Joshua Then and Now (8 page)

The phone rang.

“Hello, Joshua, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“No. no. That’s O.K.”

It was a call he feared. His bank manager, Gibson of the Royal. Would he like him to extend his $10,000 note, his overdraft, for another month? No sweat, mind you.

“Now that’s not a bad idea,” Joshua said, trying to sound casual, adding that as soon as it was convenient he would bring in sterling to cover the note. “You can count on it, Hugh.”

Joshua was now late with his school fees, and he had nothing set aside against this year’s taxes. Chargex’s computer was unhappy, and American Express was disappointed in him. No wonder he couldn’t work. What’s the point? If, he argued with himself, he could take the rest of the day off, tomorrow was bound to be good. He would make a clean start on that column. With his pretty new typewriter ribbon already in place, the keys freshly scrubbed and twinkly.

Yes yes.

Which was when the phone rang again. Jane Trimble, he thought, breaking into a sweat.
Tell her we’re not to blame
. But it was long distance. Peabody at
Playboy
, outlining an assignment which appealed to him but meant going to London. “I can’t do it,” he said, and he told Peabody about Pauline. Not everything, but enough. “I can’t fly anywhere now. I can’t leave the kids.”

Even as he said that, he sensed Peabody tuning out, scratching his name off a list on his pad. “Wait. Don’t hang up. How are you?”

“Hanging in there. Nothing terminal yet.”

“And Janet?”

“She’s had her consciousness raised. We separated last month.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bless you. I couldn’t be more pleased.” There were two kids. They had, Peabody assured him in his most astringent manner, adjusted marvelously. “I mean, I used to see them every night, but I’d come home whacked and all I’d want to do was booze or watch football on TV. Now I see them only on the weekends, but as darling Janet has explained, I spend quality time with them. Are you sure you can’t go, or is it just that you want more money?”

“Think of something I can do from here.”

“From Canada? Are you out of your mind? You never should have gone home, Josh.”

“Neither of us should have come back,” Joshua said, startling himself.

“Maybe. Just maybe.
À la prochaine fois, mon vieux
. Hey, wait.” There was a pause. And suddenly Peabody laughed a reckless laugh, full-hearted, and Joshua found himself suffused with warmth, responding to the old charm. “Say there, Josh,” he said, “why don’t we clean out the old
deux-chevaux
and drive to Arles tonight? Or maybe Amsterdam?”

“If only we could.”

“God damn it,” Peabody said, his voice cracking, “what happened to everybody?”

“Come on now,” Joshua replied without conviction, “it’s not that bad.”

“Markham passed through Chicago last week. He invited me to his suite in the Ambassador East. Took me to lunch and whenever I mentioned a writer, he jotted down his name in a thin little Gucci pad. He offered me an annual retainer, a fucking
pourboire
, to put things his way.”

“Markham’s rotten to the core.”

“Yeah. Sure. Only I’m no better. I’m screwing my secretary. She’s
twenty-two years old and has read
Trout Fishing in America
three times. She’s never heard of Saroyan. Never mind Saroyan – she thinks Henry James is the guy who wrote the script for a Montgomery Clift film we saw on the late show. And I’m so scared of being unable to satisfy her I drown her in gifts. I’ve had my hair styled. We listen to Elton John records together. Elton John. I’m going to be forty-nine.”

Peabody, Markham, and Joshua had met in Paris in the fifties. In those days Markham was going to be a novelist – as who wasn’t, Joshua thought, grieving.

Oh I remember Markham. Yes sir. Joshua once found out where Samuel Beckett lived and used to wait across the street from his flat, shivering in the rain for hours in the hope of seeing him venture forth. He never spoke to Beckett, but he would watch him pass and smile. Hey, there goes big Sam Beckett, a man who used to shoot the breeze with Jimmy Joyce.

“Why don’t you introduce yourself, ask for an interview?” Markham asked. “I’m sure you could sell it somewhere.”

“Bill, your presence alone would have been sufficient to taint the Sermon on the Mount.”

No more ambitious than the rest of them really, Markham made the mistake of letting it show. If there was a New York publisher in town, he found out which hotel he was staying at and lay in wait for him in the bar. But, to be fair, he was also obliging. If you were without hashish, Markham, an abstainer himself, would provide. He was there to help when you had to move. He never made a pass at anybody else’s girlfriend. But possibly because he seemed to incorporate all these virtues in one restless, yearning body, just about everybody felt ill at ease in his presence. They used Markham, but they never trusted him, and Peabody was gratuitously insulting. “Tell me, Bill, do you set yourself a number of words to write each day?”

Joshua had first met Peabody at 1 a.m. on an enchanting spring night outside the Café Royal, now Le Drugstore, on Place St.-Germain. 1951 it was. Elegant, spare, jauntily dressed, favoring a
snap-brim fedora, Peabody was already a legend in the
quartier
, drinking his way through an inheritance, zooming from St.-Germain to Montparnasse and back again in a battered
deux-chevaux
, merrily denouncing everybody he met in the cafés as resoundingly third-rate. Energy and pushy Jewish mothers were not quite enough, he delighted in warning them. Talent would also be required. Marcel Proust made them look sickly. Jane Austen knew more than they did.

Joshua espied Peabody often enough striding down the boulevard, not only the last of the family railroad money, but the world itself his inheritance. One night, soft with slanting rain and the smell of roasting chestnuts he would pluck a schoolteacher at random, the most innocent of American girls, from a table at the Mabillon, and sweep her off for a week in an
auberge
only he knew of on the banks of the Loire, rendering the husband she had yet to meet inadequate forevermore. Another night, after having painstakingly arranged an assignation at the Café de Flore with the visiting aunt of an old Exeter classmate, he would sit across the boulevard at the Café Royal well past the appointed hour, watching out of the corner of his eye as his quarry, alone at her table, increasingly distraught, turned back one scruffy importuning stranger after another until, all hope abandoned, she rose to depart. Only then would Peabody dash gaily across the boulevard, zigzagging through the oncoming traffic, to carry her off without apology or dinner to the seediest hotel in the
quartier
, a fleabag, where he would coolly strip her of what remained of her dignity, thrust her into a taxi when he was finished, and be back at the Café Royal within the hour to rage against the depravity of the times.

Peabody was bankrolling and editing a little magazine, a typically snobbish and quixotic venture, with stories and poems in French, Spanish, and Italian as well as English, lavishing the last of his inheritance on his favored writers. He had never spoken to Joshua, he did not even acknowledge him on the street, so Joshua was delighted to catch the fastidious Peabody early one morning in the Café Royal, saddled
with the embarrassing, complaining Melrose – Melrose, the banished Hollywood scriptwriter. Joshua, who had enjoyed a winning afternoon at Maison Lafitte for once, was in rare high spirits. He stood at the bar, rocking drunkenly, shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation. Then he buttonholed Melrose as they stepped outside.

“I wonder if you know,” he said, “that on this very square, in front of that church, in the spring of 1557, the gentry of this charming
quartier
gathered in their thousands for a burning. Two Huguenots, who refused under torture to deny their faith, were dragged right out here and offered mercy: if they renounced their heresy, they would be strangled before they were roasted –
à point
, it goes without saying. If not, their tongues would be ripped out of their mouths. They didn’t take the Fifth,” Joshua said, leering. “They had the natural dignity to say no, without equivocation, and out came their tongues, the crowd roaring more, more. Afterwards they were tied to stakes, hoisted high, so that their loins might be reduced to ashes while the other half of their bodies remained intact. And so, my friend, Senator McCarthy should be looked on as comic relief. A puerile American variation on a European theme. And before he came along, your only heresy was to grovel to producers and write banal scripts for which you were most assuredly overpaid.”

“Why, you creep,” Melrose began, “you crypto-fascist –”

But Peabody was guffawing, delighted. “Why don’t you send me a story, Mr. Shapiro? I can’t promise to publish, but I will read it myself.”

“Well now, I don’t write stories. I am a reporter. And what makes you think I’d want to be published in your pretentious little rich boy’s magazine in the first place?”

One night much later, long after they had become friends and Joshua had become a regular at Peabody’s table in The Old Navy, joining him in jeering at the passing parade, he told him about his need to get to Spain. Peabody was charged with concern. He smiled his tender smile and said, “Try Ibiza.”

“Ibiza?”

“Ibiza,” he said.

As Joshua recalled it, he yawned.

Imagine.

The lights had failed everywhere. Driving through the blackened village, the rain belting down, the streets awash, Joshua glanced at his dashboard clock. It was nearly 2 a.m. Shit, they can only be up to no good there. Those horny brokers and ad agency men with the slack, boozy faces, weekend John Waynes, utterly transmogrified once they held Canada Tire power saws in their hands. Or stood tall as Mr. Christian behind the masts of their Lasers. And their saucy, newly liberated wives running around braless, those steamy compost heaps they called vaginas sprayed with Misty or Oo La La!, taking themselves for sophisticates because they could now compare fucking notes as freely as their mothers had once compared strawberry shortcake recipes. What were they up to in the dark, those yahoos, and what did they want with Pauline?

Parked outside the clubhouse, Joshua lighted a cigarette and counted nine other cars in the lot the next time lightning rocked the lake. Group grope, that’s what they were into. Westmount’s summer saturnalia. But the clubhouse was not in total darkness. Obviously, they had set out paraffin lamps here and there. Should I propel the Jeep right up the clubhouse stairs, bashing through the French doors? “Hey, remember the night that crazy Jew …”

Bolting up the clubhouse stairs, Joshua opened the front door softly, slipping quietly inside, fully expecting to trip over copulating couples. Gentile jogger nuts mounting Geritol-fed harridans. From the bar, he heard the sound of music and clapping hands. Somebody must have had a transistor radio. Or maybe a cassette player. But as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he grasped that only Mr. Harry James was blowing. “The Four O’Clock Jump.” Everybody was gathered round the swirling couple. Yes, yes, the Mixed Doubles
Champions, Eastern Quebec Region, 1952. The wrong side of forty, both of them, and jitterbugging. His wife, his brother-in-law. Even as Joshua stood there, feverishly jealous, he could see that his barefoot wife, her hair flying, her long legs flashing, looked simply splendid. He also had to allow that Peter Pan, Esquire, could certainly cut a rug, as they used to say. Oh how graceful he appeared!

Joshua slid behind the bar, which was unattended, and poured himself a walloping cognac. A voice came from behind, startling him. “Crack his nuts for him.”

It was Trimble, his ordnance corps tie askew, his little eyes floating in malice.

“You’re out of your gourd, Jack.”

“Don’t count on it, old son,” he said thickly.

Now, unfortunately, Joshua was cast in the light of one of the paraffin lamps and so his presence was no longer undetected, though Pauline was still unaware of it. And that’s when Kevin did the unforgivable. Something Joshua took for an act of defiance. What he did, catching sight of Joshua, was to twirl Pauline around so that she could receive, startled, the full benefit of his grim, disapproving face.

Impulsively, Joshua walked around to the other side of the bar and clicked off the cassette player. Silence. Consternation. Rabbi Shapiro has pronounced. No more cakes, no more ale.

Pauline, never one to be caught off balance in any social situation, strode into his arms, hugged him, and said, “I knew you’d come to pick me up.”

Moist hair stuck to the back of her neck. “I began to worry once the power went,” he said.

Kevin joined them, his smile revealing dimples Joshua had not noticed before. “Now that you’ve finally honored us with your presence,” he said, “I’m not going to let you go until you sign that book for me.”

Joshua eased Pauline back from the bar so that there was nobody between him and Kevin. Remember: stick, stick, and away you go. “I
was just saying to Pauline that you not only play boy’s –” it nearly came out “goy’s” – “games surpassingly well, but you also dance divinely.”

“Joshua, please.”

Jane Trimble sashayed up to the bar, glistening with excitement. Tim Hickey, the McTeers, and a few more, equally sodden, were now also drawn to the bar, anticipating an incident. Only Dickie Abbott, whom Joshua liked, was intent on keeping the peace. “Good to see you, Joshua,” he said.

But Joshua ignored him. He picked off a strand of honey-colored hair from Kevin’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “now I know where I’ve seen you before. Didn’t you model underwear for
Esquire’s
nineteen-fifty-five back-to-college issue?”

“Oh, shit, let’s go home.”

“My wife wants to go home, but I haven’t finished my drink yet.”

“That wasn’t me,” Kevin said, seemingly not the least offended, “but you could have seen me in
Thunderball
. You know, the Bond film.”

“Holy cow. Were you really in that?”

“I was one of the scuba divers.”