Book Read Free

The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

Page 16

by Norm Sibum


  At Eggy’s, I brought up the matter of Rick. Eggy said: ‘Well, a girl’s got to get it from somewhere. Us old geezers can’t do her any good.’

  And when I next saw Moonface, and it was that afternoon in the Blue Danube, she was being jocular with a pair of Slavs; she viewed me, instead, with suspicion.

  I was alone in the Blue Danube with Moonface and contemptuous Slavs. I reflected on this and that. Thought had not altered reality; it had not even served as prelude to idea, to the form and substance of such an item. With an idea one tilted at the world and the world tilted back; and the dance was comedic, farcical or tragic or all of the above. I was dancing with my darling … The pedagogue in me was on a tear, the afternoon bright, of eternal autumnal promise. Moonface played around with a derby hat, one left behind unaccountably; and she was doing a fair imitation of Dietrich, vexingly sexual. The eyes of the Slav men glittered.

  In walked Joe Smithers, a real pedagogue stooping at the door as he strode through. It seemed Smithers had won a prize. He entered a poetry contest on the theme of thanksgiving; he submitted what he regarded as a spoof; and surprise surprise (so Smithers blushingly put it), the poem seemed to have struck a chord (or else the jury was witless), so pervasive the pessimism in the air. Perhaps this small acknowledgement of the fact bespoke good news, a shifting tide to come.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘stranger things have happened.’

  I congratulated Smithers. I was a little jealous. No use pretending I was not. As always, the innocence of the unconscious man produces the timely poem, the one of the hour; and whatever I was about, innocence had not much to do with it.

  ‘Oh,’ said Moonface, ‘cool.’

  The Slavs took Smithers’s measure and silently tittered.

  I explained to her jocularly enough that the man in our presence was a war criminal, having won a prize; but that I would stand him a glass of wine, anyway. Perhaps she heard the edge in my voice; she did not make a fuss over Smithers as she might have done. Eggy, however, when he showed up, shuffling forward with his cane, settled like a decrepit bird in his chair and said that the occasion called for libations.

  ‘A real poet in our midst,’ he crowed, giving me a look from his drooping eye. He knew precisely what he was doing.

  Smithers, uncomfortable, his small head engulfed by a large peaked cap, sipped his wine and looked glassy-eyed with the glory he had accrued.

  ‘Politics,’ he said between clenched teeth, speaking to Eggy, ‘is something I don’t concern myself about.’

  ‘What effrontery!’ some comic voice spoke within me, Stan waving his tie at Laurel.

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Eggy, ‘but good God, man, it will concern itself with you.’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  Had the glory already gone to his head?

  The Fast Eddy Effect

  The effect of Fast Eddy on Traymoreans was to wean them from flights of fancy and bring them down to earth. Now we were talking leaky basements or the latest in reality TV. Defibrillators. The nuts and bolts of getting by. Fast Eddy certainly did not seem to have a metaphysical turn of mind. Eleanor thought Fast Eddy a nice man.

  She finally met him one evening in the Blue Danube. Although it had not been necessary, Dubois had reserved us a table, instructing the cook to prepare us something, and Moonface would set it on the table. Fast Eddy said little, even when Eleanor asked him questions pertaining to his background, to his career and even to his love life. Fast Eddy demurred on all counts, and I thought he blushed. I was now a fish out of water, flopping about in my exertions to render Lucretius comprehensible, his paean to Venus and his garden of pleasures which may or may not have had room for a discussion of leaky basements. I may as well have been talking to a mildly alarmed stone statue of the Buddha in a lunar dry land. Moonface gave me a look of infinite sympathy but was otherwise no help; and besides, she was busy, setting the various courses down, topping up water glasses, bringing on the wine. Eggy had had new respect for her powers ever since that false report concerning the Blue Danube’s liquor license. At the end of the festivities, Moonface brought the bill and we each kicked in our share; though, truth to tell, I was overly generous. It was my attempt to salvage my position as l’éminence grise of the group, the power behind the imaginary Traymore throne. It was only leading to the triumph of Bly, as I could hear him in my windy cranium snickering at an amateur. Eggy had fallen asleep. In a corner, beneath the silly tapestry of a winter scene, a woman in furs was holding court, royalty in exile. Two children, a boy and girl, sat at her table; and they were grave and dignified. Other Slavs at other tables had been carrying on, loyal retainers awaiting the hour of action. The Presidential character meant nothing to them. Tragedy unfolding anywhere meant even less. It served to put things in perspective.

  Dubois the Realist

  Downtown, a panhandler let me know it was a crazy old world. I forked over a fiver in a fit of foolishness. Wearing mittens that exposed her fingers, she was blind in a blind world; her other senses were not enhanced. I thought I saw Arsdell in a fashionable coat, academe’s glamour boy, smoking a cigarette with guilty pleasure as he looked through the window of a bookstore of vain bestsellers. Here was glamour on which he had missed out. I was about to extend him the hand of friendship when Boffo the clown in me bleated: ‘For God’s sake, Calhoun, how about a little self-respect?’

  Jack Swain had always said the worst sin a poet could commit was to write his verses in return for the love of the public: ‘Lie and they’ll love you. Tell the truth and you’re a putz, one who can’t be trusted to manage his affairs.’

  This statement naturally invited a question as to what truth was.

  I stepped into a small park adjacent an old stone church, and the sparrows and the starlings were competing glee clubs.

  I rolled a cigarette, lit it, and smoked. Closed my eyes. Sally McCabe appeared, lovely chestnut curls set off by a green sweater, her face open and frank. She said: ‘Nice set-up you have here. Tradition. Grass and birds. The noon hour tolling of a steeple bell. The next thing I’ll hear you’ll be rowing for Harvard or writing a book extolling the life of reason. You’re tumbleweed, Calhoun, like it or not. You’re the cruelties of Apache and cowhand, all the lawlessness.’

  ‘Be gone,’ I said to an image of Sally McCabe.

  Then Dubois in the flesh joined me on the bench.

  ‘We’re always meeting like this,’ he said. ‘I might even begin to believe in fate if this keeps up.’

  He set his honest attaché case on the earth. His eyes told me he wanted a cigarette but he had given up the habit.

  ‘Who were you talking to?’ he asked. ‘Your lips were moving.’

  I let it pass.

  ‘You know, you’ve been touchy, lately. It’s none of my business, but just in case, is it anything I can help you with? Eleanor thinks you’re in love with Moonface. I tell her no, I don’t think so. Calhoun’s no lover. She speaks of some other woman, too. Well, come on. What gives? And none of that political crap, how we’re all going down the tubes.’

  ‘I was writing a poem in my head and you came along.’

  ‘Oh that. There’s a comet currently exploding in the night sky. There’s subject matter for you.’

  I gave vain and handsome Dubois a look, and he looked around like a man in search of better prospects.

  ‘Well,’ he said, rising, ‘I’ll see you, I guess.’

  ‘See you.’

  He smiled and shook his head. He was of such vanity that had he a plan for torpedoing Republican election chances, he would never once doubt that dirty tricks were anything less than a gentleman’s honour; and he would go home and boff Eleanor, all’s well that ends well. I felt a little like Noah minus the ark with which to ride out a storm.

  An Epiphany

  It was not that I was now unrecognizable to myself but that I was getting mystical; and no matter how it may have looked, I was a rational creature. Had Melody doctored the wine? The light of
day was departing the street, the passersby blind fish in a random current. The President could not know, of course, of my existence; and yet, he was an intimate of mine, as much so as McCabe; as Moonface sometimes was, she with all of the remoteness and the incomprehensible eyes of a muse figure, standard issue. Two of the city’s finest on patrol now walked by, the one saying to the other: ‘She either died by pills or …’

  I did not hear the sentence completed. Some amateur astronomer had declared that between oneself and any event occurring anywhere in the universe there were zero degrees of separation.

  But it was no good, I decided, explaining the Presidential thought-process by way of history’s impersonal forces; or by way of a single cataclysm as had come to pass in New York. The man really was what he had been all along, the analog of all spoiled and immature and adolescent Caesars who played at empire; he was the spoiled, privileged scion of a dynastic enterprise. He was the boy a girl affectionately pushes into a lake. He was the triumph of hope over experience. He may have meant well until the glow of the wine of power faded and the shortcomings of character wreaked their havoc. All he had to do was draw breath and he further blighted a non-existent Camelot. He was every one of us living off the fumes of a remembered glory that had never been real; and like us he pretended to empathy and was cruel. He was a cult object. He was a male Lucille Lamont beautiful in his own mind. Oh I was playing the ologist and liking it; that somewhere in the man he was so uncertain and so terrified it brought him to discover certitude. He had mistaken stubborn passivity for will, all his kitchen staff forever dealing with the fallout that was the consequence of his wrong footedness. And perhaps it should have been obvious to me that, by way of the wine, I had leaped headlong into a cavern’s sacred pool (and it was the profoundest of silences, the water delicious on my skin, its reflections on the rock walls enchanting). The wine said: ‘It takes an upheaval of the proportions of a nuclear detonation to lose one’s love of country. The shock wave has been slow in arriving, but it has come. Of course, every one of those dry lands on which Americans have designs has their own demons; it is what opens their gates to the enemy. Even in Montreal, no imperial city, just a backwater of French and Scots and Irish and Jews, not to mention Haitians, Brazilians, Iranians, Moroccans, Tunisians, one sees them on the streets—old men who had the glory of girls and hockey or football and maybe a war; who gibber at themselves; who’ve been squeezed from the dream. They cadge what drinks they can and piss alphabets on the snow. Moonface going by them, high-breasted, might as well come from another planet. Melody stands before you, gesturing at your glass. Do you want another? Do you have the stomach for it? Is that a snicker flickering in her proprietary eyes?’

  Slavs came and went. They sensed perhaps I was in a state, and they kept clear. Eggy did not show. Moonface was, in all likelihood, carrying on with Rick. Perhaps he was performing on his guitar for her, playing an anthem of hope. Dubois and Eleanor were, no doubt, discussing politics in Eleanor’s kitchen. Perhaps Dubois would stay the night. Sex as lamentation. A woman in furs entered the café. Her eyes, her somewhat tired demeanor, suggested they had seen the likes of me before; that there was no right side of history; that it either worked in your favour or did not; that life was so unaccountable that sometimes your worst enemy could be your best friend; but that mostly your worst enemy would do you in when it suited him, conditions ripe. You should not take it personally; and, of course, when you are dead it is no longer personal. She shrugged, I an ineffectual beast.

  Calhoun Transfigured

  When I woke the next morning, I found a note that had been slipped under my door. It read: ‘Cher Randall, we don’t think you’re crazy. Love, Dubois and Eleanor.’

  Of course I was not crazy; I was demented. Moonface knocked. She was having coffee with Eggy—did I want to come over? She was a happy wench just now. She had her Rick, her Eggy, her Q-touchstone. Post-graduate life was in the offing.

  ‘Give me a few minutes,’ I said to her.

  She went back to the Eggy domain, smiling.

  Soon I was standing at the window at the end of the Traymore hall, as if to see what sort of day it might become. Sparrows were at Mrs Petrova’s feeder, scattering seed. Pigeons pecked at what fell to the ground. A raw wind seemed to be burning what leaf-tatters remained on the trees. I walked through Eggy’s door and he said: ‘What ho, Calhoun? What calamities are about to befall us?’

  ‘Three bags full of Pakistan and Iran and Iraq and Somalia, plus a banking system out of whack and corrupt courts and creeping fascism. Otherwise, nothing new. Will we have a female Caesar? Shall a black man beat the odds and be head of state if no one guns him down? Stay tuned.’

  But Eggy was going to go to his grave, his faith in the sweepings of the pendulum intact. The fact that it might fly off its pin need not concern him. Moonface might have babies. She might cop a Governor-General’s award, she who put a cup of coffee in my hands and said: ‘Congratulate me. I’ve applied to Carleton.’

  But there were no classics studies at Carleton, so far as I knew. In any case, she was going to Ottawa. Just to be going somewhere. Should I laugh, cry or feel immense relief that she had found herself a window of opportunity to fly through on her magic broom?

  ‘I congratulate thee,’ I said.

  Eggy said, ‘And well you should.’ He reached for her bum and missed. ‘Oh well. Hoo hoo.’

  Moonface said, ‘Rick and I celebrated, last night. We drank a six-pack and I don’t even like beer.’

  ‘She doesn’t even like beer,’ Eggy echoed.

  He was going to miss the girl, deeply so; and he was struggling, this sparrow of man, against the diminishing ground on which he stood.

  ‘It might snow, today,’ Moonface said, apropos of nothing.

  Eleanor entered. She was wearing some kimono-like thing and was pompadoured. She said: ‘A party. How come no one invited me?’

  ‘You’re invited,’ said Eggy, ‘set your arse down. Moonface, another cup.’

  Dubois, it seemed, was off to some meeting of concerned citizenry.

  I would splurge on a taxi to Gareth Howard’s grave, Moonface asking to come along. Such a loyal and committed friend, devoting me time from her busy life. I was barely conscious of the streets through which we passed. Erotic burblings. Even so, Gar had been my oldest friend; and if I could neither see nor hear him, I must come his way like a serious knight of the grail: no hanky-panky in the backseat of a cab. Moonface was, in any case, lost to her own thoughts. And we arrived and I picked out his stone on a slope above the river; and there were his name and his dates and the carved rose courtesy of Clare, she who was somewhere in the world if not in Costa Rica. I said: ‘I think he’s disappointed in me.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Moonface asked.

  ‘My fatalism. What’s more, he suspects I’ve always been in love with his wife but that I won’t plead my case. It’s my fear of rejection. It’s my pessimist’s view that it wouldn’t work out. A drunken evening, a toss in the hay. A morning after of wry commentary on the frailty of humankind.’

  ‘You’ve been in love with his wife?’

  ‘Secret of mine. Though I did manage to let the cat out of the bag with Eleanor.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like graveyards. It’s cold.’

  She was not, at that moment, comptroller of the universe. The cheeks of her pale countenance were bright with the wind. I would like to have kissed her. I thought I could hear Clare’s laughter, rich and chesty and not malicious.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘stupid of me to dismiss the taxi driver. I thought we’d be here a while, discussing maybe my old memories and your post-graduate life. I’m not sure about the buses, and it’ll be a long hike back.’

  She wanted to go. We turned our backs on Gar and walked down the slope to the river. A promenade followed it to the city.

  ‘You speak,’ said Moonface, ‘of your friend as if he could hear you. Strange, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Could be. Thi
ng is, I can’t hear him. My excuses for my failures in life roar; his sarcasm goes mum on me. It’s as if he stole my memory of his voice for no reason but that of spite. I never touched his wife while he was alive. I agreed, in general, with his politics. I liked what he wrote. I missed his company when he was off somewhere, reporting on this or that calamity. He had a chip on his shoulder that puzzled him. By all rights it shouldn’t have been there, just that it was, and sometimes he lashed out at people, at me, at Clare, all the while he sipped cocktails with human monsters. Patterns are true up to a point. Reason has its limits. We’re not moral creatures. You’ve heard all this from me before. The world makes us crazy, and when it runs out of games to play with us, we make it crazy. And off we go again, to the races. Sometimes I love you. Sometimes I’m indifferent. Just know that when I love you I want the best for you. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Well, I got off subject—’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s such a backhanded compliment. You touched his wife?’

  We walked in silence for a while. Like Eggy, I would miss Moonface, too, when she left.

  Calhoun in Paradise

  Later, much later, I saw that, in fact, there was postal matter in my mailbox. Among the bills and solicitations from various literary venues wanting money, there was a missive from Vera. Back in my digs I read that she, Karl and Clare had it in mind to spend the holidays in Venice but would start out in Rome. Vera even had the wit to spell out the itinerary and supply me with the names of the hotels they had booked, 3-star splendours. In Rome the Hotel Abruzzi. In Venice the Hotel Albergo Best Western San Marco. It was in no sense an invitation for me to ‘come on over’ and rendezvous. I supposed I was meant to feel a little jealous. I would have to cash in a few family chips, the blood money, so as to finance my last fling at kicking the can, oh, just to get a glimpse of Clare and the pines of a Roman sunset. Perhaps I fell asleep.

 

‹ Prev