The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Anyway,’ said Moonface, her voice musical, ‘here comes trouble.’

  Trouble was Eggy scuttling along with his cane, his head sunk between his shoulders. One could easily enough picture him as a scavenging bird among the battle dead.

  I went to the door to help Eggy with his entrance.

  ‘Wine,’ he thundered.

  ‘And you, sir,’ I addressed Eggy, now that he was ensconced at table, ‘what crimes have you been up to? For we are all guilty of something. Even of having been born.’

  ‘What’s with him?’ Eggy inquired of Moonface, and then to me: ‘And you, sir, are a damnable depressive. But you shall not dim my lights. I have just come from a rendezvous. Was at the Claremont with International Sales Manager. Drank Pernod. The lady had chardonnay. I’m the last man in this town to bother with Pernod. Keeping faith, you know.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Moonface.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eggy, ‘cool.’

  Sparrows copulated in a boulevard tree.

  Moonface’s chuckles were not a pretty sound.

  Tristisimmus Hominum

  It is difficult not to conclude that Tiberius Caesar hated the Julian clan into which he had unhappily married (at the cost of his early, happy marriage to Vipsania); into which he had been adopted. And whether, after Augustus Caesar’s death, Tiberius already installed as princeps, he had grudgingly accepted full powers or had only been coy, remains a matter of speculation. For all that, the record is clear he used his powers with reluctance; the senate ought to deliberate and act on its own. The poor senate was thereby confused, Tiberius thinking it a body fit for slaves. Perhaps his intima causa had been all along his lost love Vipsania. While he brooded in Capri where he had secluded himself, Sejanus, Praetorian Prefect, schemed and plotted and murdered until, at length, Tiberius realized he, too, was the object of conspiracy, Sejanus wishing to be Caesar himself. Finally, Tiberius took back power into his own hands and had Sejanus executed and the senate purged. Quite the little bloodbath. Besides the books of Tacitus on Tiberius and his rule, I had read other books, modern and ancient, that purported to explain a difficult man. None of this was neither here nor there, I sitting at table with Eggy and Moonface, a slow afternoon at the Blue Danube. Miss Meow, new regular, was miaowing at a separate table. The only persons missing from a tableau were Blind Musician and the Whistler; between them and the miaowing woman, they could make theatre and tour. Serge kept to himself in the galley. Moonface soundlessly aped Miss Meow and broke it off after I gave her a look. We need not have encouraged the woman. Who was wearing a long and heavy coat, the air outside humid. Somewhere down the street, a drill bit chewed pavement. And when Moonface went and upped the radio’s volume, and a female voice sulkily rendered some ballad of regret, even this did not deter the feline impersonator. But what sort of man was Tiberius, really? He had been one of Rome’s great generals. He was the son of the world’s most powerful woman. He was embittered. He may have been something of a versifier, and he was steeped in Greek rhetoric. He kept an astrologer on hand as a comic foil, so I surmised, to his own unhealthy morbidity. How would Tiberius Caesar have run the American empire? I put the question to Eggy whose chin was drifting toward his chest: ‘What? You mean that old goat?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Moonface, ‘he was cool.’

  ‘From what standpoint?’ countered Eggy, tacking back to wakefulness, suspicious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

  ‘Haven’t I taught you better?’ Eggy asked.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t have gotten us into Iraq. Of that, I’m certain.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know,’ Eggy said.

  Then all at once, the sun broke out in a ponderously clouded sky; Dubois showed up, as well as Gregory, who immediately cut the radio. He switched on the TV. Soccer match. It was all he had ever wanted in life: the glory of the soccer pitch. Dubois, even he, was now sporting a baseball cap. He removed it as he took a chair, revealing newly barbered hair going silver. To Eggy he said: ‘I think you need dusting off.’

  ‘Oh no, not that,’ Eggy mock-cried.

  With the advent of the sun, I figured it could get thundery later, Eggy chipping in with his own brand of thunder.

  ‘So,’ asked Dubois of us all, ‘what’s up?’

  ‘Plenty,’ said Eggy, and then explained: ‘I just had a date with International Sales Manager.’

  ‘Another date? I can’t believe she still bothers with you,’ Dubois laughed.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m too old? There’s always penile enhancement.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Moonface.

  ‘You’re not supposed to hear that,’ snapped Eggy, and he meant it.

  ‘Tiberius,’ cooed Moonface, in answer to Dubois’s question.

  ‘Doom,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ said Dubois, a guffaw caught in his throat.

  He had been drying out, the past few days. Eleanor was stuffing him with biscuits and Hungarian white bean soup. Moonface, even so, brought Dubois his wine.

  ‘Rot your socks,’ she said.

  Echo, in the old story, loved Narcissus to no avail. And when Zeus lay among the nymphs and took his pleasures, Hera snooping around, Echo warned the god of his wife’s approach. Hera got punitive. And now Echo was always the chatterer; it was impossible for her to shut up. And still she loved Narcissus, and still he did not respond, put off, perhaps, by her chatterbox mouth. And she in her grief pined away, reduced to nothing but the voice of a voice. Certainly, the Echo I briefly knew was irrepressible and talkative, she who had acted in good faith. Life is random except when it is not, dark energy the truant in the universe.

  Café with Parrot

  When Moonface played me or her world false, her voice got girlish. It was rebellion, I supposed, her balking at trodding the path to adult realities. That she pursue the niceties of empowerment; that she study and account for herself in this way; that she marry and bear children—it was none of it just then to her liking. That throat-high voice was an irritation to me, and yet, I could sympathize with its reasons. She was wearing her hair in a new style, wrapping it up at the back and keeping it in place with a clasp. This gave her a somewhat regal air, eternal adolescence notwithstanding. Either Anna the tall waitress or Cassandra had relieved her, and Moonface left Dubois and Eggy at the Blue Danube to carry on; she came and knocked on my door.

  ‘Up for a visit?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  There it was again, that most American of words—sure. She took up her usual position on my couch. I asked if she were hungry, and she was. I had nothing in the cupboard; so perhaps we could eat out. Well yes, she was amenable. She had been front and centre when she knocked on my door, the equal of any challenge; now she was withdrawn. Such a chameleon-like creature.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  She had been quiet, of late, about her Champagne Sheridans. I inquired after one of them—Rick the guitar-playing mechanic. But no, he was not in the picture. In fact, he was in Alberta, looking for work. Moonface figured he would be happier there, among the Jezebelites of a faded Jezebel of a town. She noticed my book on Tiberius.

  ‘Tiberius,’ she giggled.

  Some little bit of her died as she giggled.

  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘when are you going to get serious?’

  ‘Serious about what? What’s there to be serious for?’

  ‘Yourself,’ I said, ‘simply you, the fact of you.’

  ‘You mean like take responsibility for my life.’

  ‘You don’t have to put it that way.’

  ‘You’re always saying I should do what I love. I love classical studies. But it seems so beside the point.’

  ‘Beside the point of what?’

  ‘Of life.’

  She unclasped her hair now; it fell down around her shoulders. It should have caused my knees to go weak—this spectacle. It did not. There was a rather hard and pi
nched look to her mouth, signalling a shapeless, disorganized anger in her. It had been a while since her last fit. That she might undergo one of these fits at any time always frightened her.

  ‘I know you care,’ she said, ‘and Eggy cares. Fast Eddy used to. Well, I guess he’s dead. Even Rick cared when he wasn’t just lusting after me. As if I was some bombshell. Which I’m not. Do you think I am?’

  I disliked her then for putting such a cheap question to me. I made the appropriate noises. What I wished to say was: Girl, you’re a ditherer.

  ‘We don’t quite compute, you and I,’ I ventured to say, ‘in this realm. But I can’t make it any easier for you, and you don’t make it any easier for me.’

  ‘How so?’

  She was astonished to hear it. I could lower the boom. But how does one lower the boom on a child? I suggested we go to dinner.

  And we went to dinner, Moonface and I, traversing some remote escarpment of a frontier. Treacherous footing. Such blossoms as were left on the trees had begun to rot. A new hole-in-the-wall had opened up a few blocks away, and we decided on it, or rather I did, not content to drift. I directed Moonface inside. We were greeted by a man who wore a baseball cap; who was evidently cook, waiter, dishwasher, owner. He was in no hurry to attend to our needs. Even so, reading off a chalkboard menu, I ordered two specialties of the house (burgers), and, our conversation at a lull, I examined the photographs displayed on the wall next to us. They comprised a record of the historical city, our faded Jezebel of a town. Too Tall Poet territory.

  ‘So, about Echo,’ I put it to Moonface, ‘any news?’

  ‘No, none,’ she answered, her voice a distant, slightly musical moan.

  ‘I wonder what happened to her?’

  ‘Let’s not think about it.’

  ‘Strange,’ I said, ‘that someone can just be there and then they’re not.’

  How lame was this observation?

  ‘Yes, isn’t it.’

  I do not think she cared all that much for what had become of Echo, something on her mind. The hamburgers were indifferent, a garnish of radish slices ludicrous. Our proprietor was sleepy-eyed. He was like a man who had gotten fat and complacent and endlessly amiable, coaching a baseball team of children.

  ‘Echo,’ I said, ‘has been much on my mind.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  Moonface knew she was being ungenerous; I gathered from this that there really was something nagging at her. I prodded.

  ‘Come on, what gives?’

  ‘This is disgusting,’ she said, putting her uneaten portion of burger down. ‘I like sex. I know I like sex, but I’m not enjoying it.’

  A bird screeched somewhere nearby. Perhaps the proprietor kept a parrot in the back.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘who are you sleeping with? Could be he has something to do with it.’

  ‘None of your business.’

  She rolled her eyes up and to the side.

  ‘And who’s to say it’s a he?’ she said, mischievous.

  ‘Well,’ I drolled, ‘I hope you haven’t discovered bestiality.’

  The dear girl blushed.

  Still, I had not ever spent such a feckless spate of time with a feckless Moonface. A vicious crack of thunder underscored her perpetual ambivalence about seemingly everything. It imparted to her an air of erotic languor, a quality I sometimes found attractive. As if we could lie about forever, caressing to no particular end. The rain poured down. I had been itching to leave this hole-in-the-wall.

  ‘I should hand you over to Eggy for a good thrashing. General principles.’

  ‘I suppose you should.’

  ‘Doom,’ I said.

  ‘Tiberius,’ she giggled, and this time her giggling recovered for her the ground she had forfeited thus far to her more girlish self.

  ‘Are we in trouble,’ she asked, ‘really in trouble? I mean, you know, politically?’

  ‘Too much polarization. Too much hatred. Too much self. Too much weak-headed brotherhood. Too much of all the right things gone hideously wrong. Stop me when I begin to bore you—’

  ‘You’re not boring me.’

  ‘It’s gotten so vast in my head I can’t put it into a few words.’

  ‘I wish sometimes that you weren’t old, not that you’re at death’s door.’

  ‘How reassuring.’

  ‘Even if you were just ten years younger. And maybe if I were just a little older. I know I’m immature. I know when you were 25 you were more grown up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Oh God, yes, I’m still an adolescent. Woman-child.’

  ‘You’ve had lots of boyfriends?’

  ‘I don’t know, how many is lots?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I’m not telling.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  The rain had stopped, and we could walk back to the Traymore. My treat, I paid the proprietor who knew we were not likely to come back. It did not seem to trouble him much.

  I was not surprised to see them still at it, Dubois and Eggy in attendance at the Blue Danube; they were wine-lit. Earlier, Moonface had thanked me for dinner, such as it was, and she thought she might drop in on a girl friend. I said fine. I watched her go her way, her walk meditative and forlorn, her hands jammed in the pockets of her jacket. The neighbourhood resumed its more familiar aspect as I retraced my course. Ragtag storefronts. Well-being at a remove from the glitz and the glam of all the headquarters of the fashion world, at a far remove. After the thundershower, the air was more a concoction of exotic gases rather than an element one simply breathed. I supposed I was equal to the energy of my friends.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ crowed Eggy, his tone evil.

  ‘Himself,’ said Dubois.

  ‘Tonight’s the night,’ I said, taking a chair.

  ‘For what?’ countered a tiny sparrow of a man.

  ‘That the Illinois senator makes history. I mean, it’s really something when you think about it.’

  ‘And the wicked witch is dead,’ ventured Eggy, referring to the other contender, the senator from New York, hard-knuckled brawler, her backers frenzied, as grim as the bacchantes of Euripides. Then I saw hooded figures in a forum, daggers at the ready, marbled gods sucking in their breath.

  ‘Hardly,’ I said, ‘she’s playing a game on eleven dimensions. She won’t go quietly, if at all.’

  ‘Spooky times,’ said Dubois.

  Cassandra, on shift for the evening, brought me wine. Her smile ravished. Why? There was Elias in the galley, checking us all out. All of life, so it seemed, was fraught with treacheries beyond counting. A bonanza for ologists, especially those who loved to talk up the poets, beings who, what do you know, had not been such putzes as had always seemed the case.

  ‘There’s a bullet with his name on it somewhere,’ Dubois added.

  ‘Yes but,’ said Eggy, flailing away in his inebriated condition, ‘I knew a man who was in Palestine in ’46. He said some Nazis escaped to Israel.’

  ‘You wonder,’ mused Dubois, not at all taken aback by Eggy’s rabbit leap in the conversational drift.

  I looked around. Blind Musician. The Whistler. The old hag and Miss Meow. Gregory had built it and they had come, even if Gentleman Jim was absent. Elias had the air of a man enduring warm-up comedians. Too Tall Poet passed by on the street, his eyes unnaturally bright, his head, even so, in gloomy cloud. Why did he not come in? Was humankind nothing more than an ordeal for him?

  ‘So why am I the devil?’ I inquired of my friends.

  ‘You’re an evil man,’ thundered Eggy, ‘because you beat my frail body with your chapeau.’

  ‘Because you’ve gone radical,’ said Dubois.

  This was news to me.

  ‘I’m nothing of the sort,’ I said. ‘I’m a cynic. A weak and callow creature. I ingest wine. I watch forces swirl around.’

  ‘May the avenging hound of hell terrify your vile bones with hungry howl,’ said Eggy.

  Pe
rhaps I recognized a quote from Propertius. In any case, predator capitalism was low in the water but was otherwise buoyant, like a treasure-laden pirate sloop.

  Dubois, on general principles, said: ‘You two are incurable.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Eggy, ‘that’s the point.’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, rising, ‘I think I’ll go.’

  ‘What’s this? You only just got here,’ Dubois protested. ‘Well, go. See if I care.’

  ‘The rain in Spain. Always.’

  Contretemps

  There is a line in Shakespeare, one he put in the mouth of a mad, old king, something to this effect: that as long as one may say worse, the worst has not yet come. What my fellow bus passengers might have thought of the goings-on in America, if anything, I could not fathom. No doubt, they had plenty of their own preoccupations. Traymoreans, push come to shove, did not expect much from life by way of truth, beauty, justice. And even on a city bus, were I to suddenly shout, ‘Praise Jesus’, no one would pay me much mind; but were I to quietly announce I was looking for some unassuming path to a god who was more or less indifferent to the human lot, I could make quite a few people twitchy, if not downright antipathic. For a moment, I was tempted.

  The great evil, of course, was the quest for perfection, hard on its heels the mindless pursuit of perfection’s opposite. A duck would always be a duck; humankind, however? I wandered the streets. I even bumped into Hiram Wiedemayer at the Bay. He was in panic; his whole life had been a mistake but only in such a way as is true of all human lives. We promised to keep in touch. Then I felt a sudden twinge of affection—it was an overwhelming twinge, stark affection—for the woman I had married in my youth, she who, when leaving me, had left us both strangers. Words in a bookshop window asked: was there a pre-Clovis culture in the Americas? I wondered if Lindsey Price had ever completed her manuscript on goddesses. Had she a new lover? Male or female? I began walking back to the neighbourhood, the day muggier now. An hour later, and I was in the Blue Danube, knocking heads with Dubois. He was snippy, saying: ‘I don’t know what the man stands for. Elect him and we’re saved? Is that it?’