Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [8]
Fax to Herr Doktor Blair Hopper né Hauptman From Sexorama Novelties
ACHTUNG
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Herr Doktor Hopper,
Pursuant to your inquiry of January 26, we welcome your idea of introducing to Victoria College the old Ivy League practice of requiring selected coeds to pose naked for posture photographs, front, profile, and back. Your notion of introducing garter belts and other accessories is inspired. The project has, as you put it, great commercial potential. However, we will have to assess the actual photographs before we can take up your suggestion to market a new set of playing cards.
Sincerely,
DWAYNE CONNORS
Sexorama Novelties.
P.S. We acknowledge your return of our 1995 TOY BOYS calendar, but cannot send you a refund due to the many stains, and the fact that the August and September pages are stuck together.
Twelve forty-five a.m. Now I held the spaghetti thingamajig in my liver-spotted hand, wrinkled as a lizard’s back, but I still couldn’t put a name to it. Flinging it aside, I poured myself a couple of inches of Macallan, picked up the phone, and dialled my eldest son in London. “Hiya, Mike. This is your six a.m. wake-up call. Time for your morning jog.”
“As a matter of fact, it’s five forty-six here.”
For breakfast my punctilious son would munch crunchy granola and yogurt, washed down with a glass of lemon water. People today.
“Are you okay?” he asked, and his concern just about brought tears to my eyes.
“In the pink. But I’ve got a problem. What do you call the thingee you strain spaghetti with?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Certainly not.”
“Didn’t Dr. Herscovitch warn you that if you started up again it would kill you?”
“I swear on the heads of my grandchildren, I haven’t had a drop in weeks. I no longer even order coq au vin in restaurants. Now will you answer my question, please?”
“I’m going to take the phone in the living room, hang up here, and then we can talk.”
Mustn’t wake Lady Health Fascist.
“Hi, I’m back. Do you mean a colander?”
“Of course I mean a colander. It was on the tip of my tongue. I was just going to say it.”
“Are you taking your pills?”
“Sure I am. Have you heard from your mother lately?” I blurted out compulsively, having sworn I’d never ask about her again.
“She and Blair stopped over here for three days on October fourth, on their way to a conference in Glasgow.”7
“I don’t give a damn about her any more. You don’t know what a pleasure it is not to be reprimanded because I forgot to lift the seat again. But, speaking as a disinterested observer, I think she deserved better.”
“You mean you?”
“Tell Caroline,” I said, lashing out, “that I read somewhere that lettuce bleeds when you chop it up and carrots suffer traumas when you pluck them out of the ground.”
“Dad, I hate to think of you all alone in that big empty apartment.”
“As it happens, I have what I think they now call ‘a resource person,’ or is it ‘a sex worker,’ staying with me tonight. What boors like me used to call ‘a skirt’. Tell your mother. I don’t mind.”
“Why don’t you fly over and haunt our house for a while?”
“Because in the London I remember best the obligatory first course in even the most stylish restaurant was grey-brown Windsor soup, or a grapefruit with a maraschino cherry sitting in the middle like a nipple, and most of the people I used to hang out with there are dead now, and about time too. Harrods has become a Eurotrash temple. Everywhere you turn in Knightsbridge there are rich Japs shooting movies of each other. The White Elephant is kaput, so is Isow’s, and L’Étoile ain’t what it used to be. I have no interest in who’s banging Di or whether Charles is reincarnated as a tampon. The pubs are intolerable, what with those noisy slot-machines and pounding jungle music. And too many of our people there are something else. If they’ve been to Oxford or Cambridge, or earn more than a hundred thousand pounds a year, they are no longer Jewish, but ‘of Jewish descent,’ which is not quite the same thing.”
I’ve never really been