The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

‘Are you angry with me?’

  ‘Yes, but then, I’ve always been angry with you, even if I have no reason to be. The other night was all me.’

  ‘Well, there was a lot of you all of a sudden.’

  ‘I don’t know where all that lot of me came from.’

  ‘I don’t know, either.’

  ‘I was just trying to be pretty Emma. Emma pretty. I’m angry, you know, because I don’t really look like Garbo.’

  ‘Why would you want to?’

  I know well enough my words are lame, but Moonface does not seem to mind.

  ‘My face is ugly. You say my ears are too small. I’m too bony—’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Well, it’s the truth. And I can’t stick to anything. Can’t finish anything. But I can get boys in my bed and make it seem like it’s a church picnic. And then women will tell me it’s just, what, a behavioural pattern, all to do with lack of esteem and success, I guess.’

  ‘Ah, the ologists.’

  ‘Oh Randall.’

  Erotic burblings. Those pale, slippered feet. And I kiss the cheek of a chameleon-like creature. She will return to Sheridan, or to some other Sheridan, but on renegotiated terms, I suspect. Suddenly, we hear Eggy in his digs thundering at the TV.

  ‘Hang the bastards. Effing hell, they ought to hang. Always.’

  Wherever Moonface and I have just been, the world itself, in all its sad and murderous disarray, has taken a hand, by way of Eggy, suggesting destiny or worse—that all love-making is theatre, a theatre of confusing gestures and sorry words.

  As Noted

  —Emma MacReady (Moonface) Jottings

  Got in late, Montreal twinkling in the cold. Like Eleanor said it would, Bob’s foot grew heavy on the gas as soon as we crossed the Ontario-Quebec line. ‘Like a horse smelling his barn.’ Bob only grunted. ‘See,’ he said, ‘there’s the sign. Danseuses.’ ‘Been there, done that,’ said Eleanor. Randall’s warm hand was inside my shirt, and sometimes he’d squeeze my breast. Like he didn’t want to disengage. I didn’t mind. Because we both knew it couldn’t continue. No one said anything for miles and miles except when, now and then, Eleanor asked Bob how he was doing, if he was getting sleepy or anything like that. Every hour or so, he’d pull off at a service centre for coffee and a pee. No, he was doing fine. He’d get the troops home. It was snug, nestling up against Randall. And then when Bob dropped us all off and he went to take the van back to the rental place, and when, in the hall, Eleanor said to us ‘Dahlings, ah bid you adew’, she really was quite amused by something, and I think I knew what it was but I certainly wasn’t going to ask her. Randall wanted to come in but I told him no, it would be too much. He almost seemed relieved. ‘You read well,’ I said. ‘Did I?’ he came back with. ‘Awful lot to go through,’ he said, ‘for so little.’ Have to deal with Sheridan, soon. He’ll be going out of his tree.

  Here’s what happened. It was after the reading at the bar restaurant, and we were all of us at Megan’s place. She’s Eleanor’s cousin, the one with the big house. Big, expensive, empty, sterile. But she’s a nice woman. Divorced her husband after a long marriage. Got pretty well what she wanted. She’s one of those women who doesn’t wear make-up, partly because she doesn’t have to, she has good features, and partly because she couldn’t care less. Her hair was long, white and fine. Her eyes very sad. But anyway, we sat around in her kitchen, talking over the evening, drinking more wine. Randall was kind of downbeat. He didn’t know why. He had expected more. ‘Sentience is what you expected,’ said Eleanor, ‘something other than a bunch of depressives.’ ‘That’s putting it a little strong,’ said Bob. Megan said she saw those kinds of guys around town all the time. The hang-dog look. Eleanor wasn’t having any of it. ‘Hell, they’re stuck in the Sixties. Still congratulating themselves for that as there doesn’t seem to be anything else in their life to congratulate themselves for.’ ‘Now now,’ said Randall, ‘better that than the great yuppie sellout.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Eleanor, ‘what’s wrong with a few material comforts I want to know?’ ‘I think it’s a lot more than a few material comforts,’ Randall answered, ‘that yuppies have to answer for.’ ‘Well, I’m all yuppie,’ Megan said, ‘and I won’t apologize for it.’ Me, I kept smiling at Eleanor all through the evening. She doesn’t have a high estimation of my powers. Don’t know how Randall managed it, he was so drunk. By the time it came his turn to get up and read, it was so late in the evening and people were irritable. He could hardly stand. But he surprised us anyway: wasn’t boring. ‘Haven’t read to so many Americans,’ he said, ‘since I read my What I Did for Summer Vacation essay to my fourth-grade class.’ That got a laugh. We were in the back room of some bar-restaurant. Back at Megan’s, and Randall went down into the TV room where he was going to sleep. Bob and Eleanor had a bedroom for themselves, and I another, but I hated it. It smelled of something that was supposed to have happened but never did. A clock chimed two in dark, cavernous space. I said to Randall, ‘Guess who?’ ‘You’re hands are cold,’ he said. I wonder if he knew I was coming. He was stretched out on the couch with a blanket. I kissed him, and he sighed. His mouth tasted of cigarettes and wine. I didn’t mind. ‘But I don’t know what you think you’re going to get out of me,’ he said, ‘it’s late, I’m drunk, I’m old, I’m shot, and I’m just another has-been Yank living off the fumes of some virtue that never was—’ I shushed him. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ I unbuttoned my blouse. Enough said. Well, neither of us wound up sleeping much, not because of the hot sex, there really wasn’t much of that, but because the couch was lumpy and narrow. Maybe at one point, I said, ‘Emma pretty.’ I hope I didn’t, but if I did, I don’t care. ‘Eggy will be jealous,’ Randall said. ‘And so will Sheridan,’ I said, ‘but I’m not telling.’ ‘Don’t,’ said Randall, ‘he won’t understand.’ ‘What’s to understand?’ ‘You’re right, what’s to understand?’ Yes, but there’s this much to understand: Randall got avuncular. He said this couldn’t become a thing, that it was a one-off thing, and all that, and we were drunk and tired and maybe not at our best. ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘You took advantage of me,’ he said, ‘you minx.’ ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘maybe I did just that.’ And maybe I said that I was giving him my body in place of the poem I had yet to write for him. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘may the muse never darken your doorstep.’ In the morning, I got a look from Eleanor. Oh, I felt like a woman. Oh, she was trying to tell me she was on top of things and fine with everything, but I think she was a little taken aback. She and Megan and Bob were putting together a big breakfast. Pancakes and bacon. There was snow in the yard that was deciding whether or not to melt. Randall was embarrassed and sheepish and hung-over, too. ‘Well,’ said Eleanor, ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger of winning the Nobel Prize.’ ‘No?’ said Megan, ‘why not?’ Maybe she was interested in Randall, but she might’ve thought it somewhat untoward for him to be playing around with a girl half his age. I would. We hung about in Megan’s place for most of the day. There was a pool table in the basement. Eleanor kept waggling her rear end when it was her turn to shoot. Normally, I’d find this display disgusting, but I could see why she was doing it, especially after she said she hated the thought of getting old. Bob was worried about Eggy, speaking of getting old. I hadn’t given the old bugger a single thought. No, I was wondering what I was going to tell Sheridan, how I was going to tell him I was moving back into my apartment, but that we could still go to Ecuador, seeing as the tickets are paid for.

  A Bit of Academe

  Already in the Odyssey three who are surpassingly guilty detach themselves from the grey crowd of the shades who lead an uncertain life in Hades—Tityus, Tantalus and Sisyphus. All three committed grave assaults on the gods, who in revenge condemned them to eternal torture: the gigantic body of Tityus is unceasingly gnawed by vultures; Tantalus is plunged in a pond the water of which flees from his eager lips, while above him is a tree of which the fruit escapes his ha
nd as he wishes to seize it; Sisyphus unendingly rolls to the top of a hill a rock which always tumbles back down the slope. These souls, in order that their suffering may be more cruelly felt, have in Hades a vitality beyond that of the common run of the dead, who are pale, flimsy, half animate phantoms.

  from “After Life In Roman Paganism” by Franz Cumont

  ‘… but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.’—Lee Atwater, campaign manager for Bush 41 and death bed convert to Catholicism.

  ‘… for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.’

  from “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke

  The more things change, and all that—RQC

  §

  Book II—In Continuation

  More Lollapaloozas

  Church bells pealed on a Halloween night. Once again, I stood at the window at the end of the Traymore’s hall, ghouls to be seen in the back lane. The residence of Edward Sanders aka Fast Eddy, he no longer with us, had been sold and renovated and placed on the market again. It struck me as rapacious, the asking price, the market system a morality, an ordering principle. Young Augustus Caesar could tell himself many things, oh, that he made of the imperium a peaceable business; but for proper delusion he must have a firm grip on the reins of power. Eleanor stepped out her door.

  ‘Roll me a cig, please,’ she said, ‘pretty please?’

  She followed me into my rooms. And she commandeered my couch as I rolled her that cigarette, extending her body across its length, leaning back on the arm rest. She fully intended to be seductive; she was partially succeeding as she exuded body heat.

  ‘I know you won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Talk about what?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m dying to know. You know, you and Moonface.’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Oh, come on Randall,’ she said, a certain unspoken trilling in her plea.

  ‘I mean I know, basically, what happened. But the details, the details, boy, that’s where all the lollapalooza is.’

  ‘Eleanor, you’re a thousand times more perverse than I.’

  ‘I know. Ain’t it grand?’

  Eggy, homuncular man, was frocked in a blue blazer and dark trousers. A red poppy. A smoke-grey pocket square. It was a one-point fold, tip showing. Zeus-like Eggy was lost in that blazer, but nattily so. I handed Dubois my birthday gift to him. He felt the bag so as to determine its contents. The bottle was as decent a sherry as I could find on short notice in a nearby liquor outlet. I figured the substance would go well with his red cheeks and their hairline cracks. Evie Longoria was Eggy’s symbolic date, she playing the part with some humour.

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ she mocked-protested, as Eggy would have her get on with it—the signing of the birthday card.

  ‘Bob is a complicated man. Simple words for a simple occasion will simply not do.’

  ‘Effing bloody hell, woman.’

  Dubois guffawed. Even so, I could tell the birthday boy was in a mood. Where was Eleanor? Evie Longoria, Alberta cowgirl, looked for all the world like a medium of a kind—a reader of palms and Tarot cards. Her hair was swept away from her pale temples, a knitted beret set on her head. Matching sweater. Voluminous skirt. Finally, she passed the birthday card to Eggy who promptly and painstakingly wrote his encomium and signed the thing. He slid the card to me. I read that Evie thought Bob a great guy. I read that Eggy thought Bob had kept him interested in life. I wrote than an arch-materialist ought to enjoy many happy returns of the day. So spaketh spiritual Calhoun.

  There we were in the Blue Danube, Montreal losing badly in its hockey game on the flat screen TV. Moonface kept appearing every five minutes or so to ask how we were doing, her manner sincere, her thin-lipped smile a bit too over-zealous for the occasion. Eggy’s chin raised his chest. Evie Longoria looked out the window into the darkness, passersby all at the outset of revelling. It struck me that she was the marrying kind. It also struck me she was in the hunt for a man, Dubois and me under scrutiny. Dubois endeavoured to keep the conversation going, now that it had to do with Evie and her plans. She was, she said, thinking of moving to Prince George, British Columbia. She interested me, no question; like Moonface, she, too, was a gentle creature, but with levels of rage in her I would not care to encounter should they surface. She did not believe that her daughter was doing at all well, slipping in school. Perhaps a smaller, less sophisticated town …

  ‘And you,’ said Dubois, ‘what about you? Where in Prince George will you see dance and opera and theatre? In the local beer parlour?’

  ‘I know,’ she answered, ‘it’s occurred to me, too.’

  Her eyes moistened. She was a woman who loved both the arts and cowboys. I studied her face like I might a map of the cosmos, in its features my own fallibilities. The eyes set wide apart. Prominent nose. Strong cheekbones. The small, even teeth. Long fingers worried a scarf wound loosely around her neck.

  ‘I just get so tired of it,’ she said.

  Whatever was she tired of? The fully formed tears—they were Rembrandtian pearls. And Dubois took her hand and held it, Eggy slipping deeper into a torpor.

  ‘It’s alright. Let it out,’ Dubois coaxed, Evie endeavouring to smile.

  Just then, though she had all my sympathy, I determined to keep my distance from her. And just then, Eleanor showed, evidently in a mood of bravado. But when she saw what was taking place, she only said: ‘My, my, what have we here?’

  She struck the wrong note.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Evie who, perhaps, had nothing for which to be sorry.

  I rose to offer Eleanor my chair, as it would seat her next to Dubois; she took it and she kissed her Bob, and let him know he would get his birthday present, later. At any other time but this, Traymoreans would ooh and aah Eleanor’s suggestive tone.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Randall,’ the good woman addressed me, ‘for stealing your spot.’

  ‘I’ll get another,’ I answered equably enough, ‘besides, I was just going to step out for a smoke.’

  ‘Hang the bastards,’ thundered Eggy, returning to the land of the living.

  Traymoreans laughed, as did Evie, somewhat shame-faced.

  ‘What do I have to do to get a drink in this place?’ Eleanor demanded to know.

  ‘Moonface,’ Dubois called out.

  And Moonface appeared, her eyes very sexy.

  The Proper Pitch of Grandeur

  Moonface knocked on my door in the morning, a look of accomplishment in her happy gaze. She had phoned her Sheridan, a personable young man whom I deemed deluded as to the Xs and Ys and Zs of this world, to the nasty particulars, his parents arty and liberal but otherwise cutthroat when it came to their ambitions. Moonface had dealt with her Champagne Sheridan who, at least, had the sense to want everything and would, most likely, wind up settling for a great deal less.

  ‘And what did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘He said he was sorry.’

  ‘Did he mean it?”

  ‘Why wouldn’t he mean it?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  I supposed, on the basis of our exchange, that Moonface loved the jealous boy.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I just thought I’d tell you. I’m stepping out to have coffee with Evie. We haven’t talked in ages. I don’t think she’s too happy.’

  ‘That’s the impression I have.’

  ‘She might go away.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘You don’t seem too bothered by this.’

  I shrugged. Below us, Mrs Petrova was unlocking her shop for the day’s business. Nothing seemed to defeat the old woman whom one never regarded as old, not in the sense that Eggy was ancient, with his 902 years worth of age or thereabouts; not in the sense that my bones ached
(rain, perhaps, in the offing); not in the sense that age was the thing of which Eleanor was terrified. How many men would she yet torment before she succumbed to the inevitability of the human condition? Of course, such torments as she had to bestow were pleasant, agreeable, even delicious torments and so, by her way of thinking, why would men complain? We heard, Moonface and I, Marjerie Prentiss and her two swains descend the Traymore stairs. We knew we would hear more from this quarter in the coming days.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘give Evie my best.’

  Moonface gave me a look. It would suit her fancies well that she and her Sheridan carry on in mutual harmony and bliss, and that I settle down with someone, Evie Longoria a prime candidate. The look I gave the girl suggested she think again. Traymorean weaknesses were also strengths: the catch-as-catch-can affair that was Eleanor and Dubois, decrepit Eggy who was, even so, Zeus-like, feckless. Moonface, of course. The indomitable Petrova. And then there was myself: cynical egghead of some vaguely realized but unexportable gifts. Taken in our entirety, we, as such, presented a front of a kind against a thieving world. And what was the world if not a thief horning in on one’s ratty spirit? Marjerie Prentiss was of that world, determined to strengthen the beachhead she had already established in our midst. How very Christian of me to reason it out in these terms and yet, the pagan in me had fought the Christian for years, Dubois with his arch-materialism of no especial aid or help. I was beginning to conclude that one cannot be in and of the world with all its beauties and horrors without some internal mainstay, be it art or be it prayer, be it love or even, as it were, hatred; be it profit-motive; be it some sort of counter-balance, in any case, to evolutionary drift. It was perhaps unnerving to think a brief interlude of physical passion had occurred between us and yet, for all that, here we were in separate universes with our separate hopes and separate anxieties, all of the Grand Canyon filling the chasm that separated her ignorance from my irresolute nature.