The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  It was McCabe who spoke: ‘You’re in error, Calhoun. Only eggheads pine for those pines. You can’t go backwards. Your only way out is the desert over which I preside. Tumbleweed and moonlight. Whiskey. Teen angels. Uncomplicated petting in the back of a Chrysler car. In other words, nostalgia, sir, for one’s youth. If it’s time travel you want, it’s the safest there is. What do you desire ghastly old Rome for? Besides, you’re so right: Clare’s a one-man woman. She’ll leave you with a shiv in your gut in some unlit backstreet.’

  And then it was the turn of other interviewers to have their shot. Szabo. Arsdell, academe’s glamour boy. Would I address his class on a theme of creative non-compliance? Fast Eddy said: ‘Life keeps throwing you life-preservers. You keep drowning.’

  Said Joe Smithers: ‘Your opinion of yourself is rather exaggerated. I, on the other hand, am bona fide. Read ‘em and weep.’

  In due course, I had words with Vera and Karl, each asking after my well-being. Clare was aloof. Dubois said: ‘We’ll take back the White House. Tomorrow, the world.’

  Eleanor said, ‘But we’re Canadians.’

  Eggy gave a speech: ‘The name is Eglinton. I’m the senior Traymorean. They call me Eggy. I was always the runt of a litter of one. Then, when I gained my majority, I was the runt of the entire human litter. Still, I prevailed. Calhoun supposes too much. It’s the rising and setting of the sun, that’s all. Oh, sometimes it’s personal when it’s going good for us. It’s personal, when from what’s good in life, we’re cut off. Can’t find a drop of wine anywhere. Can’t find a girl who’ll tolerate one. It’s when you have the vote but you’re an arse if you think it counts. Oh, I suppose I don’t make much sense. Just an old man seeing things through to a conclusion. There most likely isn’t a conclusion. Breath will flame out in the windpipe, that’s all. Whatever it is you’re trying to comprehend, give it up. You’re neither good nor bad. You’re neither acted upon nor self-actuated. You’re a fact of no essential character among billions of other flimflam artists. The artist-artist, especially, is a dufus, thinking he’s the reason for something. Well, perhaps we have souls. Perhaps we’re but machines of kinetic scope. I’ll certainly shut up. Now what was I saying? Oh, bloody hell. I’m too old for this. Get some young whippersnapper on the case. Moonface wants a good hosing. Let’s not mince words. Hoo hoo.’

  Moonface, not a stitch of clothing on her, kneeled over me. She alone was wordless. If I was to supply words, none were forthcoming, as her mere presence said it all. Silence, her eyes shut and rich with her inner mysteries. And then the world came rushing back in to sully us.

  One after the other, presences appeared and disappeared and came around again so as to instruct me; so that I should not be mistaken on any matter whatsoever. I had not fought hard enough to hold on to Minnie Dreier, or so some bony finger was putting it to me. Gareth Howard, my oldest friend, was dead in his grave. I would embark from the container port on a container ship. Two days on the St Lawrence. In Kamarooska a kiss and a thought for Algonquins. Yes, some of that. And then, past Newfoundland, open ocean. Curried chicken and jigsaw puzzles. The channel. Thamesport.

  Calhoun on the Head of a Pin

  Dubois and Eggy were drinking wine in the Blue Danube. I smoked a cigarette on the street. A beetle-like bug scuttling along the sidewalk caught my eye. It had begun to grow dark, and it was going to get too cold for a bug to explore the cracks and chasms and culverts of its terrain. It put me in mind of Baghdad, this creature, and I could not tell you why. So many people had already been snuffed there like so many insects. Sectarian cleansings. Death-dealing militias. Divide and rule, Americans in on the game with special intelligence units such as trained death squads in Honduras during a time of mayhem. The moon would rise. People would die. Some passerby would inadvertently squash the bug underfoot. It was all so matter of fact, and I was not standing there, cigarette in hand, indulging outrage; I was getting drunk. I did not know who or what I was; I was a man occupying space in a time of evolutionary drift. I rejoined my friends, Melody attending to them.

  Dubois asked, ‘Have you noticed an odd thing? More women than ever wearing hats, these days? Gives me a bad feeling. A portent of something.’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said Eggy, ‘and anyway, Montcalm threw the battle.’

  I knew he had plans to see an opera, and I asked him about it.

  ‘Hoo hoo. Tannhäuser. My cane might sprout and I forgive all my wives. But in the spring. Moonface will wear a slinky dress. Will I live long enough to see it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dubois, ‘and I’m going, too. To chaperone.’

  ‘Tra la la,’ said Eggy, ‘and not only that, she’s going to try it on for me in my room.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Dubois, ‘I’ll have to be there for that, as well.’

  It really did seem like the three of us would sit there in reasonable humour, thoroughly inane; and when forever came around, we would still be there. We would still be there doing what? Reconstituting Big Bang theories? Remembering the dead? Fast Eddy walked through the door. He said: ‘Gentlemen, greetings.’

  Melody brought him his soft drink with the air of a woman selling real estate. He, too, it seemed, was going to the opera in the spring.

  ‘I don’t even like opera,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to cut a figure.’

  Moonface was making it possible for three men to squire her and cut figures. Fast Eddy said to me: ‘You should write a poem about it.’

  I wondered if, perhaps, I should. I saw Virgil in my thoughts; and he, with wind-sculpted eyes, was drifting through the American southwest in search of shepherds, the Great Experiment showing early signs of going off the rails; and he would lose himself in the cantinas of a melancholy land. I rolled a cigarette and excused myself.

  It had become colder, the bug I saw earlier nowhere to be seen. Moonface appeared. Immediately the fact of her divided my loyalties, such as they were; allegiance, for example, to Clare who was, no doubt, in Italy; to a book I would never write, if only because, as Bly would put it, I was such an effing amateur and not enough the cool man of reason and mastery. To kiss Moonface herself (just a peck on the cheek)—even this was, perhaps, an allegiance owed that I would fail to honour. She said: ‘I thought I’d find you here.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked, oh so carelessly.

  She had that way of looking at you while not looking at you at all; it was as if, in the corner of her vision, she had spotted an angel and was being distracted.

  ‘I’m not up to anything but I see the gang’s here.’

  And what she saw through the window was the sight of Melody bringing another bottle of wine to the table, Traymoreans plus Fast Eddy about to consume it. Yes, Fast Eddy had decided, his diabetes aside, to become bibulous. We no longer talked the Latin poets, Moonface and I. She was content with Rick, her old and now current beau. And how long would that last? Someone once said that every sentence a writer writes should carry a perception. I perceived nothing, try as I might. Now I was looking at a face that was sometimes lovely and sometimes not. We were not moral creatures. To the questions ‘Were we ever and would we ever be’, I had no answers. Opinion is not knowledge, for all that Eleanor had knowledge even in her effing little finger. I could love Moonface best if I did not submit her to my notions of love; and yes, such notions amounted to not much more than pride in my thought-processes. If I did not attempt to defend myself from whatever the charge she was bringing against me, about which she was unconscious, could it then be said I was committed to the fray? Perhaps I would love her best if I did not attempt to love her at all. It was ludicrous, she and I standing in the street, in search of a reason to be standing there. I nodded at the gang in the café. She declined to join us. Dubois, Eggy and Fast Eddy, having spotted her, waved at her to leave me to my own devices and join them. It would be so much more fun for her. But no, she was just out for a breath of fresh air, but that it was a little cold. She hunched her shoulders to which her hair had fa
llen; and she was hatless. People walked by. People were hanging in trees.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m going in.’

  §

  Book V—Returning Prodigal

  As Noted

  —Emma MacReady (Moonface) Jottings

  Q took off for England this morning. Going by ship. Rough seas possible. Do we care? Bon voyage party for the man last night at the Blue Danube. Eleanor’s tits practically hanging out of her dress.

  Mom once said I’d look like Garbo, but I’m too clumsy and asymmetrically angular. Thanks, mom, for that. Randall phoned from London to say he’d arrived and was alright, though the ground was pitching about beneath him.

  Eggy pines for Randall. ‘Bloody hell, what’s he doing’ Quid non speremus amantes? What may we lovers not expect?

  Rick and I fought some more. Sex, again. This is what I hate, this is what I really hate about Randall. He gets this other look on his face, the one that says he knows nothing, never did, and I want to scream he’s lying. Liar, liar. Pants on fire.

  Wonder of wonders, Randall’s back. Surprised by all the snow. Then he told me about Clare and the Klopstocks. My God. He said he wasn’t going to get cut up over his old friends.

  Randall’s Rome letters arrived.

  Letters from Rome

  Randall Q Calhoun to Moonface

  Dear Moonface, I’m just back from a morning visit to the Baths of Diocletian. In the museum there a figurine of Anna Perennis, one dug up recently from where it was buried for centuries, put me in a tizzy. She’s a very old deity whose festival fell on the Ides of March. She had a grove at the first milestone up the via Flaminia and she was popular with the plebs, and for her sake, and for luck, ‘lad lay with lass’ at the turn of the year. The sight of her many-breasted caused the back of my neck to tingle. She is the object of many stories and she was the cause of many off-colour jokes, a cult partner to Mars. Ovid had it she was Dido’s sister who wound up in Rome, just as Virgil had it. Sometimes Anna Perennis was equated with the moon. She was also an old woman who, during a pleb revolt, fed cakes to starving rebels. Is there a tough, old biddie in you to give succour to the rabble? Altogether, it was a profitable morning. I saw also Tacitus’s funerary inscription. Do you care?

  It has rained much and it has even tried to snow. I’m perversely happy, broke and tired. I grieve of course for Clare, Vera and Karl. Oh my goodness, I didn’t tell you. They’re dead. Cable car mishap in the mountains. I’ll fill you in on my return.

  I got drunk the other day. Bar Tempio territory. Two bars over is a McDonald’s. I try not to be snooty but it is evident that the more packaged sort of tourist frequents the obscenity. A thunderstorm broke in the course of my reveries. Brooding old Rome got madcap, everyone scurrying for cover, an army of touts appearing everywhere, hawking umbrellas. I pictured you and Eggy and Mrs Petrova’s sparrows for some reason or another. I was stood up by a woman I’ve met here. Why do I always fall for women who write verse? Are you one of those?

  Did I say I was happy? I’m near mad. Virgil signals me to get a grip. He’s a way out of the coming cataclysm, only he can’t be bothered with ninnies, especially one like me who has ‘Q’ for a middle name. How affected is that in these times? You see, I really have quite gone around the bend. And yet, what’s sanity but knowing one is incurable? Knowing one is incurable means one trusts the operations of cause and effect to do their worst, Rome dancing in all the corners of one’s eyes.

  Now why is Virgil a way out as I see it, given that the man is nothing but a hostage of our platitudes? He’s nothing but a prisoner of the Augustan agenda to dominate the known world. He’s nothing but a calendar pin-up for those Christians who made of him an honourary Christian. He’s a straw man for academe, a convenient target for all sorts of exercises in self-congratulations. You really do have to come here, some day. Surely, you could find something for Rick to do. He could play his guitar on the Spanish Steps.

  I had so much I was going to write you. Here when a hand touches you, it’s a hand, not the idea of one. When an ape imitates human behaviour he is more human than his human handler. Here I could fondle you within an inch of your life. Divine prurience. In America, it would be just more fodder for the ologists, all of whom drag around Ahab’s harpoon like it’s so much training for a blood sport. There’s still life in this corrupt old heart at the core of our civilization, backwater now, and thank Christ that it is. Even Leopardi, in his day, complained of its provincialism. My regards to Eleanor, Bob and Eggy. They will have their work cut out for them, re-educating me on my return.—RQC

  Dear Moonface, In continuance: that I went up to the Palatine in a light rain, the morning chilly. There was a crowd. I looked for a tiny goddess I’d stumbled across on a previous visit, years ago, and could not find her. Perhaps she’d gone to ground, deeply so. In any case, I hung around for a couple of hours if only to get my money’s worth, the price of admission having doubled since that last visit. Then I waited for a vision of a hunched up man wearing a hooded cape; but no such vision materialized. Would I have looked kindly on a wizened Augustus leaning Eggywards at the shades, the curtain lowering on the play? Or would I have asserted my values and given out with a Bronx cheer, notwithstanding the fact that not one of those has been heard in many a year? Then in a bar, somewhere off the Piazza Venezia, two Vietnamese wenches serving, I the only customer (the music too loud), I warmed up with whiskey. Perched on my barstool like a winter-blasted sparrow, I prosecuted Virgil.

  I imagined you were there also in defense of the poet. I speechified, saying he’d been no more than Caesar’s shill. Your turn to speak, you countered, saying that in the Eclogues, especially, he’d given the little man a voice, albeit a grand one, a Theocritan tune he had perfected; that, if anything, it was too good a voice for stinky and sex-besotted goat herders. I thought you spoke well, but even so, I went on to say that, of course, our own epoch had not achieved much more than a carping critique of past glories, Bitch, Bitch, Bitch & Whine the sign on a law office’s door. Be that as it may, it should not blind us to the fact that the man in the dock had an army of slaves under his thumb, enough with which to complement two football teams, at least; that in consequence he was not quite up to our standards, as we cherish our illusion that we have outgrown all that. Once more you countered, noting that irony is neither prosecution nor defense; and that, unless slaves had composed his verses and Virgil falsely got the credit, the way things were in the ancient world were not his doing anymore than wiping out Indian tribes was ours. At which point, you disappeared from my thoughts. The barmaids struck me as warm and friendly. How had they come to be in this city and under whose thumb were they? Guitars screeched and scrounged for oblivion; some rockandroller shrieked.—RQC

  Dear Moonface, I sit in a tiny park, smell Marlboro smoke, the air damp and ineffable. The park, in turn, sits on top of some portion of Nero’s architectural fantasia, his Golden House. I can eyeball the Coliseum and view the approach to the via San Giovanni di Laterno. If the devil’s in the details, there are details in Rome beyond number. Did I say I was happy? In truth, I’m a little homesick, missing you and Eggy and the other Traymoreans. I am, after all, a boffo Yank, but one who drags a rather deep foot around. What gives me dread is coming home and getting angry again. I’ve had a vacation from anger. My old friends dying like that in some freak accident—they’ve turned my thoughts in other directions for the time being. Rome offers up the ‘big picture’. It’s all very neat and tidy, and just at this moment I don’t trust the intelligence of my emotions. Virgil, in the end, is but another dead poet. A man smokes a cigarette and reads a newspaper. A mother pushes a baby tram. Some druggies are huddled together, conspiratorial. Carabinieri stroll by, unconcerned. Christ, in the end, is but another martyr. The clouds thin somewhat, and the sun struggles to shine down on an arena of bloodlust. I have not reached any terminus where curiosity peters out, but perhaps my energy flags. I have failed in my quest to prove by logic that time i
s a continuum; my senses take it on faith, my senses so many stray cats and whimpering dogs. They tell me I’m alone and you’re alone and some peacocks in a gilded cage are likewise. The lover boy in me loves; the pedagogue cringes; the amateur scorns. Lucille Lamont is an unpleasant woman, but in some way she’s right: she’s so much more the true face of the world than are my mild objections to her triumph. Perhaps it’s snowing now on the Traymore, the sparrows carbuncular in the leafless lilac tree, squirrels skittering along the top of the picket fence. Perhaps Eggy is three sheets to a very cold wind. I can smell Eleanor’s marmalade thickening in a pot. Perhaps Dubois utters imprecations at the President. And this speculation brings us full circle. I look upon ruins and cogitate on the ruin he’s brought us, some violets in the corner of my eye.—RQC

  Calhoun’s Follies V

  —A hero’s welcome among Traymoreans? I was quickly disabused. ‘So how was Rome?’ Eggy hoo hooed. ‘Meet any signorinas there?’ Did the look in Eleanor’s eyes suggest I was now contaminated, having been exposed to exotic influences? Or had she, a homebody, reason to feel inadequate in my presence, I bringing back a whiff of the wider world to her kitchen? In any case, the sights and sounds and smells of a foreign place in my mind pretty much dissipated as soon as I hit New World air. Only in the privacy of my digs, in my solitude, would I be able to reconstruct those ephemeralities. Dubois, for once, had no opinion. He was a practical man. ‘The pope,’ he said, ‘did you tell the pope the world’s moved on?’ Mrs Petrova had grunted when I brought her my back rent. Moonface had not even received my packet of letters. I should have posted them at the Vatican, their postal service more efficient than the regular venue. No, the news was all Eggy there in Eleanor’s kitchen, Traymoreans sitting around. Eggy did not need now to see Moonface’s bosom. That she would accompany him to the opera was enough. He supposed that on account of his advanced age, he ought to grow up, Moonface long since tired of the joke. It had been a good joke while it lasted. It had seen a worn-out old man through the rough patch that was his life’s imminent end. ‘Apostles. Those damn apostles,’ said Eggy, and, as ever, one did not know exactly to what he referred—to a juggernaut made of übermenschen or to Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Eleanor sat there unusually quiet, her feet shod in red pompadours, the fact of which was loud enough. There was a sadness in her eyes I was unaccustomed to seeing. It unnerved me. Had she been pining for Marcel Lamont all this time? While in Rome I had examined my loyalties and elected for my friends. I saw now I had only placed myself on the wrong side of a one-way street, expecting the traffic to come in my direction. In other words, I would have to go against traffic to get to the bottom of Eleanor’s unease, if it were possible, as well as obtain what I thought I needed. Dubois, a man of some reserve, seemed acutely remote. Had he a new woman in his life? Had he reason to fear for his health? Immortal Eggy could kick the bucket at any moment; that much had not changed. Immortality did not vouchsafe wisdom, the usual two glasses of wine set before him. Moonface was, well, Moonface; now alluring, now a woman (excepting the eyes) of unremarkable charms. I began to wonder if I had not imagined everything that transpired between us, right down to the theatrics of Platonic flirtation. To Eggy I said that I had indeed met a woman in Rome, but that she had stood me up. To Dubois I said that some aspects of Platonic theory survive among certain physicists; that, so far as I could make out, the idea of the universe precedes the laws that govern it. I had read it in a magazine on the flight over. Silver-haired, blue-eyed Dubois looked at the floor, as if to avoid calling me demented. To Moonface I said nothing. To her I might have said, ‘Seems the queen mum has out-queened Victoria. Doesn’t high-spirited American speech have a way of one-upping other people’s fun? Putin sure has a burn on, the west still thinking Russians are savages.’ I assumed we would meet up later, she and I, and compare notes. As my letters had yet to arrive, she could not know the full import of my news—the death of the Klopstocks and Clare—except what I had stated matter-of-factly, almost in passing in the Blue Danube. ‘Women are my religion,’ said Eggy, waking from an evanescent snooze. This comment brought Eleanor to life, and she said, ‘Have a care, you old fart, I’m a jealous and wrathful god.’ Dubois looked at the ceiling. Eleanor lit a cigarette and adjusted her robe which had come away from her thigh. I searched Moonface’s eyes. Was I being left out of some loop? In which case it was nothing new. No one tells me anything. There had been a big snowfall, the city still getting out from under. Every sparrow from miles around vied for a perch at Mrs Petrova’s feeder. All that snow—it was strange to see after the ancient stones of the via Antica which had seemed to throb beneath one’s aching feet, resentful. Here the act of perambulation lacked all that romance, America, however muddled, still capable of inventing itself. The notion that things could get better or get worse was less the whim of a dreamer, a whim fed by the passing of centuries; it was more a matter of the moment; and today or tomorrow or a year from now, and who knew? Now Fast Eddy let himself in. Since when had he been accorded this privilege? He had a gift-wrapped package in his hands which he promptly thrust at Moonface. ‘I looked all over town for it,’ he said, anxious and smitten, Moonface at a loss for words. This much had transpired while I was away: she had a new suitor. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘something’s up. You’ve all been acting a little strange. I can always go away, again.’ Fast Eddy gave me a look. It was as if he only then noticed my presence in the room. Moony eyes for a dear girl replaced the rather sharp look he had bestowed on me. Moonface unwrapped the package. In another time Eleanor might have said, ‘What have we here? Someone’s in love.’ ‘Well, Randall,’ Dubois said, the sloppy grin on his face suspect, ‘we took a vote while you were gone. And when we were sure you were well and truly gone, we decided we’d have you evicted. Ask me why. Well, suppose you write that book you’re always threatening to write? Who’s going to read it? Eggheads? Who’d buy it? What bookstore stocks it? Do you think we’re going to buy it? Life’s short. Don’t embarrass us. Sex and carnage, the dumber the better.’ I was astounded. Eleanor butted her cigarette. Now she snickered, rising and tra-la-lahing to the stove to put the kettle on. She had now heard it all, I the measure of all that had put one on her and was caught out. Eggy hoo hooed. Wine, fruitcake and a history of Cuba had gotten him through the holidays. ‘So how was the trip?’ Fast Eddy asked me, some sliver of accusation in his voice. There it was: I had only been on a little trip, a jaunt of sorts. I had indulged a brief detour from Traymorean life. ‘Apparently, I went away,’ I said, ‘but it seems one can’t come home again.’ This remark struck Fast Eddy as specious. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ Eggy said. Moonface had no opinion. The spit valve to Eleanor’s trombone appeared and Eleanor was playing with the thing. Would she put it to her mouth and wheeze Stardust into the aperture? ‘Chocolates,’ Moonface said, ‘oh, my favourite kind. The really dark kind. How did you know?’ Fast Eddy was near weepy, standing in this treacherous world like a guard on sentry duty, his beetling brows knit together. Mission accomplished. Then Moonface leaned my way, and in my startled ear (and her whispering was delicious) she whispered, ‘It’s the new joke, this bit about evicting you. Eggy’s idea, the little devil. He thinks you need shaking up. We’re only kidding. But no way I’m taking you to bed.’