Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [49]
“Harlot.”
The Second Mrs. Panofsky once observed that in the absence of heart there was a knot of anger swirling inside me. And now, my blood surging, I leapt up, lifted Terry out of his chair, and smashed him hard in the face, his chair toppling over. Then I stood over him, crazed, fists ready to fly. Murder in my heart. But Terry wouldn’t fight back. Instead he sat on the pavement, smirking, nursing his bleeding nose with a handkerchief. “Good night,” I said.
“The bill. I haven’t got enough money on me. Settle the bill, damn you.”
I threw some franc notes at him, and was just about to flee when he began to tremble and sob brokenly. “Help me,” he said.
“What?”
“ … my hotel …”
I managed to get him to his feet and we started to walk, his teeth chattering, his legs rubbery. We had only gone a block when he began to shake. No, vibrate. He sank to his knees and I held his head, as he vomited again and again. Somehow or other, we made it back to his room on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts. I got him into bed, and when he started to tremble again, I piled whatever clothes I could find on top of his blankets. “It’s the flu,” he said. “I’m not upset. This has nothing to do with my reading. You’re not saying anything.”
“What should I say?”
“There’s no doubting my talent. My work will last. I know that.”
“Yes.”
Then his teeth began to chatter at such a rate I feared for his tongue. “Please don’t go yet.”
I lit a Gauloise and passed it to him, but he couldn’t handle it.
“My father can hardly wait for me to fail and to join him in misery.”
He began to weep again. I grabbed the wastepaper basket and held his head, but for all his heaving he could bring up nothing but a string of green slime. As soon as the retching stopped, I brought him a glass of water. “It’s the flu,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’m not upset.”
“No.”
“If you tell any of the others you saw me like this, I’ll never forgive you.”
“I won’t say a word to anybody.”
“Swear it.”
I swore it, and sat with him until his body stopped jerking, and he fell into a troubled sleep. But I had been a witness to his cracking and that, dear reader, is how you make enemies.
9
I’m determined to be fair. A reliable witness. The truth is, Terry McIver’s novels, including The Money Man, in which I fill the large role of the acquisitive Benjy Perlman, are untainted by imagination. His novels are uniformly pedestrian, earnest, as appetizing as health food, and, it goes without saying, devoid of humour. The characters in these novels are so wooden they could be used for kindling. It is only in Terry’s journals that fantasy comes into play. Certainly the Paris pages are full of invention. A sicko’s inventions. Mary McCarthy once observed that everything Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “but.” The same can be said of Terry’s journals.
Following, a sampler. Some pages from the journals of Terry McIver (Officer of the Order of Canada, Governor General’s Award winner), as they will soon appear in his autobiography, Of Time and Fevers, published by the group, Toronto, which gratefully acknowledges the assistance of mediocrity’s holy trinity: the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the City of Toronto Arts Council.
Paris. Sept. 22, 1951. Couldn’t get anywhere with Céline’s Mort à Crédit this morning. It was recommended to me by the touchingly insecure P——, which is not surprising, considering that he is burdened with his own inchoate rage against the world. I have the most tenuous of relationships with P——, imposed on me as we are both Montrealers, which hardly amounts to propinquity.
P —— turned up in Paris one day last spring, furnished with my address by my father. He knew nobody here, and, consequently, sought me out daily. He would interrupt me at work, inviting me out to lunch and demanding, in return, that I provide him with the names of the cafés he should frequent, and pleading for introductions. Within a week, he had mastered the fashionable Negro idiom, swallowing it whole. Once, memorably, he came upon me on the terrace of the Mabillon,