The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Anti-Follies VII

  —Eggy, near puny in his linen jacket, sips a tall glass of beer. He is in a mood, and the mood is bittersweet. It is to say he is now cantankerous, now an amorous old sod. It is to say he wants us out of Afghanistan and into Haiti where the judicious use of money might civilize the island. It is to say he is in love with a Haitian nurse who takes night classes. Eggy would attend class at her side and carry her books. Now Dubois figures he has heard everything. Well, I reckon Eggy is sincere; in the day’s last hour of light, he is a romantic fool. Certainly, he knows it. His 81 years (his 901 of them, should one be measuring poetic time) have brought him to this pass, and the realization is just about more than his poor brain can handle. But there is triumph in his new-found suffering; he is in love. ‘Her voodoo works,’ he cries to the neighbourhood, not giving a tinker’s cuss as to who knows it. ‘Hell, I don’t care,’ he says, ‘if she has this other stud on a string. Bloody effing codswallop, but I see more of her than he does. Ought to count for something. Don’t you think?’ Dubois bites his tongue. For even he, as vain as he is and impossibly handsome, knows enough not to rain on this parade. It is not that Eggy’s tough old eyes are zealous, but that they are absolutely consumed with a dedicated love. We had been talking the economy. The sky had been briefly ominous. Dubois was certain none of us, and that would be Eggy and I, knew a pissant’s worth of what was what in respect to the subject. The price of a barrel of oil was the price of a barrel of oil. I supposed this expression of market value was the product of an autonomous system, one impervious to the whims of human nature, let alone government regulations. Only Dubois knew the true innards, the cogs, gears, bells and whistles. Dubois had the knowledge, being a man of the business world, wherein the only integrity that mattered to other realms at large was to be found. A poet’s integrity was but a puff of air. Furthermore, Dubois did not appreciate my cynicism concerning such matters as the Federal Reserve and the price of tea in China and Walmart supplicants. But had anyone seen Moonface’s new come-hither earrings? ‘Yes,’ Eggy asked, ‘do you think she’s aiming to get laid? Hoo hoo.’ Well, was it as incongruous as all that, the fact of her young womanhood, the fact of those earrings, the fact of the Champagne Sheridans at her beck and call? And Gregory has gone overboard. Sea blue shuttered windows now adorn Le Grec’s (aka the Blue Danube) walls. Elias had made them. Expiation? Are those windows what occasioned his quarrels with the wife? God only knows how he must have fussed over them. Beetle-browed, barrel-chested Fast Eddy, a spectre, materializes. He takes the name of Champagne Sheridan and abbreviates it to Sherry. ‘Sherry,’ he says, ‘hasn’t the wit to realize what a hot little number he has.’ Fast Eddy vanishes. The old hag goes by, exhorting the godless operators of motor vehicles to go to church. Even Eggy has kind words for her: ‘There’s a lost bride in that woman.’ Dubois thinks not. She is purely a man-hater. As if by stealth, beautiful young women have begun occupying other tables on the terrasse. Has the Blue Danube become trendy, at last? I could swear that the eyes of Dubois are beginning to ache. It is on account of the poetry of the flashing ankle, the almost innocent laughter he hears in the soft air of the night. Yes, in this my faded Jezebel of a town. But who among us is innocent? Traymoreans? No way. It is clear Dubois would abandon the subject of politics for other possibilities, good golly, Miss Molly, at the drop of a hat. He might have devoted his ardor not to business but to endless rounds of cotillions. Indeed, Dubois in a pinch is all Gone with the Wind. A Mayan breeze brings Natchez riverboats. ‘You know,’ Eggy says, ‘and well, I don’t want to shake you fellows up, but the bomb can drop anytime now and I am ready to depart.’ There manifests in Dubois’s throat a throttled guffaw. Eggy’s sincerity has upstaged materialist convictions for the present hour. The inverted pyramid that is Eggy’s face is waggish, is cunning, is in full thrall to love of life. It is the beating of a sparrow’s heart. Dubois sits there, arms folded across his chest. It indicates he is here and not here, front and centre but distant. The man is entitled to his regrets. It perhaps suggests the man is not wholly a smug operator. Eggy raises hand or bird claw or fleshly apparatus that boasts an opposable thumb, and he cries, ‘Mam’selle.’ Two tables of beautiful girls turn their exquisite heads. Tall Anna the waitress appears. ‘Plus beer,’ says Eggy. Dubois’s mouth gapes open, his mother tongue mutilated. ‘And, don’t go yet, don’t be in such a goldurn hurry, why, bring Randall, this estimable gentleman to my right, bring him mas wine and put it on my chit.’ I am honoured. Tall Anna, smiling, holds her head high like some Nefertiti.

  §

  Part Three

  CONSECRATED SOULS

  Book I—What’s a Good Woman?

  Letter to Sally McCabe

  Dear Sally, we exchanged mash notes and verses in Mrs Major’s journalism class. Lipstick validated your slips of paper. It drove the old woman wild. She had no idea it was as bad with you as that (or perhaps she knew well enough): that you were sex, whiskey, the Chrysler car, the desert and the mutability of the moon. Good, as moral value, meant little to you. There was something of the ancients in you: what was good was excellence. Achilles would have gotten on just fine with Sitting Bull. We have all the ethics and pieties and moral concerns in the world; we think nothing of blowing away entire cities at the push of a button. Yours was an astonishing beauty that you neither denied nor advertised, you VIP’s daughter. You would have gone to some tony college; might have landed a job in publishing; might have married an up and comer; perhaps had progeny and even divorced. Perhaps your notion of paradise has long since disappeared from any scene you may still recognize. I’ve been less than stellar, though unaccountably a stalwart. I suppose I must apologize to you, seeing as I cannot picture you ever as anything other than ageless, not eternal youth so much as just eternal. Perhaps you long ago grew weary of the burden. Your consorts and attendants? Those boys were my mortal enemies whom I fought to a draw. The one party could not quite vanquish the other. That endlessly grim siege. I thought I had what was moral on my side. Perhaps you were right: there is nothing to be done. Kiss and boff and drink, and otherwise mark time. There is, in a Roman catacomb, an early image of Adam and Eve and the tree and the serpent. It is what it is, but a depiction in which there is no hint of a moralizing agenda. A man and a woman may as well be waiting for a bus as standing around, knowing, for the first time, the weight of the world. Could be you martyred yourself to your old wildness, one carried too far into maturity. Some divinities were known to have done so, rather than live a lie.—RQC

  A Bit of Academe

  “And Artemis they introduce … and say that she is a huntress, and carries a bow with quiver; and that she roams about over the mountains alone with dogs, to hunt the deer and the wild boar. How then shall a woman like this be a god, who is a huntress and roams about with dogs?”

  —from the Apology of Aristides, allegedly presented to Hadrian Caesar in Athens, 126 A.D.

  One imagines Hadrian was somewhat bored with the Christian’s play of mind, the literalness, the lack of poetry, especially as Hadrian had just been initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries, and probably had had the wits scared out of him unless, being emperor, he got a milder version of the rites.—RQC

  §

  Book II—In Continuation

  Bridgehead

  Marjerie Prentiss moved into the Traymore unheralded, her consorts performing the grunt work of moving up boxes and furniture from the van parked on the sidewalk below. Soon after, she began to assert herself, making friendly with Eleanor, who was welcoming. Prentiss must have calculated right from the outset that if she could charm the good woman, the rest of us would fall to her designs. Eleanor was both her greatest obstacle and our weakest link. Eleanor loved sitting around, talking sex in the particular and men in the abstract, and whatever the newcomer threw into the mix of politics, so much the better. I disliked Marjerie Prentiss at first sight. I was not unattracted. She aroused erotic burblings in me as seemed independent of my nerve endi
ngs. It was the oddest thing, how this woman radiated not so much sexuality as a flair for theatre (I had a weakness for theatrical women); and yet it was cold, this theatre, its sexuality but a sideshow to the main event. Her hair lacked lustre, her eyes watery and seemingly dead. To be fair, she could now and then muster a look of surprise that the world was, indeed, capable of defying her analysis of its parts, her freckled cheeks enhancing what the consequent astonishment lent to her face so that she seemed like she could be fun. How else explain her power then, and one felt oneself unable to take one’s eyes off her? Eleanor described her body as gorgeous. I supposed it was. Eggy sang her praises.

  ‘New blood,’ he crowed after he had had his first look at her, he, Dubois and I on the once-named Blue Danube now Le Grec terrasse, taking stock of things.

  And Dubois smiled that smile of his that indicated Prentiss was nothing he had not seen before. Perhaps she reminded him of his college days. Even so, while he allowed that, what’s her name, oh, Ms Prentiss as Eggy would have it, was certainly attractive, but that there was something strange about her: he could not put his finger on it.

  ‘Effing hell,’ said Eggy in response.

  Eggy was ever gallant when it came to new blood. Dubois then raised his arms in an attempt to ward off evil in the person of Eggy, the homunculus about to quote Marlowe, something about a pair of eyes launching the Seventh Fleet.

  Yes, and before we knew it, the Prentiss woman was in Eleanor’s kitchen day and night. She introduced her beau into a configuration of Traymorean souls, and not only her beau but her beau’s rival and best friend, hard drinking fellow of roughly 50, his eyes unceasingly clapped—with some violence—to the Prentiss body. It now seemed impossible to have a private audience with Eleanor, as I was accustomed to having. So that Eleanor, not entirely unaware that she had been besieged, had recourse to an old Traymorean ploy, and she began slipping notes under my door. In this way I learned that a certain Ms Marjerie Prentiss worked for a technology firm, translating its documents from French to English and presumably back again. I learned that Ms Prentiss got on well enough with Dubois; they had plenty to talk about so far as it concerned the world of business in this, our faded Jezebel of a town. I learned that Ms Prentiss intended to marry Ralph her beau, but that Phillip—the rival—was better in the sack, though he would make an untenable husband. I learned that Ms Prentiss believed all Arabs should be fried; here was the solution to a vexing problem. I learned that when she was teenaged, her brother had passed her around from friend to friend for the purposes of cheap thrills. Perhaps this explained something. She was obsessively talkative, a fact which put me in mind once more of Echo the chatterbox who had won all our hearts. From the bits of intelligence that Eleanor leaked, as it were, I surmised that the prize Ms Prentiss sought was not so much fame, fortune or any other material boon, let alone any man’s undying love, but an unassailable position in the rather fragile universe her watery eyes were forever constructing. Indeed, she moved through space and carried her lissome body somewhat rigidly, thereby announcing she was a precious bit of porcelain, have a care. As for Moonface, she had no opinion one way or another in regards to Marjerie Prentiss.

  There we were, Eggy, Dubois and I, drinking and talking on the Blue Danube terrasse. I expatiated on the Lamia figure. It was the first Dubois had ever heard of it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a daughter of Poseidon, child-devourer. Had an affair with Zeus. What else?’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Eggy perked up, and Zeus-like Eggy, raising a solemn finger, recited: ‘Shall Lamia in our sight her sons devour, and give them back alive the self-same hour?’

  Dubois shook his head.

  ‘Merde,’ he mooed, ‘how do you do it?’

  ‘Virtue,’ lied Eggy, ‘and because the rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain.’

  And whatever I might have had to say about Lamia was now shunted aside (that such seductresses, despite their air of intelligence, were really rather thick in the head). Dubois rattled on about an ex-prime minister, one caught up in a scandal that just would not go away.

  ‘Of course he told falsehoods,’ Eggy the liar thundered, enough said.

  Two Anglos at a nearby table, one wearing shorts and baseball cap, taken aback by Eggy’s thundering, interrupted their conversation and gave us a closer look. Words like American army, private investors, stock market, oil bubble, ponzi schemes, Palestine, Israel, and shares, lots and lots of shares, had imparted point to their talk. They might have been local commies or garage millionaires, impossible to say. But so much for a mythological entity who could pluck out her own eyes and screw them back in again, a gift of Zeus.

  ‘And here we thought,’ I said, ‘that Mrs Petrova was holding that apartment for her son.’

  ‘What son?’ Dubois asked, just to get a rise out of Eggy.

  ‘She has a son,’ said Eggy. ‘I’ve seen him.’

  ‘You were probably so plastered you didn’t know what you were seeing,’ observed Dubois.

  ‘I tell you I saw him,’ a tiny sparrow of a man insisted.

  ‘She has a rather subterranean voice,’ I said of Ms Prentiss, ‘as if it emanates from an echo chamber somewhere in her.’

  ‘I take it you’re referring to the new lodger,’ said Dubois.

  ‘Whom else?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dubois, ‘the way you two have been getting, lately, I never know what you’re talking about, not really. Now I, on the other hand—’

  ‘Bollocks,’ said Eggy, ‘you’re no more coherent than the man in the White House at his worst.’

  ‘You see, there you go again,’ Dubois shot back with some heat. ‘Everything comes back to this, to bashing the President, and it won’t solve anything.’

  ‘The bastard ought to be impeached,’ Eggy said.

  ‘Since when,’ I asked of Dubois, ‘have you become so forgiving?’

  ‘Christ, I give up,’ was Eggy’s answer.

  And Eggy looked so distraught that Dubois relented: ‘Alright, he’s one of those bastards who should be impeached. But really—’

  ‘The rain in Spain,’ said Eggy.

  His inverted triangle of a face was a smirk.

  ‘That Prentiss gal,’ he said, ‘she’s a babe.’

  In Eleanor’s kitchen, I was about to unleash, between me and myself, a Jane Austen send-up on the gathering. But what can one say of casual people in casual dress who talked in casual sentences; who had deep pockets of invective? Eleanor, seated at the head of her table, shook a pompadoured foot. It signified she was interested. She was pleased that what she had here in the making was a new and improved salon over the salons of the previous summer; still, she was not unaware of the tensions in the room. Immediately to her left sat Marjerie; next to her Dubois. Eggy and I more or less shared the other end of the table, Eggy’s chin having raised his chest. Standing and keeping their own counsel were Marjerie’s love interests. Ralph nursed a beer, leaning against the counter. Phillip paced like a caged lion, and he was drinking rye, a cigarette in his workingman’s hands. When he could he would interject a bottom dollar man’s reality; he would admit that, as an economic unit, he had no clout, had not amounted to much, and would never amount to much, given the way the game was structured. One was not sure whether he was congratulating himself or whether he was simply stating a bitter truth, that the world and its market forces had passed him by, but that he supposed it could always use a handyman. Later, I was to learn that Phillip had come of good family in the Townships, had married badly, had recently and tempestuously divorced, and that he had a daughter whom he dearly loved. Meanwhile, if looks could devour he was devouring Marjerie with a violence of passion that was unsettling to the sentient among us. He was going to dig a ditch in the kitchen floor, his pacing back and forth that energetic. Ralph was clearly the quiet, competent sort, though he had none of Phillip’s virile air, and he fully intended to keep his little band of stalwarts afloat by way of his contracting business and vouchsafe the R
alph-Marjerie household that was being contemplated. Marjerie, I was willing to wager, was in no hurry to play the great lady and wield dynastic clout in behalf of her as yet unborn progeny. And now, her voice a modulated boom, she suggested that Arizona senator, presidential contender, was the only sensible choice. That other one, Illinois senator, was smoke and mirrors. Dubois agreed: ‘Policies? What policies?’

  A look of triumph momentarily brightened Marjerie Prentiss’s watery eyes.

  To be fair, she might have had some justification for her view. Yes, what if Illinois senator was but a pop star, his skin colour of no account, really, so long as he sold a product; and the product he had to sell was a bonanza of all the ways a collective might flatter itself. It is to say that a technologized, affluent aggregate of whites had turned a corner, if not a page; had gotten ahead of the curve, and were not obviously racist or in any way reactionary, and were prepared to prove it. No matter that class warfare had hardly touched their insulated lives. In Eleanor’s kitchen, there were seven corks bobbing on a roiling sea. Moonface might have made eight, but she was on shift at the Blue Danube.

  ‘We are going to go Roman,’ I said.

  ‘What? Roman?’

  The voice belonged to an incredulous Marjerie.

  Well, we were not going to go Dutch or prettily to hell in a hand basket.

  ‘Oh, he’s always on about Roman stuff,’ said Eleanor. ‘And anyway, I like Illinois senator, I don’t care what you say.’

  She flicked cigarette ash into a dish, thrilled to be in the heat of battle.

  Perhaps Marjerie had identified me as a force with which to reckon. Perhaps I was only stroking my ego. Even so, in the past hour or two, my, how time flies when you are having fun, the woman had subjected me to her unblinking gaze even as she was the object, the shining apple of the eyes of Ralph and Phillip. What a little circus it was. I noted her bare feet shod in sandals, her big toes prominent, tuberous, suggesting perversity. Not perversity of a sexual kind but stubbornness, rather, and with just enough intellect to get by.