by Norm Sibum
Evidently, she had watched some documentary, or she had, somehow, read my thoughts.
‘Five minutes with me,’ the woman crowed, ‘and I’ll have you sucking my big toe.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never been moved enough to perform that act,’ I attempted to droll.
‘You haven’t lived.’
‘Sure, get a life,’ Dundarave suggested, and it was clear he was now beginning to get bored, no trouble in the offing.
‘We should all get a life,’ Dundarave repeated, a back country philosophe.
There were no gods, but humankind was explained by them, willy-nilly.
That evening, Eggy was in seventh heaven; all because the owner of one of his watering-holes had instructed him to keep clear of his sisters and his aged mother. Eggy was an hombre to reckon with, indeed. Dubois was recalling the glory days of Shawinigan hockey and some goalie, in particular, who played his best when three sheets to the wind. Dubois guffawed. Eggy then fished from the inner pocket of his herringbone jacket a postcard. It was from Moonface, mailed to him from Argentina. Where she was drinking the wine, though she preferred the Chilean vintage. I’m as brown as a little nut, she observed. Next up, Lake Titiaca, birth-place of a sun-god. Hello to Dubois and Calhoun.
‘She seems to be having quite the time,’ I said, handing the postcard back to Eggy.
‘Well, why not?’ Eggy mused.
He waved Mercedes the new waitress over. I noted how exceedingly pleasant her voice was. And she stood there like the best of sports, waiting for Eggy to make up his mind.
‘Effing hell,’ he said, ‘oh, I’ll have that filet de sole thing.’
And she went to consult with Serge in the galley who, in turn, popped out, and wiping his hands on his apron, said: ‘Mes amis.’
Dubois and Serge carried on in French, Serge, as ever, the unsung hero of the place who quietly managed the kitchen. Dubois would have rib entrecôte. I made mention of American death squads answerable to hardly anyone. I suggested that Prentiss and Dundarave were running amok. This got Eggy’s interest.
‘How so?’ he asked, hopefully.
‘They were in here this morning discussing fellatio.’
Eggy shrugged.
‘I’ll bet you don’t even know what fellatio is,’ Dubois said to Eggy, abruptly changing the topic.
‘I’ll bet I do,’ Eggy answered, somewhat aggrieved.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘that I brought this up.’
There was hockey on the TV, and the Habs would lose to the lowly Islanders.
Falling Out
It was not as if change did not occur, so I learned one afternoon in the Blue Danube. Eggy’s chin began to rise from his chest, and his eyes still pasty with sleep, he said: ‘Effing hell. Evie and I quarrelled.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes but, she said I was MCP, male chauvinist pig, and she said you were arrogant and that Bob was gutless. Well, I don’t know.’
Eggy shrugged. It was something new with him, this shrugging, as it saved him the effort of making words. I forbore to tell the homunculus that it was likely Dubois and I had been names on her list of prospective suitors and we were now crossed out. I long suspected that she and Dubois had spent a night together in the not too distant past, but as to how things went, no one was going to know, Dubois, as ever, stingy with those sorts of details.
‘I don’t think she’s coming back,’ Eggy surmised.
‘You know, I get that feeling, too,’ I said, though I had reasons other than those of Eggy for thinking it.
‘Yes but, I enjoyed her company. She wasn’t a bad sort.’
‘No, she wasn’t.’
‘But she was always talking about her troubles.’
‘Yes, she was.’
‘Oh well.’
‘When is Moonface back?’
‘How the hell do I know?’
Eggy was in a mood. He had lost in Evie Longoria an interlocutor as well as a driver and a cleaner. Somehow he was at this moment less of a lady’s man than he might have been. And she was, when she was not going on about her troubles, capable of good humour and of holding her own at Animal Table. One saw her small even teeth and broad forehead, how her skin, drawn so very tight against her bones, signalled her intensity.
‘And if Moonface,’ I said, trying to cheer Eggy up, ‘is moving around like she seems to be doing, well, she can’t be spending that much time on her backside.’
‘Don’t patronize me.’
A shot across the bow from Zeus-like Eggy.
‘She’s going to marry her Champagne Sheridan,’ Eggy supposed, somewhat dismally, ‘and she’s going to do her post-graduate thing and she’s going to have babies, and she’s well on her way, and you know, I don’t know whether to applaud or be appalled.’
‘I don’t know, either.’
‘Why don’t you know either? You’re good at seeing the future and what a person ought to do.’
‘For God’s sake, old man, far from it. Moonface is an enigma, and I suspect she’ll always be that as she’s an enigma to herself.’
‘An enigma wrapped in an enigma—isn’t that how it goes?’
‘Something like that.’
‘I would like to have had her on her backside—’
‘Evidently.’
‘Don’t get cheeky, young man. She’s my complementary function. Took me a while to discover that, but I discovered it.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘We love you,’ said Antonio, approaching the table, holding his arms out to Eggy.
‘Oh eff off. Back to Albania with you. Where you belong.’
Antonio kissed the old sod’s pate.
Confirmation of Evie Longoria’s intentions came to light two days later after her apparent quarrel with Eggy. Evie had slipped her note into my mailbox, and when I went to check my mail in the Traymore foyer, I heard Mrs Petrova’s new and richly chiming clock chiming the hours of human fragility. There was strange traffic going up and down the stairs, but the footfalls were eventually explained by the fact that Prentiss’s digs were the object of their visitations. Dubois once again had sequestered himself after a few migraine-free days. Eleanor was out of town; nothing unusual in this. Nor was Suzie Q in the vicinity. Eggy, no doubt, was taken up by a new DVD machine and hot lez sex. Perhaps this was what had set Evie off, though she was no puritan. Even so, on discovery of the note, I took it to my rooms and read that men, myself in particular, had copped out of the game or had lost interest and did not know what they were missing. Even her penmanship was intense: small lettering, even lines on unruled paper. Well, she was half-right, I supposed, but as I did not blame my grotty life on the likes of her, I did not see why she should blame me for her troubles. I balled up the paper and disposed of it. And just when I was beginning to visualize Prentiss as an entity for whom one might reach and only ever embrace empty air, all self bottomless and she especially so, the woman, utterly solid and immanent, knocked on my door.
‘Hullo.’
Cleopatra bangs. Bemused eyes.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ she went on to say, ‘just that we’re due for spring rites, don’t you think? I understand you’re conversant with such things? We may throw a party soon. Be advised.’
§
Book IV—Short of Copy
Demon Love III
—On a dank Sunday morning, I enter the Blue Danube early, Cassandra dusting off the Artemis figure in the wall-niche, Cassandra chewing gum, her dimples squirrelling. She gives me a look, the tenderness of which seems to have no rhyme or reason. It disconcerts. Last night in this very place, and it was quite busy, Antonio and Mercedes both run off their feet, Gregory playing the maître d’, Serge manfully manning the galley, Dubois worried about Eggy’s recent behaviour. The homunculus was spending more time than ever in various watering-holes. Eggy: ‘Yes but, it isn’t as if I’ve been between anyone’s legs, if that’s what you mean.’ Dubois: ‘Well, if you were between someone’s legs, i
t would explain the puzzled look on your face.’ I go out for a puff. Those are spring, as opposed to winter, clouds above. Unfamiliar birdcalls. A squad car accelerates by. No siren, lights flashing. Leafless, sentinel trees line either side of our noble boulevard. Dog walkers. Pooping dogs. It is the time of year for le grand ménage. House-cleaning. The ministrations of wax, bleach, ammonia. I suppose Cassandra will set her potted ferns on the terrasse sometime soon, along with the ornamental birds. Was Mercedes cut from the same cloth as Echo? Eggy wondered it, last night, and Dubois answered in the negative. No, Mercedes is not quite the dynamo as was Echo, though she is, in her own way, attractive. So Dubois reasoned it, Eggy supposing that that rational French mind had a point. And then Dubois and I stepped out on the terrasse for a cigarette, Dubois lauding Gregory, who was not, it seemed, afraid of work, and would make a go of the place. ‘He knows,’ Dubois observed, ‘the little things to do, and they add up.’ ‘Well, he’s beginning to know,’ I corrected, ‘as business is teaching him business.’ Dubois in the business world had been one of those men who would trouble-shoot failing companies and bring them back to health. But where were Miss Meow and the Whistler? Blind Musician, for that matter? Too Tall Poet? Had Dubois an answer for these absences? Moonface seemed reduced to the stand-by status of a rumour. She has become in Eggy’s mind little more than a minx getting her sentimental education in Argentina, irrelevant now to the great affairs of state as are life in the café. We had our cigarettes, Dubois and I, and we returned to Animal Table, where we found Eggy aghast. His filet de sole thing had, horrors, come with Greek potatoes.
Yet More Crying Jags
It was for Eleanor to know and me to find out. Wherever she had been, of late, she was not telling. Another fly-by-night fling in Toronto the Good plus shopping spree? A sunset tryst in Panama City? Eleanor, she of the gilded curls and pompadours, would only top up my amaretto and give me the look of one who had made an effort but had not entirely obtained her heart’s desire in matters of love and pleasure.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘took a little trip. The usual. Nothing exciting happened.’
Liar, liar, house on fire—She continued: ‘Anyhew, I come back, and what do you know, my kitchen’s spic and span. Bob’s doing. What’s he angling for? And—’, and here she lowered her lashes and regarded me fearfully: ‘well, what I want to know from you is this … has … oh, never mind—’
‘Has what?’
‘That Longoria woman. Is she still hanging around?’
‘She was. But she was hanging around Eggy. You know perfectly well he paid her a stipend for driving him here and there and to do a little house cleaning.’
‘Why would anyone wish to hang around Eggy, all gristle and bone and ill temper? Do you expect me to believe that?’
‘I don’t understand why you won’t believe it. The latest joke going the rounds is that he took to wearing a crash helmet when that hulk of a nurse would show up and sponge him down once in a while—’
‘Roll me a cig,’ she said, ignoring my attempt at levity. I said: ‘Bob’s planning a trip for us. Quebec City. Last hurrah.’
‘Oh is he? I’ve not heard of it. Is Evie going, too?’
‘Boys only, I think.’
‘You going?’
‘Yes.’
‘Want to fool around?’
‘Eleanor.’
But her thoughts were already elsewhere, as soon as she had put her proposal to me.
‘Prentiss is up to something,’ she observed.
‘What now?’
‘Just a party.’
‘With her, it’s never just a party.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘So how do you know about this party?’
‘She told me. Spring rites.’
‘Are Traymoreans going to be copulating en masse?’
Eleanor gave me a look. It was a look that suggested I might have hit on the truth of a thing.
‘You’re kidding,’ I said.
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘Well, count me out.’
‘So I may as well tell you,’ she said, pursuing yet another line of thought, ‘I was visiting with Ralph at his country place. No, nothing happened, like I said. I was just his shoulder to cry on. All to do with Marjerie, of course. He loves her dearly, but she won’t grow up. Loves Phillip, too. You know, best buddies. But Phillip won’t grow up, either. Said he was tired of the sex thing. Said that even if I, moi, yours truly, as attractive as you know me to be, tried to seduce him, it would only leave him cold. Well, I took it as a challenge. So I guess I’m lying when I said nothing happened. But nothing did. I tried and I made a fool of myself for trying. Nothing new. It’s your old Eleanor true to form. Got my hands in his pants and he just froze. There’s a first time for everything.’
Silence. I handed her the cigarette I had taken my time in rolling.
‘Why are men always brushing me off?’ she sighed.
She then tizzed me: ‘Tis a heavy burden to bear.’
‘You win some, you lose some, I guess.’
‘Come off it, Calhoun. By the way, have you ever had Longoria in your bed?’
‘It’s for me to know and you to find out.’
‘So you have.’
‘Not really.’
‘Criminey, Randall, with you, it’s … I don’t know. I guess they just bring their knitting along and you lie there, holding the yarn.’
‘Yes, I suppose I’m really a beast, at that.’
‘I hear there’s another new waitress in Dodge.’
‘That there is.’
‘Are you going to make a play?’
‘Eleanor, for God’s sake.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t chase women.’
‘How then do you explain your exploits?’
‘Happenstance. The stars align a certain way.’
‘I swear to God, Randall, you’re either the slickest of the slick or you’re just the goofy clown you claim to be.’
‘Oh, I’m the clown, alright. No question.’
Suzie Q assailed me in the hall as I was about to enter my digs, having just escaped Eleanor. The good woman’s voice had gotten husky, her eyes glassy, her heart too noble for my comfort. Suzie Q put her finger to her lips, shushing me. Ah, she was just then incognito. In a sweatshirt. Running togs. Thick socks. She approached me and followed me into my living room.
‘What’s the big mystery?’ I asked, as she seemed more proprietary of my quarters than I would have liked. At least, rather than occupying the whole of it, she only took up the edge of my couch, leaning forward, yes, like an athlete in a locker room miserable with defeat.
‘Are you going?’ she asked, and she seemed to be addressing the floor.
I waited for clarification. Where would I be going? The Yukon? To hell in a handbasket? She had had her locks trimmed, the curls spilling over her ears, if not the chic-est of hair-stylings, fetching, at any rate.
‘The party,’ she said.
‘I haven’t been invited to any party.’
It looked like she might cry.
‘I meant to go away for spring break,’ she began to explain.
‘Oh,’ I said, still waiting, ‘where?’
‘To the country. For a little skiing.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘But obviously,’ she said, ‘I haven’t gone anywhere.’
No, indeed. Of what was she the counterpart to Randall Q Calhoun, this Suzie Q, this clearly intelligent girl who was somewhat haughty, quick to take offense? My fumbling but serious youth not yet given to cynicism? As when a flashing ankle and sparkling eyes and a John Donne sonnet could still answer all that was half-hearted in life and shame it?
‘Anyway,’ she said, rising from the couch, her tone abstracted.
‘Look, if there’s something bothering you—’
‘You’ll think I’m silly.’
‘I just might.’
‘It’s Phillip.’
‘And her, too.’
‘But of course.’
Her eyes registered her panic. Hers was essentially an honest face.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I live here, don’t I? I’ve seen how they work.’
Suzie Q blushed. For an instant, and only for instant, she seemed grateful to hear those words. Ah, sweet femininity, yes, in a girl who apparently loathed the appearance of it.
‘But I like it,’ she said, ‘and then again, I don’t.’
‘You’ll have to be a titch more particular.’
‘Fucking them.’
It was a harsh word to come tumbling from her mouth, that f-word.
‘Oh well, there you go. Are you sure you know who’s fucking whom?’
The look she gave me now was that of a snarling, half-crazed dog.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘what do you want me to say about it?’
‘Marjerie’s right. You’re not a very nice man.’
‘When she’s right, she’s right.’
‘They make me feel dirty.’
‘I’m told that’s half the pleasure.’
Now that was fury, that fury I saw in her eyes.
Virgin Snow with Oatmeal
Wine was conspicuously absent from Animal Table; but Mercedes was there gingerly attending to Eggy and Dubois. She knew she was now massively outnumbered as I arrived, the look in her eyes the equivalent of running up the proverbial white flag. Eggy had no idea what a frightening homunculus he was.
‘Well, what’s your excuse?’ he thundered at me as I took a chair.
I had just been in audience with Eleanor. I had just been given the treatment by Suzie Q, that one which redounded to the fact that all amity, let alone the ebb and flow of critique between male and female, is life and death and give no quarter urgency until the next round of exchange. In any case, it was none of Eggy’s business what I had been up to. None at all. Bugger him.