by Norm Sibum
‘Ah,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll hit the library.’
I would read up on the Korean War. It was going to be a hike but I could manage it. And as I walked I recalled London scenes I knew. Perhaps the cenotaph of a small park put me in mind of them. Sometimes Canada seemed most Canadian to me when linked to England and the last great war, Quebec the counterweight, one of church and sin and Oscar Peterson, and hockey, of course. In any case, London—how I had once stayed with Gar when he was posted there, back before the days when the money men left the news alone, and poetry, too; how we were to meet up in a pub near Covent Garden, how it was all red cushion and dark wood; how he had brought a degenerate old writer of plays along to introduce me to; how this old geezer had said, apropos of nothing: ‘I’m perfectly willing to die. It’s getting to be a loathsome old world.’
And still, I could neither hear nor see Gar, but clearly he had laughed. Clare remained in the New World, was teaching young nippers how to make a mess of things with crayons. At the library, I gave the Korean War a pass, opted, instead, for the fiction section. Since when had I bothered myself with fiction? Perhaps I was in the mood for writers like Dickens or Tolstoy. Perhaps I needed to know of a time when the road to reality was a broad boulevard, albeit one crowded with much traffic, the stuff of history; one graced with beautiful and misapprehended women. One in which hope had not entirely departed the world, no matter how bad things looked. But the library seemed to have no air and I could not breathe; and I checked my shoelaces; and I damn near ran out of the place. In a nearby park, trees in the last throes of shedding their leaves, I occupied a bench and smoked a cigarette.
‘Randall Q Calhoun,’ I heard.
Someone, relishing the syllables, had called my name. It was Dubois. He was out and about with his worn and honest-looking attaché case.
‘Dubois.’
‘The very one,’ he said, a bit too heartily, and he occupied the bench as well. He had given up smoking; his cheeks were ruddy from the cold, delicate with their hairline cracks.
‘So,’ I said, ‘you and Eggy were certainly at it, last night.’
‘Yes. The old fart amazes me, the way he puts the wine away. He was in fine, fine form. He knows a lot more than he lets on.’
‘Of course he does, and he’s not really all that shy about it.’
‘And you, what are you up to?’
‘I think I just had a panic attack. Don’t ask why. In any case, I’m alright now.’
‘Panic attack?’ said Dubois, as if the thought of it were as strange a thing as the sight of sailing ships was once strange to Indians on the shores of the New World, ‘what’s there to be panicked about? Moonface maybe? Are you doing her?’
‘We’re only friends. I intend it stays that way.’
‘If you say so,’ said Dubois, disbelieving.
How the man had gotten through life without any apparent scars to show for it was beyond me.
‘Did Eggy ever tell you anything about Korea?’
‘Korea?’
‘His time there. He was in the Signal Corps.’
‘Not a thing,’ Dubois answered, ‘nothing.’
And it did not seem that Dubois would have been interested, in any case. I allowed myself the thought that none of these people in my life, these Traymoreans, were who I imagined them to be. I had settled my cases with the Gareth Howards and the Vera Klopstocks and the Minnies and so forth, these people from my old life (even if I could neither see nor hear Gar who was in his grave), but as for Traymoreans, perhaps they were not as noble and somehow out of the ordinary as I had given them credit for; that Eggy was just an old fool who had never grown up; that Moonface really had the soul of an accountant; that Eleanor was a frustrated hostess of a salon not worth the mention; that Dubois had coasted through life on the strength of his looks and chance business connections and was not particularly deep, and so was amiable enough. He might have guessed what I was thinking as there was intelligence and a warning in the look he shot me. I was not to underestimate him. We all have our reasons. And the like. I could do worse for friends, and besides, who was I to strut about in an overblown condition of creative non-compliance? The world perhaps was no longer about to give us much, but we had gotten just enough, in any case, to get along, camouflaged and relatively free to pursue what we thought worthwhile, even if only paths of least resistance. The look that set up shop in my eyes, said: ‘Don’t forget. The way things are, the world can turn on a dime.’
Then Dubois said, ‘I don’t know what you know. I don’t know if I even want to know, and if you’re doing Moonface, I don’t object, and if you’re not doing her, that’s alright, too, and probably better. She’s a strange one.’
‘She’s not strange. She’s really rather normal. So she reads Latin and has ill-advised love affairs—she’s living and trying to sort things out. What else is there?’
‘Well, a few million dollars would go down nice right about now. I’d take Eleanor off to warmer climes.’
He shivered. The wind kicked up again and was raw.
BYOB
It snowed briefly, and the snow did not stick, the day cold and bright. It was not yet so cold that the wind scoured your eyes with your abrasive tears, your sorrows beside the point. For some months I had been writing. I had words for my fellow Traymoreans, for the state of the world, for myself. The tallest maple in the neighbourhood, devoid of foliage, seemed violated, though this symbolized no human malaise. I would have had words for it, but—trees? Obsessive. Senators and congressmen who had once given reason for hope had revealed themselves to be dissemblers. The President spoke inanities into cameras. Perhaps if he squinted his eyes tight enough like some range rider facing the wind, he could change the world to his liking. Still, many were predicting a turnaround in the new year, a reversal of the past seven, a closing of the book on the Sixties, at last. But could a collective simply snap its fingers and the past vanish never to reappear? What of cause and effect? What of the misadventure in Iraq? Virgil might have sung arms and the man, and yet nothing he wrote obviated the fact of how it was that Rome filled in the wild and barbarian spaces at the expense of the indigenous tribes, and then ran a protection racket. How bitter were the tears the last Etruscan wept? As for the Colonies, the fledgling U.S. of A., well, the likes of Andrew Jackson, arch-democrat, were a kind of paint remover and finish all in one. Creative destruction. Move those confederations of savages along. We were not moral creatures; we were but occupiers of the time and space we would always abandon. All else flattered us. Perhaps Moonface truly loved poetry. Perhaps she was a gentle soul. Perhaps her eyes hid vast stupidities the substance of which aped some moral order or another, one rigged in Philadelphia or in communion with a contemplated pond. Walden, anyone? Ah yes, a mood of quiet objection to the vanities being ever the ascendant mood. Perhaps, however courteous, she was a succubus, boys and old men her prey. In which case, Eleanor was less the hypocrite, if one at all, making no apologies for her appetites. To say the cynic knows not the value of a thing is preposterous. I, for one, I knew the value of Clare Howard’s turn of ankle, of Eggy’s hoo hoo, of Moonface’s tiny ears, of snow electric on the black boughs of trees. I knew the value of wine, how it gives rise to the heroic mood.
I had not yet committed Osgoode to my pages. I did not think I would accord him the honour. Superstition on my part caused me to hang fire, or else fear of some black sort of serendipity; or that, by writing out the man’s name, I would set in motion events that would quickly get out of hand. Alright, as Eleanor would have it, I was off my nut. A theory in physics stipulates that if one observes and measures one alters the reality of the thing observed and measured; one suspends or speeds up time and detracts from the stability of the universe. How was I affecting Traymoreans? Dubois seemed more able, as each day went by, to penetrate the fog of the daily unfolding of politics, and yet he never seemed to take sides. Once in a while Eggy, sparrow of a man in a drunken stupor, said, ‘The apostles
of evil’; but one could not take the words seriously; they were the spoken detritus of a decrepit mind. In spite of his apparent decrepitude, and for all his foolishness, I was more and more protective of the man, our Traymorean Palaemon, Virgilian arbiter of song. Moonface and I had entered a quiet period in respect to one another: there seemed little to say.
Perhaps I had been serious when, a while back, I intimated that if one were to look into my soul, one would see Sally McCabe. One would hear the bleating of trumpets and the beating of drums. The calling out of play-action signals. The thud of colliding bodies on a football field. The cheers, the screams, the grunts. A coach swearing a blue streak at one of his athletes, yelling, ‘What in hell is that boy doing?’ One would see Sally McCabe looking up at one from the back seat of a car, a boy on her labouring away at satisfying himself. I could taste the lipstick on her mouth. One day there was Rome on its self-destructive path, and the next day there was Rome the empire; and it was as if not a single Roman eye had blinked before, during and after the transition; it was as natural a thing as the precession of certain stars; one season following another. As a certain Secretary of Defense had famously said, and it was difficult to improve on the sentiment: ‘Stuff happens.’ Unipolar Dominance would lead to something else.
The bank girl, of course, demurred on the question of marriage; and Eggy with his customary gallantry did not press her on the point. How this affected Moonface’s position as ‘first reserve’ was unknown. No, I do not think Eggy cared much one way or the other; but he was a little lonely; and he did like the ministrations of agreeable women, be they Moonface, his nurse, the woman who would come every so often to clean his apartment; his cardiologist, or Eleanor, she his conduit to the paramedics. I figured his soul was black with the smut of Eggy sins and yet he would slip away into death, his sins unchallenged. Not that he had been Pinochet, a brutalist. Not that he was Milosevic, ethnic cleanser. In fact, I am certain that Eggy, apart from the small sins all of us commit in day-to-day living, had not done anything egregiously terrible or wrong other than disappoint his wives and hold a business together; just that, given that he had acquired a considerable span of life to boast about, he must have seen much and he must have said little, waving his tiny hand at events as if bringing up the head of a motorcade in a shiny limousine. To be sure, I was being grossly unfair. How was it then, whether we were young or old or betwixt things, we were all of us Eggy to some degree?
‘Unanswerable,’ I said to myself, there in the Blue Danube, the man in question across from me at the table, his chin on his chest; and it was a rare public display of his melancholy. For the management was threatening to cancel its liquor license, and henceforth, it was to be BYOB, and, according to Eggy, it made no bloody sense.
‘You people haven’t got the brains God gave chickens,’ that sparrow of a man thundered.
The square-jawed owner, his greying hair cut flat across his head, had taken refuge in the kitchen and seemed genuinely frightened. He had otherwise the look of a man who had expected by now to be rich, but that, any day now, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would reward him. Moonface, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of Eggy victimized, whispered in my ear (and the whispering was delicious): ‘It’s not true. It’s just a prank.’
She stood away from me and I looked up at her and there was mirth in her rich, brown eyes. Somehow it was madcap Virgilian.
‘Goddamn it,’ said Eggy, waking briefly, and you can be sure that Eggy did not often resort to violent language, ‘Montcalm threw the battle. The apostles of evil. The rain in Spain was unnatural. Your wine is crud, in any case.’
And if I had to come across the man dead, I hoped I would find him in his overstuffed chair, book on his lap, and it would have been that he had only fallen asleep after a rich meal and good wine; after reading Gibbons or Symes or some such, and he had not yet read War and Peace, and he had always meant to.
‘But it’s thick,’ he would protest, ‘awfully thick for fiction.’
Melody
Dubois was in hospital (heart murmurs), Eleanor beside herself. But her man was all smiles; it was an adventure of sorts, the nurses and doctors such good and dedicated people. When I heard of it from Moonface (who got it from Eleanor and was now in the good woman’s good books), I was incredulous. I could not remember since when I had met a genial doctor, one who was not crabbed with virtue and reforming zeal and pharmaceutical dollars. It was still the heyday of the ologists, priests buggering their way into irrelevance. Poets? What manner of creature were they?
In other words, I had soured on everything again, the days uniformly bleak, no hard freeze as of yet. Rain and wind. Now and then an hour of bright sun teased one. Even the sight of Mrs Petrova on her way to church like a woman who fully expected to vanquish a widower’s heart and have God smile on her for it, could not alleviate my bottoming gloom. I knew of persons who, the temperatures icy enough, had drunk themselves into an unconscious state, and then laid out on the snow somewhere and froze to death. Was I one of those? Moonface would draw away from me slowly but surely; it would be nature taking a hand. She may or may not want a child. She was, in any case, bound somewhere for post-graduate life.
‘Why not London at least?’ I would say once in a while, if testily, ‘I mean they still do the classics there.’
But her grades were not good enough, she would reply. All that screwing around, however tentatively, had kept her from her books. Me, I was tempted to go to Costa Rica, where I knew of the existence of two mature and sensible women, and of a man who did not mind footing the bills. Even so, making a religion out of my loneliness was, perhaps, my only realistic option, as it was for the irascible masters of old, but of what was I a master?
There was not much by way of conflict among Traymoreans. Nothing on the order of Achilles and Agamemnon; of Ahab and the whale. No Chekhovian reasons to rage. No Gatsby flying the flag of capitalism against the odds until the boat up and sank. I would not be writing Hamlet. To be sure, Eleanor and Dubois had their spats. Moonface and I indulged our tiffs. With Eggy there was always going to be a difference of emphasis; his eighty odd years had steeped him in various schools of proportion (save for the drinking); but for all that Eggy and I both wanted the same for Moonface; that she hit upon something worthwhile and not fritter her life away on the asinine and inane. We had little say in the matter. If it were not for the obscenity of the war; if the reinvention, south of here, of class warfare were not unfolding before our astonished eyes; if we were not sensing wrong-footedness on every foot irregardless of political bent, the words I was consigning to my notebook, of little conceivable interest to anyone, would lull one to sleep with gentle comedy, perhaps entertain the odd senile pensioner and a dancing cockatoo.
On PBS wars were raging. The Revolutionary War. The Civil War. The First World War. The Second World War. Korea. Vietnam. And this list was decidedly incomplete. Geo-Politics 101 was Fate and Destiny. And so was our collective goodness now blighted beyond recognition. Even so, I would amuse myself, contemplating Moonface’s tiny ears. I had by now come across an article or two on No Gun Ri in the library’s computer. I supposed Eggy had not been in on the action, having been in the Signal Corps. But he must have gotten wind of the massacre—all those civilians the Americans machine-gunned under a railway bridge. I exhorted myself to commitment, even if only to Moonface’s nose, to Eggy’s petulance. It was the time of year when fallen leaves smelled like a chardonnay. A French poet, Ponge, wrote words to this effect: ‘In the end fall is a cold herb tea’. Was Mr Osgoode, moral or not, a Traymorean creature, his shoes always shined? It was the time of year when fallen leaves smelled like an old paperback of Tu Fu the itinerant diplomatist and versifier.
Eggy was chuffed. The Blue Danube was, indeed, still threatening to cancel its liquor license. Now a man as old as he had to cross the street to the wine store for a bottle of the stuff and then cross over again, having traversed the equivalent of a march through some Mongolian
waste, just to sit at a table and sip a glass. Here was injustice. Dubois took a philosophic view. Out of hospital now, he seemed to be drinking more, spraying ever finer mists of saliva as he conjectured and philosophized, his cheeks ruddier, their hairline cracks more hairline; his eyes more alert to the women on the street. I did not think he would begin fooling around; I think he was just commencing to feel his age, which was reminding him of what he might have missed. Eleanor, in any case, would thrash him within an inch of his sorry existence should he stray. Dubois said of the new BYOB policy (he was in on the joke): ‘Well, it’s an inconvenience but cheaper in the long run.’
‘Oh bloody hell,’ retorted Eggy, lost in his great coat there in the Blue Danube, ‘not really. If I buy a bottle I feel obliged to drink the bottle. If I go by the glass, at least I have the option of cutting myself off.’
Dubois laughed. Here was logic and reason and all the rest of it. But the new policy was, at the very least, yet another assault on civic space, if we mean by civic the opportunity to congregate and pursue one’s pleasures and confabulate, and in general, BS, and not worry ourselves with by-laws and such; and to teach the girls that everything their mothers taught them was not necessarily true.