The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Well, look what the cat’s drug in.’

  Eleanor had spoken. And with some bother, Dubois got Eleanor to her feet, and with some bother, he removed her from my presence, she smiling all the while.

  And I returned to my jottings. Where had I been? Yes, marvellous America with all its trillions to spend. And yes, I thought it time to write Billy Bly a letter I would never post. Correspondence between us once flowed thick and fast; it was now down to the barest trickle, some once-every-six-month note of threats and insults.

  Dear Bly, it’s been a while. How much more glammy and glitzy have you gotten? The fault is ours and no one else’s, what’s gone amiss in love, literature, politics. I hope you are busy preparing your plea for your forgiveness.—RQC

  Soul-Seeking

  I went for an early walk in a heavy pollen season. Here were workers in their clusters queued at bus stops, so many stragglers in the lee of a mountain storm. Fanatical old women walked fanatical dogs. Birds took possession of territory. Tulips were so many castle turrets in their beds. The world was in moral drift, and I was not a moral man, far from it. I had no quarrel with the pursuit of pleasure, silence and lies the decadence. I entered an old diner, one of the last of its kind, and discovered that Wendy was there, serving customers. She looked tired, as defeated as ever, an automaton. Still, she recognized me as I took a seat at the counter, and she said: ‘I hear there was trouble at the Greek’s.’

  It was no use pretending I had no knowledge of it.

  ‘Yes, it would appear there was.’

  She grunted and turned away. Had she news of Echo? Could she see through to my soul? She brought me coffee with a distinct air of dismissal. She peered about the restaurant as if in search of the limits of a property. Echo was a force that rebuffed despair. The glory of the morning was worn away by the commuter rush at its most intense. The door that had been opened to admit the breeze was admitting traffic noise and profanities. Sparrows scrambled along the sidewalk, birds in a bird dimension of ceaseless hunger. I saw myself in the haggard Wendy eyes and was not encouraged, she bored and looking for a live wire, looking for her favourite brand of trouble. Lone workers, one each to a booth, read newspapers. When I got back to the Traymore and to my digs, Moonface crossed the hall from Eggy’s. She was in a fine mood.

  ‘So?’ she said, possessing the couch.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said brightly, rolling her eyes up and to the side, her focus on some fancy or another.

  ‘If you don’t know, I don’t know,’ I said, just a little peeved.

  But it seemed she was on the verge of applying to a school in Kingston, there to further complete her studies. I should have made supportive, enthusiastic, high-fiving noises. I blew her a kiss which had the effect of gainsaying her fine and sweet mood. She recovered, saying: ‘Tell me about Ovid, please.’

  Moonface the student smiled cattily, and so honoured the pedagogue rising in me.

  ‘I already have. More than once.’

  ‘Well, again.’

  Moonface the minx. But Eggy did not believe Moonface was the sort of woman who would ever truly enjoy sex. I disagreed, but with a caveat: that sex was less important to her than, perhaps, the dreams it gave her of a pampering glory. What would Ovid have made of the dear girl, if anything? I said: ‘Well then, despite his reputation as an agent of frivolity, he was an unassuming man who understood what was at stake and knew his limits. He certainly knew what Virgil was about, as did, for instance, Horace—’

  ‘Oh Randall,’ she cut me off.

  I was being avuncular, as always. She was looking for a father, I for my soul.

  ‘I trust the aforementioned poets dead these two thousand years more than I trust the current crop.’

  It was not what she wished to hear. No matter. Even so, she was polite enough to ask: ‘Why do you trust them more?’

  ‘Though they got more things wrong, they lied less.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘You will.’

  I accosted Eggy, tiny sparrow of a man, in the Blue Danube. I berated him with my desire that Moonface should become a true force for poetry one way or another.

  ‘To thine own eyes be true,’ said Eggy, tippling from his glass.

  ‘To thine own self be true,’ I corrected.

  But Eggy did not wish to hear of it. Even so, he put it to me: ‘Has she a mind? Has it been established that she has a mind? We know she has child-bearing hips. Hoo hoo.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, annoyed with the man’s flippant tone. ‘Best we back off teasing her so much. But I would hate to see her get with some lout and get with brats.’

  ‘Point taken.’

  ‘Evolutionary drift.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  There had been a sculpture recently retrieved from the bottom of the Rhône. It featured Julius Caesar’s mug. There was a sudden flash of white wing in the Blue Danube window, a gull’s. Anna was waitressing, the tall redhead as quiet as a ghost. But Eggy was only interested in the street’s new talent, as he called it, the procession of girls passing by singly, paired or in packs. West Virginia, his state of origin, had just voted overwhelmingly, in its primary, for the New York senator. The race card had been a decided factor. Dubois entered the café.

  ‘Greetings,’ he said, occupying a chair, setting his worn and honest attaché case on the floor beside him.

  ‘What’s new?’

  ‘You,’ said Eggy. ‘And what I want to know is, with what victuals did you ply Moonface when you took her out?’

  ‘Victuals? Ply?’ asked Dubois, a bit of laughter stuck in his throat.

  ‘Why yes. The nitty-gritty, please.’

  Dubois gave me a look. I searched his face for hints of how it was with Eleanor. Nothing. Now Anna approached the table, she so shy and unobtrusive that I did a double-take, finding her of a sudden materialized at the table, as it were, immanent. She took away the instructions of Dubois who said to me: ‘I have to say I’m getting worried. In fact, I’ve been worried for some time over this. That Illinois senator. You know, he might not survive the campaign. It might throw the country into some darkness—’

  ‘It’s already been thrown,’ I interjected.

  ‘The rain in Spain,’ Eggy said. He continued: ‘Anyway, Bob, you’re avoiding my question. With what did you ply Moonface? Oh come on, you must’ve plied her.’

  ‘I resent,’ answered Dubois, ‘the implication that I plied her.’

  Now the laughter in his throat was unstuck.

  ‘So you didn’t ply her.’

  ‘It was very civilized, what transpired between us, and it’s none of your business, I think I can say.’

  ‘Well, I guess you can say it.’

  Eggy tippled some more. Dubois slathered his soup, the soup Anna had just brought him, with a ton of pepper. Anna, a scrawny beanpole of a sylph, was not otherwise going to allow three Traymorean fuss-budgets to intimidate her.

  ‘Well,’ Eggy said to me, ‘I can’t seem to ply Moonface.’

  ‘Maybe because you would ply?’ I said, somewhat prissily.

  ‘Oh you’re always so superior,’ Eggy thundered.

  Dubois delicately managed his spoon, Francophone in an English business world. One had to hand it to him: he was often better spoken than his Anglo counterparts. The old hag came in for her glass of wine, and Anna sighed, the old hag gesticulating wildly at entities only she could see. Serge the cook, usually stone-faced, rolled his eyes. He had the look of a man so organized he could squeeze 36 hours of work out of every 24 hour day of earnest endeavour. When the invaders from the south came for us, I would hide behind him, throwing Eggy and Dubois to the dogs.

  Eggy asleep on the Blue Danube terrasse. Were time comprised of so many mischievous cherubs, I could easily enough see them draping Eggy’s ears with flowers as he slept, stuffing his pockets with sea shells or pebbles (anything that might startle his hand upon waking), and c
herubs titter. More signs of aging marked him. His skin seemed shinier at the temples. The shadow was darker where he shaved his chin. He had never been known to be in want of a shave. A splendid Roman he might have made, his life predicated on his desire to transcend his hayseed origins. A stint at Caesarship, too, might have fallen to him naturally enough, his character bearing some resemblance to that of Claudius, the lame one who thought himself somewhat of a catch, even so, and was twitted by his wives. Eggy was the loneliest man I had ever come across who yet had such a strong instinct for the social. And then my thoughts would turn to Echo. I would not have believed her possible had I not seen her with my own eyes. Her qualities were all the more precious the longer her whereabouts remained unknown. It was just one of those things, this fact of Echo. Her being was not going to stem a tide or change a thing; no one who encountered her would live more fully and to better purpose, but that she was a force for life. As was Eggy with all his sins.

  What with the thickening cloud, the humidity ratcheted up, the deepening darkness of the airy spaces between the maple boughs, and it would seem the sky was kissing all arboreal crowns, gods meeting gods. For yes, the language of science fails the man, the woman, the child, for that matter, lost in contemplation of it all; who do not write it off as so much carbon; who hear the mother calling for the child; who see the boys smoking cigarettes on the sly there in the lane, TVs lighting up the windows of brick dwellings, lilacs brooding in the dark. The cat’s nocturnal prowl. And yet, all it meant was that rain was coming.

  Eleanor, she of the frosted curls, a bawdy wench, cancelled the picnic. A leaf-glistening rain was falling. We had thought, she and I, to eat cheese and discreetly knock back some amaretto in the nearby park, the one shaped like the bow of a ship. We would pretend we were voyagers seated deck side, amiably exchanging intelligence, sparrows and pigeons our companions, and the odd river gull. The fate of the world was at stake. A lone, mad squirrel would put us in mind of some untidy element in the body politic, how that body politic was frustrated; how something had to be pulled from a hat, and soon. Instead, we sat at Eleanor’s kitchen table. I rolled us cigarettes. She said: ‘It’s not that he took her out that burns me; it’s that he took the trouble to buy a rose and present her with it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, licking the adhesive strip of a cigarette paper. ‘I should’ve thought to do it myself.’

  Eleanor gave me a look. I was vaguely jealous of Dubois’s gallantry.

  ‘Bob thinks she has other needs,’ I offered.

  ‘It’s a waste of a perfectly good flower. She hasn’t got the wit to be flattered, let alone romanced. And then they wind up at the Queen E for nightcaps. Posh drinks. 20 bucks a pop. And what could they find to talk about for an hour and a half, I ask you? Her menstrual cycle? Identity crisis?’

  ‘Israel-Palestine. The demise of the middle class.’

  ‘Just give me that cigarette, damn you, anyway, and watch your lip.’

  We were, Eleanor and I, referring to the fact that Dubois, a true citizen of this my faded Jezebel of a town, had squired Moonface to a fancy spot, then took her for drinks afterwards. Eleanor was just now getting her objections out of her system. I had decided that a certain f-word did apply, indeed, to a political situation south of the border. Eleanor had decided that the intentions of her Bob concerning Moonface could not have been entirely honourable. I would have disputed this, but what would have been the point, Eleanor seething? She was dying to know details of which I knew nothing. My own view was this: that Dubois, without prompting from any source (myself and Eggy, for instance), saw Moonface as a lost soul. Here she was at age 25 or 26, tentative, feckless. There was something dark in her that wanted airing out. Dubois was a pragmatic sort for all his vanity; one goes and gets a rose. One rings up for a reservation. One sits out on a fine evening among vines and candles and chows down on shellfish or lamb, and one works one’s way through a bottle of the appropriate vintage and makes appropriate noises at critical junctures of the conversation. Perhaps I would write a comedy of manners, one fraught with futile but expensive gestures, such as when a man, honourably or not, would take a woman on her wing and she feel like a somebody. Eleanor quite capable herself of noble and theatric flourishes, was no romantic. She had taken me to atmospheric restaurants where we might as well have been truckers in a hamburger joint. It was difficult but not impossible, I supposed, to see an Eleanor demure with her Gallic swain, he explaining the culinary facts of life to some liveried waiter clicking his heels; and then, having got the misunderstanding sorted out, attending to the fair lady’s train of thought. The night before, I was with Eggy and Dubois in the Blue Danube. I had hopes that Dubois would reveal all the doings of his evening with Moonface. No chance. We fell to quarreling as, outside, citizens promenaded with dogs in the twilight. A young woman was staggering drunk, and it looked that she might heave. We argued alien life forms and the origins of life on this planet. I beat Eggy about the shoulders with my baseball cap who, for that moment, at least, was stating that aliens had messed with the DNA of primates, hence, humans. Moonface on shift looked tired and drawn, her lips more thin and unattractive, mouth more small. Had it to do with Dubois or with some Champagne Sheridan she had on a string? Had she had another of her fits? I submitted we were more than likely all there was of conscious life in the universe; that I could not see how some corner of it could have had that much of a head start on us, all things being equal. Eggy submitted otherwise, as did Dubois the materialist. Then we had a set-to about the fire-bombing of Dresden: whether it had been a city of military value. Eggy believed the Russians had wanted it done, and the Brits and the Yanks, taking paths of least resistance, accommodated Stalin. Gentleman Jim did not know the particulars; I confessed my ignorance of the history of the Great War. Gentleman Jim sat there indifferent. I was getting snaky and would have to mind my tongue. Dubois was saying now that, in any case, it is the winner who writes the history. I begged to differ, citing Tacitus and his peace made a desert. He had been on the winning side, true, but winning had cost the Romans a great deal, perhaps too much, and forever. Dubois, on a roll, submitted that all our knowledge is a hazy affair. How can we say we know what was what, circa 4,000 B.C.? I answered that we had a general idea; we were beginning then to get organized. Food surpluses. Priesthoods. Politics. Read the books. Had I just suggested that Dubois and Eggy did not read? It was pointed out to me that books did not guarantee truth, and of course, they were right, these soul mates of mine who would commit to nothing but wenches and wine. Since when had I become a professor? And so they sat there, those two, like a couple of Shakespearian rustics. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel served up a martini, so Dubois claimed, that was the real thing, not the kool-aid one got elsewhere.

  ‘Eleanor,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. We could get post-Freudian. We could just accept the fact that Dubois and Moonface had an evening of it, no harm done.’

  In No Mood for Consoling Noises

  As if Eleanor were not enough for one morning, I went and knocked on Moonface’s door. She answered, she in her pajamas, still. She stood there tugging at her tresses. The look in her eyes rolling up and to the side said I should go away. Thin lips pouted. The cynic in me noted she was deep in the throes of martyrdom. I shrugged and turned on my heel. And back in my grotto, one rife with unquiet spirits—the Sally McCabes, the Jack Swains and the like—I listened a while to piano, accordion and oud. I took up again an old history of Tiberius, a Caesar in whom Moonface claimed to have interest. But when I would press her as to why she found him interesting, she could not answer; I figured her guilty of making false claims. Later in the afternoon and well into the evening, I sat with Traymoreans at the Blue Danube. At first, it was only Dubois and I attempting to inaugurate the terrasse season at an outside table. He handed me a newspaper article to read, to do with the too-high price of commodities, buyer beware. Dubois confessed he was getting more worried vis-à-vis the situation—the coming ge
neral election, the possibility of an air attack on Iran. As he expressed his concerns, a stunner passed by. Leather jacket. High-heeled sandals. Plush shades. Clearly, she was a woman who enjoyed the fact of her body and did not care who knew it. She gave us what I thought was more than a casual glance, but I might have been mistaken. The way she walked suggested we ought to know what we were missing. She had under her arm a large portfolio of some sort such as an architect might pack from office to office. She was one more creature to chalk up for the annals of the boulevard in a time of late empire, trees by way of their foliage chorusing the sun and the birds and the sappy sexuality of men who did not, even so, stand a chance with any stunner. Dubois finished his peroration on dirty tricks. If the Republican Party was electoral toast, it would seem that extraordinary measures were required should certain operators behind the scenes wish to retain their hold on power. The President had made, even by his own standards, an unusually offensive speech that day. He likened a certain senator from Illinois to a Nazi appeaser. He forgot, perhaps, that his own grandfather had business ties with German bankers of Nazi sympathies; that this man had also participated in an attempted coup against FDR. Worse, the President delivered this speech in the Knesset, and all that remained to the imagination was to determine to what extent Likudists had engineered the applause. We moved inside, Dubois and I, and were joined, in fairly short order, by Eggy and Gentleman Jim, each arriving from different directions. Eggy was coming directly from his weekly visit to a bar in the adjoining district. Gentleman Jim was escaping his surroundings at the institution where he had his bed. Moonface was now on shift, her mood improved. Gregory was in the galley. Cassandra wiped dust from ferns, seemingly content with her lot. Wine flowed. Our dinners arrived. Moonface was perhaps pleased to see her men enjoying themselves. She was attending to us with panache. The ghost of Fast Eddy picked at his slab of fish. He was now muttering unflattering asides in respect to an Illinois senator. What, was there prejudice after death? Night fell. Now there was a Métis girl at our table whose parents had been born in France, their parents hailing from Winnipeg. It seemed an exotic history. She was studying to be a pharmacist and was a friend to Moonface, whom she described as a girl who did not think things through. Eggy was besotted. When the Métis girl confessed to having a boyfriend, Eggy was dashed. He said that, oh well, the rain in Spain, hoo hoo. He said he supposed she would find him too old and used up. And I said that, yes, the fact that he was 901 years of age, if a day, did not mitigate that well in his favour. ‘Bollocks to you,’ said Eggy to me. The girl blinked. Was she among savages, she who had been to Paris three times but found Parisians closed of mind and supercilious? I began beating Eggy about his shoulders with my baseball cap now that he was drunk enough to suggest that Muslims were taking over his home state of West Virginia, causing trouble. It looked to be a bad wine we were drinking, a crescent moon in the sky, girls in their packs giggling at the corner, preparing to cross the street against the traffic. Dubois was merry and immune to all calamities, Eggy chuffed. Gentleman Jim, like me, had voices in his head. Fast Eddy glowed with his stolen march against the probabilities. Moonface minxed and flashed her red nails like a dancer, chameleon that she was. I was uneasy. Dubois once reminded me that the word chameleon more properly applied to a lizard that had the use of protective colouration, that it had nothing to do with a girl of changeable personality. Of course he was right, he a Francophone who maintained proprietary relations with the English language. Even so, I was uneasy. What was happening in the café I likened to the desperate shenanigans of a Berlin nightspot circa the Thirties, even if we were but pikers when it came to decadence. My uneasiness was but a sign of my boorishness; that I had not fully aligned myself with my tablemates and was holding out on them. Moonface, bringing water, rolling her eyes up and to the side, released me, saying: ‘Tiberius.’