by Norm Sibum
‘Oh for God’s sake, Calhoun,’ so I berated myself, ‘you’ve done it again. Been a perfect idiot. She had something to ask and you frightened her off.’
I awaited the affectionate mirth of Sally McCabe; it did not come.
I had dozed off, the TV on. Moonface simply walked through the door. She shook me gently as the audience in the Ed Sullivan Theatre tittered at Letterman the talk show host and comic. At first, she plopped herself down on the couch and I made room for her, drawing up my knees. It was intimacy that dared but who was daring whom? She took the initiative, kneeling now on the floor at my side. Though I was still sleepy, I knew that, despite what had transpired between us, it was new territory she was establishing. Perhaps she thought she was improving my morale. Perhaps she was atoning for recent decades of gender wars. Perhaps it was just so much nothing, but I would put a stop to it. It looked as though she might lay her head on my chest and go to sleep. I breathed; she breathed, the fact of our breathing like this maintenance for the universe. I smelled her hair.
‘Oh, I have news,’ she said, brightly. ‘Well, not really,’ she half moaned.
‘Which is it then?’
I wanted a cigarette.
‘Echo. I talked with her. Or she talked with me. Anyway, she doesn’t know what to do. She said she’d seen you earlier. You were awfully nice. She wanted to talk to you but she was intimidated.’
‘She could’ve talked to me. I would’ve listened.’
‘I told her you were a pushover and wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
Were we not all things at all times? I said: ‘I don’t know what Echo should do. I don’t think Elias is as bad a man as all that. But he has a streak of something in him I don’t like. The world owes him, I guess. Poor Cassandra. What she must put up with.’
‘I know.’
Did Moonface really know? Still on her knees, she rolled her eyes up and to the side in that way she had, staring at something that was not there. It was her sexuality, her fear, her gentle nature. It would make for her a hard life to come. It struck me then, as if I were to have been the first man on the moon, that I had come within an ace of beholding what Eggy had once lived for. Fast Eddy was in the room, looking thoughtful. It was possible then I had dreamed this interlude, having fallen asleep to the drone of the TV. But no, Moonface was there, her eyes shining down on me.
‘A drink?’ I asked.
I still wanted a cigarette. The Moonface visage fascinated me; I supposed I could read in it past, present and future.
This time, she accepted a drink. Whiskeys, smokes, and long talk on various matters. We were two old friends who had much to discuss but just let our words take us where they would. Had anyone heard from Eleanor? No. But then I had not seen Dubois of late. Moonface was almost charming in her denunciation of the President. It pleased me to see she was not saying as much so as to curry my favour. She did have, after all, some idea of what was going on in the world. Out of the blue I said: ‘You need a much younger man than I.’
‘Oh Randall, don’t do that. It’s patronizing.’
‘You should be mothering a dynasty of poets.’
‘Maybe I’ll want to write poetry, myself.’
‘Why not?’
‘You could take me to Rome.’
‘There’s a thought,’ I said, much too carelessly.
‘I like the boys but they haven’t any brains. Rick had a brain but he was always jealous.’
‘What about your latest?’
‘Him?’
I yawned. I hoped she would not take that yawn of mine amiss.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll have much to say about Q in my diary.’
My ears burned a little with the news she would exercise her muse in behalf of her diary, I her subject matter. She rose and I rose. Space separated us where we stood. She got up on her sneakered toes to kiss me. There was mischief in this kiss. I was meant to have learned a lesson of some sort. It was evident, however, that good humour would attend our parting. At least there was that.
An Untouched Meal
I could hear Moonface rousting about in her rooms, the Traymore walls thin. Soon she would nest in her bed, pen and diary book at the ready. Calhoun uncooperative. Echo’s in a pickle. In my mentations Virgil the poet had gotten himself to some exotic clime; he was shambling from one Mayan ruin to the next in tropical undergrowth. What were the Mayan rites of burial? Were bird livers read before battle? Bodies had been stacking up in precipitous fashion over the last century of the first deep blush of the ologies, so many sacks of bones making for a causeway to the stars. I retired to my bed, window cracked open. After the frigid winter air, the cold night air of spring seemed a bonus, a boon, the only excuse one needed to delight in living.
A party would rise from the ashes, win all the marbles and never quite recover from victory. Here was the history of American politics. Some thinkers contended this explained Nixon and Reagan and the current occupant of the White House who was ruinous. The road out of Rome in a time of knife-fighters was a lonely one for Cicero, who watched his republic die of an overdose of irony. Elias, business partner to Gregory of Le Grec, had an air of sheepish stupidity about him. He looked as if he were continually amazed at his capacity for errors of judgment. I figured the café to be too small an enterprise to support both Gregory and Elias and his family. Were there other sources of income? Cassandra, I was told, was a schoolteacher once. It is said only impersonal forces shape history. Tell me another. I knew in my bones Eleanor was up to no good in Toronto, and that, on her return, there would be storm-rumblings in Traymorean skies as had already withstood the Lamonts and Osgoode the pedophile.
Again, Echo seemed to have just disappeared. Eggy did not think it significant, he saying of an afternoon in the Blue Danube, Dubois seated with us: ‘These days, girls come and go as they please. In my day, well, it wasn’t that there weren’t any goings-on, just that maybe one girl out of a hundred had the time and the wherewithal for it.’
‘In your day,’ said Dubois, ‘when was that? When they burned witches at the stake?’
Casting aspersions on Eggy’s great age was getting to be a stale conversational gambit. Eggy’s countenance soured. I said I was sure my mother had been a virgin when she married. She had expected happiness, to which sex was decidedly an obstacle. Dubois then said his mother had been a merry old girl, his father a patient workhorse.
‘You mean stud,’ said Eggy, somewhat meanly. His mother had been the town slut.
Dubois threw up his hands. Cassandra was waitressing, an unseeable weight on her shoulders, anxiety in her face.
‘Oh Cassandra,’ said Eggy, attempting mischief, ‘we’re dry here.’
Like an automaton she went for the wine rack. There was absolutely nothing one could say to her as she brought over a bottle and uncorked it and remembered to smile.
Moonface showed up for dinner at my place in a short skirt and red sneakers. She was ungainly now, hardly the sophisticate who had tried to put one over on me of a recent evening. I put a CD in the ghetto blaster: piano, accordion and oud. In the arts of humiliation, so I was thinking just then, we were amateurs. The Brits, for example, had those arts down pat, to go by their recent literature, whereas we were crude in comparison, pretending to an innocence that had never been, was not, and could never be, not even in some American way of life. We occupied the couch, the fixings of the meal I had cobbled together on the low-slung table before us. Moonface non-sequiturred: ‘I don’t think Virgil’s shepherds were all that merry.’
Was she just trying to make conversation?
‘Clearly not,’ I said, adopting a pedagogical tone.
‘I do like you, you know,’ she said, somewhat primly.
I was flabbergasted. Had she something more compelling than ‘like’ in mind? Piano and accordion rippled; the oud struck deep notes. I wished to smoke, my plate hardly touched, my wine glass a cliché, one half-empty or half-full of d
rifting and indifferent sorrow.
‘Well, I don’t like you in that way, necessarily,’ Moonface added, pulling now at the ends of tresses nestled on her shoulder.
‘How then do you like me, might I ask?’
‘Like a father. Like an older brother. Like a friend. Like that. But Eggy’s Zeus,’ she said, ending her peroration on a note of levity, her eyes rolling up and to the side.
‘Zeus,’ she repeated, somewhat distantly.
The girl, the woman, the girl-woman was a chameleon.
‘He’s certainly a right old numero uno,’ I said of Eggy, tiny sparrow of a man.
The piano tinkled; the oud stood off at a respectful distance, awaiting its turn. The pianist was a romantic who had turned away from the world to indulge his soul, the oud a worldly figure of pessimism. That left the even more worldly accordionist to worry about how to make ends meet. I do not know why I had Brits on the brain who sometimes were as cruel to one another, so it seemed to me, as Islamists stoning adulterers in their stadiums. Perhaps it was the presence in my digs of Moonface, who had something of an island nation in her blood, her fecklessness her way of avoiding what it might cause her to do in the name of passion. Now the oud rippled like a lion in the chase. Moonface perched on her end of the couch, a sneakered foot tucked under one leg, her thighs very much a force. We were going to tease one another to death. I thought we might as well get it over with but it was not there; that is to say, were I to fall through space she would only shrink away and pull at the ends of her hair. I went to the kitchen for my tobacco and cigarette papers. Moonface, too, thought she might have a smoke. She followed me, at odds and ends. It was a dull kiss that ensued. It should never have happened as per an old unspoken agreement between us, she the mischief-maker, of late, not me.
Holes in the Fabric of Time and Space
In Le Grec (Blue Danube to Traymoreans), Eggy, lifting his chin from his food-specked shirt, put it to us: ‘Where’s that girl gotten to, I’d like to know?’
Eggy’s tough old eyes, his loopy grin—I wondered if he truly cared as to where Echo might be. He reached for his glass, and in the wine were all his consolations. Dubois, in imitation of a movie screen cowboy, laughed: ‘My gut tells me she ain’t coming back.’
‘Afraid so,’ I said.
‘Bloody effing hell.’
Eggy set his glass back on the table with infinite care.
There was a chill in the breeze; it was not yet terrasse weather. Even so, other people were availing themselves of it, extending the territory Moonface or Cassandra or indeed, Echo, should she return, would have to cover. Women with dogs at their heels and cell phones clapped to their ears. Shining heads of over-loud voices. Youth with their eyes on other venues, other destinations all cachet, the Blue Danube aka Le Grec but a way station on the silk and spice road to paradise. Eggy’s chin dropped again. He was out for the count.
‘Heard from Eleanor?’ I asked Dubois.
‘No,’ he answered, his tone that of man who did not expect to hear from anyone let alone the good woman in question. Things between us had always been collegial, though Dubois’s materialism was anathema to the on-again off-again mystic in me. Once he asked what I really believed, expecting to be highly entertained by my response. I answered: ‘It’s not something that just spells itself out in words at the drop of a hat. Do I believe there’s a god? I don’t. Is there a soul? Who can say? You’re enjoying this too much.’
Dubois observed that my response was interesting for someone who was otherwise delusional.
Blind Musician, he who had flown up a horse’s arse and found the Golden Age, seemed to have aged in a dramatic fashion, his beard whiter and longer and perhaps pricklier to the touch. It must be harrowing, bringing culture to remote outposts, soothing the savage breasts of bush pilots and glue sniffers and seal hunters and the odd oil man poking around. With that voice of his that could cut one to the bone, he intoned we were all of us in the Blue Danube corrupt and unfit for the beauties of art. We were the half-breeds of the life of the mind. I half-believed him. Dubois was saying about Baie Shawinigan: ‘You know, it did pretty good for a tiny little town, total population 433 max, and it produced three NHL hockey players and one prime minister, who himself played hockey, team captain in his youth.’
Dubois had grown up in Shawinigan proper. Blind Musician sniffed.
We were going to get drunk, Eggy, Dubois and I, and monitor the hockey game as we did so, no matter what Blind Musician thought of us. Moonface now chatted with the man, taking it upon herself to demonstrate for our benefit that he was perfectly civilized and in complete possession of his marbles, probabilities I found improbable, Moonface’s eyes rolling up and to the side. Now Elias and Cassandra entered the café, husband and wife team bringing in sacks of supplies and Cassandra’s home-baked cakes. I examined her face and noted the absence of anxiety in her eyes. Eggy and Dubois had noted it, as well, and the three of us exchanged significant looks. Elias seemed to have a new lease on married life. I said, apropos of nothing in particular: ‘The voice of doom will have a BBC accent.’
Eggy started going on about a man’s reach, how it should exceed his grasp or what’s it for? Blind Musician must not have known his Browning as he went silent, confused perhaps, as to his whereabouts. That here, here in a faded Jezebel of a town, was the real outpost, true heart of darkness stuff. Even so, Washington was calumniating Syria and North Korea on the strength of partial truths, causing Israel to purr. A motorcade, no doubt that day, pulled up to some conference site, each limousine loaded with state secrets and lies and policy tweaks. The senate would debrief a true professional, a tall and dour Tiberius back from his labours in the forests of Germania, the tribes, for the moment, cowed and pacified by way of bribes, life’s real terror Rome’s high society. We were scuttling along, Eggy, Dubois and I, like creatures of the sea in a rising tide, merrily bubbling with our inanities, knocking back the wine. Eggy piped up, his voice precisely tailored for the part: ‘Good evening. This is BBC Home Service. Now the news. We’re scuppered.’
‘What?’ asked Dubois.
The Habs could not control the puck, pressing too hard.
A new creature came on the scene. He was wearing a light windbreaker, slacks and sneakers. He looked around as if to see whether the Blue Danube aka Le Grec were his kind of place. He caught Moonface’s eye. Perhaps she had already guessed what this man was about. He approached her and said something and she pointed at the galley where a Greek and a Greek wife and the cook were stowing away the supplies. I heard Echo’s warble in my mentations: ‘Oh, will there be a sing-fest?’
Fast Eddy was now immanent, a look of concern on his spectral visage.
A Greek and a stranger went outside. The Greek lit a cigarette while the stranger, hand in pocket, seemed to be asking questions and the Greek (Elias) looked a little defensive and worried, examining the sidewalk. Anxiety returned to Cassandra’s dignified countenance. Fast Eddy seemed awfully sad. The Habs finally scored one. Even Blind Musician cheered up.
‘Yay,’ Moonface moaned.
Had she turned at random to page 176 of Herodotus she might have read: but such as think so err very widely from the truth.
When I was next conscious it was first light. A hullabaloo of birds. It was too depressingly early for waking life. A disjointed dream claimed me, a fragment of which was Fast Eddy, he addressing Randall Q Calhoun: ‘About your writing. Better a rough diamond than a polished turd.’
‘Good God, Sanders,’ I said, ‘what do you know about writing?’
‘More than you think. Since I died I have been much about. It hasn’t been all that pleasant. Imagine a ghost having to shoot up insulin.’
The dream world dissipated. Then it was Moonface in my eyes, and she was real. She stood over me as I lay on the couch, blanket drawn up to my chin. I must have fetched it in the middle of the night. Bursting with definitive knowledge, she said: ‘That guy was a cop.’
‘That guy?’<
br />
‘Yes, that guy. He was a cop.’
‘Don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘Come on, Randall. I’m not making this up.’
‘Is there any coffee?’
‘Just made some. I’ll bring you a cup.’
So she went and brought me a cup. She was wearing a gossamer thing of a robe over her pajamas, her feet shod in soft slippers. Two pale yellow gazelles are nibbling at the young shoots of a pomegranate or apple tree. The Habs had won the night before, rather lucky to do so in overtime, so I managed to recall. I awaited words of explanation from Moonface.
‘Anyway, that guy,’ she said, seated now by my feet, my knees drawn up. I held a scalding hot cup of coffee in both hands, blowing across it.
“He was a cop and he was asking about Echo.’
‘So she pressed charges after all?”
‘No.’
‘Well then, what?’
‘No one has seen her in a while. The boyfriend called Echo’s parents who called the police. The cop, the detective, I guess, came around.’
‘He thinks Elias has something to do with this?’
‘I don’t know. No one knows what to think.’
‘Eggy and Bob—do they know of this?’
‘They were pretty drunk. So were you. But you had left before Cassandra told me what was up. I guess I mentioned it to Eggy and Bob. I don’t think it registered. It certainly has with me.’
‘I need a bath,’ I said.
‘I’ll leave you to it then.’
One of these days I would understand the Moonface visage, what it conveyed to me of the meaning of life, if anything.
‘I’m worried, Randall.’
I shrugged.
‘How can I keep working in that place?’
I shrugged again. Where would we find a new Blue Danube? Without Moonface, what would be the point? Arabesque, a form that repeatedly denies or negates closure …
‘I don’t suppose we should jump to any conclusions. I really need that bath. Unless you want to frolic with me—’