Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [70]
13
Tossing and turning in bed last night, I was finally able to conjure up the luscious Mrs. Ogilvy of cherished memory, in a stimulating fantasy of my own invention.
Here’s how it goes:
An outraged Mrs. O. rebukes me in front of the class, clipping me on the head with a rolled copy of The Illustrated London News. “You will report to me in the medical room immediately after classes.”
A visit to the dreaded, tiny medical room, equipped with a cot, usually means a strapping. Ten of the best on each hand. I turn up promptly at 3:35 p.m. and a seemingly irate Mrs. Ogilvy locks the door behind me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” she demands.
“I don’t know why I’m here. Honestly.”
She slashes the cellophane wrapper off a package of Player’s Mild with a flick of a long red fingernail, pulls out a cigarette, and lights up. She exhales. She rids her lips of a tobacco particle with a slow movement of her wet tongue, and then glares at me. “I sat down on my desk top and began to read aloud the opening pages of Tom Brown’s School Days, and that’s when you dropped your pencil on the floor, accidentally on purpose, so that you could peek up my skirt.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then, as if that weren’t sufficiently disgusting on your part, you began to rub your roger right in the middle of my Highroads to Reading class.”
“I did not, Mrs. Ogilvy.”
“I swear,” she says, flinging her cigarette to the floor and rubbing her heel into it, “I shall never grow accustomed to how they persist in overheating rooms in the dominions.” She unbuttons her blouse and sheds it. She is wearing a filigreed black bra. “Come here, boy.”
“Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”
“And you’re absolutely bursting with filthy thoughts right this very minute.”
“I am not.”
“Oh, yes you are, young man. The proof’s in the pudding.” And she undoes the buttons of my fly and reaches inside for me with incredibly cool fingers. “Just look at your roger now. Obviously you have no respect for your social superiors. Are you ashamed, Barney?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ogilvy.”
She continues to rake me with those long red fingernails and I start to leak just a little.
“Now if this were a lolly,” she says, “I might be tempted to give it a darling little lick. Oh well, waste not, want not.” She clears the crown with a flick of her tongue, and immediately another little blob bubbles out. “Oh dear,” says Mrs. Ogilvy, regarding me severely, “we don’t want the train to leave the station prematurely, do we?” Then she steps out of her skirt and panties. “I want you to now rub that against me right down here. Mais, attendez un instant, s’il vous plaît. The motion should not be from side to side, but up and down, actually.”
I attempt to oblige.
“You haven’t got it quite right yet, damn you. Like you were having trouble striking a match. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly she begins to shudder. And then, grabbing me by the back of the head, she lowers both of us on to the cot. “Now you can pop it inside me, like a good boy, and up and down you ride. Like a piston. Ready! Steady! Go!”
Actually these three pages represent my first and only attempt at writing fiction, my brief creative flowering prompted by Boogie, who was convinced I was capable of churning out what our bunch used to call a DB31 for the Traveller’s Companion Series. Boogie wheeled me into Maurice Girodias’s office on the rue de Nesle one afternoon. “You are looking at the next Marcus Van Heller,” he said. “He’s got two terrific ideas. One is called Teacher’s Pet,” he said, improvising, “and the other The Rabbi’s Daughter.”
Girodias was intrigued. “I’ll have to see twenty pages before I can commission you,” he said. But I never got beyond page three.
I lingered late in bed this morning until I was wakened by the postman.
Registered letter.
I can count on hearing from The Second Mrs. Panofsky by registered mail at least twice a year: once, on the anniversary of Boogie’s disappearance, and again, today, on the anniversary of my discharge by the court, adjudged innocent, but guilty as hell in her mind. This morning’s missive was admirably