The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  —‘Effing hell,’ as Eggy might say, ‘life is no journey; it’s a hijacking.’ Marjerie Prentiss? What is it with this pseudo-Traymorean? She has done nothing especially bad, though men dance on the strings she pulls. She is not unique in this, and so long as there are men who are up for it, there will be women to oblige. But no, she is no Ava Gardner shimmying with her beach boys on the beach, as Prentiss has not a shred of honour in her soul. She is not stupid, nor is she particularly brilliant; she observes the means, tenaciously so, dull in her ceaseless machinations. She has not the power to ruin a state, let alone a cottage industry, and yet, she is in her person a reflection of those women who do enjoy such power. There is no deeper devotion a man may experience than that which a strong-willed woman of incorruptible justice might elicit from him. Was New York senator such a woman, calling on Americans to give her the White House? Or was it too much to ask—that she be both ambitious and just and in the fray for the good of the country? Eleanor, of course, is a babe with the cunning of a ward boss. She approaches her mid-way point in life, lacking ambition. Her intransigence is, perhaps, her acknowledgment that she might have gone further in life and did not. The indifference with which Dubois regards her fooling around must be especially galling to her. I would happily hand her gavel and gown and let her preside over the inanities, but she would rather cook up poutine and playfully twit Dubois for being her almost perfect love mate. Some dismiss it as pillow talk; others call it love, the kind that seemingly aches forever in the heart. No one has heard from Moonface. We are given, we Traymoreans, to understand that, for the dear girl, Vancouver is a test of sorts.

  —When Nero bade his retainers go and bugger with his blessing, he was moral. When the thirteenth apostle bade the opposite, to marry, for instance, as a last resort, he, too, fulfilled the requirements of moral logic. Moral is maxim backed by the loudest, most sustained voices; if necessary, it is backed by might. Moral is force majeures. Moral is trivializing Jane Austen as having been very, very smart.

  —Eggy, sporting a bib, peers speculatively at a plate of four miniature cheese pies. Dinnertime at Le Grec aka the Blue Danube. Serge, horsing around with the radio, lingers a moment on a station putting out an aria. Placido, so I reckon. There is soccer on the TV. In the hands of Dubois, fork and knife meet over the body of a steak. ‘65 years,’ says Eggy, ‘why, they’re 65 years behind. You know, health insurance.’ Eggy’s America. Dubois, always in the vanguard, nods assent as he chisels himself a morsel of meat. I have gone overboard again, to his way of thinking. Americans are not that stupid, that craven. ‘I’ll believe they’re serious,’ I say, ‘when they own up to Iraq. Otherwise, nothing will change.’ ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,’ says Eggy, finger raised. Dubois is somewhat restive at this foray into his mother tongue. The café is otherwise empty. Gregory, Elias, Serge—they huddle and watch European sport. Beautiful girls go by in the evening shadows. Here is the old woman and her dachshund. What, does the mutt smell some debacle in the offing? Cassandra, who has been tending to the plants on the terrasse, who stands alone there surrounded by a vast tract of darkening dune, alone, alone in the whole wide world, looks up at the twilight blue, sweeping it with her lovely, large eyes. She expels breath which she had swallowed and held in.

  —As a teenager, I thought Sexus pretty much the work of a clown. America, it is said, had a genius for community. Tell the Sioux another.

  Brava!

  —Oligarchs: the necessary evil in every system. Augustus Caesar gave the world its greatest object lesson in the getting and the keeping and the maintaining of power. The American genius, so say its champions, is that power may pass peacefully from hand to hand, is, in effect, distributed and balanced. A partial picture of the reality. A picture explaining less and less. Devotees of transcendental politics will, eventually, have to play the game. Bare knuckles, ‘mom’ inscribed on one. My sense of futility deepens. Prentiss cannot bear the fact that Eleanor, despite her greed and insecurities, does not bring pathology to her practice of sex. Brava! Eggy snoozes inside the Blue Danube, Zeus-like. Roman Zeus was no true Zeus, too busy being august; that that other Zeus was ill-organized and partisan and inclined to dalliance. ‘I’m so lonely,’ croons a pathetic radio voice, that of an emotionally expressive male. I jot these words with hooded figures and the gardens of Lucullus in mind. In those palatial shadows sex was achieved and, perhaps, libertas died.

  —So Dubois tells us he played baseball in his Shawinigan youth. And I should read Fregault for Quebec’s history, should I wish to take it as seriously. Eggy, it appears, was never an athlete except, perhaps, in bed, and Manifest Destiny was, you know, the Philippines. Seems the last car he owned (he clocked 180,000 miles with it) was a brown Ford Comet, two-door, and in this chariot he went to see where Washington crossed the Delaware; he was pleased to have done so. Bloody effing hell. We occupy the Blue Danube like a trio of bibulous Hessians, we Traymoreans, hail fellow, well met, and all that. What sort of word is scéance? Why does it not appear in my Dictionnaire LAROUSSE? ‘Well, it’s what we’re doing here,’ says Dubois, ‘being kind of minor, not quite a full-blown spectacle.’ So far as I can see, he has no envy of American dynamism, and who knows, but that maybe China now rates the palm on that score, given the Olympics just concluded, rave performance; and neither can I see Eleanor in his eyes. Perhaps, what with the Prentiss woman and her beach boys hanging about in Eleanor’s kitchen, Dubois cannot get a word in edgewise, let alone a foot through the door.

  —The cynic is on the right side of history until, mutatis mutandis, he is on the wrong side, twitted, pitied, derided. Illinois senator, by acclamation, is the man of the hour.

  Antonio

  —Old Eggy would not have rice on his plate. ‘Take that away,’ he thundered. Antonio, the new waiter, an Albanian, shrugged. ‘So, don’t eat it,’ I suggested. Dubois told the homuncular grotesque to behave. ‘I don’t want it. What a mess. Don’t even want to look at it,’ Eggy wailed, his voice rising against the ruckus in Le Grec aka the Blue Danube. Busy night. Even so, Antonio beatifically smiled, bent down, cradled a Zeus-like pate with his arm and kissed the brow; it chuffed Eggy even further. ‘What, are you queer on top of everything else?’

  —Marjerie, Ralph and Phillip—perhaps they groom one another before initiating sex. Perhaps they burn votive candles to Venusian spirits such as hold sway over the various regions of male and female anatomy, ensuring optimal performance. Perhaps they are throwbacks each to the Sixties when a new comedy of manners arose from this or that college campus, authority snubbed, curriculum trashed, the Pentagon evil, and then the resorting to communal strictures. I do not mean to second-guess the results, let alone ridicule the presumptions, and there were many such presumptions; just that those shoes all Hansel, Hansel and Gretel outside Marjerie’s door; shoes that say times are tough but we will get through this and live happily ever after, seem an affront to Traymorean sensibilities. Eggy is having too much fun to die. Moonface boffs the boys, no question, but hush hushly. A sweet Tuxedo girl you see, Queen of swell society, fond of fun as fun can be, When it’s on the strict Q.T.

  —I settle for an afternoon of Tacitus and baseball on TV. The Optimates. The neocons. The merits of first pitch fastball hitting. ‘It’s the most hitable pitch you’re likely to get. If it’s in your zone, drive it somewhere.’ As per Tacitus, hacks will commit any crime for advancement. Lawyers lawyer, preening and stropping. If Moonface is back in town, she has gone with her Champagne Sheridan straight to his place. It suggests they may as well be married. The Jays chase the Yankee hurler to the showers. Tiberius Caesar slips into seclusion at Capri. To pursue, one imagines, the existential side of rule; to appease the inner demons. Sejanus, his right arm, then lords it over Rome as the worst sort of cockatoo, playing all ends against the middle, whipping up bloodlust, keeping the Imperial Mind in the dark. A voice dully booms in the Traymore hall: ‘Bring back some chips, too.’ She may as well have said: ‘Bring back So-an
d-So’s head.’ One of her corsairs is on a beer run. Evie Longoria has the grace of one who was at least loved, but that life has a way of, well, interjecting nasty little surprises.

  —We were silly out on the terrasse, Dubois, Eggy and I talking of Moonface. Eggy: ‘I’d just smack her bottom. Effing hell.’ Dubois searched for the Grand Cause such as might explain the lesser effects of Moonface behaviour: ‘Her epilepsy might explain her suppressed anxieties.’ ‘Her father,’ said Eggy, ‘it’s her father. Deadbeat. United Church. And the mother’s a loon. Why, she’s apparently a qualified academic. What qualified academic goes and hides in Sudbury?’ ‘Is there a bar in this province,’ I asked, ‘where you have not imbibed?’ ‘I swear he can smell them from miles away,’ remarked Dubois. It was Breughelian on the terrasse.

  —Eggy lets it be known Evie Longoria will come clean his digs once a week. She could use the supplemental income. Still no sign of Moonface. Already, it is a scorcher of a day. At the poor man’s super mart, it occurs to me to put it to myself, as I test the nectarines: what may we lovers not expect? Ralph and Phillip plan to scavenge Fast Eddy’s old place for its oak. I have run into them, hearing out their plans. Erotic burblings as Marjerie emerges from an aisle of tinned goods. ‘Hullo.’ The dull booming voice. The sound system pipes Hotel California.

  —It has been written, recorded, painted, in a hundred ways depicted; catalogued, downloaded as items X, Y and Z—every iota of perversion humankind has set loose on the world. And when one would meet with it, surround its parameters with words wise or unwise; when one would troll for it in one’s own inner deeps; when one would simply ologize, ‘This is it and this is how it works’, one, in the end, knows even less. One may as well squeeze photons into a tube of toothpaste. Antonio, speaking of Eggy, says, ‘That little man, he’s fonny.’

  —Eggy, his countenance pained (and when a man is Zeus-like and, still, he fears extinction, it is not a sight for the faint of heart), presents me with a riddler. If I had my life to live over again, would I go for it? He expects a straight-up answer. Well, an instant of time might last an eternity. Eight years of a malignant presidency may elapse in the blink of an eye. We are a few minutes shy of total sunset. It is 30 degrees Celsius. Wine. Eggy’s plate of little cheese pies. A tall woman goes by in a pale yellow frock, her eyes glassy with the inferno. Dubois paces the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. Otherwise, yes, his mood is upbeat: Americans are finally coming to their senses, and there it is, his faith in the innate good sense of the people justified. I am, predictably enough, not so sanguine. In any case, here is Eggy, his tough old eyes fixed on mine. ‘Well?’ he says. ‘I asked you a question,’ he reminds me. ‘Indeed, you did,’ I answer, not stalling, not rehearsing a reply so much as I am staring at some particularly abysmal sector of my mentations. He is such a tiny sparrow of man, this Eggy. His one eye is rage; the other features sorrow. Yes, it is rather like this: some rare alignment of celestial bodies, those eyes. ‘No,’ I say, ‘why live it over again? Handed another life to live, one will muck it up anyway. I should think once around the park is enough for any insufferable ego. Progress? Tell me another.’ Eggy shudders. That he shudders disconcerts me. I hope I have not been overly flippant. ‘Yes but,’ he raises his finger, ‘yes, I’ll say to you, I’ll say that for someone like me, born on the wrong side of the tracks, you know, well, that I married the daughter of a bank manager, that’s something, don’t you think?’ Well, it is the first I have heard of it, as whenever Eggy invokes his past, there are just ‘wives’ in the generic sense of wife, and spawn. I nod my assent. I have nothing, at any rate, to say. It is too hot for riddles. Antonio, the new waiter, asks if we want coffee. ‘No, six virgins,’ thunders Eggy, ‘and a piece of heaven.’ ‘Six virgins? What is this?’ asks a waiter, his accent thick with incredulity. ‘Well, what do you think? Six virgins? Effing hell. Do I have to spell it out? Oh, just bring the coffee. Bloody Albanian.’ Antonio bends down, kisses the Eggy pate. Eggy protests. The wine in me reaches up for the highest hanging fruit.

  —And still no sign of Moonface. Perhaps she came in the dead of night for her change of underwear.

  Letter to Emma MacReady (aka Moonface)

  Dear Emma, Before I begin to fulminate and froth, let me say I hear the trip went well. Now it’s on for Ecuador, no? If so, when? Of course, you don’t tell me anything. You were missed.—RQC

  Letter to Gentleman Jim (surname unknown)

  Dear Jim, I think you’ve drawn a line in the sand, as it were, the bottle your improvised explosive device. Now the ologists, of course, will state you only commit violence against yourself, alcoholism a disease. What’s more, you make yourself unattractive to the human family. You hide from your problems, unable to deal with the real world. And yes, the odds of the ologists being right in this are greatly in their favour; the odds are next to zero for our chances at a declaration of what’s real. I contend, however faintly that I do, that the stupor—you staring out the window, you looking at God knows what (but presumably, it involves the shambles of your life)—is that line you’ve drawn, beyond which you do not comply. By means of drink, you deny the occupiers a smoothly-functioning capital: you burn it down. It is a cheap sort of romanticism with an ugly aftermath; it is cowardice of a kind. But you are entirely within your rights, so far as I see it, to deny those bastards whom Eggy believes ought to hang the wherewithal of your heart, mind, body and soul. Just thought you might like to know. The intent of all hypocrisy, so far as it concerns each and every collective, is to keep one in line and productive, or, at the very least, to enlist one’s acquiescence in extending the shelf life of lies. Soon, you’ll be so far gone you’ll no longer find yourself able to follow any logic but that of your internal dissolutions. That you might comprehend my thought process will be pretty much moot. Mr and Mrs Civic Smile shall be glad to see the back of you. So shall Dubois who finds your communication skills somewhat wanting, your stupors sheer intransigence. It is otherwise conjectured that Moonface, remember her?—she’s the one who was kind to you, and she’s the one whom you’ve stiffed more than once, cheating on the bill—anyway, she’s slated to return to work, this evening, after an hiatus of a couple of weeks. A Traymorean or two may rejoice. A Miss Meow might miaow in contralto and purr. A beetle-browed, barrel-chested spectre—perhaps you, too, have seen him—might show and genuflect at the object of his shabby and yet somehow noble infatuation. See you there.—RQC

  §

  Book VI—De Incendio Urbis

  Squeezing Out Moonface

  It began to chill as soon as the sun went down, Eggy, Dubois and I on the terrasse of Le Grec (aka the Blue Danube) even so. A few regulars, Miss Meow, the Whistler, Blind Musician among others, preferred to sit inside. A postcard Moonface mailed from Vancouver had only just arrived that morning in Eggy’s box. It exhorted Eggy to hug Bob. And if Eggy was feeling up to it, he could slap Randall on the back as well. Nothing doing. Too much ardor required. Eggy, nursing thin tumblers of Jack Daniels, said: ‘We are poor little lambs that have lost their way. Bah bah bah. Lord have mercy on such as we.’

  ‘Baudelaire,’ said Dubois, ‘tried suicide, but he only scratched himself.’

  Since when did Dubois know anything about Baudelaire? Even so, poets could not do anything right. We talked Moonface.

  ‘You have intelligence for me,’ I said to Eggy, ‘what do you know?’

  Eggy had recently taken the dear girl to a garden restaurant, then to a bar owned by some Irish with connections to Mafiosi. A nightcap at the Blue Danube was the coup de grâce, Eggy pinwheeling home on his pins afterwards.

  ‘You see,’ I said to Dubois, ‘for days he brags he’s going to get the skinny on Moonface for me, and now, he’s got it, and he won’t tell me a thing.’

  ‘Fork over some dough,’ Dubois suggested, a disinterested cowboy, a gangland enabler.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Eggy, not a little miffed.

  ‘Well? So what’s the story?’ I insisted.
r />   ‘She’s a heavy sleeper,’ Eggy offered.

  ‘Heavy sleeper? And you know this, how?’ Dubois guffawed.

  ‘Why, because Champagne Sheridan told me so. He met up with us at the bar. Seems Moonface is well known there. Says she goes out like a light. And there’s a roommate. That is, if Moonface moves in with Sheridan, there’ll be someone else to consider,’ observed Eggy.

  ‘Hansel, Hansel and Gretel?’ I drolled, ‘or Hansel, Gretel and Gretel?’

  Eggy gave me a look.

  ‘Yes but,’ he said, getting it all out now, ‘she said, and she said it voluntarily, I didn’t force it from her, that not only was Echo groped, remember her, but that she herself, you know, Moonface, she had to fight off Elias. It’s what happened to Tall Anna, too. And now that Gregory has hired Antonio, well, it’s the writing on the wall for Moonface. The place is going to be all boys except, of course, for Cassandra.’