The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Then again I don’t think I could get Bob to go for it. I’ve lived in this city for most of my adult life. I’ll likely die in it. The Traymore is sanctuary, Mrs Petrova our guardian angel. Eggy assures me she has a son and he’s met him and he’s not a bad sort. He wouldn’t just toss us out on the street after she dies or can’t keep up with things anymore.’

  ‘Good to hear.’

  And it was good to hear that Dubois was perhaps so much more the renaissance man than I could ever be. Even so, I rose from my chair and draped an arm around Eleanor; I bent and kissed her on the cheek. Two shadows commingled with astonishing force. She turned her face to me; her eyes swept mine, her mouth asking for its due. I responded with what I hoped was an admirer’s due, but one that said she was in her skin and I in mine; that we were but fellow travellers on a road, our fates separate. Sometimes it is verity: the body, not the mind, decides, for better or worse. And she recovered, telling me to get lost; a palpable hint of contempt in her voice. You cannot promise a woman something and then point out that, in actual fact, no such promise ever existed.

  So yes, I was less than a satisfying whole on so many fronts. If woman completes man, I was an abandoned building site. I took away from a few semesters of post-secondary futility an incipient distrust of ologists. God was the sum of all we did not know, or so Jack Swain used to declare. Reason had its limits, religion no apology for the blunting of critical faculties. Both reason and religion were delinquent mortgages in respect to the house of the soul; and yet, things had come to such a pass that a poet could not claim poetry as a defense of that house.

  ‘No soul, no redemption,’ I would say to myself as I drolly regarded my visage in the bathroom mirror and wondered if it was worth the bother to shave.

  Lollapaloozas

  Canadians, phantasmagoricals, blinded by their relatively benign history, subscribed to the notion that humankind was perfectible. If the good were known, no one would do bad. It touted a shining collectivity that had not been tested by such thorough-going evils as had beset and were besetting other collectivities. Ethnic cleansings. Genocides. The sorry histories of achieving GNP. We were in the Blue Danube—Dubois, Eggy, and I—going on about foreign affairs in a feckless fashion when a voice from another table piped up. It said: ‘Pakistan was already such a mess that the Yanks couldn’t have made things any worse over there.’

  It may have been an accurate observation, but it was, as a statement, untenable, and I thought it was designed to get the White House off the hook for its blunders. The voice belonged to one Edward Sanders who was short in stature, barrel-chested and beetle-browed. He looked serious. He had just done two big things in his life: he had retired early and had just purchased half of the duplex immediately behind the Traymore. We invited him over to our table, and then, to take some of the sting out of his insufferable gravitas, he said: ‘Some of my friends, those I have left, in deference to my phlegmatic nature, call me Fast Eddy.’

  Other details of his personal history followed. He was diabetic. He was old-school conservative, leaning toward the British wing of that particular view of observable facts. He had no love of either Ottawa or Washington. He had acquired, he said, a modest but adequate enough nest egg, this from his involvement with a software company. That, and the money he received from selling his father’s house on the other side of town. He had come of age in love with late-night radio stations. Rhythm and blues. Bob Dylan. Dylan, after all, was a conservative, and if the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, had been wiser, they would not have let the Democrats outflank them on civil rights and social justice. And so forth and so on. Fast Eddy was a man after Eggy’s own heart. Dubois was charmed. Moonface had no opinion.

  Another newcomer on the scene was a skyscraper of a poet. If ever a poet deserved to be called by the name of Longfellow, this man was it. Too Tall Poet. As it was, he went by the rather nondescript appellation of Joe Smithers. Smithers came to us in much the same way as had Fast Eddy. Only this time, I had been the Blue Danube’s only customer when in he loped, involuntarily ducking his head as he came through the door. He ordered a coffee from Melody and profusely thanked her. She gave me a look and then left Smithers to his own devices. I was at that moment scribbling something in my notebook. His giggles had far to travel from diaphragm via long neck to a mouth of irregularly spaced teeth.

  ‘Are you an author?’

  Well, I waved the man over. He was an instructor at a small college on the outskirts of the city. He had no love of his students. He paid next to no attention to politics. He had just moved into the area and would, in a few years, get out of the pedagogical game. He was embittered. The only view that women had of men was that men were always undergoing a mid-life crisis. This caused men to write books that women found specious. But when women wrote books pertaining to their mid-life debacles it was a literary miracle. I assured Smithers I was writing neither poem nor novel nor any other recognized futility. I was only scribbling. Scribbling was a form of therapy. My mid-life crisis had stemmed from the cradle and would, no doubt, accompany me to the grave. Smithers did not seem satisfied with my response.

  Life could turn on a dime but decline and fall was agonizingly slow; so much so, that man, woman and child might live life according to principles of pleasure and not be inconvenienced by a debased constitution and a devalued currency and the gutting of the military. Such was Rome. I knew little of the Ottoman Empire in its disrepair but could it have been much different than the city of Baltimore in its decay? If the world was drifting backwards in time; if Russia was returning, via the ghost of the Soviet Union, to its byzantine beginnings; if China was reverting to its old imperial self; if India was going I did not know where, to what was America falling back on? Cotton Mather? The Philadelphia Congress? The charge up San Juan Hill? Hearst in his castle? Who was it who claimed to have seen Citizen Kane a hundred times? Was he a nutter or was he prescient? Would Eggy ever see the Moonface bosom? Now there, there was a question, and perhaps, as far as moments go of transient and bittersweet epiphany, it was the most compelling question that the mind in crisis could devise.

  ‘Oh,’ Eggy said when I came to see him of an afternoon and run the gist of some of those aforementioned thoughts by him, ‘I don’t know. I suppose Moonface has got to go to Ottawa to advance her education. It’s not as if Latin is dead in Montreal. She’ll be hazing the boys soon enough. The Latinity of Stiffus Prickus and all that.’

  Once more I had my heart in my hands as I left him there, more diminutive than ever in his overstuffed chair.

  Fast Eddy’s Guard

  Politicians were speaking of moral tests. Silly buggers, did they not realize we were not moral creatures? In any case, Fast Eddy was now an intimate to Traymoreans, how he viewed us hard to read. Either we were all besotted drunks without substance or moral utility, or we were a lifeline of sorts, an antidote to his new dilemma: that in his retirement he did not know what to do with himself. He eschewed drink. It was his diabetes, so he said. Smithers would come around infrequently, and when he did show, it was to seek me out. I had become a project of sorts to him, a cynic to rehabilitate. The truth is, he was worse off than I in that department, only he could not see it; he could not believe he was the bitterest gall I had ever seen packed in a 6 foot 6 inch frame. Besides, he was shy.

  It was not money that made the world go round; it was filthy money, that and the courtly ceremonies of ego. Iraq was the nuptials, the briefest of honeymoons, the wedded turmoil, the cruelties of divorce. Some believed it the whirligig of decline and fall. Some believed it the capstone of decades of maladministration and paths of least resistance, quick fixes rewarding an ever exclusive élite, the pyramid’s uppermost tip, at the expense of the widening base. I was not a political thinker, just a man cursed with the gift of worry. I was a cautious sort, closet-conservative continually amazed by human audacity. I would tire of my petty consciousness and seek refuge in music. Even music, glorious music sometimes staled; and I
could not hear in it the voice of God, just men and women lurching from measure to measure. Or I would hear the acid tongue of Tacitus, a man who was perhaps blind to himself but absolutely wide-eyed when it came to the hypocrisies of Caesars and senate and the Roman peace. I would walk over to the Blue Danube, a penitent, a clown in sackcloth looking for absolution. Eggy and Dubois might distract me, working their comedic routines against a backdrop of decline and fall. A table of Slavs might show what humanity looked like when stripped clean of illusions. Exit illusions; enter materialisms of a rather basic sort: a man entranced by his musical cell phone, a hairy-lipped old battleaxe appraising bootleg lingerie as the summum bonum of civilized life. I figured Moonface was hitting her books, so I left her alone. And just when one was beginning to get smug in the belief one had seen everything, well … back from the Blue Danube, no absolution anywhere, and I am climbing the Traymore stairs. You would think they would have heard me, Moonface and a strange young man in a kind of clinch. Moonface’s back was to the wall just to the side of her door, his hand on her crotch making claims, she not entirely displeased. The look I got from her hailed from a distant planet of superior beings. The young man, suppressing a scowl, attempted to grin. I shrugged and entered my apartment.

  Melody brought beer to a table of quarrelsome Slavs. Noble scavengers. The nobility of animals lay in their lack of hypocrisy and pretence; otherwise, I refused to ennoble nature just so sedentary liberals as well as those somewhat more active could know feel-good moments. Eggy said: ‘Ah, Mr Calhoun.’

  ‘Evening, gents.’

  Had I entered a saloon, desperadoes twirling the ends of their moustaches? How could it have been otherwise, Dubois saying: ‘We’ve been discussing escapades of a sexual nature.’

  ‘Such as when,’ said Eggy, ‘such as when, one night in Philadelphia, I met up with this tart and she … oh … oh bloody hell. It was the missile crisis. She thought we were all going to die. Hoo hoo.’

  But if Dubois expected a recollection more X-rated, he was disappointed.

  Melody, in the meantime, had approached the table. I indicated I wanted wine. As Dubois gave Eggy the gears for being a goof, she stood at my side, hand on my shoulder, the pressure her fingertips applied suggestive. It was certainly proprietary. I shifted in my chair, evincing my unease with this state of affairs.

  Dubois saw what was happening and was amused. Eggy had not as yet succeeded in getting a date with Melody, and he reminded her of this. And she, not one to overplay a losing hand, at last got the hint I was attempting to kinetically transmit her way; and she went and got me wine. But I glimpsed her face just before she turned around to act on her appointed task; it was coarse, confident, optimistic, that face. She was a woman who, in her own mind, could do no wrong.

  It was going to be tragic, I figured: Melody, though she was no beauty, still had charms that turned the heads of men. She would settle for some lout, live in a trailer with a pack of brats. The privileged at the top of the pyramid would feel vindicated in their snobbery. Liberals would at last accept the fact she had not a shred in her of transcendent talent. Should she elude the marriage from hell, she was perfect managerial material at a rather petty threshold of the capitalist way of ‘getting it done’. I certainly did not wish to sleep with her; and, come to think of it, I had more than likely misread her gesture. It had perhaps more to do with a management seminar than with an invitation to sex. So that when Fast Eddy, barrel-chested and beetle-browed, with a look in his eyes that suggested good will to all good men, put in an appearance, I was in a pernicious frame of mind. We were crowded at our small table, so he sat at one immediately adjacent and leaned forward. Melody, without inquiring, brought him his usual soft drink.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I see you’re well in your cups. I tremble for my sanity.’

  ‘The rain in Spain,’ said Eggy in comradely response.

  ‘I know just the thing for you,’ I said to Fast Eddy, ‘I think I have what you need.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Fast Eddy’s guard was going up.

  It had become apparent to us that the man was lonely; that he was thinking he was long past the point where women might find him attractive. He had confessed to having had the odd affair or two in his adult life. They had not amounted to much. Now that he was retired he could no longer distract himself with work and other expedients; he was painfully cognizant of the fact he was an unhappy bachelor. I motioned Melody over. I said: ‘Here he is, the man of your dreams. Footloose, fancy free. Financially solvent.’

  There was no accounting for it, that she actually took the trouble to size Fast Eddy up, now that she saw him in a new light. Dubois gave me a look of warning, that I should not push it; but he was otherwise amused. Melody tactfully smiled, playing along with a harmless prank. Fast Eddy sniffed, his gravitas kicking in. He was not an aggressive creature. He did not like the aggression of others. He had assumed we were all free of those sorts of games by which people bully one another. His beetling brows knitted together. A flicker of hatred. Then, the only honourable way out, he accepted he had been briefly the butt of a joke. I was not yet drunk, and instantly I was ashamed. Fast Eddy said, looking straight at Melody: ‘I’m afraid you’d find me somewhat out of practice.’

  By the time I got back to my digs, I was decidedly drunk. My little stunt—ill-conceived urge to humiliate Fast Eddy—was tantamount to full-blown moral disintegration on my part. I switched on the TV. BBC was at pains to explain the world. I switched the TV off. I slid Schubert into the ghetto-blaster. The Trout Quintet. Fish rippled in a purling brook. It only served to reinforce my sense that the world, as an entity, was out of step with itself and I with it. I waited for someone to knock on my door, Moonface, even Eleanor. No one knocked. No one arrived to restore me to my humanity; to elicit my sympathies; to pick my brains about Nixon or Domitian; to mark time; to snuggle and laugh. In another life, women sometimes looked me up, and in the darkness of whatever room I happened to inhabit, they would caress me as I caressed them; and it was all profound and silent and beautiful, or so it seemed in retrospect; moonlight in the window, music in the speakers, fingers erotically charged. McCabe drifted into view, her smile cruel and unfathomably wise.

  ‘Your questions have no answers, and even if they had, you don’t want to know,’ her laughing eyes seemed to say.

  I thought I heard Mrs Petrova in her yard, raking leaves, and at a very late hour. If so, she was a peasant warding off evil when all else had failed, her talismans being her wristwatches and timepieces, her bins of jewellery and other ornaments. In her world, the debate regarding the matter of habeas corpus was not of the greatest importance; evil had much bigger fish to fry.

  A Whole Lot of Concept

  Moonface did not bother to knock; she walked right in, saying: ‘I hear from Eggy you really tied one on. He said you were funny, trying to match-make Fast Eddy with Melody.’

  ‘I was cruel to him,’ I said, stating a fact.

  ‘Were you?’

  Her eyes were dubious. She spoke of the young man with whom I had seen her in the hall.

  ‘I’ve taken up with my old boyfriend again. Well, I guess you saw that for yourself. Rick was before your time, before you moved in. Before James. He’s a songwriter, plays the guitar.’

  ‘Peachy.’

  ‘He’s good. He’s interested in poetry. He wants to meet you.’

  ‘Can’t imagine why.’

  Suddenly, I was the stern, unbending patriarch: ‘What about school? Your studies? Virgil? The serious life? I suppose this guy thinks he’ll be at the top of the charts any day now.’

  ‘He’s not like that. He’s serious but laid back. He likes hearing about Virgil.’

  ‘Virgil?’

  Moonface would see me later when I was in a better mood.

  ‘Laid back,’ I said as she went out the door, ‘a whole lot of concept signifying nothing.’

  A Poet Matters

  Eleanor, washing dishes, did
not know if dreams could reflect on waking life. Then she wiped her hands dry with the apron she wore. The look in her eyes suggested she knew I had quarrelled with Moonface. She crossed to the table in her pompadours and reached for a cigarette.

  ‘Settle down, Randall. Rick’s a nice fellow. He was hurt when Moonface dropped him. I’m surprised he’d have her back. But then I’m not surprised. I have my problems with the girl but, at bottom, she’s decent and means well. I guess I was a little jealous. Jealous of her youth, you know. And you, sir, you’re jealous, too, and you’re not man enough to admit it. You’ve always had the hots for her. Not that you should act on it and not that she, heaven forbid, should be silly enough to let it happen. I know, I know, I said once that nature has broad shoulders and a winking eye, and what harm could come of it? Have you slept with her? I hope not. Anyway, everything else aside, the timing’s wrong. As gently and considerately as you might treat her, you’re just too much the pessimist now for her mental health. You’re even too much for me, and God knows, I take a pretty dim view of what’s happening around us. Be that as it may, decline and fall is for the chosen few. The rest of us peons—there’s nothing for us but to get on with it; with our living and our dying and our bumbling along. Ain’t no one gonna to do a whole lot for us. Excuse my French. So yes, woman that I am, I changed my mind. And if nature intended Moonface to come to grief with a rogue, better it’s a young rogue, one laid back, to boot. He’ll sing her a pretty song and she’ll love it. You seem to think you’ve no chance with Clare, and seeing as you’re intelligent and wise to yourself (for all that you’re a dummy), probably you’re right. So get over it. I think you’ve got things to do. Weren’t you going to write a book? Bob bet me you didn’t have it in you. I took up his wager. You going to prove me wrong?’