by Norm Sibum
I went inside, rolled my eyes at Moonface, who was rolling hers. One might say she knew a great deal about difficult men, having a father who was not as perverse as Eggy but equally a handful. Even so, as it transpired, not much happened. Eggy slept. He slept throughout the thunder and spitting rain, a tiny sparrow of a man intensely quiet beneath a beach umbrella. He might have been sculpted from stone. As Miss Meow miaowed, I fell into a mood. Perhaps it was the harsh wine on my palate inducing the recollection, how I once took shelter from a storm—there in the portico of the Pantheon in Rome. It rained so hard the blood and gore of ghosts danced on the stone where I stood, the place of which had been a pagan temple, a fish market, then a Christian church. Something in me was acting up as I sat by the window and kept an eye on Eggy; as I regarded Moonface with the eye of a connoisseur. What lies was she telling herself? Whether or not she deserved it, she was headed for a fall, she the brave chrysalis about to metamorphose into a creature with suspect wings. So it seemed. Perhaps it was all that any of us could expect to achieve, those suspect wings. There was no such thing as mastery of one’s little craft of self. War had been declared on the poor of an hellish earth, whether the war be a matter of animus or but a consequence, nothing personal, of how things had panned out—since when? Since cheap billionaires had become as thick as locusts. I settled my bill with Moonface and she pretended to cheer, maintaining her girlish optimism over and against the pathologies that were the prenuptials to almost every human exchange. And though, in the course of a day completing itself, it was, as yet, afternoon, she said, a silly grin dimpling her cheeks: ‘Good night, sweet prince.’
‘I don’t know why I bother,’ I said.
She looked dashed. Then I thought to sneak by Eggy. But no, as I emerged into the still more humid air and was about to pass him by, he pounced: ‘Calhoun, hear me out. It has come to me late in life, I admit. Oh, I’ve been circumspect. I might’ve played around just a little—it was mostly jabber—but I was circumspect. You don’t go rocking the boat. My effing shame. But I can see how it is. Go against all flags. Hoo hoo. Oh, and by the way, when I’m eating cherry ice cream, I think of Moonface. Bad of me. Well, you know. Effing hell.’
He was having too much fun to die.
A Poem in the Window
All appearances to the contrary, Death was patient. True, Death snapped up young life in obscene measures. Death took thousands upon thousands of entities in one fell swoop. But Eggy, having too much fun to die, was proof of the patience. Or else Eggy was testament to the fact of Death’s capacity for bemusement, Eggy—all gristle and spleen—endlessly endearing. Well, he was still besotted with some Haitian nurse of his acquaintance, she who would ring him up from time to time when she got, as Eggy put it, lonesome. Even so, he was not all the show. One evening, as I stood at the end of the Traymore hall, looking out the window at Mrs Petrova’s birdfeeder, sparrows in the failing light getting one last peckful of seed, a woman appeared in a window across the way, a window that once was Fast Eddy’s to look out, that is, before he died in pantyhose while reading Keats. She was naked from the waist up, at least. It was all I could see of her, the window’s dimensions permitting no more comprehensive view. I could not make out her face; just that, so far as features went, it was rather plain, if regular. By now she was aware I was conscious of her or perhaps, I was unconscious of her and yet, she made no move to back away or recover her modesty. If anything, she was nonplussed. If her eyes bespoke her state of mind, it was a language I could not understand, be it a language of sorrow or joy, lust or loneliness, grim self-satisfaction or utter disgust with X, Y and Z; in short, I could not read her. Perhaps hers was a brazen language, one that dared me to make something of the fact that there she was starkers at the window. Perhaps she was as shy as a shore bird feeding in a flaming sunset. She was wide-shouldered, amply bosomed. One arm hung down at her side while, with the other, she had reached behind her neck as if, with her hand, she would alleviate some tension there. Her eyes were wide apart, her nose Roman. In any case, it would seem I was the first to find the situation uncomfortable, and stepping back, I retreated to my digs, wondering who or what the effing hell she was. Pianist? Archaeologist? Children’s author? Perhaps Fast Eddy’s old domicile had passed to her, though I was under the assumption that his brother and Vietnamese wife were going to commandeer the place. Did Fast Eddy have an amour we Traymoreans knew nothing about and she was grief-stricken, looking for what used to be? No, it could not be. Perhaps I had once again imagined something, in which case I was getting far gone, and it would seem that reality, such as it was, was insufficient gratification for my pleasure-seeking senses.
Cigarette in hand, Eleanor knocked. Yes, well, I heard the good woman shut her door; heard her pompadours grabbing at the hall’s carpet all the while they slapped against her heels. She was going to catch me in a pique; I lacked the powers with which to telepathically warn her off. I admitted her, objections born of I know not what in her eyes.
‘I need a sympathetic ear,’ she explained, ‘and no nonsense.’
‘But nonsense is all I can offer just now,’ I very nearly whined.
‘I talk, you listen,’ she insisted.
I indicated that, well, if such was the case, she should have the couch while I took a chair. And she reclined and was a pretty picture. And she balanced an ashtray on her belly, twirling the ash end of the cigarette in the ashtray’s groove, deliberating on how to begin. I said: ‘Well, to get the ball rolling here, let me say that life dines on itself. It devours itself; it consumes its various parts for no other reason than to obtain energy ostensibly for the purposes of procreation, and there is no other excuse, none of love of God or of Michelangelo’s handiwork or of the tattoo on your inner thigh, glorious prospect that it is.’
‘Not now, Randall. And just so you know, I have no tattoo on my inner thigh, and some day, maybe, I’ll let you see for yourself. But not now.’
‘So that we humans are nature’s perpetual adolescents, the pursuit of fantasy our original sin such as distracts us from harvesting life so as to restock life.’
‘Randall.’
‘Well then, what brings you to my lair? Has Bob chuffed you? Are you sick at heart on account of, what, I don’t know, all those enduring obscenities we cherish and behold, each requiring an Aristotle for the sorting out? Collateral damage, for instance, is what genus of our perversity?’
‘Randall, Randall, Randall, whatever are we going to do with you?’
‘Outsource me.’
‘I’m tempted. Go bother the Chinese.’
‘There was a naked woman in Fast Eddy’s window.’
Eleanor shook her head of freshly gilded curls.
‘There surely was. Here’s how it was. She looked at me. I looked at her. Had we each recourse to a satellite link, perhaps we might’ve communicated. I might’ve said, “How do you vote? Ever so slightly left of centre? Don’t you think the Prime Minister has a glass jaw? Oh, he’s rather cute in your estimation. Does broccoli give you gas? Do you think people change over the course of time or just stand more revealed? Plato’s Eternal Forms? Well, obviously, he couldn’t have figured on and so, allowed for talking calculators, nose rings and the Edsel. How’s the sex life? Do you find the male beside the point? Is blue your favourite colour? Burnt sienna? How rare do you like your steak? I’m not much for seafood but I do like salmon. Ah, lemon meringue—”’
‘Marjerie Prentiss, Randall. Remember her?’
‘That wench? But what need has the great white shark for ologists? Oh then, well, we hunt the shark to extinction, but then, along come the ologies to save his sorry arse or help him, at least, to deal with stress. More fantasy, of course. Tell me, Eleanor, what I mean when I say we are not moral creatures, and if we were once upon a time but not now, then when again?’
‘I can see I’m not going to get any satisfaction here. The woman, well, she’s beginning to get under my skin but in all the wrong ways. Know what I mean,
jelly bean?’
‘Sure.’
‘And that’s all you have to say?’
‘Lamia. Bred and born. She’s one of those. Devours without replenishing.’
‘Here I am all upset, and you—’
‘But you don’t really know why you’re upset, just that it’s all in a name, and she’s a neighbour of yours.’
‘Why don’t you suck my big toe, you clown? Here, kiss my foot,’ Eleanor, close to laughter, continued, burbling, waving a foot in the air.
‘Arizona senator is a self-loathing nutter who lost his honour somewhere along the way, the Beltway having chewed him up and spit him out, and he’s going to cause us to yearn for the good old days of Current President, should he beat out Illinois senator for the brass ring.’
I spoke those words with grim relish, notwithstanding Eleanor’s offer of something like sex.
Even so, she withdrew her foot from a list of things to kiss, and I learned she had become weary of the company of Marjerie Prentiss and her leering swains. It would seem they were buggering one another senseless. Then they would come and park in Eleanor’s kitchen, grinning stupidly, disciples seeking a master’s blessing.
‘But I’m no master of anything,’ Eleanor wailed. ‘Sex is fun. It’s a bumper car ride. I drive, you drive. Sometimes, sparks fly. What’s there to brag about? I like to gossip as much as the next person, but there’s a limit. Do I give a toss about the fate of the species? We’re going to outsmart ourselves. That’ll be our undoing. In the meantime, I’m going to find a man—’
‘You have Bob.’
‘You would say that.’
‘I do say that.’
‘Randall, Randall, you’re beyond human help.’
‘Precisely. Why else do you think I seek a religion the name of which I might speak without gagging?’
‘I have no idea.’
And a few evenings later, and at roughly the same hour as before, the mystery woman stood at the window again, a black choker her only attire. It was not an easy equilibrium, the roles unfathomed, the roles unclear. Sinister was a word that came to mind, as did the word heaven and how to get there. Perhaps I could discern in her eyes a question, even if it was only a question she asked of herself: who am I? I supposed there were a thousand reasons out of which one and only one answer might stand the light of day. I supposed it was a great deal of space through which to fall should I wish to reach her. I did not think I wished to reach her. Words of Mandelstam the poet occurred to me: What shall I do with this body they gave me, so much my own, so intimate with me? One after the other, sparrows departed Mrs Petrova’s feeder for their roosts. I looked for fireflies in the lilac, but none danced. The next time I saw her she was somehow less present, as if, all along, she had been but a shadow of limited and diminishing light. I never saw her again. The idea of making love to her crossed my mind, yes, and yet, how deep may the exhalations of a bird penetrate the waters of the sea? It is to say I could only presume as to what had brought the theatre about, but that it involved, somehow, my being’s core. What was she trying to tell me, if anything? It had been drama, to be sure, compelling stuff, but so casual in its ceremony, so unremarked.
Early Christians
The afternoon was middling humid, maples beginning to redden and yellow, putting on their autumn vestments, shadows rich. For all that, it was still mid-summer such as drives starlets to lounge on beaches, away from the bother of their celebrity. And there was in the eyes of Phillip Dundarave the rather steely recognition that Marjerie Prentiss was, indeed, a conundrum; and yet she was not just any conundrum: she was a dear girl who could do nothing wrong. One could only hope, as the expression went, that he got it off well and truly with her, because she was going to marry Ralph the less exciting but more stable prospect. Phillip had joined me, unasked, there on the Blue Danube terrasse, my usual companions not around. Cassandra, wife to Elias, was filling in for Moonface. Cassandra. The large eyes. The ravishing smile such as could bring one gratitude for the fact she had been born. Then her melancholy. It would have done her a disservice to suggest the melancholy was due solely to her not having married Mr Right, though Elias, I am certain, must have often tried her patience. Phillip was already drunk, if coherent. Truth to tell, he was frightening me. Some gruffer than usual timbre to my voice defended my existential lot in this treachery of a universe over and against the possibility of violence. Phillip had it in him, the ability to simplify discourse with a swat of his hand. Even so, at bottom, he was somewhat honourable inasmuch as he took people at their word; was fundamentally honest for all he had an alcoholic’s cunning. Ms Prentiss must have aroused in him exquisite pain.
‘Oh, I know I can’t marry her,’ he was saying.
‘Why not?’ I asked, endeavouring to sound interested.
‘No money.’
‘Does she care about money?’
‘Every woman does.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘You weren’t ever married.’
‘I was. Once.’
His eyes were getting glassier, grin loopier. Not a good sign. Then it came out he had borrowed from Eleanor money with which to pay a traffic ticket. This meant he managed to arouse the good woman’s maternal instincts such as they were; he was likely very much on her mind in the way men often were. Worse, and diabolically so, through Phillip, Marjerie Prentiss had a broad avenue to Eleanor. One could only thank one’s stars that Prentiss was not running the show on Parliament Hill. Then again, perhaps she had a gift for such things. Hooded figures arose in my mentations like so many cemetery ghosts. Pagans? Early Christians? The Christ-figure meant less to them than their conviction that the corruptions and the cruelties of Roman life were so intractable they had little choice but to turn to other worlds, as it were, and from such ephemeralities derive the notion that life had a point. I could easily enough see Phillip crossing over to their side, consoling widows and orphans and the dispossessed, and being loved for it; his build athletic, his manner pleasing, that is, when he was not besotted with Marjerie and consequently rendered stupified. He was reticent about his daughter, and I liked him for this. It suggested that, whatever his state of mind, she was no pawn to employ in his convoluted love life, only that if he could contribute somehow to her college education he might acquit himself of the charge he had failed her. Old stories came to mind, ones in which the hero, under an evil spell, need only mouth the right formula, perform the right ritual, and he was released. In truth, the man’s company was beginning to wear on me, and he must have sensed it, saying: ‘Well, places to go. People to see.’
His eyes were not, just now, friendly.
‘Alright then.’
‘Good to talk with you.’
‘Likewise.’
‘Well then, see you.’
It was on the tip of my tongue to exhort the man to straighten himself out; that he was, at bottom, a good soul. That it was not about what Marjerie was doing to him; rather, it all had to do with what he was doing to himself. She was never going to change, but perhaps he might. I did not know everything there was to know about blinding lust but I knew enough; that a lover’s embrace was a lovely thing, perhaps the loveliest thing of all except when it was about taking prisoners.
‘All the best,’ I said.
He gave me a look. He shrugged and left. And then here was another forlorn soul: beetle-browed, barrel-chested Fast Eddy the spectre.
‘Haven’t you settled down yet?’ I asked him, not entirely pleased to see him.
‘It’s a nightmare.’
‘Nightmare?’
‘I retired too early. I didn’t think it through. I’m in love with Moonface. I haven’t got anything she could possibly want or even remotely consider using.’
‘Yes, well, you’re dead, you know. But in the meantime, can’t you get yourself a hobby or something?’
‘Don’t get cheeky.’
And yes, what would Israel do to keep America in the game? What strin
gs would America yank, and so many skeletons on key chains chatter? I have known women who, secretly religious, attended mass. They knew it was futile to explain their behaviour, lighting candles signifying weakness, a less than stellar intellect on their part. Having known powerlessness to the point of abject fear, as she was passed from leering boy to leering boy, I supposed that Marjerie Prentiss, from the outermost extremity of her pate to her protuberant toes, was now all foreign policy realism, the balancing of ends against a middle that cannot hold. She should have had all my sympathy and understanding; something in her watery, dead eyes was sucking that particular well dry. I further supposed that humankind could, on occasion, behave beautifully. Who was it said that mutual aid within and between the species is evolution’s central, shining law? Kropotkin the anarchist? If so, another sort of central committee had overruled him, its various snouts even now poking about the carcass of Iraq. Phillip Dundarave had gone his merry way, a man who always meant to do his best even when supine in his stupors. Was there something of a Buddha’s school of hard knocks in him, paths of failure that eventually bring one to one’s senses? We would have to wait and see. Fast Eddy, too, had spirited himself off, restless spectre, a barely discernible grimace on his sombre mouth masking the marauding energies of regret. There was a certain kind of male the flesh of whom, just prior to a fit of tears, seemed to undergo a molecular change, become perilously brittle, and both body and personality might disintegrate into a million pieces. Fast Eddy was one of those. A tree scene in bas-relief (Hadrian’s Tivoli), carved on a marble pillar, depicts a bird catching a bug with which to feed its chicks, coiled around a branch a serpent about to strike at the nest. No, it was not exactly Disneyland, but it could still speak volumes to reality TV. As I sat on the Blue Danube terrasse, scribbling in a notebook, touchingly but unerringly exposing my ignorance of what booted it (be it pain, be it death); as shadows lengthened; as a procession of girls and louts and widows with dogs and old men with angry beer bellies passed by; as the neighbourhood even in its shabbiness was sometimes as eerily compelling as one of Hadrian’s gardens in its ruin; as I snipped, string by string, what connected my body to its youthful idealisms, its belief that humankind, for the most part, was a decent lot, and by way of a tautological leap of faith, so must be I; now Eggy came chugging along, master of his cane. He was breathless to let me know of X, Y and Z; how Illinois senator was in danger, and to what extent his pockets were owned. Bloody effing hell, why, hang the bastards. He settled in, started in: ‘Seen Dubois?’