The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  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 IV—In Continuation

  Protective Camouflage

  I was in a state, making my way down our noble boulevard. I would chase away the images in my mind of an adolescent Prentiss, she with her 40-ish body being set upon by her brother’s pals in the parental home. Some were tickled; some were frightened; all were louts. And she, apart from the fact that she was sullen and unenthusiastic, would scrutinize the faces of her ravishers and file away her gleanings for future considerations. And the sinking feeling in me was that I suspected I would, sooner or later, wind up in her psycho-drama, no less a cretin than the boys taking their pleasure, she pursuing her research. In the way cold bodies in space roam about until larger bodies capture them through gravity, one of us would cease to wander. I shivered. Not only was I weak and craven and possessed of a vivid imagination, I was paranoid enough to believe the woman had transferred her interests from Eleanor to me.

  And in the poor man’s super mart, I bumped into Eleanor. Literally. The good woman was examining the tomatoes and their winter price. She drolled: ‘When Moonface turns her music up, I know she’s having sex.’

  Really?

  ‘When she turns her music up,’ I said, ‘she’s usually twitting me for being an old fuddy-duddy.’

  ‘Is that it? Is that it, Mr Calhoun?’

  I supposed Eleanor was in a mood.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘is it warm enough for you?’

  ‘No,’ I said,’ shivering, yet again.

  A cold, bright day, was it not?

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor sighed, ‘I think not. And these tomatoes will have no taste. I was thinking of making something tomatoey, with capers. Any ideas?’

  ‘No, none at all.’

  ‘So what are you good for? A poke in the sack? A little moral outrage? Honestly, Randall, what’s with you men?’

  ‘You women.’

  ‘Ungentlemanly, sir, ungentlemanly.’

  At least, there was something like a flash of humour in her grey-green eyes. We returned together to the Traymore, she with her tomatoes and I with my bread. On the way, she put it to me: ‘It may interest you to know that, in respect to Marjerie, I’m beginning to have doubts. The alarm bells are going off in my head.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ I said, but with some caution, ‘and I would think when she tried to stick those scissors in you, that that might’ve given you pause.’

  ‘She was somewhat justified. I was in a clinch, if you remember, with her lover boy.’

  ‘I mean it’s not that she turns your head and you start behaving badly. You were always going to behave badly. But that it’s not you doing it, it’s her, it’s that woman gotten into you.’

  ‘You make it sound so creepy.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Well, how do we get rid of her?’

  ‘How do we get rid of her, indeed?’

  ‘How ignore her? Either I leave or she leaves? I can tell you, I’m not going to leave.’

  ‘And I can tell you she’s not going to leave.’

  ‘Actually, she might. Ralph keeps talking about a house out there—in the country.’

  ‘A nest?’

  ‘Sort of. Not clear on the details. I think he’s been slowly working on one, renovating and stuff. But maybe he might rent something else, at any rate, in which to live while he works on the other place.’

  ‘And he’ll have Marjerie move in with him. And there won’t be enough room for Phillip. Cunning plan.’

  ‘I think that’s the plan.’

  ‘Well then, I suppose you ought to whisper in Marjerie’s ear as to what a great thing commitment is. Soul mates in one another’s arms. Until death do us part and all that. Enable, Eleanor, enable.’

  ‘Yes, maybe, I’ll whisper away.’

  And by now, we were coming on Mrs Petrova’s shop. She was snoozing in a chair, waiting for customers. And by now, we were climbing the Traymore stairs, Moonface’s digs silent. Perhaps all the apartments were deserted. Untimely erotic burblings. What a nuisance. But when Eleanor invited me into her kitchen for an amaretto each, something with which to warm ourselves, we fell to talking politics.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘that you don’t think things are looking up.’

  ‘I’ve got my fingers crossed.’

  ‘How silly you are. Of course, things are looking up. Even the idea of the man, if nothing else, is a huge improvement on the reality of the man still in office.’

  ‘True,’ I said, ‘and the feministas will observe that he’s still the male gender.’

  She gave me a look. And she began to get that look. And when that shambling grin of hers broke out, I made my excuses, and left.

  I read a while, recumbent on my couch. Perhaps the weight of these words, the words Lucan’s, tugged my eyelids down: Also the votaries of Cybele, the womanly Galli, tossed their bloodstained tresses and wailed to the world of its ruin. And perhaps, falling through sleep, I raised a realm of fitful dream in which Moonface, a wild-eyed rebel, exhorted men to overthrow an unspecified oppressor. Then perhaps, the crisis addressed, she was pleasuring in the thin warmth of the Cordilleran sun. There in Ecuador. It also seemed that someone was knocking on my door. I climbed back into wakefulness and went and answered the door. Marjerie Prentiss.

  She got to the point.

  ‘I gather you and Eleanor have been having words.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘What it is to me is that Eleanor thinks I’m a bad influence on her. You put the idea in her head.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘What Eleanor and I have to talk about isn’t any of your business.’

  ‘It is when it concerns me.’

  Her eyes were mascara’d. Blue silk shirt. Faded lavender denims. She was beginning to get ideas. Perhaps, I was beginning to get ideas.

  ‘You know, I could twist you around my finger,’ she asserted.

  ‘I’m sure you could.’

  ‘I could do it right now.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘But I won’t.’

  ‘I guess you won’t.

  ‘Because I’m expecting Phillip.’

  ‘To the victor the spoils.’

  ‘You’re not a nice man.’

  ‘I never claimed to be.’

  ‘Well, this is getting silly.’

  ‘It surely is.’

  ‘And you’re sure he’s not here?’

  ‘Jesus, woman.’

  ‘Alright then.’

  Detail, Details

  I was moved to write a dead man a letter. I addressed it to Jack Swain, Palermo, Poste Restante. I would risk the ire of a sad, careerist Sicilian mail clerk who would have, by now, disposed of my previous missives by grisly means. I went to complete this mission in a bone-eating cold. However, as I stood in the queue at the postal outlet, awaited congress with a mightily bored representative of a national service, a few things occupied my brain. Eggy, for instance, had broken a rather strange silence that had befallen Traymorean males in the Blue Danube the evening before. He would probably die, he said (only not now, he was having too much fun) before they would ever get to the bottom of JFK’s assassination, and it was rather sad, that, not knowing, and he would certainly like to know. For what if one went to one’s grave, in error, and for all that one had, on a Parisian stage, observed lesbians at play? The only decent idea a certain American poet managed to bequeath to discourse was the notion that we, as he put it, do not change; we just stand more revealed. Eleanor was still hanging out, as it were,
with Prentiss and the lover boys. I understood they had sampled a sex club, Eleanor getting a taste of bondage. Further plans included a Bob Dylan concert.

  ‘Well,’ Eggy pointed out last night, ‘and before you two lower the boom on me, I’ll say it’s not a thought original to me, just that we died a little when Oswald or whomever it was plugged Kennedy, likewise with King and the other Kennedy. The rain in Spain.’

  And Dubois allowed that it was true, his glittering blue eyes, however, turned inward on his personal sojourn. So I stood there in a postal queue, approximating patience, my thoughts concerned with the aforementioned such as ebbed and flowed and, otherwise, drifted in me. Yo, Swain. Came across one of your old missives. What can I say? I knew a man once who believed that family history was self-indulgence. What mattered was what Lenin said, that night in April, 1917, when the workers lifted him on the armoured car in the square and he speechified. Or rather, the route out of family that pathology took was always beside the point. Dunno. Perhaps history is that business that can’t spiritually afford reflection, at least, not in the heat of the moment. But then, you’re right, we’re sots, the kind who, in a crowd, stamp their feet in mushy snow and say, “What’s this then? Something’s got Lenin by the short hairs. Could use a drink.” Americans say power doesn’t have to corrupt. Really? Since when? Did you know that Rousseau was a bully; that Shakespeare mixed rubbish in his plays; that Paul McCartney is rated a cut above Schubert? What’s the world but a mouth in love with the noises it makes? Some day, I’ll get over your way, and we’ll have a fine time of it, and we’ll do us some gelato at the Liberty Bar. All the best, RQC.

  Football. The less said the better. But if I despised my old coach for his leer; for his collusion with knuckleheads in haphazard rites of manliness; for his always pregnant dolt of a wife, I could never come around to seeing how he saw things. Sally McCabe regarded me as an oddity, a bit of comic relief, perhaps, from the endless pageantry of her life: her beauty, her cheerleading, her car sex, and the fact she was a VIP’s daughter. She became, over time, part and parcel of my mentations, a conscience, as it were; and if not a conscience so much, then an inquisitor, albeit a lovely one. Much laughter. Many nose-wrinkling smiles. If the history teacher was a drunk and blew his brains out, so what? What was not to like in life? As with Moonface’s apparent fits, McCabe would arrive without fanfare, and often, with questions: ‘Randall, what was always your problem?’

  ‘You know, now that you mention it, I wonder if I know. Did Seneca die well? Or better than he had lived, at any rate?’

  ‘You see, there you go again. Such an egghead.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You weren’t a bad kisser, though there’s always room for improvement. I never interfered when the guys used to pound on you, though I could’ve done, because they thought you different. Don’t hold that against me, and you were different. I won’t hold it against you that, deep down, you really thought us dumb hicks. Anyway, forewarned is forearmed. You’re going to have a problem. Prentiss. She really is clueless. Don’t flatter yourself on her account. All she wants from you is that you acknowledge her perfection. You’re driving her mad because you won’t.’

  ‘Yes but, she’s mad to begin with.’

  ‘No matter.’

  ‘Well, thanks for the tip.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘Anything else? The economy? The endless war? Woodrow Wilson?’

  ‘No. But ease up on Eleanor. She’ll sort things out, eventually. Moonface? Now there’s a girl I don’t quite get. Would I wish her on a hairy beast? Evie Longoria. She’s—’

  But the visitation was now at an end, even if I was somewhat taken aback by what I took to be a hint of dismay in McCabe’s throaty voice. Still, her laughter was not unkind. Generous countenance.

  Later that morning, I had Eleanor on my hands.

  ‘No, Eleanor, no.’

  ‘Why, Randall, why not ever for?’

  ‘Haven’t you, with all the men you’ve taken to bed, rung all the changes on sex there are to ring?’

  ‘You credit me with experience I don’t necessarily have. Roll me a cig.’

  So I rolled the good woman a cigarette.

  ‘And while you’re at it,’ she said, ‘tell me what the meaning of life is, because damn if I know, anymore.’

  ‘So it’s gotten that bad?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  Eleanor of the gilded curls, unassuming voluptuary; Eleanor of the keen political mind; good woman who used to play the trombone until she decided it was a silly thing to do; Eleanor who had stumbled on even sillier things to do such as explore her sexuality, but only because someone, Prentiss, had parked a theme park of the notion in her head, was distraught.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I miss it when I was a girl growing up in the country. There was a pond we kids used to splash around in, rich kids, poor kids, middle of the road kids, smart, stupid, assertive, shy. Can you believe I was shy? Can you believe Bob was shy? We had the same childhood pretty much. I think we were wiser then.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But don’t you think so? All those dramas. It was life and death, but then, you know, in an hour it was all over and forgotten about.’

  ‘I suppose I had a long memory.’

  ‘Yes, well, that is your problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘You think me vindictive?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re petty, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Thank you for that. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s pettiness.’

  ‘No, you can’t just let things happen. You always have to know why it’s happening.’

  ‘Is that a crime?’

  ‘No crime. But when do you live? I guess I’m a shoot first, ask questions later kind of gal.’

  ‘That you are.’

  Eleanor gave me a look.

  ‘Not even a teensy-weensy smack on my bottom?’

  ‘Eleanor. Good God.’

  ‘You know, I go over to Marjerie’s some time ago, and there they are, she and her lover boys having at each other, and it put me off, I have to tell you. It troubled me, because I thought I should’ve liked it, but it didn’t feel right. And then we go to this club, and I’m put off again, only worse … well, I don’t say anything to them, my mistake, maybe, but it’s in my head and I can’t get it out of my head, and now—’

  ‘I think you’re bored, sweetheart. I think maybe you’re over-dramatizing. It’s just sex, that’s all. It’s one brand of power drink as opposed to another. It’s neither here nor there.’

  ‘It certainly is here and it certainly is there. You think it’s nothing to think about? You’re the one always going on about ancient mysteries.’

  Rudess

  Israel would pound Gaza a while, a boxer punching a bag. A round of outrage. Then a few weeks would go by, and the world would forget, as the world always forgets. And when lover has brought lover to the point of discharge, what has the rights of man to do with sensation, the eyes rolled over with their bliss, some god having flooded the soul with an instant of eternity? As for Marjerie Prentiss, there was neither rhyme nor reason why she had set her sights on me. It was not sex she wanted, least of all love; it was just that I was there, a few steps down the hall, her curiosity her morality, and it was indifferent to any pain but her own. I may as well have been nothing more than a quivering item of Jell-O of exotic flavour, and she must sample. No, she was not even a predator so much as she was an entity in motion, a cloud pushed along by the wind. She might mingle with other clouds should any happen to get in her way; she might drift forever, unimpeded in the skies of day and night.

  At the Blue Danube, I sat alone, a party of Greeks sampling the moussaka which, every two days, Cassandra prepared afresh, so Gregory explained to those Greeks. I sat and drifted. And when I collected a thought or two, and was about to treat with those thoughts in a notebook, in waltzed the Whistler; or rather, in he sashayed, swinging his arms violently, a man o
n martial parade. He astonished the Greeks. He was curt and precise with his order. Would have his coffee hot, not lukewarm. If there was no cheesecake, then apple crumb. Three scoops of ice cream. And I wondered, as he commenced his routine—the whistling through clenched teeth, the stomping of his feet—if he understood that the so-called white voter backlash to the candidacy of President Elect had not materialized as predicted, especially not in western Pennsylvania. Had he heard, too, that Jews were not now considered outsiders but as indigenous to Canaan? They had put their bosses and sweatshops behind them on the coast and broke out for the hills. They did so well that they did, in fact, raise up a David and a royal house. Assyrians, in time, spoiled the party, on their heels, Babylonians, Jerusalem gotten to be a swinging door. The man whistled and stomped furiously. Antonio, waiting on him, as much as any man can who wishes to get through a day with minimum fuss and bother, sighed. And I moved on. Inside the Traymore, as I climbed the stairs, I caught a good whiff of pot roast, Mrs Petrova’s. Warm, consoling aroma. Consolation would come with peas, potatoes, gravy, perhaps. And apple sauce? At the top of the stairs, a flash of bare ankles. Marjerie Prentiss. She had just left Eleanor’s. She looked around and cocked her head, smirking. I made a show of thinking nothing of it. Perhaps Moonface was at the library, researching Ptolemy Soter. She was resuming her scholarship, taking the odd class now, nothing burdensome. It was a full life: her Champagne Sheridan, the Blue Danube aka Le Grec, classes and, of course, the night life. I observed myself settling down to a familiar routine. I rolled a cigarette. I selected a book. Patted the couch; propped a pillow. At random, I opened the Old Testament. Judges 16. Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there a harlot, and went in unto her. I knew it was coming—the next onslaught of Prentiss. And when she arrived and had knocked and I had answered, she smirked some more.