Barney's Version (10 page)

It would be inaccurate to describe Clara as tall. Long is what she was. Skinny enough for a rib count. Her hands constantly in movement, adjusting her shawls, smoothing her skirts, brushing back her hair, peeling the labels off wine bottles. Her fingers were nicotine-and ink-stained, her nails broken or bitten to the quick. Ears the shape of teacup handles protruded from her hair — “It's the colour of shit,” she said. “I hate it” — that cascaded to her narrow waist. She had only the faintest of eyebrows, her huge black eyes lit with intelligence. And scorn. And panic. She was sickly pale, which she emphasized by applying full moons of rouge to her cheeks and by wearing orange, green, or purple lipstick, depending on her mood. Her breasts, she felt, were too full for her figure. “With jugs like these,” she said, “I could nurse triplets.” She complained that her legs were too long and scrawny, and her feet too large. But for all her disparaging remarks about her appearance, she could never pass a café mirror without pausing to admire herself. Oh, her rings. I forgot to mention her rings. A topaz. A blue sapphire. And, her favourite, an ankh.

Years before it became modish, Clara wore loose, beaded, ankle-length Victorian dresses and high-button shoes, retrieved from the flea market. She also draped herself in shawls, the colours often conflicting, which struck me as odd, considering she was a painter. Boogie dubbed her “The Conversation Piece,” as in “
Sauve qui peut
. Here comes Barney and The Conversation Piece.” And, to come clean, I enjoyed that. Couldn't write. Didn't paint. And even then I was not a likeable man. Already a sour, judgmental presence. But suddenly I had acquired a distinction of sorts. I had become an intriguing fellow. I was nutty Clara's keeper.

Clara was a compulsive toucher, which annoyed me once we had begun to live together. She was given to collapsing into laughter against other men's chests at café tables, stroking their knees. “If Grouchy wasn't here with me, we could go somewhere and fuck now.”

Memory test. Quick, Barney. Names of the Seven Dwarfs. Grouchy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc. I know the names of the other three. Got them right just last night. They'll come to me. I'm not going to look them up
.

Clara especially enjoyed teasing Terry McIver, which I approved of heartily. Ditto Cedric Richardson, long before he won celebrity as
Ismail ben Yussef, scourge of Jewish slave-traders past and slumlords present, and nemesis of ice-people everywhere.

Keeping track of what became of everybody is what sustains me in my dotage. It's amazing. Mind-boggling. The scheming Leo Bishinsky coining millions with his japes on canvas. Clara, who despised other women, enjoying posthumous fame as a feminist martyr. Me, stricken with limited notoriety as the chauvinist pig who betrayed her, a possible murderer to boot. The unspeakably boring novels of Terry McIver, that pathological liar, now on university courses throughout Canada. And my once-beloved Boogie out there somewhere, bruised beyond belief, unforgiving, fulminating. He had picked up my copy of
Rabbit, Run
, and, startling me, said, “I can't believe you read such shit.”

Grouchy, Sneezy, Soc … Snoopy?
No, you idiot. That's the dog in
Pogo.
I mean
Peanuts.

Onwards. These days I come across an account of Ismail ben Yussef's latest pronouncement to be quoted in
Time
and instead of being outraged I find myself chuckling at the photograph of Cedric sporting a fez, dreadlocks, and a caftan coloured like a rainbow. Once, I actually wrote him a letter.

I'm still waiting for a reply.

(Rereading this old letter of mine recently, I suffered one of my frequent attacks of spiritual voice-mail: Miriam, my conscience, tripping me up again.)

If I could turn the clock back, it would be to those days when Miriam and I couldn't keep our hands off each other. We made love in the woods and on a kitchen chair, after quitting a tedious dinner party early, and on hotel-room floors and trains, and once we were nearly caught at it in a bathroom at the Sha'ar Hashomayim synagogue at one of Irv Nussbaum's fund-raising dinners. “You could have been excommunicated,” she said. “Just like Spinoza.”

One memorable afternoon, we did it on my office carpet. Miriam had arrived unexpectedly, coming straight from her obstetrician, pronounced fit, six weeks after she had given birth to Saul. She locked the door, shed her blouse, and stepped out of her skirt. “I was told that this is where you audition actresses.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, simulating shock, “what if my wife happens to drop by?”

“I am not only your wife,” she said, tugging at my belt, “and the mother of your children. I'm also your whore.”

Bliss was it to be alive when we would be wakened by children in their pyjamas tumbling helter-skelter into our bedroom and leaping onto the bed.

“Mommy's got nothing on.”

“Neither has Daddy.”

How could I have failed to pick up the early distress signals, rare as they were? Once, on her return from what I had hoped would be a fun dinner with her former
CBC
Radio producer, Kip Horgan, that meddling bastard, she seemed distracted. She began to straighten picture frames on the walls and plump up sofa cushions, always a bad sign. “Kip's disappointed in me,” she said. “He thought I'd never settle for being a housewife.”

“That's not what you are.”

“Of course I am.”

“Shit.”

“Don't you get upset now.”

“Let's go to New York for the weekend.”

“Saul is still running a fever —”

“Ninety-nine and a sixteenth?”

“— and you promised to take Mike to the hockey game on Saturday night.” Then, out of nowhere, she added, “If you're going to leave me, I'd rather you did it now, before I'm old.”

“Can I have ten minutes to pack?”

Later, we worked out that Kate was probably conceived that night. Damn damn damn. If Miriam's gone, it is surely due to my insensitivity.
Mea culpa
. All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgments. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself. And now, my letter to Cedric in hand, I could hear her say, “Sometimes what you find funny is actually nasty, calculated to wound.”

Oh, yeah? Well, just maybe I'm the one who has the right to feel wounded. How could Cedric, once one of our band of brothers, take to the college pulpits, chastising me and my kind for our religion and skin colour? Why did such a talented young man eschew literature for the vulgar political stage? Hell, given his gifts, I'd be scribbling day and night.

I'd like Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Cedric et al. to get off my back. Yes, Miriam. I know, Miriam. I'm sorry, Miriam. Had I endured what they and their kind had in America, I, too, would be prepared to believe that Adam and Eve were black, but Cain turned white with shock when God condemned him for murdering Abel. All the same, it ain't right.

Anyway, back in our Left Bank days, Cedric was seldom seen without a white girl on his arm. Clara, simulating jealousy, usually greeted him with, “How long before I get my ticket punched?”

She took a different tack with Terry. “For you, honey-child, I'd be willing to dress as a boy.”

“But I much prefer you as you are, Clara. Always tricked out like a harlequin.”

Or, an avid Virginia Woolf reader, Clara would pretend to espy a tell-tale stain on his trousers. “You could go blind, Terry. Or haven't they heard about that in Canada yet?”

Clara not only did troubled non-figurative paintings, but also frightening ink drawings, crowded with menacing gargoyles, prancing little devils, and slavering satyrs, attacking nubile women from all sides. She committed poetry as well, inscrutable to me, but published in both
Merlin
and
Zero
, earning her a request from James Laughlin of New Directions Press to see more. Clara shoplifted. Sliding things under her voluminous shawls. Tins of sardines, bottles of shampoo, books, corkscrews, postcards, spools of ribbon. Fauchon was a favourite haunt, until she was denied entry. Inevitably, she was once caught snatching a pair of nylon stockings at the MonoPrix, but got off, she said, by allowing the fat, greasy
flic
to drive her to the Bois de Boulogne and come between her breasts. “Just like my dear uncle Horace did when I was only twelve years old. Only he didn't boot me out of a moving car, laughing as I tumbled head over heels, calling
me filthy names, but presented me with a twenty-dollar bill each time to keep our secret.”

Our room, in the Hôtel de la Cité, on the Île de la Cité, was perpetually dark, its one small window looking out on an interior courtyard as narrow as an elevator shaft. There was a tiny washbasin in the room, but the communal toilet was down a long hallway. It was a squatter, no more than a hole in the floor, with elevated grips for your shoes, and a clasp fixed to the wall offering paper squares scissored out of the politically relevant
L'Humanité
or
Libération
. I bought a Bunsen burner and a small pot, so that we could hard-boil eggs to eat in baguette sandwiches for lunch. But the crumbs attracted mice, and she wakened screaming when one skittered over her face during the night. Another time she opened a dresser drawer to retrieve a shawl and stumbled on three newly born mice nesting there, and began to shriek. So we gave up eating in our room.

We languished in bed a good deal of the time, not making love but in search of warmth, dozing, reading (me into Jacques Prévert's
Paroles
, which she scorned), comparing difficult childhoods and congratulating each other on our amazing survivals. In the privacy of our refuge, far from the café tables where she felt compelled to shock or, anticipating criticism, to pick at the scabs of other people's weaknesses, she was a wonderful storyteller, my very own Scheherazade. I, in turn, entertained her with tales of the exploits of Detective-Inspector Izzy Panofsky.

Clara abhorred her mother. In a previous life, she said, Mrs. Chambers must have been an ayah. Or, in another spin of the reincarnation wheel, Chinese, her feet bound in childhood, taking little mincing steps in The Forbidden City during the days of the Ming Dynasty. She was the ultimate wifey. “
Très mignonne
. Hardly a virago,” said Clara. Her husband's philandering she took to be a blessing, as it meant she no longer had to suffer him between the sheets. “It is astonishing to what lengths a man will go,” she once said to Clara, “to achieve thirty seconds of friction.” Having provided Mr. Chambers with a son, Clara's younger brother, she felt that her duty was done, and was delighted to move into her own bedroom. But she continued to thrive as an exemplary chatelaine, managing their
Gramercy Park brownstone and Newport mansion with panache. Mrs. Chambers was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company board. Giuseppe di Stefano had sung at one of her soirées. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was a frequent dinner guest. Mrs. Chambers had made a point of taking Kirsten Flagstad to lunch at Le Pavillon after the Jews had taken against her. “My mother would suffer a stroke if she knew I was living with a Jew,” said Clara, tickling my nose with one of her ostrich boas. “She thinks you're the poison contaminating America's bloodstream. What have you got to say to that?”

Her father, she once told me, was a senior partner in John Foster Dulles's old law firm. He kept Arabian horses and once a year flew over to Scotland to fly-fish for salmon on the Spey. But another time I heard her say that he was a Wall Street broker and a cultivator of rare orchids, and when I asked her about that, once we were alone together, she countered, “Oh, you're so fucking literal. What does it matter?” and she ran off, disappearing round a corner of the rue de Seine, and didn't return to our room that night. “As a matter of interest,” I asked, when she showed up at the Pergola the next evening, “where did you stay last night?”

“You don't own me, you know. My pussy's my own.”