The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Calhoun,’ spoke Sally McCabe. ‘I see you’re upset. Echo disappears. Eleanor acts up. Death and evil are triumphant in the republic, every day their pageantry. Did we not teach you well? Because you’re one of us: leering grins, limbs attached. The wind blows forever in our hearts. You see, we’re blameless.’

  I pushed back: ‘Loveliest of women, you sullied your character. You, even you bought into the notion that, even if we’re great no longer, we remain adorable. I present you with Fallujah. You counter with Las Vegas and honeymooners and true love and the teen angel choruses of tunes. You can’t admit to your own disbelief. You seek me out in desperation. Because you are an unquiet spirit and because I’m the last person still standing who bothers to reflect upon what you were. Even so, I can’t help you; you can’t help me. I would dearly love to have it back, that moment we once had, that kiss we exchanged at the victory dance after the football game. For you I may have been just a shy, awkward boy, hero of the hour. For me the kiss was already redolent with the cinder and ash of prophecy, though of course at the time, I couldn’t have known it. One more of these conversations and I may go mad. The prophecy has long since staled. It has all the freshness of the daisies Oedipus in his blind condition once picked, long before there were Caesars, long before there were Joint Chiefs of Staff, long before there was an operator like Freud.’

  I ran out of bluster and words. Sally McCabe spoiled her face with hurt.

  I did not know if this was the last I would see of her, but if she came for me again, armed to the teeth, I might try a more conciliatory posture.

  Noble Romance

  I knocked on Eleanor’s door and was greeted by a fuming woman. She said: ‘You.’

  I followed her into her kitchen. She was dressed in a T-shirt and denims. Red pompadours. Smoke curled from a cigarette in an ashtray as if in mimetic sympathy for the frosted curls of her hair. She was near snarling, she saying: ‘Did Bob send you? Isn’t he man enough to argue his own case? I suppose you want to talk me out it. I’m going to marry that guy Gambetti, and that’s all there is to it.’

  I was regretting my little visit.

  ‘I do what I want,’ she continued. ‘You do what you want. I sleep with whoever I want. And if you don’t want to sleep with me, well, that’s all on you. And you don’t know what you’re missing.’

  I had a pretty good idea. I studied the coffee mug she was handling, that smudge of lipstick on the rim, the spoon at its side with its smear of cream, a bit of stain on the table cloth. Eleanor was not fussy about order and tidiness, but even she, she would not place a wet spoon on pristine linen. Other than this, I was no more enlightened than when I had walked in and taken my usual chair.

  ‘So when’s the big day?’ I asked.

  ‘Big day for what?’

  ‘Your marriage.’

  ‘Hell’s bells, Calhoun, that’s still a ways off. Next Saturday, we do the catering hall. I don’t suppose you’ll come.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Roll me one of your thingies,’ she said, her voice softening.

  But how did Gambetti treat her in bed? How much money did he truly have? These were not questions a gentleman asks a lady, but then since when had Eleanor and I ever rested on ceremony? For a certainty, Dubois wished to know. Echo was gone and I was disgusted with much that had nothing to do with Eleanor slip-sliding her way to grave error, one that might prove more fatal to her than the Unitary Executive. Still, she was not the sort of woman one could gainsay, that is, once she had up a head of steam and knew her own mind by her own lights, however delusionary the knowing was. Cynic that I was, callous creature, I idly contemplated taking her to bed. Now would be the time to do it. What she really wanted was sympathy for her muddlement. She wished for Dubois to play a hand. Outside, city workers tore up the sidewalk; a massive drill bit pounded the pavement, the Traymore Rooms shaking as if earthquake-struck. Spanish gold had been found off the coast of Namibia. Iraqi gold, melted down, was now used to make the spurs on American boots. Eleanor pursed her lips around the end of one of my hand-rolled cigarettes and inhaled. She eyed me.

  ‘What’s on your mind, Calhoun?’

  What, she did not know?

  ‘Well, this would be a hell of a time for it,’ she observed. ‘You could knock me over with a feather,’ she added.

  Obviously, she was of a sudden amused. Then, she took matters in her own hands: ‘Tempted, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I was only thinking how little blessed our lives are with beauty and noble romance.’

  ‘Come off it.’

  She might spring for marriage, but as for beauty and all the rest, fuhgeddaboudit. I hoped she had had a good time in Toronto.

  Gregory and Elias were sinking too much into their little project Le Grec. Large potted ferns had appeared. Purple glass teardrops, suspended from the ceiling, demarcated the tiny bar area, and they could not have been cheap. All the staff was there: Gregory, Elias, Cassandra, Moonface and Serge. A new girl, tall and very slim, was hanging about, waiting to be trained. She seemed much too shy and slow of wit in spite of her loud, metallic red hair. (Melody, another redhead, had moved on to greener pastures, downtown.) Eggy, at the sight of it, would be most pleased. He had yet to show. Dubois had yet to show, the hockey game soon to be on TV.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Gregory asked, as I took a seat, he King Arthur in his Camelot.

  I could not read Cassandra’s mood for what it might indicate of her husband’s guilt.

  ‘Fine,’ I said in answer, and with one word was noncommittal.

  I suppose Gregory was counting on it being a busy night, the Habs down two games to one and needing to win, lest the entirety of this faded Jezebel of a town riot. Elias studied something that looked suspiciously like a blueprint. Moonface came over to speak. She had but a single word to offer me: ‘Expansion.’

  Ah, the dreamers.

  I could see how they might knock out a wall and extend the seating area into the adjoining rental space. But would not they have to enlarge the galley already cramped with the new pizza oven so as to prepare more food for a larger clientele? But why should I consume my noggin with these considerations? Moonface was fetching: short black skirt, black tights. I looked for Virgil in her eyes. The President had admitted as much that his administration tortured. I had had yet another chance with Eleanor and had yet again, passed on it. Her eyes told me I was diffident, spineless, and oh so transparent; but that, good golly, Miss Molly, she was flattered I would bed her just to keep her from straying off the reservation. She would marry a fellow named Gambetti, so it seemed, and he would spirit her away on a magic carpet of marriage and wealth. No more feckless Traymorean society. Yes, look out, all you somebodies. What, would she take up writing short stories and organizing charity drives? Dubois would drink himself to death, no doubt, and Eggy die just a little lonelier. Who would call the paramedics for him in the advent of one of his strokes? Moonface continued to stand at my table, at a loss for anything to say. Her eyes rolled up and to the side. She tugged at her ponytail. Well, what? What was her thought that evidently I was meant to divine? That love was the answer, and failing that, the Roman peace? Here was Eggy hoving into view, shuffling with purpose, brandishing his cane. Here was Dubois behind him, carrying his honest and worn attaché case. Sometimes I wondered if his vaunted business career had been a myth. And here they were at the table, my best soul mates of the hour, Eggy hoo hooing at Moonface for a libation, Dubois saying forget that, bring a bottle. Quebecker that he was, he was looking forward to the game. Eleanor was some other agenda.

  ‘Praises be, new blood,’ said Eggy, catching sight of the tall and slim and redheaded girl.

  From the inner pocket of his grungy linen jacket he pulled out a small notebook and checked his social calendar.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I seem to have next Friday free.’

  ‘She won’t know what hit her,’ said Dubois.

  S
o then it was a not good time to pick a fight with those two over politics, the one too sanguine, the other a man of business who still trusted the system. To Dubois I said: ‘It’s no joke, the politicization of the Justice Department and its strong-arm tactics.’

  Eggy I cautioned, saying: ‘Don’t tell me there’s an article of interest in the Gazette because it’s not possible that it would run an article of interest.’

  Eggy opened his mouth to speak, Dubois preparing to laugh: ‘The rain in Spain, you know. What’s a man’s reach for?’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ said Dubois, ‘it’s a pretty strange game of hockey the Habs have been playing. Pas de deux along the boards.’

  ‘Look, Calhoun,’ Dubois continued, winking at Eggy, a tiny sparrow of a man, ‘when the Yanks come up here to bring us democracy, I’ll be the first to insurge. You don’t believe me?’

  ‘Insurge, insurge,’ Eggy hoo hooed. ‘My cane shall sprout lethal blossoms of love. Moonface, oh Moonface, why are you not here with your child-bearing hips and pouring my wine? It’s a disgrace. Bloody effing hell.’

  And the young woman in question, whispering something into the ears of Very Tall Slim Girl, stuck out an editorial tongue. Cassandra stood behind the bar like a woman in possession of grave secrets. For Gregory, things were going according to plan. Elias had about him an air of eleventh hour resolve. Serge was a protagonist in some paramilitary raid, a parachutist firing from the hip as he floated out of the sky. And so it was. So it was that I was told how to behave, as it was, after all, Hockey Night in Canada. The instruction rankled.

  Evolutionary Drift

  Back in the Sixties, poets, mystics, philosophers, ologists, cons, pushers, pimps and politicos called for an opening of the mind, and, in the end, wound up as ungenerous and dogmatic as the old closed shops against which they agitated. Even I had said, But of course. Liberty. Free and untrammelled. And you might think that, as a consequence, intuitional capabilities enhanced, I could spell out what made Eleanor Eleanor, once I accounted for sex and security and all the rest of it. Even so, it was sheer perversity—to attempt to go Dubois one better in his powers of analysis. Well, marriage with Gambetti was Eleanor’s evolutionary drift. Random molecules having brief relations in random sequence. Or it was that Eleanor was used to getting her way, knowing of no other mode of behaviour. Or because Dubois did not resist her so much as withstand, and withstanding, infuriated the good woman. No one may ever know what booted it for her. The vast majority of us will take our secrets to the grave, even those that remain sealed to our own comprehension. Still, an Event of Proposal, a prenuptial bash, the hiring of a catering hall was cancelled; Eleanor got cold feet. A hangdog Italian came around a couple of times to plead his case. In this, Eleanor received her full measure of satisfaction from a crestfallen ego that had been cut to the quick. Then she sent the man packing. Marriage? What marriage? Who said anything about marriage? Dubois allowed himself a guffaw or two in the Blue Danube, Eggy going on about the old days of the Shah, and then Dickens and Zola. The look in Dubois’s eyes said three things; one, that he could care less about Iran’s difficulties; two,

  Zola Schmola; and three, as far as he and Eleanor were concerned, mind you, it had been a close call. And pressed to account for the fact that the Habs were eliminated from the playoffs, he shrugged.

  ‘They need someone on the wing,’ he said. ‘Bigger, faster, stronger.’

  ‘Yes but,’ so Eggy would point out, ‘that Dreyfuss Affair was a nasty piece of business.’

  ‘Well?’ said Dubois, looking at me. ‘You will, of course, have an observation.’

  ‘I have none,’ I said. ‘Three bags full of none.’

  Cassandra applied Windex and cloth to a window, her long purple hair swaying from side to side as she wiped the glass. It was her blind faith, this housekeeping. If, in the film version of The Golden Bowl, the billionaire Adam Verver believed he could break his wife’s infatuation with Amerigo and gain her affections for himself and set her on the straight and narrow, and invest her with true purpose, it was because he had all that money. Cassandra had no such recourse. Blind faith was the poor man’s leverage, and it might win you a battle but never the war.

  ‘What,’ I asked, ‘possessed you? And why did you break it off?’

  Eleanor laughed, the good woman did. Her body rippled. She ran her hand through her frosted curls. Then, sipping amaretto, she licked her lips and answered: ‘What possessed me? God only knows what possessed me. Why did I break it off? The man had ugly toes. Can’t stand a man with ugly toes. Do you have ugly toes? But the other thing of it was, I’d always be seeing in my mind’s eye the sight of Bob with my successor. I’m territorial, I guess.’

  About my toes, I could not say. No woman had ever critiqued my toes. Perhaps there had not been the time, so much else about me that might incur their displeasure. My grotty mind. My leonine sloth.

  And everything I had ever spoken to Moonface of love, spoken in some bright flush of infatuation and avuncular concern, I now retracted, love being but an electro-chemical sleight of hand born of a primal soup back when the sun was hotter and the earth less stable. And then we toed and heeled our way out of grassy Africa even unto Vladivostok. And whatever words we managed to construct so as to keep afloat a fantasy of the thing barely flattered us. The gods wondered why they bothered; they should have left well enough alone with squirrels and sparrows and stick-waving chimps.

  Or I could choose to see Eleanor as a clown, were Boffo ever a woman, and know that no real harm was done; just that an Italian experienced some diminution of amour propre. I had resolved at age 35, as I became more deeply aware of the true height and depth and breadth of impudence humankind has been pleased to describe as literature, not to let bitterness ever get the best of me in view of my failure. My progress in this business had been spotty, given my weak and callow nature, but even so, it struck me just then, as I watched Eleanor handle a cigarette and regard me with narrowed eyes, that should I wish to indulge I had excuses with which to do so. How much more bitter I might have been, a loner, an expatriate of sorts, a man whom no political ethos represented, as bad faith was everything; a man who was not honoured by a wife; a man who had not done his duty by way of children, that is, had not given the gene pool the benefit of his doubt; who was no patriot; who was a so-so poet. Who had been average in bed. (The law of averages, not honesty, spoke this news.) Eleanor, of course, would have none of it just now, she the chuckles-inducing catastrophe of the moment who had had a brief pratfall with an uomo gentile and was on the mend. She switched to politics and said: ‘It seems the senator from Illinois will prevail.’

  ‘Yes, I think he has the nomination sewn up. It remains to be seen whether he’ll be allowed to live.’

  ‘You don’t think—’

  ‘I do think. But who can say?’

  ‘The wheels are falling off everything. They nearly fell off me.’

  This, at a relatively early hour, was to be her one concession to the demands of the life of the mind. I bit my tongue lest it cut loose with some news presenter sharpening his enunciation skills: the BBC accent of doom. We sat there quiet, there in her commodious kitchen. I had erotic notions. I saw us, she and I, as the last woman and last man left standing in the world. I could see her wrinkling her nose at the sight of my ugly toes. I wondered if she were pleased or displeased at how things had panned out. Or did she even know?

  There had always been Blind Musician and the like who would appear at the Blue Danube aka Le Grec for a day or two and then disappear for weeks. It was the same with Joe Smithers the too-tall poet. Gentleman Jim was a more regular presence, but he would sit so quietly and so unobtrusively tipple his bottle’s worth of wine that Traymoreans hardly noticed him. There was the old woman who directed traffic in the streets, be it vehicular or pedestrian, and she made it clear to the citizens at large that all were at fault, but that men were most at fault, and they were good for nothing. One evening, new blood poked
a head in the Blue Danube door. The man wore glasses and looked scholarly.

  ‘Is this place licensed?’ he asked.

  No one answered, and he addressed his own query, saying: ‘Good, because I have a thirst.’

  He parked himself at our table with brazen flair. Eggy blinked. Dubois prepared to guffaw. I examined the creature. Well, as it turned out, he was a photographer. Antiquities were his specialty. For this purpose he travelled a lot in North Africa. His name was Hiram Wiedemayer.

  ‘Nice place, this,’ he said, blinking foolishly at a photograph of the Acropolis.

  ‘Ah, the Acropolis,’ he said.

  Eggy waved his arms. This brought Moonface over. Eggy said: ‘I think we require another bottle.’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ said the newcomer with enthusiasm.

  ‘Promising,’ said Dubois.

  ‘But I have to eat, too,’ said this Hiram character. ‘What have you got to eat?’

  Hiram settled on pizza. And then we shook hands all around.

  And then we argued everything, how we were still fighting the first Great War; how Germany had been the centre of gravity for western civilization; how, as that was no longer true, there was no more western civilization, just an arrangement between nation-states of expedience, their old imperialist bag of tricks still in play but more discreetly so; that the Arabs needed Israel more than Israel needed Arabs; that America was in freefall. Dubois thought Hiram awfully glib in his historical analysis. Eggy had been listening with care. Then he said: ‘I haven’t spoken on this matter much, but after I mustered out way back in the Fifties, Korea, you know, I toured North Africa; I visited the clubs, the whorehouses, the KitKat places—’