The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Brit sitcoms, especially those that traded on the idea that humankind was an endearing kind, as were the sheep it violated, were particularly abysmal. One watched the shows anyway, for the laughs, then caught the bestiality on CNN. The force of the sun, broken by maple boughs, was still strong on the terrasse. Moonface flashed her nails in such a sun, exchanging niceties with girl students come to avail themselves of sodas and salads and spinach-stuffed cakes. To the red parrot in the fern pot, Cassandra had added a green bird and a butterfly. I was even beginning to miss Elias, her husband, who had not been around. It was said he was in Toronto, tying up a few loose business ends. Even his perpetual grimace had been a kind of metaphysic; for all that I had turned from the transcendental, it reminded me I was transcendental at heart, obstreperous poet, wine-imbiber slowly and gently subsiding into drunkenness. And they that be drunken are drunken in the night (Thessalonians 5). The pseudo-Tibullus had written something to this effect: why master what depresses one unless one has a partner in love? The sparrow on the pavement had no answer. Even so, I had a new epithet for Moonface: long-bellied. A bank of storm-cloud on the horizon, and I was watching toes curl and uncurl of girlish feet shod in flip flops, sun shades pushed back over girlish brows, as it was in every sun city of the world. Giggles and shouts. Boys looked upon all this, pretending they were not bewildered. Body parts were washing up on British Columbia beaches. It was as if we had run out of room in which to bury the dead.

  Gregory was in his galley, along with Serge, who once struck me as a paramilitary type, then a philosopher, then simply a surprisingly

  amiable citizen of the world. Cassandra puttered about, Moonface hand-ling the customers. It was Moonface who gave me a look of warning, her throat flushed, lips thin with alarm. Marjerie Prentiss was the cause of this alarm, her sunshades owlish—that is to say, large, she in a black chemise, jeans. She, too, wore flip flops. Straightaway her opening was pure King’s Gambit; and as she drew back a chair and occupied it, as she pushed back her sunshades, her hips splendid, she said: ‘You still don’t like me, do you?’

  A thousand souls had just perished for the sake of her accusatory tone. She sat there, her shoulders hunched, her watery eyes relentless. My, but she expected an answer. She turned down my offer of a cigarette; she had brought her own, and there they were, the cigarette pack tucked in her waist. She waited until I had rolled one, and then she lit us both up. It was as if we were stealing a smoke in a high school lavatory. Moonface, I had just noticed, had not gone away. She was standing her ground, ready to defend a comrade to her last breath. Or she might hear what Marjerie’s desire was, if she hung around long enough. A toneless voice delivered it.

  ‘A beer, please.’

  ‘Large or small?’

  ‘Small.’

  Perhaps Marjerie supposed it was not going to be a long interview; that I would soon come to my senses in respect to her likeability. And Moonface, so I was touched to see, had no defenses against the woman, and she retreated.

  ‘What do I have to do,’ Marjerie asked, ‘to make you like me?’

  Whence this need on her part for legitimization, and from me, of all people, my body ridiculous, mind a liberal cesspool?

  ‘Shall I bad-mouth the President?’ I heard myself being asked. ‘You’d like that,’ the voice added.

  ‘He deserves it, alright,’ I said, ‘but I hear you think him a great man.’

  ‘Oh? I don’t recall saying any such thing.’

  ‘No? I thought Eleanor told me you had told her as much.’

  ‘So Eleanor talks to you?’

  ‘Of course, she talks to me. We’re friends.’

  ‘He is a great man.’

  She blinked. It was impossible to estimate the depth of her sincerity. I felt a curious absence of sex, of any attraction I might have had for the woman’s charms. It was perhaps a dangerous development, that, in her company, I was not among peasants so much as I was making deals with cynical powerbrokers. She might have just gotten out of bed, all the same, her coarse hair tousled, her eyes a little sleepy. Still, they were as animated as I had ever seen them.

  ‘It’s kill or be killed,’ she said, with a genuine effort at philosophy.

  Once more she blinked, her voice as solemn as a crypt.

  ‘Et cetera,’ she said, for good measure.

  It was possible I grudgingly admired her quasi-independent stance, one that seemed to disdain the usual platitudes. By now, her beer had arrived by way of the good offices of Moonface, who now looked adolescent and sexless, some girl labouring in a fast food outlet. In truth, I had no idea of what to make of Marjerie Prentiss. Given the right circumstances, I supposed she could render herself pleasant, agreeable, even adorable. Yes, I could see, even if they were not materially with us, I could see Ralph and Phillip frowning, upset, wondering why I could not see what they could see—a bosom buddy loyal to their obscure cause, loads of fun. Cumulus had broken free of the horizon; from between piles of them flat cloud was spilling across the sky—storm sheen. Summery girls seemingly as light as air, even in life’s ponderous embrace of them, reminded me that, yes, it was summer, no time to match wits with diabolical entities, it being, anyway, a slow news period, two weeks into August.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the ethos down.’

  ‘I think so.’

  It was a pitiable protest on my part; her expressionless look suggested as much. If Moonface might make a politician an honest wife, Marjerie Prentiss was that politician, a Livia, a Theodara, Salome as House Speaker. Ah, here were the late lamented erotic burblings. The woman yawned.

  ‘Beer,’ she explained dully, ‘it puts me to sleep.’ She yawned again. ‘I can see,’ she said, ‘you’re not going to like me.’

  My silence in the matter was perhaps childish.

  There was nothing at stake, in any case, no outcome of war or peace, no fate of a nation, no nothing; there were but two bodies, voices attached, and there was a wondering, one might suppose, if between the two bodies there was a fit. Her curiosity, if she had any, might have been mathematical: Do one and one add up to three? My curiosity came with the dust of centuries.

  And she rose as I rose; she waited as I settled the bill, Moonface disturbed. And she followed me back to the Traymore, grimly patient. And then up the stairs and then into my digs and onto my bed. She transformed herself, made of herself one of God’s milder creatures, curled at my side. She studied my eyes for what I was seeing in hers. All men were Adams, and all Adams were louts—it is what her eyes were intimating, her disgust lazy, even easygoing. There was no question of sex; it was not what she came for, though why exactly she was in my bed I was never going to know. In knowing, I would only horrify myself. We simply fell asleep. My last thought was that Moonface was most certainly aghast; she divined, for all that her mind was sometimes thick, what was up and what was coming.

  We had played one another to a scoreless draw, or so I supposed it could be said of us both, Marjerie Prentiss and I in this our faded Jezebel of a town; and yes, it was her town, too. It seemed I snored. In any case, reality beckoned her; it is to say she had an assignment to complete for the company that employed her.

  ‘This isn’t going to happen again,’ she said on her way out.

  I was not about to dispute her. Churlish of me to think it, but perhaps it was what she had, all along, wanted: to be the first to raise an expectation and then shut it down. Moral creatures or not, we certainly did not lack for pettiness of spirit. But now I was seized with a bout of loneliness. Eggy? He was having too much fun to die, and yet, I found it depressing to visit him. Dubois? He would hit on something to critique me for. Eleanor? She would only make a great show of disinterest, feeling that she had been upstaged by Prentiss and Calhoun, a pair of trapeze artists. I returned to the Blue Danube, Moonface still on shift.

  ‘So,’ she said, furiously wiping the table I claimed. ‘I don’t like that woman,’ she let me know.

  And then the penn
y dropped: ‘You mean you slept with her?’

  ‘Well, she was on my bed.’

  She stood there betrayed, a cloth in her hand, sandy tresses spilled over her brow. Long-bellied Moonface was certainly troubled.

  ‘We didn’t have sex.’

  ‘You’re the most perverse man I’ve ever known.’

  She went to bring me wine. It was almost reassuring, I supposed, that she could read me so well. The storm that had been building all afternoon was taking its sweet time.

  Chaos was rubbing my soul raw from the inside, Marjerie Prentiss the abrasive. What had transpired between us was perfectly innocent. We were none of us innocent. Her hunger for security was so intense she would turn the world upside down so as to obtain it. With one foot throttling the neck of God, her other was firmly planted on the agenda-producing soil of realism. Meanwhile, I bore up under Moonface’s censure, she among her regulars. Finally she came to me, and I may as well have been a man on death row, unjustly accused, as she said: ‘Well, if you say you didn’t sleep with her—’

  ‘I told you I didn’t. But it was all very odd,’ I added, ‘and maybe I understand her now.’

  ‘Really?’ said Moonface, too brightly. ‘Oh good,’ she said, schoolmarmish.

  She did, in fact, seem pleased that there had been progress on that particular front, Moonface willing to see the best in everyone. It seemed I was doomed to wonder for the rest of my life: was Moonface beautiful? The heavens, as they had threatened to, opened up and poured. I had been, with my drunken eye, gauging the darkness of dark cloud over and against the darkness of the wine and the abysmal depths of human shadow. Getting out of the rain, going inside, it seemed to me I, at last, comprehended Moonface, a dear girl, waitress, once a student of Virgil’s Latin. She was, on account of her sensibility or lack of one, the last line of defense against the collapse of values we imagined we still had. She did not know she was a lonely outpost and expendable. Were I a gentleman of any note, I would have advised her she was in peril. Who is to say I had not already tried? If she had fantasies of saving the world, even as she flashed her nails in the jungles of Ecuador, she had best take stock of her true situation. In the grotto that was my mind, I saw hooded figures.

  Indeterminate Genus

  Flying things of indeterminate genus were devouring my wardrobe. When I woke from the dream and heard the first crows and their primordial but celebratory calls I figured that, perhaps, the dream augured something good. Rebirth. Old duds disposed of. I was, spiritually-speaking, already defrocked. The evening following upon the dream (I suppose the hairy flitting things were moths of a kind, and yet, lacking mouth parts, how could they eat my attire, so, welcome to Dreamland and its peculiar natural laws?…), I sat with Dubois and Eggy on the Blue Danube terrasse, Eggy back among us. And the recipient of a little, porcelain bell, one Cassandra had provided him, Eggy rang the thing and it brought Moonface out to us.

  ‘You rang?’ she drolled.

  ‘We want to know,’ said Eggy, a raised finger looking for mischief, ‘what your old boyfriends think of Sheridan.’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eggy, and then: ‘Well, do they know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Know about Sheridan. Bloody effing hell, woman, whom else?’

  Moonface was irked, Eggy relentlessly naughty. Even so, he read her mind, and he lied: ‘I’m a gentleman.’

  Moonface rolled her eyes and went back inside. Meanwhile, I had lost my train of thought, listening to Moonface and Eggy chaff back and forth. Dubois was now preoccupied, and what preoccupied him was the sight of the old woman who, at this hour of the evening, was always out walking her dachshund. She wore a black rainslick in the event it might rain. It was threatening to rain. The world might be coming to an end, and still, so far as she could help it, she would not deny the dog his appointment with lamp post or postal box.

  ‘I’d say,’ said Eggy, ‘that our dear Moonface is playing her Sheridan false.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she likes things that complicated.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Dubois said.

  ‘Carroll Baker once likened a pair of glossed lips to pink sausages,’ I said, tacking in a new direction.

  Dubois guffawed.

  ‘You mean the sexpot?’ said Eggy, with renewed enthusiasm.

  ‘The very same. You might have, in your 901 years, you might have run across her somewhere, if not in Rome, then in Baalbek, say.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded being a dog between her legs.’

  Dubois, guffawing, indicated his disbelief. Moonface appeared.

  ‘Uh oh,’ said Eggy.

  One could not say he had been behaving. Moonface just stood there, flashing her nails.

  Going up the Traymore stairs, much pleased with the evening thus far, I heard laughter in Eleanor’s digs. No doubt she and Marjerie were in session, smoking cigarettes, knocking back the amaretto. If men could find women a source of endless fascination, I supposed the reverse was true, and if men were the butt of their mirth, well, anything for a laugh. I could hardly believe they were quoting one another casualty rates for the various armed conflicts now in progress around the globe. And who had been those hooded figures, anyway, so amiable with one another, so equal to what life could throw at them, of such wit as would rival Voltairean patter? Why, they were Eggy and Dubois cosmopolitan under a patio umbrella of the Blue Danube terrasse, two stalwarts laughing their way through a dark deluge with its poetry of rain and city lights, Eggy rhyming umbrella with fella, Eggy always looking for an edge. I ran a bath. I soaked in water oily with Syrian soap the smell of which I liked. I closed my eyes, Eggy and Dubois the last true blues of a silver age, let alone an age throwing up its feeble excuses at moons as pale as jellyfish.

  ‘Benevolent victory,’ I had heard Eggy whisper at a puff of wind, at maple boughs, at passing revellers, at Dubois, his cheeks red and patterned with their hairline cracks.

  Benevolent victory—it was the old Virgilian apology for Roman might. But it was as if Eggy had just prayed. The next voice I heard belonged to Moonface; it was a near musical moan.

  ‘Hello? You in?’

  I supposed I was in.

  ‘What, no Sheridan?’ I called out.

  ‘He gave me the night off.’

  Here was tacit acknowledgment, so it seemed, that sex was the primary occupation of their relationship, all other gambits so many far-flung suns of a galaxy at some incredible remove from our time and space.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, not knowing how otherwise to respond. I said, ‘There’s whiskey in the cupboard.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  I pulled the bathtub’s plug; it was a comic sound, the consequent gurgling. Towelled and dressed my ridiculous body.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Moonface, ‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’

  ‘What’s to interrupt? Auditis an me ludit amabalis insania? Horace. Loose translation: Are you hearing me, muse, or does inspiration, the pleasuring madness of, twit me?’

  I could almost hear the blush that would be spreading up the Moonface neck. She had taken up, by now, the couch. She would be half-recumbent, her hips a force, her long belly a goddess’s.

  ‘Eggy’s a menace with that bell. I feel like a maid in the employ of a rich old lecher.’

  ‘He’s becoming divine,’ I said.

  She did not care, it seemed, to pursue that line of thought.

  ‘So, Vancouver?’ I said, in light of the fact she was headed there, soon.

  I was clothed and in her eyes now.

  ‘A week from tomorrow,’ she answered.

  ‘Anything special? I mean, is there anything in particular you plan to do there?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘There’s not much I can tell you about the place. I’m told I wouldn’t recognize it.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘You seem a little, what, pensive.’

 
‘Life,’ she said.

  ‘As in—’

  ‘I was happy. Now I’m sort of happy. Why is it always like this?’

  She rolled her eyes up and to the side. She tugged at the ends of her hair that fell straight to her shoulders. Erotic burblings. But I put them out of mind, seeing as she had come for counsel, not that I had anything that could possibly bring her ease of mind.

  ‘What’s wrong,’ I said, ‘with sort of happy? Think of the millions and millions of people who lack even that.’

  ‘I hate that argument, Q. Millions and millions of people aren’t living my life.’

  ‘Well, are you? Are you living your life? My apologies. I’m just a moody drunk. I have nothing more intelligent to offer.’

  ‘It’s the love thing, I think.’

  ‘Oh, the love thing.’

  I bit my tongue before I found myself off to the races with a notion of Plato’s theory of love.

  ‘What’s your favourite part of sex?’ Moonface asked.

  I was astonished at the question.

  ‘Talk to me,’ she said.

  ‘The intimacy,’ I answered, playing it straight, ‘but even so, we’re all alone, as in really alone. The more you understand that the more you’ll appreciate what you have and don’t have, and why sex can both put your head up among the stars and bring you crashing down to earth.’

  ‘Avuncular, Randall, avuncular.’

  ‘Just trying to be of use.’

  ‘You smell nice.’

  ‘It’s the soap.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll write a poem.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Because you’ll read it and laugh.’

  ‘Douse me with water and let the ivory pipes—’

  ‘Oh God. Must go.’

  ‘That was Propertius I was mangling—’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘No one, really.’

  ‘I’m getting snippy.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to pour myself a whiskey and objectify my mystical bent.’

  She stifled a yawn. She rose and patted my shoulder, collegially. She proceeded to my door. She turned and said: ‘What if—what if nothing means anything, anymore, what do you do then?’