Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [6]
Then, years ago, I collected all eight of Boogie’s cryptic short stories that had been published in Merlin, Zero, and The Paris Review, with the intention of bringing them out in a limited edition, each volume numbered, elegantly printed, no expense spared. The story of his that I’ve read again and again, for obvious reasons, is a variation on a far-from-original theme, but brilliantly realized, like everything he wrote. “Margolis” is about a man who walks out to buy a package of cigarettes and never returns to his wife and child, assuming a new identity elsewhere.
I wrote to Boogie’s son in Santa Fe offering him an advance of ten thousand dollars, as well as a hundred free copies and all profits that might accrue from the enterprise. His response came in the form of a registered letter that expressed amazement that I, of all people, could even contemplate such a venture, and warning me that he would not hesitate to take legal action if I dared to do such a thing. So that was that.
Hold the phone. I’m stuck. I’m trying to remember the name of the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Or was it The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt? No, that was written by the fibber. Lillian what’s-her-name? Come on. I know it. Like the mayonnaise. Lillian Kraft? No. Hellman. Lillian Hellman. The name of the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit doesn’t matter. It’s of no importance. But now that it’s started I won’t sleep tonight. These increasingly frequent bouts of memory loss are driving me crazy.
Last night, sailing off to sleep at last, I couldn’t remember the name of the thing you use to strain spaghetti. Imagine that. I’ve used it thousands of times. I could visualize it. But I couldn’t remember what the bloody thing was called. And I didn’t want to get out of bed to search through cookbooks Miriam had left behind, because it would only remind me that it was my fault she was gone, and I would have to get out of bed at three o’clock anyway to piss. Not the swift bubbly torrent of my Left Bank days, nosirree. Now it was dribble, dribble, dribble, and no matter how hard I shook it, a belated trickle down my pyjama leg.
Lying in the dark, fulminating, I recited aloud the number I was to call if I had a heart attack.
“You have reached the Montreal General Hospital. If you have a touch-tone phone, and you know the extension you want, please press that number now. If not, press number seventeen for service in the language of les maudits anglais, or number twelve for service en français, the glorious language of our oppressed collectivity.”
Twenty-one for emergency ambulance service.
“You have reached the emergency ambulance service. Please hold and an operator will come to your assistance as soon as our strip-poker game is over. Have a nice day.”
While I waited, the automatic tape would play Mozart’s Requiem.
I groped to make sure my digitalis pills, reading glasses, and dentures were within easy reach on the bedside table. I switched on a lamp briefly and scooped up my boxer shorts to check them out for skid marks, because if I died during the night I didn’t want strangers to think I was dirty. Then I tried the usual gambit. Think of something else, something soothing, and the name of the spaghetti thingamabob will come to you unsummoned. So I imagined Terry McIver bleeding profusely in a shark-infested sea, feeling another tug at what’s left of his legs just as a rescuing helicopter is attempting to winch him out of the water. Finally what remains of the lying, self-regarding author of Of Time and Fevers, a dripping torso, is raised above the surface, bobbing like bait in the churning waters, sharks lunging at it.
Next I made myself a scruffy fourteen-year-old again, and unhooked, for that first whoopee time, the filigreed bra of the teacher I shall