Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [7]
Mair-zy Doats and Do-zy Doats and lid-dle lam-zy div-ey
A kid-dle-y div-ey too, would-n’t you?
To my astonishment, she didn’t resist. Instead, terrifying me, she kicked off her shoes and began to wriggle out of her tartan skirt. “I don’t know what’s got into me,” said the teacher who had awarded me an A+ for my essay on A Tale of Two Cities, which I had cribbed, paraphrasing here and there, from a book by Granville Hicks. “I’m robbing the cradle.” Then, in my mind’s eye, she spoiled everything, adding, with a certain classroom asperity, “But shouldn’t we strain the spaghetti first?”
“Yeah. Sure. But using what thingamajig?”
“I fancy it al dente,” she said.
And now, giving Mrs. Ogilvy a second chance, hoping for a better return this time, I travelled back through memory lane again and tumbled onto the sofa with her, incidentally hoping for at least a semi-demi-erection in my decrepit here and now.
“Oh, you’re so impatient,” she said. “Wait. Not yet. En français, s’il vous plaît.”
“What?”
“Oh, dear. Such manners. We mean ‘I beg your pardon,’ don’t we? Now then, let’s have ‘not yet’ in French, please.”
“Pas encore.”
“Jolly good,” she said, sliding open a side-table drawer. “Now I don’t want you to think me a bossy boots, but please be a considerate lad and roll this on to your pretty little willy first.”
“Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”
“Give me your hand. Oh, have you ever seen such filthy fingernails? There. Like that! Gently does it. Oh yes, please. Wait!”
“What have I done wrong now?”
“I just thought you’d like to know it wasn’t Lillian Hellman who wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt. It was Mary McCarthy.”
Damn damn damn. I got out of bed, slipped into the threadbare dressing-gown I couldn’t part with because it was a gift from Miriam, and padded into the kitchen. Rummaging through drawers, I yanked out utensils and named them one-two-three: soup ladle, egg-timer, tongs, pie slicer, vegetable peeler, tea strainer, measuring cups, can opener, spatula … and hanging on a wall hook, there it was, the thingamabob used to strain spaghetti, but what was it called?
I’ve survived scarlet fever, mumps, two muggings, crabs, the extraction of all my teeth, a hip-socket replacement, a murder charge, and three wives. The first one is dead and The Second Mrs. Panofsky, hearing my voice, would holler, even after all these years, “Murderer, what have you done with his body?” before slamming down the receiver. But Miriam would talk to me. She might even laugh at my dilemma. Oh, to have this apartment resonate with her laughter. Her scent. Her love. The trouble is, Blair would probably be the one to answer the phone, and I had already blotted my copybook with that pretentious bastard the last time I called. “I would like to speak to my wife,” I said.
“She is no longer your wife, Barney, and you are obviously inebriated.”
He would say “inebriated.”
“Of course I’m drunk. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“And Miriam’s asleep.”
“But it’s you I wanted to talk to. I was cleaning out my desk drawers here and I found some stunning nude photographs of her when she was with me, and I was wondering if you would like to have them, if only to know what she looked like in her prime.”
“You’re disgusting,” he said, hanging up.
True enough. But, all the same, I danced round the living room, doing my take on the great Ralph Brown’s Shim Sham Shimmy, a tumbler of Cardhu in hand.
There are some people out there who take Blair to be a fine fellow. A scholar of distinction. Even my sons defend him. We appreciate how you feel, they say, but he is an intelligent and caring man, devoted to Miriam. Bullshit. A drudge on tenure, Blair came to Canada from Boston in the sixties, a draft-dodger, like Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton, and, consequently, a hero to his students. As for me, I’m dumbfounded that anybody would prefer Toronto to Saigon. Anyway, I’ve got his faculty group fax number and, thinking of how Boogie would have taken advantage of that,