by Norm Sibum
The Checkers Speech
Marjerie Prentiss was up to something. Since when had she come by personality? How was she now hapless and vulnerable, a star-crossed lover, a clown for whom the world had much laughter and sympathy, if not love?
‘You are a dear girl but—’, said Eleanor, playing along with a stage performance.
‘And what’s this but?’ Marjerie interjected, we at table in a fine room, Eleanor’s kitchen.
‘You’re always in my hair.’
If Eleanor was truly exasperated, she was also at pains not to offend. I was offended, Marjerie’s skimpy garb but a night shirt, one that proclaimed for the wearer the right to trot all those intimacies such as had accrued to her body over time from place to place without the inconvenience of a critique, without regard for modesty of any kind, be it that of body or spirit. If Eleanor had invited me over for a dollop of amaretto, a substance I did not just then need, having come from a bar, it was clear that what she really wished from me was moral support. Eleanor’s objective, so I could plainly enough see, was going to prove a futile quest.
‘But I thought you liked me,’ a dull voice boomed at its host.
The quality of that boom was like the expansive and yet spirit-numbing sound of a standing clock in an empty room.
‘I do like you. Effing hell. But I don’t need to know every frickin’ reason why you can’t just yet marry Ralph because Phillip, you know, has his rights, too, and you can’t marry both, but it seems you have, anyway, God love you.’
So Eleanor had her five cents worth.
‘You make it sound like I’m greedy.’
‘That you are, girl. That you are.’
‘And you, well, I know you don’t like me, but what do you say?’
I supposed Marjerie Prentiss could not wait to hear what I might have to say. To call her a whore was an insult to whores, but betrayal was another matter; and I did not believe that either Ralph or Phillip had understood what they signed on for, and she was always throwing pixie dust in their eyes. She had a bottomless supply of pixie dust. I shrugged.
‘I don’t think it matters here what I think,’ I lied, taking the coward’s way out.
‘It might matter,’ Marjerie briefly allowed.
‘Alright then,’ I grimly responded, ‘it might.’
Hers was a massive ego; there could never be enough on hand to feed it.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Marjerie observed.
‘No one said there was.’
Now Eleanor was lying.
‘Men do what men do. I do what I do.’
‘But I don’t always need to know about it,’ said Eleanor, returning to an earlier insistence of hers.
‘Why not?’ asked Marjerie, ‘everyone loves a sordid tale.’
Was the woman capable of levity? She would claim the high ground of emotional, sexual and spiritual honesty, no matter the shine of the innocence or the richness of the depravity. What I did not say was that she simply liked to talk about herself to the exclusion of all else, sex a ready-to-hand confusion, an infallible source of the self-referential.
‘I’ve nothing to hide or be ashamed about,’ said Marjerie Prentiss. ‘I’m going to marry Ralph. I like having sex with Phillip. They know it. They understand it. They’re happy with it. Well, maybe they’re not always comfortable with it all the time, but men, you know, they ought to face up to themselves. Confront their sexuality. If they only knew it, they’d know they prefer to be in bed with me than out in the cold with no one.’
‘You really believe that, don’t you?’ I said.
The look I got suggested I was a simpleton. The look I returned her suggested she was demented.
‘I don’t know,’ said Eleanor, ‘it sounds to me like you’re talking through your hat.’
The look Eleanor shot my way wished I would say something useful.
‘Roll you a ciggie?’ I offered.
‘Besides, you’ve had your adventures,’ and it was Marjerie addressing us both rather pointedly.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Eleanor, a little chuffed, ‘I’m an adult, and I don’t go around rubbing Bob’s face in it.’
‘Really?’ said Marjerie, on the verge of a triumph.
I heard Nixon challenging Stevenson to an audit.
‘Oh dear,’ I said, Eleanor and I alone now in her kitchen, Marjerie Prentiss gone off to dress and get about her day’s business. She had sailed out of the room, prevailing winds favourable to her.
‘Yes,’ said Eleanor, ‘I know.’
But what did the good woman know? That Marjerie Prentiss was so obviously delusionary? That sex, for her, was a military campaign? Perhaps I was guilty of hyperbole in this, but then ours was a culture much given to overblown speech, our collective existence sheer bravado, our resources over-extended, our reason to live but a jamboree of consuming them, and here it was that I was a creature fully persuaded of the pleasure principle.
‘I like to think,’ Eleanor said, ‘that I know what I’m doing, and even when I’m clueless I know what I’m doing, but lately—’
‘The mind is the source of all treachery,’ I commented, the pedagogue in me rising.
And this fact of its rising could not be good news for a simple man and a simple woman engaged in a rather simple ritual, one consisting of amiable chit-chat, cigarettes, amaretto, flurries in the forecast.
‘No kidding,’ Eleanor snapped.
‘Besides the sowing and the reaping, what’s religion but the attempt to get the mind in hand,’ I continued, somewhat perversely, the pedagogue always angling for his moment in the sun.
‘Dionysus is what it’s all about. Striking the balance. Worship him over much, and you’ll slit your own throat. Worship him not enough and he gets peeved and resentful and retaliatory—’
‘Don’t know about any of that, Mr Calhoun. You’re the expert. I just want some peace and quiet.’
Coming from Eleanor, these were stunning words.
‘You? It doesn’t seem like Eleanor, Eleanor.’
The good woman gave me a look.
‘I’m only ologizing, and God knows that ologizing is the enabler of all treacheries in the mind. If only DH Lawrence had been more tough-minded, he might have been on to something—’
‘Sod off, Randall.’
The good woman gave me yet another look.
‘You don’t have to fight her or reason with her or, in any way, attempt to correct her behaviour. Just don’t feed what fuels her fires. She’ll lose interest and go and bother someone else.’
‘You think so?’
‘I think so.’
‘She’s like one of those dogs, all jaws, that can’t let go once a grip has been got.’
‘Could be,’ I said.
‘Well then,’ I surmised, ‘maybe drastic action is required. It’s just that should you lay down the law she’ll see it as an excuse to circumvent it. She’s not one to shy from a challenge.’
‘Why is everything so complicated?’
‘Lack of good will,’ I explained.
‘Is that all?’
‘It’s a miracle anything good happens at all.’
‘You cynic.’
‘Card carrying.’
She was beginning to get that look in her eyes, the sweep of which would melt everything that was solid in me. It was not that she was something on the order of a wanton slut, far from it, but that for her the body was truth, and if not that, then the essential reality. The mind was a necessary evil.
‘Randall,’ she purred.
Life was martial arts, and I must somehow turn the force of her momentum to my advantage.
‘Yes, Eleanor?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know nuttin’. Damndest thing.’
‘You know more than you think you know. You just don’t like the burden that knowing entails.’
‘Effing hell,’ she said, that look of hers a little glassy now.
And it was then, th
ough I had always known it, that I knew for a certainty how Dubois was her complementary function; as he, despite the fact he was vain and handsome and considered himself beyond reproach in most matters, especially those of intellect, was born to manage, and to manage not for his own gain to the exclusion of all else, but for the commonweal. Unless pressed very hard to the wall, he could take this woman who had been the apple of his eye in stride whereas I, cravenly selfish, had not the patience. But best I not bring up his name; it would only suggest she was something of an idiot for not having cottoned on to this truth, herself.
‘So you see,’ I said, apropos of nothing, ‘where there is will there are ways. Life just doesn’t give up the ghost. On the other hand, I have a hard time relinquishing the suspicion that, in the human mind, evolution is at odds with itself. It’s why I get overwrought and drink and pray. The poet’s S.O.S.’
Yet another look, one approximating shrewd calculation.
‘You’re a strange bird,’ Eleanor said, ‘otherwise I’d fancy you.’
It seemed I was let off the hook.
So I went to the Blue Danube to drink and, as it were, to pray. I prayed to the long-bellied goddess bringing me wine.
‘Emma,’ I said, calling Moonface by her proper name, ‘I’ll wager you that most of the culture wars would simply disappear if men and women just stopped talking so much nonsense about sex.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ said Moonface, rolling her eyes in anticipation of cheap entertainment.
‘Well, women think they know what men are and men think they know what women are, and none of it is the case, in any case—it’s just so much bad will and ill-temper and too much indulgence in ologizing—’
‘Avuncular, Randall, avuncular.’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
A long-bellied goddess had just quelled my effusions. I looked around to take stock of who was who and what was what—Gregory picking at his food, Cassandra discussing food, to be sure, with Serge in the galley. Miss Meow sat alone, her eyes turned in on herself, her conversational patter directed at unseen entities. Blind Musician had not been seen in ages; I assumed he was on yet another cultural tour of the provinces; or else, he had, like Fast Eddy and apparently, Gentleman Jim, departed the neighbourhood. Joe Smithers aka Too Tall Poet was forever passing by and looking in, but it seemed he could not bring himself to enter; perhaps human contact, above and beyond that of faculty and students at the college where his pedagogical gifts were employed, was simply too much for him; but that he had settled for Drunkin’ Doughnuts over the amenities of the Blue Danube seemed a political statement calculated to twit the hoity-toity regulars here.
‘So?’ asked Moonface, ‘are you finished?’
‘I think it’s a good idea you’re going to Ecuador. Not a bad idea, at all. But I should’ve taken you to Rome.’
‘Yes, you should’ve,’ Moonface agreed.
It had to have been chance, I reasoned to myself, that wrought such fragile propinquity between us. Or else it was the ghost of Virgil loath to allow his shrine-fires to flame-out, Moonface and I the last Virgilians, how inconvenient, when we might have been the vanguard of our respective ages, bringing the blandishments of change to the world and its numberless dilemmas.
Executive Orders
I had every reason to believe I enhanced the cause of Traymorean life. Was not Eleanor the beneficiary of my wisdom? Did I not supply Moonface with riddles on which to chew as she, with rolling eyes, viewed her future? Dubois must reconsider his shabby materialism in respect to my challenge of it, and only Eggy, and only because he was a consummate drunkard, safely danced, cane and all, beyond my ability to corrupt his raison d’etre; besides, he was Zeus-like Eggy and one does not second-guess a master of the universe. For all that, the failure I most assuredly was invited fresh rounds of self-castigation. That I existed on my father’s blood money was suspect. I might have sharpened my wits and written for a living, or worked at something, at least, even at the horrors of an academic regime. But no, I idled, and in the idling, besides redemption, I assumed that thought might bloom in my mentations as a natural consequence of the ebb and flow of failure and the learning experience. In other words, the contemplative life required leisure, and I was, perhaps, conceited enough to believe it. I sat there a long while in the Blue Danube. It was wintry outside, not that it snowed but that it was windy-cold and ugly. Now and then I looked up at Moonface as she went by the table to serve a customer, and I may as well have been a child searching the face of his mother for signs of trouble. Had Moonface maternal instincts? Were those babies hanging off her hips as she mulled over Ptolemy Soter? I was briefly married once; I avoided fatherhood. I had not marched in the streets since my teenage years. My faith was all catch-as-catch-can, as much a matter of whim as anything like true conviction. God was convenient; God was inconvenient, depending on which side of the bed one fell out of in the morning. Likewise, justice. I was surrounded by people who believed that, on the strength of self-empowerment, they had mastery of their lives if not of life itself, and I was always just this side of genuflecting to the spectacle, ready to concede it my sloth and over-all inadequacy; just that, deep down, quite far down in my grotty soul, I could not for a moment believe it true. Which then gave me cause to question how great a portion of illusion was crucial to the maintenance of Civic Life and the well-being of Civic Smiles. Did I in my person represent the arts of the diabolical, or was the devil in those other details—those fabled leveraged margins and dinner and digestifs at the St James Club? Perhaps these were old and quite hackneyed concerns and, if so, why was I still on about them? It was being written that President Elect and his team were reviewing the executive orders that Current President, over the course of his tenure, had so far issued; one assumed they intended to reverse the thrust of, for example, the torture regime, the surveillance state, the undermining of environmental protections and the like, all in the name of a free market system and liberty. Well then, well and good. I would be the first to acknowledge the better good of their virtues over my craven vices; and I would not be the last to worry that it was all so much whistling Dixie; that the apostles of the absurd had had it right all along, Judas Iscariot having been one of those; that, yes, even when in the presence of a Loving God, there was no rhyme or reason, just time and its unfolding; in time the leaves falling; in time Moonface rolling her eyes.
And in my digs, the wine inviting sleep, sleep bringing on Dreamland, the realm was one in which I hailed Moonface with ‘Hail Ptolemy Soter!’ A crazy wild realm, Moonface dancing on her long toes, Traymoreans cheering their own.
§
Book III—Mixing-Bowls
Caprice and Beguine I
—‘Bliss was it in that dawn; to be alive and to be young was very heaven.’ Zeus-like Eggy, his recital complete, his finger raised, now thunders: ‘Wordsworth, I’ll have you know.’ Eggy’s choice of pocket square is a two-pointer for this evening. Elegant Zeus. Gregory, at another Blue Danube aka Le Grec table, picks at his dinner. Build it and they will come.
Caprice and Beguine II
—He, of course, is a playboy of the western world. Live a thousand years, and one might have a go at just about anything. So Eggy says, waving Moonface over with a tiny claw, ‘Here’s a story. Thor, you know, the god, he thought to reveal who he was to a lass he’d just ravished. What do you think he said? Well, of course, you don’t know, but I’m telling you. He said, “Hi, I’m Thor.” She said, hoo hoo, she said, “So am I but I’m satisfied.”’ Dubois guffaws, he who has an ear for the subtleties of the language. Moonface: sad Queen of the Night with the ghost of a smile.
Moonface Epistle
Dear Moonface, Ptolemy Soter to you! Marjerie Prentiss remains relentless. I begin to think the only thing that will bring her inner peace (and she lose interest in Traymoreans), is a buggering, her somatophylakes, her filthy beasts, her bodyguards, at her beck and call. Or do you care to know? You, I suppose, were at a blues bar, playing at
depravity. As ever yours,—RQC
§
Book III—Mixing-Bowls
Caprice and Beguine I
—‘Bliss was it in that dawn; to be alive and to be young was very heaven.’ Zeus-like Eggy, his recital complete, his finger raised, now thunders: ‘Wordsworth, I’ll have you know.’ Eggy’s choice of pocket square is a two-pointer for this evening. Elegant Zeus. Gregory, at another Blue Danube aka Le Grec table, picks at his dinner. Build it and they will come.
Caprice and Beguine II
—He, of course, is a playboy of the western world. Live a thousand years, and one might have a go at just about anything. So Eggy says, waving Moonface over with a tiny claw, ‘Here’s a story. Thor, you know, the god, he thought to reveal who he was to a lass he’d just ravished. What do you think he said? Well, of course, you don’t know, but I’m telling you. He said, “Hi, I’m Thor.” She said, hoo hoo, she said, “So am I but I’m satisfied.”’ Dubois guffaws, he who has an ear for the subtleties of the language. Moonface: sad Queen of the Night with the ghost of a smile.