The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

The doctor at Verdun Hospital is beautiful. But she does not believe Eggy has only a glass of wine a day. It appeared probable she would have him transferred to Montreal General in the morning. He was already looking alright to me by the time I left. He made sure I was to realize that he was all there by recounting his recollection of the events: what happened before he lost consciousness, what went on after he came to again following the arrival of the paramedics, the ride to Verdun H, the beautiful young female doctor … all in absolutely clear and exact details. In my own mind, I could do nothing else but to pronounce him fit to venture into the Blue Danube again as soon as he is discharged. At first, in the ward of patients in rather bad shape one way or another, he looked quite out of place. He thundered a little. Moonface would have felt perfectly at home with his comportment. I hung around a while, and then it was quite late. Anyway, it’s looking up, in no uncertain terms in my book. I’ll see you in the café. Best regards.

  Robert Dubois

  Conseiller d’affaires sr / Senior Business Consultant

  An Apology of Sorts

  I did not believe Eleanor meant me harm. Nor did I believe she intended herself any. I figured I had, at one time or another, become familiar with many of the facets that were the many-sided diamond of what transpired between man and woman, enough to know Eleanor was not mean-spirited, just daffy now and then. She would back hope over experience without a blush; she would then land hard and sound for all the world like the voice of realism. There we were in her bed, pilgrims who blundered into some realm, the particulars of which we seemed to know before the fact and yet, the knowing did not mitigate folly. So that she, after a fashion, apologized. It was not so much what she said as what she did not say. She had not, in fact, gotten to the bottom of me. Well, fancy that. Since when did human beings ever get to the bottom of one other, humankind eminently predictable, but that there was always scope for a little surprise?

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I should’ve learned my lesson a long time ago, and maybe, I didn’t, that I’d only properly know a man in bed. Well, Calhoun, consider yourself reprieved: you’re an effing enigma.’

  I refrained from itemizing a thousand reasons and more that might tell her she was wrong. Among all the varieties of sex one might experience, there was sex that maintained the status quo agreeably or otherwise; there was sex that promised much and delivered little; there was sex that, now and then, quickened the spirit. There was sex that one anticipated ruing and wound up not regretting, really, perhaps because, for one reason or another, no one (Dubois, for example?) had been betrayed by it. Eleanor and I simply collided; our bodies obeyed the physical laws. Her body pleased me. Her mind, pursuing her pleasures and her questions, as well, pleased me, too. If I managed to reciprocate in kind, I wondered if she would tell me. She did not.

  ‘So, lover boy,’ she said, ‘roll me a cig.’

  Yes, I would roll her a cig in this, our new world, one made new by foolishness; one made old by new miseries.

  ‘I think you think God made you for other purposes,’ she offered. ‘But I can’t imagine what purposes those might be,’ she drolled, ‘you poet schmoet you.’

  ‘There’s no god who makes us for any purpose,’ I said, somewhat miffed, ‘just that I do believe something whispers at us every once in a while, and we are either wise or very stupid to listen.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  She was not impressed by my attempt at wisdom, and evidently, she did not find herself in a new world so much as she lay in surroundings quite familiar. She was disheveled at my side, the look in her eyes half smug, half quizzical, what with her gilded curls framing the pleasant features

  of her face.

  ‘You certainly have a splendid bosom,’ I said, yes, like a man who has long loved an image by way of book or print, and then, confronted with the real item, understands why he had been in thrall to it.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘whatever else would my breasts be but splendid. Crikey, Calhoun, it’s not like you to trip over the obvious. How would you describe them? Ripe melons?’

  ‘I think you were a lover boy once upon a time,’ she continued, ‘but I think you’ve retired from the fray.’

  I handed her a cigarette, my thoughts now drifting elsewhere. It had just popped into my head: next, Moonface. It was a demented thought; it was not entirely welcome. I saw the girl begowned in my mentations, whirling, waltzing, singing a tune with coquetry and point. How will I look Dubois in the eye? I bridled, too, at Eleanor’s mention of Marjerie Prentiss with whom two men were obsessed. There was Ralph her beau and intended husband, and Phillip her lover boy. The intricacies of this three-way were what she and Eleanor would talk to death in Eleanor’s kitchen. And then, one evening, Marjerie had come across Eleanor and Phillip in an embrace; she flew into a rage and was just this side of murderous. Subsequently, she and her swains retreated to the Townships to cool off, there where Ralph had a house on which he was working. I supposed that if Marjerie and Eleanor had not gotten so chummy, I would not be lying there just then, in flagrante with the latter, as if Marjerie’s hold on Eleanor’s psyche had made it possible.

  ‘Look,’ I said to a dear friend, ‘we’ve misbehaved. I should have my head examined. But I really don’t want Bob to catch us here like this. I’m going back to my digs.’

  I kissed the good woman’s cheek, a tear forming in her eye. Even so, she said with some heat: ‘Well, it’s been swell. But you’re just going to leave me here beached like a whale?’

  ‘You’re home,’ I answered, ‘how can I be leaving you anywhere? Unless you’re a little uneasy in your mind?’

  ‘Uneasy? You bet, I’m uneasy. Alright, so it was my idea. You didn’t have to go along with it. You never do.’

  Hell’s bells.

  ‘I’m going to miss this, whatever this was, but I’m not much of a lover boy. Never really was. Too effing sombre. If I was hauled up to the Pearly Gates and made to account for my deeds, no hope of bluffing my way through, it’s what I’d say. “God,” I’d say, “take it or leave it.”’

  The thing of it was I had just lied. I had been something of a lover boy, once upon a time, my experiences mixed. Some had been good, some a horror show, some sublime. I had been a prince, a cad, a saint. The gamut, you know.

  ‘I feel damn silly now,’ Eleanor observed.

  ‘Well, don’t,’ I put it to Eleanor, pique stealing into my voice.

  I got off the bed, hitched up my pants, tucked in my shirt.

  ‘Can’t I come over and we talk a little?’

  ‘Now you really are being silly. What’s to say?’

  ‘I just might come over.’

  ‘If you must, you must, but right now, I’m going.’

  SET-PIECES

  Canadian Beige

  We are motoring down the 401, Toronto-bound. Dubois is at the wheel of the van, a white tuque with red stripes slopped on his vain and handsome head. He is happy. Perhaps there is something of the nomad in him, Eleanor in the seat at his side, fetching and chatty, wearing her tarty boots. She says: ‘Why, it’s beige, Canadian beige, the dread colour of November. The colour of those cornfields.’

  Dubois guffaws. It was to have been presumably quite the party of like-minded souls making the trip. Eggy, Evie Longoria, even Moonface. Joe Smithers, aka Too Tall Poet, thought he might be interested; hence the rental of the van now conveying only four lost souls toward the bitch city, Eleanor having arranged that her cousin should lodge us all for a couple of nights as she had a large house. But Eggy did not think he was up to the trek, just out of hospital. And Evie figured that maybe she ought to stay behind and keep an eye on him, an intention which occasioned in me an uncharitable twinge of envy. Too Tall Poet cancelled predictably enough. Moonface, however, does occupy a corner of the back seat; I have the other. Her right leg propped beneath her, her hips a force, she plays with her sandy tresses. And I read Champagne Sheridan in her eyes and his jealousy of her affection for other males. It does not bode wel
l for Ecuador, where she and he are going in January. In any case, Eleanor is determined not to let Moonface’s moodiness affect group morale.

  ‘Did you see that,’ she asks, ‘that sign? A Conversation in Jewellery, my arse. A shop full of whispering earrings? Yuppie heaven.’

  Dubois guffaws. Bright sun. Cold landscape.

  ‘It’s like the icing on a Tim Horton maple doughnut.’

  The slightly musical moan belongs to Moonface.

  ‘What is?’ asks Eleanor, playing along.

  ‘The fields,’ answers the sighing, long-bellied goddess at my side.

  But, as it is, I am distracted by the sight of Eleanor’s knee. Well, it is a welcome distraction from stubble and the first snow and a dead animal on the highway’s shoulder. I worry now that it is a bad idea, this going down to Toronto for a poetry jamboree in which I am slated to participate along with Vietnam-era war resisters, citizens now of a phantasmagorical land. What will I have to say to them after all these years? Nothing, it would seem, as the years have bled away in that which keeps breaking and will break, forever; as anger has a longer shelf life than hope; as I am perversely skeptical of the celebratory.

  ‘It’s going to be vile. Let me warn you.’

  ‘Calhoun, for God’s sake,’ says Eleanor.

  ‘A double-digit line-up of readers? It’ll take forever.’

  ‘More reason to drink,’ Eleanor reasons, ‘speaking of which—’

  The good woman rummages in a commodious bag and extracts her amaretto.

  ‘Anyone else?’ she says, after she has had her swig.

  ‘No? Roll me a cig, then.’

  And so commanded, I roll her one. Then I address myself, like this: ‘Here you are, Calhoun, with people for whom you have the warmest feelings. No accounting for it, but there it is. Dubois is doing what he does best: shepherding. Eleanor is Eleanor, which is to say, sexual, and she doesn’t care who knows it, and she has no trouble looking Dubois in the eye, and consequently, I have no trouble, either. Moonface drifts as she has always drifted, in her body and in her intellect. The part she has to play in this drama of the moment is not a major one for her; there may not ever be a major part for her, but if there is to be one, it’s, as yet, in the future. Look, she yawns. Her thin lips disappear as she yawns. She rolls her eyes up and to the side. You are probably mistaken, but the look she gives you, though she’s abstracted, is remarkably like an interested party look. Her eyes settle on you.’

  A Reckoning in Eleanor’s Kitchen

  ‘So, you filthy beast,’ she says.

  I shrug. Then I blurt out the worst thing I could possibly say, given the situation: ‘Is it any of your business?’

  The good woman gives me a quick, a startled and rather hurt look, then returns her attention to the dough she is working with penitential hands.

  ‘No,’ she says, her voice unusually small.

  But the harm is done, and the truth is, it is not any of her business, and a further truth is that my words might have suggested to her I had had intentions all along, when it came to Moonface; and a yet further truth is that I had no such intentions, at least, not just then; the girl simply came upon me in the wee hours of the morning in that Toronto basement, the Moonface aspirations nothing with which to trifle.

  ‘But you’re not going to let it become an ongoing thing,’ Eleanor says, her voice confident again.

  ‘No, I’m not going to let it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘She’s going to Ecuador with Sheridan. It’s love.’

  ‘She seems to have moved backed into the Traymore. I guess she’s letting Sheridan know what’s what. And what’s what is that she’s tired of his jealousy.’

  ‘Maybe he has reason. I hadn’t realized she could be dangerous.’

  ‘He always has to know where she is, and what woman likes that? Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But she loves Sheridan, I think, and maybe she’ll make a man out of him.’

  ‘She has to make a woman of herself, first.’

  ‘Eleanor, now you’re being, what, avuncular.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m jealous of that twit of a girl.’

  ‘You don’t expect me to keep paying you bedroom visits?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I do.’

  ‘Well, good. We got that straight.’

  ‘But you might want to.’

  ‘I might want to, but I can’t and I shouldn’t.’

  ‘What’s with the scruples? Since when have any of us ever had scruples? You know, I think it’s only Bob who has ever had any, and I know how he gets, sometimes. He can charm a woman’s knickers off at a hundred yards.’

  ‘He evidently charmed yours.’

  ‘He certainly did.’

  I have always admired Eleanor when she cheerfully admits the obvious, and it is as if the discovery is all hers. The good woman slaps the dough around.

  ‘Just a few days left until reckoning time,’ she says.

  ‘What reckoning?’

  ‘The election.’

  ‘Oh that. Yes, well. How about some amaretto for the dread in my gut?’

  ‘Only if you roll me a cig, please.’

  A Reckoning in the Blue Danube

  ‘So you finally did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘You know what you did.’

  ‘You’re going to have to spell it out.’

  ‘You boffed Moonface.’

  ‘She boffed me. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Some difference.’

  ‘Anyway, it wasn’t what it may seem.’

  ‘It never is.’

  ‘We were drunk.’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘I was too drunk to perform.’

  ‘Did you get a look at her bosom?’

  ‘Do you need to know?’

  ‘I guess you did. You know, you must take me for a fool. You and Eleanor. Merde. No, she hasn’t said anything. She’s been too good to me, lately. It’s been a long time coming, I guess, but I think the time for it came, you and her. I don’t know whether I appreciate the fact you haven’t said anything, or she, for that matter, or whether I’m really pissed off because when the cat’s away, the mice will play. So, what do you say?’

  Dubois fixes those blue eyes of his on me, his soup spoon holding steady halfway between the bowl and his mouth. I have no way of knowing whether he is furious or amused or all of the above.

  ‘Nothing, really,’ I say, ‘you know what Eleanor’s like.’

  ‘Yes, I do know what Eleanor’s like, but what are you like? Tell me that.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I’m an ass.’

  ‘No you’re not. Too easy an answer.’

  ‘I’m not?’

  Cassandra approaches the table with the coffee pot.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Dubois asks her, regarding me.

  Her smile ravishes. Her eyes are large and luminous.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answers, ‘what’s he like? Nice. He’s, you know, nice.’

  ‘Yes, I think he’s nice, too,’ Dubois says, stifling a guffaw.

  A stifled guffaw on that man’s part portends a journey into irony.

  ‘He’s nice but he’s a sonofabitch,’ he laughs.

  ‘Sonofabeetch,’ Cassandra mimes.

  ‘God,’ says Dubois, ‘if Eggy finds out what you’ve been up to, he’ll—’

  ‘He’ll what?’

  ‘He’ll be beside himself.’

  Cassandra, smiling, turns around and leaves.

  ‘The next thing you know you’ll be doing her,’ says Dubois.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. You’re a menace.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to apologize for. It just happened.’

  ‘You’ve been fighting her off all this time and you finally gave in?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Nothing ever just happens.’

 
‘The war in Iraq?’

  ‘Let’s not get off the subject.’

  ‘And what’s the subject?’

  ‘I just came from seeing Eggy in his rooms. He’s had another episode. I’m going to call his doctor. I think it has something to do with his medication. I hope so, because I don’t know what else to think, and thinking that thought doesn’t feel good.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Either Dubois was a prince among men or he, too, was fatally flawed, preferring to fixate on Eggy’s health while choosing to ignore the little matter of my penance.

  Dead Bird

  Mornings, and she used to cross the hall and enter Eggy’s lair. And it delighted him, and delighted, he thundered, Zeus-like Eggy, that she was his complementary function. That she—pajama’d and berobed, in beaded slippers—would allow him to think he could reach for her, and he would miss and he would mutter, ‘Ungrateful wench’. However, now Moonface joins me instead, here at the window at the end of the Traymore hall. There is the duplex, half of which Edward Sanders aka Fast Eddy once owned, that abuts Mrs Petrova’s little yard. To the right, on the roof of a garage, head bitten off, breast broken open, is a dead bird. Wind-ruffled feathers are stuck somehow to the rooftop tar. Dead, most lonely bird.

  ‘Cat,’ says Moonface, ‘a cat got it.’

  Orange-leafed maples. That winged carcass. My inert notebooks. Great shouting out of futility. A blast of rock and roll music erupts from somewhere but is immediately extinguished. I have been part and parcel of a generation that wasted itself, however much was invested and saw handsome returns. Corruptions all around.

  ‘Have you called Sheridan?’ I ask the girl-woman at my side.

  ‘No,’ she answers, rolling her eyes up and to the side, that is to say, away from mine.

  The Moonface countenance darkens briefly.

  ‘But I will. I will very soon.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, more brightly now than is necessary.

  ‘I’ll say I like being back in my apartment. I’ll say it’s definitely on for Ecuador.’