by Norm Sibum
Conquest and Empire
Left of centre critics had panned the flick. I could see why. Its shallow portraitures, for starters. The premises underpinning the quest of the American Dream pretty much unassailed. Suzie Q saw in the once upon a time president only a callow male whose overweening boyishness was repugnant to her; she could not in the slightest see why women were attracted to the man. Eleanor, I figured, saw a deeper picture, but if so, she kept silent on it, noting only that the movie version of the First Lady made her out more intelligent than she seemed in actual fact. I saw that Suzie Q was not quite the dowdy creature Eleanor had described her as being; she was simply a shorter version of Eleanor’s body-type, if a tad more thick in the hips. Eyes set wide apart. Open countenance. It did not embarrass her to let one know she was a serious-minded young woman of definite opinions on the progressive side of issues. So then, whence her interest in the classics? Looking for chinks in the armor of those ancient world-dominating males? I saw hooded figures, deer park conclaves of intriguers and assassins, all zealots. I figured, dread in me, that certain chickens had not, as yet, completely come home to roost. Or that the rose petals a once-upon-a- time president had so assiduously strewn about the world’s exotic parts were not yet emptied of their fragrance: unquantifiable miseries, violent deaths.
How did Marjerie Prentiss come by the weapon with which she half-frightened Dubois out of his arch-materialist notions of causation? When I treated with the episode in my notebooks, it had not occurred to me to inquire of anyone who might know. For all that, Dubois was sequestering himself in his rooms, and on the evening following, I found Eggy all by himself in the Blue Danube, his back against the wall.
‘Have you heard from Moonface?’ he asked, happy to have company.
‘Well, Bob hasn’t,’ he went on to say, ‘and I haven’t. If you ask me her Champagne Sheridan, her Merry-Sherry lad, is censoring her mail. Why else wouldn’t we have heard from her? Or else he’s got her on her backside 24/7.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘she isn’t interested in us. Perhaps she’s too busy with whatever her duties are down there, and I don’t mean servicing her beau. If you recall, she was to be part of a crew. Her prospective father-in-law is making a documentary about South American music.’
‘Effing hell,’ said Eggy, ‘a movie. I think it better she was on her backside.’
What could one do with such a homuncular lecher?
‘Well,’ I drolled, ‘it would seem that in the annals of the film world, making movies and being on one’s backside are not mutually exclusive enterprises.’
‘Randall,’ said Eggy, ‘are you threatening me with wit? The rain in Spain—’
Save for Elias and Antonio, we were alone in the café. No Miss Meow, in tuque and heavy coat, could be seen to glint myopically at a world gone mad. No Blind Musician. No Whistler. No Gentleman Jim. Especially no Moonface.
‘The military strategists,’ I said, ‘are saying that were it not for the politicians, counter-insurgencies would have carried the day for the Yanks and Vietnam not rankle. We are seeing the end of laissez faire capitalism. The god-particle is close to being isolated. You live in interesting times, Eggy.’
‘Well, you live in them, too,’ retorted Eggy, his finger raised.
He was not one to be caught alone with a hand in the cookie jar.
‘But I keep telling you,’ he continued, ‘the bastards ought to hang. Because my eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples … Now why do I remember those words? Nunc dimittis, you know. I haven’t practiced religion in centuries. Hoo hoo.’
‘I don’t suppose you have,’ I idly remarked.
Now coming through the door were Dundarave, two smiling women on his arms: Schneider and Jarnette. Antonio rued their coming. He would like to have settled down to watching soccer on the TV. And well, the women did not seem at all surprised to see me, given they had both graced my bed in recent times. Though in the case of Gloria Jarnette, I was not much more than a by-stander; and in the case of Schneider I was but a whistle-stop while she hobnobbed for her leverage.
‘Hoo hoo, what have we here?’ Eggy wondered, sniffing out the prospect of festivities.
‘Good people, have a chair,’ Eggy crowed, and then he observed: ‘One of us will have to spring for a bottle. Randall, what is the state of your wallet?’
I supposed it was respectable enough. And Eggy beamed at the women. And he did not think he had been properly introduced to either one. Phillip did the honours.
‘Hang the expense,’ Eggy thundered, rounding on me, ‘effing hell, I’ll square it with you, later.’
I rolled my eyes, indicating that I had in him complete trust, even if it made me a stooge. But, as it turned out, we were a gala affair; the wine flowed. Eggy held forth like a well-oiled machine, the women in fine form. Dundarave was at pains to be on good behaviour; he was not just a bumpkin from the Townships out of place amidst city sophisticates. He had no idea where Prentiss had gotten hold of the gun. Gun? What gun? The questions belonged to Schneider having a moment of alarm, she fetching in a white shawl.
‘She was starkers,’ Eggy crowed, relishing a certain recollection of the Prentiss woman, ‘except for the boa.’
He was speaking of the night when Prentiss staged her floor show in the hall of the Traymore, she caressing the gun, the arrival of the cops the dénouement to the action. Eleanor, taking no chances, had called them.
‘Maybe her father collected pistolas,’ I said, addressing my words in the general direction of Dundarave, who shrugged.
It seemed to me he knew what the story was, but that it was not my business to know. I looked at the man with new interest, given that Eleanor had informed me there was something of honour in the man. I wondered what his intentions were in respect to the good woman, if any, but I kept such wondering to myself. Schneider was planning to attend the winter games in Vancouver in a year’s time. Eggy allowed he had once visited Innsbruck; had even had relations there with a starlet of renown. This tickled Dundarave’s funny bone, and he grinned. Jarnette thought she might tease the homunculus: ‘Oh sure. And she was Sophia Loren, I guess.’
‘Why, how did you know? Of course, it was her.’
All that was missing was Dubois at table, letting loose a guffaw.
‘Men and maids at time of year,’ I said, quoting all I could remember of Anacreon.
Dead Flowers
Evie Longoria, back from Mexico, came looking for Eggy. Sun and surf had done her good, though the fact that it was going to prove to be the last Christmas for her dying father had been much on her mind. Just the thought of her father produced a tear in her eyes. She still intended to move to B.C. where she expected to find a healthier life than what our faded Jezebel of a town could offer, Evie convinced that Montreal was making her daughter neurotic. In any case, Evie did not stay long in my digs. She seemed to indicate I was no longer on her list of possible claimants to her affections. Fine by me. I promised I would let Eggy know she had come calling. She succumbed to a full-blown crying jag.
Moonface in absentia, a help wanted sign in the window, Cassandra and Antonio covered the shifts. Sometimes, when it got busy, Gregory lent a clumsy hand, bewildered by the likes of Miss Meow and the Whistler. It was one thing when they were part of the background noise of a café, and it was quite another to have to actually communicate with these miscreants, the Whistler more agitated, of late, with his whistlings and stompings and need of immediate service. Cassandra was on the floor when I entered the café, her only customer.
‘Where is everyone?’ I asked, making a mock-show of concern.
Her cheeks dimpling with a smile, Cassandra shrugged.
‘Ko-fee?’ she said.
The fact of New President meant that a page had been turned and the sun would once again favour the Shining City on the hill. It was from this very same city that my old friend Jack Swain fled, only to die in Palermo. But now it was to be a hope
ful time, a problem-solving time, a time to set things straight and put the country, if not the world, on a more even keel and introduce sanity to its dealings. As Dubois the arch-materialist would have it, one could overdo pessimism, for all that his cluster headaches were causing him such havoc; yes, just when Eleanor was still vulnerable to the machinations of Prentiss or the allure of Dundarave. It was difficult to put one’s foot down when one was dry-heaving into a toilet. If my expatriation of many years once spoke for my politics, it was now possible that my politics no longer were even remotely applicable to the geist of the moment. Now and then Cassandra allowed me to flirt with her. It seemed a consolation of sorts.
The wind was too stiff and coldly unpleasant for a walk. I returned to the Traymore, and in my digs I opened Tacitus at random and read: Messalina believed that Decimus Valerius Asiaticus, twice consul, had been Poppaea Sabina’s lover. Messalina also coveted the park which Asiaticus was beautifying with exceptional lavishness. So she directed Publius Suillus Rufus to prosecute both of them. The implication was clear: what Messalina wanted she got. I was already sliding into sleep and a subsequent dream. In which I could hear but could not see Eleanor baking in her kitchen. And then Suzie Q showed up. It was immediately apparent that she was one of those women who did not ravish at first glance, but who grew on one over time. She had piled her hair on top of her head, revealing her ears and a fine neck. She had in her hand a bouquet of dead flowers which, shyly, she thrust at me. She said she would not discriminate against men because they were too old, suggesting that sex was sex, no matter what. Highly principled. Eleanor coughed a warning. But Suzie Q was stubborn, her wide-set eyes gone sultry, her countenance honest and determined. I woke, groggy and a bit shame-faced.
The Mystery of Zeus
A famous comic was often saying that God was a silly god and had done the world incalculable harm. The pity of it was that I, an unbeliever, wanted to shout from the rooftops that a godless world would prove infinitely worse; but that to do so might get me arrested; it would assuredly rate me the scorn of a generation or two, not to mention the generations yet unborn. I was convinced of the reality of Venus, who had prevailed against the insurgency of Psyche or the inner life, Venus’s realm of the senses both lovely and brutish. What did in Psyche was an overdose of self-absorption, not to mention the narcissism and literary pretensions of my peers. Sometimes it seemed to me that Venus’s vengeance had been as harsh as any Dionysus exacted from humankind, the goddess ensnaring her subjects by way of greed and empty lust and hateful politics. I myself could confess to a soft spot for Psyche, and sometimes I wondered if there was not in Moonface just a splinter of that goddess. And sometimes it seemed to me that Eleanor, however much she inveighed against the calamities of the recent past and mind-destroying unction such as trumped everything with bread and circuses and bloodbaths, was quite at home with Venus’s work even so, the bawdy wench confident of the supremacy of the flesh over the ephemeralities of a less carnal love. I myself had long understood I was divided in my loyalties. Some might say that the Sixties in which I came of age promised an accommodation between body and soul, a way out of life-negating dualism. It seemed to me the accommodation was rather short-lived; or that it only enjoyed a partial success, one predicated, perhaps, on parodies of the notion of body and soul. I had slept with women who were always on a mission. I had slept, too, with women for whom the sex had been almost an accident and not entirely unwelcome, and it was as if we had slaked our thirst at some oasis before pressing on with the grim realities of life. The mystery of Zeus was that he was both the guarantor of justice and the source of caprice. Ah, Zeus-like Eggy. Chip off the old block, so to speak. Nonetheless I went to him for a palaver on various matters, the pedagogue in me getting the upper hand over Boffo the Clown. Eggy, dwarfed by his armchair, baby blue fuzzy slippers on his feet (courtesy of Longoria?), bade me get to the point. He was old and time was precious.
‘Yes, well,’ I said to Eggy, ‘I think I’m coming down with a case of God again.’
‘Is that all?’ the homunculus answered.
‘Just thank Christ you’re not in the Sudan,’ he continued, ‘and anyway, I was blissfully contemplating Moonface on her backside when you blew in.’
‘My apologies.’
‘None needed. But you know, why, I can see her contemplating God on her backside. Why the effing hell not?’
‘Champagne Sheridan might have something to say about that.’
‘What’s he got to say? He isn’t the brightest penny—’
‘Perhaps. But I think it’s more to the point that when Moonface is on her backside contemplating God, what she’s really doing is contemplating the fact He can’t be contemplated, as He does not move and can’t be moved.’
‘Convoluted, Randall. Kitchen-sink Plato. But I’ll grant you this: I for one don’t think it laughable that you should wish to have a serious thought or two at this stage of your life and then wash it all down with some wine. This is, after all, the true gift of pleasure: that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.’
‘The ways in which you’re incurable continually amaze me.’
‘Do you think they’ll drop the bomb?’
Speech! Speech!
Mrs Petrova was passing from her shop to her suite as I entered the Traymore. She grunted, regarding me as a mad man. She, in her 80s, still had a weakness for the operas of Puccini, but she was otherwise a sensible woman, and she expected of men an honest day’s work. Still, she could not object that I had ever been remiss with the rent. I proceeded to my digs; and, as I unlocked my door, I was waylaid by Eleanor, who was glassy-eyed and perfumed.
‘I intend to watch the speech,’ I said, attempting to forestall any ideas she might be having.
‘Oh,’ she purred, ‘can I watch, too?’
I supposed she could. She arrayed her splendour on my couch; and I supposed the least a gentleman could do was to offer a good woman a whiskey, and she accepted.
‘A kiss?’ she burbled.
I thought not. There was already a respectable amount of wine in me, and that was the way I wished to keep it—respectable. I filled a glass with water and switched on the TV. She had heard from Prentiss, that evening. Apparently, Prentiss was most charming on the phone, even apologetic.
‘No kidding,’ I said.
I smelled trouble.
‘And how’s Bob?’ Eleanor asked.
‘Seemed fine to me,’ I answered, and then it hit me: perhaps she was a bit put out that Dubois had elected to spend an evening in the café with Eggy rather than pass a spate of time free of headaches with her.
In the middle of the President’s State of the Union address Eleanor fell asleep, gently snoring. I viewed it all through the eyes of Tacitus: whose enemy was one’s future ally? I was pretty much of that world when Eleanor woke, embarrassed.
‘Oh god,’ she said, ‘did I snore?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you missed quite the speech.’
‘Was it so stellar?’ she asked.
She rose to a sitting position and began to rub her eyes. It was the first time I had ever seen her rub her eyes, their colour a grey-green admixture, her shoulders sloped. She seemed most vulnerable.
‘Another whiskey?’ I offered.
‘Oh no, that would destroy me.’
She was on her pompadoured feet now. She tousled my hair where I sat in my chair.
‘Randall,’ she said, ‘Randall, Randall. Whatever are we going to do with you?’
‘I don’t know that there’s anything to be done,’ I countered, ‘just that I just witnessed a sane and civilized man assume he was addressing a nation of grown-ups. I mean, I don’t know that it testifies to a page of history having turned for the better, but still, even so—’
‘Randall,’ said the good woman.
She buried my face against her comely and full-figured body, yes, like the loving wench she was.
‘Randall, Randall, is that all you live for now, politics
? I think you need Moonface. I would never have thought it a good idea, but I think you need her.’
‘I need her,’ I drolled, ‘like I need yet another hole in the head.’
She half-lurched, half-slinked out of my apartment. She always had to let me know what I was missing. And when I finally went to bed, it seemed Eleanor’s perfume had become inseparable from the molecular structure of my face. And I dreamed a bad dream. New President, sans security, availing himself of an ATM machine on some street, took a bullet, and a few seconds later, the headlines at a newsstand screamed the fact of his death; and I was witness to my own rage.
A Bit of Academe
Remember how long thou hast already put off these things, and how often a certain day and hour as it were, having been set unto thee by the gods, thou hast neglected it. It is high time for thee to understand the true nature both of the world, whereof thou art a part; and of that Lord and Governor of the world, from whom, as a channel from the spring thou thyself didst flow: and that there is but a certain limit of time appointed unto thee, which if thou shalt not make use of to calm and allay the many distempers of thy soul, it will pass away and thou with it, and never after return.
From the Second Book of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
§
Book II—Delicate Pops
Demon Love I
—There is no Moonface to serve us wine. Missing: those delicate pops of corks extracted. Those flashing nails. Those eyes of hers that seem somehow born of another, more rich sensibility than the aplomb of present-day dead enders—or so she might like to have us believe. That Moonface smile, baring strong incisors, ironically naïve. It is not that she is a sex goddess—she is far from that, but then she is a chameleon-like creature. Moonface: backwater waitress. She has read Virgil in the Latin despite her birth in the outback of Ontar-I-O. (Did she not spirit a copy of Catullus to Ecuador?) Unfailingly polite and incalculably rude, she is, in any event, hopelessly a girl of her times. Her bad taste in music does not preclude an evening at the opera, she shimmeringly begowned. Trouble is, I fear I make more of her charms than they warrant. This quite ordinary daughter of a United Church minister who may or may not find herself lost, one day, to the dreary suburbs, has comprehended one notion, at least: that there is life and poetry beyond the clutches of logic and the strictures of conformity as well as the inanities of alternative culture. I am to investigate DVD machines for Eggy as his, the one Moonface lent him and that her Champagne Sheridan hooked up, has packed it in. Too much hot sex. Lesbian liaisons. Eggy the empiricist.