The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Off you go,’ I said, like a father to his child.

  Perhaps she figured the conversation had not truly ended. That flickering in her eyes of panic giving way to good cheer was her riposte to me. Often enough, I had seen her on the street performing—as Eggy called it—her chicken shuffle, a pout to her countenance: the world, damn it all, never seemed to cooperate. Seeing her like that, one could never, in a million years, regard her as a beauty or a powerful mind. It was a mystery to me—the source of her peculiar charm.

  ‘Off I go,’ she replied, somewhat rueful, her thin-lipped smile revealing bright incisors.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, just outside my door, and she gestured in the direction of Eggy’s digs.

  She meant that I should check on him. I nodded. She clattered down the stairs. And I did go and check on Eggy, and he was just fine, thank you very much, and he would deal with me later, so I ought to get out of his hair.

  Unfinished Business

  One might say I went into seclusion, this after the election’s impending result was clear. Ohio called for the Illinois senator, and I left Eggy, Dubois and Eleanor in the Blue Danube to carouse. I could confess to mixed feelings, to some bewilderment; to the barest glimmer of a recognition that my adult life, rooted as it was in the bad old days of the Vietnam War, was going to be complicated with something like authentic hope, and I might have to see America in a new light. I ascended the Traymore stairs; in my digs I turned on the TV. Soon after, the Illinois senator was President Elect, and all that remained to round off the evening were the speeches to come. And even when the Arizona senator, officially conceding, quelled the boos emanating from his crowd of supporters and showed he was a gentleman; even as I told myself that America was still a collective madness, I saw no reason to wax cynical against that sea of tearful and hopeful countenances in Grant Park, the victor’s crowd. Perhaps in no other empire but Rome did the contradiction run so deep, that one of an idealistic vein and the political machinery calculated to starve idealism of nurturing gases. Soon Dubois and Eleanor were hauling Eggy up the stairs, and the homuncular old man was singing, singing something like a quack quack here and a cluck cluck there eee aye eee aye oh. Dubois guffawed. I assumed Moonface was at her Champagne Sheridan’s, as her digs were silent. I might not have minded a visit from her just then, and God only knew to what such a visit could have led.

  In the morning, the air unseasonably warm, I occupied a bench in the nearby park. This park had the shape of an arrowhead, of the prow of a ship bearing trees of yellow, tattered leaves to some fabled port of call. But it seemed to me I was sleepwalking even as I sat there, alone with such emotions as I was sure no Traymorean would appreciate, much less comprehend. Sleep, so far as I could determine it, had been dreamless, the night before. There is the bottomless well of self that no light ever penetrates. Even our noble boulevard seemed unusually quiet, the morning’s commute spent. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it. Passersby had the manner of feudal subjects. I half-expected her and, soon enough, I was set upon by Sally McCabe, she a beauty queen from my high school days, misbehaving daughter of a VIP. Her voice had long since been a mainstay of my mentations. She spoke: ‘So, Randall, here you are. Are you not pleased? Here I am and, in America, a page has been turned. Or don’t you know how to handle the pleasure? Aren’t you just a little homesick now for the desert we knew, for the grandeur of that emptiness, for the teenage cruelties which attended our every breath? Especially now, now that the people have proven, once again, that they can turn an argument on its head and confound the world. That man as president—what audacity. Oh Randall, don’t give me that look. Don’t you recall how grimly you lusted for me, how steadfastly; how I was the whiskey, the boffing, the splendid starry nights? Alright, so it was all a horror to you, but where else, where else in the whole wide world is this possible—me and electoral surprises? I mean, really, Randall, here you are in this most staid of phantasmagorias, long in the tooth, condemned to the sidelines, a feckless, inconsequential poet. You miscalculated. Don’t you see that now?’ I answered: ‘Sally, oh Sally, no doubt you have a point. No doubt I have missed your charms, even if I can’t say I ever really had the experience of them, save for the singularity of a kiss and a cheap feel. Still, I’m not ungrateful for what little there was. I remain open to your blandishments, just that, well, I’m accustomed to the life here, to the provincial doldrums of this Jezebel town, and I’m not persuaded that history has been turned; that there is plenty of scope for it to turn yet again, and not for a happy outcome. Surely, you recall what you taught me: the infinite promise of your thighs a more compelling infinity than the hazards and happenstance of justice, as welcome as they are, at times.’

  She wrinkled her delectable nose.

  ‘Randall, you were always a little stuffy even when heroic, but I’m flattered, nonetheless. Care for a kiss? Randall, Randall, just kidding. Alas, we’ve gotten wise. I do note, however, that certain women hereabouts have made inroads on you. Lucky you. But don’t worry. As it gets said, this, too, will pass.’

  I was in Eleanor’s kitchen, uncomfortably so, for all that the room was the finest of Traymore rooms, a commodious salon. Perhaps the source of my discomfort lay in the persons of Marjerie Prentiss and her carpenters Ralph and Phillip. Ralph and Eleanor were discussing the election results in tones that registered their approval. Phillip smoked and paced. I gathered he had hit up Eleanor for another loan, he in arrears to the Magog constabulary in the Townships on account of some drunken foolishness of his. Marjerie had not bothered to dress, she in drab, linen nightwear that reached her mid-thighs. It was garb in which a girl might sleep who still lived in the depressive air of the parental home. And perhaps Marjerie figured that no one was paying her sufficient attention. Or perhaps it was her argumentative streak, but she pooh-poohed the President Elect, saying she did not know why everyone thought him the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Ralph gave her a look, one that said, no, that was not the point.

  ‘Things are looking up,’ I offered, uncharacteristically cheery, ‘but the fact remains that the Americans are still bombing wedding parties. I mean, how many wedding parties can they blow to kingdom come?’

  It was a question made to order for rebuttal.

  ‘As many as they want,’ a dull voice boomed.

  ‘Really?’ I said, knowing I was about to get dangerous.

  Eleanor shifted her weight in her chair, dubious as to the turn the conversation was taking.

  ‘Just bomb them all,’ Marjerie recommended, fixing impassive eyes on me.

  Phillip lit another cigarette and continued to pace, any politics but a workingman’s politics alien.

  Ralph frowned. Marjerie’s intended had a comical set of ears, as they were large and they stuck out from his head; and they, to my mind, imparted Britishness to him. In fact, one of his parents, I could not remember which, was a Brit.

  ‘What’s that going to solve,’ he asked, ‘this bombing everybody?’

  ‘Yes, well, what’s talk going to solve?’ Marjerie shot back, the acme of reason.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Eleanor, a little distraught, ‘I don’t know, sometimes, what I see in you, girl. Tell me, Marj, what it was I saw in you?’

  Eleanor poured herself a taste of amaretto. She was rarely unsure of her mind, but in this instance, it seemed that conflicting loyalties were taking a toll on it. She asked me to roll her a cig. His gaze passing from woman to woman and back again, Phillip, no doubt, was confused as to which of them was most his heart’s desire. Or did it matter, and he would have them both, if he could, in no particular order, and not necessarily separately? Ralph, with the air of a man who was forever picking up the pieces, wondered aloud why Marjerie was always, what, a contrarian, was always wishing for hateful things to happen to people she chose not to like.

  ‘They do hateful things to us,’ was Marjerie’s simple reply.

  Yes, and she had only to arch her back, as it were, which set off her bosom to advantage
, nightwear lifting from her thighs so as to remind the man she had ascendancy; she called the shots when it came to lust and considered opinion. Eleanor, no stranger to the arts of seduction though she had not the patience for them, found this little demonstration of prowess on Marjerie’s part irksome, Phillip about to leap out of his pants. He had the air of a man who had been overlong in the woods and was not uplifted by the experience. Marjerie’s eyes narrowed. I was sensible of her charms, but I was also getting used to them, a development which permitted me to see the woman in a somewhat farcical light; that she really was rather provincial. And, as I was about to reach across the table so as to deliver Eleanor her cigarette, Marjerie intercepted my hand, held it in a show of significance, extracted the cargo, and placed it between her teeth, the only insouciant but empowered entity in the room. And she waited until one of us thought to offer her a light, and Ralph was the first among us to cave, as a gentleman does gentlemanly things. It seemed to me that whatever one thought of the woman’s performance, she meant that one should think on it, and if one thought her contemptible, so be it. She squirmed like a coquette, just to put icing on the cake, she getting to be a middle-aged sex kitten, a Lolita who had unfortunate views. As there was no gainsaying her, I rolled another cigarette. And when I finished, I rose from my chair, went around the table to Eleanor’s perch, and placed the item with its rightful recipient all the while I stood behind her. I lit it. I grazed her cheek with mine, she somewhat bewildered.

  ‘Must run,’ I said.

  ‘Must you, dahling?’ Eleanor trilled, now discovering her role in this most minimal of dramas.

  ‘Yes, I must,’ I asserted.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, in acknowledgment of them.

  ‘Marj,’ I said, perhaps over-familiarly, addressing a wench, a woman who had not in her the slightest iota of the capacity for love, ‘you are a piece of work.’

  Perhaps I paid her tribute. Perhaps I served notice. A few mirthless chuckles in the room.

  ‘Whatever does he mean?’ she asked, as I departed.

  I heard Ralph reaffirming that President Elect was good for the world. I heard Marjerie snort. Phillip wondered if there was any beer.

  I stood a while in the hall, staring out the window at a backyard world. Towering maples. A lilac turned yellow. A dead white bird on the roof of a garage—It was a splendid day, bright and warm and very autumnal. I was not surprised when I heard the padding of Marjerie’s large and unlovely feet on the carpet. It would not have been like her to leave loose ends hanging, and having reached me, she resumed an old conversational thread: ‘You don’t like me much.’

  To be sure, I was weary of being told that I did not like her much. I wished I could say I thought her confused, because misinformed. Or that I could sympathize with the fact that, as a girl, she had been abused, passed by her brother from friend to friend. I could not. She was, how could I say it, perverse from the outset, though the ologies might argue that no one is born predispositioned. I could see that, despite the charms of her body, she had other charms as well, and could jest and smile and bat her eyelashes and treat anyone she chose with the warmest regard; but that, in her case, there was always a hook, all roads leading to it.

  ‘I hear you’ve been having adventures,’ she said, with ill-concealed amusement.

  ‘Well, well,’ she added.

  I turned and looked straight into her. She really was amused, her watery, dead eyes registering the fact that her mental landscape had somehow been altered in interesting ways on account of my shenanigans.

  ‘It’s not any of your business,’ I said.

  ‘Why is what I do your business?’

  ‘I’ve not made any of it my business. In fact, I’d say you go out of your way to make it my business, and that’s what I don’t like. And, if you must know, I don’t know that I like that you make it Eleanor’s business, but then, it’s between the two of you.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  There was no mistaking it: she really was amused. And Lucille Lamont, pseudo-Traymorean, was now saying that, yes, it had been murder, and she had done it because she could do it; oh, not because she hated Marcel so much (she had loved him now and then), but because if she had not killed him he would have killed her; that is, his drinking and his problems would have eventually ruined the marriage and she believed she had deserved better. Lucille Lamont was a woman who knew what she knew, and what she did not know could hardly have been relevant to anything that mattered. In any event, she had gotten away with it. Death by misadventure, so the police put it. Was Marjerie Prentiss a witch that she could summon this voice of Lamont and have it plague me? Just as I was beginning to think I would get the worst of this exchange with Marjerie, Eleanor stuck her head out her door and called down: ‘Are you going to have coffee with us or what?’

  Well, she was not inviting me.

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ a dull voice boomed, and then it said, addressing me, ‘it’s not like I have to sleep with every man I meet, because I don’t, and I’m actually quite selective.’

  Those words of hers, I assumed, explained everything. She had placed the tip of her forefinger to the corner of her mouth, standing there playful yet myopic and, as ever, tickled. Perhaps one had to surrender all arguments to her if one wished to keep one’s spirit intact. I resorted to an extreme measure: ‘The rain in Spain,’ I said, ‘always.’

  Long Fingers of Crimson Cloud

  And perhaps I was, after a fashion, in love with Moonface, the realization a bullet taken smack between the eyes; she a woman still pretty much a girl. But that it could happen to anyone, yes, this love-state, even to a cynic such as me. And how like a boy: this urge to tell her of this love. Say, did you know swans mate for life because courting uses up too much energy? Now Dubois was political; he had organized and campaigned; by way of his business dealings, he had helped to direct flows of cash to needy coffers. He read the memoirs. Brian Mulroney. Paul Martin. Ex-prime ministers. He must have known his René Lévesque chapter and verse, how the man had been born in New Brunswick and was raised in Quebec. He argued Trudeau and Diefenbaker with Eggy. Suggest that the Kennedy brothers had made possible the liberal confidence, if not the swagger, of a Trudeau, and Dubois would more than likely agree. I myself had no desire to impose my sensibility on anyone; it is just that I resented being imposed upon, I a muttering egghead hoping against hope that President Elect, asked to walk on water, would not sink like a stone.

  The sun shone in the hazy sky, the celestial entity on a line complementing the axis of our noble boulevard. It would make the hour of day roughly three o’clock. The Blue Danube terrasse was littered with crinkly leaves; I swept some off the table at which I sat. Moonface brought me soup, generic minestrone the offering. And girls in tight denims and boots went by, no particular cares troubling their gazes. Blooms were surviving the odd night of serious chill, but their days were numbered. A pesky wasp. The autumnal light put me in mind of Venice, as when one might look in the direction of Mestre, pollution augmenting the red glow of sunset. In receipt of some windfall, I would whisk Moonface off to a hired palazzo, and we continue our session and argue the merits of Goldoni or Titian, or of the painter—his name always escaped me—who depicted the snake-bit Eurydice in a time out of mind and far beyond the crassly banal. It was my natural milieu, so it seemed to me just then, and it ought to have been Moonface’s, as well, her hips too much slimmed down, so I figured, alarmed. She went back inside, not a word exchanged between us, none needed. I had figured, too, that Eggy would take advantage of the warm temperature and avail himself of the terrasse, not many opportunities for that left between now and late April. I half-expected to see the homuncular man at 82, or was it 902? years of age, stumping along with his cane, hardly able to contain himself, what with some new tidbit of gossip concerning a nurse or a bank girl. Perhaps Dubois would show, vain and handsome Dubois with whom I remained on easy terms, despite Eleanor. Some skies could afford the histories that un
folded beneath them. Perhaps this one could, too, this New World sky lacking—and here was the painter’s name—its Giorgione and the enigma he depicted and suffused with menace. Was I not thoroughly conversant with the poetry of heartache, the pop tune lyrics of my youth?

  Long fingers of crimson cloud, the sun about to expire, and here was Marjerie Prentiss. Yes, here she was, party girl all made up—lip gloss and eye cosmetics—and her triumphal mood was the wind in her sails. She had the air of a woman who, but an hour ago, had overcome a particularly besetting fear. It did not seem she was just passing by, she taking a chair, her voice dully emphatic: ‘You see, we don’t need to ask your permission.’

  I had no idea what she meant. Short skirt. Striped leggings. Modish jacket. And in the corner of my eye, I saw Moonface stiffen inside the café, exchanging polite words with the Whistler. Chameleon creature, daughter of a minister (United Church), Moonface was a girl who was too lady-like to admit that sex was carnal and yet, propose to her a somewhat off-colour joke and her dimples might surprise one, and one might wonder what she knew and when she knew it. And she who, otherwise, insisted on justice for all her customers no matter how irritating their behaviour, was not pleased to see this latest advent of Marjerie Prentiss. Moonface was somehow wise to this woman, but in ways of which she was entirely unaware.

  And here were Eleanor and Phillip and Ralph, the threesome arm-in-arm, tipsy already, up to no good, a procession scattering leaves. They might as well have been skipping home from school, their pace, however, ceremonial, Eleanor’s shiny, black boots contrasting greatly with the men’s sneakers. I knew the look on her face, and now Marjerie’s remark was effectively explained, my heart sinking at the knowledge, Phillip flicking a cigarette into the street. Collegial Ralph, his natural instincts those of a prince among men (and yet how blind he was), steered Eleanor onto the terrasse, his eyes large and luminous with what he understood as spiritual love, Phillip now bringing up the rear, seemingly bored. Well, the sky was spectacular, worthy of note, the light near silvery-gold, what with the autumnal trees. The eyes of Moonface were a rich, golden brown, or so I reminded myself. It was as if nature had designed them for this moment, and this moment only, the many atmospheric variables producing the effects to which we were all witnesses, unlikely to combine again in quite this way, that sky aching with transcendence. Sex was, in part, a desire to satisfy curiosity. Even so, Marjerie Prentiss had not, in the preceding minutes, aroused my curiosity; rather I was experiencing an unaccountable urge to defend my person.