The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  And then there was the night Moonface and I got back late from an evening out. It seemed Eggy had had a stroke and there was a commotion of Traymoreans and paramedics in the hall. The look on Eleanor’s face wondered if Moonface and I were lovers. The look on mine suggested otherwise, and what is more, I was keeping a faith so obscure it was not worth explicating the matter, no, not to anyone; not even to a good woman who would serve me coffee and biscuits five days out of seven and go where I went in my conversational spacewalks. I was flattered, of course, that she made a pass at me. I was relieved, too, that Dubois would never know. I was taking my celibacy seriously, though a woman like Eleanor who played the trombone and baked cherry cobbler was not to be lightly denied. Every town in America has its Sally McCabe. That she was ageless, wise, cruel, free of doubt and self-reproach. I would say to Eleanor, ‘This creature wandered to this continent on a Phoenician barge. I’ve told you already how, in the Utah desert, she took up with Coop and his pale red crew cut hair. They’d ride around in his pale blue Chrysler car. They’d listen to “Cathy’s Clown”. To “Teen Angel”. “North to Alaska”. “Sixteen Tons”. “The Monster Mash” Me, I gummed up the works. Wrote poems to her. This made everyone nervous. And the more I was mocked the more I wrote, and it pleased her. I caught a football for her I wasn’t supposed to catch. I was only following my own nature. Everyone around me, true to their natures, made me pay for my presumptions. Perhaps Sally McCabe caused Mr Jakes, our history teacher, to blow out his brains, who knows, proving the power of myth over the historically-minded mind, the petty materialist? Would I have lived another year if my father hadn’t been transferred out of that hell-hole of a state? Now, as for your idea that we form a salon and have weekly get-togethers either here in your kitchen or in the Blue Danube, I’ll think on it. I’m not at the moment keen.’ And Eleanor grinned, saying, ‘Mr Calhoun, you’re one of a kind. Maybe with you I’m out of my league.’ Oh no, I would protest. If anything, it was the other way around.

  Bats

  And I slipped notes for Dubois under his door, the fact of which bemused him. ‘Randall,’ he said to me, one spring afternoon in the Blue Danube, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ Another voice: ‘Yes, what’s with all these notes, lately? And why haven’t I been getting any?’ That voice accusing me—was Eggy in his 8th decade, sensing treachery everywhere. ‘Why nothing, Bob,’ I answered Dubois, ‘it’s just that I know you think me extreme in my views. I applaud that you retain your faith in the innate good sense of the American people. It’s a faith I lack.’ ‘As much as I hate to say it, I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said Eggy, raising his glass to me, a collegial but wary gesture. A table of Slavs on the other side of the café regarded us with some derision. ‘Bob,’ I continued, alluding to previous business between us, his invitation to have me come and drink with him, ‘your request is under consideration. My Internal Review Board is certainly taking it seriously. Whiskey? Enlightened discourse? Tempting. It’s just that I’ve become such an autodidact of late I don’t believe I can play the scholar and speak dispassionately on Caesar’s lost legions, let alone current events. Then, too, knowing you, you’ll wish to expatiate on gravity and anti-gravity, on Jesuits, on Mayan numbers while I struggle with the sum of my parts and the whole seems altogether short-changed. Is this a fair assessment of your druthers? And you, Eggy, how is it you’re so besotted with My Fair Lady when you are, as you put it, the scion of a switchman and a roadhouse Jezebel? Why not Richard III? Whence the high Tory? Or is it just that we’re out of earshot here of the Reveres and the Thomas Paines and Tinpan Alley?’ ‘You,’ said Eggy, ‘are going to take some getting used to. You do have a peculiar way of talking. Well, are you boffing Moonface? Because if you’re boffing Moonface, I might have something to say on the matter.’ ‘Eggy, Eggy,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ ‘I’ll bet,’ said Dubois, much entertained.

  Bob, I enjoyed the other evening immensely, the warm evening, the bats flitting between the maples, the whiskey. Especially the latter. Oh yes, and the talk, you attempting to convert me to materialism and me letting you know I’m 99.9% there, just that I reserve the last one-tenth of it all as a means of keeping the house honest, though the house always wins. Does this sum up my spiritual position? And when Eleanor joined us and let out one great bleat of her trombone and then apologized to the world at large, I thought to myself life’s worth living and it’s good, on occasion, to kid around. I’ll endeavour to reciprocate. But entre nous, I’m not all that keen on her plot to organize a salon.—RQC

  For the Record

  Twice in the course of a year, Eleanor will have come across corpses: Marcel Lamont, and soon, Edward Sanders aka Fast Eddy. Whom she will find in pantyhose with a grimace on his face. Here is the Keats he was reading: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. ‘Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?’

  §

  Book II—Follies Ho!

  Calhoun’s Follies I

  —I have settled down somewhat in the Traymore Rooms. I write a little every day, if diffidently. I do not expect I will add to the sum of human knowledge. I do not expect I will entertain that much. It is always a wilderness for others, pleasing oneself. But were I to write up this place, were I to present a stage set to the world at large of unassuming rebels and cultists, who among my characters could best plead our case? Eggy with his death-is-just-over-the-horizon-for-me eyes? Moonface keeping a schoolgirl’s diary?

  Was up at five to catch the fabled worm. Grabbed empty air, the thought of my mortality just then a depressing thought. I laid down on the couch, switched on the TV, heard out a televangelist. ‘Believe you me,’ he chortled, ‘when Christ comes, you will know it.’ He was wearing a blue suit with a pink tie and silver clasp, an American flag pin affixed to his lapel. I pictured swarms of angels darkening the sun in advance of judgment. I switched off the TV. Sometime later, and I was, perhaps, in a sort of yogic trance as I brewed coffee and smelled toast and the homemade marmalade of Eleanor R that she foisted on me. Or perhaps I managed to hypnotize myself, turning the pages of my notebook, each page of it a sail otherwise becalmed, but each a testament to offenses against some tut-tutting Poseidon of a critic. In other words, in my endeavour to make sense of things, I had gotten to the bottom of exactly nothing.

  The name Lucille Lamont was scrawled on one of those pages. Question marks followed. Was she, on that page, seeking intellectual justification for the murder of her husband? ‘Evolutionary opportunism,’ I imagined she said of a force she thought she could enlist to her advantage. I chose not to respond; she might have bested me in a quarrel. How does one rebut evolutionary drift? All the machete work I would have to do, hacking through the lost byways of God and free will and any number of related considerations. Was not up for it. Nor did I care to reassemble the fallen down pieces of the old patriarchal hegemony, if for no other reason than that one cannot turn back the clock. Still, it had been a power with which one could argue, however unsuccessfully; it is all that one can ask of power—that it listen. Well, it usually does not unless its own interests are involved. Lucille Lamont, no feminista, certainly no ballerina, no drawing card for some independent production company, no cutting edge of a turning tide, was just another broker of the everyday and the humdrum, petty cruelties her currency (as they are for you and me), the new pieties and platitudes of the hour hers to massage as she saw fit. I went for a walk.

  Oh, but it was a glorious day, indeed. The early weeks of Traymorean existence had made spring seem a promise. Then summer and terrasses and flirtations. Now autumn. Now and then glimpses of Moonface passing beneath the yellow leaves of maple boughs, of a girl steeped in ancient verses. Yes, even as she was fatally of her time, as stretched and consequently frayed as a rag pulled at by the contending forces of a blank politeness and a rage she barely suspected her body harboured. Processions might prance and reverence gods; oracles might sing and pronounce, but she in her black denims and red sneakers was h
unched at the shoulders and non-committal, the world of ancient verses less an injunction against our stale hypocrisies and more a theme park. More depressing than any thought of my mortality was to know I could do nothing for her, could shine no light on various confusions of intellect, the old benedictions and accidents of lust discredited. And even if this were not it at all, I was simply too long in the tooth for this young woman. It had been one thing to depart the Old World for the New; now it was a weary, fed-up new world; and every day dawning was already some bleached skull of an animated cartoon’s desert floor. So it seemed. Glorious day, indeed.

  To be sure, Lucille Lamont, as we all are, was guilty in her thoughts and at one with her urges. But could she be charged with a deed born of a plan? A method, not immediately apparent to her, was always right in front of her nose. Did she hate her husband so much? Was it the way he chewed his food? His smell? His snoring? Perhaps it is too easy, throwing the word hate around. Why not pity? Pity is an emotion that attracts its own dark arts. My exposure to her was limited to chance meetings in the Traymore hall. To the hello’s, the how are you’s. To, well, things are not bad but I have seen better. A tinge of whine in an otherwise all-knowing tone of voice—

  We were trying to have it too many ways. Always in America the trumpets and cavalry of the triumph and the escape clause. A coffee machine in the window of a specialty store stopped me in my tracks. It was a beautiful machine shining with a bronze burnish. I would buy it just to have it for its own sake; that I might actually use it was another matter. Here was my materialism and my spiritual side. I stood there, admiring spigots and valves. What had Pompeii that could compare to this? But could Caesar have been a mystic by virtue of the fact Rome had no machines (siege engines excepted) and slaves did the work? A smartly-dressed woman was now beside me, inspecting the object. ‘It’s quite the thing,’ I ventured to say. The look she shot me suggested I had just invaded her space.

  Returned from my walk, and no more the wiser for it, I sit here performing the same old lustral rites, marking boundaries with words; I kid myself I am breaking ground. A bowl of orange slices, banana. Yellow foolscap, gray pen; the rolling tobacco, the amaretto. How precious, itemizing objects on a desk, itself a tawdry piece of furniture not Regency. A contemporary symphony, the music of which is not easy listening, produces an image in my mind of a heavy crock. Tipped on end, it allows so many yellow demons to stream out that had been pent up. It is as if they skitter now through some citrus grove such as I saw once in Sicily, the almond trees in blossom; the sea sparkling all the way to Africa, the island once as lusted after as was California. Geo-politics 101 is Fate. Eggy, whom I saw earlier in the hall, went on about Moonface, and how he expected to get the measure of her bosom.

  —My first impression of Lucille Lamont was not favourable, she bored, clever, disputatious. Her idea of flirtation was Stalinist. I could not imagine her in flattering dress, her attire aggressively drab and shapeless; and yet, clearly and unaccountably so, she wished to be thought of as fetching. Yes, and given her boasting as to what a high roller she once had been, a winner and not a loser, why then had she married Marcel, good sport but self-destructive by the looks of it? That these thoughts enter my head at all give me pause, more reason to despair of myself for giving those thoughts the time of day. Is there more to add to them without resorting to damnable ologies, those articles of faith which claim to know why people gravitate to people who can do them no good?

  Dubois, Eggy and I would discuss the war, afternoons in the Blue Danube. Well, sometimes we did, so as to fill in lulls in the conversation that, on occasion, arose, Eggy losing his train of thought. ‘Hoo hoo,’ he might say, ‘I’ve mislaid my wits.’ Moonface listened in now and then. She would only look puzzled as we pronounced on this and that, our grasp of current events coloured by our view of previous debacles that had transpired before she was born. If the war in Iraq was a staple of Traymorean discourse, I did not wish to know Lucille’s point of view. I assumed it was a liberal point of view, but I could have been wrong. One evening, I heard through the walls of the Traymore, a Lamont shouting match in progress. There was mention of Graham Greene the famous novelist. A pair of drunken voices, one hissing, slurring heavily (Lucille); one in full-throated contempt of the lack of true sensibility anywhere (Marcel). I am sorry to report that, perhaps, Lucille had some justification for describing the writer as a muddleheaded mystic. Marcel argued otherwise, though I could not make out his every word. Just that Mr Greene had divined the human soul. And that was that. Then silence. Then, you gin-soaked Catholic stooge. Then, up yours. Then, worse, as Lucille was likened to an intimate part of her anatomy, and something made of glass was smashed.

  There is no causal connection between the war and the death of Marcel Lamont; between the war and a belief by the police that Marcel’s death was the result of ‘misadventure’; between the war and the fact Sinatra might now sing: ‘It’s witchcraft, crazy witchcraft’. There is no causal connection between the war and the belief ordinary people have that this world is the best of all possible worlds, and they may well be right, just that they are not. History the tale of unfolding progress, surely evil comes along for the ride, moral outrage the luxury, spinnaker, the cherry on the cream. If Lucille had not set a trap for Marcel, gin the bait, she did not seem all that eager to dispel our suspicions.

  —And so, in March, I moved to the Traymore. April had hardly come around, and Marcel Lamont was dead. Moonface and I converse. Often I drop in on Eleanor R. Sex is no mystery for her; it is physio. Eggy is quite the character, Dubois another egotist of conventional depths. Which is to say he assumes we live in the best of all possible worlds as there is no other. None. Of course, one may imagine worlds. One may deduce their possible existences by way of mathematical formulations. ‘Bonjour, monsieur, ça va bien? Shall we talk red-shift stars? Iraq is nothing. No, really, it’s nothing.’

  And so, on a moving day, I had the intention to do something serious with my life. Ah, creative non-compliance. I knew instantly, as soon as I saw her in the hall with her copy of Virgil’s Eclogues, that I was going to allow Moonface to distract me from my grand purposes. Just the sight of that book told me I was a fraud in any case. And was Lucille, in her own way, playing a similar game of non-compliance to the prevailing orders, Marcel her proof of sincerity, and she had the courage to expend him?

  Evil is sometimes cause and always a consequence. The yellow wasps of September dart about in the deep peace of a late summer afternoon. Sparrows and squirrels lark about as if a life and death struggle were just that—a lark. So many middle-aged women in the streets seem so tired. If men can always plead their maleness, what can women plead? Is not Lucille Lamont entitled to her excuses? But she never looked tired, and I do not imagine she does now. Heavy of body, Lucille Lamont is as empty of soul as a hot air balloon.

  But suppose Marcel had been trying to dry out, as it were, and get a grip on his life, get out from under? He had, in fact, checked into a clinic before I showed up at the Traymore as a raw recruit. Suppose Lucille, at first all for it, realized she could have none of it? Who could she then despise if, in fact, she did despise an innocent or a Marcel who, at times, was brutal to her; but who gave one and all the benefit of his doubt; who liked his sailboat, his booze and hearty laughter? Life is random except when it is not.

  I have been much put out by Marcel’s death; it is not because the man meant anything to me. It is just that his demise swamps me with a glut of Lucille Lamont thoughts. Have not written anything worth a damn. (To Charlottetown: infinitive bespeaking a Canadian jig.) Lack of knowledge. Lassitude. As Bly would say: amateur.

  —It is quiet in the Blue Danube. Moonface sits, turned sideways on her chair, one leg slung over the other, her torso square with the book she reads. Her left hand is flush to the table, her right hand resting on top of it, bony elbows suspended in space. I cannot claim for her any elegance of body but the length of her thigh is terribly elegant, suggesting p
ower and grace and promise beyond the scope of words. It almost seems that her lips move as she reads the Latin of Publius Vergilius Maro, as she employs skills I have long since lost, I now unable to coax latinities into accordance with English sense. Yes, she is having at the Eclogues, some lines of which render Scylla and powerful whirlpools and frightened mariners, her lips parted, she fully focused. She is no innocent, but she has much to learn. My eyes lock on a tapestry tacked to the wall, one depicting a snowy alpine scene. It speaks of no perils; there is in it none of life’s chanciness. Demented landlocked item. As if it would sell more bratwurst and schnitzel to the Slavs who meet here, to whom I am indifferent. I cannot tell myself why this should be. They seem too comfortable with their uprooted lives, and smug. In walks Eggy, or rather he totters through the door with his cane. ‘Wine,’ he says to Moonface, ‘toot dey sweet.’ I rate a nod as he says, ‘Oh, you here?’

  Eggy is in a reminiscing mood. He starts up, saying, ‘A few years back, I and My Fair Lady, why, we took a long drive. I footed all our expenses. I didn’t expect to get to first base with her, but we did manage to raise Kamarouska, a village, you know, on the St Lawrence. In Kamarouska a kiss and a thought for Algonquins. Thereafter, it was New Brunswick, lobster tail and clergy in a village by the sea near the state of Maine. My Fair Lady thought herself a bluestocking of certain Scots forerunners, and Montcalm threw the battle, as I always say. Hoo hoo.’ So much for Eggy’s reminiscence. I look at Moonface and she looks at me, her look impish. Eggy promptly falls asleep, his chin having raised his chest. Would Virgil have understood the plight of the Micmacs? My best guess is in the affirmative. I leave Moonface to the old man. It is as if I leave them to some remote island of harsh winters, just that—between an old man and a young woman—there is no hope of regenerating the tribe.