The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  ‘There isn’t much more to tell,’ said Eleanor, her demeanor softening, ‘we were invited to watch. We watched. And then Marjerie, the minx, she finished him off with a vicious little yank, if you ask me, and then she said it was over, spring officially sprung, and the world would unfold as it should, let the chips fall where they may. And then, Bob, you got your jaw back in place because it had dropped all the way to the floor, and me, if I were to be honest, no, it didn’t do anything for me.’

  ‘Yes but, Suzie Q—’ Eggy protested.

  ‘Too true,’ Eleanor broke in, ‘there was that. You see, Randall, obviously she thought she was up for it, and then she wasn’t, and she got upset, especially after Phillip called her a silly cunt and she bolted. Then Marj and I, going after her, got into it in the hall—’

  ‘Yes, I think I might’ve heard that in a dream,’ I said.

  ‘And now,’ said Eleanor, ‘now all’s quiet in the Traymore realm, except for us. But I didn’t really sleep right.’

  ‘Why, I slept like a babe,’ Eggy let us know.

  ‘I have to say,’ said Dubois, ‘that I did, too.’

  ‘Shouldn’t someone see how she’s doing,’ I asked, ‘Suzie Q, I mean?’

  ‘Tried that already, but she wasn’t in,’ Eleanor responded.

  ‘Good grief.’

  ‘Do you disapprove?’ Eggy put it to me.

  ‘Yes, of course. Not to the sex but to the gamesmanship. Suzie Q’s just a kid, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Not really,’ Eleanor begged to differ.

  ‘Even so,’ I insisted, ‘you can’t just produce some stiffus prickus and say, “Here, go to work on it.”’

  ‘I take your point,’ Eleanor said, her tone a bit odd, so I figured, ‘but I don’t think it was like that. They didn’t hold a gun to her head. She wanted to do it.’

  ‘Maybe she thought she did,’ I countered, ‘but she and I, we had a chat recently, and I can tell you she’s not all clear about what she’s doing with those two. Well, I think they’re using her for their little games. And I don’t understand why you became a party to—’

  ‘Whoa. What’s this? Calhoun the Christian? Since when? Adults play games. Sometimes somebody gets hurt. You can’t have an omelet and all that—’

  ‘Eleanor,’ I said, ‘no. I think not. And you’d better see to her. And I don’t mean to come down as a righteous prude and get on your case, but the girl’s just a girl, however clever and sophisticated she thinks she is, and sex is one thing, but psychodrama’s another, and if they want to diddle one another on their own, fine, but to get you to watch—’

  I could not, it seemed, complete my thought, but was I coming off a moral man?

  ‘I knew it,’ said Dubois, ‘underneath all that cynicism a moral structure.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I answered, ‘hardly. I’m still very much the cynic. But between those two—Prentiss and Dundarave—they might just have ruined her, and it’s a waste.’

  ‘Yep,’ observed Eleanor, ‘you’re still a cynic, alright.’

  It was nagging me in the Blue Danube, later, Cassandra, as usual, admitting me early: how I could not just come out and say to Traymoreans that they had conducted themselves poorly. It was going to be a chore, committing to my notebook the gist of what had transpired in Eleanor’s kitchen. Why not just write yet again, for the nth time, evolutionary drift, and have done with it? Oh, Suzie Q would stew and nurse her wounds and get over it, and then go look for some meek creature male or female that she could manage, and attend to her needs by her own lights, to hell with party favours. Or she might turn hermit or sign up for a focus group and vote Republican. Well now, here was the cynic, right on time. Sometimes Cassandra just stood there, gazing out the window; and then something in her countenance seemed to reach back in her head for a thought that had gone missing and she could not quite find it. And then her feet and her hands recovered their capacity to move, and she would swing her fine head, and her long hair swish about. And then she might come and top up my coffee, I some minute part of a very large equation in her calculations. For Suzie Q, what was done was done. One assumed she would move away on the return of Moonface, and she would forget all about Traymoreans. America’s debt just might bring the world down. No doubt, I would get my Prentiss visit in the next day or two, and she regard with me those dead, watery, and sexually smug eyes. I knew that in Dundarave there would be, upon waking, just the barest whisper of remorse in him; not because he could give a toss for Suzie Q’s tender feelings, but because it had been demonstrated once more he was not quite his own man, and it would rankle. And then Cassandra announced to me that trouble had arrived; and indeed it had—in the person of an excited homunculus, Eggy rapping on the glass door with his cane.

  Eggy on a Mission

  ‘I knew I’d find you here,’ Eggy crowed as he settled in for a hit and run.

  He waved off Cassandra.

  ‘I have appointments elsewhere,’ he thundered, and then to me: ‘Got to see nursie. But you know, why, I just saw Suzie Q, and I spoke to her.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, alarmed.

  ‘Of course really,’ Eggy thundered, ‘think I saw a ghost? Why, I told her right there in the hall, I told her I was sorry for last night. But then, I couldn’t be that sorry, she should understand, as I hadn’t seen everything, well, not much. Because I fainted. Well, according to Bob who thinks I’m on my last legs.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  ‘Oh hell, nothing. No, she didn’t say anything. And I thought, uh oh, she’s not liking this very much, and she’s going to whack me one, you know, and she looked at me, and then, guess what? Why, she laughed. And then, what’s more, effing hell, and she just might become my complementary function if she keeps it up, she bussed my cheek. See? Right there.’

  And Eggy, Zeus-like Eggy, he who would have a universe believe he was a harmless old fuddy-duddy, his finger raised, attempted to indicate the general area where it could be understood his cheek and the buss occupied mutual space.

  ‘And that was that,’ Eggy concluded, ‘I’m short of copy.’

  The homunculus shrugged.

  ‘Hoo hoo,’ he said, as an after-thought.

  §

  Book V—False Carnations

  Demon Love IV

  —Eggy and Dubois at Animal Table are on a roll, the life of the mind glorified. Duck Soup meets Aristotle. Outside, dark rain and the shiny boulevard. Dubois: ‘The female sparrow will mute the song of her mate should he try to attract some other female with his song.’ Eggy ( impertinent): ‘Yes but, Jews are aliens from outer space. Read your Ezekiel.’ Dubois: ‘And to think that this man in his 7th decade was going for a doctorate. No wonder they eased you off the reservation.’ Eggy: ‘Well, you know, I decided to take up drinking.’ Calhoun: ‘Perhaps Lot’s wife posited humanity’s first existential question.’ Eggy (doubtful): ‘Why, is that in Ezekiel?’ As busy as Mercedes is, even so, she makes time for the uncorking of Animal Table’s second bottle, her smile up close, eyes distant, hips a force. It is very near like an unveiling, this corking rite. Did that figurine of Artemis just move, bending her bow? Eggy: ‘They should’ve dropped the puck by now.’ Calhoun: ‘There’s never a hockey game when you need one.’ Eggy (to Mercedes): ‘Well, you could pour, you know.’ Calhoun (to Mercedes): ‘Don’t let this runt push you around.’ She blushes, this waitress with blue brassiere. Miss Meow at her table not only miaows, she Mao’s, her massive shoulders slumped. She has been companionless, these past few days. They seem American, that crew at their table, Vermonters, probably, come to Sin City for a lark. One hears: ‘Men look at women and women look at women.’ One hears: ‘What’s perverse and what’s normal are normal.’ Perhaps one of the members of the crew is a celebrated novelist. Eggy: ‘Why, because x equals minus b plus over minus … oh, I don’t know, complete the effing square yourself.’ Dubois (to Calhoun): ‘What’s got into him?’ Eggy (thundering): ‘Coleridge. That’s what got into me. Where A
lph, the sacred river ran. Through caverns measureless to man … But, in any case, Moonface is a scatterbrain.’ Calhoun: ‘She will have changed when we see her next. She might not know she’s changed, but she will have—’ Eggy: ‘Ah yes, Champagne Sheridan’s got her knocked up. Babies and the burbs.’ Dubois: ‘Not if she’s careful.’ Eggy (finger raised): ‘Has any wench ever been careful?’ And Dubois would go for a puff and I would join him, and we leave Eggy perplexed as to quadratic solutions and whether Coleridge wrote the poem or whether the opium wrote him. Calhoun (to Dubois on the terrasse): “I think we’re in for an epiphany.’ Dubois (guffawing): ‘Did you bring an umbrella?’

  —To Eleanor’s for a sliver of the liquid amber. And what is serious? ‘Serious,’ Eleanor in her kitchen answers, ‘is when your desire aches and can’t find its complement.’ Since when is the good woman a mystic? The grey-green eyes. Gilded curls. Bright lipstick. Her mind will freely range from subjects as various as the Federal Reserve to Jacob Burckhardt to which high heels might she look good in. And I know and she knows, and even Dubois knows; and all the world knows it: she will marry her Bob, her knight; as he has, for the most part, protected her, try as she might to give his security the slip. With Gambetti the millionaire. With sartorial Dundarave. Even with me. An understanding shall trump desire. (And she will get all his money of which, I suspect, he has more than meets the eye.) But no matter, for the good woman is not avaricious. Even so, she bids me bugger off; she has a date with a mall. And I go and stand at the window at the end of the Traymore hall. The stippling lilac. The deteriorating snow. The elegant river gulls. Sparrows splashing in the dirty ground pools. And Suzie Q is in from classes. And Prentiss is out with a ‘you’ll never pin me down’ look on her face. And no, it does not seem I will have that pleasure.

  —Prentiss is of good cheer, dead, watery eyes as frisky as squirrels bouncing off March trees. She stands at my door, a nondescript frock on her. ‘You missed the revels,’ her dull voice booms. ‘So I’ve been told,’ I answer. A bare toe rubs against a bare ankle. Even her Cleopatra bangs calculate the odds of … well, who can say what they calculate? ‘Phillip certainly had a good time,’ she observes. ‘I can imagine.’ ‘You really don’t like me.’ And so forth and so on in respect to a conversation that has infinite legs—

  A Conversation about the Meaning of Life

  A note from Eleanor, slipped under my door at some unknown hour of the night, summoned me for an audience in her kitchen at eleven or so in the morning. I complied. She was not alone; as I walked through her door I heard Prentiss, and this was not auspicious.

  ‘Randall,’ said Eleanor, cheerily enough, ‘set yourself down.’

  ‘Hullo,’ a dull voice boomed.

  Prentiss was evidently amused. I declined an offer of freshly baked carrot muffin.

  ‘So what does it all mean?’ Eleanor put it to me, her tone suggesting she was prepared to be relentless on this score.

  ‘Diddlysquat,’ I said, without thinking.

  I might have said: ‘Prentiss, your bangs are ludicrous.’

  ‘Come on, Randall,’ Eleanor, ‘we’re serious. What the effing hell does it all mean?’

  Once more without thinking: ‘You live, you die, you’re forgotten.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Eleanor, miffed.

  I blessed Marjerie Prentiss with a significant look.

  On a cloud-soddened afternoon, I sat in the Blue Danube, noodling in my notebook. I was surprised to see Eleanor coming through the door, energetic in her pompadours.

  ‘That was a poor performance, this morning,’ she immediately informed me, ‘right poor.’

  ‘I didn’t think the question was serious,’ I answered.

  ‘You really don’t like Prentiss.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Do you think you can tell me why?’

  ‘Eleanor, darling, we’ve been through this, haven’t we? And I don’t think her friendship has done you much good.’

  ‘That’s my call, not yours.’

  ‘Fair enough. But don’t draw me into things between you two, alright?’

  Eleanor gave me a look. Man proposed; woman disposed. But then, yes, as she had not a mean bone in her body, it was not in her—for all her stubbornness and the way she would insist on carrying her wishes through to a conclusion—to force the issue.

  ‘I have a funny feeling about her,’ Eleanor now said, changing tack.

  ‘Like she’s going to finally succeed in shooting one of us?’

  ‘Maybe. But no, it’s something else.’

  She fished for a cigarette from the packet of smokes she held in her palm; and she placed it between her lips. Where it dangled as her eyes became a pair of reflecting pools, pondering the unknown.

  ‘Hold the fort,’ she said, ‘I’ll be back.’

  And she stepped out to the terrasse for her puff; and she had the air of a woman who had much on her mind; and she shivered a little. And when she had had her puff and was settled again at the table, letting Cassandra know she was only passing through, no need to fuss, she said: ‘Yes, I have a funny feeling. No doubt about it. But damn if I know what it is.’

  Then: ‘It’s turned cooler again,’ she observed.

  Well, she had not come wearing a jacket, the sweater that flattered her fairly light. And my noodling was now quite disrupted; I had lost forever some vaguely-realized train of thought, my ability to focus, even on futility, not what it once was. So it seemed. Even so, I was overcome by a wave of sympathy for the woman across from me whose biscuits I had eaten; whose liquid amber I had had generous portions of; whose kisses I had even had the pleasure of receiving, mostly in a spirit of play; nothing outright sexual. She was, after all, not only appealing but a trouper; and she could have accomplished much in life. Ambition aside, and all things being equal, she had a knack for general contentment, though her love affairs or debacles now and then upset her equilibrium. To be sure, Dubois peeved her on occasion on account of his perceived indifference to the troubles she incurred. He was not, in fact, indifferent; just that, in the main, he trusted her, and she knew it.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll know next time not to make carrot muffins.’

  ‘Indeed. Anything but that.’

  ‘Come on,’ she said, impishness in her eyes, ‘wouldn’t you like a roll in the sack with Prentiss? I’ll bet she could give you quite a time.’

  ‘Are you pimping? Trying to set my teeth on edge? I can’t say she’s a bad person. She’s just not a good person.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Have you ever slept with a bad woman?’

  ‘Not knowingly.’

  ‘Can one ever know?’

  I shrugged.

  Critique

  What children had I sired? What foundation had I endowed? What book written so as to change the course of history? What revolutionary thinking? My plea would have been that I had endeavoured not to hurt anyone; but my, what weak pleading it was; as, of course, one hurt somebody by virtue of breathing and occupying space. If I had made myself very nearly a hermit, anchorite, recluse, even so, I was bibulous in public, and there had been sex, however haphazard. So yes, as a drinker and smoker politically unaffiliated, if I was sure to annoy the life-style puritans and the political-correctness crowd, I did live simply, much more simply than those who had ambitions and high overheads. Even Dubois, for all he had spent his life in the business world, did not live extravagantly despite the junkets of his younger years—golfing trips to South Carolina on company jets. And when he first joined Royal Trust, they were still doing data-entry with keypunch cards. Could I imagine how noisy it was? Eggy had spent his money on his wives, and on wining and dining prospective mistresses; and I supposed that was what Moonface had always been for him—a pleasure his old age precluded from sex; and he could play the Grand Man of Democratic Tendencies. One had to take Eggy seriously when he avowed he had always held to left of centre views
. Eleanor, a shopper, was the spendthrift Traymorean among us, but there it was—that she was a Traymorean indicated a fairly humble circumstance, but one freely chosen; and she, too, was more or less left of centre, even if the NDP had weaselled rightwards. Moonface, apart from the odd time she would swank herself up in an opera gown, was all denim and sneakers, and she liked it that way, even as she liked flashing her nails. We were not, strictly speaking hoi polloi, but we were not Park Avenue posh, either. And if Marjerie Prentiss had ambitions, scheming to get rich did not seem to be one of them. Punishing men in bed was her apparent vice; and so long as there was a ready supply of men who craved the punishment, I did not believe her appetites would cost the world, for all they compromised Traymorean tranquillity. Mrs Petrova herself was a fixture on our noble boulevard; and I would have wagered she was well off, indeed, old-style shopkeeper; she was a touchstone. She was the neighbourhood. The sparrows were copulating; the squirrels were squirrellier. Spring again.

  I made for the Blue Danube, which would be open for business; and when I got there Dubois was already installed at table.

  ‘Did you ever sleep with a bad woman?’ I asked him out of the blue.

  Glittering blue eyes searched my face.

  ‘Never,’ Dubois guffawed, ‘is there such an animal?’

  ‘It seems a statistical probability.’

  ‘And yet, bad and men seem to go together a lot,’ Dubois offered.

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  ‘Cassandra,’ Dubois called out, ‘are you a bad woman?’

  ‘Very bad,’ she grinned, ‘the worst.’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ Dubois said, ‘I won’t turn my back on you.’

  His cheeks were red with mirth; her dimples deepened. The place was appallingly empty and yet, here was trouble about to arrive in the person of Arthur Eglinton, otherwise known as Eggy to people in the know.