by Norm Sibum
—I lie down on my couch in a semi-dark room, drink in my hand, music in the ghetto blaster. I close my eyes; images abound. Seaside temples. Lemon groves. Human cruelties. The ologists say that hunting in packs was our boulevard to a civilized state. So much for our noble natures. No, you crouch in your cave and you hope for the best. You get the crop in or you fail. You eat or starve like any other animal. The music says, ‘No, no, no, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Love exists.’ ‘Of course, you’re right,’ the cynic responds, ‘but surely, even you’ll agree that love is happenstance’, love the thing that apparently suspends the operations of cause and effect and the grinding wheel of time. Music hisses, crashes with cymbals, percolates with flutes, and trumpets displeasure with my cynicism. ‘What evolutionary drift?’ it says, ‘for every note contained within me has meaning and purpose, to wit, architecture.’ ‘Right you are,’ I answer, in no position to argue, and besides, there is a knock on the door.
Why, it is Moonface. Moonface in tears. Cheeks streaked with mascara. No, it is not Moonface; rather it is Eggy who is of the moment, because she is saying the man’s slumped over in his chair. Her eyes, once black to me, brown for all the world to see, are stricken; and they are saying, ‘Calhoun, I love you like a father but Eggy, well, he’s Zeus.’ What, that sparrow of a man? Her voice is saying, ‘I think he’s had a stroke.’ In any case, we rush over, Moonface and I. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘he’s just having one of his episodes.’ ‘I couldn’t rouse him,’ she insists. We are in Eggy’s room now. If he was slumped over, now he is rigid, firmly flush with the back of his chair, his eyes wide and a little awed. His eyes comprehend they have got company. He speaks up, ‘I think I fell asleep.’ ‘I think you’re going to the hospital,’ I say. ‘Bloody hell I am,’ he weakly thunders, ‘the cardiologist will just get on my case about drinking. I’ll have to mollify her. Then I’ll have to go against her when I’m back on my own again. You see how it is. Damn nuisance.’ Phonecall is made; ambulance arrives; medics troop up the stairs. Dubois sticks his head out his door. Eleanor, still ill-tempered, pads over, barefoot. ‘Good Christ, Eggy,’ she says. Moonface fusses, gives Eleanor a look, as Eggy is strapped to the stretcher. Dubois says he will drop by the hospital, later. Eggy says, ‘Hoo hoo.’
Back in my room, the reverie broken, I now have no idea what I think about anything. It would seem Moonface, evolutionary drift or no, was born to love, the soil for it a tad thin.
—And, a few mornings later, fog hanging in the yellow trees, there in the Blue Danube, a tiny café that caters primarily to disaffected Slavs, Moonface turns up the radio, and the tune is “Funky Town”, and she jives a little, her eyes half-closed in their boredom, and it annoys me. So much for romance however one-sided, and I feel patriarchal and judgmental and there is no joy in Mudville. I say nothing. The café is otherwise empty of clientele. It is as if a sign on the door reads PLAGUE, QUARANTINE IN EFFECT; and carts rumble by, adding to a pile of burning corpses in the street, birds looking on from high perches. And it is as if, besides Moonface’s handcream and the coffee staling, getting downright poisonous, the smell of a cathedral’s cold crypt—other-worldly, relentless nether region at the heart of everything—thumbs up my nostrils and stuns my brain. ‘Eggy that devil,’ says Moonface near to sighing. It is a coincidental choice of epithet on her part, as, last night in this place, Eggy against a backdrop of roisterous Slavs, had said of the President, ‘He’s an apostle of evil.’
‘Pretty strong words, don’t you think?’ I replied. ‘Well,’ said Eggy, ‘I suppose Nixon was worse. Hoo hoo.’ He gripped his glass of wine and a coherent history of America fell apart in my mind. After Rome and Byzantium, I just have not the room, so many wagons ho wagon trains tumbling off the edge of a precipice in my mentations, mixing it up with buffalo and dinosaur bones. Moonface was on shift then, too, busy with the Slavs who were passing around one of those new gadgets that combine the functions of phone and computer and camera, or so I understand it; and I figured sourly enough that this technology, too, will go the way of wagon trains and musketry even as Moonface at their table was girlishly saying, ‘Cool.’ One of the men, as if peering around a corner, gave her bum a good going over with his eyes. Eggy sat there, saying, ‘But I’m too old and I don’t much care now, and you younger fellows are going to have get up to something, should you want truth, beauty and justice.’ Moonface, overhearing, passing by us with an armful of used plates, girlishly snorted, ‘Fat chance of that.’ ‘You behave,’ Eggy laughed, ‘you rotten girl.’ ‘How is it,’ I asked myself, ‘we can be both dying of too much history and not enough of it?’
—It was a small and sombre group at Gareth Howard’s funeral. Clare avoided my unspoken entreaties. Old marble plinths tipped every which way. Yellow trees. The invasive caw of a crow. A minister parcelled out his words, and Gar, in a contemplative mood, might have found them poetic. Or, feeling combative, he would have parried with a grumbled ‘up yours’. He rather disliked the homiletic: to all things a season. I skulked about the edges of the gathering. I made no attempt to verbally claim the dead person of Gareth Howard. I refrained from muscling in on the living memory of him, a memory which, in any case, looked to have a short shelf-life. I did not say, ‘Yes, he was a great guy.’ Colleagues in the news business lamented the passing of a conscience. It was what their eyes said, at any rate. I thought of the frustrated writer of short stories and novels. A smartly dressed woman with whom Clare was, shall we say, tensely diplomatic, folded her arms across her chest all the while she clenched her purse tightly, her knuckles white. Her face was otherwise appealing and open. From what world capital had she flown? Clare was, and always had been, a knockout. She may have had her affairs during her husband’s many absences, but she was, all the same, ferociously loyal to some underlying principle of their relationship. Erotic warmth briefly pulsed through me before it flickered and died away. Ministerial words trailed away in a wind beginning to gust; the words gambolled down a gentle slope toward the river, funereal words that suddenly got playful. To everything a time under heaven. And, under heaven the isolate. And there it was, the word, the almost bardic word that conditions friendship, collegiality, lust and love. I noted a raptor in the sky and pictured the fur and bone, the bit of tissue of a mouse. Sex, so I was thinking, and unaccountably so, is a cold thing; a bucking about on a bed. Sometimes, yes, it is warm, and sometimes it is even hotter when lovers come together with their secrets and without walls. I was not dressed for the occasion, so it began to seem to me. I should have been decked in tights and bells and a jester’s cap. The President was beginning to be seen as mad in some quarters, he and his vice-president and coterie; and I recalled that Gareth Howard had interviewed his share of the demented. The tinny, unforgivably rude hectoring of a cell phone. Curses. Mumbled apology. Finally, the interment. Dirt clods slapped down on the casket. A smartly-dressed woman threw in a rose. The redness of that rose was obscene in view of Clare; and she stiffened a little for all she was most likely past the point of whatever tears she had already shed. In Kamarooska a kiss and a thought for Algonquins. What is it about funerals in the New World that clutch at the land, whose claims are greater than those of rapine and slaughter and conquest and settlement? Die and it is yours. I did not attend the wake. No, I went instead to the Cloister, the old wateringhole Gar and I used to frequent. Defiantly, I gunned off its new clientele, the members of which had not the slightest understanding of integrity; a word those smug tipplers were trashing with gusto. But I raised a glass all the same and drank down my Sea Breeze. Then back to the Traymore. I slid a CD into my ghetto-blaster, heard in this new symphony grief amidst the dissonance of cymbals and drums. The real thing. I saw Clare majestic in her stockings. Another spell of erotic warmth. It was like taking a cup of hot milk for sleeplessness; but that I gag on milk. Now, at the window, that one which looks out on a back lane straddling lots and yards, I commune with sparrows and a squirrel. It is to say I mourn the various assemblages of the
Gar face and the Gar voice, none of which, so long as I yet live, will ever again cohere.
—Last night, Dubois comes over, worry on his face. He ought to marry Eleanor but cannot bring himself to. Meanwhile, we may have a new lodger. Can he make the grade? I deeply regret I let Moonface know of the extent of my affection for her. I may as well have taken a length of two by four and whacked her with it, the way her head has turned vis-à-vis me; how she whah-hah-hahs me and wards off the Evil Eye. Alright then, Moonface, love? I’ll forget it. You will see how scrupulously I will abide by your terms.
§
Book IV—A Proper Narrative
Salon
Sometimes when the maples are green with leaf, the wind gentle and not bringing too much heat; and the sky is clear or its cumulus dissolves in the evening air, and the day’s last sparrows go to roost; and the girls are meditative in both body and mind, the boys not too puerile, people of all ages out for a stroll; then well-being is palpable, owing to something other than one’s net worth in any mercenary sense. And sometimes Moonface, her shoulders hunched, walks the crucible of the street, returning from a night spent with some young man or other. I note how lonely her aspect is, how unmet. How useless I am to her in her search for meaning.
Four glasses of wine, and Eggy was lit: ‘Moonface is my first reserve. I’ve asked a girl at the bank to marry me.’
Moonface tossed her head.
Eggy: ‘Well, will you want to improve? Who can marry a woman who doesn’t want to better herself? The rain in Spain—’
Eleanor R suppressed a giggle; now she had heard it all, Dubois grinning.
I leaned back in my chair. At the moment, Andrew Jackson, President the seventh of the United States of America, or some such entity, interested me more than Eggy on his fool’s errand. (That AJ had happily set about annihilating those pesky Red Stick insurgents there where the Tallapoosa bends sharply.) Still, Eggy seemed to know he was indulging himself and yet, he did not much care. We were gathered in Eleanor’s kitchen on the occasion of her first salon.
She, not the most fastidious of women (though she enjoyed mastery of her kitchen, it sometimes mastered her), had vacuumed and swept and wiped and dusted. A grumbling Dubois helped. Sweet Haven lovebirds they were not, if only because they maintained separate apartments. Eleanor, fingering the spit valve of her trombone, said: ‘Well, Eggy, I suppose congratulations are in order.’
‘Hear hear,’ said Dubois.
Eggy beamed, Moonface disgusted. Eleanor put the spit valve which she was always fingering—as if it were a mood rock—aside. She reached for a fancy cracker with its slice of cheese. She shovelled it into her mouth. She reached next for a pickle and crunched it in half between solid molars. She was pleased with herself, the kitchen warm, homey and roomy. It was perhaps the finest room of all the Traymore rooms, excepting those, perhaps, of Mrs Petrova’s ground-floor suite.
She assured Dubois she would not bring up the Lamonts as a conversational gambit, Dubois having drawn a line in the sand. Even now he did not believe anything untoward had happened in respect to Marcel’s demise. Too much gin, that’s all. The man paid for it with his life. Eggy would have no opinion, Moonface’s jury quiescent. It would seem Eleanor and I alone were thinking otherwise; certain dark arts had been employed to repatriate Marcel Lamont to the realm of the dead. Eggy, sparrow of a man, was saying: ‘Oh, I don’t believe the girl will marry me for my looks. Nor will she necessarily marry me for my money. I haven’t that much.’
‘Then for what?’ Moonface, on the edge of some irritation, interjected.
‘Why, for my charm and considerable intellect.’
Moonface could not have been in a good mood or she would have laughed down Eggy’s love of self. The rest of us were, so to speak, rolling in the aisles.
‘Anyone for coffee?’ Eleanor inquired, rising from her chair with a majestic lift to her shoulders, tra-la-lah-ing to the stove to put the kettle on, she sporting a flattering blouse and new pompadours. Perhaps later, Dubois would get lucky.
I had written about Moonface. Worse, I committed the mistake of informing her I had done as much. She was suspicious.
‘I suppose you describe me as immature.’
‘A point of view,’ I countered, somewhat testily, ‘to be arrived at through the arcana of physics, suggests we all had a hand to play in the death of Marcel Lamont. We’re each of us fickle and inconstant creatures, mouthing our pieties one moment and silently stewing in darkness the next.
Or like so many Andrew Jacksons drunk on frontier liberties, we breed horses between campaigns. In any case, I dolled you up as a sex object of lethal dimensions. Those tiny ears of yours. Chew on that.’
And she seemed to be chewing it as I spoke the words, her eyes rolling up and sideways. We had been talking over and around the conversationalists in the room, Eleanor registering the fact, storing away this intelligence in her commodious mind. No doubt, the good woman thought us lovers, Moonface and I, and we were not. We were, however, competitive partners in a game whose rules and whose object were most unclear. But had not Constantine the emperor translated Virgil’s fourth eclogue into Greek hexameters, and peace would come to the trembling cosmos? iam redit et uirgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. Latin words that speak to new beginnings. If it is nature, and nature only that works the great sea-changes in the life of humankind, Moonface was just a girl, and probably no great shakes in bed, at that. At least, she was not hanging around Mexico City, privy to the Second Coming of Diego and Frida, parasitically living off the reputations of those two artists. No, she was steeping herself in the malignant light of Virgil’s moon, he who, so as to defend Rome’s reasoned rule of the known world, would snatch from Homer’s defeated and dead their lawful property: to wit, the poetry they had earned.
Later, in my own digs, supine on my couch, I reviewed the salon. I had not, in truth, enjoyed it as much as I would have liked. For all that, I was conscious of the fact that, over the months, I had served as a catalyst to Traymoreans for a certain kind of conversation. A claque of sorts, if one comprised of stubborn individualists, we would turn this way and that in our quarrels like a single flock of birds. Dubois, shifting from a position of indifference in regards to the war, now fired off letters to the editor castigating the President for his callow utterances and feckless helmsmanship. Even Eggy could be heard to say from time to time, as if it explained something, ‘Apostles of evil. Well, it’s true.’ Moonface had no opinion. Eleanor’s last political loves were Kennedy and Pierre Elliot Trudeau, and Kennedy was long since departed, his brains splattered still against the interior of the presidential limousine, and that was the end of it. Even so, politics as such, or so I figured, had little to do with our seeming comity. More so it had to do with each our standing-apart from the effluvium of war and profit-taking, from every theatrical display of moral gamesmanship. A wary outlook seemed to brand our foreheads with an identifying mark, one that said: ‘I’m here
for you if you wish. I don’t expect to win. I don’t suppose you expect to win. Please don’t expect me to even try. I like my pleasures.’
If the materialism to which Dubois subscribed as a philosophy of life was entirely conventional, he, at least, recognized the power of certain intangibles to riddle life with mysteries. He tsked-tsked mention of God, but poetry was something, at any rate. Eleanor, more the logician than any of us, amateur trombonist, consummate in her kitchen and comfortable in her bed, nonetheless enjoyed her spells of solitude and respected her intuitions. She knew she could not prove Lucille Lamont a murderess, but no matter, she just knew. Moonface? Erotic fancies, no doubt, compromised my view of her; and yet, from what I could see, she was as likely to settle down, marry, have children as do anything only a mystic might comprehend. Eggy was, perhaps, the jewel of the Traymore crown; translucent, acerbic, kind, selfish, thoughtful, as silly as a goose; in short, he was all human possibility enjoying a last burst of brilliance. Dying star. Or rather, he was just effing decrepit
but that he had lived a little.
The Lamonts never fit in. Marcel was welcomed, was considered ‘sympatico’, but he had kept his distance, Lucille always tugging on his strings. It was clear she could not entertain herself unless she was in the driver’s seat and scheming this and scheming that. She was not well-liked, if at all. Mrs Petrova was necessary. She was a woman admired throughout the neighbourhood for her vitality and fearlessness and the tight ship she ran without hectoring her lodgers in the process. I lay on my couch, dyspeptic chrysalis. Virgil was a thief in the night. Old Hickory, or Andrew Jackson, split open the backs of his slaves with God’s grand purposes. A new symphony shattered the universe with lyrical and dissonant passages. The music seemed to skirt the perimeters of full-blown madness, Bacchic frenzies, Dionysus hooting in a mountain wood; and I with my superstitious awe of grotto and grove, was an urban creature. I could not comprehend the American mind.
A knock at the door, and it was Moonface somewhat distraught.
‘I love you, too,’ she said, heatedly.
It was as if she resented saying as much; as if the saying it was costing her more energy than she wished to expend.
‘But,’ she advised, ‘I won’t sleep with you.’
‘Of course not,’ I replied, astonished.
Blutocracy
The bedroom a pleasant crypt. I half-awake. Bird chatter a conduit to consciousness. Sparrows, starlings, crows. I could see, as I looked out a window that Mrs Petrova had strung up a new squirrel-proof feeder. A bluejay, a nuthatch and a lone reddish finch were attempting to raid it. Life seemed rich and hopeful, the morning after Eleanor’s salon.
Who was I kidding? Darker thoughts now, to do with the American mind that I could not comprehend, the national cruelties, even so, familiar; the Sally McCabes who were all beautiful and pragmatic in their seemingly necessary sadisms; the empty-minded brutalities of young men who peopled cheap horror flicks, who were sometimes parodied and mostly extolled. It was the funfair waterslide descent into barbarism on a collective scale. As Eggy might have put it, it was a blutocracy. I had an all too brief moment of seeming clarity: Moonface as Psyche. But mythology was suspect, Bly saying, ‘Calhoun, forget the gods. Global capitalism is our handiwork.’ Of course, and it was going to finish us off even before we would see its victory cross in the sky. Was not Mr 007 its Hercules, its John the Baptist, corporate foot-soldier who wenched and dispatched rivals and flirted with Armageddon? It was too early for the Blue Danube. I would go elsewhere to eat.