The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Errant Memory

  So many years ago, after having left the U.S., I departed British Columbia for this eastern province, for this island city in which I have skipped like a stone from one lodging to another. I flitted from affair to affair, disillusioning women as well as myself. I live among the generalities that inhabit my mind like a junkman’s oddments; I lie about in my digs, listening to symphonies. And memory, dragging its lame foot, is hauled along by that music. Just now, I recall making love to one woman in particular. We managed what we could in the broom closet of her art gallery, the mops helping to render some discretion to our fervour, like so many postillions securing privacy while newlyweds eyeballed the artwork, looking for that something which would complement their furniture. (Soon after, the gallery closed for lack of sales, and the woman absconded, owing her artists.) What does any of this mean? Good fun, yes, but perhaps we are not moral creatures? In the morning, Mrs Petrova will clear the snow away from her shop downstairs and the effort will not faze her in the slightest, a curl the colour of burnt cinder loose on her forehead. When did I write the words that follow? Moonface, my immediate neighbour in the adjoining apartment, is not quite sleekly full value for her self-empowerment, but she is getting there.

  No, there is no use pretending that the image of Moonface, lying about in her pajamas, committing Traymoreans to her diary pages (the act of which distracts her from the classics she reads at university), did not add a certain frisson to my capacity for lust. There is no use pretending that Eggy will not start early on his wine intake. Eleanor R shall whip something up in her kitchen or go out in the world and scratch an itch. Dubois shall pound his keyboard, besotted with his mind, his neck craned, his glittering blue eyes spooning at the computer screen. He will calculate that things will change not necessarily for the better but to the benefit of some. It is what we knew as history. Will the future offer us plutocracy light? Economic populism? Theocratic state? The slow burn of decline and fall? Comedy jamborees? If you must know, I direct you to Dubois. I, too, took to heart the professed ideals of the Great Society. Well, almost, I a skeptic counselled in my mother’s womb—she who had not the sweetness and light of, say, a giggling starlet, my skepticism ratified by my father’s reptilian brilliance. Fat lot of good it has done me, going around appalled.

  Calhoun’s Military Service

  Momentous decisions are sometimes spur of the moment. Life is random except when it is not. There was a war in Asia; I went north. I opted out of military service, not a moral agent as such; rather I was a blind particle looking to collide with its fate. I claimed to understand what I did not understand, the year 1968, chasms in the national fabric both widening and deepening. My parents, most nominal of Christians, rendered unto Caesar. Of that period in my life, a great deal is now mercifully hazy. I recall the pre-induction physical. Along with my fellow cannon fodder, I was poked, prodded and otherwise examined like so much beef. If, for some, this exercise christened their love of country, I only got cold feet. The historian Tacitus would have sympathized with the demands of the state. He would have had little good to say of me; and he would have concurred that the war was pointless. Much in life is pointless for all that there are the campaigns of the hour: military incursions, new fruit drinks, corporate raiding, self-promotional stunts. Political progressives would arrange my thoughts to suit their pleasures, the reactionaries, likewise. Not much remains of any middle ground, and what remains is a sinkhole for makeshift consciences. Cynic, I please myself.

  In Vancouver, B.C., a city double-parked by the sea, I married for complicated reasons, citizenship one of them. I could not hold down a job; I was all thumbs at the game of snooker. We divorced in short order, she and I; and I went off to Europe and further complicated myself. She threw herself out a window, and I must not think it had anything to do with me.

  It is the old story of one’s demons. They might be but garden variety demons, but even so, mine in perpetual Mardi Gras mode, I was, and I remain, a walking festival of them. I certainly do have pedigree of a modest sort, to wit, that I, the father of no one so far as I know, the son of Edna née Avesbury, socialite of minor magnitude, and Harry P for Prince Calhoun, chemical engineer and something of a Genghis Khan cum Scrooge when it comes to rapine and bank balances, am the spawn of an understanding. It does not deny the possibility of love, God, redemption and other intangibles; just that such concerns are better left to other people. The less said about my parents, the better, I in my 6th decade. If we are not moral creatures, I, for one, have endeavoured not to hurt anyone. A spectre in my mind that I name Boffo the Clown holds his belly and guffaws. Of course, it was not always the case that I was so high-minded; and one always hurts some unsuspecting soul simply by drawing breath. Generally, sex was the weapon; and when one had been on the receiving end, it sometimes afforded one a glimmer of the consequences. To be sure, I have indulged my share of delusions, among them the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds; that evil is a treatable condition; that America is blessed, her democracy a state of grace. Bent backs and the pieties of whores built the country. I would rather believe that than believe social justice had anything to do with it. The lone prairee demanded improvisational skills. So when I stand on a street corner and smoke a cigarette, my middle finger in full index position, what you will see is not the athlete I was, however brief that career, but an aging boulevardier in American tweed, a kind of patchwork Main Street of an aesthetic sunset. I have had peculiar friends.

  Jack Swain

  Jack Swain was one of these peculiar friends. His mother, an Albertan, rolled cigarettes with one hand, even on horseback and in a wind. The father, Idaho born, knocked around with a toolbox. So that it was in Palo Alto where Jack, in his senior year, quarterbacked the high school football team. He resolved to write poetry, finishing up university in Vancouver, B.C. He went on to teach, to drink liberally and wench like a fool; he published once and never again. Too other-worldly for his Marxist-Leninist colleagues, for Billy Bly who described the Jack Swain verses as limpid and of no use to the working man, Jack came to spend his last years in Sicily, as far away from this continent as he could manage, for no other reason than that he could not stomach an actor become Commander-in-chief, first among equals. If Bly was the cool professional, Jack’s sense of injustice was heartfelt. Even so, I thought the Sicilian idyll extreme. But to the memory of the man dead now these twenty years, I say, ‘Jack, I’m afraid the Fat Lady still sings. Can you hear her, you know, the one who drove you around the bend?’

  Jack was partial to plump women, yes; but that one, that porker, as she bellowed from sea to shining sea under spacious skies of onerous greatness, was more than a lover boy and a self-deprecating bard could bear. To put it vulgarly, and he did put it vulgarly, ram a fist up an intimate part of her anatomy and she would never notice, keeper of the American flame, the Eternal Comeback. When America invaded Iraq, do you not suppose she invaded herself?

  And you, Gareth Howard, deceased, would you prefer I forget these initials stabs at an accounting of some sort? Your mother and father, both Canucks, were reinforced by seven generations of colonial circumspection. For all that, it was in the U.S. where we first met and promptly got drunk on some vile muscatel, having just lost each our ripe cherries. You were a prospective journalist and a polymath. You were soon to pass through your first gateway to hell—there in Asia.

  These lugubrious musings on the nature of time—Yes but, it snows as if it has never snowed before. It may never snow again. The white stuff comes sideways out of the wind. Plastered to awning and tree branch and parked car, to a jumbo-sized Christmas wreath affixed still to a lamp pole, it muffles tires and human tread. Gar, I have been to Rome and back in the past weeks but you could care less. ‘Oh?’ you would say like a man who had been there many times, ‘how was the old girl?’

  Smoking Towers

  I did not know, once I had transferred myself to the Traymore Rooms and gotten to know its residents
some, that I would take to writing them letters, slipping the missives under their respective doors. I had always written voluminous mail to old friends and longtime enemies; but I suppose Gar, Vera, Bly and Minnie—to name a few friends and enemies—were too used to me and my wiles for me to pull any wool over their eyes, as when I might claim I had, at last, seen the light. They certainly did not believe, for instance, that I was any genius. Just prior to taking up Traymorean life, I sat there in the basement suite I was about to vacate, my belongings packed, waiting for Reginald and his van. I was tired and down at heart and confused, a more than middle-aged man of no accomplishments, chary of principles, bedeviled by the smoking towers of an America I had only known by way of TV screens for the better part of my adult life.

  I am caustic in regards to the notion that America is always able to reinvent herself. ‘Out of what?’ I ask. Hopes and dreams, as ever, for which someone will pay. I console myself Montreal is an old city, older than most cities on this continent. I trust nothing new.

  Introductions All Around

  It was Robert Dubois, impossibly handsome and rather vain, who introduced me to Traymorean society. On the following afternoon after my arrival, he knocked on my door, told me to get my coat, and he would treat me to a glass of wine at a nearby café. He would brook no refusal. Lucille Lamont, sticking her head through her door, made note of this invitation, and I could not be sure, but it seemed to me she scowled. The look in my new friend’s eyes instructed me to pay her no mind, those glittering blue eyes companionable. ‘We’re all pretty friendly here,’ Dubois said, ‘and we’re friendly there, too, in the Blue Danube.’ He gave me a hand to shake, a somewhat worn attaché case in his other. On his head was slopped an outlandish tuque, creamy white with red stripes. He had the air of a man who had enjoyed modest success in life and was comfortable with his lot. I detest smugness. ‘Well,’ said Dubois, ‘what are we waiting for?’ I shrugged my assent to the man’s proposal. I grabbed a coat and let myself be led down the Traymore stairs and out the door and to the corner where the Blue Danube was, a small café beneath some seedy-looking apartments where Moonface was pleased to serve us. Arthur Eglinton, wizened old runt of man whom Traymoreans affectionately called Eggy, had been awaiting our company with some impatience. Dubois having said that he had brought the new guy in for interrogation, Eggy hoo-hooed in my direction and said, ‘How do you do?’ And then he asked, ‘And what do you do?’ ‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘Well, that’s something,’ Eggy replied. ‘Come on, now,’ said Dubois, ‘you must do something.’ ‘The nothing I do,’ I responded, ‘is to write verse. Oh, I read a little but mostly I sit around and brood.’ ‘I’m a reader, too,’ Eggy volunteered, ‘but brooding—that’s too much heavy-lifting for me. Verse, you say? Problematic.’ He reached to pinch Moonface’s bum and missed. I thought perhaps something had moved in her eyes at my mention of the fact that I wrote, but I could have been mistaken.

  Perhaps the wine went straightaway to my head; before long I blurted out a compressed life history, how I played football in high school—a depressing experience; how I left the States for Canada, knocked about the various provinces and Europe, as well; knocked about this island city; and in conclusion, could not make sense of myself. ‘Welcome to the club,’ Eggy laughed, not unkindly. ‘It is what life’s for—to come to know there’s no sense to be made. The rain in Spain and all that.’ ‘Yes, it’s all pointless,’ Moonface pitched in with exaggerated solemnity, the timbre of her voice a little thin but musical. The look on Dubois’s face said that, on the contrary, life has a point. ‘I beg to differ,’ he said. ‘Beg all you want,’ said Eggy, ‘but it won’t do you much good. Moonface, I can see the bottom of this glass.’ She rolled her eyes upward and to the side as if in exasperation, and I could see she was touchingly oblivious to her charms. She replenished Eggy’s glass. Dubois advised us, ‘Eleanor should show up soon. She’s one of your neighbours, too, Randall.’ ‘Hell of a woman,’ said Eggy, ‘but a trifle argumentative for my taste. Of course, the Lamont woman takes the cake in that department.’ ‘You just want women reduced to the level of slaves,’ said Moonface. ‘But of course,’ said Eggy, ‘the more the merrier. Hoo hoo.’

  Eleanor’s entrance broke up this exchange. ‘Ah, the new Traymorean,’ said Eleanor R, she sizing me up as she occupied a chair, setting three grocery bags on the floor, supper, so she explained. Dubois grunted. Evidently, Dubois and Eleanor were an item. She was not bad looking, on the plump side with frosted curls, her eyes intelligent. I read in them that, though she was no bully (as was Lucille Lamont, most likely), she was used to getting her own way. Here was a woman who might have spun Jack Swain around. ‘Well,’ she said to Moonface with a startling sharpness of tone, ‘do I get a glass or do I have to fill out an application form for one?’ An eclipse of sorts darkened the waitress’s pale visage, her pleasant existence called into question.

  A Prettier Truth

  Perhaps, at bottom, everything is sex; but if so it is an ugly truth for an ugly world. I prefer a prettier truth, one infinitely riskier to my well-being: that there is something noble circulating in the Moonface brain.

  She often began her day with Eggy, taking coffee with him in his rooms. What could they possibly talk about? There was certainly nothing noble in his disintegrating sack of a brain. Despite all his reading, he was interested, really, in nothing but wine and Moonface’s bosom, of which he would get the full measure before he died. Moonface, he said, had promised him this. She did not mind he would try and grope her. I doubted that she did not mind. ‘However,’ so she let me know, ‘I’m too quick for him. He treats me to dinner once a week. He considers you a rival, an interloper on his privileges. He wishes the best for me and I really do believe he means it.’

  I would slip notes under her door. They amounted to no more than idle chatter. Dear Moonface, trees aflame. Tulips in their tulip rows. Is the face of spring a young woman glad-footing around some maypole? Is it an old man with salty tears? Listening to Gianni Schicchi just now. The wise dude prepares for the fact he’s never prepared. Wings it. Shall we meet? You tell me. Under your door.—RQC

  I would tell her about my Vancouver life, how I barely got by. How I married and how my father deemed the woman unsuitable. He cut my subsidies. Difficulties. The inevitable divorce. Her suicide that I must not think had anything to do with me. Reinstatement in father’s books. The rain, the mist, the cavernous beer parlours. Loggers, miners, prospectors some of whom quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley for the price of a beer. “The Poet wandering on, through Arabic and Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste”. The bird cacklings of Chinese matriarchs. The tribes down from their islands, each Indian locked away in his or her inner being. The half-savage daughters of the well-to-do. It might surprise you how we carried on: moonlit back roads up the mountainous coast. Bottomless whiskey flask. I would tell her Montreal is a cosmopolitan burg of cosmopolitan stalwarts, Francophobes sniffing, Anglophobes hauling English trash off to some landfill. I would tell her that Virgil, whose poetry was the object of her Latin studies, had been on a suicide mission. He meant to please Caesar but would stay true to his dark vision of what was shaping up. Some sickness got him, yes, but he died of the book.

  Mostly though, I would, by way of a note, just invite her out. She almost always wore black denims and red sneakers, her hair done up in a ponytail, her shoulders hunched. I lacked the courage to steal a kiss. Once in a while she would give me a look. It said: ‘I know what you’re thinking. I won’t think anything bad of you but I won’t think anything good either. Poor man.’ She had me over a barrel of some sort.

  ‘Guess Who?’

  Eleanor liked to talk sex and politics. Mid-morning, and I would put aside my notebooks in good, healthy, writerly disgust, and gravitate up a carpeted hall in the salacious light of early spring to her digs, the good woman greeting me, pompadoured. Often, she wore summer frocks. She, on the plump side, was supple and devastating. It would seem she enjoyed my company fo
r all that I wondered what it had to do with me in the particular; just that I was male and could carry a conversation. Was Dubois so vain he was incapable of jealousy? Did he harbour secret torments, her body welcoming every sailor? What sort of arrangement had they fashioned from a messy froth of desire and trust? She would finger the spit valve of her trombone as I held forth. She would blow through it now and then as if to caution I was on shaky ground when it came to my reminiscences of Sally McCabe, who in high school allowed me to steal a kiss for which I had paid a heavy price. ‘Goddess?’ Eleanor queried. ‘Goddess,’ I affirmed, ‘prime mover and shaker in the operations of the American mind such as manifest in every election cycle.’ ‘Oh, we’re half Americans, anyway,’ Eleanor said, half-relenting, ‘Bob and I. Spent half our lives in Florida.’ Bread was baking in the oven. The kitchen was all too often a disaster, Eleanor grimacing, ‘It’ll take me all day to clean up the aftermath.’ It was very odd then, how she rose once and stood behind my chair, clapped her warm hands to my eyes and said, ‘Guess who?’ Her perfume overwhelming my thoughts, I went along with her caper, in any case, and then she backed off; and it was as if she sprang away, like a wrestler breaking a clinch and looking for a new hold. ‘What you call goddesses,’ said Eleanor, ‘are made of clay. Teases and sluts. I was one of those, I don’t mind telling you.’ I pretended to be shocked. ‘But if Bob,’ she continued, ‘were to start getting extracurricular, I’d break his kneecaps.’ ‘I bet you would,’ I said out of respect.

  I wrote Eleanor notes, too, and slipped them under her door. I’ll be there or I’ll be square. By the way, I do want to hear out this notion of yours that Lucille L is a murderess. Really? How so?—RQC