Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [68]
“No pictures,” said Miriam.
Poor, vulnerable Zack Keeler was the next to be chastised. He was uncharacteristically morose to begin with, because he had been to Al Mackie’s funeral that afternoon. Mackie, a sports writer of our acquaintance, had usually staggered on from Jumbo’s or Friday’s, both of which closed at two a.m., to the Press Club, which remained open until four. Zack was distressed because Al’s widow, he said, seemed disconcertingly composed as her husband’s coffin was lowered into its grave.
“That should come as no surprise,” said Miriam. “It must be the first time in twenty years she knew exactly where her husband could be found after ten at night.”
To do him credit, Zack’s spirits revived at once. “You’re too good for him,” he said, kissing Miriam’s hand.
12
The morning I brought Clara home from the hospital, we had to pause on each of the five landings, enabling her to catch her breath. Clara immediately stripped down to her bulky, red-stained panties, and complicated arrangement of belts. “Your guarantee of chastity,” she said. She arranged her collection of medicine bottles on the bedside table, popped a sleeping-pill into her mouth, got right into bed, turned her face to the wall, and went to sleep. I settled into the kitchen with a bottle of vodka and a sense of descending gloom. Hours later I heard her stirring and brought her a tray with tea and toast. “So,” she said, “what happens now?”
“You’ve got to get better before we can talk.”
Shuffling off to the toilet, slippers slapping, she peered into the tiny room that was to have been the nursery. “Poor little Sambo,” she said, and then she saw that I had made up a bed for myself out of the sofa pillows. “Why don’t you send out for a red-hot brand,” she asked, “and burn an A into the flesh between my leaky tits?”
“I bought some veal chops for dinner. Will you want to eat in bed or in the kitchen with me?”
“I suppose you won’t know what to do about me until Boogie gets back from Amsterdam and gives you your marching orders.”
But a stoned Boogie was no help. I brought him up to date and then asked, “What were you doing in Amsterdam?”
“Shopping.”
Yossel said, “Every time I see you you’re drunk. I’ve got a lawyer for you. A landsman. Somebody who won’t overcharge. Maître Moishe Tannenbaum.”
“Not yet.”
“You think it will be easier a month from now?”
Swimming in vodka starting at breakfast, necessarily brain-dead, I don’t remember too much about the following week, but I do recall that we were given to exchanging niceties. Barbed niceties.
“Feeling better, Clara?”
“Why would you care, Dr. Prudestein?” Another time, “I’ve been a neglectful wifey. I suppose I should ask how are things in the cheese business? Is Camembert moving better than Bresse bleu?”
“Charming.”
“Poor Barney. His wifey a whore and his best friend a junkie. Oy vey. Such a sad fate for a nicely brought up Jewish boy.”
One evening Clara, chain-smoking, pacing up and down our living room while I was reading on the sofa, ostentatiously ignoring her, suddenly whirled about and snatched my book from my hands. It was Austryn Wainhouse’s translation of Beckett’s Molloy.30 “How can you read such boring shit?” she demanded.
This enabled me to put her down, quoting one of her favourite poets back at her. “William Blake once wrote a letter to a guy who had commissioned four watercolours from him, but deplored the result. ‘ … that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak Men,’ he wrote. Or women, he might have added. ‘That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.’ So just possibly it’s not Beckett but you who is inadequate.”
She began to stay up late again, writing in her notebooks, drawing. Or she would sit for hours before her mirror, trying on different shocking shades of lipstick and nail polish, eye shadow with built-in sparkles. Then she would pop a sleeping-pill or two, and not stir again until late the next day. One afternoon she disappeared, only to return three hours later with her hair dyed