Joshua Then and Now (13 page)

“And did they have to wash up before and after?” Joshua asked.

“Now you cut that out. We’re into serious stuff here. Like, these are the Days of Awe.” He cracked open another quart of Labatt’s. “I guess we could leave the windows until tomorrow.”

“Aren’t we going to the synagogue tomorrow?”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Well, the day after, then.”

“Sure.”

“This edition, you know, it also includes the New Testament, the guy on the stick, and I must say he had a sweeter nature than most of the old prophets. But not a word about this to your Uncle Harvey, for Christsake.”

In the morning, Reuben wakened Joshua early; they both got into their best suits and shined their shoes until they gleamed. Then they started out for the B’nai Jacob synagogue on Fairmount Street. The closer they got, the slower his father walked, his manner increasingly agitated.

“Hold it. We get in there, and they’ll give you this sort of scarf to wear, a tallis. You watch me closely. I’ll show you how to put it on.”

“I remember, but. From my bar-mitzvah.”

At the mention of his bar-mitzvah, more legend than scandal now, his father paled. “If anybody in there asks you about it, you deny it ever happened. Your mother never did it. Right?”

“Right.”

“Oh, and listen, you stand up for certain prayers, you sit down for others. I give you the elbow once, you stand up, twice, you sit down. Got that?”

“Yeah.”

Outside the synagogue, many of the faithful were gathered together in the sun. Smoking, gossiping.

“You think there’s no more room inside?” Joshua asked hopefully.

His father fiddled with the brim of his Adam hat. “I’ll tell you what, we’ll cross to the other side of the street and walk up and down a couple of times, just to get the feel of things.”

They crossed the street.

“There’s Dr. Orbach,” Joshua said.

“Where?”

Joshua pointed to a group of men, all of them wearing prayer shawls, standing on the synagogue steps. Dr. Orbach’s right arm was held in a cast, his fingers encased. He wore a sling. “Right there,” he said.

“I’ll tell you what,” his father said, quickening his pace, “I’m going to let you off today.”

“Oh yeah?”

“But, shit, your mother isn’t expecting us home until one.”

It was now only ten o’clock.

“Have you seen
Union Pacific yet?”
his father asked.

“No.”

“It’s playing at the Palace. I’ll take you.”

“During the Days of Awe?”

“Yeah. Right.”

T
HE SEAPLANE TOOK OFF THE NEXT AFTERNOON
, wheeling over the lake again and again, fading into the sun, seemingly gone. Then, catching Joshua by surprise, it came roaring up from behind to swoop low over the Hornby cottage, wings wiggling, before it settled on the lake, making for the Trimble dock rather than the country club. Joshua watched from his study window, his mind elsewhere.

With Murdoch.

Murdoch’s seventh novel, its contents sour, its jacket elegant, sat before him on his desk. It was a mechanical book, shallow, written with a fine writer’s remembered skills. Joshua longed to go for a swim. He could see the kids and Pauline horsing around in the water below. Instead, he slipped paper into his typewriter, plucked a can of Bras d’Or out of his small fridge (a Christmas gift from Pauline), and sat down to write Murdoch, determined to lie.

Even before he started his letter, long overdue, Joshua imagined him tottering down the stairs to the door of his Lonsdale Road flat. He would be snorting, coughing up phlegm, a Gauloise drooping from his purply lips, his big hairy belly bouncing, breaking wind as he stooped to retrieve Joshua’s letter with the rest of his morning bumpf. Murdoch huffing as he climbed the stairs once more, settling down to his long dining room table, sweeping last night’s dishes
aside, lifting the kettle from the gas stove, its bottom badly charred, to make himself a cup of instant, stirring Courvoisier rather than sugar into it, and washing it down with a couple of After Eights or a chocolate digestive, whichever was handy. Trying to remember the name of the bird who was surely resting in his bed, and wondering if he would have to make it clear yet again that a shared breakfast was not part of the Murdoch deal. Skat, ducks.

“One of them,” he once told Joshua, outraged, “actually gave me the clap. A Rodean girl at that. I tell you, there are no bloody standards any more. My daughter, Jessica, she’s seventeen now, brought round one of those frightful Fulbrights the other morning. A New York Jew. Depressingly earnest. He said he was
like, you know, man, a writer
, and so I offered him drinkees and he said no thanks, the little twit, but coffee and chocolate cake would do nicely. He was wearing denims. Bell-bottom trousers. Platform shoes. Joshua, what sort of people do you come from?”

The last time Joshua had been in London and seen the remodeled flat, bespeaking Murdoch’s all-too-temporary affluence, it was filled with black leather furniture from Heal’s, long on nickel tubing. A Hockney drawing, a gift from Angela, hung over the fireplace that now served as a catch-all for empty Smartie boxes, champagne corks, dial-a-chicken bones, and wads of Kleenex he had masturbated into. Built-in bookshelves, rather than old boards and bricks, were everywhere. A long, glass-topped coffee table, all jutting angles, good for nothing but painful knee-banging, came from Casa Pupo. There was a Sansui hi-fi, any knob beyond volume an enigma to him. And central heating, which he also hated. Clippings from Durrant’s, copies of
Beano
and
Dandy
, book proofs and mugs, rode every available surface. Moldy coffee in one mug, soggy Gauloise butts adrift in another. For there was not a char in NW1 who would service Murdoch’s flat any longer.

In his mind’s eye, Joshua saw Murdoch, scratching absently at his groin, opening his morning newspapers (the
Times
, the
Guardian
, the
Daily Mail
), hungrily searching the gossip columns for a passing salute. Digging into his mail, he shakes out check-size envelopes and then hunts for intimidating invitations to mount on his mantelpiece. Shoving the bills and fan mail and income tax demands aside, he finally comes to Joshua’s thick envelope. Filled with glee, Joshua hoped.

Once profiled in the
Guardian
, Murdoch was asked, “Are you married?”

“Sometimes,” he replied.

There was a spare bedroom in the flat, available for the issue of his several marriages, should any of them dare to visit.

“Ralph came to see me last week. The little snot’s at St. Paul’s now. Do you know what that costs? Never mind. He actually wanted advice. A father-and-son chat. Good Lord, I’m still a child myself. I like nothing better than to suck a girl’s titties and have her read
Winnie the Pooh
aloud to me before I go tuckybyes. Do you give your children advice? I expect you do. The years have made you pompous, my dear. Ah well, I suppose nothing compensates for the loss of talent. Both our brains have been addled by alcohol and the young have no mercy.”

Yes, yes indeed, Joshua thought, giving up on the letter and racing down the hill barefoot to join his family in the lake.

“Hey, look,” Susy squealed, “it’s Daddy!”

Everybody smiled or waved. Even Alex. They were happy to see him. Me, Joshua Shapiro. My family. Who would have guessed, he thought, his heart thumping with pleasure as he allowed himself to be splashed, pulled, and ducked.

But that night Joshua turned over in bed to find Pauline standing by the bedroom window, watching the seaplane by moonlight. “Why doesn’t he leave here?” she implored. “Why doesn’t he just fly off?”

“Maybe you underestimate Jane’s charms?”

“It’s not Jane that’s keeping him here. I can assure you of that.”

“What, then?”

“Money.”

The seaplane did not take off the next morning, or the morning after, and neither did Kevin appear at their place. Then, late in the afternoon, the phone rang. “That will be Lady Jane,” Pauline said.

Joshua scooped up the phone, nodded at Pauline to indicate that she was absolutely right, and then, covering the mouthpiece, said, “Dinner tonight.”

“Damn,” Pauline said.

Yes, Joshua thought, damn damn, recalling an encounter he had never told Pauline about, something that had happened some five years earlier, during the winter that had followed their first summer on the lake. It was three weeks before Christmas, Pauline and the children were in Ottawa visiting the senator, and he was on his own, drinking late most nights at The King’s Arms, only staying in if there was a hockey game to watch on
TV
.

Then one stingingly cold, windblown morning, his column completed, Joshua was obliged to hurry down to St. James Street to cable it to Toronto. His battered old Toyota wouldn’t start, the battery dead again, and he was going to need a taxi. But Montreal’s taxi drivers preferred retreating to the nearest tavern when a fine, powdery snow was blowing over icy roads. Westmount Taxi brought a busy signal, their phone obviously off the hook. Diamond answered, but the snotty girl on the line couldn’t promise anything for half an hour; Joshua offered a flyer over the meter reading to the first taxi to show within ten minutes. Only five minutes later a taxi came slithering down the street, braking softly against a snowbank in front of his door. “Hey,” the driver said, “aren’t you Joshua Shapiro?”

As they drove off, wheels spinning on ice and blue salt, the driver continued to watch Joshua intently in his rear-view mirror. “My father, you know, he watches you on
TV
, he says all you do is shit on people.”

The taxi reeked of Joy. Somebody had left behind a Hermès cowhide tote bag. Joshua zipped it open: A tube of vaginal jelly. A plunger in a white rubber case. A tiny flask of vaginal cologne.
Obviously, before rushing off to her assignation, the lady had sprayed herself down there. His father would have approved.

“Where did you drop your last fare?”

“The Ritz.”

“She forgot this,” Joshua said, holding up the tote bag, “and I have a feeling she’d be most grateful if you hurried right back with it.”

His column delivered, Joshua stopped for a drink at The King’s Arms, and continued on to the Ritz, having decided that a half-bottle of Chablis and a mushroom omelet would not be self-indulgence, but his just reward. Considering the inclement weather, he was not surprised to find the Maritime Bar all but empty. Only two of the tables were occupied. And a lady, elegantly dressed, long-legged, her black hair streaked with just a hint of gray, sat at the bar. A cowhide tote bag rested on the stool to the left of her. The stool on the other side was occupied by a tall man with thin sandy hair and a reddening neck. He was pleading with her, while she swished the olive round in her martini, shaking her head haughtily. He whispered something, and reached for her hand on the bar, which she promptly withdrew. The color rising in his cheeks, he slid irresolutely off his stool. Now she turned to him, her voice steely, and said, “Yes, right here. Do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Do it.”

The people at the other two tables were caught up in their conversation, and Joshua pretended to be absorbed by his
Gazette
. The man, obviously intimidated, gave the pack of cigarettes that rested on the bar an intentional shove, dropping it to the floor, and then stooped to retrieve it. As he managed that, his face bleeding red, he shakily grasped her swinging foot by the ankle and brushed the toe of her shoe with his lips. Simultaneously, she emptied her martini glass over his sandy-haired head.

As the man fled the bar, wiping his face with a handkerchief, his eyes appalled, she already had her back to the room. It was all over so
quickly that Joshua immediately doubted that it had ever happened. But then Jane turned on her bar stool and said, “Why, hello there.”

“Hello,” Joshua said.

“I’m Jane Trimble, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he said, leaping up. “Um, would you care to join me for a drink?”

“And what would Pauline say to that?” she asked, her eyes taunting.

“I’ll phone her,” he replied in a rush. “Possibly she can join us.”

“But isn’t she in Ottawa?”

“Yes,” Joshua allowed in a faltering voice. “So she is.”

“I’d love to join you, honestly, but I only came in out of the cold for a quickie. I’m supposed to meet Prissie Hooper here. We’re going to Holt’s.” She paused. “I don’t think it would be a good idea for her to see us together.”

Why the hell not, he thought.

“I’ll catch her upstairs,” she said, touching his hand lightly “Oh, and Happy Holiday.”

Holiday?

“Isn’t it Chanuka this week?”

She pronounced it like the western wind, the chinook, with an “a” added.

“Yes. I suppose it is.”

“Well then,” she said, and gathering up her cowhide tote bag she was gone, leaving him with a stirring in the groin, torn between anger and admiration, wondering how she had managed to twist things so that it seemed as if he had tried to pick her up and failed.

Dark clouds were scudding across the lake, obscuring the surrounding mountaintops, as they set out in the boat for the Trimbles’, docking just as a wall of heavy rain began to blow across the water, catching them on the lawn. “Now repeat after me,” Joshua said. “Jane Trimble is a first-class bitch, but she can do nothing to upset me.”

“Yes, certainly,” Pauline said, already churning.

The first thing that Joshua noticed, as he and an equally drenched Pauline came tumbling through the French doors into the living room, was that Kevin – wearing a blazer with a Royal Bermuda Yacht Club crest, canvas ducks and sandals – was confidently ensconced in what Joshua knew was Jack Trimble’s favorite wing chair.

Joshua smiled sympathetically at Trimble, but his host, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, refused to acknowledge it. Something had happened. The air was crackling. Trimble, those dreadful tartan Bermuda shorts cutting into his ballooning belly, ending just shy of his apple-pie knees, seemed to be in good spirits, which was rare that summer, a season Joshua would always remember as the one where he, incredibly dense, failed to pick up the signals that might have saved everybody.