The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Oh Randall. Randall the avuncular.’

  She was irked. But the fact she was irked was each our release point, a way out of an impasse. Even so, her mouth drawn tight, complexion flushed, she was just then no liberal-minded daughter of a community-inspired idiot. She said: ‘Now I don’t know why I came over.’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘Anyway, you’re not much help.’

  ‘No, I guess I’m not.’

  ‘It’s because you’re old enough to be my father.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Or maybe you can’t, you know, perform.’

  ‘And if I could, what then, you nasty, little minx?’

  Was Moonface snickering?

  ‘There are remedies,’ she said.

  ‘There are always remedies.’

  ‘It’s easy, pleasing men. Why are you so difficult?’

  I was scattered about in a million pieces.

  She rose, Herodotus still clasped to her chest. The look she gave me was one that suggested she had much to think over. She would get back to me, as it were. At any rate, we could each consider ourselves as having been assessed.

  I could hear Moonface in her digs, preparing for bed. Plumbing rumbled and knocked. I could see her, knees drawn up in that bed of hers, her diary book rested against her hips, pen at the ready. Q in one of his theological snits again. Didn’t fuck me. Well, plenty of boys have, and I’ve seen no great light, as a result. With Q it’s all dark, but I can see everything distinctly, flowers and trees and birds and the like. Means what, exactly?

  The piano, accordion and oud had played themselves out. It was just me and silence and whatever Traymorean sound blundered through Traymorean walls. Fast Eddy wandered in. He whose curse had always been his insufferable gravitas was all Churchillian cheer, he chomping on his cigar, pale blue eyes suggesting we would fight them here and fight them there, in the villages, on the beaches. And so forth. Great fun.

  ‘Moonface,’ Fast Eddy said, ‘does not appear to want to go the distance with you. And you, who would’ve thought it, but you have scruples.’

  A ghost could not have been more pleased that was once deeply smitten with a girl named Moonface. Then Sally McCabe: ‘You’re slipping, dear boy. You’re letting down the side. But then you always flattered yourself you were some sort of swashbuckler. Let me tell you, you were humoured. It’s what women do. Still, you were always sweet. Well, not always, but most of the time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ I addressed some ethereality, my tone black.

  Speak a truth, and in an instant, a truth will invite its untruth; and I was a weak and shallow creature of fevered delusions of spiritual grandeur. How was spiritual groping-about in a rank and dark and horror-infested cave any different from Elias having groped Echo in the light of capitalist day? How any less primitive? I might flatter myself that I was X, Y and Z, but I would never flatter myself that I was any avatar of enlightened reason; of any moral claptrap that had addled the human mind and permitted it to slaughter and rape and oppress in the name of values religious or secular. Was Echo even alive? Perhaps what I needed was Rome and the shambling and haphazard sexuality of her narrow streets, a lethal moonlight in the pines. I felt at home there, half in ancient history, half in the waking moment. Where there was not such a grotesque distinction to be drawn between the glories of the body and the glories of the spirit, though of grotesqueries Rome had plenty. Traymorean society was not going to accept the fact that, almost overnight, one Randall Q Calhoun, could suddenly mouth the word spirituality without gagging, whatever he meant by the word. They would not trust it who knew me for my wine intake; who could see I was not dead to the charms of women, whatever my so-called scruples. Perhaps on this score I was only tormenting myself like some anchorite in his filthy hole, living on locusts. Perhaps it was as banal and contemptible and as unprofitable as this. Lust had, and would always have, pride of place in the human heart, out of which grew love as Plato once avowed, and I had always thought him right in this, if in little else. Only that, what, something in our era, in our kick at the can, was out of kilter, and more lust was not leading to more love. Politics would not solve it and law could not legislate the emptiness. The voice of redress was as wild as Esau baying in the hills for justice and for love of wild song. Eggy just might possibly understand. I would go see him in the morning.

  Eggy’s Little Speech

  Eggy said: ‘Haven’t you been paying attention? I claim no high purpose in life. Wine’s my purpose. Will lovely Moonface allow me to pinch her bum? We must wait and see. A pity about Echo. I spin my prayer wheels such as they are. The rain in Spain and all that. Do you do table hockey? I was shuffling by the Sally Ann the other day, and there it was on display. The table and the hockey. Hoo hoo. I was in the Signal Corps, you know. Korea was my crucible. That and my wives. Bloody effing hell, Calhoun, if you can’t take the breeze in your sails, get out of the wind. There’s no soul to find. Exactly when did yours go missing? I close my eyes, and there it is: the scarecrow I saw once in a field when I was a boy. I think something clicked in my mind just then. Click click click. I mean, look at the thing, the way it’s exposed to the elements and mocking birds. Almost a pun, that. But that was me. That’s you. Wind and straw. The rain in Spain. Always.’

  A rich man from Toronto called on Eleanor. She was unwise enough to entertain him. Later we were to learn he called her ‘Ellie’, that he was no millionaire’s millionaire, but give him time, he was just getting started. Dubois (oh, bad luck!) unwittingly knocked on Eleanor’s door, was told to go away, she was busy. It was unmistakable—the appearance of entitlement. A smart pant leg, the one leg crossed over the other, ran parallel with the couch. Not only that, here was Eleanor in high evening mode and it was only mid-morning. An emergency session of Traymoreans was convened at the Blue Danube at the stroke of noon.

  Gregory at opening time assumed that all was fine for Traymoreans. But things were not fine; there was none of Dubois’s usual horseplay as he ordered wine from Cassandra. Eggy, however, was amused; and he would have his usual sausage and onions and customary libation.

  ‘Well, did you get his name?’ Eggy asked Dubois.

  ‘How could I?’

  Dubois was not a man who generally lacked for answers. If he was not Irish, he had the luck of the Irish, so to speak. He was smug, and because smug, pleasant. And because pleasant, he was every man and woman’s bonhomie. Say Russia to him, and you would get analysis of Russia’s newfangled oligarchic practices. Say the U.S. of A, and you would receive the lowdown on the dollar’s plummeting value. You would think you had just been treated to a charming tale. The last thing he expected was that Eleanor would take not just another man into her bed, but a future husband.

  ‘What now?’ asked Eggy, as if there were anything to be done.

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Dubois, a riot of his cheek’s hairline cracks threatening to pull his face apart.

  ‘I’d smack her bottom,’ said Eggy with some conviction.

  The wine came, and Eggy’s food, by way of Cassandra, nothing but a waitress’s boredom in her eyes. How could this be, her husband a groper, a suspect in a missing person case? But through boredom one might stave off unwanted thoughts. The sight of alarm on Dubois’s visage was most unfamiliar. Even the man’s immense vanity could not prevent the dawning upon him that, somehow, he might have driven Eleanor to a transgression.

  ‘She was always on about getting married. I’ve been married.’

  ‘Oh you could’ve married her,’ Eggy surmised. ‘But I daresay the sex would’ve fizzled, thereafter. Standard procedure.’

  ‘Actually,’ Dubois confessed, ‘it hasn’t been that great, of late.’

  ‘Marriage counsellor?’ Eggy chirped. ‘Not that I much believe in them.’

  ‘But we’re not even married.’

  ‘Well then, somebody,’ Eggy huffed.

  How futile was it, exactly, swimming collegially with cephal
opods, seeking cancer cures, looking for lost love that flew the coop? Cynic that I am, even so, I said: ‘Bob, wait it out.’

  ‘Why, you know something?’ Dubois put it to me, a little suspicious.

  ‘Well, we have our chats, you know.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ he said, somewhat heatedly.

  ‘Randall’s right,’ said Eggy. ‘Wait it out. She’ll be back to you.’

  Elias entered the café. The look on Cassandra’s face was the resignation born of giving a cheating husband the benefit of the doubt. There was no end of pain. A man gives his all elsewhere; a woman gets her all elsewhere. So it seemed. The sky was beginning to betray us with rain, though the earth hereabouts needed it.

  ‘Well,’ said I to a stricken friend, ‘do you love her? Because if you don’t, it’s only games.’

  Eleanor and Dubois—the most proud and vain of lovers—deserved one another, but I, strange role for me to play, was fighting for community.

  ‘Games, you say,’ said Dubois, suddenly remembering that, in this, he was an old hand; but that, even though he was a man of business, he was honourable.

  ‘Who’s been playing games around here?’ he asked.

  ‘Now now,’ said Eggy, presenting a calming influence.

  The man’s probably a fly-by-nighter,’ I suggested.

  ‘Hoo hoo,’ said Eggy who had been that often enough.

  A Rite in May

  It was pouring outside, rain drumming on the new-leafed trees. Except for Moonface, on shift, and Serge the cook, I was alone in the Blue Danube, the radio broadcasting ugly music. All the siss-sissings, coo-cooings, phony intimacies such as were the mercies of the marketplace. Serge, a philosopher escaped from a mismanaged nation-state, approved of this music, however. He heard principles of self-determination and the testament of energies. My ears told me otherwise. Paint-by-numbers decadence. Meanwhile, Dubois was up against it, things having gone from bad to irretrievable. A rich man from Toronto, a certain Gambetti, was going to hire a catering hall in the east end among the industrial parks and strip malls, and he would invite friends and relatives to a feast, and he would, in public, propose marriage to Eleanor, as if marriage, in this instance, would transcend life’s claptrap. Traymoreans were included on the guest list, and Dubois, too, if he wished. But did Eleanor know what she was about? The lilac behind Mrs Petrova’s suite was in blossom, so I noted earlier as I sneezed. Life was like this. A Presidential pronouncement incurred one’s outrage; good friends were in disarray, the peace of Traymorean society disturbed, and then, one caught cold or developed allergies, to boot. I supposed I would have to trot out some old suit I had not worn in years and dance along with a rite in May, all in honour of the wrong gods. I stepped outside to smoke. Raindrops popped like so many polyps on the street.

  Agent Provocateur

  A favourite downtown eatery, smoked meat joint, had closed after years of doing business. I took Moonface elsewhere. To a restaurant that cooked a decent and peppery burger. We had been roaming the shops. Underground, at some venue or another, she had even sampled perfume. She held her wrist to my nose; I got a whiff of Agent Provocateur. Supposedly I had just been presented with saffron and coriander by way of scents. I shrugged. Moonface shrugged. State secrets were safe for now. In the restaurant, we sat at a long counter with high swivel chairs. We drank weak coffee, waiting for our burgers. I liked the place; it was often busy but relaxed, the waitresses generally middle-aged, no-nonsense types who switched from French to English and back again in a flash. A bus man’s holiday for Moonface, her hair loose about her shoulders now that she had let the hood slide off her head, rain outside and wind. The burgers arrived; she bit into hers, her mind distracted by considerations other than those of the taste of food. She said: ‘I’ve been thinking about Echo.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking that you think about her.’

  What sort of statement was this?

  ‘Not always,’ I said, telling a partial truth.

  ‘I think she’s just another excuse for you to play at being noble.’

  My only reservation about the place was that, here, I might run into Arsdell. Arsdell was one of academe’s finest. He had most of my contempt. I looked around. Thankfully, there was no Arsdell organizing some campaign against famine, pestilence and war. He ought to be treating with student illiteracy, which was rife.

  ‘Echo,’ I said, ‘is the life force personified.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You’re such a chameleon I often don’t know what you are.’

  ‘Some compliment.’

  ‘We are what we are.’

  ‘I don’t believe in love. Do you?’

  ‘Having our troubles with Champagne Sheridan are we, or with his mother or both?’

  ‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

  ‘Love,’ I said, beating back the rising pedagogue in me, ‘is real. It’s not a hoax. It’s to be found in and around the wreckages of human hearts. It has nothing to do with compatibility between lovers. Getting on with one another—it’s the luck of the draw. Maybe the Lamonts loved each other once, but that didn’t stop Lucille from offing Marcel. Dubois loves Eleanor, who loves him; they just might survive one another if Eleanor ever settles down.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘You said you don’t believe in love. Of course, you believe in love. Just that, well, beware. That is, don’t deny its existence or it’ll bite you on your arse. Love of man. Love of woman. Love of poetry. Love of life. These loves are real. Not even Dubois can darken what’s sacred with his materialism.’

  Moonface looked impressed. Our waitress (Monsieur, Madame, more coffee?) replenished our cups. She had seen it a million times: silver-haired lecher, young woman getting snowed.

  No, I was not noble. But I was effing spiritual.

  Moonface, I figured, had squandered her affections on too many rat-like boys. I was on my couch, listening to music. From within their sacred flame, piano, accordion and oud seethed like distant thunder. Earlier, I had spoken nonsense to Moonface about love, but it had to be said, even if only to arrest her eyes rolling up and to the side. Let her disagree if she wished, but let her quarrel with a reality, not a phantasm. Did she not see the ghost of Fast Eddy flitting about who was insane with love of her? Sally McCabe appeared now, saying: ‘Yes, Calhoun, you really are slipping. There’s only the romance of the body and the consecrating whiskey. This love you have of mind for mind—it darkens the night’s desert floor. Don’t you know? You were there.’

  She sounded almost wistful. Could I now be her only remaining friend?

  In Eleanor’s apartment there was a fight in progress. I had been mistaken; love is no sack bulging with the gifts of truth and lie. It was its own truth, its own lie. One accepted the burden or one did not. There was no miracle of logic that Dubois could pull off and return Eleanor to her senses. A door slammed. Another door was kicked open. Such was the petulance of Dubois.

  Echo would not have one child; she would have ten. She would not write one poem; she would write a thousand. She would not bake just one chocolate layer cake; she would feed a legion, and the lowliest grunt would lick the spoon. Moonface might not know what was at stake; Echo did not need to be told. Piano and oud matched her footfalls with a jig. So far as I knew the police had not been back around to the café. Perhaps they interviewed Elias at his home, perhaps at the station. Perhaps interviews had been discontinued. Cassandra’s smile could still ravish, but it ravished less frequently. She had the look of a woman who had dodged a bullet. Elias had the look of a man who had survived the front but might not next time. It was as if their destiny were holding, if that destiny was that they should run a café and raise daughters. Echo was, in any case, gone. What did I know of any Echo? She was a slip of a girl with whom I had barely

  spoken. I might be wildly wrong about her character; I doubted I was wrong.

  Once I thought Moonface was born for lov
e, thinking it in one of my more expansive states of mind. I stood corrected; Moonface had been born for the mutability of it. Echo was born to love life in no uncertain terms. For all that, I supposed Eggy had by now forgotten her. How swiftly things change, and with what indiscriminate sweep.

  Four in the morning, and I was awake with the rag ends of a dream in my thoughts. In it, there had been many people, elegantly attired, sitting at the long tables of a catering hall. Eggy was Master of Ceremonies. He invited revellers to the microphone to sing or joke or just talk. Dubois and Moonface worked the bar. Dubois, of course, was miserable. This was understandable. The conspicuous absentee? Eleanor, for whom the charade had been wrought. Gambetti’s degree of difficulty consisted of this, that he must convince jaded old matriarchs and bemused patriarchs and their children and their children’s children that Eleanor was worthy of his love. Booze and cake. Accordions. At this point I awoke. It was not a nightmare as such; it was a question asked in the form of a dream. Where was Eleanor? Where was Echo, for that matter? Why was everything ever so slightly out of synch? I went to the bathroom and piddled. The trouble with being awake at four in the morning was that all answers to all questions were bleak in their view of life.

  On the morning that followed, I went to the neighbourhood library. I would reacquaint myself with a few items: orgones, L-fields, morphogenesis, qi, pneuma, and the like. I was perhaps sinking to new lows. Echo’s energy could have been explained by rational means. Really? In any case, it was not her energy so much as its quality, the way it seemed to have left a sparkle on everything she touched. The library could have used her at the desk so as to cheer things up a little. I bolted. And in a park, one frequented by mothers and their preschoolers, I sat and smoked, the wind chilly. There are times when the life we live lacks rhyme and reason, science a side-show, poetry The Bearded Lady and her glassy eyes. Birds hopped. Squirrels plumed. The sky spun cloud. Toddlers, already socialized, had already been warned off me. I must have been there before I was there, a Delian problem, the doubling of a cube on a bench. A familiar voice called my name. It may have projected itself from a leaf or a twig, pebble, bit of debris, blade of grass.