by Norm Sibum
She said with some heat, ‘Look, Calhoun, get this: Lucille Lamont is how I make amends between me and myself. She’s my truth before God, seeing as I see the truth of that woman. Do you think He minds I must stick His nose in it? You bet He minds. She’s low-lying evil, but evil all the same. Do you think I like this hang ‘em high mentality? It’s not my job to judge her. But if and when she ever looks in my eyes, she has to know I know. It sits in my gut like a greasy meal. By the way, who’s in the kitchen? This is raunchy stuff we’re eating.’
I had not noticed, so rapt I was in the operations of the Eleanor mind.
Moonface (and was she joking around?) had brought us over a candle and lit it, and Eleanor’s frosted curls seemed to glow for a moment, a kind of divine apparatus.
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Eleanor. ‘Now could you bring us coffee? And if there’s something sticky and sweet and alcoholic to drink in this house, we’ll have that, too.’
I was so caught up with Eleanor and her musings that I had been oblivious to the fact the Blue Danube had filled with Slavs; that Moonface had her hands full and that, dreamy-minded or not, she was competent and efficient in her work. Some swarthy and mustachio’d character was playfully giving her the gears, and Moonface was smiling, her eyes rolled to the ceiling, she holding menus to her bosom. She was Iphigenia operating on blind trust.
We fell silent again, Eleanor and I. It was one of those prickly silences in which judge, jury and the accused think the worst of one another. My dinner companion, the evening’s benefactress, was getting glassy-eyed. I was restive now and wanting to go, staring out the window at human detritus in the street. Moonface served the coffee and liqueur. Then as if she were in a world of her own and we did not exist, she upped the radio’s decibels. A harsh and unpleasant female voice sang of wham bam sex. Never had fire and desire been such an unlikely pairing by way of rhyme. I was weary of the emphatic. Somewhere in a nation-state a president was noodling in his brain, his base disintegrating, the one of Bibles and values and pristine principle; his generals sullen; his cabinet and advisers all scrambling about, pushing each their agendas. Spin doctors spun their cotton candies; and, would the man widen the war? It was not an unreasonable question to ask, though many in the pundit class tittered as, categorically, they asserted: ‘Ain’t gonna happen. That’s money in the bank.’
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ asked Eleanor, as if trying to rope me back into her world, she preoccupied with some showdown between good and evil of a quite different order.
Truth to tell, I disliked the expression ‘a penny’ and so forth; it was intimacy on the cheap. Besides, who could think, what with the racket emanating from the radio?
‘Oh hell, law’ I answered, ‘the raison d’être of law has undergone a sea change.’
‘Oh, do you think?’ Eleanor said in a twitting tone of voice, stealing from the current put-down phrase of the hour.
‘Protect the rich, screw the poor, that sort of thing? Old news. What else you got?’
‘I worry about Moonface. Sometimes I think she hasn’t got the sensibility God gave a baboon.’
‘She’s young. What do you expect? You’ve had years to acquire your, what do you call it, sensibility; your druthers, your prejudices.’
‘There’s something more to sensibility than what can be learned.’
‘Well then, either she’s got it or she doesn’t.’
Eleanor was dying for a cigarette. Any moment now, she would rifle her purse for one and light it in the candle’s flame. She would waddle outside, puffing defiantly. And yet, a moment gone by, and still, she sat there, less an oracle than a cheap shot artist whose only aim in life was to pillory everything that moved.
‘Thanks for the dinner,’ I said.
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Ever hear of No Gun Ri?’
‘Can’t say that I have.’
Peering into a small pouch of coins, Eleanor added: ‘Shall we leave a gratuity?’
‘I’ll get it,’ I said, Moonface in the kitchen with the cook, kidding around. She was worth the fifteen percent, I supposed. I would dock five on account of the music. I helped Eleanor with her coat.
And she lit up on the short trek back to the Traymore, the air calm, cold, clear. She slipped her arm through mine, saying: ‘You’re not such a bad fellow, you know. What are you saving it for?’
Secular humanist? Was I that? Must I declare my particulars in a census? If I could teach Moonface anything, it would be this: do not let the bastards pin you down; but should it come to that, make them a pay a price. I had already been with her, if not strictly in the biblical sense. We had not had intercourse, but we had been intimate, so much so it constituted a minor betrayal on Moonface’s part to her current consort. It was an hour spent in a harmless snuggle, each of us remaining clothed. Millions of baby boomers might have approved; or, à la Bly, a heavyweight, snickered. She had a knack for nesting, to go by her decorative and tasteful touch. There was a Veronese print on her bedroom wall, that one of Venus coddling (and twitting) Mars, little cherubs gambolling about. It was timeless, idyllic, and it masked a thousand horrors. There was a new epithet going the rounds: zero-sum gamers. It was meant to characterize the mentality of the President and his vice-regent. So that it would seem that Venus, squeezing her nipple, and Mars in his languor (and still armour-clad), nostalgically comprised the notion of a balance of power. Were we not hurtling backwards in time—to the wars of the Titans and other semi-coherent gods, and nature was not so much the battlefield as one of the combatants? A question perhaps too speciously asked. And then I would go out, and on the street, I would learn that the world is front and centre and immediate; which is to say the sun happened to be bright and the day cold, and in the Blue Danube, Moonface somewhat abstracted, Slavs were talking colonoscopies.
Dying in Brindisi
Calabria. The abandoned cantina on the beach had been a portal to another world. It was as sun- bleached as an enormous animal skull monitoring time in an arid wasteland. What dream had died in that spot? What humble aspiration? I photographed the ruin even if packing a camera around had been a nuisance. Then I dozed for a while on that beach, sand fleas or some other insect pestering me. Even so, I dreamed. Greek, Carthaginian, Moorish incursions. I supposed Virgil’s return from what were for him classical lands was also an incursion of a kind, his great poem not quite ripe. Eggy said that east of Vienna people have a view of life different from ours. A commonplace remark, one that Eggy refused to substantiate. He had gotten around; I should take him at his word. A leader was wanted in America, unifier, backdoor messiah. Some impute to Ronald Reagan, President the 40th, this distinction. Who knows which America danced in his crinkly eyes to his barnyard fiddle or languid baton, those folks in Latin America needing prepping?
Caesar was in the east when Virgil went to Greece; in Megara he came down with fever. He had been putting Caesar off, who wanted reports on the progress of the great poem extolling the empire, as if the empire were a moral thing. Virgil would revise as he travelled. Spitting blood, he was, no doubt, tubercular. It is said he had carved grottos with no other tool but that of his intense gaze. I had read Mr Broch’s famous treatment of Virgil’s death. I did not believe the author understood in the slightest what makes a poet a poet. Even so, I pictured Caesar rushing to the poet’s bedside—in Athens, say; then escorting him by ship to Brindisi, neither man truly the friend of the other. For each man was locked into each their function and role, Virgil’s view of his lot strictly ironic, Caesar not quite able to indulge such latitude vis-à-vis himself. Had Caesar really loved Virgil he might have acceded to the poet’s wish that the poem—ambitious, epical—be put away and forgotten if not destroyed. Rome would be Rome with or without it. But perhaps Caesar was a competent judge of literary worth. Eggy, it all too often seemed, was no competent judge of anything, given his prodigious wine intake, his pins sabotaged. Still, he would say the nonsense had gone on long enough. The apostles
of evil, hoo hoo, had run out of gas, a first term black senator from Illinois the imminent man of an imminent hour. Moonface might as easily paint her toenails as divide her thoughts between Virgil and her suitors and her political druthers. Was homeland an American word?
As I predicted, Traymoreans were taking little notice now of Osgoode, the new lodger; though, in point of fact, he was noticeable, in and out at all hours, his door-slamming not yet part and parcel of mere background noise. Even so, and mysteriously, the constant trooping up and down the stairs of women had ceased, as had their voices lilting with hello’s and good night’s. Had he fallen out of favour with them? Had they no more use for him? Was he now in a state of apostasy? Was he, after all, no more than a seller of insurance? He was courteous, well-spoken. He was somewhat interested in the arts, so he had mentioned to Moonface whom I briefly feared might be tempted to take up with the man.
‘No,’ she told me with an imperious air, ‘he’s not my type.’
Eleanor, whose parents had been devout but not zealous, searched him out for a belief system, if any; and to her amazement she could find nothing out. Oh, he informed her, alright. He was a Yank. He hailed from a small town in the state of Washington; had enrolled in a small college in the Seattle area; had, by chance, drifted into the computer game; had come east to work for a software firm. (Firm, he called it, as if talking steel or railroads or pharmaceuticals.) Then Montreal. He did not think he was any more or any less religious than anyone else. He supposed there was some ‘design’ or structure to the universe. As for the women, their presence in his apartment was work-related. ‘It’s an out and out lie,’ so Eleanor let me know, and I had to agree. He was a shining head and a holy roller, no question, but why the low profile? That it made him subversive and more chic than he deserved to be. He was evidence for the fact that not only did I not comprehend the American mind, I had failed to understand how the world had changed even when such change occurred right under my nose. My brain had been perhaps arrested in its forward progress when a president, a presidential contender, and a spiritual leader of the civil rights movement had been, one after the other so long ago now, in another country, assassinated. Except for that bit about the women, Eleanor pretty well bought his story, but I wondered if I was not as suspicious of Osgoode as she was of Lucille Lamont, and for the same reasons. There was in Osgoode’s eyes, for those who wished to note it, ambition. There was a clearly defined purpose, the world in his sights. There was something revolutionary about the man, and it cautioned me, saying, ‘I know you were revolutionary once. It was pathetic, how you failed. But Jesus loves you, anyway.’ Whom would he find expendable on his way to grasping the brass ring? I did not fear for myself or other Traymoreans; we were out of the loop. Dubois, semi-retired, still kept his hand in various business ventures, but it had more to do with maintaining a social nexus than with making a buck. It was not difficult to imagine, as Osgoode held his hand over his heart and pledged allegiance, that bodies would fall. My father had been a knife fighter, country and corporation so much office politics; but the shining head was a different animal. For him it was more than power and financial gain all wrapped up in the flag, though it was just that; only that the flag had come to symbolize something other than a rough and ready republic labouring somewhat under the burden of its innocence.
I took the rent to Mrs Petrova. I asked her there in her shop, ‘Want some money?’
She shrugged and answered, ‘Sure.’
It was the most American of words, that word ‘sure’. There were ancient imps in her eyes. And when she was done with time and time done with her, we Traymoreans might be out on the street, depending on what that mythical creature, her son, might have to say about it. She was far from frail in her eighty or so years. One moment she might be attending church in fancy red shoes and a rakish hat, and the next, she might be on her hands and knees digging in the earth for grubs. Versatile woman. A terror to thieves. It might require centuries for us to learn again that poetry and music are divine gifts, not commodities. The thought had nothing to do with the watches and the bracelets and the rings in Mrs Petrova’s glass compartments; had nothing to do with the ancient calendars and their winter scenes; with the crazies who came off the street and talked gibberish to the woman on account of the fact she was a legend and favoured by the gods. The thought had everything to do with all these items. The rent paid, receipt received, the woman having written Natasha Petrova on it with a careful flourish—in the bottom right-hand corner, I went out the tinkling door to the Blue Danube.
Dubois and Eggy were already there. Moonface at school, a young man, new recruit, waitered in her stead. He was Albanian, as it turned out, and he seemed angst-ridden from head to toe but was otherwise a good sort, Eggy and Dubois breaking him in. I sat with my friends, endured their insults. I soon learned that in 1961, Eggy had a wife, and with her, had crossed the continent by car and raised California. I had visions of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball and comradely sex. Then Eggy said: ‘And once I went by train through the tunnel at Kickinghorse Pass.’
And Dubois said, ‘What has this to do with California?’
And Eggy shot us one of his standard looks, the one that said we had yet to live sufficiently to appreciate his wealth of experience. I wanted to be serious, but my friends were in a larking mood and would not have it. ‘What’s pestilence, famine and endless war?’ asked the mocking eyes of Dubois. Perhaps it was true that he fired off letters to the editors only because it was hilarious fun.
The Albanian brought over another bottle of wine at Eggy’s behest. Mikki seemed permanently stuck in a no man’s land between a collapsed state and a discotheque. One perhaps associates exile with men and women of sentience, forgetting that exile also numbers among its supplicants the mute and the shell-shocked and the not so clever. I had no wish, really, to get drunk; but there it was, I was going to get drunk and count Eggy and Dubois as my closest soul mates. Gareth Howard was in his grave, and I could not see him or hear him or sniff him or otherwise sense his presence. His words had counted for something, if only momentarily; he a journalistic insect that mates with a deadline and immediately thereafter dies. Jack Swain materialized briefly before my eyes and was gone again, he the only dead man to whom I would post a letter. I did not recall what I might write. ‘Dear Jack,’ I suppose I would begin, ‘It’s untrue, the notion that there’s no justice in this world. It’s just that the justice you get is rarely the justice you truly need. But you know as much.’
Every cell in my body clamoured for something to happen. A president might own up to his crimes or pigs fly. One could get to like a purgatory, one’s redemption nowhere in evidence. I looked at Eggy and for the first time thought him smug. I looked at Dubois, and damn it all, but he was deeply envious of his old friend’s seeming air of immortality. Something had changed; and as Dubois explained what was wrong with the Democrats and their new lease on life (given the results of the last mid-term), I noticed he was now exuding saliva in a fine spray. I pulled back a little from his proximity. I noticed also that his facial skin was minutely scored: wispy scratchings on a coloured block of glass.
‘There she is,’ Eggy near shouted, ‘Black Dog Girl.’
‘Where?’ said Dubois, leaning closer to the window.
‘There. She’s just now going by the bus stop.’
‘But the dog, where’s the dog?’
‘She doesn’t need a dog to be Black Dog Girl,’ retorted Eggy with words that explained everything.
I looked and nothing much registered, save that the girl had a contemplative face. I rose from my chair, nowhere near drunk, made my excuses, and bolted. In the hall of the Traymore, I ran into Osgoode who was stepping out. For a single unguarded moment, he—with a glint in his eye—exposed his superiority. Here was the young Octavian, romantic, lethal, and, as always, underestimated. No doubt there was in his satchel an early draft of his infamous proscription list. His suit was just this side of a hideous green. I mumbl
ed hello, and squelched the impulse to advise him that it was colder outside than he might think. I ducked into my rooms, knowing that whatever mood I had fallen prey to now, no Traymorean could help me. Even so, someone knocked on the door. It was Moonface. She looked fetching, her pale complexion set off with a shiny scarf. She said: ‘I just dropped by the Blue Danube and the boys said you looked peculiar. I thought I’d check. Are you alright?’
‘Of course, I’m alright. Do you want to come in?’
She thought it over.
‘Can’t stay long. I’m meeting James. I wasn’t going to tell you because it’s none of your business, but it’s over between us. I’m too arty and not political enough. He’s drunk on anger, though God knows he has his reasons. We make love and it’s like two strangers having arguments with themselves inside their heads, and the other person may as well be on the opposite side of the planet. I don’t understand it, Q, I really don’t.’
Was she going to cry?
She had called me Q. I was only Q when she was in trouble. But what could I say? As for the pain of love, she had not seen anything yet. It was the one thing I could say, but in the saying of it, my tone would slide into the avuncular—a word which produced in my mind the rather comic spectacle of a worm bunching up and straightening out as it inched its way from A to B, predators everywhere. There was whiskey in my cupboard.
‘How about a drink?’
‘No, that would really set James off, me smelling of booze. I think I’ll just go. You seem alright.’
‘Come by, later, when it’s over. Maybe there’s something to see at the movies.’
‘Sure,’ she said, a little abstractedly.
It was hard to see in her just then the woman who read Virgil in Latin, something I would never accomplish; Latin had mystified me in high school. Besides, the Virgil I knew was a modernist Virgil, hostage to our platitudes and critiques of the past. Either he was at the core of our poetic tradition or he was a shill for Caesar, or both, and Dante’s Jay Silverheels, to boot. Oh, he was an avuncular man, one rendered pensive by the evils of empire. The Virgil I had formed in my mind was a great heart with a mind to match, and in the end I supposed he had eluded both his time and mine; he had settled for pleasing himself.