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By Root 463 0

damage but had been willing participants and had “thoroughly enjoyed the activities.” However, he stopped short of noting that, on balance, Penelope had surely done more than Yehudi Menuhin to encourage musical appreciation among the young. Penelope lost interest in the boys once they reached the age of fifteen. Unfortunately this also proved to be the case with Mrs. Ogilvy. That cruel blow was only somewhat mollified by my new relationship with Dorothy Horowitz. Dorothy, who was my age, would never allow me to venture beyond groping on the family’s plastic-covered sofa, or on a bench in Outremont Park, and even this activity was blighted by forcibly proscribed zoning laws. Dorothy would withdraw her hand, as if touched by fire, when I directed it to the pulsating root of my ardour, considerately unbuttoned, and popping like Punch out of its box.

Nineteen forty-three that was. Field Marshal von Paulus’s army had already been decimated at Stalingrad, the Americans had taken Guadalcanal, and I had that pin-up of Chili Williams in a two-piece polka-dot bathing suit tacked to my bedroom wall. My mother had begun to mail jokes to Bob Hope and Jack Benny, as well as one-liners to Walter Winchell, and my father was already a uniformed member of Montreal’s finest. Izzy Panofsky, the only Jew on the police force. The pride of Jeanne Mance Street.

In the here and now in my apartment in The Lord Byng Manor I zipped through breakfast, and decided to take advantage of the fact that the family living in the apartment immediately downstairs from me, the McKays, were at their weekend cottage on Lake Memphremagog. I rolled back my living-room carpet and pulled the curtain that hid my embarrassing but necessary full-length mirror. Next I donned my top hat, tails, and trusty Capezio taps, and shoved Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Bye Bye Blackbird” into my CD player. Remembering to tip my topper to the good folks in the balcony, resting my cane on my shoulder, I loosened up with a Round-the-Clock Shuffle, eased into a satisfying Brush, followed by a really swell Cahito, before I risked a Shim Sham and collapsed in the nearest chair, panting.

Hello, shmuck, I thought. And I resolved yet again to cut back on Montecristos, medium-fats on rye, single malts, that delicious beef-marrow35 hors d’oeuvre they serve at L’Express, XO cognac, marbled rib steaks at Moishe’s, caffeine, and everything else that was bad for me now that I could afford it.

Where was I? Nineteen fifty-six. Long back from Paris. Clara dead but not yet an icon; Terry McIver’s first novel published, when literature would have been better served had he been interrupted in mid-flight by a gentleman from Porlock; and Boogie, high on horse more often than not, writing to me whenever his need was dire. I didn’t begrudge him the money, but it was a hardship, as I had just begun to test the polluted waters of TV production, struggling, never settling a bill until Final Notice. Compounding my troubles at the time, I had stupidly resumed my affair with Abigail, and oh my God she was now hinting at leaving Arnie for me, maybe bringing their two kids along with her.

Hold the phone. Somewhere in my Noter’s Write Book I’ve got something very apropos to that time and the problem I fumbled so badly. It was written by Dr. Johnson in 1772, when he was sixty-three years old: “My mind is unsettled and my memory confused. I have of late turned my thoughts with very useless earnestness upon past incidents. I have yet got no command over my thoughts; an unpleasing incident is almost certain to hinder my rest.”

What follows is an unpleasing incident, and how it began. One day, my accountant, the vile, ineffable Hugh Ryan, sent Arnie to the head office of the Bank of Montreal with a sealed envelope that he said contained a certified cheque for fifty thousand dollars. But when the bank manager opened the envelope, he found photographs of naked boys and an invitation to a candlelit dinner at Arnie’s place. A distraught Arnie came to see me at Dink’s. “There’s something you don’t know. Every morning