Barney's Version (13 page)

“I am perfectly capable of standing,” I said, poking her back into her seat.

“Well,” she said, “serves me right for being considerate in this day and age.”

Onwards. At the risk of offending my neighbours, maybe even inviting a lawsuit like Jim's boss, that age-ist boor, the truth is that the building I call home in downtown Montreal is actually a rich old fart's castle. There's no moat or drawbridge, but, all the same, it could easily qualify as a fortress for besieged Anglophone septuagenarians who tiptoe about in terror of our separatist provincial premier, whose school nickname was “The Weasel.” Most of my neighbours have unloaded their Westmount family mansions and shifted their stock portfolios to Toronto for safekeeping, as they wait for the
Québécois pure laine
(that is to say, racially pure Francophones) to vote in a second referendum on independence of a sort, yes or no, for this provincial backwater called Quebec.

Our building was recently disposed of by the Teitelbaums, sold retail to a new bunch out of Hong Kong, their suitcases laden with cash. It's called The Lord Byng Manor, after Viscount Byng, the British general who led thousands of Canadians to their slaughter in the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917, and later went on to become one of our governors general. The Hong Kong bunch, fingers to the wind, want to rename our stately pile of granite Le Château Dollard Des Ormeaux, in honour of an early hero of New France. Dollard Des Ormeaux is said by some to have sacrificed himself and his sixteen young companions to save Ville-Marie, as Montreal was known in 1660, in a battle with a band of three hundred Iroquois at the Long Sault. Or, conversely, he was a fur trader with his eye on the main chance, who came to a deserved bad end when his raiding party was ambushed. In any event, my neighbours are outraged by this insult to their Anglophone heritage, and a petition is circulating to protest the proposed name change.

One of my neighbours, once a feared federal cabinet minister but now in his eighties, has gone gaga. He is still a natty dresser, never without his tweed hat, regimental tie, hacking jacket, and cavalry-twill trousers. But his eyes have emptied out. Weather permitting, his
keeper, a cheerful young nurse, airs him out once a day, taking him for a turn round the courtyard. Then they subside onto a bench in the sun, the nurse dipping into a Harlequin paperback and the former cabinet minister sucking jellybeans, watching the cars come and go in the parking lot, and writing down their licence numbers on a pad. Whenever I pass, he smiles and says, “Congratulations.”

The senator who recently moved into our penthouse is none other than Harvey Schwartz, booze baron Bernard Gursky's former
consiglière
. Harvey is worth kazillions. He and Becky own a Hockney, which I wish were mine; a Warhol; a painting by what's-his-name, who used to ride a bicycle over his canvases;
²¹
and a Leo Bishinsky, constantly rising in value. I stopped the Schwartzes in the lobby recently, the two of them obviously bound for a charity costume ball, tricked out like a twenties mobster and his moll. “Well, I'll be gol-darned,” I said, “if it ain't Bonnie and Clyde Schwartz. Don't shoot.”

“Ignore him,” said Harvey. “He's drunk again.”

“One minute,” I said. “You know that Bishinsky you own?”

“You've never been invited to our apartment,” said Harvey, “and you never will be. Forget it.”

“I thought you'd be delighted to know that I worked on it too. Let fly with a wet mop Leo handed me one day.”

“That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” said Becky.

“Ten to one you've never even met Bishinsky,” said Harvey, brushing past me.

We also boast a gaggle of divorcées of a certain age in The Lord Byng Manor. My favourite, an anorexic with a helmet of lacquered hair dyed blonde, breasts once as flat as yesterday's flapjacks, and legs as thin as pipe cleaners, hasn't spoken to me since we ran into each other after she had returned from a second-chance clinic in Toronto, where she had gone for a face-lift and a boob refill. I had greeted her in the lobby with a kiss on the cheek.

“What are you staring at?” she demanded.

“I'm waiting to see if the dent remains in place.”

“Bastard.”

I no longer really have to go into my production office, where I am considered a spent force. I could live anywhere. In London with Mike and Caroline. In New York with Saul and whoever is his latest squeeze. Or in Toronto with Kate. Kate's my darling. But in Toronto I'd be bound to run into Miriam and Blair Hopper né Hauptman, Herr Doktor Professor of Nostrums.

CBC
Radio, overjoyed to have Miriam back in Toronto, immediately found a niche for her. Reverting to her maiden name, Greenberg, by which she first came to national attention as an arts reporter, she now presides over a morning classical-music program called “By Special Request.” It enables listeners to ask for any recording they fancy, treating us to the insufferably cute stories behind their selection. I tape these shows, tracking the tunes most popular with Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch. They are, in no special order, “The William Tell Overture,” “The Moonlight Sonata,” “The Warsaw Concerto,” “The Four Seasons,” “The 1812 Overture.” I play these tapes back at night, seated in the dark, a Macallan in hand, savouring the voice of my one true love, pretending she is not on the radio but in our bathroom, going about her nightly ablutions, preparing for bed, where she will curl into me, warming my old bones, and I will cup her breasts until I fall asleep. Riding sufficient Macallan, my pretence will go so far as to even allow me to call out to her, “I know you're worried about my smoking, darling, so I'm putting out my cigar right now and coming straight to bed.”

Poor Miriam. Her program's a clunker. Between playing records, she is obliged to read her listeners' letters aloud; once — to my everlasting glee — a letter that purported to come from a Mrs. Doreen Willis of Vancouver Island:

Gotcha, I thought, pouring myself a big one, slipping into a soft-shoe shuffle. Then I sat down and began to scribble notes for another letter.

In my declining years, I continue to linger in Montreal, risking icy streets in winter in spite of my increasingly brittle bones. It suits me to
be rooted in a city that, like me, is diminishing day by day. Only yesterday, it seems, the separatists officially launched their referendum campaign with a show performed before a thousand true believers in Quebec City's Grand Théâtre. Their prolix, if decidedly premature, Declaration of Sovereignty, recited by a spotlit duo, owed more to Hallmark Cards than to Thomas Jefferson.

“We, the people of Quebec, declare we are free to choose our future.

“We know the winter in our souls. We know its blustery days, its solitude, its false eternity, and its apparent deaths. We know what it is to be bitten by the winter cold.”

We are dealing with a two-headed beast: our provincial premier, a.k.a. The Weasel, and his minions in Quebec City, and Dollard Redux, the fulminating leader of the Bloc Québécois in Ottawa. Dollard Redux has lit a fire here. Soon the only English-speaking people left in Montreal will be the old, the infirm, and the poor. All that's flourishing now are
FOR SALE/à VENDRE
signs, sprouting up every day like out-of-season daffodils on front lawns, and there are stores with
TO LET/à LOUER
signs everywhere on once fashionable streets. In the watering-hole I favour, on Crescent Street, there is a wake at least once a month for the latest regular who has had his fill of tribalism and is moving to Toronto or Vancouver. Or, God help them, Saskatoon, “a good place to bring up children.”

Dink's is the name of the bar I repair to for lunch just about every day, and again at five in the afternoon, an hour when the place is thick with sour old farts. That adorable gamine who is my personal assistant at Totally Unnecessary Productions, the indispensable Chantal Renault, is familiar with my routine. Ignoring the men, who are always stirred by her presence, she tends to come and go with cheques that have to be signed and more exasperating problems. Happily Arnie Rosenbaum is no longer with us. Arnie, who was in my class at Fletcher's Field High, is the
nebbish
I once foolishly hired to run the Montreal office of my cheese-importing business. Prompted by guilt, I kept him on when I prematurely went into
TV
production back in 1959, finding a place for him in accounts. Those days. Christ Almighty. One step ahead of creditors, I used to delay
settling lab, film-stock, and camera-rental bills until the last possible moment. Then there was Arnie to cope with. Teeth-grinding Arnie, who was suffering from halitosis, asthma, ulcers, and flatulence, his maladies exacerbated by the torments he was subjected to by his boss, Hugh Ryan, our resident chartered accountant. One day Arnie would come in to find an entry that wasn't his own in one of his ledgers, obliging him to waste hours in futile calculations. Another day, popping what he took to be one of his pills, he would, before the morning was out, be struck with a sudden attack of diarrhoea. Then there was the afternoon Arnie caught up with me at Dink's and thrust his raincoat onto the bar. “I'm just coming from the cleaners,” he said. “Look what they found in my pockets.” Condoms. A vibrator. A torn pair of tiny black panties. “What if it had been Abigail who had emptied my pockets?”

I also loathed Hugh, but didn't dare fire him. He was the nephew of our federal minister of finance and a frequent dinner guest in the homes of the presidents of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal. Without his assurances, my line of desperately needed credit would be severed. “Arnie, if you only learned to ignore him, he would stop bugging you. But I'll speak to him.”

“One day, so help me, I'll pick up a knife and ram it between his shoulder blades. Fire him, Barney, I could do his job.”

“I'll think about it.”

“That's exactly what I expected. Thanks for nothing,” he said.

Among the regulars at Dink's these days there are a few divorcées, a number of journalists, including the
Gazette
columnist Zack Keeler, a couple of bores to be avoided, some lawyers, a marooned New Zealander, and a likeable gay hairdresser. Our star turn and my best friend there is a lawyer, who usually claims his bar stool at noon and doesn't surrender it until seven, when we yield Dink's to ear-splitting rock music and the young, there to make out.

John Hughes-McNoughton, born into Westmount affluence, misplaced his moral compass years ago. His thin hair dyed brown, he is a tall, scrawny, stoop-shouldered man, his blue eyes radiating scorn.
John was a brilliant criminal lawyer until he was undone by two costly alimony settlements and a deadly mixture of booze and irreverence. Defending a notorious swindler–cum–lounge lizard some years back, a man charged with sexual assault on a woman he had picked up in the Esquire Show Bar, John made the mistake of going out to a long liquid lunch at Delmo's before returning to the courtroom to deliver his summing up. Floating into the well of the court, slurring his words, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now my duty to make an impassioned speech in defence of my client. Then you will benefit from the judge's unbiased summary of the evidence you have heard here. And following that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you, in your wisdom, will pronounce on whether you find my client innocent or guilty. But, honouring Juvenal, who once wrote
probitas lau-datur et alget
, which I won't insult you by translating, let me admit that I am far too drunk to make a speech. In all my years in court, I have yet to come across an unbiased judge. And you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are incapable of deciding whether my client is innocent or not.” Then he sat down.

In 1989, John addressed public meetings in support of a quirky new Anglophone protest party that would elect four members to our so-called National Assembly in Quebec City. He also published corrosive op-ed pieces here and there ridiculing the province's loopy language laws, which ordained, among other foolish things, that henceforth English, or even bilingual, commercial signs would be
verboten
, an affront to the
visage linguistique
of
la belle province
. In those contentious days even Dink's suffered a visit from an inspector (or tongue trooper, as we called them) from the Commission de Protection de la Langue Française. This latter-day, pot-bellied
patriote
in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts was saddened to discover a banner suspended from the bar that read: