by Norm Sibum
—There is no plot-line to the twists and turns of one’s existence, but there is impetus; there is something like fate which one’s momentum attracts. And yet, there are joys to life in Quebec that have not been hopelessly polluted by the joys of ‘lifestyle’. The first sustained snowfall sifting through the trees that makes of everything a hush is one of those joys. The first warm robin day. The deep afternoons of late September, the maples and their vestments. Even so, some old hag on the street seems to have been off her meds of late. If I do not go to church she will not only call the cops, she will fly up my arse with her ratty sneakers and tumble-down socks. Echo, a Blue Danube waitress, is not the brightest penny, not by a long shot, but she is the sort of girl who will conquer your heart, any heart in the blink of an eye. The ologies do not deserve her.
—The primaries: Roman circus. Americans pretend to outrage at the liberties the contenders take with their credulity. Some object to the gender of a woman running for presidential office, as if gender were but some abstract notion of a living and breathing body. I am not a political animal, but it is as if I have been left with no choice but to watch ritual acts of copulation. Boogie days and nights. Jack Swain sat it out in Palermo where, perhaps, he had a better seat, lobbing long-distance peanuts at the interchangeable shadows of a senate. Sicilians thought him a character, they otherwise nonplussed with most human antics. My interlude with Lindsey Price began, as I have already described, in a French language bookshop. She was aware, she later told me, of a pair of eyes burning into the good side of her face. Joe Smithers had been holding forth with his verses, and he surprised me. I had expected cloying allusions to his dying father; he had recourse, instead, to his affection for his faded Jezebel of a city. It was his stab at continuity.
—Lindsey Price had, she told me, packed a suitcase and closed up her cottage. She got in the car and drove. She supposed she would head into the city on a dreary day. It had been a long winter.
—Down out of the hills and into the cornlands. Abraham would not have believed these cornlands. He would have prayed to his Sky-Father, saying, ‘Lord, there’s nowhere here to hide the shadow I cast. All the snow. All the ice.’ You cross a grotty old arching bridge, then a long causeway—the river wide and grand. Potted concrete, decrepit system of thruways and on-ramps and off-ramps and trestling bridges. Tattery Jezebel of an island city. Walter, to whom Lindsey Price was once married, used to say she drove too fast. Walter, Walter, good egg, dead of an Arab’s bullet. She stopped somewhere and rang up Hilda, her old mentor. ‘Sure, you come stay with me, my precious.’ Hilda Riesendorf taught Lindsey the world’s old god-systems back in her student days. This was before Lindsey met Walter, who took her on a whirl around the world’s modernity.
—Here is how I imagine it. Hilda is 90, effervescent, stooped. Weighs less than the scent with which she sprinkles herself. A Haitian woman cooks and cleans for her. There are eight rooms and a hall the length of a cruise ship in Hilda’s apartment, the building of which she owns, passed to her from her long-deceased husband. It is not far from the Traymore Rooms. She has no children to whom she might bequeath property. She talks to her African masks that hang on her walls, dubbing them Al and Putzie and Dizzy and such, little terrors they are who will accompany her on the next leg of her journey. Were she to leave them behind they would be sure to misbehave. A woman like this could certainly be significant in anyone’s life. Lindsey Price has her own mask that she calls Spot. It was the central ritual item of our ceremony.
—Her first city gambit: to bathe and luxuriate. It is a lovely body in an old cast-iron tub. Women are narcissists, so Lindsey Price told me. I pretended to astonishment. ‘Intelligent men,’ she said, ‘understand this. Women who don’t are fools. Walter used to mock-bow at the foot of the bed before plunging into me and splashing about with great vigour, that is, until he tired of me. Even then, he adored me, like a sad old bear getting arthritic. But I do hate the word adore. It’s a word the high and mighty use when they wish to appear affable.’ Yes, she talked like this. After her bath, she rang up a few people and got their news. She made appointments for lunch. Hilda snored gently on her wide couch, a woman about to meet her gods, shawl tucked to her chin. The Haitian woman flapped about in slippers, a terrible anger in her eyes. Lindsey did not want to know. Music tinkled. Haydn.
—I would have thought that, for Traymorean society, she would have been a natural. It was not the case. I came across her in a French language bookshop where we exchanged no words. I came across her again—in the Blue Danube. She had burned the manuscript on which she was working; she had started over again from scratch. Some tiny old man kept looking at her as if he knew her; and of course, Eggy, the man in question, did not. He was looking for an excuse to make her acquaintance when I appeared on the scene. Lindsey said, ‘You were white-haired. Snub-nosed. Leonine. Startled. Kind eyes. But a terrible lecher, so I surmised. A bit old, to be sure, but not yet doddering. Nothing might happen in the sack but we might talk. I hadn’t talked, really talked, with anyone in ages. Walter would always put up with my silences, that is, when he was around. Then you saw Spot on my left cheek. Deep in your mind you were aghast. Don’t deny it. Well, we didn’t talk, at first. I had to make the first move. Slowly, I got the lay of your land. You were great friends, clearly, you and the old man and the waitress. Oh well, the war. It obsessed you though you claimed it didn’t. It is what we talked about in the beginning. I told you I was married once to a man named Walter. He worked for the State Department. Now and then he would mutter “48” when he thought no one was in earshot. You looked quizzical. “Palestine,” I said, “Deir Yassin.” “Oh, that,” you answered. I loved Walter. An Arab’s bullet got the best of him. “Oh dear,” you said, wondering how much it had to do with your life. Your eyes were all over my body. You could not make heads or tails of Spot. Some day I would tell you how Spot came to be. For the moment, impulsively, I told you I would have made a good prostitute. “But why?” you asked. I explained to you it was not the sex so much but the company. And when you pointed out I could have the company without the sex, I begged to differ. I failed to convince you. It was not a thing, I guess, that I could explain. Some women will say I have a poor self-image. Yes, and tell me another. What’s more to the point is the hostility I incur from your women. I carry on with you in the café, and the smiles all around are sheets of ice. Moonface sniffs. Eleanor is oh so aloof. Only Echo maintains any sort of neutrality, presumably because she’s fairly new on the scene, and has yet to really take the measure of Traymorean males. She, perhaps, doesn’t know yet what to measure. Yes, a witticism. Walter never had an embassy of his own to run; he was what they call in the trade a go-fer, fixer, expediter. No, I really don’t know the precise word that described his business, but that the Arab hadn’t meant to kill him.
Stray fire. Wrong time, wrong place. Sex was a way by which I could return Walter to some creature to whom I could relate. His tastes in most things were conventional. He hadn’t the time to explore literature as much as he would have liked. I did him the service of reading certain books he thought he should be reading. I would present him with a critique; he trusted my views. He had been privy to certain rumours which, if proven correct, would indicate the world would get to be one unholy seething cauldron of a toxic brew. This was a long time ago. The rumours seem to have been on point. I am not a fatalist as I suspect you are, Mr Calhoun. We should not be surprised, I think, by certain coincidences, for example, that your good friend Gareth Howard had crossed paths once upon a time with my husband. I myself had no opinion of Mr Howard, an opinion, in any case, that had to rely on a single meeting in a Rome bar. It is where the paths crossed. The Americans were up to some funny business regarding terrorist suspects. Walter was an American who, nonetheless, sometimes regarded his fellow citizens as aliens. Then he was posted to Ottawa. We bought ourselves a vacation cottage in the Eastern Townships. Shortly thereafter, the bullet did its work. I have done with mourning. I
suppose my love for Walter was more respectful than deeply and insanely passionate. I don’t know if I will ever feel that way toward any man, as much as I like men. It doesn’t seem to have been in the cards, but then, you never know. It isn’t likely to transpire with you, I can see that now, but your company is agreeable, and even a little instructive. It is easy to turn your head. I wouldn’t have thought you would let yourself get foolish over any woman. I don’t know what you can possibly see in Moonface. It’s the name, I fancy, the name and the fact of Virgil; that and the twinned facts of imperial Rome and contemporary America. Say as much to you and you get defensive. Then we got as far as your bed. You keep a rather Spartan apartment. It does not meet my comfort level. In any case, there we were in a post-coital state, and you were rolling us each a cigarette. You had already poured drinks. We could hear music in Moonface’s rooms. It was loud on her side of the wall, and it seemed hostile. You thought it high time I tell you the story of the scar on my cheek. What I liked about you was the way you sucked in your breath at the first sight of my body. I also liked that you left it to me to bring up certain matters in my own sweet by-and-by; you’re not pushy. In this instance, however, you were insisting. And so I told you. It was a violent tale. It said I was fifteen at the time, petting with a boy on my parents’ couch, a fire sparking in the fireplace. It said my father was away, he a high-level civil servant. It said my mother came home and caught us, she who had been at a meeting, to do with church finances. She was a very strict, very proper, repressed woman. Something, I suppose, gave, and she exploded. To keep it short, she branded my face, as it were, with a half-blackened log she grabbed from the fireplace. We will never know why. Jealousy? It seems too pat. There must have been a thousand causes such as came together in a single moment. This episode was only the beginning of the insanity that encroached on her mind. I don’t know if my father truly loved his wife and if love was returned, but it broke his heart, what happened; he had loved me. My beauty, however marred, has been, even so, triumphant. Perhaps every man I take to bed is a way to punish my mother. I suppose what you call the ologists would say as much. I say it’s what I would have done, in any case. Men are not saints; I could have done without some of the company I have received. I understand your woman-wary soul. I am pleased you are the confidante of the Eleanor woman and that you worry for Moonface. You were silent after I spoke my piece. Clearly, you were trying to picture it all in your mind. Before I met Walter, I was already taking men to bed. I would accuse them of feeling sorry for me. It would seem I had to punish them, too. Walter cured me of that. He said, “There are a thousand reasons why we go to bed with one another. Do you think you understand the implications of each and every one of them? I certainly don’t. Can we not just enjoy the fact that we do go and have a romp, and sometimes it’s marvellous?” The boy. Then I related to you what happened to the boy on that God-awful night. As beside myself as I was with my pain and rage and my mother’s fury, I did see in his eyes a look of terror from which he would never recover. I never saw him again. I have heard through the grapevine he’s married, has children, lives quietly somewhere. He should not have held himself responsible for what happened; I rather think he has done so. You poured us each another drink. I was worried just then you would tell me you had fallen in love with me. You didn’t; you sighed. It was the sort of sigh that indicates the universe is a mystery for good or ill. You said, “Life is random except when it isn’t.” You placed a warm hand on my thigh and squeezed. You got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I heard you in the bathroom, relieving yourself. It was a sad sound you made, a lonely piss on a lonely night. Then I knew you couldn’t possibly love me nor I you, at least not in any deeply insane way. I might understand how your mind worked but it didn’t necessarily follow that I knew you, or that there was any guarantee that I could know you and vice versa. I have sometimes seen how Moonface looks at you. I don’t know what she has by way of imaginative powers; I suspect she flatters herself in this regard, but she’s protective of one Randall Q Calhoun. It’s all that’s important, that we are able to feel safe now and then. I may have struck a false note when you returned from the bathroom. I said, “Anyway, that was the story of Spot.” You looked horrified. We exchanged a collegial kiss in the morning; we agreed to meet up, later. I returned to Hilda’s. There I prepared a light breakfast. I set her tray on the ottoman at the side of her couch. All the while I had described for her the events of the previous night. She said nothing. Then, reaching for a slice of toast, her look somewhat impish, she said, ‘Really, my dear, you ought to check your Golden Bough. What we are about, what we have always been about, is to effect good outcomes. Science is only the latest wrinkle, though science is very powerful. Listen to your gentleman friend. He has no clue to what you are but even his silent testimony is worth something. You were not meant to be alone. He is not your answer. But you are to face your dilemma honourably; you are to find yourself someone suitable, before it’s too late.” She chewed, and then her eyes closed. A sensation of infinite weariness nearly bowled me over. I had been on my knees, pouring her a cup of tea. Hilda had been my true mother; she could not last much longer. I was cognizant of my true age; I was not anymore, as it’s vulgarly put, a spring chicken. I had been thinking like a college co-ed. I was just about to cry. Hilda spoke again: “My precious, I won’t have the tears. Effecting good outcomes sometimes brings disaster. In fact, it all too often does. But unless you can tell me there’s another way, I can see no other way. Now hand me my cup of tea and go about your business. I’ll be fine.”’
The above are words Lindsey Price spoke to me. They were my pink slip, as it were, delivered to me in the Blue Danube and in other places. I cannot say I had fallen for her, given that what goes on in the mind has a separate reality from what transpires between a man and a woman face to face. She certainly seemed brave; she may also have been an incurable egotist and near insanity; I may have come to regret her. Hopping into bed with persons does not always add to one’s experience; in this case, I would say it had. Moonface, I think, is relieved to see the back of her. Eleanor certainly is. Echo stood back and observed, furiously taking mental notes, as if recognizing she is not the brightest penny but that she is not afraid to work hard at addressing any shortfall. Eggy, in the end, thought the woman strange, Dubois bemused. He asked, ‘Well, did you sleep with her?’ I shrugged, and he took my shrug for a yes. Then he said in a lecturing tone, ‘I hope you enjoyed it. Where we are in life, it’s not something one can take for granted any longer.’ It was his turn to come off avuncular. Eggy had the sense not to press for details; he would have been keen for them were I in the mood to spill. She had gathered her writing materials and slipped them in a large handbag. She had put on her pea coat, watching my face all the while. She walked to the door of the Blue Danube, then for a moment turned around. The raised mass of flesh on her left cheek was what it was—briefly hideous. She went out the door, waved through the window, and was gone.
Anti-Follies II
—I had been to Rome at the turn of the year. As I may have said already, I may as well not have gone; what I might recall of its sights, sounds and smells had dissipated in a North American air that does not forgive an Old World coddled by museums. Over the course of our brief set-to, Lindsey Price let me know she, too, had been to Rome; what is more, she had even met my old friend Gareth Howard in a Roman bar. I asked her which bar. She answered she could not remember but that it must have been in Trastevere where the meeting occurred. There were plenty of Americans about, and, come to think of it, she could remember some number of them arguing the merits of a war in its early phases, the outdoor patio trellised. Faux-ornamental grapes. She had had a powerful wine. Her husband Walter and Gar shouted at one another over the din. To Lindsey Price, Gar seemed a little dour. I might as well say now of our affair that it, too, may as well not have been; the savour of it as strangely out of sight out of mind as a scent that disappears in the shifting of a wind. Perhaps
it will also return to me at a time when I least expect it. Just now a woman of quite ample charms, a stunner, pounds across the Blue Danube floor in her high heels, headed for the washroom; Eggy steadies himself, placing his tiny hands at the edge of the table. ‘Did you see that? Hoo hoo.’ Moonface, on shift, is not all displeased with the man’s unabashed chauvinism. She is getting, so I surmise, worldlier. Perhaps in their aggregate her various liaisons are beginning to make a difference, Champagne Sheridan the latest. It all depends, of course, on the quality, not the quantity of such couplings. Finished with the washroom, the stunner in question reoccupies her table at the window, makes Eggy’s day with a friendly glance. It happens, sometimes. He may take the memory of it into eternity. Moonface brings her a tall glass of beer, and she has a lusty swig, her hair long, thick and lustrous. Will wonders never cease?
—Echo will gain experience in the Blue Danube, then move on to a grander venue where, no doubt, she will earn better tips. We will not get to know what otherwise makes her tick, though we will endlessly speculate, and in the process, mark ourselves as the old fools we are, Eggy, Dubois and I. And perhaps Moonface will allow Fast Eddy to unlace her red sneakers and massage her feet, perhaps not, Fast Eddy, in any case, an hallucination. The radical right has mirrored the antics of the old left in the previous century so as to get and exercise power. ‘Well, of course,’ says Eggy, three sheets to the wind, and feeling fine, ‘they were lefties once and would know.’ Gregory the cook fiddles with the new high-resolution TV. He thinks the sports channel will attract customers. He is going to get his deadbeats. Dubois explains sub prime mortgages, economics now his specialty; and when I suggest that profit-taking is a bit like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he says I am getting the hang of it, at last.