Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [56]
And now I prepared myself for a visit from what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed a feminazi. Probably wearing a nose-stud and nipple-rings and knuckle-dusters. A German army WWII helmet. Shit-kicker boots. Instead, I opened my door to an awfully demure young thing, a mere wisp of a girl, chestnut hair not crewcut but flowing, smiling sweetly she was, wearing granny glasses, a Laura Ashley dress, and dainty pumps. She immediately endeared herself to me by admiring the photographs of tap-dance immortals which line my walls: Willy “Pickaninny” Coven, creator of the Rhythm Waltz; Peg Leg Bates, caught in mid-flight; The Nicholas Brothers, of Cotton Club fame; Ralph Brown; the young James, Gene, and Fred Kelly in their bellhop uniforms, photographed at the Nixon Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1920; and, of course, the great Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, shown wearing his top hat, white tie, and tails, circa 1932. Ms. Morgan set up her tape recorder and produced a sheaf of questions, softening me up with the usual — “How did you meet Clara?” “What attracted you to her?” et cetera et cetera — before she fired her first missile. “In all the accounts I have read, it seems that you were indifferent to Clara’s great gifts as a poet and a painter, and did nothing to encourage her.”
Amused, I tried to get a rise out of Ms. Morgan. “Let me remind you of what Marike de Klerk, wife of South Africa’s former prime minister, once said in church: ‘Women are unimportant. We’re here to serve, to heal the wounds, to give love —’ ”
“Oh, you’re such a card,” she said.
“ ‘If a woman inspires a man to be good,’ said Madame de Klerk, ‘he is good.’ Let’s say, if only for argument’s sake, that Clara failed to fill that office.”
“And you failed Clara?”
“What happened was inevitable.”
Clara was terrified of fire. “We live on the fifth floor,” she said. “We wouldn’t have a chance.” Unexpected knocks on our hotel-room door made her freeze, so friends learned to announce themselves first. “It’s Leo,” or “It’s the Boogieman. Put all your valuables into a bag and pass them through the door.” Rich food made her vomit. She suffered from insomnia. But, given sufficient wine, she would sleep, a mixed blessing because that prompted nightmares from which she would waken trembling. She didn’t trust strangers and was even more suspicious of friends. She was allergic to shellfish, eggs, animal fur, dust, and anybody indifferent to her presence. Her periods brought on headaches, cramps, nausea, and vile temper. She endured lengthy attacks of eczema. She kept a plugged earthenware jug under our window, a bellarmino, filled with her own urine and fingernail clippings, to throw back evil spells. She feared cats. Heights scared her. Thunder petrified her. She was frightened of water, snakes, spiders, and other people.
Reader, I married her.
Given that I was a horny twenty-three year old at the time, it wasn’t because Clara was such a sexual wildcat. Our romance, such as it was, was not enriched by abandon between the sheets. Clara, the compulsive flirt and dirty-talker, turned out to be as prudish with me, in any event, as the mother she professed to abhor, denying me what she denigrated as my “thirty seconds of friction” time and again. Or enduring them. Or did her utmost to stifle any joy we might have salvaged out of our increasingly rare and frustrating couplings. After all these years, it’s her admonitions that I remember.
“I want you to scrub it with soap and hot water first, and then don’t you dare come inside me.”
She condescended to fellate me once, and was immediately sick to her stomach in the sink. Humiliated, I dressed in silence, quit the room, and tramped along the quais as far as the Place de la Bastille and back again. On my return, I discovered that she had packed a suitcase and was sitting on the bed, hunched over, shivering, in spite of wearing layers of her shawls. “I would have been gone before you got back,” she said, “but I’m going to need money for another room somewhere.