The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  We might have talked about torture memos or the pending oil contracts in a lunar dry land once called Shinar. We might have discussed the election campaign that looked to have no end. We might have gone on about the three senators in the running who, despite being three, were a twosome Punch and Judy show. Of course, I was an elitist in the privacy of my being, one well-camouflaged. For a while I had thought Traymorean society was breaking apart; it was always unclear what we actually had in common besides a residence. There were the staples of sex and politics. Moonface had a new Sheridan Champagne whose mother, evidently, was flying into town to nip the affair in the bud. This was something we might have talked about with some relish. Or Fast Eddy who had died wearing pantyhose, a book of Keats in his hand. Eleanor had no room in her commodious head just now for Tacitus. I handed Eleanor her cigarette. Traymorean society was, in fact, more or less intact. Her eyes had softened and they looked a little spoony to me, and I was alarmed. I saw myself unlacing Moonface’s red sneakers. The blonde in the soap was not in a good frame of mind; she had just slapped the hunk across the face. What, as if to stimulate self-awareness in him? Senate reform? Peace in our times?

  Yet Another Blow for Priapus

  Dubois, Eggy and I her only customers, Moonface was radiant; it seemed the mother of her new Champagne Sheridan was enchanted with her. Suddenly here was Fast Eddy to say: ‘Yes, but the boy has neither looks nor talent nor great riches nor ambition, so that the fact that the mother approves of her son’s sweetheart is neither here nor there.’

  Fast Eddy had spoken, and now he was gone.

  I had unkind words for a certain senator from Arizona. Dubois, gentleman that he is, decided to defend this presidential contender: ‘Well, he’s big on free trade. Can’t be all bad.’

  I said, ‘He was shafted in the year 2000 by the same people he’s all kissy-kissy with now. You call that honour?’

  ‘I call it politics,’ said Dubois with a Gallic shrug.

  ‘Hoo hoo,’ said Eggy.

  How few words it takes to sum things up.

  There but for the grace of the treasury go our grotty selves.

  Even so, I was surprised when a serious look got hold of Dubois, he saying: ‘Now don’t say I never told you anything. But there was quite the scene the other night when we were all here watching the hockey game. You left, I think, at the end of the first period. So you missed it. But anyway. Seems Cassandra’s partner was pawing Echo in the kitchen. Finally, she had enough of it, and she phoned her boyfriend who soon after that showed up, ready to take the guy’s head off. The upshot is that the police came around. Echo is going to press charges.’

  ‘Hoo hoo,’ said Eggy.

  ‘Moonface, too—she’s rattled by this,’ Dubois added.

  ‘What will become of the place?’ I asked.

  Dubois shrugged and Eggy squinted.

  I said, ‘I don’t think Echo is the type to play games. So if she says something happened, it must have.’

  ‘Another blow for Priapus,’ said Eggy. ‘And we’d been having so much fun,’ he continued, ‘bloody hell. Why can’t you boys and girls get it sorted out?’

  ‘Us boys and girls? What did you ever get sorted out?’ asked Dubois.

  ‘Why,’ said Eggy, ‘I was always a gentleman.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Dubois.

  It was hard to imagine Echo in distress, she all good cheer and gusto and determination to master the arts of waitressing. It was a very bad business, what Gregory’s partner had brought about. Echo might very well leave, and even Moonface might. She moaned slightly in that musical way she had. She agreed, standing there at my side, that it was a bad business, enough to sully what had been a couple of good days for her.

  ‘People are always spoiling things,’ Eggy observed.

  Gentleman Jim

  Gentleman Jim had discovered our company and of what a generous nature it was. He was a drinker with a cane. White Bermuda shorts and pristine white socks were his garb. Rain fell of an evening in gloomy torrents. The thing is, we had not seen the man in a couple of days.

  ‘But what’s his story?’ I asked Dubois for lack of anything better to ask, my questions welded, as it were, to the doomed superstructure of the American ship of state.

  Doom consisted of a shortfall in honour and the lies told so often they were now truth. It was the triumph of hope over experience. It was the sentiment that problem drinkers like Gentleman Jim should be locked away as he, most likely, would always lack the money to buy his way out of trouble, unlike the men who caused most of the trouble. Dubois answered me: ‘Insurance. Says he was a backroom boy. I guess that means he didn’t knock on doors.’

  ‘I think,’ said Eggy, ‘that he has much to forget, the way he puts it away.’

  ‘So where is he?’ I said, indifferent to the man’s whereabouts, in any case.

  ‘I don’t know everything,’ said Dubois, shocked at himself.

  ‘He got pretty disgusting, the other night,’ Eggy offered.

  ‘We left him at the bus stop howling at the street,’ said Dubois.

  I had visions of a drunk being rolled for what sanity he still possessed. There had always been in the eyes of the man a look of untamed apprehension. It made him authentic, however weak. He had seen the face of God and wished he had not. He lived in a care facility for the semi-infirm. The wine was, strictly speaking, what put him there; it was also his way out now and then.

  An Evening for Vulgarities

  Eggy, flattering himself, fancied he had been a security breach at some point in his life. The fact that a government official had left a top secret document on the seat of a London commuter train had brought this on. A passenger, finding it, handed it to the newshounds at BBC. Meanwhile, in Canada, an ex-biker’s moll was in the news for having slept with a cabinet minister.

  ‘What,’ I said to Eggy, ‘you managed to get into Hoover’s bad books?’

  ‘Why just his,’ Eggy countered, ‘why not Special Branch as well? The rain in Spain. Hoo hoo.’

  ‘What do you think my life’s been about,’ he thundered, ‘Holy Mass?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, apropos of not much, ‘that if one were to have sexual relations with a tree, and if one is high enough up on the political food chain, even the tree in question will have to be vetted.’

  It had been a while since I had manifested a thought as vulgar as this.

  ‘Go on,’ pshawed Eggy, impressed with this turn of my mind.

  We were at the Blue Danube, he, I and Dubois.

  ‘Now if Arizona Senator gets a black man, preferably a general, to be his running mate, he just might win the election,’ observed Eggy.

  Dubois did not think so, as the only black man he could think of who was a general had been badly burned by the machinations of the current administration. Furthermore, Dubois did not believe Illinois Senator stood for anything that he could see, so that Arizona Senator was quite likely to win, anyway, no matter who he picked for his running mate.

  ‘He had better not run on foreign policy,’ said Dubois of Illinois Senator.

  ‘So how many women have you taken to bed?’ I put it to Eggy, tiny sparrow of a man.

  ‘Six,’ he answered, without blinking a tough, old eye.

  ‘Only six,’ I said, ‘and you such a rake? 901 years old at that?’

  ‘You asked. I answered. Why should I lie?’

  We would get deep into the wine, our voices rising through the branches of the lush tree shading the terrasse, up and out to the stars above.

  ‘I want to smack that girl’s arse,’ thundered Eggy, speaking of Moonface.

  But Moonface was not available, busy with customers inside the café.

  ‘Howsomever,’ said Eggy, eyeing me with a drooping eye, ‘how many women have you slept with?’

  ‘I lost count,’ I drolled.

  Both Eggy and Dubois threw up their arms in disgust with my vanity.

  If anybody was in anyone’s bad books, it
was Dubois. He had chanced across Moonface the other day, a hot and steamy one, and she was wearing something flimsy revealing of her bosom, and he made some sort of gesture, taking hold of his shirt with the thumb and forefinger of both hands and pulling on it. She did not countenance well the implication of said gesture; she told Dubois he could go and eff off right then and there. Yes, well, the dear girl. Truly obscene were the fantasies of world domination on the part of Republican Party apparatchiks who had brought so much grief to so many. Miss Meow passed by, miaowing in the evening dark. The Whistler was not far behind her, striding along with his usual exaggerated motions. It was a disconcerting spectacle as he, being Jewish, was very nearly goose-stepping. Absent so far were Too Tall Poet and Blind Musician. Still, it was quite the neighbourhood, one chock-a-block with characters.

  The Quality of Eleanor’s Tears

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘we’re mostly sexual creatures, don’t you think?’

  I had just echoed some ologist, much to my horror.

  ‘Really?’ said Dubois the materialist, we at table with Eleanor in her kitchen.

  ‘Well then, what are we? Chemical soups? Electrical discharges? Nothing else?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ was Dubois’s lazy answer.

  Eleanor sucked on a cigarette I had rolled her.

  ‘Living,’ I said, ‘we live to what end?’

  Dubois and I noticed Eleanor’s tears at the same time.

  ‘It’s mostly the bloody footprints I remember,’ she said. ‘And how hard I tried not to look at his eyes.’

  ‘But getting back to what you were saying—’, said Dubois at me.

  ‘I’m not finished,’ Eleanor interrupted with some heat. ‘There he was, you know, Marcel Lamont. There he was on the bloody floor, dead. There wasn’t any sign of a soul in or around or about that body. Maybe it had already flown the coop. Still, and don’t give me the gears for saying it, and it was the ickiest, spookiest feeling, but I had the feeling he somehow knew I was looking at him, ashamed I’d found him the way he was. I mean the dead speak, you know. Somehow they do. Don’t ask me how I know, because I don’t.’

  She sipped from her glass of amaretto. Dubois and I had recourse to wine. Neither of us was going to insist on chemical soups and electrical discharges.

  ‘It’s just ego that makes us think we’re the point of it all,’ said Dubois.

  ‘Don’t trifle with me,’ said Eleanor to her Bob.

  It was time to go. I kissed the dryer of Eleanor’s cheeks. She nearly extracted my heart from its cavity, the way her look entreated me. Dubois just sat there, somewhat astonished and too drunk by far.

  §

  Book III—In Continuation, a Proper Narrative

  An Odyssey of Hands

  There was Eggy’s drinking hand on its journeys to the glass, its pilgrimages to Moonface’s derrière. Excursions fraught with peril and no guarantees. Another birthday was imminent for his death-is-just-over-the-horizon-for-me eyes, and he was immortal. The hand of Eleanor R was soon to embark on some foray or another, this theatrical hand, devil-may-care hand, at home in bed, competent in the kitchen, imperious in both the Traymorean and the wider world hand. If the prose of some slutty novel was more suited to it than the pentameters of Homer, perhaps I could redress this state of affairs. And what to do with the hand of Elias, how it darkened Echo’s smile and compromised her spirit and robbed Cassandra, his wife, of her honour? That is, if Elias was, in fact, guilty of molestation and more. Lop off the offending item? My own hands had had their voyages, some of which I would not care to repeat; some of which had introduced me to delights; some of which had been as humdrum (and yet compelling in their own unremarked ways) as a walk to the poor man’s super mart, dangers all around, treacheries, jealous gods. It is said of North African women that they overwhelm one on account of their wild and beautiful energy. I had of course no way of testing the assertion though, in the neighbourhood, the sight of a tall, green-eyed Moroccan mother who wore short skirts and ankle bracelets, who was ferociously devoted to her children, whose husband was a chump, whose smile was grudgingly tolerant of all we lesser mortals (including Eggy), would always stop me in my tracks. The political hand. The warring hand. The loving hand. The rapacious hand. The indifferent hand, the one oblivious-to-the-air-through-which-it-travels hand. To the storms that knock it about, to the marvels, dangerous or not, that ought to bring that hand up smartly and cause it to sing praises of the living and of the glorious dead. The reasonable hand. The industrious hand. The economic unit of a hand attached, by way of nerve endings, to the cold madness of a calculating brain. The romantic hand. The futility. There was always that—the futility and the next day’s hangover, an affliction to which Eggy seemed immune. I began to suspect that for a brain a crystal bowl sufficed for Eggy, its surfaces wine-splashed, its glintings and sparklings a record of all that Eggy knew, had experienced, had done, a Zeus-like comprehension of the Zeus pigpen, our universe. Moonface was now painting her nails. She bedded boys who, so I believed, presented her with diversions but otherwise bored her, her golden brown eyes the light of summer trees, her nostrils alert for some exotic scent such as might reveal her life’s meaning. Perhaps it might travel her way all the way from Venice or Cairo or Kabul. Perhaps it would cover no greater distance than that which separated her Traymore digs from a library’s stacks. Echo the new waitress had astonished me. She knew she had; and she enjoyed the fact of it.

  Eleanor claimed she was going to visit her brother. It had been ages since she had seen him. I do not know why I did not believe her. Something in her sexual eyes shone with a plan. She did not say that, well, things had gone amiss between herself and Dubois. She did not berate the man or otherwise verbally cuff him around. No, she just needed a break. To this end she bought a bus ticket. She would brave the six-hour tedium of a passage down the 401 to Toronto. She supposed she could smoke at rest stops, if there were to be rest stops. Nothing was civilized anymore. She had been close to her brother, whose wife had left him. Oh, and he was now drinking heavily. Besides, what did Dubois need her for, he who was self-sufficient? That, I supposed, was a cuff of sorts. In respect to Dubois, I begged to differ, saying: ‘Bob’s proud, but he’d fall apart without you.’

  ‘Fall apart, my arse.’

  It was to be a significant exchange of views between us, so much so that, there in her kitchen, though it was still morning, she had brought out the amaretto and poured. I rolled cigarettes. I handed her one and sat back, swirling the amber in my glass. She was wearing one of her gaudy dresses. She ran a hand through her frosted curls. This was a highly theatrical gesture on her part, even for a woman prone to such gestures. Something was on her mind. I ventured to guess that that something had nothing to do with her brother, let alone Dubois. I knew enough to keep what I was thinking to myself. Usually, we resorted to politics, she and I, when we had nothing else to say. We were awaiting developments such as pertained to Echo and the charges she might bring against Gregory’s business partner in the Blue Danube. Eleanor was less than impressed with either party. She had said: ‘Cockteasers and stupid men—just leads to alpha silliness and stainless steel bras and pointless laws.’

  Bringing the subject of Echo up again, I said: ‘I don’t think Echo is a tease. She’s just enthusiastic.’

  Eleanor gave me a look.

  ‘How enthusiastic?’

  ‘She’s friendly. Elias is, well, I don’t know, sullen, weird, unhappy all around. Maybe he was drunk. Should Echo have been expected to discern the state of his psyche and forgive him it?’

  ‘You believe her then?’

  ‘I do.’

  Eleanor seemed a little disappointed that I did. I shifted themes.

  ‘How long are you going for?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you. I know you don’t want to hear me speak ill of Bob. It’s not as if he’s doing anything wrong. He isn’t. I have an
itch, to put it simply. Don’t know how to scratch it. You apparently aren’t interested in scratching it.’

  She took a drag on her cigarette and knocked back a swig of amaretto. She leveled her eyes on me.

  ‘You know, you’re getting to be a bore. I would never have thought that of you, Calhoun. You may not have been good for much, but at least you were good for some booze and smoke and a bit of chat.’

  ‘If I gave into you there wouldn’t be anything left of me.’

  ‘You can take that to the bank.’

  ‘How does Bob survive you?’

  ‘You’d be surprised at what a little demure thing I can be. It’s part of my dirty tricks campaign. It’s what every woman has in her arsenal.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘You’d better believe it.’

  ‘I imagine you two rolling around like apes on a Congo mountainside, no-holds-barred.’

  ‘If the image entertains you—’

  ‘Any chance of a refill?’

  Eleanor wondered if I was worth it.

  Evidently I was, and she poured. She had to reach across the table in order to pour. A generous glimpse of her bosom. I am sure I was meant to have it. Her air of triumph would outlast the glaciers. Sometimes she was insufferably full of herself.

  ‘And what’s to become of Fast Eddy’s house?’ I asked, changing the topic yet again.

  ‘Don’t know. The yard’s going to seed.’

  ‘He never did much with it, anyway.’

  ‘He was a strange fellow, I’ll give him that,’ Eleanor sighed. ‘God, that it should’ve been me to come across his body, and he wearing pantyhose. How awfully strange.’

  ‘Yes, that was some touch. I’m sure he never intended anyone to find him in such a state.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He was a very private man.’

  ‘Private men, you know, have wild inner lives.’

  ‘I’m a private sort, and I don’t consider the inner me to be all that wild.’