The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  But no, the truth was I did not always say something, and just now, I did not know what to say. So I said: ‘It seems to me they’ve got their hooks in you.’

  Perhaps I had just seen panic in her countenance, but I could have been mistaken; I frequently was.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Eleanor replied, out on a limb of her own devising.

  ‘The almighty hooks,’ said Eleanor.

  Marjerie was checking us out from within the café. As was Dubois with the odd sidelong glance. Eggy was a tiny sparrow of a man tiny in his chair, he, in any case, impervious to any treachery that mortals lesser than he might foment.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you want to boff Phillip, then boff him. Just don’t pretend it’s anything other than lust. And anyway, it’s too much mixed up with whatever it is Marjerie’s got going in her brain. Your having the hots, so to speak, is going to bite you on your arse.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with Marjerie?’

  ‘You know it’s got everything to do with her. She doesn’t care who’s doing what to whom so long as she gets to pull the strings. I have to confess I’ve never seen anything like it. To describe her as manipulative seems too tame. It’s not about what she wants from you or me or anyone else; she just wants to run the show, any show, even a flea circus.’

  ‘I just worry I might lose Bob,’ she said, her voice uncharacteristically smallish.

  ‘I wonder if you haven’t, already.’

  I had intended, just then, to be angry with her; I was, in fact, quite angry, but the words came out of my mouth with an element of whimsy to their import.

  ‘I’m cold,’ I said, stating a categorical fact.

  She had already flicked the remnant of her cigarette into the street. We were each in that state of drunkenness when thought was still lucid, the blood running royal. I had a lot of affection for the good woman; I was not, even then, unmoved by her obvious charms. Even so.

  ‘For God’s sake, Eleanor, sometimes I think you’re a few bricks short of a load.’

  And my head spun with druids and Caesars; it was the wine. With terrorists. With moguls of finance devoted to ritual sex practices. It was the wine. And my head spun with Eleanors and Moonfaces and Gloria Jarnettes somber in their birthday suits, they lamenting the last of their glory days, the poetry of their lusts and the cheek of their satirical outlooks on the world. For yes, when some guru said to them there was no mind-body separation, and that Wall Street was as much a part of God’s mind as a bump on a log in the forest, they told him to drop dead. It was the wine. And my head spun with Evie Longoria who was a hundred times lonelier than Too Tall Poet, for instance; who was himself, ten times lonelier than the proselytizing hag who was lonely enough. It was the wine. American crimes spawned by American reach—the wine. That is, it was impossible to list them all, just that, in their entirety they were a kind of pulsation, a throb. When I left the Blue Danube, they were deep in commaderie—Marjerie Prentiss and her faction, Eggy and Dubois. Perhaps the imminent removal of my person permitted it, as if my person had been a spoiler to their fun. Moonface in the Traymore hall appeared to be troubled, or was it only theatre? The look in her eye—it was the look she had when, not so long ago, I came across her and some rat-like boy having at it. I shrugged; she retreated to her digs. And, as I fumbled with my key, up came a slippered Mrs Petrova on the Traymore stairs with a pot of soup in her hands. For whom? Her mythical son no one had seen, though Eggy, thundering, always claimed he had had the privilege? Mrs Petrova had the look of a girl caught out in an act of minor naughtiness, her hair in curlers, scarf wound around her head, two bright patches of rouge each for her cheeks. I did not wish to know to what extent she was secretly demented; I bade her a good night, and through my door, I raised my couch on which I collapsed. Lucan had ascribed to druids in their groves weird doings. In the middle of the night, my heart racing, I woke from an unfriendly dream.

  Subsidence

  The Blue Danube was a Benedictine atmosphere of Christmas lights and labour; Cassandra brought me a coffee and her dimples, those dimples cheer-inducing. I wondered if Dubois had something to live for now that Ottawa was in an uproar, the game that was afoot as worthy of the romance of skullduggery as any in Washington. Eggy? Politics to him was but an excuse to see that certain bastards should hang, as he always put it; otherwise, Moonface was his complementary function. Eleanor had the hots for Phillip Dundarave, or so she believed, she sensing, perhaps, that he was her life’s last great fling. There was no reason to gainsay her in this, just that Phillip Dundarave was not a loving man, a hoser pure and simple. Bits of a dream turned up in my mentations now like so many bottom creatures forced to the surface of a lake. Marjerie Prentiss, it seemed, had entered my digs. She herself was like a woman just roused from a dream, one that had been pleasant enough, her eyes sleepy, mouth a lazy grin. She made of her right hand a piece, thumb cocked. What’s your hurry? Why resist? You know I’ll shoot. She was enjoying herself as she advanced, I back-pedalling. I attempted to study her conscious mind and drew a blank. I would divine her secret urges and got that lazy grin and her dead, watery eyes, instead. I turned us around somehow so that I was now backing out my door. Her contempt for me was rather superfluous, almost a distraction from her intention, which was to expose me to the world as a clown of no consequence. I was out the door, she still convinced I could not escape her. I was running down the Traymore stairs, buffoon and coward. Mirthless chuckles. And on the street, Evie Longoria was passing by, she gone mad, her arms folded across her chest. She was saying over and over that death was not defeat and defeat was not death; and, try as I might, I could not believe her. Though I snapped my fingers, jumped up and down, and in a hundred ways made a fool of myself, I could not rescue her from the spell that had consumed her. She was a more terrifying sight to behold than Marjerie Prentiss now shown up as an amateur, even with the gun. Moonface appeared from nowhere, clearly upset, but she had no more luck than I in dealing with Evie. I should have disarmed Prentiss; should have coaxed Evie into a kinder light; should have consoled Moonface. A very mediocre poet once told me, this the one thing he had been right about, that there were in life no should-haves. Cassandra was now making noises, something like concern in her large and luminous eyes.

  ‘Soup now?’ she asked.

  The dream seemed to settle through my body like subsidence.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘thank you. You’re spoiling me rotten, you know.’

  She touched my arm, only too happy to plead she was innocent of the charge.

  Eleanor was frantic at the café window, looking in. She had not even bothered throwing on a jacket. Red button up sweater. Gypsy skirt. As eager as she apparently was to see me, once inside, she approached the table with something of the air of a woman shielding herself from infectious disease. She waved off Cassandra and took a chair.

  ‘Bob and I had a fight,’ she said, too cheerfully.

  ‘He said why don’t we take that trip he was always promising me? I said I wasn’t keen, anymore. Maybe next year, but not now. He wanted to know why I wasn’t keen, anymore. Like, what gives?’

  ‘Well,’ I put it to the good woman, ‘what gives?’

  ‘Phillip.’

  She fished a cigarette from the pack she had in the palm of her hand and placed it between her lips. They were exaggeratedly pursed. She was all braggadocio and lip gloss; she was just this side of tears.

  ‘Virgil,’ I said, giving way to the rising pedagogue in me, ‘wrote that love’s a curse and the one who’s smitten is to be pitied.’

  ‘Do you think I care what Virgil wrote who knows how many centuries ago?’

  ‘Phillip,’ I countered, ‘will hose you for a night. It’ll probably be glorious. In the morning he’ll hit you up for a loan. In the afternoon he might bring his laundry. In the evening he might introduce you to some chick he just picked up in the street. Worse, he might reacquaint you with Marjerie Prentiss while he holds her hand and swears to her his eternal d
evotion. I mean, just how badly do you want to have your face rubbed in it?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘I’m not a complete retard.’

  Now she twirled the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, dying to smoke the thing.

  ‘So I take it you don’t mind being hosed, being squeezed for money, being a laundress, being a cuckold, and being downright humiliated?’

  ‘You can bet your booties I mind, but it’s beside the point.’

  ‘So what did you tell Bob, if I may ask?’

  ‘You may. I told him pretty much what I told you.’

  ‘Hell’s bells, Eleanor.’

  ‘Hell’s bells me all you like, but I’m resolved.’

  ‘Resolved?’

  ‘To depart my senses. To be a silly goose. Phillip can do with me what he wants. I’ll beg for more.’

  ‘Knowing him, he’ll be too swacked to be of much efficacy.’

  ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  ‘Right. So it’s already been arranged: a night of coition and a melding of souls.’

  ‘No need to get snide. But yes. Tonight.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘God’s got nothing to do with it. Bob said I needn’t come cry on his shoulder.’

  ‘Good old Bob.’

  Eleanor gave me a look. Then, the cigarette back in her mouth, her hands flat on the table, she leaned back and drew a deep breath.

  ‘I guess that’s that,’ she said, not exactly meeting my eyes.

  She rose. Such a handsome figure of a woman she was as she rose, as she stepped behind me; as she bent and bestowed on my person a kiss. It was a kiss that would challenge me to stop her if I could; and, of course, it was understood I could not, being but a passive observer of folly, and being all too susceptible to her charms, besides. She exited. And it was Cassandra’s turn to look seven parts curious and three parts troubled. Even so, she was the last woman on earth who could rightfully claim unfamiliarity with the woes such as love brought one. I assumed she had long since forgiven her husband his past indiscretions. Something flashed in her eyes to suggest she had not.

  It had not even the dignity of a farce. Tragedy was too remote a consideration with which to describe certain events about to unfold; though tragedy, so to speak, just might have sneaked in the backdoors of various workaday lives. I was sitting in the Blue Danube, Eggy and Dubois my companions of an evening. Moonface humoured the Whistler. If something was troubling her, and something had been, she had left it at home, and she was bright of countenance and solicitous of our needs. She was now headed for us.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she said, rolling her eyes, sexual and sexless, chameleon-like creature.

  ‘My dear,’ said Eggy, summoning mischief from his foggybottom depths.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  Traymorean males were unaccountably at a loss for words. Eggy had been on about how Europeans had never eaten so well as when they first raised the Holy Land and encountered pomegranates.

  ‘Tell Serge,’ said Dubois, pleased with his dinner, ‘that he’s outdone himself, tonight.’

  ‘Oh I will,’ Moonface cooed.

  My eyes filled with her slim hips and modest bosom. There was between us ancient history, one as recent as Toronto, one as ancient as Orpheus mooning over his lost Eurydice, the cock-up in that little matter his fault.

  ‘About those crusades,’ I said, ‘especially the first wave—’

  Dubois arched his eyebrows; Moonface scooted off.

  ‘Especially the first wave,’ I repeated, ‘that, having survived the vicissitudes of transit, and they were arduous—climate, lack of food, among others; having repulsed the Saracen arrows and so forth and so on; having raised Jerusalem, at last; having breached the walls, they set about slaughtering like there was no tomorrow. It was their reward. They were as happy as pigs in the proverbial you know what. And thereafter, after we got serious about nation-states to which the Templars were, perhaps, the prelude, the first multi-national corporation, came the monotony of a history of class defending its privileges. What say you, you my intellectual betters?’

  It seemed that Eggy was worried for my psyche. Dubois guffawed. Even so, a tiny sparrow of a man, homunculus, smiled his superior smile, that one that put to me a single unassailable observation: if I expected better from humankind I was barking up the wrong tree. Zeus-like Eggy. Whereas Dubois, in respect to the drama in Ottawa, was concerned that clowns had been set loose among the levers of power; and even if Current Prime Minister had to go, as the man was a spiteful spirit dressed up in velvet parliamentary accessories, and had overplayed his hand; the opposition was, perhaps, on the brink of overplaying theirs. In other words, second thoughts had occurred to Dubois in this matter as he dined on his hamburger steak. Hamburger steak was not on the Blue Danube menu, but Dubois was a favoured customer …

  ‘Effing hell,’ said Eggy, the other favoured patron, ‘there hasn’t been this much fun since Billy gave us the meaning of is.’

  Eggy had just referred to President the 42nd and his penchant for exploratory sex and protean verbs.

  ‘He certainly had been is-ning,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Is-ning,’ said Dubois, not entirely impressed.

  Is-ning, for Eggy, was a bridge too far. Even so, President Elect was raising hopes that the normal operations of intellect would soon return to the White House. And just then, all is-ning aside, and I was vaguely preoccupied with Moonface and her troubles and her charms; just then, as I looked out the window, I saw Eleanor charging by; and if she was not deeply troubled, her body language could have fooled me.

  Whores, Pimps and Whatnot

  So Eleanor had just passed by the café, clearly in trouble. I debated whether I should remain with my comrades, eat, drink and be merry, or go and give the good woman a good measure of succour. I could not imagine what had happened; on the other hand, I could imagine all too easily that Phillip Dundarave was at the root of it. The Whistler now unleashed his whistles and stompings.

  ‘Waitress,’ he called, his voice reedy, ‘could I please have a cup of coffee with two ten per cent creams?’

  One saw something like a sigh briefly shadow Moonface’s countenance.

  ‘So, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?’ Eggy whimpered at me.

  Dubois had the air of a man for whom levity might just have engineered a new lease on life.

  Eleanor, having come back around to the café, in search, no doubt, of succour, signalled at the window. It spawned confusion. And when she pointed at me, her grin the measure of her abasement, Dubois was not only startled, he was sad and disgusted.

  ‘What’s she want?’ Eggy innocently wondered.

  Embarrassed for us all, I said I would go as summoned.

  ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said to Dubois.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he answered.

  I wondered if Moonface guessed what was up, her fingers briefly brushing Dubois’s shoulder.

  ‘Damn it all,’ thundered Eggy, ‘what’s the mystery?’

  Zeus-like Eggy did not like being the one in the dark. Moonface sighed and the Whistler whistled. The hairline cracks of Dubois’s cheeks threatened to consume his once equable temper.

  It had better be good, or so I was telling myself, as I went out the Blue Danube and down to the Traymore. It was probably going to be worse, I surmised; for as I climbed the stairs I could hear Phillip pleading: ‘Come on, Ellie.’

  The trouble was, the man’s pleading was more on the order of parody; but in any case, to call Eleanor Ellie was almost a first. Not even Traymoreans resorted to this endearment, at least, not often.

  ‘Go screw yourself,’ I could hear Eleanor suggest from her kitchen, her tone awfully partisan.

  Had I ever witnessed her truly angered? Even so, there they were: Phillip with a sniggering Gloria Jarnette in the hall. He was pawing her with his carpenter’s hands. From Marjerie Prentiss’s open apartment a dull voice
boomed: ‘Oh, just leave Ellie alone.’

  Marjerie Prentiss was drunk. Phillip, clearly, did not think me much of a challenge. Gloria Jarnette, in mock-annoyance, pulled Phillip’s hand off her breast.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ Phillip grinned at me, genuflecting at Eleanor’s door.

  The thought crossed my mind I should pound him one and clear his face of its insipid leer. But why should I stoop to such silliness? Because, and the answer stupefied me, it would occasion retaliatory pain. Surprisingly, however, I had no attitude toward Jarnette one way or another; she was decidedly a free agent. I gave a Phillip a look as I entered Eleanor’s digs; he was mock-alarmed. So yes, Eleanor had been laughing, crying, seething, and otherwise, giving vent. She was seated at her kitchen table, noticeably perfumed. She had poured herself an amaretto.

  ‘Ellie?’ I said, with a questioning tone.

  ‘Don’t start,’ she snapped, ‘I’m not Ellie to you.’

  ‘So that’s how it is,’ I said, as gently as I was able.

  ‘Effing right. That’s how it is.’

  And, as it turned out, and as it had been arranged, close to the appointed hour, she went out on the street. Walking down our noble boulevard in the opposite direction from the Blue Danube, feeling somewhat like a whore, she flagged a taxi. It took her down on St Jacques, motels and strip bars the prevalent venues. She rented a room, then called Phillip’s cell phone, one he had borrowed from Ralph. She waited on her demon lover. And he showed, but with Gloria Jarnette.

  ‘I couldn’t even get angry,’ Eleanor said, her voice husky, her shoulders shaking slightly.

  ‘I mean,’ she continued, ‘I was so flabbergasted. What was I thinking? I didn’t even wait for him to explain himself. I could’ve clawed that woman’s face, she so effing pleased with herself. Thank God, I hadn’t stripped. Can you imagine? I just grabbed my purse and ran out.’