Barney's Version Read Free Page B

words?”
    â€œA few words? Leon? We’ll be standing here for hours.”
    Boogie told Terry he was fulfilling the artist’s primary function — making order out of chaos.
    â€œI should have known better than to ask you a serious question,” said Terry, retreating from our café table.
    In the ensuing silence, Boogie, by way of apology, turned to me and explained that he had inherited, from Heinrich Heine,
le droit de moribondage
.
    Boogie could yank that sort of conversation-stopper out of the back pocket of his mind, propelling me to a library, educating me.
    I loved Boogie and miss him something awful. I would give up my fortune (say half) to have that enigma, that six-foot-two scarecrow, lope through my door again, pulling on a Romeo y Julieta, his smile charged with ambiguity, demanding, “Have you read Thomas Bernhard yet?” or “What do you make of Chomsky?”
    God knows he had his dark side, disappearing for weeks on end — some said to a
yeshiva
in Mea Shearim and others swore to a monasteryin Tuscany — but nobody really knew where. Then one day he would appear — no, materialize — without explanation at one of the cafés we favoured, accompanied by a gorgeous Spanish duchess or an Italian contessa.
    On his bad days Boogie wouldn’t answer my knock on his hotel-room door or, if he did, would say no more than “Go away. Let me be,” and I knew that he was lying on his bed, high on horse, or that he was seated at his table, compiling lists of the names of those young men who had fought alongside him and were already dead.
    It was Boogie who introduced me to Goncharov, Huysmans, Céline, and Nathanael West. He was taking language lessons from a White Russian watchmaker whom he had befriended. “How can anybody go through life,” he asked, “not being able to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the original?” Fluent in German and Hebrew, Boogie studied the Zohar, the holy book of the Cabbala, once a week with a rabbi in a synagogue on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, an address that delighted him.
    Then, years ago, I collected all eight of Boogie’s cryptic short stories that had been published in
Merlin
,
Zero
, and
The Paris Review
, with the intention of bringing them out in a limited edition, each volume numbered, elegantly printed, no expense spared. The story of his that I’ve read again and again, for obvious reasons, is a variation on a far-from-original theme, but brilliantly realized, like everything he wrote. “Margolis” is about a man who walks out to buy a package of cigarettes and never returns to his wife and child, assuming a new identity elsewhere.
    I wrote to Boogie’s son in Santa Fe offering him an advance of ten thousand dollars, as well as a hundred free copies and all profits that might accrue from the enterprise. His response came in the form of a registered letter that expressed amazement that I, of all people, could even contemplate such a venture, and warning me that he would not hesitate to take legal action if I dared to do such a thing. So that was that.
    Hold the phone. I’m stuck. I’m trying to remember the name of the author of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. Or was it
The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt
? No, that was written by the fibber. Lillianwhat’s-her-name? Come on. I know it. Like the mayonnaise. Lillian Kraft? No.
Hellman
.
Lillian Hellman
. The name of the author of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
doesn’t matter. It’s of no importance. But now that it’s started I won’t sleep tonight. These increasingly frequent bouts of memory loss are driving me crazy.
    Last night, sailing off to sleep at last, I couldn’t remember the name of the thing you use to strain spaghetti. Imagine that. I’ve used it thousands of times. I could visualize it. But I couldn’t remember what the bloody thing was called. And I didn’t want to