by Norm Sibum
‘How is my good sir?’ she asked, her voice much too bright for my liking.
What sort of theatre was this? Champagne Sheridan would soon take her to Vancouver, and if it was theatre she wanted, she would get it there.
‘I’m fine,’ I answered, ‘and you? How’s Sheridan?’
‘Taking Spanish classes.’
‘What for?’
‘We’re going to Ecuador, too, you know.’
‘Ambitious, are we?’
‘It’s his father. He studies music. And we’re going to Chile. Maybe Argentina.’
‘As folklorists, I imagine.’
Moonface gave me a look. And besides, though she now and then privileged me with her future plans, somehow she never actually told me anything.
‘Aren’t you pleased for me?’ she asked, ‘I’ll have adventures.’
‘I should think you will.’
It was churlish of me to picture it, she doing the chicken shuffle through some mountain jungle, burdened with a backpack, wondering perhaps if Virgil’s poetry and a classroom had not been more her speed, after all. Her father, getting to be a lost soul, would be even more lost. Her mother, apparently, periodically went bonkers.
I rolled a cigarette, would stand in the rain and smoke it. I could hear it now, Eggy hoo hooing, hailing Moonface as Indiana Jane. To be fair, it had to be acknowledged that Ecuador might bequeath the dear girl what she needed: life without safety nets. Malaria and tainted food, undrinkable water, altitude sickness, rabies, drug trade, Chevron’s messes. I took the cigarette outside, noticing for the first time another Cassandra touch (it had to have been her touch); that in one of the fern pots there was now a red parrot on a stick, attached to which were tiny wind chimes. Some passing rube, failing to respect the whimsicality of the gesture, would be sure to trash it, the neighbourhood another sort of jungle. Here was Dubois, making his way along our noble boulevard, head bent, shoulders stiffened against the rain. So soon? Had he not work to do at the office? He carried his honest attaché case as a badge of honour. He made the turn under the fern archway, and standing on the terrasse, he said: ‘I didn’t feel like working.’
He motioned we should go inside. Where, after he greeted Moonface and she him, and it was all very jocular as Dubois liked it, and he had his soup now, and his beer, he said: ‘Eggy fell again. Maybe you don’t know. It was after you left, last night. He got up to go. He got through the door and then, I guess his knees just buckled. He’s pretty bruised. In the end, I hauled 140 pounds of dead weight up our stairs, he yelling all the while that it had been some senorita he’d had in Beirut. Senoritas in Beirut? I think he was raving.’
‘I didn’t hear a thing. I dozed off.’
‘There wasn’t a lot to hear but it was a lot to hear.’
‘Oh, is Eggy alright?’ Moonface asked, approaching the table.
Strictly Calvinist
Was it possible an honest man might not be honest enough, should his world be too narrow a confine? That the bubble in which he breathed preserved him from experience, for all that he was seemingly uncorrupted by a wider and deeper engagement with things? If so, perhaps Too Tall Poet was that man.
‘Life sucks,’ he said, and then giggled at his own vulgarity.
And yet, he delivered these words with the solemnity of Ahab knowing the whale was going to win out, even so, irrespective of Ahab’s focus and commitment. Joe Smithers aka Too Tall Poet was steeped in the American classics.
Moonface had just gone back inside the Blue Danube, pleased to see that discourse was building between us, her stellar versifiers, her men of the arts and scholarship, of all that would dignify her burgeoning universe. And Eggy, poor bugger, was confined to quarters, too bruised to venture out.
‘But Paul,’ I said, ‘you know, the man of the gospels, was certainly most judgmental.’
But who actually gave an effing hell? Eggy might, so long as I brought him back some beer from the depanneur. The pedagogue in me, rank amateur in view of the fact that Smithers was a professional pedagogue, was spreading his peacock fan of feathers and strutting. No, strike that; I was bored, reduced to listening to the sound of my voice.
‘You mean you’ve actually read the book?’
Too Tall Poet meant the holy book.
‘After a fashion. Not that I can quote you chapter and verse, but it puts pictures in my mind of worlds trying to sort themselves out, like this one we’re in. Despite what Paul had to say about it, censuring the activity, what was the guy who made statuettes of the goddesses, idols, as it were, going to do for a living? Work in the tin mines—as a Christian?’
‘Don’t know to what you refer. I’d rather read Fitzgerald.’
Smithers, though the ancient towns of Corinth or Ephesus might not readily form points of interest in his mentations, was a literate denizen of the neighbourhood; on occasion he dropped by the Blue Danube aka Le Grec. The solitariness of the loner, so I figured, was not to be based on the length of time one went without human company but on the intensity of the self-incarceration. He would begin to cross the street from the doughnut franchise, the one Traymoreans called Drunkin’ Donuts, as it was a hang out for a low-level criminal element; he would look this way and look that way for lurking vehicular traffic, and he would stride over, and now, he would have to duck beneath the archway of ferns, coming out on the terrasse, the look in his eyes one of a fugitive seeking temporary succour. Now and then he had words with Moonface; he was professionally disinterested in her body, and yet, one often saw him lost and agonized on our noble boulevard, some throwback to the days when one battled the temptations of the flesh. For him I had grudging respect; at minimum he did not run with any literary pack. And he was too sensible to ask if I were working on anything, though it might have been nice, had he inquired. Just now he had the look of a man indulging some delicious sin but knew he would have to pay for it. Some men, assured that God was grace, needed constant reassuring of the fact, were strictly Calvinist. Yes, and he did not pretend he was anything but a wretch, there being enough of the boffo-liberated running around, smiling into cameras, organizing cultural events. He did not know what to do with his legs, they were so long. One day, he would die, and there might be discovered among his papers stunning little bits of verse, demonstrating once and for all the extent to which life, as he had just quaintly put it, sucked. I preferred to think so rather than concede he lacked the courage of his pessimism. He had absorbed the death of his parents and the crack-up of his girl friend. In light of which he still had a few things going for him; that he did not speak like a computer print-out; that his social palaver was not just some reprise of a TV sit-com. Even so, now he was rising to leave. He was wearing a pinkish, candy-striped shirt, his slacks a thoroughly-repellant shade of green. Perhaps he just could not sit still too long; that his body might attract quantities of pain he might never sluff off.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, looking at me out of the corner of his suddenly panicked eyes, ‘but I have to go.’
Perhaps it had been good for him to see me. He was something the drift of a river had brought this way. And so, he went, tall-masted ship of self, all those classics in him of an American strain, though he was purely a citizen of this our faded Jezebel of a town, intimate with its drifting snows and steamed hot dogs and east end crime stories and copper roofs. And I was alone now of an evening; that is, there were no Traymoreans with me on the terrasse. Even so, it would seem Miss Meow had found herself a friend, and together they were braving the out of doors, miaowing away to their mutual content. It drove a passing terrier mutt crazy.
I brought Eggy his beer. He was miserable in the light of a lamp; he was dwarfed by the expanse of the chair in which he was ensconced, the TV switched to PBS and Hitler’s Germany. He could see I did not wish to stay and keep him company, his tough old eyes deliberating as to whether they would put on a show of his irritation at the fact. They opted, instead, for his frailty.
‘Yes but,’
he said, ‘it hurts to move. Could you bring me the opener before you eff off?’
I rummaged in his tiny kitchen for the device he had requested. I supposed it was still within his power to use it.
I had affection for the man even if he had been mean to his wives. He was not without courage; he had, once or twice in his life, seen himself for what he truly was, even if he had flinched at the result. It was more than a great many men achieve. We were not moral creatures, none of us, yet one might posit such questions of right and wrong as would challenge the assertion. Here was Hitler; here was Buchenwald. Here was the notion that nothing had changed, except in the matter of degree and means and the policies by which men and women of policy mask intent. The Pythian oracle was as efficacious as any ologist’s post-holocaust memoir such as would ward off future outbreaks of evil. Eggy might raise a finger and object, yes, as the man still retained some smidgen of belief in human progress; it was, after all, how he was educated. All he lacked was a yacht with a well-provisioned liquor cabinet.
And Eleanor and Marjerie were up to no good, the one glassy-eyed, the other snakily drunk. They arrived at Eggy’s door as I was about to bid the man good night, leaving him to his laments and chortlings and war documentary, Eleanor sing-songing: ‘You can run but you can’t hide.’
Marjerie, meanwhile, peered in at Eggy who, for all that he was dwarfed, was Zeus-like in his royal chair. Who was this creature, anyway, this troll, this homuncular grotesque? Marjerie’s eyes were watery, dead, lethal. Eggy, peering back, was reduced to a single word.
‘Oh,’ he said.
He could not, for all the tea in China, recall her name.
‘The rain in Spain,’ he said.
Marjerie shrugged; she had now seen everything. Her toenails were painted the colour of turquoise, her flip-flops azurite. And I was marched off to Eleanor’s kitchen, the finest room, perhaps, of all the Traymore rooms. Marjerie stalked behind us, lioness.
‘Roll me a ciggie,’ Eleanor commanded, ‘and I’ll give you some of this.’
She pointed at a bottle of amaretto; she pointed at the cupboard wherein I would find myself a glass.
‘No,’ said Eleanor, ‘he rolls them better.’
Marjerie had grabbed the tobacco pouch and cigarette papers I placed on the table, and she was making a mess.
‘I’m just rolling one for myself,’ she said, a little peeved.
‘Anyway,’ Eleanor put it to the woman, ‘where were we?’ She answered herself: ‘Oh yes. Monumental.’
‘Indeed, prodigious,’ said Marjerie, she with that dull booming voice.
It did not require much imagination on my part to suppose that the who and the what in their exchange had everything to do with Phillip. It would not matter how much liquor I managed to knock down, I would remain insanely sober.
‘One is plugged,’ said Marjerie, lazily suppressing something like
incipient mirth.
‘I’ll bet,’ Eleanor drolled.
A pompadoured foot took on a life of its own.
She, unleashed, was nothing new to me; it was her companion of an evening that gave me pause, her eyes studying, it would seem, Eleanor’s every move. And for what? I wondered. She had made a hash of the rolling job, the cigarette too fat in the middle, too thin at the ends.
‘And Ralphie boy,’ Eleanor asked, ‘ample enough?’
‘Adequate.’
‘Brand X?’
‘No name brand.’
‘The usual.’
‘The very same.’
‘Well, Randall, are you blushing, me boy? Ah, look at the lad. Hell’s bells, it’s only girl’s night out. We’re having ourselves a little fun.’
But the way Eleanor put the question to me, her tongue getting just a little thick, it was as if she were lost and looking for familiar ground.
‘I’m shocked,’ I said, falsely.
Then I stared into the Prentiss eyes. Was there anything in them that might bespeak warmth and a capacity for affection? Her silly grin proclaimed her adorableness to one and all. Cigarette smoke caused her to squint. Eleanor might come up to the very limits of cruelty in her behaviour, but even so, she was not cruel. Marjerie Prentiss, so it seemed, was like a cat that had long since lost interest as to whether the mouse she killed would return to life and run around again. I rose, feeling theatrical. I walked around the table; stood behind Eleanor. She reached up for my hands as I nuzzled my nose in her hair, whispering as I did so: ‘Eleanor. Eleanor.’
I had bought my way out. I smirked at Marjerie. Territoriality was one thing, kinship another.
Yes, Paul had been clever on the Areopagus of Athens, long ago in a spiritually opulent time, the pagans he addressed too smug and self-satisfied. Even so, it had resolved nothing, though the church might claim otherwise, the Unknown God still unknown and unknowable, perhaps irrelevant, love a butterfly in loopy flight.
And I lit a candle for McCabe, there in the sanctuary of my digs. And as the flame bloomed up like a July lily; as Corelli bore down on his violin strings that bespoke a Rome whose pursuit of pleasure was not without the melancholic, that is to say, the body is everything but flesh is vanity, I offered my supplications, saying, ‘And may all your boffings be jolly, and if not, I’ll always be your friend.’
More Psy-Ops
Dubois was already at the Blue Danube when I got there at the crack of noon, needing something, Moonface perhaps, who looked fetching, bustling about inside the café. The man’s newspaper was neatly, no, was folded ever so precisely in half, and one assumed he brought such exactitude to all his endeavours. He cleared his throat.
‘I was downtown, last night, having drinks with an old friend. This friend of mine, well, I can’t say how accurate his information is, but he told me there’s a naval task force, an armada almost, enroute to the Persian Gulf. Americans, Brits, the French. Since I know this will get you exercised, and how you get exercised, I couldn’t resist telling you.’
So then, he had been downtown, having fancy drinks. In the Ritz-Carleton or the Queen E, one might obtain a stellar martini. And while he was away, playing man about town, Eleanor and Marjerie had been at play, women beholden to no strictures of the patriarch. In any case, I had been privy to so many false alarms in the last year or so I did not know what to make of the news. And yes, it was quite evident that Dubois was waiting for my face to set its jaw against the face of war, his eyes peering over the top of his newspaper at me, his mouth set to guffaw. It was true, as of that moment, that Georgia and Russia were edging toward war, South Ossetia the bone of contention, Israeli military advisers in the mix, and, who knows, Americans, too. Where was Evie Longoria, cowgirl in slippers, a woman with whom I might idle away a missile crisis? Well, it was an idle question. Moonface stepped onto the terrasse and asked how I was, and in neutral tones I said I was fine, had she any coffee? She had.
‘Well?’ said Dubois, not to be deprived of his fun, ignoring Moonface, whose mouth was drawing tight.
‘So, just coffee?’ she interjected, those paltry three words reverberating through all the dimensions of a cosmic order.
I nodded. The sky, just then, began to brighten with sun. Through the open door, one could see on Gregory’s flat-screen TV the Olympics in full sway.
‘Who knows,’ I said. ‘It’s chilling, if true.’
‘Chilling, if true,’ Dubois mimicked. ‘I don’t think it’s true,’ he added, ‘and even my friend doubts the veracity of the report, saying his source is one of those hysterics of the blogosphere.’
‘They are, in fact, considering more sanctions,’ I said, ‘seeing as the Iranians still haven’t told the Americans what they want to hear. A naval blockade would, presumably, form a part of those sanctions.’
‘That’s an act of war,’ said Dubois, and by his tone of voice, I could not tell if the man was simply having fun with me or if he, too, was not just a little worried.
I assumed that Dubois, living by his enlightened rules, still retai
ned his faith in the system and in the good sense of people everywhere. And here was Gregory greeting us, hands on his hip: ‘How’s it going, guys?’
‘Having fun?’ I said.
‘Sure. Fun,’ he answered.
Gregory went back to firmer ground. What was it, sometimes, about the sun in the sky, that it was the source of all treachery? Moonface showed with my coffee, and blowing at the tresses sweeping down her face, she said: ‘I was going to drop by this morning, but Eggy wouldn’t let me go.’
‘Aha,’ Dubois guffawed, ‘the old bugger finally got his hands on you.’
Moonface blushed, and it was a sight.
‘No, he didn’t get his hands on me,’ she said, some stagecraft frog in her throat, ‘but he tried. He was just lonely. Maybe you guys don’t pay him enough attention.’
‘Trust me, we do,’ said Dubois. ‘Well, maybe he’ll wise up,’ he added.
Eggy’s foolishness was, of course, his wisdom. I had a naughty thought or two in respect to Moonface. Why did old men (such as I was getting to be) rage against the decrepitude of their bodies and torment themselves with the charms of young women? Why not simply dream on, accepting, all the while, that the dreamed-of embrace was but a hedge against one’s irrelevance, a purloined bit of peevish passion as per Eggy, floundering in his armchair? So much for psy-ops, a looming world war. Moonface’s rich golden brown eyes had just now trumped even Dubois’s grand sense of mischief, as well as passing fire trucks, ten thousand athletes amassed in Beijing, and the sparrows at our feet.
Girls in Flip Flops