• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 490 0

bookshop becoming a pizza parlour, and — this is amazing, truly amazing — the first time we ran into each other, on Stanley Street, we actually embraced, delighted by our chance encounter, and retreated to the Tour Eiffel for a celebratory drink, fostering the illusion that we had once been bosom buddies, survivors of those two loosy-goosy years together on the Left Bank. We shared an hour or more of remember this and, damn it, don’t forget that. The evening we all went to that Charles Trenet concert and ended up eating onion soup in Les Halles. Or, hey, how about the time Boogie sat down to the piano in that bar in Montmartre, letting on that he was Cole Porter, and earning all of us rounds of free drinks. Then we got into de haut en bas riffs about the provincial city we had deigned to return to, and how St. Catherine Street, Montreal’s main stem which we now recognized as all-but-total sleaze, had once seemed a crossroads of the world to us. My God, I thought, I never realized what a good fellow McIver was, and I’m sure he felt the same about me that afternoon. I promised to call him, if not tomorrow then the day after, and he assured me he would do the same. But he didn’t, and I didn’t. Too bad. Because had either of us come through I think we could have become friends. It was a road not taken. But not the only one in my life. Hell, no.

Onwards. Leo Bishinsky was back in New York, established in a Village loft, and already the subject of unreadable reviews in recherché art journals. And Cedric Richardson’s splendid first novel had been published to ecstatic reviews. I sent him an unabashed fan letter, which he did not acknowledge. That hurt. Considering that we had once been more than friends. That we shared a bond of sorts.

“You people,” he said to me. You people. Brandishing that poor, wizened dead thing at me as if it had slid out of a sewer.

Next thing I knew, Cedric’s photograph was on the front page of The New York Times. Bloody, his nose broken, he was being held by two smirking, fat-assed Kentucky state troopers. He had taken part in an attempt to register twelve black children in an all-white school and had been caught up in the flying bricks and fisticuffs that ensued. Ten whites had also been arrested in the riot.

As for me, following my retreat from Paris and the artistic wankers I had wasted my time with there, I resolved to make a fresh start in life. What was it Clara had once said? “When you go home, it will be to make money, which is inevitable, given your character, and you’ll marry a nice Jewish girl, somebody who shops …” Well, I’ll satisfy her ghost, I thought. From now on, it was going to be the bourgeois life for Barney Panofsky. Country club. Cartoons scissored out of The New Yorker pasted up on my bathroom walls. Time magazine subscription. American Express card. Synagogue membership. Attaché case with combination lock. Et cetera et cetera.

Four years had passed, and I had graduated from dealing in cheese, olive oil, antiquated DC-3S, and stolen Egyptian artifacts, but was still brooding about Clara, guilt-ridden one day, defiant the next. I went out and bought myself a house in the Montreal suburb of Hampstead. It was perfection. Replete with living-room conversation pit, fieldstone fireplace, eye-level kitchen oven, indirect lighting, air-conditioning, heated toilet seats and towel racks, basement wet bar, aluminum siding, attached two-car garage, and living-room picture window. Admiring my acquisition from the outside, satisfied that it would make Clara spin in her grave, I saw what was wrong, and immediately went out and bought a basketball net and screwed it into place over the garage double doors. Now all that was missing was a wifey and a dog called Rover. By this juncture, sitting on $250,000 in the bank, I sold off my agencies, netting even more mazuma, registered the name Totally Unnecessary Productions Ltd., and rented offices downtown. Then I set out in quest of the missing piece in my spiteful middle-class equation, the jewel in Reb Barney’s crown, so to speak. After all, it