The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  —Moonface, shortly after I moved into the Traymore, slipped me a note. It observed I was leonine, the nose snubbed, hair in a state of arrested white. That I was a new section in her notes on the menagerie. The flattery is well received; even if, last night, as she brought me wine, I spoke these words to her, she thinking of pursuing her studies out of town: ‘Ottawa? It may be a classics town. But it’s a prig’s town. It’s a smug person’s town. It’s a making sin safe for the professional classes sort of town. I hope you reconsider.’ She rolled her eyes.

  —Now that you think of it, it was always in the air, as much so as Sputnik and Paul Anka, as white buck shoes and a missile crisis, as cheese spread and Budweiser: the spirit of Ayn Rand. Perhaps as some Aristolelian extension of matter into essence, she was the spectre attending the ceremony, one that tied the knot between Marcel and Lucille; one that whispered property rights into their ears. A magus-temptress. (Rhinestone glasses, scuffed highheels.) She might have said, ‘The world’s at your feet. You’ve only to take it. What persons in their right minds wouldn’t? This is the Land of Use-it or Lose-it. So we’re a little tawdry. So our eyes get too big for our stomachs. Look how far you’ve come already since your chance meeting at the supper club, happiness the rhumba that followed upon the tiramisu. To tell you the truth, I’m unsure as to whether I approve of this business that seems to require the state’s imprimatur. Be that as it may, the ball’s in your court, Marcel. Forehand smash. Deft backhand. Ace the serve. Pssst. Forget that Lucille, your May bride of a thundery afternoon, has seen better days. Morality is reinvention. Take her to Florida. Time-share unit. Fuck her in the arse. Meditate on the waves. Be the innovator you are. Hone the entrepreneruial skills. The computer’s a grand machine. How right you are to hop on this bandwagon. Leave Nietzsche to me. I have a firing squad firing 24/7 at the likes of every Kant, mushy brain of every liberal.’

  —It was wine in the afternoon. It was Eggy on a tear. As if 80 plus years of life had finally taught him how not to spoil things by cavilling; by unseemly selfishness and overweening pride. ‘Oh bloody hell.’ He was wise to himself as we sat there, courtesy of the Blue Danube, our libations on the table, Eggy a sparrow of a man. ‘Moonface is going to fête me,’ he said, ‘but how and with what resources, I can’t say. The opera, maybe.’ With a very slight but nonetheless measurable trace of irritation in my voice, I said, ‘I know. You advised me already that she has plans.’ ‘Oh, did I?’ he shot back, yes, with a sparrow’s worth of dudgeon.

  But somewhere in this sparrow of a man was a page of Tacitus, the senate a cowardly aggregate of time-markers, their words a parody of words, their truths but senatorial heads affianced to body and fortune. The proles in the streets were restive, the lovers cynical who had dalliance in the deer parks. It was a contemplative moment, Eggy reaching for his golden glass of beer, his hand in delicate relations with the space it travelled through. He said, ‘The rain in Spain. Hoo hoo.’ His words seemed, for all that they were non sequiturs, a petty rant, a disavowal of the news cycle, a remarkable comment on the times. So that even I, as the American legislative branches played their games, as they pretended to what was good for the country; as they sent mixed signals in all directions, presumably for the benefit of the electorate and the Executive both; so that as the shadows lengthened, as commuters rumbled by in their high-gloss chariots; as the addicts smoked; as lonely housewives engaged in all their obscure theatrics; as girl students roamed in packs and boys pounded basketballs; as birds sounded off in the golden trees and a mutt sniffed a hedge; even I who, more often than not, abide by decorum, said, ‘Well, Eggy, one wonders if, before you die, your eyes ever will feast on Moonface’s bosom in all its glory?’

  ‘Oh but they shall,’ said Eggy triumphant, ‘they bloody well will.’ Damnable lie, of course, but it was the sentiment that mattered. You had to give the man credit; how it was he had gotten free of his squalid origins to play the Grand Man without, in the process excessively violating justice. And yet, given that the bosom of Moonface was a kind of Holy Grail, how many good knights were hanging from trees, carrion birds pecking at their eyes, just so Eggy could redeem his spirit and bring life back to some blighted harvest? What if she embodied a stupendous hoax, one tantamount to a betrayal of the deepest magnitude; that she was already lost in her quest, her Latin studies of no earthly or heavenly use? Then Eggy said, ‘We knew we were in trouble with Nixon. Montcalm threw the battle. Oh bloody effing hell.’ He took a long, throat-rippling swig of his beer. The sky seemed to tinkle along all its faultlines.

  —Much of what men think about women, women think about men. But I have yet to meet a woman who reasons like old Eggy. I could see he was excited about something, this sparrow of a man. He waved me over to his table as I approached the Blue Danube on a golden day. What could there be in the world that was ‘off’ or out of kilter or repulsive or morally suspect? But how convoluted that sounds! Must we always be drawing a line in the sand at which point body and mind separate? ‘For God’s sake, sit down,’ said Eggy, his cane propped against the table, two glasses of red wine before him. He was drinking both.

  I took a chair and, his brow suddenly troubled, his eyes went blank. Just then he looked the image of a stone portrait, one of those Roman busts one encounters in the basements of European museums. He came to, eventually, saying, ‘Don’t get cheeky with me. Oh bloody hell.’ He must have been addressing general principles as I had not said anything—yet. ‘Beautiful day,’ I finally offered. ‘True,’ he said, ‘true.’ I went inside the café and came back with a glass of wine for myself. His tiny hands were those of a pontiff, folded together there on the table. They were penitent, greedy, magisterial. In the meantime, his eyes had gotten dull again. Ferocious anger, fathomless melancholy on his brow. Was there some Caracalla in this sparrow of a man? He said, brightening on the turn of a dime, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got what I meant to say. Deficit position. Hoo hoo.’ ‘What,’ I asked, ‘are you talking about? The Federal Reserve? Tantric sex?’ ‘Don’t get severe with me,’ he said. ‘I rather think I meant the latter,’ he said, ‘and don’t look now but there goes Black Dog Girl. My, she’s splendid.’ I did not stick around and get drunk with Eggy. The day was too burnished with some bronze sheen for that. I left him to his own devices of which he has more than meets the eye.

  —Pay me millions to fake it, and I could not do it, not even as cheap genre; I could not fake some tale of the inner sanctum. And yet, deep in my bones, I know. Randall Q Calhoun knows, for power is wielded all around us. But one may as well watch the sun sparkle on the sea for clues as to what moves on its floor. What tin men we are who believe we choose and are not chosen. No word from Gar. None from Vera. But drinking whiskey on a ferryboat, waving at beachcombers on their Ithacas off the British Columbia coast, copping a feel as the seawind whipped through our hair—now that was something: those warm-hearted kisses that delighted the soul, the lips cool in the winter air. It is not to say we cannot see things for what they are. It is not to say we cannot distinguish right and wrong. It is not to say we perpetually deny ourselves states of grace out of spite. And it is not to say we cannot rectify a bad situation; but that, for the most part, we are blind, our blindness the broad thoroughfare into the real. So Calhoun opines. Cheap genre, indeed.

  —There always has been and always will be a Lucille Lamont. She has in these times, how do I say it, good camouflage. That she irritates people just enough and no more. So that they see her as a nuisance, a person to avoid whenever possible. Besides, this husband of hers she allegedly did in, what was he but a nobody, a drunk, a probable wife-abuser? Eggy pleases himself. ‘Lucille?’, Eggy has said, ‘I never minded her. Marcel was a trial. Unstable character. I know what Eleanor thinks, and Eleanor is otherwise of sound mind and all the rest of it and good company now and then, but when women get on about other women, well, you know, feathers fly. Hoo hoo.’ Eggy is already a monument, one that occupies a public square and sees it all; whose answer to it
all is strategic silence. It seems very wise.

  With Moonface one never knows; one day she is glamorous, her lashes longer and darker (it does something for her high cheekbones), and she shines from a place within; and the next day, she is a colourless wallflower, prematurely defeated, without appeal. She complains of her fits; she lives in dread of them. And men are a pain and she has nothing to offer them but her fecklessness. What has any of this to do with fascism? It has much to do with Randall Q Calhoun, how he (how I) expends hours and hours and hours fingering the various loose ends of the life and the lives at hand, wondering if they interrelate, if at all; wondering how much is to be owed chance and what to design, and how much of that design is for good and how much for evil. Enough. What, will I organize in the streets?

  —Slavs motion to Moonface to turn down the music here in the Blue Danube. One slams an empty beer glass on the table. No doubt, the ologies have something to say about this. How many lifetimes required for the unlearning of theatrical gestures one has enacted against repressive regimes or collapsing states? I give Moonface a look; she looks away. ‘Do you know what you’re up against? Do you know what creeps across the land, seriously unpleasant? You already tell me in a hundred different ways how I’ve failed you, and I’m neither your father nor your husband, much less your lover, and you’re right, and still you don’t know. Indeed, you can’t cry on a pillow constructed of Latin vowels. The living don’t help much.’ Of course, I do not mouth these words; a look is sufficient. Black eyes and a sour expression push back.

  There is narrative and there is narrative; you wheel the horse inside the walls of Troy and bad things will happen and continue to happen until, eventually, one arrives at some futuristic point of time in the slums of Rio. I will steer clear of Eleanor’s kitchen at least for today. Whiskey, sex, large cars? The eyes of Sally McCabe blink, she under the weight of the boy who is on her and taking his satisfaction. Her delectable nose sniffs the wind, she giving it and not the boy her full attention. As if, by way of this wind, the dead were talking to her; were perhaps warning her, and if not the dead, then some other eternity. I have to stop seeing such things in my mind. Sometimes boredom brings it on: that baby blue Chrysler car parked on a rise overlooking a sea of sand and sage and mesquite. Crew-cut Coop leans against the front of his car. He smokes a cigarette; a pal boffs his Sally on the backseat. What Conestogas ferrying the pieties over the endless expanses? General Motors had been there before it was there. What will it get me at the drycleaner’s, at the bank? What will it get me with Eggy should I, against my better judgment, interrupt his isolate trance; with Moonface should I sashay into the Blue Danube and barter for a cup of coffee, bravado and not coin the trade of the realm; and she, full-frontal assault, attack me with Virgil and her lonely bosom, her black eyes looking for their betrayer? (I had slipped my arm around her waist the other night, and, at first, she was fine with it.) I had crossed over a line—somewhere on the open Atlantic and yet, for all that, I was getting signs: debris in the water and birds in the air. Soon enough, I would raise some shore the inhabitants of which would paddle out and greet me where I had dropped anchor. But I stand there in the middle of a sidewalk stopped dead in my tracks. It is as if I am Socrates meditating on one leg, passersby in awe. I would like to take it back—that arm. God only knows what the Calhoun arm has set in motion.

  —‘Satanic forces,’ I say. ‘Colossal stupidity,’ she says. We argue, she and I, in an amiable fashion, bread baking in the oven. Eleanor R wears one of those body-length aprons the logo of which reads ‘Boss’. Eleanor R has frosted curls. And she has, just now, the demeanor of one expecting to be informed of what she already knows. Actually, we are horrid little creatures, she and I, the way we sit in our comfort at her kitchen table, she playing with the spit valve of her trombone, I pouring us out some amaretto, a sweet substance for which she has a weakness. We are attempting to come to grips with collective madness. It seems we are getting nowhere.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘for the sake of fancy, let’s imagine that, here or south of here, the upper percentile of the populace, fabulously empowered, fabulously rich, behind their closed gates, worship some Belial or another and don’t give a straw for the rest of us; whether we’re consumed by pestilence or storm; whether by penury or helicopter gunships. Furthermore, let’s picture the grotty rest of us in our tenuous relationship with a notion of the commonweal; how we’re depraved, worshiping our celebratory demons, our two-faced angels such as turn the cranks of blue-haired old biddies and pasty-faced pulpiteers, of witless housewives and their honey-voiced but even more witless spouses, the kind who oversee franchise outlets and collect alms for their various sects, all the while their runtish broods are consigning themselves to the love of Jesus or are jacking off in the garage or both. Et cetera. For the sake of fancy, for sheer torpor of intellect, out of boredom with all the ologies such as would calibrate the distance between our soulless souls and some couch potato god, all the while insisting there is no such thing as God, let’s imagine satanic forces. It would explain much if it were true.’ ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face, Mr Calhoun,’ Eleanor R says, ‘colossal stupidity. I don’t know why you have to get exercised with the devil.’ ‘Because,’ I say, ‘and I admit I haven’t much of a case, the standard definitions, the usual run of the mill diagnoses seem only to give the malaise permission to have its way. They’re a part of it.’ ‘In other words,’ says Eleanor R, ‘you don’t trust the best minds of your day.’ ‘Absolutely not,’ I say.

  SET PIECES

  In Eggy’s Domain

  At loose ends one evening, I knocked on Eggy’s door. I heard him slide in his slippers over the pinewood floor. It would take him a while to reach me. Soon enough, however, I was admitted into the Eggy lair.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ I was asked as he, with the aid of his cane, shuffled and slid over to his old armchair before which was a carpet, on the other side of which was an another old armchair, a rack of shelves against the wall stuffed with books of varying thicknesses. I had not known what to expect. There was a scholarly side to Eggy the boulevardier, this I had known, but somehow seeing evidence for a creature more thoughtful than he might let on threw me a little. After all, here he entertained Moonface and endeavoured to pinch her bum.

  ‘You do the honours,’ he said. ‘Wine and glasses in the kitchen.’

  And so I did the honours, the wine on a counter alongside a box of crackers and an unopened tin of sardines. It was the kitchen of a man who dined out a lot on sausages and fried onions.

  I did not know why, but I felt perhaps I had imposed on him. Suppose he had been sitting there given over to his memories, the world of his inner life superceding all other possibilities? On every available surface it seemed there were photographs of women, previous wives, most likely, and young smiling faces—progeny, I supposed, and there was a snapshot of a uniformed man who could only have been Eggy in his Korea days. As for the books on the shelves, I was not surprised to see Herodotus or Gibbons and other more contemporary historians, but I was surprised to spot the flashier book spines of spy novels and whodunits and instant biographies of political personalities. The room struck me as a compromise between the demands of those living still, and the silent submissions of my host to the bequests of the dead. I put it to the man: ‘Suppose all hell breaks loose and you look around. Who’s there in the trenches with you? With whom can you work? Who, by the very fact that they exist, can only make things worse? Who’s all sweetness and light and can never be otherwise, no matter what corruptions they ingest?’

  ‘Beats me.’

  Eggy smirked.

  Her Eyes Weren’t Really Black

  I said to Moonface: ‘There are those who believe in Nemesis. Which is to say that the immoderate use of power and little regard for the consequences invite downfall. Still, there are those who find this explanation too much a party to myth, as if Nemesis were an old wive’s tale. There are the more scientifically
-based examinations of cause and effect. We’d be talking geography, food supply, population growth, climate fluctuations, the ability or inability to adjust to circumstance that is always tied to a system of governance, be it democratic, oligarchic, plutocratic, or outright jackboots and midnight knocks on the door. So that there are those who say morality has nothing to do with good or bad use of power, if we take morality to mean a regard for justice and distribution of wealth; that there is only power and the question as to whether, once power is attained, it can be held against all comers. It’s a natural condition—to want power. It’s so much more unnatural to refuse it. We couldn’t be paleolithic wanderers, forever, in some wind-blasted Eden. Yet many do refuse it. Et cetera and so forth.’