The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘She had you going there, didn’t she?’

  ‘Why, was it you who came between us?’

  ‘No. Would I do such a thing? But yes, what’s happened to you? Once upon a time you would’ve said, “Come on, girl, let’s see what pleasures we can prove.” You weren’t born like that, but I instructed you well. I see you’re drinking whiskey, eating pistachios. Kind of puts me in mind of faded aristocrats or bitter pedagogues. Remember Mr Jakes? Our history teacher who blew his brains out? Now why do you suppose he did that? I can never get it out of my mind. I never bought the explanation he was out and out nuts.’

  ‘I think he took a look around him and realized it was hopeless. But that would be the romantic view of it. They said his marriage was bad and he had debts.’

  ‘They always say that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘I wonder if his shade is heartened to hear you say it?’

  ‘You know, I’m not eager to find out.’

  ‘Why not? You were always more than just a pom-pom girl.’

  ‘A compliment? Late, but I’ll take it.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘The girls now—they might look sexier, but it’s all show, I think. We actually boffed you guys, though maybe we were insane to do so.’

  ‘I don’t recall you boffing me.’

  ‘You were a special case. Handle with care. This one has scruples.’

  ‘Are you kidding? Scruples? It was more like I didn’t rate your favours back in high school.’

  ‘Sure, you rated them. But you thought us all drunken sheep fuckers, which we were.’

  An Additional Piece of Time Accorded

  Dubois was having lunch in the Blue Danube. Where I had gone, quite out of sorts. Despite my being out of sorts, Dubois expatiated: ‘These days,’ said Dubois, ‘because of medical breakthroughs, a man has an additional piece of time accorded him, enough that he might set the record straight so that the wrong people don’t claim him for the wrong reasons as their patron saint. And what about you?’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ Dubois put it to me.

  ‘You’ve thought a lot about things,’ he added, ‘and you just might publish those notebooks yet.’

  I was flabbergasted. Vain and handsome Dubois was serious. He was lunching on a plain burger slathered with pepper and mustard, having slurped up his soup. And then his cell phone went off, and it was Eggy on the other end, inquiring as to conditions outside the Traymore. Could he negotiate the sidewalks? A hockey game was slated for that evening.

  ‘We’ll get you here,’ Dubois assured him, ‘be ready to go at 1830 hours.’

  I still had not done an honest day’s work, whatever that might have been.

  ‘You plan on showing?’ I was asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and continued: ‘Goethe was claimed by communists, Christians, pagans and everyone in between. But then, don’t mind me. Just an idle observation.’

  ‘Piaf thought Montreal Mickey Mouse. But when Lévillée played piano for her, she was disabused. He was going to go to Paris whether he wanted to or not.’

  Dubois was a patriot. But what was he on about? And such words as we had exchanged up to this point were sufficient for an afternoon’s Apollonian discourse. I went home, having promised I would come back around in the evening. There was a note tacked to the outside of my door; it accused one Randall Q Calhoun of unnatural acts. It was signed E and MP. High spirits, perhaps. Man proposed; woman disposed. A tittering behind Eleanor’s closed door. I inserted my key in my lock, having ripped the note from its tack, crumpling it in my hand. A door, not mine, opened, and here were two blithe spirits in the hall, female Katzenjammers. Eleanor in ceremonial dress. Marjerie Prentiss in a night shirt. Her shinbone was nicked where, presumably, she had recently shaved. Blood coagulated.

  ‘We’re going to give Eggy his thrill,’ said Eleanor, her voice curiously strange, off-centre.

  Gilded curls flashed with unnatural sparks.

  ‘But his heart,’ I said stupidly, no other words forthcoming.

  ‘He’ll die happy,’ a dull voice observed.

  ‘But he wants to watch the hockey game this evening,’ I explained, somewhat panicked.

  ‘Mortal man has seen enough hockey,’ that same dull voice pointed out.

  What drug was in their systems, Eleanor glassy-eyed, in the embrace of a punk Dionysus? They were like a comedy duo, the taller Eleanor in her heels nudged against her shorter and more plain counterpart who was, nonetheless, perhaps a great deal more lethal.

  ‘Shoo,’ I yelled, now waving my arms, hoping to scatter a couple of carrion birds.

  ‘Aw,’ said Eleanor, grinning, ‘we’re only kidding.’

  ‘But we had you there,’ a dull voice noted.

  ‘We wouldn’t hurt Eggy Schmeggy. Wouldn’t touch a hair of his sainted head. God knows how long we’ve put up with him. A little more won’t be much skin of our nose. The way he’s knocking it back, it won’t be long now.’

  Marjerie seconded Eleanor’s assertion.

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry,’ she boomed.

  ‘Did you know that in Manhattan,’ she went on to say, ‘nobody gets drunk anymore. Nobody smokes. One imagines they go home and have virtual sex. Where are the literary lions?’

  Was Marjerie Prentiss a closet critic? The ancients warned that godhead revealed was always a moment hazardous to mortals. I had been stuck with the role of mortal in this tableau. It did not seem I could claim, as mortals would come to claim, that I actually got more out of life than the gods, seeing as pleasure, because ephemeral to transient mortals, was more intensely had by them. As if to remind me for the nth time of what I had been missing, Eleanor waggled a pompadoured foot. Not that she any longer cared. Marjerie simply stood there, barefoot dormitory wallflower.

  ‘Yes, well, see ya, Ran-dull,’ said Eleanor listless now, but in possession of enough vigour that she might sport with the last syllable of my pronomen.

  ‘Bye,’ said Marjerie, waving limply, her expression all disdain.

  What were men but children unworthy of sport, especially the sport of those truly evolved? There was a stench of death in the hall, even if, in reality, all one might smell was Mrs Petrova’s cabbage. Orpheus got to be a cynic. Perhaps now one might understand why. I shrugged. Three adults in the hall of the Traymore Rooms were faintly aware of each their absurdity.

  ‘Have to pee,’ Marjerie said, folding her hands on her crotch, on the verge of an ugly bout of laughter.

  She minced into Eleanor’s apartment. Eyes locked—Eleanor’s and mine, all space between us gone neutral. In fact, her eyes were less glassy now; but I could see nothing in them; nothing of sadness; nothing of anger; no hint, even, of curiosity. I was there and not there. I was a fact some rational mind had to register, as it was what rational minds did—locate, identify as threat or non-threat, guarda e passa.

  ‘Eleanor,’ I said.

  Mention of her name perhaps dislodged her, for a moment, from her trance. She muttered something, and stepped into her digs.

  For an instant, for a duration of time not much more than the flitting of sub-atomic particles through human air, I figured I was back among the sane in the Blue Danube, the atmosphere nearly festive with Greeks and Albanians temperately drinking wine. The hockey game was on, and the match would prove to be a parade to the penalty box for the Habs, the referee having it in for them.

  ‘Merde,’ said Dubois, who was more apt to render profanities in English.

  Then Eggy, his tough old eyes angling mischief at me, mock-crooned: ‘The vicar is a bugger and the curate is another so they bugger one another immobile—’

  Dubois guffawed.

  ‘Well,’ Eggy hoo hooed, ‘it’s true.’

  But that the economy was in dire straits; that Dubois agreed it was, so hang on, the ride would get rougher yet. Gregory approached the table.

  ‘How’s it going, guy
s?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Eggy, his finger raised.

  ‘Tell Serge,’ Dubois said, ‘that he’s done it again.’

  ‘Good steak?’ said Gregory.

  ‘Excellent,’ Dubois countered.

  Antonio, with a wink, unfolded a serviette and made of it a bib; he tucked it in Eggy’s many-splendoured shirt.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Zeus-like Eggy responded, ‘teach Moonface to do that and it would be something.’

  Traymorean hoots resounded through the café, Greeks and Albanians startled.

  ‘And I’d smack her backside,’ Eggy added, for good measure.

  ‘Moonface,’ said Antonio dreamily, wondering, perhaps, how a girl had come by that name.

  Gregory returned to his boon companions. I went out for a puff. And outside, on the terrasse, as I puffed, I listened to the music of ice crackling under footfalls, thought it almost beautiful, street lamps lurid. I would write a novel about Frederick of Hohenstaufen who drowned a man in a barrel of wine just to see if the man’s soul would fly out, the emperor a man after Dubois’s own heart. But of course, if a soul were to have been witnessed leaving a body behind, there would have to have been a natural explanation for the phenomena, no truth but in nature.

  ‘Moonface is the enigma,’ I heard Eggy chorusing as I reentered the café. ‘Why she’s the real enigma, not why the universe keeps expanding when, according to the logic of gravitational pull, it shouldn’t. I’d drill her one.’

  ‘Eggy,’ said Dubois rather off-handedly, ‘you’re getting rambunctious these days. You’ve been getting pretty wild, if I may say so.’

  ‘You may. The vicar is a bugger and the curate is another—’

  I was getting drunk, beautifully drunk. Ice crackled. Moonface in my mentations beamed. But I was rudely interrupted.

  ‘Think they’ll drop the bomb?’ Eggy said, peering up at me, ‘I mean, oh I don’t know, but will they?’

  ‘Relax,’ said Dubois, ‘they might, but not yet. So eat your pies. Serge went through a lot of trouble cooking those up for you.’

  ‘There once was a cook named Serge who as he cooked gratified an urge … effing hell, doesn’t scan, just flying by the seat of my pants.’

  ‘It doesn’t, properly speaking, rhyme,’ Dubois noted.

  ‘Oh eff you. You’re worse than Randall, always correcting me.’

  ‘With you it’s one thing, then it’s another. You keep changing the subject. When did we last have a proper conversation, let alone a debate?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. A few minutes ago?’

  Eggy was on a roll: ‘The vicar is a bugger and the curate is another—’

  ‘Will you stop that?’

  Perhaps Dubois was irritated; perhaps he was truly enjoying himself. But I was back in the Traymore hall in my mentations, men and women there sizing one another up, no mistaking what was wanted.

  Foggybottom

  That she was civilized about it surprised me. But then I was inebriated, and the machinations of insider-traders might have struck me just then as polite transfers of wealth. How she did it never ceased to amaze me: that, for a woman who was not conventionally a looker, she managed to transmit such heady allure. Once more she had minced her way into my digs, her air conjectural. What might she find? What manner of beast? Otherwise, like adversaries, we stood in the middle of my living room.

  ‘The boys are away,’ she explained, ‘I’m lonely. Is that too hard to grasp? We’re adults, you and I. We don’t, you know, have to do it.’

  I was, in any case, too far gone to do it, having just come from the Blue Danube. And she was, at least, wearing something other than that nightshirt, item of wear as might qualify her for residence in Bedlam. Comfortable smock and slacks. Her hair was freshly washed. There was nothing about her that did not seem wholesome and companionable. She was making it seem like we were strangers on a train, and it was going to be a long haul, why not make the best of it? North by Northwest?

  ‘I was going to watch Letterman,’ I protested.

  ‘Why? You think he’s funny?’

  ‘I don’t watch him for the humour, which is a pretty cheap sort of humour, anyway.’

  ‘Then why?’

  She was making an effort to seem interested.

  ‘If America has a collective brain, even if it can’t compete with China in mathematics, he’s its cerebrum, or he’s the canary in the cage, if you get my drift.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘He gives voice to what sticks in the craws of Yanks.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Current President. Or death. Or taxes. Smelly cabbies. Overbearing women.’

  ‘He’s a pig,’ a dull voice boomed, ‘that Letterman.’

  She pressed her hip against mine. Infinite suggestion. So yes, what was the harm, life a rum business in which man and woman (while elsewhere on the earth, people starved or otherwise led wretched existences) might ingeniously conceive short-lived escapist behaviours? When I woke in the middle of the night, head throbbing, Marjerie Prentiss was gone. Perhaps I snored and drove her crazy. Perhaps I only imagined her presence in the first place. I trudged to the toilet, cursing my stupidity, even so. No doubt she was crowing to half the world, her computer the only light-source in a dark room, that she had cracked the Calhoun code. Love, of course, was not dead; but saying so was a way to make a point. Had we actually boffed, Marjerie and I? Until one of us began giggling? Three and out. Negative yards. Ah, here is what happened: we sat on my couch, Marjerie Prentiss and I, heard out Kissinger the realist on TV, he rattling on about this and that and the balance of powers. Marjerie approved; I was disgusted. Charlie Rose moderated, this man who knew less about more than any other being on earth.

  Love was dead and yet love lived, was this and that; was here and there, inside and outside the soul. St Francis of Assisi was not as pacific as all that; he approved of the Crusades and death to the Saracen. Moonface, so I knew well enough, would have failed me and I her had we become an item. Pretty Emma, Emma pretty had squatter’s rights in her psyche, one sometimes compromised by the pills she ate for her fits, that robbed her of her personality, or so she complained. Hence her chameleon-like nature. Her hair was elegantly wound at the back, her lashes long as I took a seat in the Blue Danube in the afternoon. The tight-fitting top she wore revealed the pale swelling of her bosom, so much so she seemed the living portrait of a quattrocento love object. The radio blared its over-amplified, courtly come hithers. Gregory once again drank with his boon companions, if in broad daylight. They monopolized Moonface when she was not dealing with the phone or with customers. Tiny Christmas bulbs festooned Blue Danube window glass. Moonface wished to be normal; I had pushed her to reach for more than she could reasonably grasp. In this I was a scoundrel. And yet, was she not extraordinary? Not for reasons due to her looks, perhaps, or her intelligence. But that, in her brain chemistry, there was something like a divine fire. And, as the poets once understood, it was not the sage but the fool who best knew the thoughts of God. She wished me not to leave too soon. When she had a moment, when she was not front and centre in the censuring gaze of Gregory (who would, understandably, run a tight ship), she said to me: ‘I’ve been to see my neurologist. He told me the kind of epilepsy I have is potentially fatal. I’ll have to be careful in Ecuador. But if I keep taking these pills all the time—’

  ‘I know,’ I said, cutting her off, ‘you’re being managed rather than doctored.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed, her moan slightly musical.

  ‘You know those scenes in old westerns when a scout puts his ear to the ground to listen for the approach of men on horses? You’ll have to listen to your body like that. You’ll have to wing it. I wish I could say something helpful.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, rolling her eyes up and to the side, the phone ringing, interview concluded.

  §

  Book VII—Spolia Opima

  I
n a Peace Concluded by Love

  It was to me a surprise. Perhaps Eggy had something to do with it, he a mischievous gnome at table with Eleanor and Dubois, those two lovebirds convivially shoulder to shoulder. Sunday afternoon in the Blue Danube aka Le Grec.

  ‘Randall,’ said Dubois, as I approached, ‘pull up a chair.’

  ‘Yes, do.’

  The silky purr was Eleanor. They were well along in their consumption of wine, representing, perhaps, the pagan end of things. And on cue, here was Antonio to kiss Eggy’s pate.

  ‘I love you, Eggy,’ simpered Antonio.

  ‘Oh eff off.’

  Eggy was most disgruntled. Cassandra dropped menus on the table; I supposed a feast was in the offing.

  ‘Will you eat with us?’ asked Dubois.

  It was a natural enough question, but it seemed so oddly put. And Eleanor looked most fetching. The low-cut high-collar blouse. The glossy lips. Throwing on her coat, she joined me on the terrasse for a puff.

  ‘Oh, I can see the wheels are turning,’ she said, ‘Randall’s stripping gears in his head. I knocked on Bob’s door, shoved him into bed and basically raped him. Anything wrong with that? Sure, he put up a fight. He was a bit worried about his heart. Then he wondered if I meant it. How could I not mean it? It’s work, exciting a man, especially one of his age.’

  Moonface Obbligato

  We woke, Moonface and me, still wearing what clothes we had on us when we went to bed. That we were garbed, still, testified to our innocence, though some might contend that to be naked in paradise is the only true badge of innocence. Even so, I cannot say I did not touch the dear girl and that she did not touch me. I cannot claim we refrained from conversing on matters of God and life’s meaning, her thinking on it all pretty conventional, in any case. The usual stuff about a first cause. The usual wall beyond which human comprehension obtains no traction. No matter. There are moments (even moments that, when strung together, comprise a lifetime in a single night) that require no genius. Her eyes, richly golden brown, may have been gods, for all I knew, and more than enough intellect for me to handle. She had, or so she put it to me, felt in between beds; that her own was not quite her own any longer, given that she was mostly sleeping in her Sheridan’s bed, plus the fact she would soon sublet her apartment. She also put it to me that she was a little frightened as well as excited in respect to what the immediate future might bring her. Perhaps I could now, now that it was morning, recall my hand on the small of her back, as if—even as we had lain there face to face in the dark, a high wind whistling outside—we were promenading on a dance floor. And yet, something like sleep shivered inside me and took me with it and away from her. I figured my snoring would drive her away; it did not. In the morning then, and she went to her own digs which were next to mine, but that she would return when I had the coffee made. She did so, and we were with one another on a much more prosaic basis, drinking coffee, shelling walnuts, my one concession to the holidays. I suggested to Moonface that she might drop in on Eggy, and she replied she had it in mind. The pedagogue in me began to speak of abduction as perhaps the ultimate cause of an effect we deem human history. As I spoke on the matter, it triggered a memory of the dream I had had in the night; that Eggy was Zeus and Champagne Sheridan a puppyish Dionysus; but that I was only a mortal hero whose attitude towards women, if playful, was fairly superficial, pirating and football everything. And she did go and visit Eggy only to retreat from him and back to me, she blushing from her bosom upwards; that the octogenarian had finally succeeded in pinching her bum. It had been a hard pinch, and the old chuffer was now gloating. Hoo hoo. We listened to music while she got back her equipoise. The viol. Sainte-Columbe. I might go weeks and not listen to a single note of anything, excepting the overly hopeful pap one heard on the Blue Danube radio and on TV. Then, orgiastically, I would indulge and lose myself in what can only be described as exquisite sensations; or, indeed, I would rediscover some part of me that had gone missing. I might see parrots flitting between the umbrella pines of a Roman park. I might recollect some old amorous adventure. I might come up against my mortality.