The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  —Crépuscule: from crepusculum: from creperus, meaning doubtful. To wit: crepusculum the doubtful hour. Eggy has done this to me, planting in my mentations the French word for twilight. Must pinch Eggy’s intravenous feed to his most highly regarded claret.

  —Was it W.C. Fields who observed he did not drink anymore, just that he did not drink any less, either? I can just barely recall the sissboom, pop, crackle, thud, squeal and squeak, splat and pffft, and kerfuffle of Spike Milligan and his musical cohorts, but no estimable quotes. All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy. I suppose a pennywhistle could be perceived as a Dadaist ploy, but clearly, enhanced interrogation techniques are torture. No civilization is impervious to its own stupidities, but you know, those Yanks, they always were and always are a cut above, the dears. Not only that, they have been torturing the wrong people, people unlikely to appreciate win at any cost managerial principles, and so are unlikely to forgive their tormentors. Perhaps Evie Longoria wonders why I have it in for screeching electric guitars, but the interrogators have made no mistake about it: they understand that such guitars jelly brains, blasting the paradisal groove 24/7 into torture cells. I will run away with Cassandra; we will begin anew on a desert island where, swacked on coconut juice, I will noodle on the clavichord. She can handle the lyrics, prancing about like Dorothy Lamour in a grass skirt. We will inaugurate a new Bronze Age. Current President is beyond describing, yes? Eight years of him, and still, words not only fail, they curl up in fetal positions and die. He has all the arrogance of an A-Team member for the shabby aspirants to the D-Team. Well yes, his distrust of the ologies, his anti-academic prejudice I share, so I confess. Why encourage poltroons? Because he knows—it is the silver spoon with which he was born—that, at bottom, most people seek power and leverage and disguise the unattractive appetites as noble intent. Those who turn power down are not quite right in the head. It is possible that, at the core of this man, there is evil, as we are all of us capable of exercising evil; but it is so much more likely that, in this man, there is no core and so, there are no forces vying for his conscience, if, in fact, he is in possession of the item. The man follows a script, but who has written it? If Quixote wore a curd-pot for a helmet, the Presidential bucket comes complete with night-vision goggles. If all I had wanted in life was good living –babes and booze and a beachside shack—I might have been tempted by crime. As it was, I got noble and silly, living off blood money, my father entirely legal and legit, and a moral obscenity, to boot: those chemicals he mixed in the name of science. ‘The workers,’ Evie Longoria has said, with unsuspected spleen, ‘why have sympathy for the workers? They were hand in glove with the bankers, wanting what they couldn’t afford. They’re just going to bail out capitalism, anyway, and run the loop again. I say, let it crash. Revolution. Hoo boy.’ Eggy thought her a woman who cannot handle drink. Dubois got his mental cue cards ready, just in case he must come up with a devil’s apology. Alberta cowgirl, indeed. Well, I think he was seeing in the woman possibilities of a creature comfort sort. I, being somewhat worldly, and not unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of emotional transactions, knew those possibilities could not come at par. But why tell him and spoil his fun? This world that is our daily omnibus has gotten so empty, insipid and lethal I am almost prepared to grant a ponce on the order of Rousseau his point: oh for noble savages and loping dogs.

  —Green-sweatered Sally McCabe. Her pom-pom antics. They were meant to light fires in the fans in the bleachers, in absurd athletes torn between the solitary satisfactions of shooting rabbits in the desert and the demands of a corporate body which was a football team coached by a pervert. McCabe’s crew of girls was more a Greek chorus than a glee club of short skirts, as we never won; as we never knew a change of lead except for that one time when fluke, not hope, trumped reality. Her nose wrinkled with mirth, McCabe’s did and so, she registered I was that fluke; how I caught the football and ran with the thing; how I tripped into the end zone as if looking to undo ironclad laws. Tumbleweeds drifted across Polson Field, and I was mostly cold. ‘I guess,’ Sally McCabe must have said to herself in some unguarded moment of her mind (perhaps in the girls’ room, or in the parking lot smoking a cigarette, or in the back seat of Coop’s car, suffering kisses) ‘that Calhoun boy has introduced a new variable into the equation. Will wonders never cease.’ And now when I watch a game of football, it in no way resembles the game I knew; the athletes warriors, not absurdists just passing time, drunk and not minding getting knocked about; winning or losing beside the point. Meanwhile, like children in a school cafeteria, Dubois and Evie Longoria are playing bumpsies, knocking shoulders here in the Blue Danube. Some desultory talk of Ottawa and a prorogued parliament. Just a few words, nothing more. ‘Well, you know,’ says Eggy, hoo hooing at Moonface, ‘you are always in my mind.’ ‘Always,’ agrees the long-bellied goddess topping up our glasses. ‘My belly button was showing,’ she lets us know. ‘Oh let’s see it,’ says Eggy. And Moonface beams. Has that been erotic burbling in her voice? ‘And for you an extra splash,’ she says to me, ‘because you’re you and there is no other.’ My, whence this zest? She rolls her eyes up and to the side. One wonders if Evie Longoria is not thinking to herself: ‘So, this is the way we’re going to play it, tonight, fast and loose.’ She taps a newspaper folded to the crossword section and says, ‘Okay, somebody, let’s have it—a word for penultimate.’ ‘Yes but,’ Eggy thunders, ‘there is no one word.’ ‘How can you be so sure?’ Evie wants to know. ‘I don’t know, I just know.’ ‘Randall?’ I am asked. ‘Beats me.’ ‘Well, you’re no fun,’ I am told. Dubois shrugs. ‘Last but one,’ Moonface advises, passing by. The Blue Danube is expecting a large dinner party that has not yet arrived. It just might fit, if I’m allowed. I mean, who’s keeping score? Evie taps the eraser end of a pencil against her small, even and sharp teeth. I am not so sure now that she is mad, but she is giving off, as it were, signals, she not the sort of woman who, like Eleanor, would just barge ahead and storm the castle, forget the intricacies of a plan. I had written Dubois a longish note, one I slipped under his door. It explained why there was no book, why I had yet to write it; because I will not write programmatically. Dubois’s return of note was a single word. He wrote guffaw. He is on a roll of sorts, Eleanor in the country for a cousin’s funeral, his blue eyes glittering with intelligence and fun.

  —Cold. Verily, an inhospitable climate. Had Paul been born a Canuck, there would have been no church, not in winter, at least. Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Winnipeggers? That pagan Prentiss is heard in the hall, saying, ‘He’ll get his. I’ll sit on his face, yet.’ Of late, Moonface has been ravishing. Whom does she ravish? She still looks to vote with her feet: Champagne Sheridan and Ecuador. Perhaps he has the sense to realize he is weak; he will have to hobnob with the right crowd to get anywhere, only which one? Eleanor once exercised that option, hanging about a nightclub that copycatted Studio 54, she a fetching wench but perhaps too much the country girl. Drugs drove her from the scene as she could not handle them. Amaretto will do nicely, thank you muchly. Couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag, anyway. Don’t know what I was thinking. No, really, I’m fine. I just don’t fit in anywhere. Sexpot den mothers won’t do, these days. Yada yada. You’d better go. I think I’m gonna cry. And yet, whether or not the good woman cares to notice, sexpot den mothers are everywhere, writing books, spouting comedy, curling Ovid’s toes. For a return to sanity has been much anticipated. Complete sentences shall minister unto foreign policy. The Yanks will prevail in Afghanistan with better grammar. Cicero will get his head handed him.

  —The chill terrorist, young Octavianus, Augustus Caesar to be. One-third of a triumvirate, Mark Antony and Lepidus the other partners. The Lex Titia formalized the arrangement, giving the men legal sanction, dissolving the republic. Perhaps the proscriptions were not as bloody as rumoured, but they had the desired effect: no in-house opposition. Now Octavianus had only various generals to defeat, and in the end, M
ark Antony. Who was an amiable sort. And it takes two to tango. And he could hold his own in a game of poker, but everyone underestimated young Octavianus. Everyone always does. Now a looker, heavily sweatered (and what the cold has done to her cheeks and flashing eyes ought not to be legal) waves Antonio over to her Blue Danube table. ‘Now there’s an eyeful,’ says Zeus-like Eggy, his finger raised, keen-eyed still at 902 years of age. But his heart belongs to Moonface. ‘I’m going to opera her,’ he informs me. ‘Well, don’t tell Sheridan,’ I advise. ‘Oh no. Hoo hoo.’ Yes, and the connotations of a noun put to the uses of a verb, one taking a direct object, are rich in possibilities. ‘Tell that woman I’ll buy her a drink,’ Eggy thunders. Antonio, passing by, shushes him with a wink and mock-simpering lips. ‘Oh, eff off.’ The looker perhaps wonders what she has done to deserve this. Eggy, in any case, is on to other business. ‘We’ll be gathering here, tonight, to watch the election results.’ What, we have priorities? ‘I’ll Handel her,’ Eggy puns, grinning like a cherub. I suppose he means he will oratorio Moonface, part of the build-up to Christmas.

  —So, like the crew we are, we wind up in Eleanor’s kitchen. Eleanor’s kitchen is a not unfamiliar haunt; but everything is at sixes and nines, Eleanor not her usual expansive self though she is in her pompadours, Dubois subdued. Marjerie Prentiss shows. She has the air of a woman scouting new recruits in an exhausted field. And it is not long before she and Dubois are arguing federal politics; for each it is a lame attempt to amuse. And for a woman as much given to sex as she is, everything is political, and what is politics are no more welfare and coddling of immigrants. I cannot state it with any more specificity than that. She is, in fact, Ayn Rand incarnate, so it strikes me just now. She is the cobra, Dubois the mongoose who has some sentimental regard for the social contract, whatever that is, on a snowy night in this our faded Jezebel of a town. Dull voice booms that liberals never get it. She coquettes Dubois with her breasts and the force of her hips, the sulky way she smokes her cigarette, dead, watery eyes fielding all her interlocutor’s talking points as so much routine. His blue eyes glitter with intelligence; he is Huck Finn looking for his getaway raft. Eleanor is irked because Eleanor is old-school: territorial. Eggy, Zeus-like Eggy, is out of his depth because mired in the mediocrities of mortals. He will commit opera with Moonface. ‘No kidding,’ snaps Eleanor who, in any case, fails to see that Moonface is operable, men so easily besotted with what are but trifles. ‘Bloody hell, what bee got in your bonnet?’ asks Eggy, with reason. He is ignored. Prentiss trots out Reagan, Dubois Iran. I trot out Cicero, but no one pays me any mind, as well they should as my sense of the absurd fails to cast any light on the absurdity of the situation; just that Boffo the clown in me, well, he wonders if I might not Benito that woman, as in Mussolini, but that, good golly, such a crude response, and with such unreliable hormones, too.

  §

  Book VI—Buffoonery and Cowardice

  Druids, Templars and the Medici

  In the next district over were the ritzier girls, money the bloom on their pretty and sheltered countenances. I went for a passport photo, the shop a portrait gallery of fetching brides of a sub-continent. The proprietor was as hyper as he was dapper, his two minute service more like ten, his mind elsewhere. I, too, thought it a bit strange that in me a somnolent urge might be close to waking, and I would jump my Traymorean orbit for Rome or, why not Istanbul, or Yerevan on the river Razdan? Downtown, at a cut-rate discount, I bought books from yet another dealer bowing out of the fray, a book each on Druids, Templars and the Medici. Desultory talk of Ottawa politics. And then, back in the neighbourhood, I stopped by the Blue Danube, Cassandra run off her feet, Dubois on site. Miss Meow miaowed. She, according to Dubois, had been reviewing her day, her table companion a suppliant to a host of woes, the complaining incessant.

  ‘And when her reel ran out,’ observed Dubois, ‘there was the replay button.’

  He was pleased with his quip. Which was when Eggy showed, the homunculus looking like a movie star.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was at the Claremont, drinking Pernod. Always.’

  It explained everything. It explained credit-default and barometric pressure. It explained why love was love and gold was gold. Why Helen, Spartan minx, did not mind so much that men fought over her favours, but did they have to fight so clumsily and messily, with an eye always on sacking the city? Wasteful. And it explained why, in his heart of hearts, a man might live for love, and it was the only grandeur life might afford a tough old carcass of quite ordinary lineage. It explained why anything was anything. And what is more, Eggy explained he would finagle Moonface into some outing or another, the opera, maybe, and he might smack her bottom, figuratively speaking, of course.

  ‘Rots of ruck,’ Dubois guffawed.

  And where was Eggy’s wine, no glass set before him?

  ‘Cassandra,’ Eggy called out, hopefully.

  But Cassandra was serving up pizzas and pitas and moussakas.

  Dubois told a flowerpot man that all good things would come in due course.

  ‘To conviviality,’ I said, clinking glasses.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Dubois, in his best imitation of a light moment in parliament.

  Perhaps we spoke too soon. One could not say a shadow darkened our table: too cheesily dramatic, too much the stalest of stale clichés. But then, it did seem that the temperature suddenly dropped.

  ‘Hullo,’ a dull voice boomed.

  Three figures now towered over us: Marjerie Prentiss and those who consorted with her—Ralph and Phillip. Dead, watery eyes assessed Traymorean males for entertainment value.

  ‘Hello,’ answered Eggy, and I thought he answered without properly taking stock of a situation now arising.

  And, well, he was irked by the fact that some tension in the air was suddenly constraining him and he did not know why; he had no quarrel with these people.

  ‘Bon jour,’ said Dubois, his tone neutral.

  I said nothing. Ralph studied our faces, yes, with the air of a man for whom the notion of brotherhood was a birthright. Phillip shambled even as he simply stood there, both arrogant and insecure and not a little bored. They might have, perhaps, shaken our hands but that the presence of Marjerie somehow rendered the proposition ludicrous. Was the sex they had fun? A broad, tree-lined avenue to life’s great mysteries?

  ‘Eleanor,’ said Marjerie, ‘is on the way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eggy, relieved to hear it, ‘why, it’s been a while since she’s graced us.’

  Marjerie gave him a look, and it was, in fact, her most fetching look, one emanating from narrowed, bemused eyes; just that, who was Eleanor to dispense grace, she only a foot soldier in a game of takes-no-prisoners in which Marjerie was Napoleonic? Perhaps I was mistaken, but there it was, and whatever it was it had to do with Marjerie having, at last, stolen a march on us. The equivalent of a circus harlot become head of state just made it official: a breach had been effected in Traymorean society, and through it Eleanor fell to Marjerie like an apple from a high branch of a tree. If it were striking Dubois in this way, he was keeping mum, his attention drifting now to the TV, hockey game about to start.

  ‘Well, bon appetit,’ he said, as matter-of-factly as that.

  His tone suggested he could do nothing about nothing; such company as Eleanor chose to dine with was her business. She knew where she could find him; indeed, he was only a hop and a skip away from a sane arrangement among equals. Phillip went and took a table, one now up for grabs. Miss Meow miaowed, sensing turbulence. Cassandra on her way to the galley gave Marjerie a brief looking-over. Marjerie continued to hold her position, she a woman who had had her triumph, and yet was still short-changed. What was it about her that frightened us so, if fright it was and not a spell robbing us of speech? It was Eleanor who relieved us of a deepening quandary, she arriving like a fresh wind; her gilded curls resplendent; her cheeks bright; her tarty boots imparting swagger and high spirits with each clicking of heels on Blue Danub
e tiles.

  ‘Hey boys,’ she said.

  I supposed Dubois gave her what he hoped was an amused glance. Eggy, however Zeus-like he was, could not be sure he knew what was afoot.

  ‘Hello, Eleanor,’ he said, giving the good woman the benefit of his doubt.

  I shrugged.

  If Eleanor would tell me in confidence she found certain aspects of her friendship with Marjerie and her swains troubling, why then was she, in the next moment, as it were, the belle of their party-times? It was, of course, her rightful place; she was born to conduct her life as the belle of some party. Had Traymoreans failed her in this? How had Marjerie Prentiss copped her soul? I went out on the terrasse for a puff. I soon had company.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’ve got the hots for Phillip,’ Eleanor told me, lighting up a tailor-made.

  It was cold, she shifting her weight from foot to foot, summoning warmth.

  ‘He’s really nice, really a gentleman deep down,’ she said, appealing to me for a blessing of a kind. ‘He’s had a hard life. Sure, he has a temper and drinks too much and womanizes, and well, you know, he certainly has the hots for Marjerie, and I tell him he can’t keep going on like that. Ralph’s his friend, a loyal pal, and it would be a shame if they came to blows over that woman. I mean, she can really be quite charming and attentive and all the rest of it, but I don’t know that she deserves the attention she gets. Oh hell, I don’t even know if I know what I’m saying. Say something, Randall. You always do.’