The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  Hurrah.’

  Evie shushed him, sensing he was perhaps getting carried away. Large-boned Evie looked as fragile as ever, as delicate a neurotic as rare china. And here it was I wished to spend a quiet night, Moonface rolling her eyes up and to the side, pleased there were so many friends of the café about, and her life had meaning. And we all got roisterous.

  And for all that Eggy managed to annoy me (that Too Tall Poet was a real poet and I was not), it must have been quite the evening: Evie Longoria in my bed, Hiram Wiedemayer on my couch. Fascinated with Blue Danubians, he nonetheless lamented the fact he failed to bring his camera and capture our mugs.

  Eggy had said, ‘We might’ve had a picture of Moonface on her backside.’

  That Evie wound up in my bed had nothing to do with sex; it had everything to do with wine, and, as it was, it got the best of her. Even so, she said, before her eyes went shut: ‘It’s terrible of me. I’m so greedy. I’m so lonely.’

  I most likely said something as idiotic as this: ‘Think nothing of it.’

  Hiram and I once more argued Israel-Palestine, but he was all thumbs up for President Elect. And then, a bad hour come around, and I woke, Evie’s face a peaceful countenance. It was as if she had prayed and made her peace with God, let the executioner’s blade do its worst. In any case, when I next woke, she was gone. Hiram, too, was gone; perhaps they had left together.

  I would take my hangover to the library. Let winter-bundled mothers pushing strollers cluck their tongues. Let squirrels bark derision and sparrows wing-rub their bellies in glee. But could science explain the premonitory? Might I chance upon haruspex specifications in Myra Breckinridge? I did not get far, Eleanor accosting me at my door.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asked, innocently enough.

  She could only be referring to the evening previous.

  ‘First,’ she continued, ‘Eggy’s on the stairs, singing at the top of his lungs. Then Bob throws himself on me, and he hasn’t done that in a while. Tells Marj who was over that if she wants in, get in, otherwise get out. Then I hear Eggy’s little helpmate became your playmate. And that Hiram fellow—’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I would love to paint you a picture but the brain’s all fuzz. Permit me to pass, unless you know something about the science of premonition.’

  She gave me a look, her lip gloss too bright to contemplate.

  ‘I foresee,’ she said, ‘that with you I’ll never get my just desserts.’

  ‘Justice? What justice? There’s no justice.’

  And as soon as the words were out, I knew I was possibly in error; that a page had been turned, and we were living now in a new history. So it seemed. I pitched myself past the good woman. Down the stairs and beyond. I pulled up at the scene of the evening’s crimes where Cassandra, pitying me, gave admission early.

  ‘Ko-fee?’ she asked, knowing what was required.

  She had been stringing Christmas lights, this goddess of terrible aspect indulging the felicities of the domestic. She was as fresh as a daisy despite what had been, for her, a late night. And I saw in my mentations long-bellied Moonface, sinuous Moonface performing a veil-dance peculiar to her as she circulated among lotus-eaters, some of whom were Albanians. Yes, it must have been quite the evening. There had been, for instance, a strange stringy blonde in a track suit yelling: ‘Go, Habs!’

  Hiram Wiedemayer: ‘Who would’ve thought it? What a nightmare it’s been. We were on the Titanic and now we’re on the Good Ship Lollipop where the bonbons play.’

  Well, the man was entitled to speak of it, he—along with Eggy and I—an American transplanted.

  Evie Longoria: ‘I should really call my daughter.’

  Some homuncular voice: ‘Ah, young talent.’

  Dubois: ‘Bring on the virgins!’

  Go, Habs!

  Too Tall Poet: ‘John Newlove’s the poet to read.’

  A chorus of voices: ‘Who’s he?’

  And so forth and so on.

  And then, in my digs, and before she passed out, Hiram snoring on the couch, Evie said, her eyes just then enormous: ‘If you’re going to ravish me, do please be gentle. But you’ll find I’m no beauty. I’m so embarrassed.’

  And either I spoke it or simply thought it, the words these: ‘Something in your voice touches me. Even so, you’re in no condition to be ravished.’

  And perhaps, as the woman slept, I could hear snow falling, the night now so quiet when all had been boisterous clamour; could hear each flake asking pardon for disturbing another.

  Rank and Status

  It was time to pay Eggy a visit in his lair. Evie Longoria had complained of its old man’s smell.

  ‘Yes, she was here, and we made a pact,’ Eggy said. ‘I won’t go on about her earrings anymore if she doesn’t give me the matron treatment.’

  Theirs was a relationship that Dubois once described as an old married couple’s.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘earrings in the ancient world indicated rank and status. The women who wore them certainly didn’t do chores.’

  ‘No,’ replied Eggy, ‘they were probably on their backsides.’

  He raised a finger so as to punctuate his remark, and whatever else he had to say evidently slipped his mind. Zeus-like Eggy.

  ‘I wonder what’s on the talk shows,’ he finally said, now a lonely urchin.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I know,’ he said, with a hint of eureka in his rising voice, ‘it’ll be all New York senator the new Secretary of State to be. She’s at last got an ample pot to piss in.’

  Yes, she had that, and opinions on the matter were rife, and rumours, and huzzahs and faint praises and excoriating curses.

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ I said, my tone awfully lame.

  ‘What do you mean we’ll see? Of course, we’ll see. She’s a warmonger and she’ll bugger something. They should hang the bastards. All of them. Back when they had the chance. But the Democrats, you know, they’ve got spines of tissue paper.’

  ‘What’s this, Eggy? Poetry?’

  ‘Don’t get cheeky.’

  Here he was then, surrounded by his books, family photos, memorabilia. He was a quite ordinary man who was somehow not ordinary, the whys and wherefores of it hard to pin down. I supposed he had been everywhere he had claimed to have been and done what he said he did. Now and then truth-telling infected his patter, and one was led by it to conclude his affairs with women had been rather minimal, his portion of love on the meagre side of a half-empty chalice. And just when I might begin to think I understood the man, I would know I did not and probably could not ever; there was fancy leg work in his old pins, yet, and the occasional and rather alarming irruptions of a twinkle in his tough old eyes. The secret of the secrets he seemed to have was that they would remain his secrets—for me to know and you to find out—and, otherwise, eff you. He was not all that pleased to see me, even if he, hating loneliness, had an instinct for the social; even if he had been mean to his wives. He had always, in a certain sense, told me what I needed to know, though the knowing might not have taken the guise of words. A look, a gesture, an intonation of voice, and I should understand that even if history were continuous, each discrete part of it as was a human life was not knowable; yes, it was a one-off deal rendered moot by death. So that we could talk about Kennedy all we wished, but so what? And we could slag the Prime Minister for his glass jaws. Great fun. And rue the miseries of the earth’s peasant classes. Oh dear. That they were getting a screwing the likes of which had never been seen before, but that, well, the rain in Spain. Hoo hoo. In what did Eggy believe? Of what was he the elitist, the aristocrat? And of what was he just some old bugger on a street corner, churning his way toward a jug and the ministrations of wenches? Truth, beauty, justice? Yes, there was all that in him, in some room of his soul cordoned off with thick silk rope; a room that was mostly given a miss, yes, even by his own footfalls, but that awaited its honour. Of this, I was certain. And how did he do it? How did he pay
for the overhead, so to speak, the ogling minions of a phantasmagorical land dwindled down to a trickle?

  ‘I think,’ said Eggy, ‘that Moonface hasn’t given up on academe. She’s writing Sheridan’s papers now. He isn’t much of a student. But he’s her lover boy. Effing hell, I was never that. No wench offered to cross my t’s, except, you know, in the sack. Do you think they’ll drop the bomb? Oh dear. What if they did? I mean, it’d be tits up, wouldn’t it? Alright then, I’ve got a thing about black bottoms. What’s the harm in that? It’s a damn sight better than squeezing some nuclear trigger. Haven’t you read A Thousand Days yet? And you call yourself a student of history?’

  Current President seemed a tad vindictive, what with his eleventh hour granting of sinecures to those who had played ball and would complicate matters for the incoming administration. It was nothing new, but the scope of it was unprecedented. As it was too miserably cold for a constitutional stroll down a noble boulevard; but as I was feeling some impatience with a homunculus, I would hide away in my digs and await the inevitable calamities of social unrest and climactic distemper. Even so, Eggy was startled when I rose to leave, saying I would, no doubt, see him later. His seeming lack of pleasure in my visit had been his coyness. What startled me was Moonface in the hall. She had a burble in her throat; her mouth drawn small and tight was mischievous: ‘I give you leave to come see me in my chambers.’

  It had been a while. And her rooms were not as they had been before: cozy and tasteful. They reflected now that she was half here, half there; half vagabond and half prodigal. Her laundry lay about for all to see. Plants were neglected. She cleared a love seat of its pile of books and magazines and other debris. Would I like a coffee? Would I roll her a cigarette? She did not often smoke.

  ‘Sheridan was going to take me to the movies,’ she said.

  It was I who used to take her to the movies.

  ‘You used to take me,’ she accused.

  ‘Well, how can I now, what with your hectic schedule?’ I answered, defensive.

  ‘True,’ she said, rolling her eyes.

  The coffee made, she handed me a hot mug and I placed a thin stick of cigarette in her mouth and held a lighter to its end. She inhaled smoke, and parked herself on a floor cushion. She would use an empty orange juice bottle for the cigarette ash. Her hair uncombed, her shoulders slumped, she was just a moping, ungainly girl without a clue as to what to do with herself, the goddess in her off on a fool’s errand.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what occasions this?’

  ‘Oh,’ she answered, her voice thick with rue, ‘I don’t know. I’m not happy.’

  ‘Sheridan?’

  ‘Yes, well. He thinks everything’s cool. How grand it is we’re going to Ecuador. All his friends think he’s Mr Grand. I’m just the chick who warms his bed. Do you see?’

  I looked down upon her as a father might a daughter. It was not a role I wished to have.

  ‘Well, do you see?’

  She got off her cushion, and on her knees, she wriggled toward me, an insipid smile on her drawn mouth. She laid her head on my lap. And then she said she could not bring her father anywhere; he always monopolized the conversation, going on about the oppression of the Flemish language.

  ‘Good God,’ I said, ‘didn’t you raise him right?’

  Next up, was Eleanor. It went like that, sometimes, and I might consider myself a reader of Tarot cards with a clientele. An ologist of a sort with a steady practice. But all Eleanor wanted was a cup of sugar, she too lazy to go out and fetch her own. She was wearing a fabric of gaudy colour such as clashed with her clear and innocent countenance, one that belied the fact of her sinful urges. She was still unable to account for Dubois’s renewed attentions.

  ‘But I’m not complaining,’ she let me know.

  At any rate, something sugary was in the offing. I was reading that bit in Lucan where an Etruscan seer, in his attempt to expiate Rome, J Caesar’s arrival imminent, analyzed the entrails of a bull and was horrified by the putrescence he saw, and by the diseased and malformed liver. He would sugarcoat the result for his anxious audience, but inwardly, he quaked. I fear an unspeakable outcome. I knew Prentiss’s knock for what it was—trouble, and I sucked in my breath and answered the door. She said: ‘You know what gets me about you people is that you don’t do anything. I’m a doer.’

  Her voice, a dull boom, nonetheless seethed with rage. I supposed you people were none other than Traymoreans.

  ‘Well, Bob’s always busy,’ I said, ‘and Eleanor cooks. Eggy provides counsel, as befits a senior member. But if you mean me in the particular, I guess I have to plead guilty.’

  Was I not amiable?

  Why Is Anything Anything?

  Eggy, but a pea in his pod of a winter coat, answered Dubois’s query.

  ‘Why, the doctor tried to set me up with his secretary.’

  ‘Oh well, that’s something,’ said Dubois, feeling, perhaps, that his question was answered, the state of the old man’s health put to rest by this promise of an assignation.

  I figured that Eggy’s response was part and parcel of yet another apocryphal tale. And he regarded, with a lamenting gaze, the cheese pies before him. And it was as if, by regarding them, some morsel of it all would appear in his mouth, and he circumvent the perils of transference. More often than not, food wound up in his lap. Effing hell. A dead night in the Blue Danube. The Habs on TV, my attention wandered.

  Moonface and I on a ballroom floor, the palace a monument to broken dreams. Moonface and I poised beneath the star bursts of a glittering ceiling. I would place my hand on the small of her bare back. A dip in the knees, and on the beat … Would she freeze or trip? Or was she born, after all, for the spectacle of grace? Yes, while about us in the shadows, hooded figures, the indigent and the homeless, played the games of the dispossessed. For it looked like there would be much dispossession to come. There it was: the taunting flicker of a tongue. There it was: that love is a pitiful force, up against the crushing immensity of space.

  ‘So,’ Dubois put it to me from out of the blue, ‘are you any closer to finishing your book?’

  What book? What impertinence was this?

  ‘Oh,’ said Eggy, raising a finger, ‘he’s just a poet, and poets are, why, you know, riffraff.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ so I announced.

  Serge in the galley had cooked up for Dubois a special burger, served it wreathed in pickle slices. Eggy was miffed, no such honour for him. Gregory joined us at the table, bored and tired. But he was up for a wager on the game’s outcome.

  ‘He’s the man,’ said Gregory, ‘he’s the man,’ this in reference to President Elect.

  Perhaps Gregory was expecting a rising tide, and his fortunes improve. Tiny blue Christmas bulbs, so many tear drops, adorned a small evergreen. Outside, it was dark, of course, and dreary, the street quiet, the lamps that lit it baleful. In some unhealthy street-glow a runt of a tree was having a go at life by the liquor outlet. Eggy had taken to wondering whether it would survive. The figure of Artemis in her niche did not move; try as I might to cause it to move. Perhaps I had not consumed sufficient amounts of wine.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, addressing the table, ‘I fear an elegaic mood has taken hold of me.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Eggy, yes, with some disdain.

  Dubois guffawed. Gregory looked very afraid.

  ‘And because it has,’ I continued, ‘I think it the better part of valour that I remove myself, what, from this distinguished company of noble and stalwart souls—’

  ‘Here it comes,’ Dubois interrupted.

  ‘So as to answer, in my solitude, whether that which is over, finis, deader than a rotted fish, can generate beginning. What was it that Eliot implied? That the beginning is only a thing that comes around again, like one’s tax returns? As for Ottawa, hell, it’s but stale beer compared to champagne. Antonio, my bill.’

  And Antonio, who had been keeping to himself, nothing to do, now had som
ething to do.

  ‘Well, take care of yourself,’ said managerial Dubois, as if he cared.

  ‘Rot your socks,’ said Eggy.

  ‘Sure, rot your socks,’ Gregory repeated, trying out a new expression for size.

  I dreamed (after Letterman had had his cheap laughs on his TV show) that Prentiss and her prankering men set upon me.

  Prentiss: ‘Well then, let’s have it—the meaning of life.’

  Calhoun: ‘Aristotle said it was happiness.’

  Prentiss: ‘Let’s have it from you.’

  Calhoun: ‘I have no idea.’

  Prentiss: ‘Don’t you?’

  Calhoun: ‘I could presume.’

  Prankering Men: ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go.’

  Calhoun: ‘But if Aristotle said these things, that happiness is the meaning of life, that the soul is the perfect expression of a natural body, does it follow that the soul is happiness?’

  Prankering Men: ‘What’s he smoking? Because we’ve got to get some of that.’

  Prentiss: ‘I am the meaning of life. I am your happiness. You can lick me. Come on, haven’t got all day.’

  Prankering Men: ‘No m’am. Haven’t got all day.’

  I supposed the dream was a variety of nightmare. What was a dream? Electrical disturbance in some organ of sense? Reason? The constant support of an intelligible world? How fragile Aristotle thought the world to be. Had he known the half of it? When I woke, it seemed I had been one of the chattering classes all by myself. Heard plumbing. A Traymorean was up and about. Do you remember when we met? That’s the day I knew you were my pet.

  It seemed to me that if Marjerie Prentiss loved her swains, it was a shallow love, at best; she loved herself first and foremost, and the melodrama in which she was its epicentre. There might be ologists who would venture to say that this overweening self-regard on her part was, in actual fact, a species of hate, one that men had foisted on her, and they might have a point. However, in Prentiss’s case, if in no other case, and I would stake a wager on it, self-hatred was self-idolatry. I was low on money. And in wet snow and wind and waning light I would go to the bank machine at the corner. I did so, and there was Eleanor, fancy that, withdrawing cash; she doing a sort of shimmy at the machine, a shimmy bespeaking her impatience with technology; how it is convenience creates more time, yes, only that it is time less lived. Nonetheless, transaction completed, she turned, and turning, spotted me.