by Norm Sibum
‘I’m sorry. You said something?’
‘It was nothing.’
She folded the letter along its creases. She reinserted it in the envelope. She held it a while in her hands which rested now on her lap, her eyes closed. Then she rose.
‘Finish up,’ she said, sliding the wine glass back to me.
Calhoun the Gladiator
The lone prairee demanded improvisational skills. I was Virgil charged with reading Caesar’s face. How read what flickers in the shallows of human eyes? How many cockatoos were screeching in the halls of the Pentagon? Ask me to write an essay on the intricacies of the game of football, and I would make my excuses, pointing out that I was dreamy when a child, uncoachable. Had been a prodigy of sorts. Even so, I-formations, slant-six Dodges—it was all a nonsensical jumble to me. Civilization is always turning a corner. The coach is always saying: ‘Douche-bags. Well, don’t be afraid to wash your willies when in the showers.’
How does one say farcical in Farsi?
It has taken me all my life to atone for catching a ball and playing the hero. It would take me all day and most likely a good bit of wine to pay my debt to literature, the apology I owed it. Would Moonface have on her game face, one of these days, or Eggy’s ticker go bust? Would the President give an order and all hell break loose?
The Supreme Folly
We crossed the hall to Eggy’s rooms, Moonface and I. A matter of a few steps, the crossing over seemed almost biblical, all physical and human laws up for grabs as time and space succeeded time and space. But he was to be caught up to speed with things Calhoun and Moonface; how we had wine in the Blue Danube after the movie we went to see; how we argued Rampling’s state of mind in The Night Porter. Had she in fact exercised free will, electing to strike up again with her old concentration camp tormentor? Or had she been so messed over by him, as it were, that she was ever his Eliza Doolittle? Was there a more delicate way of stating cases? For all that, Moonface, so far as I could determine, had no idea what she had just seen. She paraphrased Virgil to me: ‘The banks of the Mincius. Reeds. Bees. Oaks.’
Eggy was jealous of our intake of wine; he had passed the evening disgustingly sober. Come morning, I accorded it an honour that Moonface knocked on my door before knocking on his, she having passed a guilty night on account of divided loyalties. To have spent the evening with me meant standing up one of her boyfriends. There was a new development on the street: someone had moved into the rooms above the café. He was blind and was, apparently, a member of the city orchestra, packing a violin. After the evening’s concert, he decided to sample the food in the Blue Danube. He was a miserable hose bag, bearded and grey; and he sat there a few tables over, complaining about the smell of cigarette smoke on everybody. He had the face of one who had flown up a horse’s arse and had encountered the Golden Age. Irritated, I had, at length, invited him to eat elsewhere—in an ology ward, a padded cell. I was getting up steam when Moonface shushed me.
‘Why?’ I asked her.
‘If everything’s pointless, why not let him have his innings?’
‘He’d beat his wife if he had one. I don’t care how well he saws away.’
I put it all down to evolutionary drift, how we had been hanging around the Blue Danube, Moonface and I, with a few Slavs and a blind musician who was an avatar. Was ich mir den wünschen sollte, eine gute oder schlechte Zeit? Or had the musician performed that evening a little something more seemly from Mendelssohn?
‘Well,’ said Eggy, ‘now that we’ve established you two spent the night at the movies and then got drunk, to what else do I owe the pleasure? My intelligence? My matinee looks?’
He patted his lap but Moonface was having none of his lap. He said to her: ‘If you’re going to deny me your charms, missie, away with you two. I sit here remembering the cold, red hands of My Fair Lady and the night we spent by the St Lawrence. That’s all that’s left to me.’
Moonface was about to plant a parting kiss on Eggy’s brow when in breezed Eleanor singing: ‘It’s my party and I’ll come if I want—’
She was in a loose robe, wearing her mules. She was in a mood, her curls freshly frosted. She held in her left hand a cigarette, her right hand gesturing at the side of her temple that either she, or someone she had yet to name, was beyond the pale.
‘Dubois. Need I say more?’
‘What now?’ I asked.
‘I asked him to move in with me and he won’t. He said everything was fine, why change things? I want a real relationship. “What’s a real relationship?” you might well ask. You know, I don’t know. Maybe that’s why I’m upset. He comes over in time for his favourite public affairs TV show. We watch BBC news and then it’s to bed, unless he goes off to his bed. In the morning, he’s gone, and I have no idea where he gets to. What if he’s got a little something stashed away in another part of town? Do you think I care? You can bet your bottom dollar I care.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Eggy interrupted her, ‘seems to me you come and go as you please. There are no real relationships. There are only relationships.’
What, was Eggy getting ological in his old age?
‘Some relationships are better than others,’ said Eleanor.
‘To be sure. There was an old fart of Ischia whose conduct grew friskier and friskier.’
‘Oh fart yourself,’ said Eleanor, dangerously annoyed. Then, on the turn of a dime, her countenance softening, she said: ‘I suppose I’m greedy. It’s always been my problem. Bob has never mistreated me.’
‘He’s a prince among men,’ Eggy chimed.
Moonface had no opinion.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sure Bob loves you. You’re made for one another, both of you as vain as Siamese cats.’
‘Vain?’ said Eleanor, ‘as in vanity? Sure, my guy’s handsome. Wouldn’t have it any other way.’ And then, indicating me: ‘And you don’t know what you’re missing.’
Moonface blushed as Eleanor patted her hips and shimmied off. Eggy called out: ‘You can sit on my lap anytime. Problem is, you’d squash me.’
Eleanor, apparently, did not hear this spate of bonhomie.
Later—and it should not have surprised me but it did somehow—the gang was all there: Eggy, Dubois and Eleanor R at table in the Blue Danube. Slavs defended their turf. Blind Musician was in a corner, grey, grizzled and unsympathetic. One could only hope that the Slavs would, perhaps, eventually prove too much for him. Moonface circulated about, bringing food and drink to the various parties. Gaetan Szabo sat next to a blonde, she wriggly, smart, and clearly enjoying herself. They were both outfitted in leather, he craggy-headed, half-Hungarian, maker of erotic verses; inordinately proud of the fact he employed the noun cunny as an action verb. He was as astonished as I at this chance meeting. The blonde wondered if I was important.
‘So, Calhoun.’
A shock of white hair tinged with rust was making a last stand on Szabo’s pate. The smile on his lips had long since succeeded in gutting sincerity while preserving its carcass.
‘It’s been a while. This is Lise. Lise, that there is Calhoun, a man of some talent and a serious fool. Me, I’ve been busy. Writing books. Lots of books. I’ve been otherwise entertaining myself. She blows me within an inch of my life and then reads The New Yorker. Do you think I can cure her of liberal bias? I’m all for bombing Iran, you know. May as well get that straight at the outset. Like I said, you’re a somewhat talented man with an instinct or two but you fail to get the big picture.’
‘That’s what I always tell him,’ crowed Eggy.
‘It’s what we tell him,’ other Traymoreans echoed.
Blind Musician was startled out of his lonely peevishness; Slavs went silent a moment and then decided we were all of us children. Had Szabo taken on the apocalypse as his mistress since I had last seen him? An argument was in the offing and it was going to be futile. Dubois did not know that it was going to be futile; and I did not try to prevent him from joining battle. He addressed the st
ranger: ‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course, I’m serious except when I’m not. Which is to say I pursue certain frivolities, though I’m serious when I pursue women.’
Dubois was unimpressed, his eyes glittering. Perhaps just now he was beginning to realize that his interlocutor was not the kind of man to cave to superior logic.
‘But bomb Iran?’ Dubois asked.
‘Either that or appease.’
‘Appease?’ Dubois repeated. ‘Appease?’ he said once more, as if appease were a word he could not get his thoughts around.
‘The rain in Spain,’ said Eggy, ‘and they’re off.’
Once in a while Eggy was quite capable of serious intellectual engagement; evidently, he figured this was not to be one of those times.
Wariness grabbed hold of Eleanor’s eyes. Moonface stayed out of it. She had no opinions about anything. Szabo said: ‘It’s going to happen.’
He may as well have said that Caesar would cross the Rubicon.
Dubois asked, ‘And how do you know?’
Szabo answered, ‘I have sources.’
Eleanor was no stranger to ‘sources; she had had a few in her time. Accordingly, her wariness increased. I wondered what Gareth Howard, my oldest friend, would have made of Szabo’s assertion. He had had a few sources, as well, oh yes, in his time. I was quite prepared to ridicule this notion of sources; I bit my tongue. Szabo had written some interesting verse; it could not have been an accident. Then again …
‘And what do you do?’ Eleanor asked of the man, as if she had not already guessed.
And the man, in answer, put up quite an unnecessary show of false modesty. It was his way of saying Eleanor was a nobody, dismissible.
‘Are you or aren’t you a poet?’ Eleanor asked again.
She may as well have asked whether Szabo was a monkey.
Sadly, I concluded the man was hanging from a tree, too, as we all were; but it was quite another tree from which Szabo was suspended, as he was reputed to be very rich. Obviously, his mistress, this Lise with the Cheshire grin and blinking eyes, had no idea that Szabo pitied us. Had Dostoyevsky written us a mad scene? Would I lunge for Moonface’s bum? Eggy’s silence was due to the fact he had fallen asleep. One of the Slavs, a regular, as he passed by to go out for a smoke, tenderly patted Eggy’s shoulder as if caressing a shrine. That little gesture was a breath of fresh air. I was going to break up into little pieces inside and each of those pieces was going to guffaw. Surgamus: solet esse grauis cantantibus umbra. Blind Musician, my arse. Indeed, heavy is the shade.
One Last Kick at the Can
‘What turns men into clowns?’ I asked Eleanor R.
She wasted no time in letting me know: ‘Sex, power, over-estimation of prowess. Ask me another.’
She was about to slide a baking tin into her oven. Oatmeal muffins of carrot slivers and raisins.
‘Bob’s new favourite,’ she said in a tone of voice that ought to explain everything and set the restless mind at rest. So I ventured another query: ‘Why is there such a plethora of clowns, these days? They give me a bad name. Who could be so envious of my lot they’d speak power to truth and deny that western civilization wasn’t cracking up?’
‘You lost me there,’ Eleanor said, ‘but I suspect you allude to your friend, that one with the exotic name.’
‘Friend? Don’t know about that. I suppose we’ve been standing pat in some sort of collegial formation but I’m sure he thinks me an idiot. It’s perhaps my salvation.’
Eleanor in her pompadours and a light dress began cleaning up her kitchen. She was got up for spring and here it was winter. Flour and raisins went back in the cupboard; carrots back in the fridge; bowls and cups and mixing spoon in the sink. Now she swept at the floor with a few brisk flourishes of a broom, a frosted curl spilling across her forehead. The kitchen’s warmth was a bit oppressive.
‘I’ll leave the dishes for later,’ she let me know, and she plopped down on a chair and reached for a cigarette.
She would eventually answer all my questions, the wherewithal for it not so much in what she had to think or say, but in her eyes. It was the look that said that while I was a man she was a woman; and there it was, all either of us needed to know; she exempt from certain torturous processes of logic that would have me tied in knots.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘the way he went on about his flavour of the month and how love orders his existence, well, one could smile if it all didn’t smack of Health and Education and Holy Water.’
‘There is that. There is that.’
‘Now if Bob were to start fooling around, I’d thrash him senseless. But what would sign his death warrant would be some smarmy hypocrisy on his part. If you’re going to be bad, well then, be bad. If you’re going to play the patriarch, play it to the hilt; but don’t use women to help you pretend to what you can’t possibly be on your own cognizance.’
‘Amen,’ I said, somewhat glibly, ‘but he’s rich enough to afford his own set of rules.’
Eleanor gave me a look.
Even so, I could have kissed her; and not because she had brought me any clarity of mind; she had not. What turns a poet into a thug? The only grandiloquence I could claim was that I fought battles in an arena much sterner and lethal than that of mere politics and penthouse lust. Its ruins were more ruined, its dead more dead, its moonlight more stark. But why had not Eleanor brought out the amaretto and we really get down to cases?
I left Eleanor R to her muffins and trombone, to the management of her bed partner and “Stardust”. I knocked on Eggy’s door; he bade me come in. And he, a sprite of a man in his vast armchair, took one look at me and said: ‘Hell’s bells, Calhoun, I’ve got no answers.’
He sounded rather querulous.
Even so, he continued, ‘You’re a lover, not a warrior, and even at that, I daresay you’re not much of a champ in the sack. Hoo hoo. Sorry, old man, but life’s short, especially for me, and well, I’ve watched you trot about these parts playing the poet. I’m not much impressed. Can you say, “Sing, muse, of arms and the man”—all that rot? Can you even manage, “Beautiful soup so rich and green, waiting in a hot tureen”? No, I thought not. Have you plunged your hot shaft in the Moonface estuary? No, you haven’t the nerve. Effing scruples. You male German feminista. Men like you drive me to drink. Causes me to question God’s grand purpose. When you don’t propose, women can’t dispose. Now be gone with you. I’m going to stay indoors and drink myself insensible. Send Moonface over should you see her. I at least know what to do with her though my wacky willie is out to lunch.’
I left Eggy to his own devices, which were considerable, for all that his mind was a shrivelled bean and his body decrepit. There were bodies hanging in trees. We were not moral creatures, loneliness the engine that powered our urges and our betrayal of them.
Sally McCabe
Sally McCabe, long absent from my thoughts, began putting in appearances again. I would be in one of my funks, lying on the couch, listening to music.
‘Hello, Randall, long time no see. Nice little set-up you’ve got here. Good people. Good talk. And that Moonface—she’s such a sweetie. Why haven’t you dinged her yet? What are you saving it for? You’re not so old as all that.’
Or she would say: ‘Who, me? Don’t blame me for the country’s parlous state. I did what I could. Think Mars would’ve been anything other than a brute if Venus hadn’t worked her charms? You know the story. Think I liked the boys drooling on my tits? I thought you all perfectly ridiculous with your football. The coach was a nasty piece of work but I scared him right off. So you’re a poet now. How things turn out. Are you going to write me something? Aren’t I worth a line or two? The blood used to drain from your face when you saw me, you so precious and cute.’
Or she would really turn on the charm, saying: ‘Randall, why do you mourn? Can’t you hear the wind in the tumbleweeds? Can’t you hear the moon swoon with her lust for kisses? Hear Gene Pitney on the radio of the Chrysl
er car? Falsetto voices? Wet knickers? Why can’t you? Nothing’s changed. It’s all there still, you, me, Coop, Thompson and the sheep-fuckers. Even now Mr Jakes the history teacher is blowing out his sweet brains. All for us. So that history won’t bother us. Isn’t he nice?’
Fantasia on Greensleeves died away in the ghetto-blaster.
Afternoon Kiss
All animals dream, even mice. I said as much to Eleanor in her kitchen, but she ignored this declaration of fact.
‘Here’s something about Bob I’ll bet you don’t know,’ she said, seductive, proudly so.
‘I’m sure there’s much about him I don’t know.’
‘He wrote his thesis on Camus. The money world came later,’ she stated.
Did seals snuggle beach balls and starlets giggle? Camus and beaches and girls and killing Nazis in a spirit of good, clean fun—it was Dubois ‘to a T’. Then Eleanor had other ideas: ‘I want to get out of here. Bob and I, we could move to the country, be man and wife, put in a garden, keep deer meat in a freezer, cozy up on cold nights. I grew up out there. In a town so small it was barely a village.’
‘What will you do for conversation? How cut a figure? Difficult to see you in high heels, what with corn stubble and wind-hardened snow.’
‘We’ll have each other. We can always find new friends. You can come and visit, and Eggy, and what the hell, I’ll even put up with Moonface.’
I shrugged. I was through and through an urban dweller, though I had spent time, in the long, distant past, with Gareth Howard, my oldest friend, in his Townshipper’s shack; weekends devoted to drink; to kicking around political and literary footballs.