The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘Take care,’ I said to Phillip’s air of menace, as I initiated my exit.

  He was bored with the conversation.

  ‘Pleased to have met you,’ I added, addressing his new bedmate, Wanda Schneider regarding me with speculative eyes.

  In my digs, I collapsed on my couch and closed my eyes, foregoing the music and the whiskey. Before long, a familiar voice was gently teasing me, and it belonged to green-sweatered Sally McCabe, cheerleader, beauty, daughter of a VIP.

  ‘Randall, you poor boy, at sixes and sevens, it seems. Who will feed your fantasias now, Moonface in Ecuador, Prentiss not in her right mind, Eleanor observing the straight and narrow? Wasn’t there someone else, as well? What was her name? Evie Longoria? Who went to Mexico over the holidays and hasn’t been heard from since? No, I don’t know what’s happened to her, if anything. As for Wanda Schneider, new talent, the new Wonder Girl, she’s another—like Prentiss—another phenom incapable of love. She does it for the prestige, and what’s prestigious is, but of course, herself. That she would latch on to Dundarave makes sense, if you think about it. He comes from a good family. Had a decent education. He just got weary of the conventions of his class, hence the James Dean schtick he’s never outgrown. Or he’s like the man in Mildred Pierce, the Beragon guy, who claimed he lost his awe of women at an early age and is not sentimental about them. Dundarave probably sees that the way in which Schneider is a head case can’t be undone and so, the easy sex, no ological muss, Schneider much too busy polishing her image to notice he really doesn’t think much of her. Is this a fair estimation of things as they currently stack up? Well, you’ve always got me, kid. The war in Iraq seems to be winding down. The new president is getting the feel of things. You’d think something like sanity is gradually seeping back into the collective psyche, but you and I know better, don’t we? In any case, it’s not me you want. And to show you I’ve always had your best interests in mind and that my heart’s in the right place, I give you Moonface. Here she is, your long-bellied goddess up on her tippy-toes, wending her way towards you. She’s been having a good time down there, no question. Even so, sometimes, she’s afraid and not sure why. It might have something to do with her Champagne Sheridan who loves her, yes, but it’s, how to say it, an uninspired kind of love. She needs you just now. Your tenderness. Your irascibility. The way you get on your pedagogical horse and will be avuncular with her. The way you have even, at times, touched her, for all that you’re old enough to be her father. She’s calling to you. “Q,” she’s saying, her voice slightly musical, her eyes rolling, her red nails flashing, “I think I’m in trouble. Everything’s cool, but, I don’t know, it should be better. Nothing but blank pages in my new diary.’

  Dundarave Settles In

  Sunny afternoon, snow receding from the streets, and Eggy’s call that it would be an early spring looked to be correct. The Schneider woman knocked on my door, and before I knew it, she was presenting me the glories of her body in my bed. She had the air of a woman in a rush to make last-minute purchases, lest some scheme of hers go in want of attention to details. I have no idea why she figured I could add lustre to her polished self-absorption, but there it was; and it was not a crime, what transpired, but that the world was basically absurd.

  ‘This will not happen again,’ she informed me, her tone clinical, she putting on her clothes.

  ‘I don’t expect it will,’ I answered, just a touch chuffed.

  It seemed I was checking a certain quadrant of the sky for the imminent storm that had already come to pass, blown over, and now was all pleasant breezes in a landscape of ruin.

  No doubt, she and Phillip Dundarave were perfect for one another, each a predator who sheared rather than butchered. And yet, I was beginning to think that, in comparison, Marjerie Prentiss, the poor dear, was just one of those women who went through life misunderstood. There was no mistaking Schneider, intimacy not high on her list of priorities, let alone a debate over American foreign policy and the philosophical overview of Ayn Rand, that whore with a heart of rhinestone at whom Socrates, open to all comers, would have looked askance. Now standing at the window at the end of the Traymore Hall, Schneider gone, I saw a crow steal some item of food from where a squirrel had evidently stashed it, the squirrel chasing the bird out of the back lane tree. A section of pizza crust dangled from that crow beak. The Eggy and Dubois apartments were quiet. Eleanor opened her door and regarded me with a withering look. Now and then, even for her, man crazy as she was, men were disgusting creatures and not to be trusted. I was sorry to be, in this instance, the source of the male gender’s bad reputation. I shrugged. Downstairs, at street level, the door banged open. I heard Dundarave’s voice and the sound of boxes slid along the floor. He was giving instructions to someone. He was propping open the foyer door as I stood at the top of the stairs and called down: ‘Need any help?’

  ‘I already got it,’ Dundarave answered, not batting an eye.

  I recognized a couple of hosers from Drunkin’ Donuts, the doughnut franchise nearby.

  I worried that Dundarave had caught sight of Schneider as she left the Traymore; if he had, it did not seem to bother him.

  ‘You know,’ Dundarave grunted, lifting a box from the floor, ‘I’m not really moving in. Just looking after the place. For Marj.’

  What, was she returning?

  Eggy had a gift for social intercourse. And when I gave him the news in the Blue Danube that Dundarave looked to be staying on, he was nonplussed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, somewhat archly, ‘another toper. The more the merrier.’

  He was sweetly oblivious to the implications. That Prentiss had gone about the Traymore brandishing a gun was as much something to be remarked upon as was his conviction that Moonface had been born to live her life on her backside. That Prentiss was the centrepiece of a threesome, Dundarave one of her bookends, was simply one phenomenon among others, as in the way crows were black as opposed to red, and that the previous vice-president ought to be impeached if not hung upside down

  à la Mussolini. To what extent Eggy had shed his West Virginia upbringing I could not say. Eggy would point out his politics had always been left of centre, and he was a Quebecker though his French was atrocious. I did not see any point in relating to this homunculus the recent Calhoun-Schneider episode. He was sure to respond with something crass. He would cast through his mind for the most polite way of rendering a vulgarity, and then inquire: ‘Well, did she give your knob a good rub?’

  Korea had been his war; for Eggy, it had been the beginning of things going wrong. In fact, he and I, American expatriates both, had a curious way of regarding Americans. They were to us exotic life forms. I saw them as if I were a ghost looking at Romans through a palace window on the Palatine or catching street scenes in the Suburra. Tacitus and I. F. Stone could have been an instance of transmigration of souls, so far as I was concerned, for all that the former had been circumspect in the reign of the paranoid Domitian and the latter could breathe so much more freely in respect to Nixon’s administration. Even so, it was not good to push the Rome-Washington analogy too far.

  ‘Well,’ asked Eggy, ‘do you think Moonface will come back to us?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Effing hell. I don’t know. Seems to me she was happy to be quit of us or she would’ve been back, by now.’

  ‘Yes, I doubt we’re that big a deal in her life.’

  ‘You boffed her, didn’t you?’

  Eggy was peering up at me with mischievous eyes.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Bob told me.’

  ‘Bob doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know what happened.’

  ‘Well, he was there, wasn’t he, when the bunch of you went down to Toronto?’

  ‘So what? We all got drunk on the night of the poetry reading and Moonface couldn’t sleep, afterwards, and she came to me and we just sort of, how can I say it, hung out.’

  ‘Hung out? Is that
what you call it, these days?’

  Cassandra was waitressing, she wife to Elias, one of the owners. She appeared at our table to check on us.

  ‘Homesick?’ I ventured to ask her, noting the look in her large eyes.

  ‘A lot,’ she answered, vaguely quantifying homesickness.

  ‘I really miss it, you know,’ she added, ‘family, climate, life-style.’

  She walked away.

  ‘She’s certainly getting more comfortable with the language,’ Eggy noted, his finger raised in the air, ‘hoo hoo.’

  His all-time favourite movie was My Fair Lady. All women, according to his lights, were diamonds in the rough who wanted education. Sometimes I wondered if the ancient chauvinist had not the interests of women more sincerely at heart than the progressives of my generation.

  Busman’s Holiday

  I boarded a bus at the downtown terminal and was driven east through the cornlands and into the hills. Twittering cell phones. Conversational hum. That sissing sound of hideous music being relayed by wires from portable CD players to human ears. Light snow squalls added to the thin crust of snow on the fields. Birches, spruce. Powerful-looking crows. In a town at the top end of a long finger of lake extending into Vermont, I rented a hotel room. The room was stark but not entirely shabby, the exterior of the hotel pink. My original intention had been to stay at a nearby monastery and exist in silence and purge some demons; perhaps I was carrying around one too many. Even so, I figured I would only have felt foolish in such surroundings, and besides, I considered I did not have in me an iota of spiritual talent. A man could come to no less devastating conclusions about himself in a lounge over a drink as in a penitential cell. So I drank and watched TV. Now and then I braved the lakefront and the cold wind; walked and regarded the Catholic steeples of the town with a wary eye. Now and then I smiled at the hotel staff so as to reassure them I was not entirely mad. It seemed a plan. In my dreams I had tempestuous sex with Sally McCabe, and she seemed grateful. Calhoun, there’s more in your quiver than has met the eye. And then she and I would attend some Roman dinner party of a dying breed of pagan luminaries. Late 4th century. And someone would quote Virgil and someone else would tut-tut, and swallowing the grapes he had ingested, quote instead from the scatological novel of Petronius. And yet another debauchee would ruefully note that the glory days had killed Rome, but that they had been glorious days, nonetheless. McCabe and I, holding hands like two teenagers on the verge of falling in love, would find the world—even as it was on the precipice of calamity—a beautiful spectacle. I hardly noticed that while it was McCabe who had always been plotting my return to the American desert, I had somehow turned the tables on her, bringing her to Rome for more than just a tourist’s experience. After two days, I had enough of this self-imposed solitude and time away from Traymoreans, and I took the bus back to the city. And on the return drive I realized that I had hardly given Gareth Howard, my oldest friend, dead now, a thought. He had a shack in the area near the American border where we used to drink and carry on like a couple of prophets so terribly sure that things were fatally amiss and could not be set straight. I saw the lovely Clare Howard in my mentations who had had to put up with Gar’s travels and his rage. He had been a foreign correspondent. She, I believe, did not deny him his truths but would have preferred a life and a marriage less obsessed with politics and his wandering. Old, old water now under an old, old bridge. And perhaps even more to the point: one’s thoughts, however laden with regret and something like sorrow, matter so very little. Crows pecked at roadkill by the side of the highway. What I had seen of Quebec so far, when it was not drearily suburbanized, was a haunting place. The Old World that had come here was still in evidence; it was the New World that looked so provisional as one crossed over the Champlain Bridge and saw the downtown office towers seemingly frosted in the frigid air; as one thought hockey and beer and Jesuits. Vendors of grilled sausages and hot mulled wine might add a little extra colour to wintry Ste Catherine’s.

  I paid my first call on Eleanor, she of the gilded curls and reliable welcome. But I found her pensive, she crocheting in her kitchen, her small black and white TV tuned to a melodrama, the sound muted.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked blithely.

  TV ghosts with consummate cleavage confronted ghosts who looked virile but seemed suspiciously effeminate.

  ‘Things,’ Eleanor answered.

  ‘Things,’ I echoed.

  ‘You know,’ Eleanor went on, somewhat agonized, ‘no Bob. He’s been locked in his apartment for two days. I don’t know if His Nibs is alive or dead. And Marjerie called. And then Ralph, who’s still her intended, wouldn’t you know. And I had a visit from Phillip, and that was strange. When it rains it pours.’

  ‘So how’s Marjerie?’ I asked, unsure if I truly wished to know.

  Eleanor set down her little project. She stuck her chest out and sighed.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you’ll be wanting a little of the amber. It’ll cost you a ciggie.’

  But she made no move to procure the precious liquid.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘can you believe it? The wench has been having coke parties out there in the boonies. Ralph has had enough of her antics. Phillip flipped his lid when he heard of it. Called her a useless cunt. Cocaine had cost him his wife and a stint in rehab. I guess you didn’t know.’

  ‘No, I had no idea.’

  ‘Yes, and then Marjerie tells me she laid it on a bit thick when she was telling me tales of how her brother used to fool with her. There wasn’t any, oh what’s the word, penetration. As if I didn’t know the word. He’d bring his pals around, and, as a way of returning the favours they’d done him, he’d get her to perform some little show. But you know, entre nous, I think she got to like it. Anyhow, Ralph has had enough. Had it up to here. But I told you that. Don’t get me wrong—I like the woman, but she can be such a cow, at times. And Phillip came over, and guess what he asked me? Asked me if I wanted to see him naked. I mean, he’s a grown man. What gives? And no, I didn’t want to see Mr Drop Dead Gorgeous naked. But yes, I did, I’m sorry to say. He has the body of a god. And he got stripped off and then this silly grin got a hold of his face, and he was all shy and sheepish, and then he said he was very tired and heartsick. Can you imagine it—that man using the word heartsick? So, could we just lie down together and not do anything, just lie there? So we did, and we didn’t do anything. And I don’t think I slept a wink, but he slept. Slept like a man who was at long last at peace. Just that, when I tried to sneak out of bed, his arm wouldn’t let me go. That was last night, as a matter of fact. And then this morning, he starts up again about Marjerie, that she hadn’t got the brains God gave a goose. That if she continued messing around with coke he would never ever want to see her again, and I think he meant it. I know you don’t think much of him, but he has some honour in him, a kind of honour, if you can call it that. He said he never intended to sleep with me because of Bob. Sure, he’d flirt. He didn’t think that was against the rules. Come to think of it, Randall, it was you who caved, dear boy. I’ll bet you’re missing Moonface.’

  ‘Well, if you’re not going to offer me some of the amber, I think I’ll—’

  Eleanor shimmied to the cupboard.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘is this what you had in mind?’

  I had my drink with Eleanor, our conversation drifting into generalities. To do with the new presidency and the state of capitalism. She was surprised, and yet not so very surprised, that things had turned out as they had. She once worked for a powerful man of business (she had been his mistress, as well, and it was an agreeable arrangement); and though the gentleman had not missed opportunities to turn a buck to profit, he had been somewhat uneasy in respect to where the financial world had seemed to be heading.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but from the outside looking in, it looks like a world of unconscionable greed and not much else.’

  ‘I was on the inside for a while,’ Eleanor said
, ‘and it’s not exactly that. Business is a game some people like to play. For my boss, money was just a way of keeping score. But yes, there was a darker side, and I met plenty of men, and women, too, who gave me the shivers. They just didn’t care. Not one jot. Then I met Bob. It wasn’t that he was some rebel who was going to change how things were done, but he wasn’t blind, either, to the realities. Anyway, we clicked, and that’s the story of my life. Some life, say what? You’d better go. I can feel a crying jag coming on.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  I pecked her cheek and left. And I went out the Traymore and across the street—to the video store. I rented the movie W, a biographical treatment of Previous President. On the Traymore stairs I met Suzy Q, a knapsack slung around her shoulders. She was headed for the library. I said I intended to watch a movie later on, and I told her what it was about.

  ‘I despise that man,’ she said, cheerfully enough.

  ‘Well, if you’re at loose ends, come over and we’ll watch it together.’

  Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘It’s an innocent invitation,’ I said, a trifle irked.

  ‘Really?’ she answered.

  And she wondered if there was such an item in the panoply of man-woman relations.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I shrugged, ‘but if you hear me throwing large objects around in my apartment, you’ll know it got to me.’

  She went by with a show of bravado, I some ludicrous impediment to her plans. In any case, I figured I might let Eleanor know of my plans. The movie might take her mind off her unhappiness. If she figured that eight years of ‘W’ had been enough, what were two more hours? In other words, to mark some time, she just might come over, her Bob still incommunicado.