Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [31]
“That’s not what you are.”
“Of course I am.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t you get upset now.”
“Let’s go to New York for the weekend.”
“Saul is still running a fever —”
“Ninety-nine and a sixteenth?”
“— and you promised to take Mike to the hockey game on Saturday night.” Then, out of nowhere, she added, “If you’re going to leave me, I’d rather you did it now, before I’m old.”
“Can I have ten minutes to pack?”
Later, we worked out that Kate was probably conceived that night. Damn damn damn. If Miriam’s gone, it is surely due to my insensitivity. Mea culpa. All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgments. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself. And now, my letter to Cedric in hand, I could hear her say, “Sometimes what you find funny is actually nasty, calculated to wound.”
Oh, yeah? Well, just maybe I’m the one who has the right to feel wounded. How could Cedric, once one of our band of brothers, take to the college pulpits, chastising me and my kind for our religion and skin colour? Why did such a talented young man eschew literature for the vulgar political stage? Hell, given his gifts, I’d be scribbling day and night.
I’d like Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Cedric et al. to get off my back. Yes, Miriam. I know, Miriam. I’m sorry, Miriam. Had I endured what they and their kind had in America, I, too, would be prepared to believe that Adam and Eve were black, but Cain turned white with shock when God condemned him for murdering Abel. All the same, it ain’t right.
Anyway, back in our Left Bank days, Cedric was seldom seen without a white girl on his arm. Clara, simulating jealousy, usually greeted him with, “How long before I get my ticket punched?”
She took a different tack with Terry. “For you, honey-child, I’d be willing to dress as a boy.”
“But I much prefer you as you are, Clara. Always tricked out like a harlequin.”
Or, an avid Virginia Woolf reader, Clara would pretend to espy a tell-tale stain on his trousers. “You could go blind, Terry. Or haven’t they heard about that in Canada yet?”
Clara not only did troubled non-figurative paintings, but also frightening ink drawings, crowded with menacing gargoyles, prancing little devils, and slavering satyrs, attacking nubile women from all sides. She committed poetry as well, inscrutable to me, but published in both Merlin and Zero, earning her a request from James Laughlin of New Directions Press to see more. Clara shoplifted. Sliding things under her voluminous shawls. Tins of sardines, bottles of shampoo, books, corkscrews, postcards, spools of ribbon. Fauchon was a favourite haunt, until she was denied entry. Inevitably, she was once caught snatching a pair of nylon stockings at the MonoPrix, but got off, she said, by allowing the fat, greasy flic to drive her to the Bois de Boulogne and come between her breasts. “Just like my dear uncle Horace did when I was only twelve years old. Only he didn’t boot me out of a moving car, laughing as I tumbled head over heels, calling me filthy names, but presented me with a twenty-dollar bill each time to keep our secret.”
Our room, in the Hôtel de la Cité, on the Île de la Cité, was perpetually dark, its one small window looking out on an interior courtyard as narrow as an elevator shaft. There was a tiny washbasin in the room, but the communal toilet was down a long hallway. It was a squatter, no more than a hole in the floor, with elevated grips for your shoes, and a clasp fixed to the wall offering paper squares scissored out of the politically relevant L’Humanité or Libération. I bought a Bunsen burner and a small pot, so that we could hard-boil eggs to eat in baguette sandwiches for lunch. But the crumbs attracted mice, and she wakened screaming when one skittered over her face during the night. Another time she opened a dresser drawer to retrieve a