The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Marry Ralph,’ I said, my tone of voice that of a man quoting from a book in which he does not much believe.

  She tarried. She fingered my wrist. She wet my lips with her tongue, her eyes fixing mine all the while.

  ‘For God’s sake, Marj,’ Eleanor said, ‘leave something of the man to himself.’

  The good woman had my gratitude, she who had just come to my rescue. Prentiss shrugged, blinked, turned, and minced out the way she came. Eleanor grinned, much entertained.

  For years I lived like a rat in various rat-holes, underwritten by a trust-fund, courtesy of my father who was not rich-rich but wealthy enough. I did not, in principle, object to riches save when the well-heeled behaved badly, money their moral ascendancy and fraudulent prestige. Such people are better seen and not heard. For all that, I would not have minded having the gold of Croesus at my command (so that I might spirit myself elsewhere) as I entered the Blue Danube, and it seemed oppressive and ludicrous as a refuge, the winter night a pall. To be sure, the trees that lined our noble boulevard sparkled prettily, encased in ice. Bright cheeks. Muted sound. Crunched snow. Even so, one might consider whisking Moonface away to Rome or Venice, to the pockets of lovely quiet each of those cities contained, and we hold hands on a stone bench, and recite bad Renaissance poetry with neo-platonic agendas. I could even present Dubois sitting there at his table with his folded Glove and Mail, that mind-teaser, with a company to manage, one of those wonder-working companies that eradicate disease or purge the land of toxins or elevate the poor; that somehow vouchsafe truth, beauty and justice for the as yet unborn generations whom, as we knew, would honour them; as they had to, for we had not. Dubois, for the most part, retained his faith in the system, though now and then, his air was that of a man who knew all along the system was no more than a farce with executive sanction, and it got people killed. How tragic for one who believed there was no problem that did not have its solution, if only the will be there, and the appropriate knowledge, and the votes. Where a poet might see a blinded and fated Oedipus, he saw the disgrace of inefficacious method. Moonface had a new pair of boots.

  ‘Ask to see her boots,’ Dubois said, as I took a chair like a man just relieved of guard duty.

  And Moonface giggled like a schoolgirl, but she was not going to show off her boots, and I would not have been interested unless, of course, she was going to treat us to a full-blown floor show. Perhaps it was what Dubois had in mind, the rotter.

  ‘Eggy,’ he said, ‘will not grace us with his company, tonight. He’s terrified of the ice.’

  There was no wine on the table. I could still taste the empirically-minded tongue of Marjerie Prentiss. My run-in with her, and the fact that Eleanor witnessed it, had tickled Eleanor’s funny bone, and I supposed it a spiritual advance of a kind; that perhaps she was on the way to uncoupling herself from Marjerie’s machinations.

  ‘You looked so silly standing there, like a man afraid to disturb a sleeping puppy,’ she had laughed.

  I had given her a look and she laughed some more, her own recent humiliations, for the moment, forgotten. Paleolithic men, squatting around a fire, discussing the next day’s hunt, seemed the height of sanity. And while Eleanor laughed, there had been a trooping on the stairs—Ralph and Phillip. One heard them calling out to Marjerie to get dressed; they would take her to dinner. Chinatown. It was not much of a Chinatown in this our faded Jezebel of a city, but even so, Eleanor now mock-wailing over her plight. What was she expected to do, subsist on berries and bugs? Well then, throw on a coat; the train was due to leave the station. Oh, a fine, fine woman she was, but when was she going to learn? One could see her in the backseat with Phillip, saying something like: give me your body, man, it’s effing cold, she keeping it light while, in the front seat, Marjerie would display how adept she was in the role of the traffic-conscious wife. Phillip was hers to give, and he did not seem to mind being passed around—this arrogant and shambling carpenter who would inherit neither heaven nor earth.

  ‘So,’ I said to Dubois, opening up a conversational front, ‘we’ve got a new Liberal head.’

  ‘Apparently so,’ he replied, pretending that it was not a shocker; that the past few days had not, in fact, been a reaping of whirlwinds.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he continued, ‘we’ll see.’

  Dubois drew a knife through his filet mignon. The only other customer in the café was chatting up Moonface, the man clearly lonely and yet, in his tone one heard that Moonface lacked certain credentials (a fully pronounced bosom, perhaps); only that, it being the kind of night it was, one had to go with the cards one was dealt. I could have pounded him for his shabbiness; Moonface seemed oblivious. Emma pretty. Pretty Emma.

  ‘She’s really beside herself,’ Dubois said, ‘with those boots.’

  It was true that one did not often associate the dear girl with conspicuous consumption.

  ‘Have you seen Evie?’ Dubois asked.

  It seemed rather suspicious that he would ask.

  ‘No,’ I answered, ‘not lately.’

  Dubois regarded me with some suspicion of his own. One heard a party of men and women in high-spirits pass by the café.

  ‘Oh look—’ Moonface began to say.

  My warning eyes caught hers. Yes, it was Marjerie and her swains, and Eleanor. I would have wished to spare Dubois the sight.

  Seven Leaguers

  I was restless and wanted to go, and even Dubois pleaded he had a meeting early the next morning. Still, neither of us made a move, the café cozy, winter outside. Save for Serge as reliable as ever in the galley, and Moonface, we were alone in the place.

  ‘You still haven’t shown him your boots,’ Dubois said to our waitress.

  ‘They come over my knees,’ she exulted, now a sex kitten, once a Plain Jane.

  ‘Seven leaguers,’ I said.

  ‘Seven what?’ Dubois wanted to know.

  ‘Boots,’ I said, ‘that give the wearer magical properties. Covering vast distances in a single bound. The ordinary rules of time and space not applying.’

  ‘They’re fur-lined,’ Moonface said, vainly attempting to bring the boots in question back down to earth.

  ‘I’ll bet you look good in them naked,’ Dubois drolled.

  Moonface, blushing deeply, had taken on the hue of the centre of a rose.

  Every once in a while, vain and handsome Dubois got vulgar.

  The phone rang and Moonface went to answer it, her hips swaying somewhat. This seemed a new development. We were going to miss her when she was down in Ecuador, vainly and frantically trying to find herself. She and her seven leaguers … could transport me to ancient capitols … Yesterday, the universe was infinite and today, it is considered finite, though perhaps it might be granted an extension on the morrow—

  A Modernist Painting

  We were gathered in the Blue Danube, Eggy, Dubois and I, hockey on TV. I could see that Dubois was on high alert. For a tiny claw with a mind of its own was making for a glass of wine and managed to tip it, as it was right at the edge of the table. And just as it was about to fall through space, I reached out and snagged it by its stem, righting the glass as I did so. There was no reason why a certain recollection should occur to me just then, but one did, of a football I caught once in the midst of chaos way back when. Dubois said to his flowerpot half: ‘I don’t think you’ll be drinking any wine just now.’

  A terrible silence. Now Eggy’s chin had raised his chest, but at an odd angle, breathing laboured. If man has a soul, and if Eggy had one, it was in a state of consternation, roused from some torpor, not much liking the whisperings of demons and angels. Not only that, but Eggy was composing a modernist painting, what with that inverted triangle of a face askew. Dubois gave me a look, the back of his hand flush with Eggy’s brow. We would not just yet call for an ambulance. Meanwhile Miss Meow and her companion miaowed. The Whistler whistled, his face within kissing distance of a book on which he was intent. Gregory and some Albanian friends
were about to uncork a bottle. I looked up at the TV, and the Habs were already down by a goal. Snow fell. Serge, who from the galley, had noticed something was amiss, was now at the table, wiping his hands with his apron. Dubois motioned to Moonface to come over.

  ‘Get a wet cloth,’ he said.

  Moonface went white, her countenance hardening. For they were still great friends, she and Eggy, though she did not much visit the old man like she had before when they would gossip and he would pinch her bum, to no avail.

  ‘It will draw the blood to his head,’ Dubois explained, Moonface having brought the cloth.

  The phone rang. Gregory inwardly scowled. Bad for business, this scene unfolding. Or else he was merely frightened at the prospect of death, even one not his own.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, Eggy looking awfully frail, ‘maybe we ought to call that ambulance.’

  Serge nodded that it was a good idea but, the phone engaged, Moonface was now handling an order; in any case, Dubois thought we should wait.

  ‘You there?’ he inquired of a tiny sparrow of man.

  ‘Can you feel this? If you don’t like how it feels, just say so.’

  A fluttering of eyes. Dubois removed the cloth from Eggy’s forehead, and he was deliberating if this was it—Eggy’s last hour. We were all of us as if wrapped in a winding sheet of bad winter light, silly Greek pop music and the TV. And while Mark Antony was playing at house and empire with Cleopatra, Augustus Caesar-to-be seized on this as an affront to Rome’s dignity. Actium. A battle to the death which, in the end, was nothing more than a skirmish, only that it changed the known world. History was like that: immense energies summoned and then the absurd. Eggy come back around, Dubois put it to him: ‘Can you eat some ice cream?’

  Eggy, eyes fluttering, thought he could; and when Serge brought a bowl of crème à la glace, Eggy pronouncing it krem à la glass, he dug into it with sparrow-like gusto.

  ‘How’s things?’ Gregory asked him.

  ‘Georgie Porgie, puddin’and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry—’

  Gregory had no idea.

  I was perhaps asleep by the time Dubois got Eggy up the stairs. Now and then, in the course of the night, some restive wintry breeze rattled the ice-slicked lilac tree in Mrs Petrova’s yard, making of it castanets. Augustus Caesar had not the bother of the press: donning seal skins, he haunted his private underground grotto, putting to the shade of Romulus questions that had no answers, pretending to Apollo above ground—there on the Palatine—that he had not been a terrorist in his youth. For the empire was now a viable proposition, if men only kept their heads screwed on right. He had been circumspect enough, had he not, to permit the illusion of a free people, checks and balances and all the rest of it; and the senate could lord it over North Africa where the grain was, excepting Egypt which was his special concern? Give Moonface another ten years and she would be beautiful in a distinguished sort of way, her rich, brown golden eyes a bit wiser, cheekbones more refined, voice a note deeper, posture less defensive. But of course she already had a wonderful telephone manner, the fact of which, when she remarked on it, caused Dubois to guffaw and Eggy to hoot and I to roll my eyes and she to blush when she caught our drift. To say that God was dead had long since failed to carry import. Not all excess led to wisdom. Some wisdoms grew wiser or at least held their ground; others shrank, chipped away by a relentless barrage of the inane.

  Legal Tender

  Eleanor entered my digs, larger than life in a short skirt and heels. Dark leggings. She was bemused by the sight of me attempting to sew a button on a pair of trousers.

  ‘What? No more group grope?’

  These were the first words out of my mouth. A kind of bark broke from her throat; I took it as laughter.

  ‘Whatever are you thinking?’ she asked.

  ‘We were playing Scrabble,’ she explained, ‘and Ralph won because, unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t stoned.’

  She parked beside me on the couch, and squirmed a little.

  ‘I thought you didn’t care for drugs.’

  ‘A bit of weed now and then I don’t mind.’

  ‘Well, to what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Must there be a reason? You not pleased to see me? Don’t you think I look, how do you always say, fetching?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t managed to prick myself. That’s something, at any rate.’

  I snipped off the end of a thread with the scissors and then put spool and needle and scissors back in the shoebox where I kept such items. Eleanor went on a brief tirade.

  ‘You’re such a liar, Randall.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You’d love to get into this.’

  She patted her hip.

  ‘I never said I wouldn’t love it.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know how men without women survive.’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘You’re in a mood, aren’t you?’

  ‘I wasn’t, but now I am.’

  The radio was tuned to opera. Eleanor hated it.

  ‘Opera,’ I said, ‘is only Italian country and western. Think of it that way.’

  ‘Country and western, my arse.’

  ‘Only it’s Handel,’ I said, and I may as well have been talking to myself.

  ‘Tell you what. Some day I’ll treat you to one.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Sure. Why not. It would give you a reason to dress up.’

  She shifted slightly so as to be able to scratch the bottom of her thigh. I no longer knew her, it seemed; no longer understood what about her was innocent and what was something on the order of a tired agenda. We heard Evie Longoria in the hall. We heard Eggy answer his door: ‘Go out? Go out where? It’s effing cold. Orange juice? Eff orange juice.’

  ‘Your blood sugar, my good man.’

  And so forth and so on.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to Eleanor, ‘I’m in a mood.’

  And though she looked fetching even if she was just flirting, I was not eager to play along.

  ‘Please go,’ I said.

  Perhaps I had just then hurt her. Perhaps I was entitled. But then, one was never entitled.

  I put on a thick coat and went out in the bitter cold. On a street corner, I stood and had a puff, a complete and utter loon. In the sky above, a crow chased off two river gulls. Another crow, on a ledge, called to a crow high in a sparkling tree, the rays of the sun catching the ice just so. I was almost rapt with the spectacle. A finger poked my shoulder. Evie Longoria’s eyes perhaps wondered if I was mad. Would the fact of my madness make her feel less lonely?

  ‘Eggy’s in a state,’ she said.

  ‘We’re all in a state, I think. The reasons are legion. Where shall we begin?’

  She took my response as gentle and inviting. A car, stuck in the snow, spun its tires, the world, otherwise, a colossal solitude. I could offer to get some wine, and we sit in the Blue Danube and drink. Perhaps she read my thoughts better than I might have credited her; but she must go and collect her daughter; they had a movie date. Soon they would fly to Mexico to spend Christmas with family in a timeshare. She expected to have a great time, only she could not get her weight under control. She would have to wear a swim suit. It was what one did.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your weight that I can see,’ I said, the last gallant man on earth.

  ‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,’ she said, striking a false note.

  I did not know what to say so that she might recover a true one. She did not have a light spirit.

  There was something in her that could crush light itself. Oh dear. Some lout, sporting large earrings, shoved his way past us, expelling foul verbiage at a furious rate. Awaken in my heart the wrath of an offended soul …