Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [29]
“She’s crazy.”
“And you?”
“Don’t worry. I can handle it.”
Drugs is what we were talking about. Boogie had graduated from hashish to horse. “We should try everything,” he said. “Kvetchy Jewish princesses before they go home to marry doctors. Arab boys in Marrakesh. Black chicks. Opium. Absinthe. The mandrake root. Magic mushrooms. Stuffed derma. Halvah. Everything on the table and under. We only get to go around the block once. Except for Clara, of course.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Miss Chambers of Gramercy Park and Newport is into reincarnation. It comes with her trust fund. Didn’t you know that much about her?”
Clara’s things included, among other items, a two-volume edition of The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky, a water pipe, a dictionary of Satanism, a stuffed owl, several volumes on astrology, palmistry charts, a deck of tarot cards, and a framed portrait of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666, wearing the headdress of Horus. But the concierge wouldn’t let us remove anything until I had paid her 4,200 francs in overdue rent. “Money disgusts me,” said Clara. “Yours. Mine. It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth talking about.”
It would be inaccurate to describe Clara as tall. Long is what she was. Skinny enough for a rib count. Her hands constantly in movement, adjusting her shawls, smoothing her skirts, brushing back her hair, peeling the labels off wine bottles. Her fingers were nicotine-and ink-stained, her nails broken or bitten to the quick. Ears the shape of teacup handles protruded from her hair — “It’s the colour of shit,” she said. “I hate it” — that cascaded to her narrow waist. She had only the faintest of eyebrows, her huge black eyes lit with intelligence. And scorn. And panic. She was sickly pale, which she emphasized by applying full moons of rouge to her cheeks and by wearing orange, green, or purple lipstick, depending on her mood. Her breasts, she felt, were too full for her figure. “With jugs like these,” she said, “I could nurse triplets.” She complained that her legs were too long and scrawny, and her feet too large. But for all her disparaging remarks about her appearance, she could never pass a café mirror without pausing to admire herself. Oh, her rings. I forgot to mention her rings. A topaz. A blue sapphire. And, her favourite, an ankh.
Years before it became modish, Clara wore loose, beaded, ankle-length Victorian dresses and high-button shoes, retrieved from the flea market. She also draped herself in shawls, the colours often conflicting, which struck me as odd, considering she was a painter. Boogie dubbed her “The Conversation Piece,” as in “Sauve qui peut. Here comes Barney and The Conversation Piece.” And, to come clean, I enjoyed that. Couldn’t write. Didn’t paint. And even then I was not a likeable man. Already a sour, judgmental presence. But suddenly I had acquired a distinction of sorts. I had become an intriguing fellow. I was nutty Clara’s keeper.
Clara was a compulsive toucher, which annoyed me once we had begun to live together. She was given to collapsing into laughter against other men’s chests at café tables, stroking their knees. “If Grouchy wasn’t here with me, we could go somewhere and fuck now.”
Memory test. Quick, Barney. Names of the Seven Dwarfs. Grouchy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc. I know the names of the other three. Got them right just last night. They’ll come to me. I’m not going to look them up.
Clara especially enjoyed teasing Terry McIver, which I approved of heartily. Ditto Cedric Richardson, long before he won celebrity as Ismail ben Yussef, scourge of Jewish slave-traders past and slumlords present, and nemesis of ice-people everywhere.
Keeping track of what became of everybody is what sustains me in my dotage. It’s amazing. Mind-boggling. The scheming Leo Bishinsky coining millions with his japes on canvas. Clara, who despised other women, enjoying posthumous fame as a feminist martyr. Me, stricken with limited notoriety as the chauvinist pig who betrayed her, a possible murderer to boot. The unspeakably boring novels of Terry McIver,