The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Dubois spoke of the black senator from Illinois. Who had given a speech to some Jews that pleased them while antagonizing Arabs. I had no answer for Dubois, none that would withstand any test of logic, and I said: ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

  Dubois, disdaining me, folded his arms across his chest. It was a gesture that made of his mind an unassailable fortress. Moonface and Serge spoke to one another in French, Dubois’s eyes glittering at the sound of his mother tongue. The government of the hour seemed to be going against form. The Prime Minister had the look of a man with a glass jaw. Perhaps Eleanor knew what mattered, she less interested in the poetry of sex than in the wherewithal.

  I left Dubois for the terrasse. He could join me, if he wished, so I let him know. Bevies of summer girls were going by; it seemed I could reach out and touch their joy, if joy it was; that it was very simply no longer winter. A tree getting lusher by the hour shook me. Metaphysics? The cold hand of mortality? All the clichés about lust and death being in one another’s pockets were just then true, made all the more true by those girls and their predilection for black nail polish. As I sat there, Moonface checked to see if anything was amiss with me. I shrugged her off with a smile. In a nearby flower bed, such fat peonies. Could they be the product of thin Jezebel air? I may as well have been in Rome or Lisbon. Dubois came out to me, shaking his head. He had been slowly working through his thoughts over a tall glass of beer. For a man who trusted the system, collective enthusiasm for anything remotely resembling a political saviour would always arouse his suspicions. How could I blame him, given the history of the past hundred years? He said, taking up his position at the table with something like injured dignity: ‘I can’t see what your reasoning is, Randall.’

  ‘What reasoning,’ I answered, about to squelch a soliloquy on the rise in me, ‘unless it’s that one that says man in history puts his faith in illusions, but every once in a while an illusion trumps all else, even a prayer. I don’t how much better I can explain myself.’

  ‘You can’t. And you haven’t explained yourself. What’s the next president going to do about the price of oil? Israel-Palestine? The war on terror? These are the things that matter, not eternity. Not Jesus Christ.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Well, I say so.’

  Dubois laughed. But he was redder in his cheeks than he had been a while, not since he was chuffed with Eleanor for fooling around with Gambetti.

  ‘But then,’ he now said, ‘if we want trouble, here comes real trouble.’

  Eggy picking his way toward us with his cane …

  Eggy said: ‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.’

  Girls? The free market system?

  ‘It would seem he got it,’ Eggy said. ‘But that woman is going to hound his every step. She’s in it for the long haul. She’s got plans that go far beyond his.’

  Eggy was referring to a bitterly contested primary campaign between a woman and a black man.

  Moonface appeared, happy to please.

  ‘Well, wine, you know,’ said Eggy. ‘I didn’t come here to sightsee. But wait a minute, what am I saying? I miss Black Dog Girl. Where has she got to?’

  It had been explained many times to this tiny sparrow of man that Black Dog Girl had left the neighbourhood; the dog presumably went with her. Dubois said: ‘Not this again.’

  ‘Bloody effing hell. She had splendid hips.’

  Moonface rolled her eyes up and to the side. She went back into the café like a woman with the fate of the world in her hands, shoulders set against turbulence.

  ‘Well,’ said Eggy, giving me a look, ‘what doom awaits us?’

  ‘He’s saying that salvation is at hand,’ Dubois laughed.

  ‘I said nothing of the sort,’ I replied somewhat grimly, ‘and there’s every indication that things will get worse, yet.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Dubois, still laughing.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with Calhoun,’ Eggy hoo hooed, ‘partly because I’ve lived a great deal longer than you two and partly because I see no reason to trust our species and partly because all I give a damn about is girls. Cheesecake, wine and girls.’

  ‘Oh, it’s that now—cheesecake,’ Dubois said.

  ‘You bet, and with big strawberries. Think I’ll have some now.’

  Eggy called out for Moonface. He called out like a man whom death might suddenly silence and he have no more calling out to do, ever again.

  Breviarium Imperii

  It was awfully moist and awfully warm, the evening that was gathering to itself the end of times and the hours of revelry. Dubois, Eggy and I occupied a table outside the Blue Danube. Moonface, who sat with us for a while after her shift, was now off to rendezvous with one of her Champagne Sheridans, a ‘rumply teddy bear’. Or, as Eggy would have it, have a look at her father and have at look at Current Beau, and one would know a lot about Moonface. Animated from the wine, and on account of his penchant for introducing historical trivia into our talk, Eggy now spoke a single word. He said: ‘Breviarium.’

  Dubois guffawed. If nothing else, Eggy always entertained him with sudden rabbit twists in conversation and logic.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Eggy said. ‘It’s just a word I came across, you know, around about five hundred years ago when I was taking a Latin class to pass the time, girls few and far between.’

  ‘Well, what’s brevyareeeyum?’ Dubois wished to know.

  ‘I can’t remember. It just popped into my head.’

  The pedagogue in me shot to the surface like a fish snapping at a bug.

  ‘Allow me,’ I said, ‘it has to do with Augustus Caesar. Don’t give me that look. Just happen to have read about it, recently. It refers to a record of the imperial accounts he gave his successor Tiberius shortly before he died. Seems a large part of the treasury was his private fortune. He had compelling reason to want good governance. History is irony, given the state of the treasury to the south of here—’

  ‘Which is, in theory, public money,’ interrupted Dubois.

  Eggy looked delighted; he had sparked discourse.

  But do not suppose for an instant I had any idea what I was on about. I missed just then the company of Gareth Howard. He would have addressed the concerns of Dubois in respect to the senator from Illinois, and he would have, in doing so, exposed Dubois as fundamentally un-serious. Jack Swain, on the other hand, would have had us dancing for joy right there, his old nemesis Reagan, once a president, at last discredited. Dubois would have balked. He would have pleaded a larger picture, a broader historical context, to which Swain would have icily remarked that his picture was so much larger, comprising, as it did, eternity. But now and then Dubois could surprise you, he troubled by the implications of this and that originating from on high and eroding further the premises of a constitutional republic. In the meantime I was in love with the fact of the Moonface nose, the bronze curls of Echo, even Eleanor’s swaggering libido, and Tibullus’s love muse who was named Delia. Erotical irruptions. They were like so many birds flitting about in a tree.

  ‘Well,’ asked Eggy, ‘what does it all mean?’

  ‘What does what mean?’ Dubois laughed.

  ‘I’m not asking you, I’m asking him—Herr Professor.’

  ‘It means,’ I replied calmly, ‘that Tiberius, on his succession, had enemies. And he was on thin ice with the senate. So that the fact he was privy to Augustus Caesar’s accounts made him, I guess you could say, official.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eggy, ‘like getting briefed by the CIA.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  I was restive, bored with my company. I caught the gaze of Gentleman Jim who had been sitting inside all this time. His eyes were focused on something remote. Also inside were Blind Musician and Miss Meow, each sniffing at the presence of the other, Blind Musician defiantly Anglo, Miss Meow a Francophone. These sorts of quarrels had never meant anything to me. We sat there, Dubois, Eggy and I, the wine in each of us softening hard e
dges. Or perhaps it was the humid air that softened. It always fascinated me how faces could change character in an instant, like the silvery flashings of fish; and here was Eggy angelic; and here was Dubois vain and handsome and almost courtly in manner, soul mates of the moment. Here was Cassandra very busty—her eyes large and soft, her smile impish—to clear our table of some plates.

  ‘We’re behaving, Madame, don’t you see?’ said Eggy.

  ‘I know,’ she answered.

  Elias glowered.

  Hiram Wiedemayer surprised us, showing up with his camera. He would not be refused. He took pictures of Eggy in his digs, Eggy royally homuncular in his arm chair. He took a picture of Moonface standing at Eggy’s side, she looking for all the world like some Indian princess undaunted by a future of white colonizers. If only we were not parodies of what we seemed. Dubois, for all his vanity, was uncomfortable with the camera, as I was. So Hiram got our portraits later, in the Blue Danube. He explained he could not get Traymoreans out of his mind since that evening when he had by chance met us in the café. I suspected him then of Zionist sympathies but he was otherwise frankly liberal, dedicated to the arts, and the sanctity, as he put it, of the individual. It is to say he saw in us peculiar qualities; we were somehow noble for being what we were, a something he could not quite define. Nor could we. Let us just say that in Eggy he saw majesty, a creature occupying happily the niche for which he was born: Mr Common Man, but with book learning. I nearly giggled. It was a mystery, those two or so hours he spent with Eleanor in her digs. Dubois, who rarely suffered from bouts of jealousy, was frantic, the hairline cracks in his cheeks writhing like snakes. Later, Traymoreans in session at the Blue Danube, Eleanor slyly whispered in my ear that she had always wanted to know what it felt like to be a centrefold. Dubois shot me a dark and evil look. In any case, Hiram Wiedemayer stood us all drinks; he felt he had accomplished something tremendous. It was his business, he said, to record dying cultures and antiquities. We were not sure we liked being depicted as antiquated.

  ‘Ah,’ said Eggy, ‘you should’ve seen Echo. Now there was a girl to photograph. Hoo hoo.’

  ‘Who is this girl?’ asked Hiram.

  Eggy explained, over and above my shushing him, Elias and Cassandra within hearing distance.

  ‘Oh, shush yourself,’ snipped Eggy back, a tiny sparrow of a man. ‘Effing hell, she just ran off with some young stud. Happens all the time.’

  ‘Why,’ asked Hiram, ‘what else do you think happened to her?’

  Even Eleanor saw good reason to nip this in the bud.

  ‘She has that classical profile,’ said Eggy, persisting.

  ‘She used to work here,’ I added, ‘only she took off, and we don’t know where she got to or why.’

  Moonface bit her tongue.

  ‘She was an honourary Traymorean,’ I said.

  ‘Was she honoured?’ asked Hiram, cheekiness to his tone.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we were honoured by her presence.’

  There was in Hiram’s mild eyes a suspicion we were holding something back.

  ‘Later,’ I told him, ‘I’ll explain, later.’

  (But I did not, in fact, explain anything later, certainly not the who and the why and the how and the what of Echo. I flattered myself by thinking that Hiram had no need to know.)

  He looked around. At Blind Musician and Miss Meow. At the hag. The Whistler was whistling and stomping all the while. Too Tall Poet had looked in the window, but then decided to pass on us. Gentleman Jim was just beginning to work his way through a bottle, he a dying god who understood to the last possible decimal point the cost of realms that die away. Hiram shook his head, somewhat awed.

  ‘In my neighbourhood,’ he explained, ‘you just don’t see this, this many characters in a single place.’

  There it was then; we were characters. Truth to tell, Traymoreans had not been this excited about anything in quite a long time. We should have charged a fee.

  Some men only derive meaning for their lives from history-altering times; I was getting mine from each humdrum hour that passed. From a certain lilt in Moonface’s voice, for instance. From something glimpsed by chance on a TV screen. The page of a book randomly selected. The sight of sparrowlets shivering with hunger. The way Eleanor might hold her cigarette and sip from her favourite drink. Tiberius had lived in the inner circles for so long that, when his moment arrived, and he was sole princeps now, the whole of the known world at his feet, he might have regretted it had come to this. Let us not assume that every man welcomes power, even absolute power. Moreover, he had sacrificed the love of his life to his predecessor’s grand designs of continuity of rule. As was usual for me, I lay on my couch, reviewing events. I switched on the TV, the BBC voice of doom just signing off. Here was the weather, the pornography of storm and ultraviolet and pollen count. Here were talk shows, each host jesting at the expense of politicians, especially Current President. Here was an inane movie, espionage the theme. Homburg. Umbrella. A starlet was a wit. Moonface and I had slipped through one another’s fingers yet again. Fast Eddy flashed in and out of the living room, swift photon of light.

  Echo Glimpsed

  Moonface approached me where I sat outside the Blue Danube. Golden brown eyes shone, but with clouds. She waved off Cassandra who was inside. To me she said: ‘I’m not staying.’

  The pedagogue in me was rising. The voice with which it would speak was the voice of a hooded figure, one familiar with secrets and the exercises of power. I put it to Moonface: ‘Before you go then, let me ask you, do you suppose New York Senator who is possibly grossly misunderstood, do you think she stayed in the race for the sake of women? Or was it simply power and leverage, she the party’s most likely choice for the next election, should her rival lose this one? That it’s conceivable she may even contribute in some subtle way to his losing it. Do you suppose Livia, Augustus Caesar’s silent partner, wielded more clout than the senator will ever wield, even if she were to succeed in her ambitions? I should imagine that Livia, out of her devotion to power, understood its limitations, but then, I can be only supposing.’

  ‘Randall, stop it.’

  Moonface had just spoken rather sharply.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ she explained, ‘only it’s kind of personal. Embarrassing even.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  Moonface looked long and hard at a point distant in space, then grimly said: ‘Sheridan wants to tie me up.’

  ‘Tie you up?’

  ‘Sex, you know.’

  She rolled her eyes up and to the side. Ah then, the body was still the last frontier for some. Moonface was a hooded figure in a park of ilexes.

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  ‘Should I let him?’

  There was just the barest hint of a musical moan at mention of ‘him’.

  ‘Why ask me?’

  ‘I asked Eggy. He just laughed.’

  ‘Well, he would.’

  ‘I don’t think I like the idea.’

  ‘You aren’t bound, of course, to like the idea.’

  ‘Pun? But no, I don’t like the prospect.’

  ‘So there’s your answer.’

  ‘’But I like him. Oh I do.’

  ‘How much do you like him?’

  ‘I guess not enough.’

  ‘So it seems. Tell you what. Just giggle.’

  Moonface giggled.

  ‘Not now. Not with me. With him. And if he fails to see how absurd the situation strikes you, you can draw the necessary conclusions. He’ll draw his own, if he’s not mentally enfeebled.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What don’t you know?’

  ‘Anyway, I think she’s more power hungry than she is an idealist.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘New York Senator. It’s so obvious.’

  ‘You might be right.’

  ‘I have to run.’

  ‘Run then. Run like the wind.’

  ‘Avuncular, Randall, avuncu
lar.’

  Moonface headed down the street, shoulders stooped. She was Delia, Lesbia, Cynthia, if a little on the gauche side. She was that ancient in the early years of the 21st century.

  §

  Book VI—A Note on Progress

  Anti-Follies VI

  —At some point in the night, Dubois slid a note under my door. I quote: ‘Some great philosopher (it may be Yogi Berra for all I know) said that bullshit baffles brains.’ Dubois went on to intimate that if there has not been much by way of progress since progress emerged as a concept (late 1800s?), it is only that we have yet to give it much chance. We must keep striving. L’homme révolté. No situation is to be accepted as definitive.

  —Eggy is having too much fun to die, going for year number 82; hopefully, he will see a few bastards hang. It is a better bet than that he will gaze on the bosom of Moonface.

  —Eggy rattles around in his memories. I am startled to hear Paris, 1919, Ho Chi Minh. ‘Well, you know,’ says Eggy, ‘it was the beginning of the end. Bloody Europeans—they should’ve taken the man seriously. Moonface will drop her drawers for anybody, fancying herself desirable. Well, she is. The Haitian is doing voodoo on me. Where’s my bloody sausages?’ It is Serge who brings them from the galley, and, as he sets the plate on the table, he grips the old man’s shoulders with affection. ‘Dubois,’ says Eggy, ‘has been a good friend. Moonface has been a good friend. Even you, Randall, have been a good friend. The rain in Spain. Always.’