Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [85]
It was a seething Dollard Redux who was filling the screen now. Don’t be intimidated by threats, he said. No matter what they say today, after a Yes vote the rest of Canada will come to the table on bended knees.
“I suppose,” said O’Hearne, “that you and the rest of your tribe will be moving to Toronto the day after. But what about guys like me? Stuck here.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m now thinking of voting Yes myself.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“For more than a hundred years this country has been held back trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Are you prepared for another century of adolescent bickering, or should we settle the matter once and for all?”
I still wasn’t ready to contend with my bed without Miriam, so I left my car where it was, turned my coat collar up against the punishing wind, a harbinger of the six months of winter to come, and began to wander the once-vibrant downtown streets of the dying city I still cherished. Past boarded up stores. Signs in foundering Crescent Street boutiques that read CLOSING DOWN SALE or EVERYTHING MUST GO. Squatters had appropriated the crumbling building that had once been the art-deco York Theatre. Some lout had spray-painted FUCK YOU, ENGLISH on the window of a second-hand bookshop. Every lamp-post on St. Catherine Street was adorned with both OUI and NON placards. Scruffy, shivering teenagers with sleeping-bags were camped outside the Forum, where the tickets would go on sale in the morning for a Bon Jovi concert. A greasy, bearded old man, wild-eyed, muttering to himself, and wheeling a supermarket cart before him, was rummaging through a wastebin, searching for empty cans that could be redeemed. A plump rat skittered out of the lane behind an Indian restaurant.
MacBarney hath murdered sleep.
Back in my bed, I tried one remedy after another, unavailingly. Tonight when I reached for Mrs. Ogilvy, sliding my hands under her sweater, attempting to unhook her filigreed bra, she whacked me a good one across the face. “How dare you,” she said.
“Then why did you rub your tits against my back in the kitchen?”
“Why, I never. Do you think I’m so frustrated, a ravishing woman like me — getting it every afternoon in the gym from Mr. Stuart, Mr. Kent, and Mr. Abercorn, though not necessarily in that order — that I’d stoop to seducing a little Jeanne Mance jewboy wanker with dirty fingernails?”
“You left your bedroom door open.”
“Yes. And you couldn’t control your bladder even then. Had to make peepee. Only fourteen years old and already suffering from prostate problems. Probably cancer.”
And still sleep wouldn’t come. So I set the spool of my life on rewind, editing out embarrassments, reshooting them in my mind’s eye … and that Monday afternoon in 1952 as I entered my hotel on the rue de Nesle, the concierge rapped on her cubicle window, slid open the glass, and sang out: “Il y a un pneumatique pour vous, Monsieur Panofsky.”
Clara was expecting me for dinner. Well, why not? I stopped at the nearest Nicolas and bought a bottle of St. Émilion, a favourite of hers. Discovering her in a deep sleep on our bed, an empty bottle of sleeping-pills on the floor, I immediately propped her upright, supporting her, walking her up and down, until the ambulance came. After they had pumped out her stomach, I sat by her bedside, stroking her hand. “You saved my life,” she said.
“Your hero.”
“Yes.”
Then her putrefying corpse floated up at me, the eye sockets empty, worms feeding on her bosom, and Cantor Charnofsky pounded on my door again. “You going to piss in bed at your age?” he asked.
Roused, I recognized it was time for one of my pinch-it-trickle-and-shake-it pees, and then padded back to bed.
Four-thirty a.m. Sinking, my eyes lit with joy at the sight of Boogie looming large before me. “I knew you’d turn up eventually,” I said, “but where have you been all these years?”
“Petra. New Delhi. Samarra. Babylon. Papua. Alexandria. Transylvania.”
“I can’t begin to tell you the trouble you’ve caused me. Never mind. Miriam, the Boogieman is here. Would you set another place at the table,