The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

Granted, it was a windy but pensive speech I gave, there in the Blue Danube after closing; there in the raw light of three candles set on the table. Moonface had loosed her hair and it spilled around her shoulders. The lover boy in me had flailed about; the pedagogue took over, that demon in me I was always pushing back. I hated holding forth. Wine had unhinged my tongue; I was enjoying holding forth.

  ‘And what about poets?’ Moonface asked, hands clasped to her cheeks, elbows on the table.

  ‘Well, what about poets? Hopeless dreamers. But sometimes they’re students of power and the powerful. They keep an eye on events, as well they should. Sometimes they know who got where and how and why and to what end. Poets, too, want power. Words are their consolation prize. Sometimes these consolations are nothing more than self-induced fantasies. Since poets are little valued in these parts, they’re not much of a threat to the powers that be. Who in their right minds would place much value on semiotic gobbledygook, let alone take fright from it?’

  It was then I noticed, in the raw light of three candles working its miracle with the wine, building grace and well-being and benign intoxication, three flames weaving a romance, that the Moonface eyes were not really black; they were a deep and richly glowing brown tending to gold. They were, at any rate, a startling colour. I worried for us both on account of them.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘of Ovid.’

  It was as if she were asking for a fairy tale or the legend of some hero.

  ‘Well, what’s to know? He was a jet-setter. He fell foul of Caesar’s program of family values. He was a middle class soul of some wit and some flair for the pursuit of the pleasures. Perhaps Caesar thought him a buffoon.’

  Her dimple flashed. She was beginning to have altogether too much fun at my expense. She asked: ‘Do you believe in Nemesis?’

  ‘But of course. And we’re in for it.’

  §

  Book III—The Good Ship Lollipop

  The Beginning of a Proper Narrative

  I knocked on her door and she answered, Moonface in her jammies, socks on each narrow foot. Botticelli might have painted those feet and their martyrdom. She nodded me in. Perhaps her willingness to admit me had to do with the evening before when Clare Howard finally tracked me down, finding me in the Blue Danube. Clare was both majestic and drawn, bringing news of her husband’s sudden death. The look on her face said I was to blame, but then she regained hold of better thoughts. Even so, Clare did not want my company, though I gallantly offered it. I told her that Gar, her husband, my oldest friend, had loved her very much. I was told, in turn, the particulars of the funeral. Should the jackal eulogize the lion? She left me at table with Dubois and Eggy, the two of them politely silent. She was out the café door, her lovely face unreadable. And then, as Eggy, irrepressible, said something about Jackie Kennedy, I glared at the homunculus. Effing hell, I was just suggesting … Dubois told the old bugger to shut up. Moonface had been a witness to it all, and now I was following her into her untidy bedroom. On her bed, on the off-white duvet, was something of a tableau. What looked suspiciously like an old primer was a hardcover edition of Catullus’s verses. Dead worlds lived: the poet’s Rome, and the decade (the 40’s?) in which the edition had been printed. Perhaps Bogart had read out some of the smuttier verses to Bacall. In addition to the book were loose sheets of binder-paper scattered about on which were scrawled Moonface’s notes. And there was what I took be the dear girl’s diary. She sat now on her bed, Indian-style, her back flush with the pillows propped against the wall. She indicated I should deposit myself beside her. I heard myself asking: ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Why not?’ she answered, a little too brightly, gathering up the papers and books, making room.

  ‘I’m going to flunk,’ she said, ‘if I don’t get serious.’

  Erotic burblings.

  She was somewhat lanky in her physique.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘maybe I should leave you to it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘you can stay a while, but just a while. I have to go to class.’

  Perhaps there was time enough to steal a kiss.

  ‘It’s so sad,’ she said, ‘about your friend. No, really.’

  ‘Yes, well—’

  Clare Howard had been a figure of judgment in the café; as something more, at any rate, than a dead man’s wife. Abandoning Dubois and Eggy to their bickering, I went back to my digs and began a letter to Vera Klopstock. I described for Vera a little of Traymorean life and how I had settled into certain routines. I asked after Karl’s health. And how was life in Costa Rica? I pictured a seaside bungalow. Bananas. Fishing spears. Nets. I wrote that I had foolishly declared my love of Moonface to her and she responded: wha-hah-hah! The girl-woman was irked. Eggy was sniffing that Moonface was getting serviced by someone outside our circle. Never offer a woman love when she wants sex. Conversely, hoo hoo, never offer sex when what’s wanted is love. Effing hell. Wise, old, Zeus-like Eggy. I figured Vera was gadding about the island in a grass skirt. I then informed her of Gar’s death, wondering as I did so, if the news would take her aback; I wondered, as well, if there had been something between them once, as Vera had, on one occasion, complained about Gar’s prickly nature. Her tone betrayed an intimacy. It was, however, well-known: Gar did not suffer fools. I wondered, too, if the early Christians were the prigs some assumed them to be. Eleanor, so I continued writing, had received a letter from Lucille Lamont. The Lamont woman would fly to Australia to visit relations. Well then, good. She should stay as long as she liked. No one would care if she never came back. It was not yet a full-banked fire, this ardor I had for Moonface, but Vera was to understand (not that she would mind, she in her own career was cheerfully amorous) that I would not lay a hand on the girl in question. It would be rather like kicking and scuffing away what thin soil there was of love on the rock on which humankind squatted.

  And so, it was a bit disconcerting now, Moonface sliding down her pillows to adopt a prone position on her back, her knees drawn up, her hands resting on her belly. What was this? She turned her head slightly so that she could read my face, and she said: ‘Did I tell you? My father’s United Church. I lost my virginity when I was 13. The boy wound up in prison, but not because of me. There’s this poem, Catullus’s, where a boy’s buggering a girl and then Catullus buggers him. When I first read it I blushed. You can kiss me if you want, but you don’t have to. I have to get my teeth straightened. Anyway, so now you know, I’m not a virgin. Sometimes I find it so boring, the poetry, that is. Sometimes I feel like it’s a language that only I and no one else gets, and it’s my secret.’

  I was terribly aware of the proximity of her body and its allure. But I was also seeing Gareth Howard in his future grave; and it was as if he had been penalized for his cold, Apollonian seeing-into-things. The cornlands of Ontario were, I suppose, restive, what with Lucille Lamont among them somewhere, she as inevitable as bad weather and taxes. Would Moonface change her mind and salvage an awkward moment by offering me coffee? Sally McCabe flickered briefly in my mentions, she enjoining me to take the girl, for God’s sake. As it was beginning to verge on comedy, the situation, the dear girl artless and perhaps very confused about what she thought she wanted, I reached across my body to squeeze her shoulder in some collegial way. Involuntarily, I sighed. I had not the courage of my convictions, clearly. I got from Moonface’s dark eyes what I took to be amused scorn. Perhaps she thought to confuse me when she said: ‘The Good Ship Lollipop doesn’t sail every day.’

  Calhoun’s Follies III

  —The liberal believes he has conquered fear; the conservative knows it is so much hoo-haw.

  —If Britain was the template of the modern, what with its factories and merchant classes, if America is the latest wrinkle in this perversity, then I have been useless since at least feudal times, the shortest route to absurdity one’s refusal to sell out. If worship of the collective is a recipe for homicide on a mass scale; if worship of the individual is frivolity, but a w
ay to have one’s pockets more thoroughly flattered by every corporate thief in the land; if the death of the gods spelled the death of poets (was not Nietzsche but the first op-ed machine?); if there is even an iota of reality to the words above, then the world is in such a temper that I might, mistakenly or not, consider the authors of Genesis and all those who would be Flaubert to have been one and the same clown at which kids at the circuses laugh, all the cities of the plains sheer braggadocio.

  —Minnie Dreier was my last chance at respectability, if, by respectability, we mean the honoured passions. I wanted the romance of it all. She wanted to be the Great Woman. She lacked the talent though her body had charms and her mind had scorn to spare. She might read the great historians and keep up with the news and cultivate a progressive bias in regards to politics, but if she thought me a loser, the other men in her life were bland and decidedly uninteresting. They were just dishonest enough to cut her the slack by which she deceived herself. I suppose I had played the same game. Jade cigarette holder, indeed.

  —Moonface insists we only meet on neutral territory. It is to say she agrees we could become an item, but Platonically so. She is a great friend of Eggy, has no problems entering his lair, which she does nearly every day. She suffers his innuendos with good cheer, as if Eggy can be nothing but incorrigible. He will also expatiate, however fleetingly, on Picot-Sykes (or is it Sykes-Picot), on Kipling; on the end of the era of the Common Man. He will disremember the names of former wives, and Moonface will remind him, ‘There was Cynthia.’ ‘Oh, screw Cynthia, mother of my children.’ I believe Eggy has a true regard for Moonface’s welfare, would like to see her get somewhere in the world; but he has no liking of pushy women and he has nothing but contempt for men who think themselves avatars of a new humanity. He has said, ‘People fly up a horse’s arse and think they’re on the fast track to solving everything. Bloody hell.’ His politics are old-fashioned: loosen up the purse strings; let people, like water, seek their level.

  —Robert Dubois is the sort of handsome and vain man I cannot abide and yet, there is no percentage in actively disliking him. He likes his conversation; any topic will suffice. He listens, his eyes telling you, however, that you are on sufferance. On very rare occasions, something in them bespeaks melancholy and failure in life. This something flickers and then, poof, it is gone. And he is slapping your back or he is trying to tell you that, no matter what you say, the sun rises in the east, and there is an end to it. But if you wish to continue to believe that it rises in the west, well then, fine, but please do notify him of the fact should it actually occur. He does not speak of his relations with Eleanor.

  —Marcel Lamont kept a sailboat on a lake not far from town. The ologies tell me I have no grounds for thinking his wife evil, that I am only projecting a fantasy on her feral countenance. Eleanor R is much less complicated than I in this matter; she believes murder was carried out in the Traymore right under our noses.

  —If truly there is poetry in me, I must owe it to the intervention of a god, one who never heard of the Enlightenment, one who was never wrong-footed by a rational mind. It remains a mystery, how mother suffered father in her bed.

  Calhoun’s Follies IV

  —Well yes, we are all of us, in fact, showing up a little more grey around the edges, a little more grizzled and cranky. Damned inconvenient, what with the war on its multiple fronts, thorough-going sleaze and nepotism, religious hysteria, party-favour humanism, sham art. And we have no reason to despair, to mope across our spiritual squares from A to Z in our spiritual tutus? So pardon me my complexes as I, unschooled, un-tenured, unofficial, soldier on with McCabe deep in my soul, she that laughing harlot, the Authentic Existence’s own prom queen who, at the head of every seaside procession, slathered with roses and reeking of incense, presents every man his choice: either accept the possibility that there are virtue and harmony in this life or, cynic that you are, believe it all a fraud, but do not waffle about in between, congressman with a gold toilet and celebratory shit.

  So I go knocking on a Traymorean’s door; I am granted an audience. King Eggy, dwarfed by his armchair, says, ‘For God’s sake, sit. Don’t lurk. I’ve been noodling in my mind. Have you been noodling in yours?’ ‘Eggy,’ I say, ‘and it’s impertinent of me to ask, but what I want to know is this: were you cruel to your wives?’ Eggy, stand-up fellow that he is, a sparrow of a man, answers, ‘No, I wasn’t cruel. Who, me? It’s the wives who got nasty and ill-tempered. I can’t blame them. They expected a certain splendour because I, silly me, was foolish enough to promise them it. I had sex on the brain. They had other things on the brain. I made money but didn’t worship money. The fact I may have a soul is entirely conjectural. But if I have one I got it in Korea, seeing as we shelled to smithereens a few villages here and there and dispatched the souls therein to their gods. A man can only go one of two ways after seeing something like that. Either he gets to be so much drifting about or, praying to obscure deities, he is the walking wounded. It is not to say I have a conscience or some other bauble of the mind. What I have can’t be put in words. It comes with tears, if you’re not too embarrassed to hear it. Oh dear me, not the tears that self-infatuated idiots generate but the kind of tears that a cold wind raises in one’s eyes and can’t be helped. You can choose to build a philosophy out of it, maybe even a religion. Or you can shut your mouth and cut your losses. I chose the latter. Hoo hoo.’ I mock-bowed to the man’s superior wisdom. He mock-suffered me, and I backed out the door.

  So I go knocking on the door of Bob Dubois. He is banging something out on his computer. He is so steeped in virtue he has forgotten the word exists. He is so vain he has forgotten himself. He does not even apologize for the disarray his digs are in. ‘Bob,’ I say to him, ‘I’m on a fact-finding mission. What I want to know is this: why do you continue to believe in the innate good sense of the American people?’ His eyes get a little glassy. His jaws get a little slack. He has not been expecting the question, so it seems to me. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says, after a moment’s reflection, ‘I think I know where your question is coming from, you being such a cynic and all. But I’ll assume you’re serious. The sort of man I am, the life I’ve led, the schooling and training received, all that whatnot, has led me to believe all problems are solvable. And when they’re not, it is only due to the fact we lack sufficient data, not inadequacy of mind. You don’t agree with me on this? Let’s say there is justification for your point of view. Let’s say, alright, there are problems that are insoluble that will always be insoluble because that’s just the way it is. I say, alright, but the odds are, even as we knock our heads against a concrete wall, that we’ll muddle through, anyway. We always have and we always will. Hence, my faith in the innate good sense of any people. It has nothing to do with good sense, perhaps, but the odds have favoured us, and barring some cataclysm, an asteroid hitting us, say, they always will. Life trumps death. You ought to take up materialism, old man. Less arduous. Now I’ve got this letter to finish. I’ve decided I’m for impeaching the President.’ He laughs, the rotter. My eyes get glassy; my jaws slacken. For a financier enamoured of logic, he is awfully baroque. He is his own variety of madness.

  To Eleanor’s. I knock; she barks, ‘What now?’ I push through. Some acrid odour in the air. And in her kitchen I see that the good woman is incensed. ‘I’ve been up since 5 this morning, baking. I burnt the cookies. Why? Because I got engrossed, watching Advise and Consent on TV. Most unlike me. And you? I don’t like the look in your eyes.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’m on a mission.’ ‘Christ, a mission?’ she says, ‘whatever for? You’re no missionary. You’re anything but. You’re a man who pleases himself.’ ‘Could be,’ I say. ‘Well, it’s true,’ she rebuts, ‘and most men I know have always pleased themselves. Anyway, let’s get this over with. I can see I won’t be able to put you off.’ (Even so, she allows me a generous glimpse of her thigh, her robe parting as she leans against her kitchen counter.) ‘Look,’ I say, drawing out a chair
for myself, ‘all I want to know is this: what convinces you that Lucille did in Marcel?’ ‘Because he’s dead, you ninny,’ she says, a trifle short-tempered, ‘because she’s such a condescending, I-can-do-anything-and-get-away-with-it kind of witch that she did it for the hell of it. She didn’t hate the man. There’s no deep-seated bundle of twisted wires in her soul; and, in any case, she hasn’t got a soul. If she didn’t hate the man, certainly, she didn’t love him enough to despise him, if you get my drift. Is she evil? There you got me. There I can’t say. I prefer to think of the woman as a two-legged blob that simply absorbs and ejects impediments. Charge her with a crime, prove her guilt, put her in the electric chair or shoot her up with some cocktail, and you will have simply extinguished some protoplasmic endeavour organized along capitalistic lines.’ She lights a cigarette and dares me to gainsay her. ‘My,’ I say, ‘that’s a dark view you have of crime and punishment and all things Lamont. You take my breath away. I had no idea.’ ‘Well, now you know,’ she answers, ‘I’m all for humanity and doing the right thing. Everyone deserves a second shot after screwing up. But for every rule an exception. I can’t prove I’m right about that woman and you can’t prove me wrong; just know that I’m right. Now, as you no doubt have discerned, I’m in a lousy mood and I wish you out of here.’ Her voice saying one thing, her eyes another, I go. And it leaves Moonface. It leaves Moonface for me to interview. But life is pointless to her, and meaningless. She is rubbing our noses in it, she is, having sex with some cretin outside our circle. Yes, I am a little jealous but not as jealous as one might think. She has got to get her toe wet, sometime. Take the plunge. A few laughs.

  A few tears. A bowl of milk each year, Priapus, and these cakes are all you need expect …