The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts
Page 4
—There are tides, human migrations, the consequent spawn. Evil? It is a game of charades for the blind, the attempt to posit it ontologically. If there is no such thing as evil, there are no moral creatures, only those migratory sweeps, a tumbling through space. We now ape beyond the earth’s atmosphere what we have been doing for millennia on the ground, tumbling. And perhaps the chimpanzee that first picked up a stick and used it, in a string of causation raised the first Edenic crime. How much blame accrues to Lucille Lamont? Inevitably, conflicts arise. Whose corn, fish, copper? Of what efficacy the strange gods? The women are of use. Such remarkable craft, those birchbark canoes. Soon enough, however, it is the victor’s turn to cry foul, immigration a hot button issue, nation-states collapsing, every capital a Troy. If there is no such thing as evil, there are hopes and dreams which, if immaterial, are certainly tangible and measurable, so much so history crushes them. One wishes to improve one’s lot; unwittingly or, indeed, with calculation, one triggers a chain reaction of events. In Kamarooska a kiss and a thought for Algonquins. 10,000 orphan daughters of the French king, and the die is cast in the attempt to colonize Quebec. Fire dances from the eyes of Heraclitus as he whittles down a thousand tribal wars to a single word: conflict. If we are not moral creatures, we are lethal, and some describe the fallout as evil. Yet another glorious autumn day. And I scribble on paper, lose myself in history; and I am shrunk to a pin’s head for a brief span of time. Angels jitterbug on my miniaturized mass. But soon enough I spring back to my full and rightful volume, will go off to the post office presently with a bundle, one slated for a literary redoubt.
It would seem I require a censor, a Grand Inquisitor with invasive counter-tenor voice, one who will save me from myself. Everyone else—they are throwing off their shackles, their doubts, their oppressors. I am scrambling wildly for my inhibitions. All the world’s treachery and not worth the paper it is written on.
—Out for another walk, I pass among loathsome creatures far from being in control of their food supply. Shining head males who, due to the unnatural warmth, wear shorts and tank tops, the girls glassy-eyed and chitterish. Are we not all refugees from collapsed stars, the shock of separation so great we have forgotten everything we once knew; but that, as we make our way along the avenues, as if in a pop tune, each sparrow and blade of grass, each blond brick, the cigarette smoke pluming in the humid air, bequeath us the illusion we are omniscient, and we know all the why’s and how’s and wherefore’s; except that the girl or the boy at one’s side, well, maybe they will or maybe they will not gratify our wants? We are all of us traversing the edge of the world in our packs and sub-groupings in want of X, surfeited with Y; but that the mysterious powers of Z will come for our salvation, whether Z is within or without us, helping those who help themselves. An old woman in an old coat, getting about like a peg-legged sailor, gripping shopping bags, lets some boy on a bike know he should keep his distance. Her forays into the garden are becoming more arduous, more beset with dangers. She does not trust the best minds of her day; I, for one, cannot blame her. She arouses my curiosity but I am too cowardly to ask her, ‘Do you feel life has gotten better since the day you were born? More amenities? Better medicines? Improved methods of conveying oneself through space? Or do you feel things are worse: more complications, more rules, more gadgets you can’t possibly use let alone keep track of? On what are your opinions based? Good or bad health? Cheery or sullen temperament? Experience shrewdly appraised? Does it matter? Did your first kiss move mountains? How about the last?’
Rome tells you this: evil is not the end of this world, just of some. Ah, the small sadisms. But evil? Mr Calhoun, you know nothing of it though you have lived with it all your life.
In Eleanor’s kitchen you talk Sally McCabe and tumbleweed and whiskey, the desert moon, the gloomy faculty of a high school for whom you had no respect, sad educators propping the sky, secret fantasists of the sort a woman named Rand encouraged to do their worst. Eleanor listens as she always does, her attentive face left in position, thoughts elsewhere. On recipes; on electoral reform; on Dubois.
Has she capacity in her thoughts for this: we are not moral creatures, kindness to strangers and muffins our ‘let’s party’ redemptions? RQC: ‘Do you know what Dubois said to me just a few minutes ago?’ Eleanor R: ‘No, what did Bob say to you?’ RQC: ‘He said I was going to drive everyone around the bend, obsessing about the White House lawn.’ Eleanor R: ‘He has a point, you know. It isn’t the centre of the universe which, as we know, dear boy, hasn’t one.’
How can the woman stand being this sane all the time?
—Moonface’s two front incisors are slanted inwards like a double-door gate one opens from within. It is back to Plato and Montaigne and Darwin and Tolstoy and Shakespeare and Homer and Horace—to the canon, in other words. Except that you do not go back. The sum total of it all suggests you ought not to bother. Instead, a woman from your past occupies your thoughts. She gauges her wants and desires. Should she or should she not? Oh what the hell. And she grabs your neck and pulls you to herself; as if to say, no, you are definitely not the one, but there is no one else around, so pucker up. Up the stairs then to her boudoir. The shadows of a maple just outside the window fall across the bed. It is neither love nor sport, what transpires. It is marking time until the heavens part and trumpets announce the angels who, in turn, announce something significant is at hand, darkening the sun. And there you are, not where you are supposed to be but where you happen to be. Before you know it, you are saying once more we are not moral creatures. Once more the void nods off. In the meantime, you make tender love, until she wearies of it and springs her metaphysics on you. She is greedy and likes to play the slut. You have no objections. Her knees are nice to look at.
You go home. You write, apprentice of the word and of love. Such silly, pretentious stuff you write. Should you give the woman a call? And risk another three months of running in place? You are tempted.
So that is how it was once upon a time and not much has changed. Now I wind up in the kitchen of Eleanor R, the sanest woman around, this after I had popped into the Blue Danube, having spotted Eggy inside. There was grizzle on his chin. I teased him. ‘Eggy, you old hoser,’ I say, ‘you look like you’ve been in bed for three days with whiskey and sweetheart.’ Eggy beamed. Can a man as old as he beam like that? Moonface gave me a look and I left. Eleanor’s rooms are so cluttered with knickknacks, sentimental debris that, even if I had the means of saying something, I could not possibly catalogue an item of it. And it seems a kind of failure. She is bored with me just now and so, it is a quick mug of tea. A bleat of her trombone sends me out the door. ‘Next time, fella.’ As if she had anything to say for evolutionary drift. I will go back to the Blue Danube under a grey sky; I will smell Halloween as I go. I will be a hobgoblin of outrage, shadow governments putting the kibosh on my love of country of a country I once knew, one inseparable from its attachment to violence, slavery and greed.
But in the street, debonair Dubois assails me. Like reformed drunks, these non-believers. He thinks me a fool but obviously, the fact of me entertains him. ‘Are we closer yet,’ he asks, ‘to a non-materialist basis for the universe?’ ‘As a matter of fact, nowhere near.’ ‘A pity. I was so looking forward to your thinking on it.’ ‘Silence,’ I say, ‘the profoundest silence imaginable. As who was there to hear the Big Bang?’ ‘Well, that’s something. Let’s meet, later.’
And in the Blue Danube, Moonface. Cream is drying on her cheeks. Slavs swoop down on cabbage rolls like carrion birds.
—Moonface informs me that she in her diary refers to Randall Q Calhoun as Simply Q. Who is this entity? It is clear that she and Eggy have been talking about me. This is novel, I as scuttlebutt. I must confess I am momentarily titillated. Simply Q? He’s somewhere about my person, God knows, slung around my ears, hanging off my nose or other appendage.
Her bosom, high with wide cleavage, is a lonely bosom. Moonface might make the best of mothers,
the most misunderstood of mistresses. Perpetual virgin? Now and then a look on her face suggests that, no, she is not too proud to pleasure herself. Cynicism followed by trying harder—a great danger to her soul. Furthermore state that evil stalks the land, and see if even an iota of the heroic sparks in the dying embers of your soul. A Moonface sideways glance accuses you. It is as if her eyes know before her brain can tell them so that you will betray her simply because you are you.
—The man Marcel Lamont had been and Iraq in its dismemberment—it is what preoccupies me now. That I sit in the Blue Danube early in October on a humid afternoon. I met Marcel shortly before he died. He was coming out his door in the Traymore, and he was sober. ‘So you’re the new man,’ he cheerfully ventured, but as if I were the replacement for some other tragic figure who was no longer in the Traymorean picture. I could see easily enough that when he was out front of his demons, he was agreeable, lively, curious. Powerful physique. Fond of handball. Otherwise, between us, not much transpired, Marcel’s wife Lucille a strong deterrent to me for extending any social courtesies. She certainly rubbed me the wrong way. Early on she told me she thought most women insipid; that in life there are no guarantees except those one begs, borrows or steals. I had no idea what she was talking about. Foolishly, I suppose, I jumped into the hole she had so considerately dug for me. ‘What,’ I answered her there in the hall of the Traymore, ‘what if you’d been up on a platform in Paris, 1790s or thereabouts, the blade of the guillotine poised above your neck, your privileged self at risk, your blue blood about to gush away? Wouldn’t you plead entitlement then?’ She shrugged. ‘And,’ I continued, because I was unaccountably irritated, ‘what if some cruise missile, programmed to target a somebody in Baghdad, wipes out, say, thirty innocent nobodies, instead? Wouldn’t you, a nobody, think you’d been roughly handled? Wouldn’t you be a little put out? Is Mr 007 a god or Tinkerbelle?’ She thought me a lunatic. I thought her perverse.
If it was a plan, it was certainly a sketchy one. Lucille Lamont was having none of those precisely-established minuets, so prominent in whodunits, by which alibis are built and police are misdirected. She brought a case of gin into the apartment. She took off for Ontario. It would take a few days, but presumably Marcel would poison himself in short order and enjoy doing it. But why? And to what end? Dubois scoffed. ‘Murder? Not likely,’ he said. ‘What motive? What does she get from it? The software he’d been developing? A leaky sailboat? Marcel was no Rockefeller, no whiz kid. He was a wife-beater. Yes, well, maybe she did provoke him, but still, I mean, come on.’ Eggy had no opinion one way or the other. ‘Man proposes; woman disposes,’ he said. Dubois scoffed some more, saying, ‘There you go again with that poetry stuff.’ The police had closed the case: death by misadventure. In the notes she kept on the Traymore menagerie, Moonface merely observed that Eggy had no opinion, that she herself had none; that life was pointless and had no meaning; that when she was a little girl she used to weep for Christ on His cross, but that had ended when her breasts began to develop.
—Eleanor R had discovered the body, the body, that is, of Marcel Lamont, about nine in the morning in his apartment. She was stepping out for smokes. She knew Marcel was on a toot, Lucille in Ontario. For no particular reason she could think of, she rather liked the man, and did not like to think he was doing all that drinking and not eating. But would not Lucille have gotten in some groceries before she left? Maybe. But would Marcel take nourishment other than that of gin? That was the question. So she went and knocked on his door.
And the door was unlocked, and this was not unusual. She stepped in and saw right away the old telephone had been upended, the receiver off its hook and buzzing. Then, caught by the sun streaming through the living room window, curtains undrawn, she saw a dark trail of blood; and she followed it to the bedroom where, nude at the foot of the bed, lay Marcel. In recounting this to Dubois, at first she said the body was blue; then she said the legs were orange. No matter; he was dead. The conviction immediately formed in her that Lucille was at the bottom of it. She had always had a hunch about that woman; it was not a flattering hunch. The place was uncharacteristically tidy, so much so the place itself was what was out of place, the empties stashed in the kitchen sink except for one or two looking like fish out of water on the couch. Lucille was a poor housekeeper, Marcel comfortably slobbish. Why, if he was that far gone in his drunken state, would he scruple to pile the empties in the sink? This was not like the man she thought she knew and rather liked. Dubois, scoffing as always, said, ‘She was going away. She tidied up before she went away. Lots of people do. They don’t like coming back to a mess.’ ‘Tidy?’ Eleanor R nearly barked, ‘tidy? An army of janitors had been in there. The kitchen floor nearly blinded me.’ Dubois responded, ‘I say she just cleaned up, banal as that might sound to you. And maybe she told Marcel to keep it that way—on pain of death.’ Dubois laughed, touching the shoulder of the woman who was the apple of his eye, this woman in the service of whom he had placed his vanity and powers of deduction. Eggy really did have no opinion in the matter, saying only that if Lucille Lamont had once been a bit of a sport, a highroller, man-friendly, well, bloody hell, what was the harm in that? I myself placed little credence in Eleanor’s suspicion. Even so, I could not get out of my mind that configuration between Marcel and Iraq, between the grandiose crime and the petty theft of a life. Would Euripides, defender of women, have looked with compassion on Lucille Lamont? The speculation was briefly rife over a bottle of wine at the Blue Danube one evening not so long ago. Yet again, we went through the possibilities. Was her motive the life insurance? Money-making patent? Property we did not know about? ‘Perversity,’ said Eleanor R. And I wondered if she was not borrowing the word from me, seeing as I make great use of it, and had been doing so in our kitchen chats. ‘Sheer perversity.’ ‘Oil,’ joked Bob Dubois, and then blushed, a certain glint in the eyes of the apple of his eye. ‘Christ, I was only joking.’
Yes, what would a writer of genre fiction make of all this? Not much, I supposed, as I went to bed that night quite sloshed.
Calhoun’s Follies II
—To hork. By virtue of the fact that a Viking, one day, squeezed a nostril shut and horked out the other and baptized a Newfie rock in the name of wanderlust? Some say a Viking squad traversed as far as Oklahoma where, no doubt, a friendly game of football was got up between Norsemen and Shawnee.
—Moonface. We could tumble into her bed and discuss Ezra Pound. ‘He was only half right about Browning,’ I would say, ‘and that’s where so much went wrong.’ But she is as likely to paint her toenails right then and there as recite from Pisan Cantos.
—So America was not schooled in the Homeric. She slipped into her coming of age with puritanical spite, unwarranted optimism the medium. Space taunted her. All that space of prairie and mountain coaxed her forward in lethal spurts. It went hard on the Indians and the buffalo. And she, in the meantime, presented herself to the world with strangely theatrical social graces. Ah, Buffalo Bill Cody, yankee Bembo cracking a whip.
—Well, when the weather’s nice and the Blue Danube’s owner, pitching peanuts at a squirrel, puts out a few tables and chairs, Eggy and I take up positions, Eggy with his eyes on the girls. He is not unmindful of the grave import of grave political words; words like ‘imperial overreach’ or ‘burgeoning civil strife’, but he prefers to them the gravity of young women, especially those for whom a proper construction of the world is a serious matter. ‘Dubois,’ he said on one such afternoon, a wasp buzzing about his beer, ‘had a time of it trying to convince me of the virtues of Black Dog Girl. You know of whom I speak?’ But no, I did not. ‘Oh, but you must. Well, I at first couldn’t see what the fuss was about. And then she goes by, she with the dog, and I peer a little harder, and my goodness, Dubois was right. Unsung hips. Oh bloody hell.’ ‘Yes, but what of the Patriot Act? Will you make light of that?’ And no, he will neither make light nor heavy going of the business, Eggy’s mind on other business, to
wit, Moonface’s sacrosanct bosom and the fact that, it being his 81st, she is volunteering to fête him. ‘81st,’ I say, ‘I thought you just had your 80th. How many birthdays can you have in a year?’ ‘Why, as many as I want. I think she has the opera in mind. Tannhäuser I believe. It’s not My Fair Lady I’ll have you know, but it’ll do. She gets points. Hoo hoo. Tra la.’
So we sit there, Eggy and I. He has his fancy glass of fancy beer; I have the cheap stuff in wine. The wasps sew tapestries in the air. All that is missing seems to be lederhosen and dulcimers. As if he were reading my thoughts, Eggy says, ‘Innsbruck. Was there once.’ And then—nothing. Thought closed, case closed. He might have met royalty in the town. Might have had a fling. I will never know. His mind, mostly alert, on occasion will falter. Pull up for a rest stop. He is a tiny man, as tiny as a sparrow; that is, if you can picture a sparrow getting about with a cane and a loopy grin. It seems to me the lovely physiques of lovely girls are what keep his mental operations in order; that they are a kind of alphabet for Eggy, those girls, a way of putting the world together. They are a way of keeping his hand in, now that he has weeded out, for us, at any rate, what bad memories he has had to preserve: Korea, wives, and the fact that Tricky Dick went from slick lawyer to presidential Othello, Desdemona the Constitution, Kissinger his Iago. And then, all of a sudden, the flow of his words seizes up; curtains draw down his eyes. As busy as the street might be with cars, trucks, buses and passersby and capricious taxis, it will get very silent. It will get as silent and as cool as a sepulchre deep in the labyrinths of a Roman basilica, no matter that the sun is quite warm in the trees and the breeze is a southerly. And just when I am thinking I should call for an ambulance, up he pops from whatever deeps into which he had descended, and he chirps, ‘Oh, there’s Prunella across the street.’ Well, who is Prunella? And she, as it turns out, used to clean Eggy’s rooms for a wage and sometimes consent to be his dinner companion for a Friday night when she was at loose ends. ‘Oh but she’s rather bi, you know, and she went chasing after some KitKat wench who, in turn, went chasing after some stewardess, suckered into some hell on earth in Cleveland.’ And then we are in for a round of Balfour and Lawrence, as in T.E., and the Plains of Abraham and the Long Parliament. These things interest Eggy but not as much as does Black Dog Girl. ‘Let’s have another glass,’ he suggests. ‘Fuck my cardiologist. Oh my, I shouldn’t say that. She’s 35 and not bad looking. Hoo hoo. Tra la.’