by Norm Sibum
‘Yes,’ said Eggy, ‘I don’t think I told you this, but I told Moonface I made a mistake. She should always have been my Number One, not Number Two, reserve position. Hoo hoo.’
Dubois guffawed. He had melancholies of his own, just that he was too much the gentleman to bring them to the table. Eggy’s head began to droop in the general direction of his chest. The wine intake. And that he had spent all morning reading a military history of Quebec. And it was eternal, the wine, the maples, the old women and their pooches, even the boom-boom cars with their infernal music. A red-skirted girl with saucy ankles, cell phone at her ear, smoked a cigarette and strode across the landscape, militant. It seemed Dubois’s heart might break.
The Ruling Classes
So Moonface was sad. And, as she used to do, she swung her legs up on my couch, began pulling at the tresses of her hair. She had already asked if she might phone Sheridan; I reminded her I did not have a phone. Of course. She had forgotten. She missed her apartment but did not think her apartment missed her. She felt she was just camping out, however, at Sheridan’s place. If she still had not returned the books I lent her, it was because she was afraid; it would mean commitment, not to me but to a fork in the road, a decision pending. She asked: ‘Did you ever know a suicide?’
She directed her gaze into space.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘she threw herself out a window.’
‘Oh, that’s awful.’
‘Whiskey?’ I put it to the girl.
‘No.’
‘The ruling classes rule. That’s the thing of it, all there is to say on it.’
‘Avuncular, Randall.’
‘So how’s it going otherwise?’ I asked.
‘We’re going to Ecuador, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Pretty exciting. And we’re getting things sorted out.’
I supposed it was the sex thing that was getting sorted out, and that she meant me to know as much. She had never seemed so sexless. Or else, I had absolutely no interest just then in her charms, only that she was a friend and was confused.
‘I know you’re not happy with me,’ she offered.
‘Why should I be unhappy with you?’
‘Come on. You’re not. You think I’m doing everything wrong.’
‘Are you?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I think it’s great you’re going to Ecuador. You need it. About time you see how the rest of the world lives. Sheridan? Well, he seems solid enough.’
I lied, but even so, she let my less than emphatic recommendation pass unchallenged. Sheridan did not have a clue and yet, he might learn.
‘I just want to paint my nails, flirt, get drunk, boff my brains out. What do you think?’
‘Really?’
‘I could just lie here and fall asleep.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’m going to pour myself a whiskey,’ I said.
She rose from the couch and stood there. A grin manifested on her face, one which indicated she was not exactly sure what it was she would do next. She might as easily perform a striptease as put her John Henry on a Declaration of Independence. As sign someone’s death warrant. As kneel down and pet a stray dog.
‘Maybe I’ll see if my bed will have me,’ she said.
‘Pleasant dreams,’ I said, avuncular, once again.
Sortes Virgilianae
There would come a day, and Current President would pass from the scene; and all the world step back from reviling him, free of this burden. Was this not the vaunted perspective the wise had always cherished? Daydream? Moonface high-stepping in a swirling, carnal red gown, her shoulders thrown back, countenance proud—daydream, too? Truth, beauty, justice—just more daydreams? On TV, the sound muted, the running back spun off the force of the tackle. Breaking loose, he danced in for the score. Cheerleaders in orange. Helmets bright. As I lay on my couch, I opened the Aeneid and read in Book Nine how the Trojans in primordial Italy succumbed to the lust for glory.
Earlier, in the Blue Danube, I sat with Eggy, fruit cup and coffee his lunch. The old man regarded me with shrewd eyes; and it was somewhat disconcerting. Now and then, when he was not hamming it up, and though the looming crack-up of America was not, perhaps, paramount in his thoughts, he nonetheless grew sombre, if not meditative. He said: ‘How are you getting on with your work?’
My work? It did not seem a proper association—my person and work. Eggy continued: ‘Yes but, and well, what do I know, but I think Moonface makes love without enthusiasm.’
‘Are you asking me to corroborate your statement?’
‘I don’t know. How would I know?’
‘How would I? I’ve not slept with her.’
‘I don’t say you have or that you should.’
A portion of peach, by way of a spoon, was embarked on its perilous journey to Eggy’s maw. And either the operations of the universe unfolded according to a set of laws or they did not, and there was no guaranteeing when and if the spoon would deliver its load.
‘Well,’ said Eggy, ‘you’re the writer. You’re supposed to know these things.’
‘Know what things?’
‘How it is with Moonface. Effing hell.’
What, was Zeus-like Eggy calling a poet to his duty? And what might that duty be?
Perhaps Cassandra was mad, as in less than well-adjusted as per the specifications of the ologists, more Medea than a bride compromised by the goof she married. She was chewing gum, her cheeks those of a placid squirrel. There were two ways of seeing how it was with Moonface, and each, almost but not quite, contradicted the other. She was either adrift, or she was doing as well as could be expected. I rose, and as I did so, I instructed Eggy to behave.
‘Oh, I will, alright,’ he replied.
Loneliness rushed back at his person, one that was a tiny frame, the waist set high.
‘Oh,’ he called out, his finger raised, ‘I’ll have to win the lottery. Or else I can’t take Haitian Nurse out for her birthday.’
‘Well then, good luck,’ I said.
‘Hoo hoo.’
So much for Eggy, Moonface, Cassandra. I unmuted the TV. Heard out the silk and gravel voices of the play by play; as drums were pounded; as the very sky itself seemed part and parcel of an echo chamber, shadow consuming more and more of the field on which athletes assembled in opposing formations. On the snap of the ball, these formations lunged forward, fragmented, scattered, formed new groupings, piled on; and then a ball was whistled dead, terminating the action. I held Virgil’s book in my hand; it was a journeyman’s translation of the Latin, one rendered at a time when Sonny and Cher sang I Got You, Babe and Johnny Unitas knew post-season heartbreak. It was not mere affectation to say that, just as the field of honour was divided as I have described by light and shadow, so was I divided between love and hate of the spectacle. That there was joy in the game. That there was a money-machine in it. The great lie was that it was America at its finest. The great truth lay in the fact of America’s genius for hoopla—the trumpets, drums, chantings of thousands upon thousands in an enormous stadium, an immense beating heart of want, so many hopeful faces already betrayed. But never mind. The despotic head coaches, their prowess on display, incurred my distrust. Virgilian warriors in shoulder pads and cleats mugged for the cameras. It was one’s stab at glory; it was one’s culpability in the brightest of voids. If life was meaningless, or if I had been wrong all this time about X, Y and Z and all stations in between, perhaps my enemies the ologists were more right: the gene pool’s ability to withstand infections was what signified, nothing else. So much for an unknown bit of Mozart music that had just turned up. So much for the humongous bailout of the banks on the part of the Feds. So much for another pound of flesh gouged from the idea of a republic. Crisis? Why not have it said that a section of reef had only shuddered and fish exploded in watery space and then returned to calm? There was no more meaning, let alone sense, in it than t
hat. Even so, with an unabashedly heavy heart, I could lament the life and death of a nobody, some butcher, baker, candlestick maker of imperial Rome, and wonder if the meaninglessness of that existence added to or, two thousand years later, subtracted from my own. Here was ancient graffiti: You are Venus, babe. So and So sucks So and So’s cock all through the harvest. It was twenty years at least since I last read Virgil’s epic. Sississboomboombah. I set the book down like one might a mortally wounded animal. Someone knocked. It was not a good time for Marjerie Prentiss to present herself at my door.
A dully booming voice put it to me: ‘Is Phillip here?’
‘No.’
‘Well, can I come in?’
‘You won’t find him in any of my closets. He’s not under the kitchen sink.’
She gave me a look. Faded red button-down sweater. Denims. Flip flops. And she saw that I had been watching a football game. She saw the book on the low-lying coffee table. Perhaps she noted I was in an agitated state of mind.
‘I wouldn’t take you for a sports fan,’ she said.
‘Maybe he’s at Eleanor’s,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe.’
It was evident that she was reevaluating me by way of my furniture. A few chairs. Couch. Shelves. TV and ghetto blaster. A writing desk that I now only used as a place to stack books and various papers. A few prints on the wall of sentimental value, one of which was of a prince of old astride a prancing tiger. The football game was a dancing on graves punctuated by timeouts for ads. Quaintness, so I had read somewhere, was but viciousness turned on its head. Marjerie Prentiss was abused as a girl, so I had been made to understand. If I had sympathy for what the girl had undergone, I had none for the woman she had become, even if, so far as I could determine, she had committed no crimes against person or state. There was always someone somewhere who rubbed one the wrong way; perhaps, for me, she was that being. She sampled love like certain gourmets sample cuisines—empirically. She had the heart, mind, body and soul of the executioner, and it was all legal, all sanctioned, to be expected. She seemed so much more disciplined than I, but to what end? She might never figure in any scenario such as might push for collective darkness; she might as easily pursue her obsessions on the quiet as head a movement; but she was, nonetheless, geist, cipher, paradigm, gateway, permission, full steam ahead for all that was twisted and inane. Perhaps we all of us were that. She had been abused but she had been somehow pampered, her allure the petulance of a beauty pageant contestant. One had courage in the face of certain dangers and none for others; and in regards to Marjerie Prentiss I was a coward and she knew it. Those watery dead eyes. I initiated a shoo-ing gesture with my right hand. I grinned mightily so as to apply a veneer of good nature to a pretext.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m expecting an epiphany at any moment.’
‘Oh, one of those,’ a voice boomed, and she bought it and went for the door.
Picture Father Rome lolling on the banks of the Tiber, calculating odds for the next thousand years—
§
Book VII—The Rain in Spain
Bash
No tree was properly a tree unless hanging from a stout bough were riffraff and runaway slaves, enemy spies, treasonous liberals, sacrificial virgins. Lyre birds aping the moans of the dying. But where were we? Ah, Marjerie Prentiss. She was pretty much as I anticipated, the spitting image of a socialite cum cultural renegade; barefoot, she wore a long, slinky dress. Plunging neckline. Fake tiara. Ironically self-referential. One might compare the forces her mind and body could bring to bear on her surroundings to those of an event horizon. Otherwise, country rock emanated from a machine; I supposed the croonster was crowned by a white stetson, his looks seemingly waxed onto his frame. As I write these words, as I commit to a sheet of paper, to some bit of space-time fabric, as it were, Moonface waitresses here in the Blue Danube. She was absent from the party. She is slipping away from us, her future departure for Ecuador already eliciting the crocodile coos of Traymoreans. Now she majestically imposes on a street cleaner (operator of a machine that vacuums fallen leaves) who has blundered into the café. Monsieur? And even as, with half a mind I watch her, my mind’s other half elsewhere, it strikes me how she in her other-worldliness, and in her misguided grasp of reality (she has the air of a woman who considers the results of human history thus far a travesty, and so has better ideas), stands in my mentations at the border of dream and waking state, and has, despite her want of confidence, the power to consecrate souls. It is the way she flashes her nails. It is the way she unconsciously grabs at her inner thighs. Her sexuality, seemingly at a far remove from the humdrum realities of serving customers in a café, is, even so, as inseparable from the air we breathe as the scent of flowers after a summer’s shower. In any case, I not only attended the party, I dreamed of it, afterwards. Who is to say I will not just now confuse the one for the other, dream for the miserable waking reality that was lived? Well, it went something like this: Marjerie had invited people who were strangers to me. Some women, for instance, whose smiles were too desperate. A Francophone poet, one Merrill Maynard, let me know he was obsessed with physics at their most bizarre. I cannot say I understood a word he put to me, but I liked him all the same. Eleanor sulked. And that she sulked was not expected. She had arranged herself rather fetchingly on the mattress, a quilt of many colours covering it. On one of the overstuffed pillows scattered around the room Dubois perched, a little at a loss. Eggy sat primly on a chair, his grin uneasy. Moonface was invited by way of a card slipped in her mailbox. She chose to ignore it. She did not like the issuer of the invitation, even if she could not tell me exactly why. Now Ralph and Phillip looked for all the world like Errol Flynns in the role of Robin Hood, now like scantily clad bum boys of a Neronian court. Eleanor waved me off as I endeavoured to get to the bottom of her mood. Which should have been, I supposed, Dubois’s business, only he seemed abstracted. Perhaps Eleanor and Dubois had had a quarrel. Well, let us say one drink led to the next. I knew early on it was going to be an evening of dangerous drinking, as when one’s soul chafes at unpleasant company but that the body has no defining limit, and the drink simply disappears in one’s gut. Marjerie Prentiss, for a while pleased with herself, pretended that all she had desired was a casual get-together; but she was, as it were, working the floor, laying claim to the status of the Traymorean one had most to reckon with. Perhaps friction had developed between herself and Eleanor in this regard. Ralph chatted up one of the female strangers. His passion was restoring old houses. Phillip stood in a corner, moodily drinking. Truth to tell, he did not stand so much as pace in ever diminishing circles, and I worried he might worry a hole in the floor and vanish. Now and then he caught Eleanor’s eye. ‘Hoo hoo,’ said Eggy. But no one noticed. Zeus-like Eggy in some godless realm. And when Eleanor rose and made good her escape, she pompadoured as ever, I thought it significant. Phillip followed her, Dubois startled to see it. Meanwhile I was deep in conversation with the poet. He attempted to explain to me the possibility of other universes by way of the physics that would allow for such. It was something to hold onto, this conversation, a ruse with which to fend off the boredom that I figured was coming for me. Dead watery eyes glittered at the back of my head. ‘But the economy,’ I heard myself saying. Merrill Maynard thought me an idiot. Did I not know? Black holes had four dimensions, one of time and three of space, whatever that meant. A woman introduced herself to us. Oh, she did not pay much attention to politics. Her garden and her dog were her handful, she divorced, her only child off with his father in California. The movie business. The poet, physically short of stature, nattily attired, bit his tongue: he was irked. How nice that this woman had a garden and a dog and was divorced. What was this, over and against the near certainty that the universe would simply swallow itself in some far distant prospect of time? So much for beating one’s head against the wall in pursuit of the perfect poem. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘not going to happen.’ Well, what was not going to happen? Perfect poem? Self-
cannibalizing universe? The latter, I said. And I was not to be asked how I knew, just that it was an opinion I had read. The woman, losing interest in us, drifted over to Dubois who had, by now, slid his pillow-perch next to Eggy. Eggy poured on the charm. And so it went—country music, physics, loneliness. The drink, of course. Somehow we were all of us preoccupied enough that Marjerie Prentiss slipped away, unnoticed. Perhaps in the corner of my eye I saw her leave. The poet thought Yeats overrated. I assured him he was mistaken. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, and all that. Merrill Maynard promised he would reconsider, his bugbear Victor Hugo. Send a man out to the store for cigarettes, and a depiction of said action would come to 50 pages in a Hugo tome. I shrugged; I had the opposite problem; sometimes I could not see what was in front of my nose. It was as if my mind, in its stubborn insistence that there was some other more vital reality, had no use for reality, only that words failed the ineffable. Merrill Maynard gave me a look. Eggy was reciting dirty ditties, his finger raised. Maynard gave him a look. ‘The man has a fabulous memory,’ I explained, indicating Eggy, ‘but look at what filth has come to rest in it. Now when a star collapses, doesn’t it fall through to its neutrons, and then collapse further, some inconceivable density achieved, and then—what? Nothingness? I’d say Eggy has reached the neutron stage.’ Maynard smiled somewhat nervously, unsure the analogy was appropriate. I looked around. In fact, the party was a rank failure. The woman whom Eggy would charm evidently figured him as uncouth and a loon, Dubois too much the know-it-all. Two other women who had set up shop, huddling together on the mattress, discussing subjects unknown to us, rose and made their excuses to depart. They mistook me for the host; I passed them on to Ralph who now looked every bit the man of the house-renovation world. He managed to detain them a while with his best I-am-not-a-sexist-but-I-am-master-of-my-universe smile. In other words, he was a decent fellow. Yes, there were serious absences, gaping holes in the immediate social fabric of a gathering. Eleanor, Phillip, Marjerie. I could only assume they had gravitated to Eleanor’s kitchen, a fine room for socializing. Yes, I was curious. And yet I had the feeling that, were I to join them, I would be getting in the way of something that was none of my business. Perhaps Marjerie, realizing that the bash was a bust, so to speak, had thrown in the towel and they were having a high old time of it there in Eleanor’s salon, Maynard the poet and I at an impasse. He was understandably importuned. So now I sit here in the Blue Danube, writing an impression of it all down. Here is Moonface to ask me what really happened. She rolls her eyes up and to the side. It is something she does, and it is, at times, in an appealing way, characteristic of her nature. ‘All hell broke loose,’ I answer, and then return to my reverie, giving Moonface no more reason to hang about. Dubois saw me leave the Prentiss living room, the look on his face that of a man who was amused by something or another, but who was wondering what this other fellow, namely me, was getting up to? The gesture I provided him expressed the fact that I had no idea. I could see Ralph was troubled; even so, he would trust to the fact that, in due course, all would be revealed and explained. He was collecting glasses for the washing up, the room emptied now of all persons save for Dubois, Eggy, Maynard and myself about to step into the hall. And Maynard, seeing that I was about to exit, decided it was as good a time as any to take himself off. I suggested we meet in the near future at the Blue Danube. ‘Actually, the café is named Le Grec,’ I said, ‘you go out the door downstairs and turn right. Can’t miss it.’ I have to say I got the impression Maynard was not much interested. I entered Eleanor’s digs. Her knickknacks and plants and overflowing ashtrays. The lived-in look. She was a solitary who loved the company of men. She was a thinker who, nonetheless, did not vex herself overly much with somber reflections. I raised the kitchen. I was very tipsy. It did not render me anymore sober that here, here was Eleanor in the arms of Phillip, who was backed against the kitchen counter by her hips. Marjerie held something in her right hand. My stuporous eyes made out a pair of scissors that she was about to wield as a weapon. It seemed unnaturally quiet. I supposed that sound had even less chance than light of escaping the gravitational effect of a black hole. It seemed an odd ballet of hooded figures in a deer park, a sky beginning to darken and squall. At first, Phillip was fascinated by Marjerie’s arm so evidently poised to deliver a mortal blow. Then he was mildly alarmed, so much so he wrenched Eleanor aside just as I got to Marjerie from behind, yes, in the nick of time. ‘Jesus effing Christ,’ Eleanor said, unable to trust her eyes. Marjerie, in my grip, did not resist. I locked my free arm around her waist so as to render her immobile. She did not register contact. Woman confronted woman. The amazed and seemingly slow-to-boil Eleanor regarded a sullen Marjerie. Then a grin took hold of Eleanor’s countenance, and it was her disbelief, her guilt, her, hey, stuff happens grin. Phillip searched the refrigerator for a beer. There was none to be had, and he mumbled something about Marjerie’s fridge. Marjerie surrendered the scissors to me and I let go of my captive. She was temporarily bereft of sense, and yet, Eleanor should consider herself put on notice. ‘I could’ve killed you,’ Marjerie dully announced. ‘And you,’ she said, facing me, ‘you’re an accomplice.’ If there was any truth in the statement, it lay so deep beneath the surface of things that it could not matter. Here was Dubois. Dubois, to be sure, understood drunken and crazy behaviour, only that the atmosphere in the room was supercharged. ‘Roll me a ciggie, sport,’ Eleanor asked of me, her hand on her belly, she swallowing. And now, so as to complete a tableau, I supposed, here was Ralph put to the wise by Phillip. ‘Come on, Marj,’ spoke a man resigned to picking up the pieces. Marjerie, as if in a fairy tale, stomped her foot, bare heel striking a faux parquet kitchen floor. Then they filed out, three lost pilgrims without benefit of the world’s understanding. In shuffled Eggy with his cane. ‘What’s going on? Effing hell.’ Dubois took a chair and sat. It was no time for me to be sticking around. Let Eggy and Dubois sort things out. In my digs, the TV switched on, I watched a history of old Warner Brothers films. I learned why Bette Davis was what she was, that her complaints vis-à-vis the studio system notwithstanding, in no other venue could she have articulated her vision. Ditto for Crawford and Stanwyck. Bogart, in the filming of Casablanca, wondered why a man in his right mind would give up Ingrid. My eyes got heavy, even as they rested on the latter starlet’s marvel of a face. I suppose that, in my dream, I relived the evening’s happenings, only in a more confused and lurid light, the details of which I had thought to recount and then thought better of it. ‘Well,’ I say to Moonface back at my table again, wanting her due, ‘things did get nasty.’ ‘Oh dear. Eleanor and Phillip? But I don’t feel sorry for Marjerie. I think, you know, she plays with fire. Anyway, I’m happy. Happy, happy, happy.’ ‘I’m happy you’re happy,’ I answer, and it seems a foolish response.