Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

troubles.”
    Peace and quiet. Hymie. I should have known better. The most generous of hosts, he furnished his beach house with wall-to-wall guests almost every night, most of them young and all of whom he set out to seduce. He would regale them with stories of the great and near-great he claimed to have known. Dashiell Hammett, a prince. Bette Davis, misunderstood. Peter Lorre, his kind of guy. Ditto Spence. Passing from guest to guest, he would illuminate them like a lamp-lighter. He would whisper into the ear of each young woman that she was the most gorgeous and intelligent on Long Island, and confide in each of the men that he was uniquely gifted. He wouldn’t allow me to brood in a corner, but literally thrust me on one woman after another. “She’s wildly attracted to you.” Going on to introduce me, saying, “This is my old friend Barney Panofsky and he’s dying to meet you. He doesn’t look it, I know, but he just got away with the perfect crime. Tell her about it, kid.”
    I took Hymie aside. “I know you mean well, Hymie, but the truth is I’m committed to a woman in Toronto.”
    â€œOf course you are. You think I don’t hear you coming on like a pimply teenager on the phone after I’ve gone to bed?”
    â€œAre you listening in on the extension in your bedroom?”
    â€œLook, kid, Miriam’s there, and you’re here. Enjoy.”
    â€œYou don’t understand.”
    â€œNo, it’s you who don’t understand. When you get to be my age, what you regret is not the times you cheated a little, but the times you didn’t.”
    â€œIt’s not going to be like that with us.”
    â€œI’ll bet when you were a kid you clapped hands for Tinkerbell.”
    Early every morning, rain or shine, Hymie, who was then being treated by a Reichian analyst, would trot out to the dunes and let out primal screams sufficiently loud to drive any sharks lingering in the shallows back to sea. Then he would start on his morning jog, accumulating a gaggle of everybody else’s children
en route
, proposingmarriage to eleven-year-old girls and suggesting to nine-year-old boys that they stop somewhere for a beer, eventually leading them to the local candy store for treats. Back at the beach house, he would make both of us salami omelettes garnished with mounds of home fries. Then, immediately after breakfast, still hoarse from his dune therapy, Hymie, who was connected to the world outside by his phone, would put in a call to his agent: “What are you going to do for me today, you
cacker
?” Or he would get a producer on the line, cajoling, pleading, threatening, honking phlegm into his handkerchief, lighting one cigarette off another. “I’ve got it in me to direct the best American film since
Citizen Kane
, but I never hear from you. How come?”
    I was often wakened in the early-morning hours by Hymie hollering into the phone at one or another of his former wives, apologizing for being late with an alimony payment, commiserating over an affair that had ended badly, or shouting at one of his sons, or his daughter in San Francisco. “What does she do?” I once asked him.
    â€œShop. Get pregnant. Marry, divorce. You’ve heard of serial killers? She’s a serial bride.”
    Hymie’s children were a constant heartache and an endless financial drain. The son in Boston, a Wiccan, and proprietor of an occult bookshop, was writing the definitive book on astrology. When not contemplating the heavens, he was given to writing bad cheques on Earth, which Hymie had to make good. His other son, a wandering rock musician, was in and out of expensive detox clinics, and had a weakness for hitting the road in stolen sports cars which he inevitably smashed up. He could phone from a lock-up in Tulsa, or a hospital in Kansas City, or a lawyer’s office in Denver, to say there had been a misunderstanding. “But you