The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  It is evening in the Blue Danube. Blind Musician, older and shaggier, is uncharacteristically silent, his thick lenses reflecting light and futility. ‘I saw a robin, this morning,’ I say, ‘strutting in Fast Eddy’s backyard.’ ‘But of course,’ says Eggy, ‘it’s spring. Get up, get up out of your bed. Cheer up, cheer up the sun is red.’ ‘Oh boy,’ observes Dubois, ‘we’re firing on all cylinders tonight.’ ‘And how,’ Eggy continues, ‘did Fast Eddy get to be on Moonface’s A-list of paramours? That’s what I want to know.’ ‘Because he truly admired her,’ I suggest. ‘He dreamed of massaging her feet,’ Dubois adds. ‘Doom,’ I say, ‘the definition of doom is precise logic scuttling back and forth between two absolute points of illogic. Doom is what madness brings us.’ ‘Not again,’ says Dubois, ‘thank you for bringing that up.’ ‘What, is he on about that again?’ The voice belongs to Eggy, its pitch rising and querulous. ‘More wine, messieurs?’ asks Moonface, rolling her eyes up and to the side. She stands there, sexual and prematurely schoolmarmish. Her eyes are on a distant object, a menacing star, a future devoid of humans. She is considering how that might sit with the Hostess with the Mostest side of her. Or so I believe, very tipsy.

  —I am on my couch, and it does not take long: Sally McCabe: ‘Calhoun, you dog, who would’ve thought it? A hot little number comes along and decides to take you seriously. Sex becomes politics becomes metaphysics becomes proper burial rites, gratitude all around. Well, you haven’t amounted to much as an author, but it would seem you have a new fan, even so. I’m a little envious. But, kisses. Got to run.’ Then Fast Eddy, he with his jaw-clamped cigar: ‘Randall, you’re shirking your duty. I told you, you must have a serious talk with Moonface. She’s lost and getting more lost. Alright, so you’ll insist it’s none of your business, her future, but who else is there but you? Who else could read her the riot act? Eggy, maybe, but he can’t string more than three thoughts together, being too old. You’re a not unintelligent man. You’ve been around, seen what becomes of dreams and drifting over time. You don’t have to play the heavy. It’s not fascistic to interfere, to insert the odd word of caution now and then. Can the world afford another lost soul? You mistake me. I don’t wish to see Moonface get to be just another efficient economic unit. I want to see her fulfilled. Got that?’ And though I am, for all practical purposes inert and dead to the world, in my thought I dismiss Fast Eddy, he a ghost, with a wave of my hand. Fulfill. It is a large verb, a very large one, indeed, fraught with much risk and misdirection. There is something to be said for the operations of chance. Life is random except when it is not. There is also something to be said for sticking with something or someone, come what may. Still, the Presidential stick-to-itness has given serious purpose a bad name; it has gotten a great many people killed. How redeem this balance sheet? Tomorrow it will be warm enough for the Blue Danube terrasse. To sit and admire the passing women. But why cannot I just lie here and sleep?

  —It is touching how Dubois trusts the system. It is even more touching, his loyalty to Eleanor. There are hints, now and then in our general conversation, of an unhappy marriage in his past. Hints and nothing more. Even Eggy knows nothing. ‘You know Bob,’ Eggy will say, ‘good for a tipple and teasing the girls. Knows his politics. Wrote a paper on Camus way back when. But here I am stringing more than two thoughts together. Hang the bastards. That’s what I say.’ Well, what does it mean, to trust the system? One may not trust its politics, but one expects to receive one’s pension, the warming up of the earth be damned. I go back over the business to do with Lindsey Price. I had treated with her honourably. I had had the wit to recognize she was at a crossroads, the best and worst of times to take a lover to bed. We had gone far beyond the everyday concerns of Traymorean society, so much so it had frightened me. I had licked behind her ear and stated we are not moral creatures. She then made a nest of the bed and shivered herself into sleep. In the morning I drew her a bath. Every wall of the Traymore Rooms was listening. She was splendid, immersed in her baptismal fountain, her knees drawn up. I could have wished, however, that she had forgotten she was one of those supreme egotists, cause of all effect. Could she not have acknowledged that things might have transpired differently, only they did not? Too late for this little vexation on my part. I had otherwise squelched my sometimes overwhelming sense of futility that is human endeavour. She may or may not have noticed. We were on trial; we had on trial the parlous state of the world. Such is a purely private affair. Men performed music from within a sacred flame; the oud rang the changes on man, woman and God. We should have sold tickets, she and I, our little tryst a rip-snorting affair. That afternoon, as we sat around with Eggy in the Blue Danube and played a game of what was the best meal you ever had, Eggy answered, ‘Oh, that’s easy. British Rail. Kippers and scotch.’ For the first time in my hearing, Lindsey Price guffawed. That moment alone may have justified everything that transpired between us. As far as supreme egotists go, Eggy is a battle-scarred, wily veteran of the campaign.

  —Eggy is beside himself; he cannot make his rounds fast enough, the sweethearts he has to see. From bank to physio to the Blue Danube and stops in between. He has got a string of them, women with whom he must liaise, his strokes apparently in abeyance, wine intake holding steady. It is the weather, of course, the shorter skirts, easier smiles. For now. Come the dog days, and they will come, summer at its muggiest will slow a tiny sparrow of a man down. More than once Dubois has said to me, ‘You should write a book on him. Why not? But make it light.’ ‘What,’ I have replied more than once, ‘you think his life has been all humouresque?’ ‘Make it light,’ Dubois always repeats. I will never be able to satisfy these Traymoreans, these culture critics who do not mind the fact of the Prousts and the Tolstoys, just keep such-like out of their hair. ‘Upon my word,’ says Eggy in the Blue Danube, he regaling us—Dubois, Eleanor and I—with his latest close shave, ‘I’ve got lucky stars.’ Well, what’s the story here? Seems a car had lost its brakes and nearly pinned him to a tree as he was crossing the intersection to the bank corner. ‘Too bad,’ says Dubois, his blue eyes glittering with bonhomie, ‘that it didn’t.’ Moonface, hearing him, tsk-tsks. Eleanor shifts in her chair, rearranging her legs. ‘Eggy,’ she says, ‘you’ve got more lives than a herd of cats, I swear.’ ‘Hoo hoo,’ the man responds, ‘it seems so.’ For the first time Gregory the cook appears deflated; the hockey playoffs underway, the expense of the TV and the cable feed, and he has yet to enjoy a full house in his establishment. He has trusted the system: build it and they will come. The Blue Danube, if nothing else, is a laboratory for testing the efficacy of the various clichés, some of which, no doubt, will fall away when the ocean currents change. What Oedipus will pick what daisies from what roadside ditch? What Electra will honour what grave? What sparrow strop its beak on what twig? The lilacs are budding. A pestilential Executive is getting away with being pestilential. ‘You’re at it again,’ observes Dubois, ‘stop it.’ ‘Let him be,’ says Eleanor of one Randall Q Calhoun, ‘he’s noodling.’ ‘Oodles of noodles,’ hoo hoos Eggy. ‘You like the looks of that?’ Eleanor asks, she a little chuffed, seeing as Dubois’s eyes have wandered to a stunner in the street. Dubois rolls his eyes, a grin semi-frozen to his wine-ruddy mug. All this time, and save for the occasional tsk-tsking, Moonface has been sitting quietly at another table, inspecting her red nails. She has the look of someone awaiting an interview. We are on very thin ice, she and I. We have not between us even the excuse of sexual passion with which to enrich an argument of man, woman and God. She has slipped through my fingers and I through hers. What disasters, emotional and otherwise, have we managed to avoid?

  —Mrs Petrova’s shop window, in what it reveals of time-pieces and curios of sentimental and atrocious taste, of gewgaws and cheap gems sparkling and gleaming in soft April light, is a time-warp. She has exchanged the snow shovel for a broom, the immediate area scrupulously swept, a winter’s worth of accumulated debris disappeared. Say the word happiness to her and sh
e will grunt. Happiness? But of course. What, otherwise, is the point? Nature gave her a strong and optimistic disposition; she has a powerful shrug for those moments when life does not at all go well. I calculate she has been a widow for some twenty years. I am one of Mrs Petrova’s colourful lodgers. Another is Eleanor. I sense dangerous moods in the woman. Something between her and Dubois has gone awry. She is an intensely sexual creature; she has ungratified nesting urges. Dubois responds to the sex and is indifferent to the nest. It is significant that she has put away her trombone on which she would wheeze out “Stardust”; it was a crucial part of her mild eccentricity, as are her showy skirts and pompadours and frosted curls. Is she threatening to grow up, she who considers most men mere boys, if men at their sexual peaks? Push come to shove, Dubois will confess that the only movies he cares for are westerns and thrillers. Here perhaps is the great clue to his inner being: that reality is systemic, therefore amenable to improvement. Fast Eddy is not going to be one of the quiet dead.

  —Gregory the cook got his wish, Echo run off her feet. Families had commandeered Blue Danube tables, game six of the first round of the playoffs, the Habs in the hunt for the cup. Echo in profile, so I was startled to realize, is classical. I have seen her many times in a Greek or Egyptian or Etruscan past, she the modern child of Greek and Italian confluence. Full frontal, and she is all moxie, some table clamouring for an extra fork, and she responds cheerfully enough, warbling, ‘I’m on it.’ Dubois would instruct her in the art of extracting wine corks. ‘It’s all in how you use your instrument,’ he said, his wink perhaps unintended. ‘The deeper the screw goes, the more leverage.’ Sexual entendres got the upper hand, Eleanor stone-faced, Eggy in 7th heaven, Echo’s cheeks in full blush. Eggy has lived for Moonface and wine; now Echo provides lift for his wings, he more a spiritual essence than a physical manifestation of old age, he the wisp of a wine-dazed grin. This grin only deepened the more that Echo hovered at our table, she a brazen hummingbird. Eggy’s grin was an ancient shadow lengthening outward from the marble pillar of a god, especially so when I remarked, ‘When her mind catches up with her body she will devastate.’ Yes, she expends three times as much energy as she needs to do her work, but even so, she is everyone’s darling, Eleanor cold and aloof and inwardly hot. For all that, Eleanor is too classy to just sit there and pick apart Echo’s faults as she has done with Moonface.

  —All one saw and heard in childhood was true and real, though the attempts of adults to reproduce the child and the events are only so many lies. The trees did talk, as did the waves of the sea and the clouds in the sky. Witches slept in closets and under beds, their power to turn one’s blood ice-cold indisputable. Dogs were always one step ahead of one’s thoughts and intentions, and were wise and not a little sad, given the ways of the world. Harm a shiny red and spotted bug, and one would die in some gruesome manner. Louise was beautiful beyond compare, hers the pigtails that one yanked in class, and one would marry her, and the irony is, in one way or another, one did. And so forth and so on. And the truth is, there is much I cannot remember. There were, for instance, now and then outbreaks of my mother’s blind fury, and one knew one had been touched forever by them, there at the dumbstruck roots of one’s heart. There was my father’s reptilian brilliance which repelled the moon and turned its face. But I have chosen to speak of my parents as seldom as possible, just that I did not pop up from under a rock. One was not aware that, as a child, one loved life. I love life now in the way that old and decrepit Eggy loves women, through wistfulness and the memory of how the women once fit in his arms.

  SET-PIECES

  In the Country

  We rented a car, Eggy, Dubois and I, and into the country we went, Dubois at the wheel. It was a bright, April morning warming up. The snow seemed to have largely disappeared from the countryside; we would see more of it in the hills, above the cornlands. Eggy’s chin raised his chest. I had the backseat to myself.

  ‘You’re going to like this place,’ Dubois said. ‘I know it well.’

  In other words, we were headed for a lake an hour and a half out of the city. There, at lakeside, stood a five-star hotel, the bar our Mecca. We left the highway for the country roads. Eggy woke now, his flat nostrils quivering at the memory of various watering holes he had once frequented out here in a long career of frequenting.

  ‘Me and a certain bluestocking,’ Eggy said, ‘laid up in a B&B somewhere hereabouts. Until a certain husband and a certain wife got wind of it. Thus ended the tryst. There was hell to pay.’

  ‘Was it worth it?’ asked Dubois.

  ‘Well, depends on how you look at it, I suppose. I thought it was worth it. Bluestocking wasn’t so sure, I believe. Ungrateful wench.’

  ‘One of those,’ observed Dubois, swerving to avoid a ditch in the road. The earth the colour of straw, hawks circling lazily in the air.

  Eventually, we arrived. A narrow gravel lane, pricey automobiles parked to the side in a not as yet full shade.

  ‘Seems a busy place,’ I said, not looking forward to the company of swells.

  It was a chore prying Eggy out of the car, but I got him out.

  ‘The bar?’ he asked.

  ‘Just follow your nose,’ said Dubois. And then to me: ‘See, he’s got his afterburners switched on.’

  Eggy was caning his way, stutter-stepping, not wasting any time in his approach. Two men in baseball caps and wearing sunshades and speaking French were raking dead leaves from an embankment. I had not known what to expect, but at first glance the hotel was colonial heritage, painted white. Shamblesome. A comfortable old shoe in which to drink away one’s last years should one have the bank account and the inclination. Now in the holding bar where the uptight staff had decided to stash us, Dubois sipped from a medicinal-looking dry martini. He wished it had been served in a beaker rather than in the fluted vessel he had. Eggy was working on his Jamieson’s. I had asked for a maison rouge, and not knowing the vintage, guessed it was Californian and very good. Dubois was treating us. He pointed at the wine.

  ’96 bucks a bottle,’ he said, having seen the drinks menu. In some circles the price was but the market value of nothing more than potable plonk.

  Through a doorframe painted olive-green that separated the holding bar from the dining salon, a conference group of a sort now passed, heads bowed, feet shuffling. A junior management seminar? Dubois saw my look, and said, he who had once been a player in the business world: ‘It’s a good thing to do. You take people like them to a place like this, they get a taste of class, and they never forget it.’

  Really? But I did not have the heart to give him the gears over his educational methods. My back had gotten up for reasons due to another cause. For one of those vultures of the merchant class, casually and sleekly dressed, designer shades, pristine white ball cap, had stuck his nose in our little realm and leered in a patronizing fashion, his wife cold and critical.

  ‘Small fry,’ I said, ‘but with serious amounts of spending money.’

  Dubois grinned. He knew what bravado made the world go round.

  Two ducks exploded from the surface of the lake still thinly iced over. Eggy then said the ice was flowing northward. Dubois wondered what was in the whiskey that he would make a comment like that. We had not much else to say to one another. But we were content.

  In Her Bad Books

  Eleanor was too seasoned a woman to speak ill of Lindsey Price; even so, her eyes said it all, she saying: ‘Well, I imagine the earth moved.’

  I ignored the cattiness inherent in the remark.

  ‘What can I tell you,’ I said, ‘it was just one of those things.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘It had no legs,’ I said, referring to the affair.

  ‘Seems to me I could see plenty of fins and flippers.’

  ‘Eleanor, really.’

  ‘You smirked. I didn’t like it.’

  We were in her kitchen. She had bread baking in the oven. An old black and white
TV sat on a counter, the sound off. The scheduled offering was a soap of some sort. A blonde who looked like she had had too much physical exercise was speaking words at a hunk, looking thoughtful.

  ‘I apologize,’ I said, ‘for the smirk.’

  Eleanor puffed loudly on a cigarette. I was enjoying her bout of jealousy.

  ‘For God’s sake, Randall, she was a predator. How could you fall for that, seeing as you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding predators?’

  ‘What makes you so sure I have?’

  ‘These women who care for nothing but themselves—’

  I cut her off: ‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, but yes, she was rather self-involved. Aren’t we all?’

  ‘Sally McCabe wouldn’t look on her kindly.’

  ‘Sally McCabe would have thought the more the merrier.’

  ‘You’re not the type, Calhoun. You’re not a hoser. You’re just, what, one of those liberal losers history has passed by.’

  ‘That’s harsh, Eleanor.’

  ‘Well, I say it.’

  ‘Say on.’

  ‘Dubois isn’t going to marry me.’

  ‘No, he isn’t likely to.’

  ‘But I guess it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no, I can’t say.’

  ‘You mean you won’t say.’

  ‘Not my business.’

  A soft April light blossomed in the window. It lit up Eleanor’s frosted curls. She butted her cigarette, rose and went to inspect the bread in the oven. It was now almost too warm in the room. She shut the oven door and sat down again.

  ‘Roll me another cig,’ she commanded.