, I was taken aside by the visibly shaken young Haitian girl. She had no last words to impart to me, but did point out that Izzy had expired without signing his credit-card slip. A dutiful son, I paid for my father’s final squirt of passion, adding a generous tip and apologizing for the inconvenience to the establishment. And this afternoon, on the anniversary of my father’s death, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Chevra Kadisha cemetery and, as I do every year, emptied a bottle of Crown Royal rye whisky over his grave and, in lieu of a pebble, left a medium-fat smoked meat on rye and a sour pickle on his gravestone.
Were ours a just God, which he isn’t, my father would now dwell in heaven’s most