The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘They want to bomb us all to hell,’ she said, speaking of Arabs.

  ‘Who wants to bomb us all to hell?’ thundered Eggy, momentarily waking.

  A tiny sparrow of a man slid back into oblivion. It did not seem that the question was worth answering. Dubois got a look on his face, one that would bring reason to the table, but then he lost heart. Eleanor sipped her amaretto. She looked good enough to eat. I had a terrible thought: five would get you ten she had Phillip, who would not cease his pacing, on the brain.

  It was one of those hot nights when even the idea of sex was one idea too much, even though I had known women for whom heat unlocks their sensuality. Was Marjerie one of those? One of Eleanor’s gilded curls was moist at her right temple. Phillip was like some stallion bucking in a barn.

  Afterwards, prone on my couch, I waited for Moonface’s knock. I was certain she would stop by for a report at her shift’s end. Traymoreans had withstood interlopers before. Lucille Lamont, for instance, had murdered her husband right under our noses, leaving him a case of gin to drink while she buggered off to Ontario. She got away with the crime. Osgoode the pedophile was simply no more to be seen, once the police received complaints concerning his activities. So far as I could tell, what booted it for Marjerie Prentiss was the getting of leverage for no other reason than the sake of getting it. She would get the better of Dubois, I figured, he an entity, like her, who did not like to lose arguments. She had won over Eleanor and Eggy. She was accustomed to the sight of men tangled in their feet on her account. I was staring at a muted TV, Letterman the comic and talk show host regaling his audience with topical patter. ‘We may as well amuse ourselves,’ his facial expression seemed to suggest, ‘as do anything else.’

  ‘You’re awake,’ she said, brightly.

  Moonface had let herself in, and she had unmuted the idiot box.

  ‘They’re talking about torture,’ she observed with neutral tones, indicating Letterman and the woman with whom he was conversing, the mental health of the republic apparently on the line.

  ‘So?’ Moonface asked of me, wanting the goods.

  I had nothing to say. I thought I might have had a great deal to say. I drew up my knees, providing Moonface with room on the couch. She loosed her hair, a gesture which announced the termination of her working day. I reached for my tobacco; I began rolling a couple of cigarettes. Eventually, I handed her a thin stick which she placed between her lips, unlit.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘a good time was had by all. You had your basic Phillip fellow. I would say his testicles are in a vise. He’s got it bad, 999 hells of jealousy and another thousand of unrequited desire. I can’t say she leads him on, but I didn’t see one signal from her that he should try his luck elsewhere. Ralph just stood there watching. Did he seem upset, concerned, perturbed, irked? Did he give the appearance of a man about to put his foot down? As in, look, we’re going to get married and we’re going to buy a house. Discipline, discipline. No more fooling around. No, not really. Maybe they’re a threesome. Maybe they’re recruiting Eleanor so as to make it all Even Steven. In which case, I should imagine Bob will have a thing or two to say about it as, liberal-minded though he is, he’s not the type to share. Or else, truth to tell, I haven’t a clue. And you?’

  Letterman’s guest, even as she chided Current President, did not seem at all the self-righteous type; and she looked like she might be fun on a rainy afternoon. But then I was on record as not liking fun. Moonface started in: ‘Oh God, I had them all, tonight. Miss Meow. Blind Musician. The Whistler. The hag. Too Tall Poet took an hour and a half to drink a half pint. Miss Meow miaowed. The Whistler whistled and stomped. The hag was going to have us arrested for not going to church. Miss Meow miaowed harder. Blind Musician thought he might move. Too many philistines in the area. Cassandra and Elias spatted. Just for you, Randall, I came by, because Sheridan wanted me to stay the night at his place, and I’m not in the mood. You should be pleased. No, I haven’t finished watching Night of the Iguana. I’ve only just met Ava Gardner. I don’t know what I think about Marjerie Prentiss. I don’t see what men see in her. She reminds me of Lindsey. But Lindsey was nicer.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘that Lindsey was nice, but I know what you mean.’

  I avoided telling Moonface that certain women, Eleanor, for instance, could not see what men saw in her person, but that it proved that men were, for all practical purposes, in want of a clue.

  ‘—We Americans don’t do those things. We’re not Nazis.’

  The woman journalist and book author had just made a declaration of sorts, the audience applauding, Letterman blinking his eyes. Half of a smile was frozen to his face.

  ‘Anyway,’ I added, ‘what’s Marjerie to you?’

  ‘You’re not interested in her, are you?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  The dear girl, the unlit cigarette dangling mischievously from her lower lip, squeezed my foot and took herself off.

  It was a dream, of course, one in which Moonface stood before me, her shoulders thrown back, a complicated creature. She was often in my dreams. And here she was a solitary entity, looking out of troubled eyes at things she saw as wrong but did not understand, her bravado her maidenly bust. And yet she was utterly selfish and not a little narcissistic, her smile revealing two incisors slanted inwards, two halves of a gate. How a woman could appear so lost, so afraid and yet quite capable of occupying space, the dream failed to tell me. She spoke, saying: ‘I was thinking about what you said, remember, about love, about Virgil, about his shepherds, and I want to tell you you’ve been right all along, but the world tells me to tell you you’re out to lunch. So sorry.’

  She unclenched her hand, and there, crayoned on her palm was a pink valentine. It was inscribed with Latin words that I read as English: The world is not workable. Such a strange girl, this girl. Hapless seductress. Prophet with impromptu prophesy. The space between us took on a life of its own, seemed perplexed, indecisive.

  What’s Up with Calhoun?

  The face that stared back at me from the bathroom mirror was not unattractive, not unfriendly, and not yet entirely run to jowls. Even so, that look of incipient shock affixed to my mug I could have done without; it nearly floored me. To what extent had it been molded by the knock-on effects of my own virtues and vices, and to what extent was it but a trophy to the prevailing geist? What was up with Randall Q Calhoun and the state of his erotic burblings and his cynicism and his sense that all was in drift and in thrall to a near universal imbecility? One saw it always, in the streets, on television: the self-congratulations of louts of either sex. So much celebration of so little. What was up with Calhoun that he could not say yes and he could not say no to playful Eleanor, to feckless Moonface? There was the old injunction that one does not foul one’s nest with ill-considered notions of lust and love. I had skimmed through a book of the art of Balthus for hints of Moonface. Much girl-ness, yes, girlish thighs, mocking eyes, the savagery of the life force, but no sign of a Virgilian strumpet of the Traymore Rooms. Perhaps she was a mutation of a kind; or she had been engineered; was a harbinger of a world in which nature herself would drown in doubt and self-recriminations of every sort. Perhaps drift was the wrong word with which I should depict the vertigo, the torque, the physics of coming unhinged; and yet I would come off prim if not self-righteous, accusing a collective of spiritual suicide. Mrs Petrova’s backyard roses, mutely occupying space, induced, perhaps, a swooning sentimentality in her Russian soul. They were time incarnate, so far as they concerned me, because beautiful and transient. Life was easily enough stripped of God and poetry, yet no man or woman could entirely escape the suspicion that it all might actually mean something.

  As I walked a noble boulevard connecting the Traymore to the poor man’s super mart and points beyond; as I passed by boutiques and cafés and depanneurs and fly-by-night operations set in their brick edifices; as I was irritated by such pedestrians who, in their phantasmagorical stupors, ha
d no grasp of yielding the right of way; as I took care to avoid dog feces dried in the heat, I mulled over the fact of Marjerie Prentiss and her consorts. She had introduced into my little world all the unwanted variables of premonition. I did not know how or when or even why, but she would shake Traymorean life to pieces. She was akin to some right-wing media host on a mission to undermine liberal sanctity, her brooding suitors running interference on the field of battle. By endlessly talking about Ralph and Phillip, especially there in Eleanor’s kitchen, Eleanor perhaps getting a little tight-fisted with her supply of amaretto, Ms Prentiss would eventually succeed in convincing her immediate world that she was, indeed, its queen bee, repository of all right thinking. It was true that Europeans had no understanding of American realities, could not quite comprehend in just what way and for precisely what reasons the average American had no interest whatsoever in anything beyond their coasts, but were, nonetheless, the centre of the universe and the only populace that, by any criterion, mattered. Iraqis or Icelanders lived on sufferance. Such was Ms Prentiss; in other words she could see no effing reason why she should not be endlessly adored, her watery, dead eyes astounded by those who would withhold their genuflections. I went as far as the Polish delicatessen at the start of the next district over, and from a woman who might as well have expertly commented on the novels of George Eliot as slice ham, I got the ham of which I was fond. And a link of kabanos. And the woman’s warm and frank smile.

  I was making a ham sandwich when unfamiliar knuckles rapped against my door. It was Marjerie Prentiss.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, blinking twice. ‘Ralph and I are fighting.’

  I had not heard any commotion. Did they yell at one another under water?

  ‘May I cross the threshold?’ Marjerie asked, with a proprietary air.

  Put upon, I sighed that she might.

  ‘And Phillip called and he wants to have it out with us, with me and Ralph, and I can’t be there. Eleanor’s not in, you see.’

  She spoke as if from a treasure chest at the bottom of the sea. Now she was standing in the living room, at loose ends; I took my time extending her the courtesies. I munched on the sandwich and mock-bowed.

  ‘I get the feeling you don’t like me much,’ she said, claiming the couch, a low coffee table between it and the chair on which I was seated.

  She was wearing denims that flattered her hips, a sleeveless red blouse with shiny buttons. Flip-flops. She swept aside coarse tresses from her brow.

  ‘I don’t,’ I replied, much too carelessly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can’t say why.’

  ‘Because you won’t say why or because you don’t know?

  Her inquiry was toneless.

  ‘Or maybe,’ she said, exploring, ‘you don’t like women.’

  It was a stupid thing for her to say.

  ‘You’re twitting Phillip, from the looks of it.’

  ‘Twitting?’

  ‘Playing him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You’re keeping him around just to keep him around.’

  ‘Yes, I am. What of it?’

  ‘It’s not nice.’

  ‘What has nice to do with anything? He likes it. I like it. Ralph likes it.’

  ‘Well then, maybe you ought to get back over there.’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  I saw that she would submit to any sex practice, she a long-distance runner who could run forever. Perhaps she read my mind, she lowering her lashes. Somehow, she contrived to appear both sleepy and insolent.

  ‘Who says men aren’t illogical,’ she said.

  ‘I’m a far from rational being,’ I crowed.

  She adopted no pose, really, made no gesture such as could be construed as seductive. But she emanated something, a something I could not pin down, and she did so with a powerful will, just by sitting there.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I say bomb them before they bomb us.’

  One might think she was addressing the senate. I could hear Dubois jangling his keys, locking his door, clambering down the Traymore stairs. The phone twittered in Mrs Petrova’s shop. Eggy was probably at his weekly physio from where he would engage a taxi to the Blue Danube and compromise a morning’s worth of health. Marjerie Prentiss certainly did have inspiring hips.

  ‘Why do you want to go and bomb people?’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I just think someone should.’

  She had not the slightest interest in sleeping with me or that I should lobby her for her favours.

  And she was the sort of woman who put other women, about whom one might have had doubts, in a better light. Whatever might transpire between myself and Traymorean ladies, be it sexual, be it otherwise, even so, was not likely to preclude friendship. It was not so with the woman on my couch; and she was recumbent now and this infuriated me, the intimacy she presumed unearned. I had eaten the sandwich but was unable to appreciate the ham’s flavour, caught up in low grade hostilities. Here was beetle-browed, barrel-chested Fast Eddy, a spectre, and he was disgusted.

  ‘She’s not a nice woman,’ said Fast Eddy, addressing me.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I addressed him back in my mentions, ‘what has nice to do with it, like she said?’

  ‘She’s not a nice woman,’ Fast Eddy repeated, he with his insufferable gravitas.

  ‘I take your point.’

  ‘You’d better. She’s eye candy. Looks delicious and goes down like gall.’

  She had the unshapely feet of a bumpkin. And since when had Fast Eddy, for all practical purposes a virgin, gained worldly-wise wisdom? I would be surprised at how much he now got around. Someone was being buzzed in. Strange footsteps on the Traymore stairs. Marjerie sat up, ears perked like a dog recognizing its master. Perhaps it was Phillip come to settle her hash, as the saying went. The footsteps continued on, all the way to her apartment.

  ‘You should go now,’ I said to the woman, ‘I don’t want him coming here.’

  I was just this side of livid.

  ‘But I might be in danger of my life,’ she said dully, knowing that she was as unconvincing as she was dull.

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Against All Flags

  The Blue Danube terrasse. Moonface, flashing her nails, addressed me: ‘Here you are, good sir.’

  She brought wine. And it seemed to me she wished to make love to Randall Q Calhoun, not to the flesh of him so much, not to his ridiculous body, but to the idea of him. And thundering was on the way. Besides the humid volatility in the atmosphere, here was Eggy, tiny sparrow of man, moving right along with his divining staff, his octogenarian’s cane. Moonface, aware now of his approach, gave out with a throaty giggle: ‘Trouble.’

  ‘Wine, you ungrateful wench,’ he called out as he made the turn to pass under the overarching ferns to where I was seated. ‘Wine, and I don’t care who knows it,’ he thundered.

  More giggling on Moonface’s part. What the dear girl required was a ruby for her navel as would complement the redness of her sneakers. The observation was Eggy’s. The homunculus dropped into a chair.

  And we were silent a while, as he caught his breath. Inside the café, Miss Meow miaowed the hearty patois of one who was forever talking to herself. The hag at the bus stop exhorted one and all to go church or she would call the cops. A wind was in the maple.

  ‘I got cherried, hoo hoo,’ Eggy said, able now to resume discourse.

  ‘How so?’ I asked, gamely enough.

  ‘Why, you know, it was the cake I ate. There was a cherry in it. In it, you will note, not on top of it. The whole enchilada of a cherry. The real deal.’

  Eggy was most pleased. But as Le Grec, save for its cheesecake, did not offer such temptation, I had no idea where Eggy might have availed himself of his godly and delectable dessert.

  ‘So where was this?’ I thought to ask.

  ‘Why, up on Monkland,’ Eggy let me know, referring to a better appointed but less noble boulevard.

  It seemed a h
ot little number knew of him there, Eggy saying: ‘And I walked all the way to and fro. Took a while.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would seem, sir, that cherries certainly have a way of finding you.’

  And Eggy beamed like a man for whom truer words could not have been spoken; like a man on whom the gods have smiled; except that, wait a minute, he himself was Zeus-like, the vast entirety of the cosmos and all its mysteries his cherry ripe for the picking.

  ‘The rain in Spain,’ he hoo hooed.

  His chin raised his chest. And yet something had to give, even at the risk of disturbing an old bugger’s catnap. The electioneering. The economy. The distant wars. Prentiss. Gaza. It began to thunder.

  And it looked to be a nasty little squall.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, shaking the old man’s shoulder, ‘let’s go inside.’

  Eggy was having none of it.

  ‘No,’ he thundered while thunder growled in the troubled pearl of a sky above.

  He raised a finger in the air and declaimed: ‘I am ready, sir, to depart from this life.’

  Moonface showed her anxiety as she stood by the window. She blew some wisps of hair off her brow.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t be silly,’ Eggy countered with the vehemence of a child. ‘I’ll be here when it’s over, sitting just fine. So in you go. Bloody effing hell.’

  He withdrew his finger, folding his hands on his lap. His mouth hung open a little, his eyelids drooping.

  ‘Rot your socks then.’

  ‘You rot your socks.’