by Norm Sibum
‘We’ve seen it coming,’ said all-seeing Dubois. He continued: ‘If I’d been Echo’s boyfriend, I would’ve handled it differently. I wouldn’t have made a scene like he did in the restaurant. The cops see all that, they don’t want to deal with it. The thing is, you have to make the cops take the allegations seriously. To do that, you have to play the game by the book.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ chuffed Eggy.
I had no opinion, knowing now that, once more, I must revise my estimation of the man Elias, husband to Cassandra. I must also wonder about her. How much did she know or suspect, if anything, when it came to her man’s predilections?
‘Bloody peasants,’ said Eggy, ‘they come here and start treating their women like dirt. Bloody uncivilized, if you ask me.’
‘And you’re civilized?’ Dubois countered.
‘Well, I keep my hands to myself. They don’t go where they’re not wanted.’
‘Like hell,’ said Dubois. ‘We know what goes on when Moonface visits you.’
‘That’s different,’ Eggy protested, ‘and anyway, she’s my complementary function.’
‘Complementary function?’ said Dubois, having yet another occasion to laugh.
‘Yes,’ said Eggy, ‘I could see out eternity looking at her. Forever, you know. Why, it has nothing to do with sex.’
‘Do tell,’ said Dubois.
‘I worry about Cassandra,’ I said.
‘Howsomever,’ said Eggy, ‘I want to sleep with this young Haitian woman I’ve gotten to know.’
‘But you’re 902 years old,’ I could not help but notice, ‘she isn’t going to want to sleep with an old bugger like you, not in a million years.’
‘Yes, dream on,’ said Dubois.
And Eggy looked more surprised than hurt. He had the look of a man utterly unaware of his age and other particulars. It had been a while since we sat out this long on the terrasse, past BBC news time, at any rate. Gregory had built it, and some regulars had showed, and then they were gone, save for we hardcore Traymoreans. Dubois looked natty in his knee-length coat and baseball hat. Eggy looked rather like Lenin, what with the hat he wore. I said as much.
‘But I always get mistaken for Kissinger,’ Eggy crowed, his finger raised, ‘why, back in ’87—’
‘Which ’87,’ asked Dubois, ‘1787?’
‘Don’t get smart.’
‘I think Cassandra wants to go home,’ I observed.
Yes, and I wondered what she did for a treat, for kicking back, as it were. A shot of something from the liquor cabinet? A square of chocolate? The intermezzo from Cavaliere Rusticana? Snuggle with hubby who just might be a sex pirate? A lonely sob on the back porch?
Sleek Babes
Dubois, bored with me, turned the better part of his attentions to the meat on his Blue Danube plate. The occupants of the galley had finally acquired the knack of preparing it to his specifications. Dubois possessed, right down to his fingertips, the air of a man who was in no especial hurry to begin digging his bunker or run for the hills. Life was good.
‘So,’ he remarked just to be civil, ‘it sounds like that Wiedemayer fellow got a phone call from Putin, and Wiedermayer’s leaking the gist of the conversation.’
The cool Francophone brushing-off the politically overheated Anglo. I had spent the afternoon with Hiram Wiedemayer, photographer of antiquities, a traveller in ancient lands. We drank at a bar on the city’s party street while talking doom with a capital D, the day bright and crisp, sleek babes going by, leggy in their heels, cell phone clapped to well-coutured ears. Hiram was entranced.
‘How surreal is this,’ he said, ‘we’re sitting here with our wine, all these gorgeous women, and western civilization is going down the tubes?’
My sentiments, too. And now suited men, men who had the look of men just gotten off airplanes; men who had X, Y and Z to hawk, expense accounts to honour; men with briefcases milled about and took stock of their surroundings and the girls. Hiram Wiedemayer, American transplant, capitalist to his core, nonetheless bemoaned the fact that America was passing up its best chance in years for national renewal. That he was Jewish and obsessed with Israel’s fate only added to his pessimism. He was convinced that, in recent weeks, Putin had backed the U.S. of A. into a corner, forcing its hand on Iran. The Americans would bomb because it now had no other choice, and—
‘Interesting,’ said Dubois, cutting me off as I recounted what Hiram the realist had to say.
But the girls on the street had also exercised Hiram.
‘Good god, those babes. Just look at them, would you? I’m going nuts here. I’ve got to separate myself from America. I’ve got to separate myself from Israel. Can’t keep agonizing over the mistakes they keep making over and over. This is a good city we’re living in. Good place to be.’
I was so agog with the import of Hiram’s words, so inwardly miffed with Dubois’s apparent indifference, that I barely noticed Moonface’s cheery hello, one that proclaimed her contentment with her life for the moment. Even so, I thought it good that she could not and would not ever match for prowess those sleek babes of Crescent Street; she had neither the looks nor the resources nor the killer instincts of a predator. She might wish her men to think of her as pretty Emma, but it was only whimsy on her part, an interlude on the road to Ecuador; or indeed, as Dubois would have it, on the royal path to Ottawa and the civil service.
The Last Comic Standing
Marjerie Prentiss, so I was convinced, wished for Eleanor to continually second-guess herself. It was not enough that Eleanor suffer the occasional lapse of judgment; she must also sour the pursuit of pleasure by way of self-doubt, and then seek advice and pointers from Prentiss as to how best proceed. Moreover, men were not to be enjoyed so much as secured. What hit me about Marjerie’s digs was that her place was unexpectedly Spartan, more so than mine. There was the entertainment console, to be sure. A queen-sized mattress on the living room floor. Black sheets, overstuffed pillows, rumpled blankets. Such a pallet would feature from time to time, so I figured, three loving bodies. A large philodendron and some other plant I took to be a clematis. There was a photograph pinned to a wall, one scissored out, I supposed, from a magazine, and one I suspected I was meant to see. Her pretext for having me over? She had wished my opinion on something or another. But at first, my disbelieving eyes did not quite register the import of the photograph; I stepped closer to it. And saw a male of indeterminate age but younger rather than older, naked save for the black hood that enwrapped his head and the red briefs he wore; he was bent over in an institutional-like corridor, hands clasped behind his knees. Eyes burned into the back of my head. I shrugged, disgust with the image and hatred of the eyes taking possession of my thoughts.
‘And?’ I said.
‘Oh,’ spoke that dully booming voice, ‘it’s just that you’ve never been here.’
Tank-top. Denims. Knobbly toes. The splendid hips. Brittle hair. A gaze that looked at one with intense curiosity, yes, from the bottom of the sea.
‘Well, now I can say I’ve been here,’ I said.
‘You’re not ever going to like me,’ said Marjerie Prentiss, her smile terribly innocuous.
‘I don’t suppose so.’
‘Eleanor says you’re the nicest man.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on my being nice.’
‘Oh, I’m not.’
‘I don’t think you’re nice.’
‘Not at all.’
‘In fact, I think you’re rather twisted.’
‘Decidedly.’
There must have been something like a grandfather time-device in another room; the hour was bonged—three o’clock—and time sounded hollow. Was there not a Lorca poem in which an hour was famously struck? Of course, I was going to have this moment on my mind for a while, her little triumph. That, and the allure of her body, even so. And if the world was going to get any more twisted than it already was, she, she was its clown.
And Moonface, standing before
us, flashed her nails that were not, in this instance, painted. I searched her visage for I know not what, in light of the fact that Eggy had spoken of her sweet mood of recent days. Was it sweet still? Had she broken into a soft-shoe just then, I would have not been much amazed. And fauns appear, and Silenus and satyrs gone mellow, a wine-heavy retinue; all of it as if depicted by Watteau or Titian in dreamy light; Moonface to be anointed Prom Queen, Roy Orbison plucking on a lyre. I shivered. I asked for a whiskey. Moonface rolled her eyes up and to the side, more a maid-in-waiting than a sceptre-equipped queen; and she spoke of how pleased Champagne Sheridan had been to have sat at table with us not so long ago so as to have words with Blue Danubian luminaries.
‘Yes,’ said Eggy, ‘I thought he was rather delighted.’
‘The rookie has promise,’ Dubois guffawed.
‘Now boys,’ said Moonface.
We were, after all, her men. And to speak of Marjerie Prentiss just then would only have sabotaged the pleasantries. Even so, northern light and northern chill were ill-suited to the sweet agonies of desportment; for all that the forebears of Gregory the Greek might have worshiped at shrines of Eros; for all that Gregory’s radio spewed assembly-line burblings of love and loss. Even so, here was Blind Musician as officious as ever with his blind man’s cane, he for whom I suspected Brahms was just a pill to give the unwashed; and presto, the beast was elevated a notch. Here was Blind Musician come for lentil soup. His baritone filled vast subterranean acres with contumely; that we were all of us Philistines. Moonface went to him who had ventured inside. She had developed stratagems for dealing with the man, one of which was to broach the subject of Scriabin and hear, in turn, that the Russian had been an airhead. Blind Musician might sense but he would not see the dear girl rolling her eyes, let alone strike a somewhat saucy pose with her slimmed down hips.
Damnatio Memoriae
Rain fell heavily through the maples. Evening. It seemed I was rooted to the spot, there on the pavement, and were I to move just then I might disintegrate. The window of the Blue Danube framed Moonface, she arrested on her way to a table with plates of food, her attention turned to another table and the customer who had obviously called to her. In a flash, as it were, I saw her life unfold. She was set to love her Champagne Sheridan a while and he her, and this love might or might not deepen and come to define each their needs and wants. A successful foray into Ecuador might seal the bargain they had struck; it might just as easily inaugurate the beginning of the end. No matter, they were young, and the young wade into life, blind to its hazards, optimism a hormone. Moonface might turn her back on Virgil and his poetry (I suspected she already had); she might scale down her ambitions, if any; modify her passions in respect to those of her man; she might even get pregnant and carry the Champagne Sheridan child, but there was always the civil service. She was unfailingly courteous; it was the one thing that could be said for her, and perhaps she had her loopy parents to thank for it. She was just cheeky enough to think herself on the right side of history’s judgment, however she defined it; it was a prerogative of the young, but she had no sense of the ironies. It was only political correctness on her part to suggest that winners tend to die of their success. Politics, then? America, certainly, was nothing but a series of headlines, and yet she would count herself liberal and believe what liberals were expected to believe, whatever that was. And if America was sagging at the knees, then sag away; it had nothing to do with what made Emma MacReady Moonface to Traymoreans. She might, in time, come to have an affair, one that was a reaching back for something she had yet to suspect she had lost. Was she all for true love? No, I was that absurd creature, even as every bone in my body told me that love was only love, and if true, it was never the whole truth. Moonface was in her working mode, hair tied in a ponytail. Coarse blouse, black denims. Her posture seemed exaggeratedly proper. Now she set plates before a bored looking middle-aged couple, she looking straight into the eyes each of a man and a woman having already made preemptive adjustments to anticipated disappointment, Moonface’s smile rich with hope and bon appetits, and was there anything else? Suddenly, standing behind the cash box, was Cassandra, the look on her wide face that of a woman who had just been rudely startled into wakefulness. I knew that look. I had always known it as the Medea look, and whether turned inward or outward, it was lethal. Here was Elias now, and sheepish, he was blinking. Pedestrian traffic parted around me; rain pelted me, the ordinary commotions of an evening remote in my ears. I had no urge to enter the café; I lacked just then the courage with which to fend off Miss Meow’s miaow. I could continue up the street; if I walked far enough, there were other eateries, including a little nook whose Japanese cuisine I once thought to sample. Eggy, I figured, was in his rooms, saving his money for another day. Perhaps Eleanor and Dubois had gone to a movie. Prentiss and her band of merry brothers were to be avoided. Even so, I could not seem to move my feet. Just then, Moonface caught sight of me. Her mouth opened as if to say that, in regards to my person, something had slipped her mind. She was, once again, so sorry.
The next morning, Evie Longoria, once an Alberta girl, Montrealer now, 50-ish cowgirl with a smattering of culture, took Eggy shopping. Eggy paid her for this service. He complained of it later at the Blue Danube; that the woman critiqued how he shopped. Also, he drank too much. Marriage, I supposed, was Zeus-like Eggy’s self-imposed penalty for his vices. For instance, he thought himself married to Moonface (though not to Eleanor), Evie yet another prospect in a string of hectoring Heras.
‘Come on,’ I said, chaffing an ancient sparrow of a man, ‘you love it. It’s attention.’
The look Eggy gave me was that of a rat who knew he was cornered and would fight to the death. When Dubois, joining us, was brought up to speed, he guffawed. Mid-September, the day was humid, warm enough on the terrasse for our pleasant little lives. There was news of Gentleman Jim.
‘Yes but,’ Eggy said, ‘Moonface said she saw him barefoot last night. And, you know, why, it was wet out here.’
‘When was this?’ I asked.
‘Last night.’
‘When last night?’
‘She didn’t say. But he didn’t come in, Moonface pretty happy about that. Yes, he was standing right there, just staring at her through the rain.’
‘Well, it couldn’t have been me.’
‘Of course, it wasn’t you. Effing hell, what are you talking about?’
It was too complicated to explain, Dubois narrowing his eyes. Antonio brought medicinal beer and wine, Traymoreans so many Chairmen of the Board whose bad tempers he must placate.
They were a pair of potted plants joined at the hips—Eggy and Dubois. And when I was once again among them at the Blue Danube, Phillip Dundarave was seeking commiseration in their company, he bent on drinking. He had become, so I figured, a bottom dweller in the pecking order of a three-way.
‘She turfed him out,’ Eggy said, explaining the suppliant to me.
She could only have been Prentiss. Her putative lover had rue slathered all over his powerful frame and sheepish mug, one pint down, a second one breached. Meanwhile Dubois was dangerously silent, and in this perhaps he revealed his true intelligence. Dubois liked to chatter and benignly dominate; no doubt, from Phillip, he was seeking hints as to Prentiss’s intentions. The woman had, after all, wormed her way into Eleanor’s affections; she might even attempt to turn Eleanor against his affections for her. Phillip, too, was also a possible rival, one who seemed to think highly of Eleanor’s indisputable charms.
‘Cunt,’ said Phillip, simply.
‘The rain in Spain,’ Eggy hoo hooed.
And the evenings were getting shorter, Eggy sensible of the fact, his fun threatening to be curtailed by a spoiler called nature. Cassandra brought out lit candles, Phillip slouched in his chair, his inebriated state threatening to shift gears from mere ruing to outright hostility by way of slurred speech turned inward. He reiterated a word which bespoke Prentiss in terms of an anatomical particul
arity.
‘My, my,’ said Eggy and once again hoo hooed, pleased to hear it said, push come to shove, as the word had, at times in his life, summed up his feelings exactly.
Dubois was, however, uncomfortable with the epithet. It was a highly charged word, and one must pick one’s spots, employing it judiciously.
‘In point of fact,’ said Dubois, ‘what is the nature of your relationships?’
There was no doubting what Dubois wished to get at, Phillip sitting up now, glassy eyes alert.
‘Oh,’ he answered, an innocent pup, ‘we just hang out. We aim to buy a house in the country and renovate it.’
‘Yes?’ said Dubois.
‘Oh,’ Phillip responded, ‘do you mean me and Eleanor? Relax, man. Nothing’s going to happen.’
The humidity of an evening threatened to swallow the flame of our candle. Eggy had the look of a man who had just witnessed marvels. Dubois sunk back into silence.
After Phillip took himself off, a lonely man without a secure port in which to lay his weary head, I helped Dubois get Eggy up the Traymore stairs. It had begun to rain again, in any case, the front end of a scaled-down Texas hurricane upon us.
‘Come on, man, move,’ Dubois commanded.
‘I’m moving. Effing hell.’
The stairs negotiated, and free of our clutches, Eggy immediately tottered to his door, his head sunk between his bent shoulders. Dubois knocked on Eleanor’s. I already had it in mind to go back out on the sly. Moonface just might be at that Irish bar down the street. Dear girl that she was, gentle if chameleon-like, she now and then irritated me. I always assumed I was blind, to some extent, to her shortfalls in character. I had to admit that, on her part, passivity as a ruse to control and manipulate was a less than attractive feature of her being. She had every right, of course, to marry her Champagne Sheridan. She had every right to cashier her Traymorean membership for a position in the upcoming Ecuador Expedition. She could decide that Virgil had, after all, bored her to tears; that art required no more sensibility than what was needed to push the buttons of a video-camera. I heard: ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in.’