Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [81]
“Yes.”
“They’re into that now. The libbers. One night you help them with the dishes and the next they go back to college to get a degree and soon enough they’re being shtupped by some kid. Barney, you want hockey or baseball tickets, I’m your man. Call me and we’ll have lunch. There she goes. Beep beep beep.”
I had just finished my drink, and was heading for bed, when Irv Nussbaum phoned to ask if I’d seen the latest opinion poll on the referendum. “We’re sliding,” he said.
“Yeah. I know.”
All the same, Irv was euphoric. “But there are bound to be more anti-Semitic incidents any day now. I feel it in my bones. Terrific!” Irv had just returned from one of those United Jewish Appeal feel-good tours to Israel. “I met this guy named Pinsky there who claimed he knew you in Paris when you didn’t have a pot to piss in. He said you did some deals together. Hey, if that’s the case, I’ll bet they weren’t so kosher.”
“They weren’t. What’s Yossel up to these days?”
“Something to do with diamonds. I ran into him at Ocean, maybe the most expensive restaurant in Jerusalem. He was swilling champagne with one of those new young Russian immigrants. Some tootsie she was. A blondie. And he drove off in a Jaguar, so he has to be earning a living. Oh, he said to ask if some guy you both used to know — Biggie or Boogie, I forget — owed you as much money as he owed him.”
“Had he heard from Boogie recently?”
“Not for donkey’s years, he said. He gave me his card. He’d like to hear from you.”
Couldn’t sleep. Consumed with guilt because I had lost contact with Yossel years ago. Was it that he was no longer useful? Is that the kind of shit I had become?
Damn damn damn. Had I suspected I would survive to such an advanced age, sixty-seven, I would prefer to have earned a reputation as a gentleman, rather than a ruffian who had made his fortune producing crap for TV. I would like to have become a man like Nathan Borenstein, the retired GP Doctor Borenstein must be in his late seventies now, what my daughter, Kate, calls a cotton top, round-shouldered, wearing trifocals, and seldom seen without the silvery-haired, petite Mrs. Borenstein, probably the same age, on his arm. I have arranged to sit immediately behind them at the symphony concert series at Place des Arts, the seat next to mine empty these days but held on to, just in case. When the house lights dim, he links arms with Mrs. Borenstein, ever so discreetly, and later he frees himself, opens his copy of the score, and follows the performance with the benefit of a pocket flashlight, nodding pleasurably or biting his lips as the occasion demands. The last time I saw them together was at the Montreal Opera Company’s presentation of The Magic Flute. As usual, I kept an eye on Borenstein, applauding an aria when he did and abstaining when he did.
Overdressed, bejewelled women, who have benefited from rhinoplasty, ultrapulse carbon-dioxide laser treatment, abdominoplasty or liposuction, prevail at Place des Arts. These days, according to Morty Herscovitch, some of them also go in for soya-oil breast implants. You nibble a nipple and what do you get? Salad dressing.
I collect little snippets of information about the Borensteins. Her eyesight, I have heard, is failing, so he reads aloud to her after dinner. They have three children. The oldest son, a doctor, is with Médecins sans Frontières, serving in Africa, wherever the fly-bitten children with bloated bellies can be found. There is a daughter, who is a violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and a son, who is a physicist at the — the — not Tel Aviv, but the other city in Israel. Not Jerusalem either. At the something institute in the not–Tel Aviv, not-Jerusalem city. It’s on the tip of my tongue. It begins with an “H.” The Herzl Institute.34 No. But something like that. What does it matter?
Once, following a concert at Place des Arts, I dared to approach the Borensteins. They were standing outside, seemingly irresolute. It was