The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘A little out of her pocketbook range, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I shouldn’t hold her to it. So why don’t you take me to the Ritz-Carlton?’

  ‘Because,’ explained Dubois, ‘we’re having a good enough time here.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Gentleman Jim rising, his voice a little severe, ‘I wish you a good evening. Remember, three o’clock sharp.’

  He was buttonholing Eggy with this injunction.

  ‘I’ll be there or I’ll be square,’ vowed Eggy.

  And then, the man having departed, Eggy whined: ‘What am I getting myself into? Why do I want to go to that death house of his? I guess just to see what it is I wish to avoid. Well, I’ll kill myself before it comes to that for me.’

  ‘We’ll help you,’ laughed Dubois.

  But Eggy had been serious. Eggy looked weepy.

  We covered a great range of topics. We even touched upon Agincourt, the battle of, this battle that involved the longbow, so Eggy had pointed out. Even Moonface allowed herself a moment of bawdiness, doing a little dance with her hips as she stood in place, just seeing how things were going at the table. We were her men, Eggy, Dubois and I, and perhaps Moonface did see herself as a warrior princess, a queen of some rogue confederation of tribes. She expected to begin her pursuit of a Masters in the fall. She leaned down to kiss Eggy’s sour old cheek with her thin but royal lips. I am sure the old man at 901 years of longevity caught a glimpse of the royal bosom. Happy Birthday, Eggy. Then Gregory the cook came over to perform his how’s it going, guys, with you guys? Elias had been the only one moping in the Blue Danube. Cassandra kept herself to the galley throughout the evening, preparing some food item for the next day’s menu. I was not able, as a consequence, to glean any intelligence from her eyes. I took my leave. I had not played much of a part in the festivities though I consumed my share of the wine and contributed the odd observation. For instance, I conjectured that the New York senator was finished in her run for the nomination, and now was the time for serious political hanky-panky such as I was convinced was in the offing. Eggy shushed me. Later, in my digs, I heard Dubois hauling Eggy up the Traymore stairs. Eggy was in a good mood, quoting Marlowe again. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

  ‘That’s enough for tonight,’ said Dubois, obviously tired.

  ‘Oh rot your socks,’ thundered a tiny man.

  What’s Bred in the Bone

  Two notes were slipped under my door either earlier that morning or in the course of the night, Dubois and Eggy the culprits. Dubois, describing himself as a Senior Business Consultant, wrote: Chassez le naturel et il revient au galop. He then provided the English equivalent: What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. The meaning of Eggy’s note was obscure, its origins even more obscure, as Eggy, for the life of himself, could not remember the proverb’s author. Eggy, with his bird-like scrawl had written: Better is the poet who is acquainted with erudites as he shall be able to avoid putting his finger in his eye. The New York Times? No, the quote smacked of the hoary old age of an ancient culture. Hebrew? Arab? Persian? I woke with these words, not mine, in my thoughts: Those vast, venerable walls were not meant to keep out cows, but men-at-arms … One might have assumed that Dubois and Eggy would have passed out on the night previous, returning from the Blue Danube to their digs in the Traymore; instead, they went and got literary. At some point in recent days, the Secretary of Defense (the Kansan who replaced the infamous Rumsfeld) quoted Churchill at the end of a speech he had given, saying: ‘The price of greatness is responsibility.’

  So then, the Americans, according to an American, would remain a beacon.

  And well, it would seem that this man, when he first came to Washington, summer of 1966, at the height of the American build-up in Vietnam, could look forward to the following intractable items, while he went to work for the monumental ego of Lyndon Baines Johnson, to wit,

  —violent domestic turmoil; two major assassinations at home; a major war in the Middle East; the seizure of an America Navy ship by North Korea; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the resignation of a president in disgrace;

  —and then, by the end of the 1970s, these items, to wit,

  —a collapse in Vietnam, and the death of millions across Southeast Asia; high inflation, high interest rates; two energy crises; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; revolution in Iran, the capture of American hostages there; tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers in Angola and Ethiopia.

  Had I been paying attention throughout those years? Why, it had been a tempest.

  And then, the Eighties,

  —and the fall of the Berlin Wall was in the works; victory in the Cold War; reunification of Germany in Nato; the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the liberation of millions of Iron Curtainites and other entities around the world.

  And in what ways were American cruelties different from those of the Canadian and British modes of persuasion? Eggy, Dubois and I might argue it, as if comparing cheeses. Eggy seemed to have fallen head over heels in love with a black nurse, much to Dubois’s bemusement. We could none of us recall when Algeria got independence, but that DeGaulle, in Eggy’s words, was a piece of work. A spectre named Fast Eddy threatened to defect to another neighbourhood, he in and out of insulin shock. Born and raised as an American, I was expected to succeed. It went without saying, the steady drip drip drip of failure everything that I was.

  And I was, once more in a book of Gombrich, looking at Piombo’s The Death of Adonis for hints of Echo, when Moonface came over to tell me that, she too, got a note from Dubois. She said: ‘Bob’s giving me the option of cancelling the date. I never actually thought it would come to anything.’

  ‘Oh you should go,’ I said breezily. ‘Bob’s a noble host. You’ll eat well.’

  ‘Randall.’

  ‘You’ll have to dress up.’

  ‘I was thinking my opera dress and red sneakers.’

  ‘I suppose in some circles that would pass muster.’

  ‘You don’t think he has ideas—’

  ‘I honestly wouldn’t know,’ I answered, lying.

  Away went Moonface like the brave young woman she was, even if, at times, she feared her own shadow. I could see it now, as I took note in a book of Gombrich of Cellini’s gold saltcellar: Ceres about to recline, legs slightly parted, her left hand on the left breast of her otherwise modest bosom. And then, Neptune or Poseidon opposite her, his trident poised. Yes, that would be just about enough foolishness as anyone, god or mortal, could handle for a day.

  ‘Make it up with Bob,’ I said.

  ‘Mind your own beeswax. Roll me a cig.’

  Eleanor, of course, knew she was wrong. Her damnable pride was obstructing the flow of her affections for Dubois. And here was yet another one of those mysteries how, for all the man’s vanity, and it was considerable, it had never hardened into pride. So it seemed. He was simply waiting her out. And when she was ready, ready, that is, to be herself again, beauty marks, warts and all, they would resume relations. One could argue forever who owed whom what and, in the arguing, forget to live.

  ‘You think I did wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, no, I don’t know.’

  I hated to equivocate, but there it was. I continued: ‘You had an itch. You scratched it. It scratched back. But now you see where your loyalties lie. It’s possible one can cheat in sexual matters and not betray a trust. It’s possible, but only just. On this score most of us delude ourselves. What’s trust? What are its characteristics? Informing ourselves of its physical properties, as it were, we create a chimera—’

  ‘Calhoun, stuff it.’

  I was being avuncular. I handed her a cigarette.

  We were in the privacy of her kitchen, the finest room, perhaps, of all the Traymore rooms. The table hosted coffee mugs, ashtray, sugar, cream. A single tulip in a vase. She had pinched it somewhere. She lit her
cigarette. She regarded me with narrowed eyes. I had never been clear about the colour of her eyes. Mottled green, blue, grey. I was a bit tired, not inclined just then to precise observation.

  ‘Well, if you must know, I miss his company. And now, what to do about Hillary?’

  She referred to a certain New York senator who, in her ambitions, was likely to be denied triumphal re-entry into the White House; who had been First Lady once upon a hallowed time of apparent boom and plenty.

  ‘Again, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is she to be lauded and extolled or buried up to her neck in hot coals in one of Dante’s hells for the politically reprehensible? What’s more important? The integrity of her lust or the health of the party she represents?’

  No answer. Evidently, Eleanor R had her own questions and her own answers. Or she had Dubois on her mind or rising food prices. Earlier, at the hall window, I watched Mrs Petrova in her yard. Sunday finery that she wore did not stop her from puttering about. Here was neither woman as slave nor woman as Caesar, but woman as comptroller of her universe. After a long winter, others in the neighbourhood were slowly returning to their yards to rake and sift and seed and prepare for the barbecue season. All the little sparrows were feathered coquettes. Someone was playing a mouth organ somewhere. State a truth and you invite its opposite. Which is to say that the stuff of life was like the flashing, silvery fish of the sea; too mutable, too restless a business to pin down. And yet somewhere in all this evanescence, were the heavy imponderables that never change.

  Marvellous America

  There was a time not long ago when America might, with some derision, ask of Europe, ‘What have you done, say, since the 1600s?’ The point is, of course, that the Old World was a museum. But apart from all her space and natural wonders, what was so marvellous in America? Baseball. Dance halls. Late night radio waves of a certain era. ’47 Chevy’s. Low-slung Buicks. Even so, America’s unceasing triumphalism has long since dulled the memory of what I once loved. Romans used to twit Greeks for their pursuit of the life of the mind; that it was a vainglory; that it was a mark of unsuitability for managing the affairs of the world. And yet, look at Rome as she is now, a city so obnoxious in ways peculiar to herself, so haunted, and in places so breathtakingly beautiful, that one almost begins to believe that time, a great deal of time, does, indeed, heal all presumptions. What American city in future will claim such distinction?

  Yes, Eggy was depressed. It was the first I had ever seen of it. He had his mood swings like the rest of us, but this was something else. A shadow on the inverted triangle of his face said that death was not to be borne, no, not with a pair of death-is-just-over-the-horizon-for-me eyes. For all that, he was a tough old bird; he would get over it and hoo hoo us to distraction. He had given Gentleman Jim a reason to live: Gentleman Jim now had drinking companions. Eggy had honoured the man with a visit, and ceremonial portions of vermouth were, no doubt, meted out. I saw in Gentleman Jim’s wrecked, booze-soddened self a meticulous soul, a natural inclination to speak softly and dress neatly, to maintain a decent standard in all matters of comportment. His table, when he sat alone, was a study in order. One imagined one would not find so much as a smudge on the bottle of wine from which he replenished his glass, no iota of food crumb either on the table or adhered to his shirt or littering the floor at his feet. Some might view his drinking as self-destructive; if so, his attire was spotless, used serviettes pristine. It seemed he often went into a trance even as he would sit within arm’s length of a Traymorean conclave, and he was in another dimension, one unavailable to any other human agency. Only Moonface seemed able to slip in and out of his reveries without disturbing their structural integrity. He possessed the unmistakable aura of a seventh-generation Canadian; I had come across a few of this type. Difficult wretches. Gareth Howard, my oldest friend now in his grave, belonged to this exclusive club by right of birth, and had, with his wandering ways, rebelled against its strictures, one of which was to talk the talk of excellence but not tarnish a legacy of mediocrity. The ghost of Fast Eddy came and went like rays of sunshine that appear and then vanish according to the whims of wind and cloud.

  Meanwhile, Eleanor nursed a funk of her own, Dubois away in Ottawa. He was probably having the time of his life; Eleanor was sure of it. Dubois was always having the time of his life, it being the sort of man he was. Eleanor was always going to get her curls freshly frosted. It would seem the recent Dubois-Moonface outing had also rankled the good woman. Details had not been forthcoming, lost as they were to Dubois’s vast sense of discretion. No Traymorean even had a hint as to what had been on the menu of some old town eatery. A happier Eleanor would not have given it a second thought that Dubois would walk Moonface through a 5-star meal, or that Moonface could have been a threat to Eleanor; Moonface but a girl afraid of her own shadow, not to mention men. When I pointed out to Eleanor the number of Champagne Sheridans she had on a string, Eleanor only sputtered with some dismissal of the fact; that they were mere boys, and the boffing, such as it was, could not be mistaken for major league boffing. One does not casually gainsay a woman as seasoned as Eleanor. It was conceivable, however, that Dubois was looking for payback; if so, what a blow to Eleanor’s pride should he suddenly develop a passion for babes of an amateur hour. One could almost admire the subtle workings of the Dubois mentality, and yet I, for one, believed that relations between he and Moonface were entirely innocent. Moonface was simply collecting another mentor.

  Dubois back among us, Eggy immensely relieved (he had missed his boon companion), we sat around the Blue Danube. Traymorean chaffers had harried Cassandra, and she perhaps wondered why she had ever gone in for restaurant life. As used as she was to men drinking wine, the sight of lily-white Anglos and one Francophone so deep in commaderie and so flush with bon mots must have unnerved her. Of immediate concern was the fact of Eggy’s recollection of a black bath-nurse, her immensity as opposed to his Lilliputian private parts. What had been the politics of this? Eggy had replied: ‘It was I do my own, thank you very much.’

  Gentleman Jim dryly observed that it was standard procedure.

  Eggy was fairly advanced in his wine intake. Effing this, effing that. Gentleman Jim had the look of John the Apostle at a convivial Last Supper, quiet but attentive, applauding the better exchanges of wit. The Saviour figure, I supposed, was supplied by Dubois, who had been after all educated by Jesuits, though he was strictly a materialist, entirely secular in his view of the mysteries. He was now telling tall tales of perilous flying, how once he flew in a DC-3, all engines leaking oil, all available landing strips fogged in; how, the pilot’s hand forced, the pilot had glided the plane down on a wing and a prayer there in Newfoundland. Then there was the white-knuckle service between the Victoria and Vancouver harbours, the taking off and landing in serious chop, the near collisions with the Lion’s Gate Bridge and with men in boats foolish enough to be out fishing after dark. And so forth and so on. Eggy described flying into Innsbruck, mountain peaks leaving no margin for error. Dubois shrugged. Fast Eddy reminded me that Moonface’s birthday was imminent. She would like a book for a gift. He had accepted the fact that she was not likely to take up accounting as a way of life. This left Eggy’s Plan B: the study of history. Tipsy myself, I could see plying her with The Annals or the Twelve Caesars. We would see just how serious the young woman was. I was astonished to learn she was approaching 25 years of age. Or was it 26 now? She seemed so much younger, so unformed. Eggy was chuffed now, charging the younger generations for having short-changed his, as if his generation had been all duffers and retards and hopeless in the sack. Dubois continued playful, saying Ver-sigh in reference to the infamous treaty that failed, in a sense, to close the window on one war, leaving the door open for another. I was tempted to go and fetch Eleanor, to have her resume her rightful place among us; to remind us that our intellectual capacities were a matter of some doubt; that they were overstated. If the world knew the truth about us, it would resume its channel-surfing with
out the slightest trace of a bad conscience. One other person was back among us. Blind Musician. He had been to Seoul. There Canadians had performed Delius and Hovannis. As if any Traymorean cared. Whatever happened to Joe Green, Eggy wanted to know, having recourse to a stale jest on the name of Giuseppe Verdi. Blind Musician had only just learned of the blind eye the State Department had cast in respect to the corruption and graft that was the government in Baghdad.

  ‘I mean,’ he brayed with his foghorn of a tempest, ‘what if that money was supplying the extremists and costing the coalition lives?’

  ‘Coalition?’ I asked of an invasive baritone.

  The knock was Eleanor’s, she dressed for trouble: the bosom-accentuating blouse, tight denims, pompadours. And she was going to get her way, even should Dubois pop his head out his door and I give him a look, one that said would he please come get his woman, he had punished her long enough. The good woman shoved me with one hand; the other hand clutched amaretto. She kicked shut the door behind us. And now she was grabbing at my fly, and now, thankfully, it had jammed. I led her to the couch, the sight of which elicited her giggles.

  ‘How many women have you biffed on this thing?’ so she put it to me, incredulous.

  ‘Clearly, one too few,’ I was about to retort, and thought better of it.

  Seated together now on the offending item of furniture, she made half-hearted attempts to fondle my person; she would rather shut her eyes and drift. Now she was nestled, as it were, in the crook of my arm. I had retrieved the amaretto and placed it out of harm’s way. Now, with unbelievable timing, here was Dubois. Ah, Dubois to the rescue. He sized the situation up, making rapid calculations like the man of business he had once been. He ignored me utterly. He shook her gently. She squeezed open an imp’s eye.