by Norm Sibum
‘No, you’re just a bore through and through. At least, you’ve been that way ever since you got back from Rome. Like Rome was too good for us for you to cut us in on the spoils.’
‘What’s to say about it? Besides, I wrote Moonface the odd letter or two, dwelling on things Roman. Ask her for them. She’d let you read them.’
‘Don’t want to read them. I want you to tell me.’
‘There’s nothing to say. I hung out, drank wine, brooded. It’s pretty much what I do here. The scenery was different, that’s all.’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t what you were there for. You were there to get in Clare’s pants, if I remember right.’
‘If there’s one thing you’re subtle about, it’s sex.’
She gave me a look.
‘Clare liked her men to be direct but she didn’t like thugs. There’s a difference,’ I explained.
‘You don’t say. Well, I like men to be direct. And five will get you ten the odd thug isn’t to be sneezed at.’
‘Don’t look at me. I’m not much for the rough stuff.’
‘Not looking at you. As Eggy says, “Bloody hell.”’
There were layers upon layers of hurt and anger in Eleanor’s tone. How much of it was real? How much imagined, a dollop now and then of self-pity? Theatrical woman are quick to avail themselves of self-pity. I liked theatrical women, always had, but the pity part could be bothersome. Lindsey Price was rather unique; she was so much the egotist she had no need of woe is me. As for Clare Howard, dead wife to my oldest friend in his grave, she had been neither the theatrical nor the self-pitying sort, but she was able to go from hot to cold and back again on a dime. She had been a magnificent woman, and since her fatal accident I had relived the single kiss we exchanged, over and over again in my mind. Life the Great Tease.
I feared for Eleanor, and it only followed I would have to fear for Dubois, too. It would prove a bad business if my hunch was borne out, Dubois betrayed. Echo was betrayed. Wrong place, wrong time. The dirt done her was in the fact she was open to life and a cretin took advantage of her smile and the favours it bestowed. There was so little grace in the world, however rough and ready that grace, that years might pass before one would ever encounter it again.
The book I was writing was not going anywhere. Words succeeded words succeeded words at which the likes of Dubois only laughed. Perhaps it would serve him right should Eleanor pull a fast one and he get wind of it to his own disadvantage. Dubois’s worst fault as a materialist was that words were as much subject to consumerist appraisal as a toaster or a pepper grinder or the child-whores of Bangkok. And this was a man who had idolized Camus. Where had the romance gone? Had the hairline cracks of his cheeks spread to his brain? Perhaps I was not as impressed with his Jesuitically-formed mind as I should have been. In fact I was in the act of scribbling when there was a knock on my door. It was Moonface, all smiles.
‘I don’t know,’ she said when I let her in, ‘I’m just in a good mood.’
‘For once.’
‘For once.’
‘And to what is owed the pleasure?’
‘My boyfriend’s mother likes me.’
‘Hallelujah. Huzzah. But we know that.’
‘But that’s not it.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’ve decided you’re right, you know, when you said I don’t have to contribute anything to my classics studies other than my love, and that some day, I can pass the love on.’
‘A red letter day in this, my faded Jezebel of a town.’
‘You’re such a cynic, Randall. But you keep trying, I guess.’
‘Trying? Trying what?’
‘To be good.’
‘Would that I could do some good.’
‘You are. You do. You inspire me.’
‘Spare me the encomium. Look at this. These words. Here’s real betrayal. Literature will never forgive me.’
‘Well, maybe you’ve got a point there.’
That was Moonface for you. Just when you thought her feckless and dull, she could slip one in you and twist it a little. She was seated now beside me on the couch. She leaned back, tucked a red-sneakered foot under her denimed leg. I had forgotten my manners. Would she like a drink?
‘A shot of something?’ I asked.
‘No, that would be pushing it.’
‘So does this mean you’re going back to school?’
‘Could be. I’ll have to take my bachelor’s all over again. Awful grades.’
‘At least you’d know what you’re about.’
‘Oh Randall.’
She hated it when I got avuncular. But was she going to kiss me? Something had just flashed in her rich, golden-brown eyes. Her child-bearing hips were alluring. When all is said and done, there are stages in their lives when women are infinitely more sexual than civic-minded.
‘I think Eleanor’s going away,’ I said.
‘I heard it, too.’
‘But don’t ask me. I don’t know what’s up. How’s Echo, by the way?’
‘Haven’t talked to her. She sure was mad. I thought her boyfriend was going to shoot Elias.’
‘Are you staying on?’
‘I think so. It’s been hard enough going to work lately, and now all this.’
‘Yes, I can imagine. Sometimes I’m afraid that Traymorean conviviality has only made things worse for you and Echo.’
‘Well, it’s not your fault or Bob’s. Eggy sometimes gets so loud, he embarrasses me. But he’s so old and he’s going to die soon.’
She was only stating a probability but I did not like her just then for stating it.
‘Eggy is not going to change,’ I said.
‘He’s stubborn, alright. Is it true Fast Eddy was wearing women’s clothes when he had his heart attack?’
‘Partially true. He was reading Keats.’
‘Oh. Right. I forgot.’
Now Moonface was getting feckless, as if she had reached the limits of her attention span. Then she rebounded somewhat, saying: ‘I did like him. He was sweet. Not like you guys.’
‘Point taken.’
‘I should think so.’
There was an edge to her voice. She was, indeed, like the moon, changeable. Now innocuous, now menacing. She had slipped through my fingers and I through hers, and yet, here we were, getting on with Traymorean life.
‘Well, I think I’m going to have a drink,’ I said.
‘I think I’m going to go,’ she said.
Hours later, and the knock was Eleanor’s. I hoped I was dreaming it, that she was drunk and wearing something very thin. Dubois could poke his head out his door at any moment. Her words were slurred.
‘Kith me, kith me, you fool. You know you’ve always wanted to.’
Elias puttered about in the galley; the look on his face—half grin, half grimace—suggested he knew no girl named Echo. Moreover, if he had known of such a creature, he certainly would not have groped her. Eggy was silent and content to be so. I worried for Cassandra, Elias’s wife. She came in now and then with a cake she would have baked at home to sell in the café. We did not see much of her but even so I liked seeing her: she was shy, undoubtedly intelligent and determined. When she felt sure of her ground, her smile ravished. The last thing she could possibly want was a train wreck of a marriage, there being two daughters in the mix as well as a business to run. I supposed there must be qualities to Elias she could respect but he was such a closed man I could not discern them. I could see he was homesick, sometimes, his being here a favour he granted lacklustre Canadians of no apparent traditions but hockey and bagpipes. I said to myself, ‘There’s rage in this individual that could very well get the better of him. Also, he looks as if, at any moment, he will burst into tears.’ I was playing the ologist, a shameful pleasure. Eggy asked: ‘Did you say something?’
We sat by the window in the bosom of the sun, Eggy’s demeanor near angelic. Whether or not he was aware of the tensions circulating in the café, he was
certainly far removed from them. I waited for the halo to form above his inverted pyramid of a head. Of course, Eggy’s soul was black with the sins of a long life and multiple wives, but his loopy grin just now was beatific. Verily, the cliché was true: the grip of the old on life is as fierce as the grip of the newly born. Love Eggy or despise him for his antics, one had to admire his commitment; he was going to see things through. With any luck, he might even see a few bastards hang. He would say that one does not die as such; one simply runs out of breath. There is only life; there are only what may live and what must die by way of the dictates of natural selection. Husband and wife love one another deeply, yes, but they will pass on to progeny what shall kill the children, unless other operations of chance get them first. Despite Cassandra’s prominent sharp nose, her face was attractive. Perhaps it was the large, dark eyes and the smile. She was busty, her hair long and almost purple in its tint.
‘Sure,’ I said, smiling back, when she asked if I wanted more ko-fee.
To me she extended an almost exaggerated respect. Eggy she humoured.
Now Cassandra and Elias had a verbal exchange in Greek. The words seemed tinged with pain and regret, though yes, I could have been imagining it.
‘How much longer,’ Eggy asked, ‘do you think this place will keep its name?’
‘It’ll be the Blue Danube forever, at least to us Traymoreans.’
‘Hoo hoo,’ Eggy said.
From the night before, there were revellers on the street, ugly because swollen with excess, the Habs having won their seventh game first-rounder, moving on to the second. I prayed these revellers would stay clear of the Blue Danube, and they did, crossing the street against traffic to the doughnut shop, pumping their fists. Was there evolutionary advantage in obnoxiousness? Cassandra, too, seemed relieved. Elias might as well have been on Mars. I could feel a spell coming on. As if its messenger, here was Fast Eddy now, he saying: ‘So, you’ve spoken to Moonface. Good. You’re not such a fly-by-nighter, after all. I always wondered if you really cared.’
I waved my hand in dismissal and he was gone. Can a ghost pitch woo at a girl, especially one named Moonface?
I made a count of nation-states in deep and dire trouble; I abandoned this barren exercise. How often can you say ‘He shoots, he scores’ in a phantasmagorical land? In any case, Canadians were no less expert in rank perversions and psycho-dramas than any other collective. Cassandra tugged at her wine-dark hair, seated now, worried and abstracted. Elias, blinking his eyes, looked every inch a murderous warlord. The collective, in the deepest recesses of its cave-black psyche, was crying for a bloodbath. Politicians pandered to this request. A Pan would have been spooked; would have led his revellers to higher ground, away from the teeming valleys of burned-out Apollonians and New York senators. I looked at Cassandra who looked at me; we had no idea what was afoot in one another’s mind but, gazes met, we understood perfectly. Such understanding cannot be borne for long.
‘Wine, Cassandra, wine.’
The woman ravished my thirst with a smile.
Le Grec
The heat, not unwelcome, was unnatural to the time of year, leaves not yet on the trees. Even what snow remained on the ground looked parched. The Blue Danube, save in the hearts of Traymoreans, was no more. It had been swept from the field by the rather prosaic soubriquet Le Grec. I suppose this satisfied the enforcers of the French sign laws. I could easily enough picture ‘The Greek’ as a gangster, as a larking Zorba. The philosopher Diogenes shuffling about the streets in his barrel, paying the price for the liberty of his mind. But pizza cook? Yes, the old Blue Danube, now Le Grec, was offering pizzas to an unsuspecting public. I had nothing against pizza but it was a travesty of sorts, in light of the schnitzels and debreciners and sauerkraut the place used to serve up. And Eggy and I and Dubois made our compact; from here on in, we would always say we would meet up at the Blue Danube at some specified time of day or night, to hell with Greekness à la the Gallic rendition of it. Now, given these changes, Eggy was terrified that management (and Gregory carried on with the air of a man who had ideas) would drop the liquor license and institute a BYOB policy. Snow and ice, extreme heat, boozelessness—these were Eggy’s degrees of difficulty, his wars. Moonface and I had gone through our wars of which lust, jealousy, and uneasy affection were part and parcel. Then she slipped through my fingers and I through hers. Even so, there remained between us something of a bond. We were mutual witnesses now to other combatants and other wars such as was life swirling about Traymorean existence. Echo had made a serious impact on the hearts and minds of Traymorean males. On Elias, too, perhaps. How would Gregory, he more or less the captain of the good ship Le Grec, handle the lapse in discipline that had occurred? Echo had not been seen for a few days; there was no news of her. Eleanor was away. I suspected she was pursuing trouble, Toronto not a bad burg for that sort of thing. If in our faded Jezebel of a town the arts of self-gratification were de rigueur, there they were so many life skills one honed to perfection; or one was sent back to Battle Harbour or Saskatoon, disgraced. Eleanor, I was sure, needed no lessons.
What had the most of Gareth Howard’s mind in his last lucid moments? I always assumed that Clare, letting sanity back into the house, had spared Gar my oldest friend the ignominy of dying a bitter and dejected reader of polls, the republic to the south having veered wildly from its course, its appointed destiny as the world’s last best hope. The country did not require a president; it wanted an exorcist. Moonface, noting my mood, kept clear of me in the Blue Danube. Gregory was nattering into a cell phone as he attended to chores in the galley. Liverpool and Chelsea duked it out on the televised soccer pitch, the great brand names of the world encircling the field within the arena. Gregory, too, was a complicated being, wiry and athletic, frustrated footballer, perhaps, with sensitive eyes. I believed that, at bottom, he lacked confidence and was even more passive than I. He would simply overlook Elias’s transgression, who was his business partner, after all. An old woman entered the café, took one look at the TV screen and sniffed. It reeked of maleness, what her senses reported, and as Moonface rose to see what she might want, the woman turned around abruptly and shuffled off. Moonface seated herself again and tugged at her ponytail. She had been using Herodotus lately as an oracle; she opened the book to page 362 and read: “Thus far the history is delivered without variation … ’ The blouse she wore, though it revealed nothing, was suggestive. The sight of her modest bosom unbound was what Eggy had lived for until he gave it up. It was to be a pleasure reserved for Moonface’s Champagne Sheridans and no other, Eggy’s tough old eyes usurped by kinder, but perhaps, less dedicated ones. It was not believable that Eggy lived now for virtue; no, it was the wine and the prospect he might see a few bastards hang. Sally McCabe appeared in my thoughts just long enough to say: ‘I keep telling you, Calhoun, you belong with us, me and Coop and the other hosers riding around in the desert in the Chrysler car. You’re not a huckster. You’re not much of an Apache, either, but whiskey and boffing one another senseless are better than a poke in the eye with a literary stick.’
The wind picked up in advance of a storm. It might get thundery for the first time in the year. Having left the Blue Danube and Moonface, I did not walk far; I went only as far as the little park, giving Mrs Petrova in her shop a nod as I passed by. I was sniffling and snuffling, leaves beginning to unfurl like so many millions of tiny sails. Echo spotted me on a bench and walked my way. She was, as ever, up-tempo, indefatigable. She spoke: ‘Do you mind?’
Of course, I did not. I looked into her pale blue eyes. They were round eyes the colour of a hazy, summery sky. Her bronze curls were spectacular. Whatever she might have had to say to me was lost now in a silence that established itself between us from the get-go, as it were, as if silence were the better thing. Manfully, I struggled not to break the mood, though she looked at me invitingly. It is to say it would have been alright to talk. She took it upon herself to speak: ‘Look, I don’t want to impos
e.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well, I didn’t actually think I was,’ she almost giggled, shrugging her shoulders upward, her lovely arrogance in direct opposition to an outburst in her of humble pie. Perhaps here was a clue to what made her tick: she simply ignored contradictions. Two sparrows copulated in a nearby maple, the male flitting on and off and flitting on again until the female seemed to have had enough. I was terrified my nose had gotten runny. I said as much: ‘I think I’m getting allergic to things in my old age.’
‘To me?’ she laughed.
‘To flora.’
She gave me a look. She was a tiny thing of serious power as yet
unrealized. She could hardly be conscious of what the gods had given her.
‘I heard about it,’ I said.
‘Oh that,’ she answered promptly, her tone dulling.
‘Well, it’s none of my business, but I wish you the best.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, a little confused, and she added: ‘I’m taking a few days off until I decide what to do. I really need the job. But I don’t have enough experience to work elsewhere. It’s kind of, you know, a dilemma.’
‘You’re between a rock and a hard place.’
‘Rock and a hard place. You bet.’
All sorts of madness were fluttering about in me. Some awkwardness flaring up between us, it was time to relieve the pressure.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I have some things to do.’
‘Oh, for sure.’
‘I guess I’ll see you when I see you. If you decide to move on, let me just say the Blue Danube won’t be the same without you. You’ll be missed.’
Echo blushed and inspected the grass. Somehow, it should have been the other way around; that she should have walked away from me, eternally triumphant, humming a song as she did so. I figured if she really had something she wished to say to me, if it was genuinely important, other occasions would arise.