The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Chittering

  We have chittered in the rough-bladed grasses, Moonface and I. Had such high hopes of breaking through our natures to something truly civilized. As if naming the world forestalls its evils. It does not, really. As if taking pictures of snow leopards in the wild is a charm against evil. It is not. The saying so proves I am no romantic as Dubois has charged. But I am rambling, filling space. Leave some blank for all the troubled absences and the deities that preside over them. This will prove I am, if nothing else, damn near pagan.

  A Bit of Academe

  The Common word for these figures was oscilla, and the fact of their swinging in the wind suggested a verb oscillare, which survives in our tongue with the same meaning.

  But here we must leave a question which is still unsolved. All we can say is that the old idea of substitutes for human sacrifice must be finally given up, and the oscilla, whether or not they were substitutes for human swingers, were probably charms intended to ward off evil influences from the crops.

  from “The Religious Experience of the Roman People”—

  The Gifford Lectures for 1909-10, Edinburgh University

  §

  Part Two

  ECHO’S GONE

  Book I—Phrygian Mode

  Ghosts

  Even as snow fell in thick, slanting gobs, it would soon be spring. Blind Musician knew it. One could almost bear him now, he the neighbourhood’s sourest entity. At any moment, he might exchange his grotty coat for an Hawaiian shirt, even if he sat quite motionless, braying in the Blue Danube that cigarette smokers were anti-progressive. It was in America and perhaps the world over, the anniversary of the murder of a civil rights hero. Blind Musician observed with a voice that always caused my skin to crawl, that was a grating horn the burr from which no wretch, no matter how secure his refuge, was safe: ‘A fine and noble man, that Dr King. Didn’t smoke, so far as I know.’

  To add insult to my injury, Blind Musician probably played a half-decent violin. Eggy ignored the remark. Eggy in his decrepit old age, sparrow of a man, chirped at me: ‘This time next week, Calhoun, we’ll be sitting outside and Black Dog Girl will walk by with her splendid hips, and all will be right with the world. Hoo hoo.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ said vain and handsome Dubois. He explained why: ‘Because she’s left the area. Didn’t you know? Took the dog with her.’

  Would Eggy cry?

  Lately, he was writing me amorous escapades, Vincent and Veronica the two hosers of his imaginings. I was to append them to my jottings, Eggy waiving his claim to authorship. But that, and wait for this, I would find the Eggy words too hot to handle.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he crowed, ‘too hot for your chaste little thoughts.’

  Veronica then, concerning Vincent: ‘He not only plugged my every orifice, he not only drove me to the point of exhaustion, he devoured me, nights on end.’

  What, here in phantasmagorical Canada? The words certainly had a familiar enough ring, but I had not the heart to accuse the old bugger of the tacky crime of plagiarism.

  His words to do with Moonface, however, were strictly on the level. The young woman was a waitress at the Blue Danube (now under new management and soon enough to be rechristened as Le Grec; she a reader of Virgil in Latin and a lodger in the Traymore Rooms).

  ‘We will see her in the end,’ Eggy thundered, his tiny hand raised in the air as if about to unleash a lightning bolt, ‘doing the chicken shuffle on our noble boulevard, headed west.’

  A guffawing Dubois nearly died of his laughter.

  Out of spite, I was thinking I would light up. This would certainly incur the disapproval of our blind prophet, blind fiddler not one of us had been able to abide for more than a minute or two, each subdivision of which was an eternity. Blind Musician? He was one who had flown up a horse’s arse and bumped into the Golden Age. I must have muttered something uncomplimentary in respect to that avatar of high culture.

  So that Dubois guffawed some more who used to smoke and longed to smoke again. He had become somewhat adept at reading my unspoken thoughts. This meant, somewhat disconcertingly, that he had been paying attention. The hairline cracks of his cheeks were, if anything, more spidery; it was difficult to say why. Had he had a dream which presented him with the back-stage activities of his soul, his mortality a matter of sliding facades and hoists and winches and cans of paint? Moreover, Dubois was bragging he would now fly to Rome and see what the fuss was all about, putting my powers of observation to the test by his sight-seeing there. Well, he was blowing smoke. A man reaches his middle 60s, he begins to tease himself with travails he would not, otherwise, contemplate undergoing. Dubois, semi-retired man of the business world, was suddenly expert in matters of Caesar, pope, architect and painter, not to mention filthy-minded poets. Why could he not take me at my word, that Rome was not our childhood so much as it was our fate?

  Moonface served us, after a fashion. Mostly, she brought wine. We were her men, Eggy, Dubois and I, her little contingent of male stalwarts. We may not have been the stuff of her dreams but we were hers, for all that. Her old love of Virgil’s poetry, her student days apparently behind her, was put on hold. She read Herodotus now, that amiable father of history; and she had not had a fit in a while, knock wood. A new boyfriend was in the picture. All we knew of him was that he was in media, headed for a sinecure. Too many boyfriends and not enough confidence in her intellect were besetting Moonface. It had been one of my labours to settle her down on this score and to instill in her some patience for the rigours of classical study. I myself had not the patience God gave a hummingbird. Eggy, I suppose, was her true mentor; he was always trying to clap his tiny hands to her body and then tell her she ought to take up the Hundred Years War.

  There was at our table a presence unavailable to the normal operations of the eye: Edward Sanders aka Fast Eddy. The beetle-browed, barrel-chested spectre picked at his food, staring at it with some trepidation. It was hard for him to swallow, let alone chew. He had gotten hairier in his afterlife, the hairs on the back of his neck backlit by what light there was in the window. Fast Eddy assured me he was fine, pay him no mind. Now and then he just gave up on the chore of eating, the knuckles of his right hand flush to the table, the fork held loosely between thumb and forefinger, his shoulders stooped; and he would gaze at Moonface with touching entreaty. But just as it was not going to be in life, so it was not going to be in his low wattage Elysium; that Moonface would return his love in any meaningful sense. She was wearing a coarse white shirt and black denims. Her eyes were an indifferent black just now, registering her indifferent mood. In actual fact her eyes were brown, a rich, golden brown which sometimes charmed. I was as conscious of her body as ever. My lust for her even so was an intermittent force, my regard for her stable; she had my backing for anything she chose to do in life. But whether or not she pursued post-graduate studies in Ottawa, I would always wonder in what way I had failed her.

  Dubois rose to leave, vain, handsome, tolerant. Even so, Blind Musician was getting on his nerves, as well; to Blind Musician Blue Danubians were philistines. Dubois gave me a look which suggested he had had enough. He reached for his venerable attaché case where it rested on the floor. He said, regarding its contents: ‘I’ve got something to show you but not now.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘If you must know, a critique of your writing efforts. It’s been fun, putting it together.’

  Eggy struggling to his feet, pulling himself up by way of his cane, saved me the burden of a withering response. He said: ‘I’ll shuffle down to the bank, I guess. Got a little number there to see. Oh but I see it’s still snowing effing hard. Bloody hell.’

  Eggy collapsed back in his chair.

  ‘So, see you around,’ Dubois said.

  ‘Well,’ asked Eggy, ‘are you going or not? Silly twit.’

  Dubois was going. He slid his arms inside the sleeves of his coat and laughing, said: ‘What a life,’ he said, ‘what a crew.’
<
br />   He departed. He had read Sartre once upon a time; I pitied him for it.

  The snow was everywhere banked in heaps, black, filthy deposits of the stuff. It was the shabbiest time of year for this, my faded Jezebel of a town. Still, if one looked out the window at the end of the upper floor of the Traymore Rooms, one could see that the lilac tree was beginning to bud, birds and squirrels more frenetic. Mrs Petrova in her eighth decade, landlady to Traymoreans, was even so vital and energetic. She still had on her hands a vacant apartment, and it was being held, we were led to believe, for her mythical son. Eggy always insisted there was such a son; he had clapped eyes on him once. I wondered if the spirit of Fast Eddy would not gravitate there, and that he would become, at last, a full-fledged member of our little tribe. It was going to be a terrible thing, so I figured, were I to hear emanating from that apartment the flushing of a toilet in the middle of the night. A restless spoon stirring tea. Yes, and cigar smoke? Fast Eddy, when alive, had smoked cigars in his loneliness. I witnessed, the other day, Mrs Petrova transporting an armload of folded bedding to the apartment in question. She gave me a look. It was a look of innocence accompanied by a Russian shrug.

  Emma MacReady

  Verses? I had not written any in a while; either I was done with them or they were done with me. Perhaps it was due to the fact that Virgil, as an object of study, vacated the Moonface eyes, and so poetry vacated Calhoun. I have lived some 60 years of a life; I am not entirely pleased with how things have panned out. A man dives for cephalopods so as, one imagines, to advance scientific inquiry as well as get his kicks. Unadventurous to a fault, I confine myself to music, and, failing that, movies. So I took Moonface to a seldom-viewed film: Kurosawa’s The Idiot. It was almost like old times, how, in the odeon that had seen better days, I was as conscious of her body as I was of the famous director’s craft; how she played with her ponytail, sighing and restless, the film long and slow of pace. It was a great work of art despite its imperfections. I insisted on it, and she said: ‘Well, maybe.’

  ‘Your objections?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  Afterwards, we drank wine in the Blue Danube aka Le Grec. Echo was the new young waitress of the moment. Impossibly bright, frighteningly enthusiastic, she improved on Wendy who had the face of DeGaulle and lasted a week; who was middle-aged, ill-tempered and lazy; who knew everything about everyone just by looking at them. Eggy? What a disgusting old fart. Dubois was not much better though she flirted with him on the off-chance he might favour her with a response. She viewed me with neutral eyes; and now and then I would impart to her the courtesy of a greeting when our paths crossed on the street. Then she looked prematurely old, always rum in mood. Defeated. There were so many Wendys out there. Echo, however … Well, if one could describe a girl as cute as a button and not insult her loveliness in the process, she was that. Her voice was a pleasant and mischievous warble: ‘Here, let me light that candle for you.’

  Moonface gave her colleague a collegial glance. She waited for the girl to go away before she startled me, saying: ‘We should’ve done it at least once, you know, had what you guys call a tumble in the sack.’

  Perhaps I blushed.

  Her eyes growing blacker in the candlelight, she inspected the end of her ponytail, her mouth slightly parted, her two incisors slanted inward like two halves of a gate. The pedagogue in me got the upper hand: ‘You can sleep with any number of people and not gain one jot of experience from the exercise.’

  What had my remark to do with anything?

  We were Echo’s only customers, the café once more under new management. Two Greeks owned it now; they took turns working the galley. They were affable enough, their English language skills suspect. They just assumed we were always joking with them; they kept smiling and laughing back. We took care to look astonished when it was admitted that the cheesecake now on the menu was homemade; that Cassandra, wife to one of the partners, was responsible for this fact. Gradually the clientele changed; Slavs, one by one, drifted away. There were more Greeks hanging about, as well as locals from the neighbourhood who had been leery of the place when it was under other management. And, come May, and if one were an ancient Roman … but enough of beating on pots and invoking deities. Moonface said: ‘I never told you much about my father, did I? Don’t you want to know about my father?’