Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [32]
We languished in bed a good deal of the time, not making love but in search of warmth, dozing, reading (me into Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, which she scorned), comparing difficult childhoods and congratulating each other on our amazing survivals. In the privacy of our refuge, far from the café tables where she felt compelled to shock or, anticipating criticism, to pick at the scabs of other people’s weaknesses, she was a wonderful storyteller, my very own Scheherazade. I, in turn, entertained her with tales of the exploits of Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky.
Clara abhorred her mother. In a previous life, she said, Mrs. Chambers must have been an ayah. Or, in another spin of the reincarnation wheel, Chinese, her feet bound in childhood, taking little mincing steps in The Forbidden City during the days of the Ming Dynasty. She was the ultimate wifey. “Très mignonne. Hardly a virago,” said Clara. Her husband’s philandering she took to be a blessing, as it meant she no longer had to suffer him between the sheets. “It is astonishing to what lengths a man will go,” she once said to Clara, “to achieve thirty seconds of friction.” Having provided Mr. Chambers with a son, Clara’s younger brother, she felt that her duty was done, and was delighted to move into her own bedroom. But she continued to thrive as an exemplary chatelaine, managing their Gramercy Park brownstone and Newport mansion with panache. Mrs. Chambers was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company board. Giuseppe di Stefano had sung at one of her soirées. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was a frequent dinner guest. Mrs. Chambers had made a point of taking Kirsten Flagstad to lunch at Le Pavillon after the Jews had taken against her. “My mother would suffer a stroke if she knew I was living with a Jew,” said Clara, tickling my nose with one of her ostrich boas. “She thinks you’re the poison contaminating America’s bloodstream. What have you got to say to that?”
Her father, she once told me, was a senior partner in John Foster Dulles’s old law firm. He kept Arabian horses and once a year flew over to Scotland to fly-fish for salmon on the Spey. But another time I heard her say that he was a Wall Street broker and a cultivator of rare orchids, and when I asked her about that, once we were alone together, she countered, “Oh, you’re so fucking literal. What does it matter?” and she ran off, disappearing round a corner of the rue de Seine, and didn’t return to our room that night. “As a matter of interest,” I asked, when she showed up at the Pergola the next evening, “where did you stay last night?”
“You don’t own me, you know. My pussy’s my own.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It just so happens my aunt Honor is staying at the Crillon. She put me up. We ate at Lapérouse.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Look,” she said, and digging into her skirts, she produced a wad of one-thousand-franc notes, and threw them at me. “Take whatever I owe you for room and board. I’m sure you’ve been keeping track.”
“Is it all right if I charge interest?”
“I’m taking the train to Venice with my aunt tonight. We’re staying with Peggy Guggenheim.”
Shortly after one o’clock in the morning a week later, Clara returned to our room, undressed, and slid into bed with me. “We drank endless Bellinis at Harry’s Bar with Tennessee Williams. Peggy took us to Torcello for lunch one day. For your sake, I visited the Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. Had you lived there back then you wouldn’t have been allowed out after ten o’clock at night. I was going to send you a postcard from the Rialto,” she said, “to say there’s no news to report, but I forgot.”
In the morning, I couldn’t help noticing the angry scratches running down her back. A veritable trail. “Peggy keeps Russian greyhounds,” said Clara. “They got overexcited when I wrestled with them on the rug.”
“Nude?”
“We should try everything. Isn’t that what your mentor said?”
“Boogie’s not my mentor.”
“Look at you. Raging inside. You want to kick me out, but you