by Norm Sibum
‘Going. Maybe I’d better check on Eggy. He could hardly walk when we closed up.’
‘I know. I heard it all, he and Bob clambering up those stairs as if those stairs were the bloody Matterhorn. You know what I worry about? Eggy not being able to climb them even when sober.’
Was Moonface going to cry?
A Closing Window
It surprised Dubois to think that he knew so little of the local constabulary. How many gradations of rank were there among detectives, for instance? We were in the Blue Danube, he and I, Eggy at another watering hole nearby his weekly physio. Serge the cook was in the galley. He had the look of a gangster from Marseilles, his hair close-cropped military fashion. He had a peculiar posture and gait. Martial arts? He was fluent in French and English and Greek. He seemed, in fact, too intelligent for his menial position. For all that, I was hazarding a guess he was there by choice, not force of circumstance. Perhaps he was a philosopher. Dubois said: ‘It’ll go like this, I think. The local police will hook up with the Sûreté, and other provincial police. Somewhere along the line, the RCMP might get involved, I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how it would work. Maybe we ought to read more thrillers. She stays vanished long enough, and we’ll be hearing about Interpol.’
Dubois was cutting into a slice of pizza. I figured that were Eggy here, he would have piped up, saying: ‘And MI6.’
He would have hoo hooed. Why not the FBI? The CIA? So then, still no word of Echo.
I had been scouring my art books for a portrait of her. On a hunch, I started with del Sarto, but though the overall look of his madonnas was a close match to the sensual force of Echo’s countenance, the eyes were always wrong, Echo’s peepers more round than almond-shaped. It was much the same with Botticelli. It was as if I were a detective, myself. I even took to sitting in the tiny park just down the street where the girl had recently assailed me with her presence. As if she might have left a clue there as to her current whereabouts. Nothing. No Echo, no gusto born of life force. Sparrows and dogs and squirrels. It might be that this business had turned into an obsession with me. No one of us had known her long; we could not be expected to mourn her absence in any profound way, but there was no question she had caused us to notice her simply by her whirlwind hold of the sun. Eggy had never seen anything like it, and he had seen much.
Ah, but in a book of Gombrich, a young woman (Head of St Apollonia: Perugino altarpiece), was very approximate to Echo’s look. That air of sauce and challenge. In another volume, the central female nude in Piombo’s The Death of Adonis was quite suggestive of her profile.
Dubois, having treated with matters of police procedure, his hunger sated, leaned back. He began an account of the human record, starting with the origins of language, that the first sentence ever uttered must have been: ‘I want this’ as opposed to ‘I love you’.
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Dubois. ‘Do I rate the palm?’
Well, were we moral creatures? Two observations were undeniable, at least: America once made a covenant with knowledge and the moral courage knowledge ought to vouchsafe; but that America had often broken faith; and in the past eight years had not only broken faith but had smashed the covenant beyond recognition. For all that, and despite the fact they seemed to be the source of more op-eds than any other source, I knew too many so-called secular humanists to be much reassured. They were Arsdells ‘to a T’: callow time-servers, egoists. I rolled a cigarette that I would smoke outside, the evening’s revelries ramping up around me, parking spaces claimed, the traffic in and out of the liquor outlet a steady stream, hooded young males, girls in the briefest of skirts and stiletto heels. Pensioners walking mutts. Business as usual. Humanism’s highlight reel.
‘I suppose we should put it to Eggy. He must’ve been there. He’s old enough to have witnessed the birth of language.’
Dubois availed himself of mirth. It had been a satisfying exchange of views.
Prodigal Girl
I saw at a glance, coming out the Traymore door, that she had spent a great deal of money. The black, flat-capped cab driver, having already popped the trunk, was unloading her suitcases as well as the shiny tote bags, and setting them on the pavement. I offered to help Eleanor with her booty up the Traymore stairs.
‘That’s mighty white of you, Calhoun,’ she said, oblivious to the driver, her voice edgy, her smile defensive.
She was dressed better than when she had left, or so I figured, not having seen her leave. If the attire was conventional, it was nonetheless tasteful, suitable for an ambitious woman of politics or business, her new high heels tony. Her hair was freshly frosted. She paid off the driver with a theatrical gesture, presenting him with a sheaf of twenties and suggesting he keep the change. He needed no encouragement. I grabbed the suitcases plus a bag, and she managed the rest, and together we clambered up the Traymore stairs which did not exactly bespeak Corporate American life. As she unlocked her door, she said in a somewhat curious manner: ‘Come see me in my kitchen.’
Ah, Eleanor in full thrall to Aphrodite, the jealous Aphrodite, the payback Aphrodite, no goddess bitchier than she save for Hera, Zeus’s other. But of what had Eleanor to be jealous? Dubois, so far as I knew, behaved well in her absence, whereas she, I would have wagered, had not. I said I would give her a chance to settle in after so long a bus ride; I would come by in an hour. It dawned on me then that she must have taken the connector flight from Toronto; it would explain the freshness of her outfit and the twenties, airport fare. It would not explain, however, what she was up to, what mischief she was contemplating, which rug was about to be yanked from under whose unsuspecting feet. I hoped Dubois had a healthy centre of gravity for he was going to need it, he who was always going on about physics; or how, in a universe some 13 billions of years of age, a short history of the Democratic Party was not even worth the blink of God’s eye. Of course, there was no God, religion a cheap stunt. No, we inhabited a planet that was but a corpuscle in the bloodstream of some vastly larger entity than our galactic purview. This last supposition, product of Dubois’s thinking, was unworthy of a rational mind. I went about some business to which I had to attend, but in an hour or so I was back, my heart pounding. She could only have intended, of course, that we would smoke, imbibe and chat.
Her look was a searching one as she admitted me, her eyes momentarily soft and seductive. I smelled the amaretto on her breath. I hoped Dubois was across town, pursuing one of his vague projects. She slinked away from me and then stopped in the middle of her living room. She had slipped on something else, semi-formal evening wear. She spun around, light of foot in her new shoes. I made the proper noises.
‘Well done,’ I said.
‘You bet your bottom dollar,’ she said, unexpressed expletives breaking the spell.
I followed her into the kitchen, admiring the performance of her walk.
I rolled two cigarettes. Something was amiss. The new edition of Eleanor did not seem to suit the previous edition’s kitchen. Even so she topped up her glass and poured me a measure of the liquid amber. Somewhat fussily, she seated herself, a crazy grin beginning to form on her mouth. Was she starting to get glassy-eyed?
‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to know. Tit-for-tat. Your tat mightily irked me. You know, back when you were carrying on with that woman, what’s her name.’
‘Lindsey,’ I said.
‘Whatever.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, mounting a weak counter-offensive against as yet unknown threats.
‘He doesn’t understand, he says. Well, how’s this then? You want to know? Sure, I threw myself at all sorts of men. Got lucky a couple of times. You might ask what I was doing. I might answer I was fit to be tied. I want Bob to marry me. You know he won’t. Meanwhile, and my, how inconvenient, I still have an itch. Do you care to scratch it?’
She leaned forward. She leaned back.
‘No, I thought not.’
She was d
angerous, I surmised just then, perhaps the most dangerous woman I had ever known. It had less to do with sex and more to do with territory. She had always let me know she was infinitely more dangerous than Lindsey Price, to whom I had falsely accorded that particular distinction, and I had always pooh-poohed the claim. I was missing my cenobitic existence.
‘You know you want it,’ she said, like some co-ed trying out newly discovered leverage for size.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I believe in sustainable resources. I wouldn’t leave you a heap of bones. And you’re worried about Bob. Honour between friends. You see how Bob thwarts me at every turn?’
‘You’re a handsome woman, Eleanor R, but I thought it was understood: we are not fated. I nearly wrecked a home once. I’ll not do it again.’
I more than halfway lied, seeing as Gar my oldest friend was already in his grave when Clare and I had come together in his country shack however briefly, even if for an eternity.
‘You always say we aren’t moral creatures. So then, what’s your scruple, if I say scruples don’t apply to me?’
I lit my cigarette and handed her the thin stick I had rolled for her. I lit it as well, taking my time in the formulation of an answer. She held my hand with the lighter between her two hands. The pedagogue was rising up in me; he would strike too many trumpery notes. I shoved him back down as I spoke: ‘We aren’t moral creatures. I haven’t changed my mind about that. You would, in fact, leave me a heap of bones. I’m not the lover boy that once I was. Too much disillusion and drink.’
A husky voice said: ‘I’ll be gentle.’
‘Eleanor.’
‘Well, you seemed to have gotten it on with what’s her name smartly enough. Your smirk was so loud it broke the sound barrier.’
‘What, you think it was sex?’
‘What were you doing, pushing daisies?’
How explain to her what I could not explain to myself, but that that woman, that what’s-her-name had passed through my life just at a time when she was, for whatever reason, entitled to a piece of me and I had it to give, no explanations necessary?
‘We were, how does the parlance go, hanging out.’
Eleanor shrugged and wilted. It was not a pretty sight or one in which I took pleasure.
‘Bloody effing hell,’ she said, her theatricalities chased from the stage.
The upshot was, I gave her a kiss, a longish one, one I hoped would leave us both with our dignity intact. I enjoyed the kiss. I suspect she did, too. Resurrecting some good humour, she then pushed me off, saying she could not have dalliance with just any Johnny-come-lately, what sort of woman did I think she was?
But if I thought everything was going to be fine from here on in, in the Traymore, I was mistaken. Eleanor and Dubois were having rows. Shades of the Lamonts. No, strike that, those last words an all too convenient comparison. Eleanor and Dubois did not throw furniture. Eleanor, out of exasperation, may have wished to kill Dubois but she loved him, so I will always submit. Dubois, in his feckless, can’t-pin-a-man-down fashion, loved Eleanor. Theirs was not a love the poets might have sung and have caused to be put up in lights; but it was love, a love, and if nothing else, an avowal of mutual need. Booze got drunk; voices rose; the atmosphere was stormy, but Eleanor was not Lucille and Dubois was not Marcel expatriatable to the realm of death. What then was the problem? Love between Eleanor and Dubois did not require a reason, only that Eleanor had got it in her head that she wanted one. I said as much to Moonface, who had come over for hamburgers, bringing Louisiana hot sauce. It was perhaps Virgilian, her gesture, and if it was a Moonface touch, it revealed an aspect of her I had not yet suspected. It was such a worldly note for the unworldly Moonface of my thoughts. It, of course, reminded me that Virgil’s shepherds were not mere literary fancies. The Caesars were up to no good; the world was crashing down around our ears, but we would season our meat with a concoction made of peppers, vinegar and salt such as would have really stung the wounds of Christ. Moonface said: ‘You’re sure it’s love?’
‘I think so.’
Well, I preferred to think so.
‘What a romantic you are, Randall.’
I took offense.
‘No, I’m a cynic, high echelon. But cynics, at least those such as me, have an undeserved press. We don’t question the existence of the basic constituents of the universe; we don’t question the existence of the universe itself. Carbon we can weigh and measure; love is so much more intangible, but there nonetheless. Moral behaviour is the shell game, is misdirection, a turkey shoot. Moral behaviour can mean many different things to many different regimes. One might die for the sake of honour. One might die for love. But moral behaviour? I’m hardly a romantic.’
Calhoun had spoken. Moonface consumed her burger with enthusiasm.
I did not indicate to her that, on any given day, I did not object to Eleanor’s flirtatiousness; it had been a great pleasure. But that, lately, it was something other than play; it was hurt and anger and God knows what. I supposed the prospect of old age disturbed women as greatly as it did men, but Eleanor was far from having arrived at that pass. She leaned toward the pulchritudinous, but it was a lovely pulchritude worthy of a Rembrandt. I further supposed that one cannot always find a reason for seemingly unreasonable behaviour. It was as if something had flown up her nose and was pounding her brain. Dubois might relent and marry her but I could see he might be protecting what had made their liaison work in the first place, its below the radar operations. I could see it might be nothing other than selfishness on his part, a form of leverage, an imposition on the Eleanor R soul. What an impenetrable thicket of suppositions plague the human mind.
‘No,’ said Moonface, ‘you’re a romantic. Even I know that.’
She ran the back of her hand against her mouth, her rich brown-gold eyes large with appetite. She always came out of nowhere—the lusty Moonface. The lust in her always receded like dying thunder, and the feckless Moonface then came to the fore. By now I could almost time it.
‘What shall we do now?’ she asked with mischief.
‘What have you in mind?’
Women are perverse. If there had been no Lindsey Price, I doubted that Eleanor and Moonface would have found me as much of interest of late. Had they taken note of a satisfied customer?
We would take in a movie, a new release. It was something that we, at any rate, could do with ourselves. We did not know of any other way, it seemed, to be with one another’s bodies. But as we stepped into the carpeted hall of the Traymore, Eleanor stuck her head out her door. She said: ‘Stepping out to play, you kids?’
Well, she had always assumed Moonface and I were lovers. I would have thought it obvious that we were not. To her credit, she did not usually violate justice in her machinations. She abjured woman as victim and she was quick to call out any woman for bullying, as she had done with Lucille Lamont. But Eleanor was jealous now, and it was not attractive.
Downtown, somewhat disorientated by the throngs of people and the clamouring traffic (I had forgotten about the hockey game), we made our way as best we could along Ste Catherine to the Cineplex. Moonface had my arm, walking at my side like a lover. If the venue was garish and off-putting, it was a pleasure palace for those who wished their pleasures undiluted with the subtleties. Look into the eyes of the movie-goers and there was erotic flux to be seen and even high spirits. Yes, there were always the loners marking time. There were always the dull-eyed. In other words, what was there to criticize? The feature itself impressed us. We left the place in a sober and chastened frame of mind, and we were out of place on a street of revelment, painfully so. I hailed us a taxi. In the backseat, Moonface’s knee grazed mine. Finally she said: ‘You’ve done it again.’
‘What have I done?’
‘We go to a movie—I get depressed.’
‘But you said you liked the movie.’
‘I did like it.’
‘So what depresses you?’
‘I don’t know—tha
t people can be people like that.’
‘You mean so violent, so petty and lost.’
‘Yes, like that.’
The cab driver coughed. That cough seemed to subsume everything, even the air Moonface and I were breathing. It was a statement, that cough, but whether in accord or discord with our dialogue, I could not say.
A cell phone tinkled with inane melody; the driver answered it and was now in his own little world to which we were but adjuncts, Moonface and I, paying customers, souls to be freighted between points of a compass.
Later, I almost caved.
Page 272 of Herodotus
We had retired to our apartments. But shortly after, I listening to piano, accordion and oud, Moonface reemerged, Herodotus in hand. With some heat she read aloud from page 272 of the book: ‘Such then were the governments, and such the amounts of tribute at which they were assessed respectively.’
‘Your point?’
But she had no point; for once the oracular powers of the text seemed to have failed her. She joined me on the couch, uninvited. Chameleon that she was, cynic that I was, it was more parody than passion, what followed. It was only fantasy, that I undid the buttons of a coarse shirt and slid hands under the cups of her shiny bra, her small breasts indignant. Even so, she looked stricken, holding Herodotus against her chest. Even as, in my mentations, I would study her countenance, the eyes the window of the soul, she was deeply unsure of herself. We were, so I noted with some irritation, still teasing one another to death. No human urge is more tough and resilient and obdurate than the sexual urge. None connects as devastatingly to the most fragile parts of the psyche. But I did not want a million pieces of Moonface to reassemble. I did not want regrets, her eyes now shut, expression sheepish. She was helpless and perhaps a little humiliated. It was going to be awkward, conversation in the coming days. In the old days, I would have already taken my pleasure and hoped she had taken hers, and we would be sharing drinks and smokes and talk by now. Godard the filmmaker was oh so full of it, for instance. In the end, I said, and perhaps it was beside the point that I said it: ‘What you want is a man your age.’