Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [53]
Paris. Nov. 8, 1951. George Whitman has insisted that I read at his bookshop. I suppose James Baldwin wasn’t available.
Forty-five people are there when I begin, including P —— and his chums, who have obviously come to mock me. Then a bunch of Letterists, sent for by Boogie no doubt, turn up to demonstrate. But they are sadly mistaken if they think they can intimidate me. I carry on in spite of their braying, for the sake of those who have come to listen.
P——, clearly delighted to have seen me attacked, invites me out afterwards for drinks and an opportunity to gloat. Solicitous beyond belief, he offers to lend me money again. Possibly, he suggests, I should return to Montreal and take a teaching job. “You, with your McGill scholarship and Arts Medal,” he says with ill-concealed envy.
“Those who can’t, preach,” I tell him.
Insulted, he attempts to sneak off without settling the bill. I insist that I had only come to the café at his invitation. Caught out, seething, he hoists me out of my chair, and punches me in the nose, bloodying it. Then he flees into the night, leaving me to pay the bill.
It is not the first time P —— has tried to settle a contretemps with his fists. Nor, I suspect, will it be the last. He is a violent man. Capable of murder one day, I fear.23
10
Hello, hello. Reb Leo Bishinsky is in the news again. MOMA is mounting a retrospective, which will next travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, world-class at last. Leo’s photograph in The Globe and Mail reveals that he now wears a rug — made out of his collection of the pubic-hairs-of-celebrated-models, from the look of it. He is bare-chested, beaming, embraced by his twenty-two-year-old mistress, a veritable Barbie doll, her arms entwined round his huge, hairy, pastrami-barrel belly. I miss Leo. I really do. “Before I start work in the morning,” Leo confided to the Globe’s reporter, “I venture out into the surrounding woods and listen to the trees.”
The Globe’s page three yields even richer ore.
Forget Abelard and Héloïse. Never mind Romeo and Juliet. Or Chuck and Di. Or Michael Jackson and the Beverly Hills orthodontist’s number-one son. This morning’s Globe offers an all-Ontario twisteroo on such poignant tales of romance. A guy named Walton Sue got married yesterday, thereby, according to the Globe’s reporter, “adding another act to the almost Shakespearean tale of love, money, and family feuding in which he and his wife have been cast as unlikely protagonists.” Walton Sue, who has been physically and mentally disabled since he was hit by a car fifteen years ago, has now married wheelchair-bound Ms. Maria DeSousa, who suffers from cerebral palsy. They were wed in a “secret” ceremony in Toronto’s Old City Hall courthouse attended by more media than family, wrote the Globe reporter.
Sue’s problem was that his father, who strongly objected to the marriage, controlled his $245,000 settlement from the accident. But the day before yesterday a lawyer had Sue declared incapable of managing his property, thus shifting control of the money to the Public Guardian and Trustees of Ontario, which enabled Sue and Ms. DeSousa to move into an apartment for the disabled.
I’m not poking fun at this couple, to whom I wish a hearty mazel tov. My point is that I think being mentally disabled gives Sue a better shot at a happy marriage than I ever had, and I speak as a veteran who has struck out three times. The last time wed to a woman “whom age cannot wither, nor custom stale,”24 but who ultimately adjudged me unworthy of her, which was