The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  THE TRAYMORE ROOMS

  A NOVEL IN FIVE PARTS

  Quebec, America and Rome

  NORM SIBUM

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Norm Sibum, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sibum, Norm, 1947-

  The Traymore rooms / Norm Sibum.

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927428-23-8

  I. Title.

  PS8587.I228T73 2012 C813’.54 C2012-907648-1

  Edited by Dan Wells

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover Design by Kate Hargreaves

  The author wishes to acknowledge Michael Carbert, Marko Sijan, Don McGrath, Dan Wells and Marius Kociejowski for services rendered as copy-editors. Also, he would like to thank Richard Labrosse for his translation of Ballade pour mes vieux jours, by Luc Plamondon and André Gagnon, found on page 692.

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  In Memory of Peter MacFarlane,

  b. 1927, d. 2010 at 902 years of age

  Part One:

  THE TRAYMORE ROOMS

  Book I—Against Chronology

  To Begin

  Now Edward Sanders, aka Fast Eddy, hatless in winter, beetle-browed and barrel-chested, shows up in the Blue Danube, the left side of his face inflamed. He is not happy; deep-set eyes accuse. Silent, he joins us at our table. A round of greetings. He raises his hand to check our effusions. He will make the most of this moment, encased in layers of sweatshirts, nylon coat, baggy denims, his pale blue eyes registering what had been cataclysmic. Those eyes are absolutes, so complete is his revulsion for all accidents of time and space, he claiming a sparrow flew into his mug.

  Well, how? He was turning a corner at the back of his duplex just as a bird endeavoured to do the same, its flight path minimizing the possibilities of attack from predators. Chicago School of Physics: two solid objects cannot, at one and the same time, inhabit the same space, unless one is to speak of hand-to-hand combat or acts of passion.

  Eggy, old and decrepit, snorts, octogenarian bravado and envy asserting: ‘She must’ve squeezed too hard.’ Yes, there it is, what explains Fast Eddy’s wounded pride. But Fast Eddy’s love of our waitress Moonface is pure, as the girl is a noble creature. Eggy’s hand begins its journey to his glass. Eventually, the glass secured, wine is consumed. Says Eggy, ‘Just trying to cheer you up. Effing hell.’ The old man would sow the wild oats he had failed to sow in past years long since dissolved in the wake his passage has left on the broad sea of life, the Ebenezer—his willie, his Priapus—now inert. One day, perhaps, Fast Eddy will declare to Moonface his love of her, and she will grant him the justice of his argument. He might have to see a doctor, his left ear shiny red, grown enormous.

  It did not augur much then, the scene described above. It came about early in my Traymorean existence. Congratulations are in order, I think. Not only have I managed to take root in the Traymore Rooms, I have survived its inhabitants: Eggy, Moonface, Dubois and Eleanor R, Mrs Petrova our live-in landlady and others. In the end, they did not see fit to turf me into the street. They had threatened to do so now and then.

  What has been more spectacular than spectacular failure, than the truths that did not quite endure, than the lies that all too often succeeded? I would put such questions to myself in the Blue Danube while filling up notebooks with my infernal chatter. I would observe the snow falling, how it settled on fur hats and tuques and caps; how a wind drove it against scarfed shoulders. I observed what, beyond the cold café window, had all the attributes of a dream: the afternoon commute, its sounds muffled. Though it has since changed, its dimensions, its floor-plan altered, the Blue Danube when I first knew it was not much more than a hole-in-the-wall. A few tables. A pair of coolers for keeping pastries semi-fresh and bottles of water and juices on the cool side of lukewarm. A tapestry I despised. The TV at ceiling level was usually switched off, the screen staring down at us a pallid eye. A small galley I never examined. A restroom off to its side. Potted plants came and went like literary experiments. Stacks of newspapers and magazines situated on a broad window sill. A hookah, so Dubois once said, commanded that window, its only reason to exist being to perplex passersby. Until a Slav took over management, the place had been a home away from home for Iranians. They consumed cow brains and sheeps’ balls, so Eggy insisted, and Dubois did not gainsay him. The owner went to visit family in Tehran and was never seen in these parts again.

  I believe, and you might agree: time is anything but linear, except perhaps when it comes to train schedules and the like. And yet, one might easily enough succumb to a memory or two while on the overnighter from Vienna to Venice. There you are, looking out the window under a dawn sky, brooding on the Italian landscape. And if you are not that child in your thoughts holding a sprig of meadow-clover to your nostrils; if you are not that wretch engaged in yet another miserable love affair, why then, you must be one of those Caesar fellows from a page of Tacitus. Here we go again, and though I am, so far as I know, in no train barreling along through two thousand years of time, I am back in the Blue Danube on the occasion of Fast Eddy’s adventure with a bird. There are three bottles of wine on the table, two of which are empty, one half full. I, Randall Q. Calhoun, in addition to Fast Eddy, Dubois and Eggy, am a regular here, the café but a short stumble of a return to the Traymore Rooms.

  Aphrodite’s Little Helpers

  At his table a leather-jacketed Slav is Lord Hades surveying his dreary underworld. His eyes evince mild contempt for us who have no idea as to how anything works, be it molecules attracting molecules, be it pay-offs in a dark lane. Moonface brings him his beer, she wearing a dark chemise under a coarse white shirt. Her countenance anxious, she had an attack earlier in the day, a fit. More physics, like those that confounded Fast Eddy in the body of a sparrow: she rubs her forehead where it banged against the loveseat in her Traymore digs. Well, sparrows in mythology carry the souls of the dead away. They are also Aphrodite’s little helpers, emblematic of both lustful and spiritual unions. There is Lesbia’s pet sparrow in the poem Catullus wrote, and it is known that small birds like sparrows and thrushes and such represented to the ancient Romans certain male body parts. But we are getting rather far afield here—

  And the snow out there keeps coming down, passersby bent to the wind. Dubois gives me a look. He is right: there is no hope for me. Eggy, raising an admonitory finger, points out: ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. There’s poetry for you.’ Moonface, pressing her hips against the edge of our table, offers me comprehending sympathy. She knows what an orphan poetry is. What colour are her eyes, today? Two pools of rainwater set in weathered marble.

  Fast Eddy still frowns, still suffers. I do not have the heart to rag him as Eggy had. Instead, I ask, ‘So how did the bird fare?’ ‘Hoo hoo,’ Eggy chimes. Fast Eddy glares. Then to Dubois I say, ‘The first crossbow was most likely a Chinese invention.’ He is incredulous: ‘Ar
e you serious?’ Moonface rolls her eyes up and to the side, a characteristic gesture, she a chameleon. She is appealing. She is sullen and feckless. It perplexes her that she, waitress and Latin scholar, has the power to charm a special category of men—half-baked intellectuals who distrust intellectuals, her jeans skin-tight, her soft boots streaked with salt. Eggy’s squint gaze is all over her and she surely knows it, now proud, now self-conscious, Eggy such a horror at times. And when I suggest that I knew Buffalo Bill’s great-granddaughter, Eggy interjects: ‘Why, did she squeeze too hard, too?’ ‘Don’t know,’ I answer, ‘but she was intense.’

  And then Dubois who, in his youth, hung around with Chrétien, asks, ‘What has this got to do with anything?’ The man knows his politics; but regarding life on the American plains, he is in over his head: all that nasty and brutish stuff of conquering space one Indian and one buffalo at a time. Moonface pretends she has no idea of the import of ‘squeezing too hard.’ ‘The rain in Spain,’ says Eggy, this West Virginia-born homunculus who seems to have been everywhere, he no sparrow such as accosted Fast Eddy, but a sparrow of a man.

  Thought-World

  How often in the Blue Danube I would pitch headlong into a thought-world perhaps peculiar to me, history as ineffable an item as consciousness explained by a specialist. What about Josephus the Jew, his Roman monicker Titus Flavius Josephus? History qua history does matter to this writing, as you will see. But say that at a time of weak political control in the American West, a man like Buffalo Bill Cody could pretty well do as he wished, polite society be damned. Could hunt and happily go on benders. Meditate on mass and energy. Could scalp Sioux braves and make theatre of it while his biographer inflates the Cody reputation with exaggerated accounts of derring-do, titillating the fantasies of the well-heeled of the east. Enough. Dubois, his blue eyes glittering, abstracted himself, hears my inaudible sigh. ‘There you go again,’ he says, ‘you’re somewhere else.’ No, nowhere else but here. And if I were to say I am a poet, it is easy enough to say. Say it once, it gets easier to say, and the rest of one’s transgressions will follow in their own sweet time without hindrance or hitch, the way greased, as it were, by the first calumny. And the ice has no sparkle and the snow is already tinkled on by dogs. As previously pointed out, but a few steps separate the Blue Danube from the Traymore Rooms where my brine-caked body from another life came to rest. To Mrs Petrova I pay rent, she eighty-some, eyesight and hearing sound. Born and raised in what had been Tsar Peter’s town, such heartache traces remain of her youthful beauty. How often I have waved to her in her street-level shop. How often I have pushed through a door, separate entrance. Here are the mailboxes and a radiator that gives off Saharan heat in a tiny foyer. Another door of dimpled and tinted glass, sheen of rose petal, fleurs-de-lis; and I climb the stairs to the carpeted hall that runs between the Traymorean apartments, three on each side. The wainscoting on the walls is probably bronze under the lavender-coloured paint, and it dates the building, this according to Dubois. How often I have unlocked the door of my digs and pretended I belong.

  Moonface

  How did Emma MacReady come to be Moonface? It is not even now clear to me, but Eggy is, no question, suspect in the matter. Moonface. She made a show of worrying for her men: Eggy, Dubois, her latest boyfriend of the hour, and yes, sometimes even me. And then, she could not give a toss for the lot of us. Of Fast Eddy who, so soon after I arrived on the scene, was to die of a diabetes-induced episode, Moonface said, ‘I wish he’d seen a doctor when he had the chance.’ I might have answered, ‘Could be I love you. The odds are, I don’t. As Brando said in Last Tango in Paris, men will worship at the altar of their John Hancocks. When people start talking life-affirmation, run for the hills. Now, what’s this about Fast Eddy?’

  She was right, of course, about our friend, but I can understand why he decided to give the doctors a miss. His world would become their world, no place in it for dalliance with Moonface. Once I thought her eyes were black; then I saw they were a golden brown. Russet has come to mind, russet against late autumn green. Virgilian.

  And almost Virgilian in his own right, another regular—Blind Musician—would occupy a corner of the Blue Danube and get on his high horse about cigarette smoke. He was always recently returned from one of those tours by which Yukoners or North Saskatchewanites receive their cultural upgrade. Brahms and Delius. I would have the pleasure of women with parasols, men in pin-stripes doffing straw boaters as I looked upon Blind Musician who had not that pleasure; who did not like me; who did not like people, period. Well, would that a bear of the territories had got him. The Slav would continue to survey his Dis, his massive brow meditative, though five will get you ten he really was a thug involved in the drug trade. Once a poem of mine was accepted by a cheesy journal. Unusual. Portending what? I said as much to Moonface, her voice a rising note as she responded, ‘Cool.’ Infuriating. Her brows had gotten extra dark, the mascara on her lashes clumsily applied. In my span of years I had passed from the company of sophisticated women, and how can I put it kindly, to the allure of a girl who was far from having accomplished accord with her body. Now she was fatal; now she was as ordinary as a flash of sparrow feathers in alarmed flight.

  On Being Unique

  It is a question that has been plaguing me of late: are there ordinary readers? Are we not all of us in our waking lives unique, as most spiritual systems tell us; as bank ads tell us; as your army recruiting officer might have told you? Your book club, no less? Hear yourself described as unique and know you are being targeted by market forces. I ask because the question following has been put to me (and perhaps it was Dubois, that rotter, who put it to me): ‘What ordinary reader would trouble himself with this writing of yours? You can’t even decide where your story begins.’ It is true: I cannot decide. I am not even certain where I begin. The day I first drew breath outside my mother’s womb? That day that probability dozed off, and I scored a touchdown? The moment I lost, as it is vulgarly said, my cherry? Some fatal hour when the government began to complicate my life? How about when I defied my father and thereafter was stuck with the fact I am not entirely devoid of backbone? One might say I was not a shell of a man when I moved into the Traymore, but I was getting there, me and my manuscripts of musings. I refer to them as Calhoun’s Follies because, in all likelihood, they confuse a great deal more than they clarify. Who is this Calhoun? Is this me—so flighty in mind? So, at bottom, insincere? No, I am not insincere. I am nothing if not painfully sincere, even when I am most glib and flippant. The age wants a stand-up guy. There is not going to be any stand-up guy. The age wants its lies and adores its perversions. Perhaps, you have your own ideas as to what the age wants. This is as it should be. Ah, electric cars. Guilt-free sex. A Perfect President. All the pleasures without the pain. God without religion.

  For a while there, distant wars, profligacy, and Eggy’s old age were to be my literary themes. Love, too, if you choose to believe that love conquers all. Now, I cannot say. If I remain unable to find traction by way of a beginning to the tale I have to tell, how can I presume to speak of themes? Even so, I expect showers of rose petals, roars of acclamation to greet my prowess, come the moment when I will eventually extract order from chaos. I expect horses, chariots, even elephants, barbarians bent under the weight of heavy chains, the vulgar masses jeering at them, to honour my triumph. I expect lounging temple whores and grinning gods to accord me a thumb’s up. I expect celebrities to drolly remark on what will have been my freakish rise to celebrity status. Are we so removed from the splendour of processions?

  So then, patience. You will get to know, in time, so far as any of us can ever know anyone, Traymoreans, as well as Fast Eddy. You will learn how I came to discover the true colour of Moonface’s eyes. You will hear of the pseudo-Traymoreans, the Lamonts and Osgoode; of future residents such as Marjerie Prentiss, she and her Cleopatra bangs and knobbly toes and militant free will. There are non-Traymoreans to consider. The names come fast and furious.
How I deferred to Gareth Howard’s moral authority even as I joshed him, the quality of my pessimism dubious to him. Vera Klopstock, amiable predator, married, is an old part of my life. How I had nothing to say, really, to Minnie Dreier. How I always have plenty to say to Bly, he who has the cloven hooves of the public intellectual. How I would, now and then, post letters to a dead man. How there was Echo, and how she faded. You will come across bells and whistles such as my notebooks of musings spawned, eccentric turns of mind that conform to no rational purpose, none that will rid the world of what ails it or retrieve the natural order from extinction. What, in any case, is the natural order? Moonface may or may not throw light on the matter. I will invoke the spirit of Sally McCabe, cheerleader of my high school days who, in her spirit-guise, was, on occasion, a structuralist. ‘Structure? Chronology? Subject matter? Didn’t you learn anything?’ She will dock me points for my latter-day Neo-Platonism, one all too often hung-over. She will tickle my chin as I make mention of the screed of Eunapius of Sardis against chronology, yes, as if Socrates were only wise in the dry season. And were I to say ‘Iraq and quagmire’, she would answer, ‘You expect me to explain why?’

  Evening, and in the upper-storey hall of the Traymore Rooms where a window looks out on brick edifices, leafless maples and back lanes, I will watch the new snow coat stale deposits of the same banked against fences, each drift now a new-minted sculpture, a white dune. My name is Calhoun, Randall Q. But have we not done this, already?