Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [28]
Terry, a man of daunting integrity, naturally took a dim view of Boogie. For a much-needed five hundred dollars, Boogie had churned out a steamy novel for Maurice Girodias’s Traveller’s Companion Series. Vanessa’s Pussy was dedicated to the unquestionably constant wife of the Columbia professor who had failed Boogie in a course on Elizabethan poetry. The dedication read:
To the lubricious Vanessa Holt,
in fond memory of priapic nights past
Boogie had thoughtfully sent copies of Vanessa’s Pussy to his professor and Columbia’s arts-faculty dean, as well as to the editors of The New York Times Book Review and the book pages of the New York Herald-Tribune. But it is difficult to know what any of them made of it because Boogie had written the novel under a pseudonym: Baron Claus von Manheim. A disdainful Terry returned his complimentary copy unread. “Writing,” he said, “is not a job, it’s a calling.”
Be that as it may, such was the success of Vanessa’s Pussy that Boogie was promptly commissioned to deliver more. The rest of us, eager to help out, gathered at the Café Royal St-Germain, long since displaced by Le Drugstore, to improvise sexual epiphanies that could be savoured in a gym, underwater, or taking advantage of all the artifacts available in an equestrian’s tack room or a rabbi’s study. Terry, naturally, eschewed these late-night seminars, appalled by our salacious laughter.
Boogie’s second Traveller’s Companion opus, by the Marquis Louis de Bonséjour, proved him to be a man ahead of his time, a literary innovator, who intuited karaoke, interactive TV, computer porn, CD-Roms, Internet, and other contemporary plagues. The virile hero of Scarlet Lace, blessed with monstrous equipage, went unnamed, which is not to say he was anonymous. Instead, wherever his name should have appeared, there was a blank space, enabling the reader to fill in his own name, even as one of his gorgeous, sex-inflamed conquests, enjoying multiple orgasms, called out, “———, you wonderful man,” in gratitude.
It was Clara, a compulsive dirty-talker, who contributed the most imaginative but outlandish pornographic ideas to Boogie, which was surprising, considering what I then took to be her problems. We had, by this juncture, begun to live together, not as a consequence of any deliberate choice on our part but having casually slipped into it, which is the way things were in those days.
Put plainly, what happened is that late one night Clara — suffering from le cafard, she said — announced that she simply couldn’t face her hotel room again, because it was haunted by a poltergeist. “You know that hotel was a Wehrmacht brothel during the war,” she said. “It must be the spirit of the girl who died there, fucked God knows how many times through every possible orifice.” Then, only after she had harvested sympathetic looks from the rest of us at the table, did she giggle and add, “Lucky thing.”
“Where will you sleep, then?” I asked.
“Bite your tongue,” said Boogie.
“On a bench at the Gare de Montparnasse. Or under the Pont Neuf. The only clocharde in town who graduated magna cum laude from Vassar.”
So I took her back to my room, where we passed a celibate night, Clara sleeping fitfully in my arms. In the morning she asked me to be a sweetheart and fetch her canvases and drawings and notebooks and suitcases from Le Grand Hôtel Excelsior on the rue Cujas, assuring me that I would have to tolerate her only for a couple of nights, until she found a more agreeable hotel. “I’d come along to help you,” she said, “but Madame Defarge,” which is what she called the concierge, “hates me.”
Boogie grudgingly agreed to accompany me to the hotel. “I hope you know what you’re getting into,” he said.
“It’s only for a couple