The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  And a bus of lonely faces conveyed me downtown. It was a polyglot assembly of passengers. French, English, Spanish, Czech. Haitian and Jamaican lilts. Chinese. I read those faces for the miseries all had in common. I did not want to know. ‘Time is a continuum,’ my old friend Gareth Howard once said to me, ‘in which past and future are indistinguishable.’ He had wanted to carry a point by way of ironic effect. An old black woman praised Jesus. Next to her, a Lavinia all punked up, shot me waves of her drug-induced paranoia. My skin crawled. A Virgilian combat scene flashed through my mind. Spearing him through his thigh, Aeneas pinned Turnus to the ground and heard out his pleas. Then the victor capitulated to his rage, and a moral creature not quite moral expired. Huck Finn rafted down the Tigris. I was only just getting started, my mind its usual chaos. The city was steel and glass as well as the brick and granite of an earlier history. The bus clattered over potholes. The heavy hand of the church was much in evidence, as were strip clubs and universities, Ste Catherine’s a fine street, in my view, worthy of the attentions of a Villon or a Baudelaire drifted in from Rivière-du-Loup.

  Steerburgers. Cavernous joint. A squadron of waitresses fanned out to cover each their sections. Commandos. I sat at the counter, luxuriating now in the sense of belonging to a wider world in which the Traymore Rooms and its vicinity were ancillary. Were I to carry a business card, it ought to read: ‘Randall Q Calhoun, Adjunctivist’. An overly familiar hand gripped my shoulder and I did not like it as it belonged to Arsdell who was All-Academe.

  Who was a foggy-headed humanist, one of those men who were forever scheming up new ways to waste a student’s time in the hopes of keeping a student interested. He stood there vacuously smiling, his overcoat forever chic, his only humanity his suppressed apology for his existence.

  ‘Randall,’ he cooed, the fellowship implied utterly bogus.

  ‘Arsdell,’ I said, barely suppressing my lack of regard.

  A 40-ish blonde and attractive and very business-like waitress gave him, a married man, the eye as she wiggled by.

  ‘I’m on my way to a meeting. We’re going to rally against the war.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ I said, perhaps too off-handedly.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be primed for that—to stop that insane war?’

  ‘Of course, anything,’ I shrugged.

  Anything but line up in the trenches with an arch-enemy who was so much a part of all that had gone wrong it was impossible to elucidate the reasons why.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  And even he, as thick-headed as he was, could understand he had just been dismissed. He was betrayed, singularly alone. The legions of evil were numberless.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said softly, withdrawing his loathsome and martyred hand, ‘we’ll probably need it.’

  He took his hurt eyes to the blonde with whom he spoke a few words and then he was out the door. Perhaps I should have been drawn, quartered and hung from a lamppost right then and there. I used to have faith in the Arsdells; that they were a bulwark against the barbarisms. Oh, they were the sort of men who, in the dead of night, always open the gates of the citadel from within to the marauding armies of the hour. I had my breakfast, my little hopeful excursion into the wide world otherwise spoiled. I went up to the cashier and paid my bill, and as I did so, gave an entirely innocent waitress an accusing look. Fool around with that man and she would be sorry.

  I walked the drag. It bustled with people. Sex boutiques. Bookstores. A business college. A Protestant church. Restaurants devoted to themes Mexican or Thai or Japanese. I pretended it had nothing to do with a take-no-prisoners economic system. Like so, I figured, Chaucer once pretended his pilgrims had nothing to do with the feudal order; they were creatures who were simply doing and not being done by. My oldest friend was dead in his grave. He had been a man of ordinary good looks and restless eyes. His voice carried his character: a warring front between civility and impatience with stupidity. If he eschewed the dramatic when on camera in the field, he was caustic in his reportage. I could not picture, at that moment, the polished stone that marked his final assignment, so to speak. Just the surrounding grounds, the maples and birches at the edges, the slope down to the river. A crow very black against the orange and yellow leaves. A gloomy thought this: would Gar have joined forces with Arsdell in the quest for world peace? Is loyalty an absolute? American movies were full of ingenious escape clauses from these sorts of binds. I returned to the Traymore. The trouble with the wider world was that it could get very claustrophobic.

  I breathed easier on a familiar street. Mrs Petrova in her shop, eyepiece screwed on, held a wristwatch between her hands. She was scrutinizing its innards. ‘There it is,’ I said to myself, ‘bulwark against barbarism: time and those who defend it.’ Of course, the opposing argument was always waiting in the wings, the one that blamed time for all human woes. Mrs Petrova gave me a thoughtful look as I passed by the window to the Traymore entrance, and she grunted.

  I was about to unlock my door when Eleanor opened hers and crooked her finger at me. What now? I was in the mood for a drink and music and solitude. I had, after all, eluded the clutches of academe in the person of Arsdell, and I wished to celebrate. I followed the woman through her living room—all knickknack and macramé and potted plants—to the kitchen. Bread baked in the oven. She and Dubois were probably on again. Her waddle was flirtatious, high-spirited.

  ‘Sit,’ she said, and I sat, and she continued: ‘Several things. One, that cop woman was around again, that bony blonde with the Nazi eyes. She was asking after Lucille. Think she’s bucking for detective? So I gave her the address that was on the envelope of the letter I got from the witch. Two, Moonface has just learned she isn’t really preggers. Seems the father would’ve been a Nigerian exchange student. The classic angry young man. They’d been to the doctor’s. Three, Bob wants to take me to Disneyworld. Should I accept? I think I should. A little trip will do us good. Four, but then, you know: Eggy has asked some bank girl to marry him.’

  Eleanor lit a cigarette. I wanted nothing else but music, a drink and a lie down. Gareth Howard was floating away from me on his river of death. Clare Howard stood revealed for the believer she always had been, and no one should ever have doubted her, not for an instant. That she was strong and lovely and good, and a terror when crossed. Moonface was a dull part of my mind, she and her troubles. She could not be but relieved that she was not actually preggers. In any case, it was yet another thing she had kept from me. I said: ‘Russia will sell out somebody, but which somebody? That’s the question. Putin has the look of a cynic who likes the feel of his plush poker chips. The President has the air of a man who has always depended on the kindness of strangers, his chips the cheap kind you can buy in drugstores. What has this to do with Lucille and a cop and Moonface? Did the girl at the bank agree to marry Eggy? No? No matter. He’s living securely in Camelot, and everything is fine with him. Never mind that his soul is hideously black with the sins of a long life. I’m in a mood, I fear, and I’m going to take myself off. But I’m pleased you got me up to speed in regards to recent developments as no one tells me anything, and what I’m told is largely suspect.’

  A commotion in the middle of the night roused me: paramedics, Eleanor, Eggy on his familiar stretcher. How does the woman always know to call for an ambulance? I would hear about it in the morning.

  Moonface Was Forever Messing with Boys

  Eggy bore up under a series of tiny strokes. Now and then I would know Moonface had had a fit, her visage as white as that of a Kabuki performer, mornings in the hall of the Traymore, her eyes other-worldly. Eleanor R was thinking scallops, lately, Coquilles St Jacques. She just had, she said, a yen for it. Scallops and butter and mushrooms and chopped onion and Miracle Whip. Mmmmm. The sight of her, in her pompadours and her apron, whisking something in a saucepan—was it, in a venal age, permitted? I should have considered myself a fortunate man (and for the most part I did), surrounded as I was by agreeable male compa
ny, by not unattractive women, comfortably anchored in my digs, pursuing my obscure ends. Now I was conducting an interview with myself, sitting in the Blue Danube, Moonface working. We had put to rest that business of her pregnancy; and she was, for once, in good spirits. In truth, I was feeling guilty. The news (as related to me by Eleanor) of her false alarm, of her having possibly been with child, struck me with no more force than if I had learned she had developed zits.

  ‘What will you do with the Nigerian?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean—do with him? His name is James. He’s my friend.’

  ‘Ah, your friend,’ I said.

  ‘Indeed,’ she shot back, her tone indicating that that was to be the end of it. Reginald, the man who moved me with his van so long ago last March, was jocular in a withering sort of way: ‘Love the tupperware, refrain from philosophy. Some men speak truth to power; you, you speak to a void. You’s crazy, mon.’

  We were beginning to wonder, Eleanor and I, if Eggy had a new sweetheart in a hospital ward, was engineering his over-nighters with a view toward the possibility of a tryst. In any case, he would be out again soon. Whether or not any bank girl had agreed to marry him, Eggy was not saying, and I had thought it intrusive to ask. But it seemed only the other day that his lower lip was quivering a little as if disappointed, Eggy in the Blue Danube reading a book on the French-Indian wars, two glasses of red wine set before him, the maples outside in their coats of many colours.

  Moonface, then leafing through a book, was seeing life through a bit of grim verse by the poet Propertius, some voice speaking out of a burial site to a survivor of the fracas at Perugia two thousand years ago. I had been there once upon a modern time myself, and all I could remember of the place, besides one excellent meal I had chanced across, were the local communistas unfurling their red banner in the main piazza.

  ‘Well,’ Eggy was saying, apropos of nothing, and lately, his sentences would spring up like water from nowhere: ‘I’ve been to Quebec City. I’ve seen the Plains of Abraham. Is hers the face that launched—?’

  Moonface came over, hands on hips in a gunslinger’s pose. She said, speaking of Eggy to me: ‘Is this man bothering you?’

  I thought her eyes were getting more beautiful, if possible, and her not so ample breasts more alluring. In the realm of the erotic, once you commit to the charms of your beloved, that is it, you are finished. Still, I was too old for these Stendhalian romps. Clearly, Eggy—who had twenty some years on me—was not. And perhaps he was a better friend than I to the young woman, he saying to her: ‘You know you’re rotten, don’t you. I’m going to have to have you on my lap and spank you.’

  ‘Ooooh,’ said Moonface in mock alarm.

  It seemed we could live like this forever, playful, flirtatious, downright naughty, the past rendered pure by the poetry of tombs. This is why Plato distrusted poets; they did not lie, necessarily. They were seductive, distracting the mind from the present or that which men like Plato could never keep their hands off, inasmuch as they must always manipulate it and improve it to some dubious specification. It is bad enough, trying to keep one’s balance in respect to their invidious claims as to what reality is; and here I was tights, bells and jester’s cap, living off the fumes of a lust that was rising in Moonface and taking possession of every atom that constituted her unassuming self. I could see us having sex like wild dogs, she yipping and snarling with alarm and arousal and pleasure. Perhaps the scholar in her mind was attempting to make sense of that Propertian poem of a soldier’s death. Perhaps a girl was lamenting the waste. I needed a loner’s drink.

  Calhoun Waylaid

  The war, the war, the war. I was in for it now I had let thought of it rear its hideous head. Now it was abstract and remote; now it was as immediate as a throbbing knee, the ache of which one just managed to ignore. Who had not been knocked for a loop by dint of that Manhattan day a few Septembers ago, the towers collapsing like two accordions stood on end? In light of that horror, the war was an even more shameful business feeding on all the clichés, a vain stab at collective self-respect. Tiberius? Oh he’s off chasing the tribes around in Germania. He’ll be back soon enough to darken the Roman sun with his sour countenance, to give the astrologers a hard time of it. With words like these, I might distract myself. Or I would take a powerful whiff of Mrs Petrova’s Sunday cooking through my nostrils, her pot roasts and cabbages the aromas of which vied with those emanating from Eleanor’s kitchen. If the sun was beginning to weaken, I would tell myself it would become strong again in March when the snow—part purity, part dog piss and debris—would start melting away and reveal the dead leaves and stringy grass of the city parks. I would tease Moonface a little just to see her smile. She did not have a remarkable smile, not one that could light up an entire world with joy and insouciance, but even so, fair to middling smile that it was, it was a grace note of sorts, and necessary.

  In my letterbox was a letter from Clare. I thrilled to the fact of it; then a warning sounded. Why was she writing me? She disapproved of Randall Q Calhoun. I had kept Gar out late at nights; I had hampered his development, what with my pessimistic and cynical attitudes. Even the drug runner on the street saw more of a future in his line of work than I in mine; he had more reason to smile. If she was good, beautiful and true, I was weak and callow and corrupted. Throw in a few more qualities, and the picture of me was completed. In any case, the missive consisted of all of three lines, not including the salutations; to wit, that it was silly of me not to have a phone; that she was driving out to Gar’s old country shack with a view to selling the property; and, did I want to come along? There she was in my eye: tall and willowy, her chestnut hair long. Now I really needed a solitary drink.

  Instead, I knuckled on Eleanor’s door. Soon enough, I was in her kitchen, babbling away.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she write you?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Because she doesn’t like me.’

  ‘How do you know? Did she ever say as much?’

  ‘She wouldn’t. She doesn’t go in for theatrics.’

  ‘Maybe she fancies you. Stranger things have transpired in the course of human affairs.’

  ‘Probably she just wants help clearing out the cabin of Gar’s effects. Perhaps I owe her this, some squaring of a moral debt.’

  And so, on the appointed day, Clare at the wheel of a battered import, I found myself being transported to the country, the shack just under two hours from the city, and set in rolling hills, east and west of which was land as flat as a billiard table. We were mostly silent; I had not a clue what to say. She was, as ever, dressed elegantly but simply. Leather jacket. Thick scarf. Skirt. Warm leggings and ankle-high boots. Knitted gloves. Then she said, her voice rich and to the point: ‘You may as well know, Gar was going mad at the end.’

  Dionysus had trucked with madness, but had a cold Apollonian trucked with it as well?

  At any rate, Clare’s words were most unexpected. When had we last had words? How is it that time plays these tricks by which, when face to face with someone, it seems that moments and not years have intervened between meetings?

  ‘I knew he was hot and bothered, but mad as in clinically insane?’

  ‘Politics,’ she said, explaining everything, and she continued, I her pick-me-up confidante: ‘He was convinced lunacy had taken over the world.’

  ‘It has.’

  She took her eye off the highway and gave me a look. A smattering of interest. A flicker of hatred. The radio was tuned to a classical station. If the music was, indeed, CPE Bach’s, it was at odds with the RV park we were proceeding by now, the disposable architecture of the sales office.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘what do I know? I can’t speak for Gar. I, as it were, read the mists in the air. Gar saw things up front, down and dirty, knew and talked with men such as I can only imagine. Since when have I had a chat with any mayor let alone a congressional stooge? Who was I to gainsay a world traveller? I triangulate my views of the current situation from the mu
sty pages of long dead books and that makes me, what, an egghead, a fool, and decidedly irrelevant. Are you saying you were jealous of Gar’s obsessions?’

  Another flicker of hatred. Tender, somewhat melancholy, a keyboard sonata only hardened Clare, she ignoring me her passenger, gripping the steering wheel more tightly. Semi-trucks barrelled by, shaking us with their turbulent wakes. She was cocooned by her sulk. I was made ludicrous by way of erotic fancies at a most inappropriate point of time. She laughed and switched off the radio, giving me a sideways look that suggested she had read my mind. She patted my knee; and it was as if I were a dog who knew the command to sit but had not yet learned the sense of the word heel. We were going up into the hills. White birches leaned in all directions. Scraggly spruce.

  She had kept everyone, including me, away from Gar throughout the course of his dying. Perhaps she thought she was making up for this, driving me out to the shack, pretending that once I had mattered to Gar’s life. What disturbed me just then was not what Clare was up to, if anything; it was the thought of Gar drawing his last breath in anger. I was confident he and Clare had reconciled, but only a fool, I supposed, would hate a country’s politics in his last hours.