Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [54]
Were my first wife still alive, I would invite her, The Second Mrs. Panofsky, and Miriam to a bang-up lunch at Le Mas des Oliviers — a symposium on the conjugal failings of Barney Panofsky, Esquire. Cynic, philanderer, boozer, player piano. And murderer as well, perhaps.
Le Mas des Oliviers, my favourite restaurant here, provides proof that this troubled, divided city still has its redeeming values. Its salvation, the continuing devotion to pleasure by our movers and shakers. In Montreal they do not jog or nibble a quick salad after their noonday squash game, a disease money-driven Toronto suffers from. Instead, they congregate at Le Mas for three-hour lunches, digging into generous portions of côtes d’agneau or boudins, washed down with bottles of St. Julien, followed by calls for cognac and cigars. This is where contending lawyers, and judges as well, meet to settle their disputes amicably, but only after they have regaled each other with the day’s most salacious gossip. There are more mistresses than wives to be seen. The Tory party’s Québécois godfather accepts tributes at his usual table, his manner munificent. Provincial cabinet ministers who can render fat highway contracts to the deserving hear out supplicants at other tables. I sometimes frequent the Jewish sinners’ round table, Irv Nussbaum presiding, my transgressions forgiven, or mentioned only in the hope of provoking laughter.
I brought Boogie here the day before I wedded The Second Mrs. Panofsky.
Boogie, had he survived until now, would be seventy-two years old, possibly still wrestling with that first novel that was going to astonish the world. That’s rotten of me. Vengeful. But years have passed since I expected he would ring my doorbell, if not tomorrow then the day after. “Have you read Lovecraft?”
Long gone are the nights when I would waken with a start at four a.m. to drive out to my cottage on the lake on a crazed hunch. Banging open the front door, shouting Boogie’s name, unavailingly, and then retreating to the dock, staring into the waters where I had last seen him.
“I met him only that one time, at your wedding,” Miriam once said, “and I’m sorry to say I thought he was pathetic. Don’t look at me like that, please.”
“I’m not.”
“I know we’ve been through what happened that last day on the lake a hundred times. But I still feel you’re holding something back. Did the two of you quarrel?”
“No. Certainly not.”
The pleasures of my cherished cottage in the mountains, some seventy miles north of Montreal, have diminished somewhat over the years. True, after they put in the six-lane Laurentian Autoroute in the sixties, it took me an hour, rather than the best of two, to reach it. But unfortunately the autoroute has also made the lake accessible to commuters, as well as the computer-literate who maintain offices in their cottages. Peeling off the autoroute, I no longer approach my retreat on a treacherous loggers’ road, gearing down for protruding rocks and avoiding the deepest holes, my scraped muffler system in need of annual renewal. I don’t regret the fallen trees that sometimes blocked my path, but I do miss the risky one-lane wooden bridge over the Chokecherry River, its rushing waters menacingly high during the spring run-off. It was displaced long ago by a proper steel-and-concrete bridge. And the loggers’ road, widened in the late fifties, is now paved and ploughed in winter. We have also benefited from political progress. This jewel of a lake, which I still think of as Lake Amherst, was renamed Lac Marquette in the seventies by the Commission de Toponymie, which is in charge of cleansing la belle province of the conqueror’s place-names. And where once only canoes and sailboats could be seen on a twenty-three-mile lake, our summers are now polluted by flotillas of powerboats and water-skiers. Fighter planes from the NATO base in Plattsburgh sometimes pass overhead, rattling windows. We also suffer the occasional transatlantic jumbo jet on a flight path for Mirabel airport and there are