The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

by Norm Sibum

  And she was gone before I could inquire as to what state of mind one might expect of Moonface on her return. And what I feared the most was that, on her next Blue Danube shift, the dear girl would blink her eyes a few times, and presto! and she had never spent three months in Ecuador, with sidetrips to Argentina, Chile, Peru. Or perhaps, worse still, she would have no further use for Traymoreans and Blue Danubians, and she would drift into Ottawa and we would never see her again. In fact, the latter eventually was to be expected most; and I figured I had already girded myself for the prospect. Moonface? Just some girl who used to hang about. Waitressed at our local. Bit of a scatterbrain. Had pretensions to poetry and being a sexpot. Well, she was rather nice. The Letterman show a rerun, there was no reason to ward off the increasing weight on my eyelids. Perhaps, Americans were, after all, entitled to their belief that they were an exceptional people. What did I know of the place, anymore? One heard it had gone rightwing-crazy-berserk, violent. One heard that it had regained its senses. One heard tripe about the better angels of one’s nature. One did not know what to believe, if anything. One despaired as it was conceivable that one’s mentations had gone up every blind alley and met with every dead-end; had explored every nook and cranny except any that mattered. The point of life was to know that one would live and die and be forgotten, the recognition of the fact one’s decency.

  Some Excitement

  A thin slip of snow lay on Mrs Petrova’s backyard grass. A cardinal flashed red in the dun-coloured crown of a maple; and I supposed it or some other bird, passing through, was the issuer of a purling song. Sparrows, perching in the tulip tree, looked fat and spoiled. Then I came away from the window at the end of the Traymore hall, hearing the telltale sound of Traymoreans greeting each their day, and the sound was plumbing. Once, at about this time, a slippered Moonface in pajamas would frisk into Eggy’s lair, and they would gossip and he would endeavour to pinch the dear girl’s bum. Mid-morning, and the foppish countenance of a grand duke (late 17th century) regarded me from the pages of a book. He was history incarnate, as he was a mediocrity. But he was one who had had the wealth and the power, the impetus and ability to harm. If he punished cruelty to animals, he beheaded sodomites. He put to death wooers illicitly serenading the objects of their affections. Taxed the peasants at extortionate rates. Forbade science but was fascinated by scientific instruments and gadgets. And I went to the poor man’s super mart to replenish my stores, and then, back again, I came upon a squad car, its light flashing, parked in irregular fashion in front of Mrs Petrova’s shop. Well, it would seem that someone had attempted to rob the neighbourhood’s darling, but that someone else had come on the scene and spooked the thief. I approached the door, thinking to see if my landlady was alright; ill-humoured patrolman waved me away like I was pestilential. And that was the last that was heard of it; but that, a couple of hours later, peering through the window, I beheld Mrs Petrova seated, newspaper on her lap, black-framed reading glasses set on her nose; and she was at peace with the world and its treacheries, and I wondered just how pious she was, if at all. A blustery wind blew debris about, the squalling sky, however, a spring sky. It was this world of the boulevard and the elements with which Mrs Petrova, caterer to the local yen for watches and wedding bands and the like, was at peace. I then ducked into the Blue Danube, riding a wave of appreciation for appearances and all the vanities, jolly Antonio winking. Eggy was on site, eyes closed, chin on his chest. I took another table so as not to wake him.

  Had my soup. Scribbled a little in my notebook, Prentiss’s behaviour of the evening before drifting back into consciousness. What if she had been in some perilous state of mind, and I had offered her nothing but my indifference? One was cognizant of the possibility that tragedy was more often the consequence of missed signals than of malicious intent or overriding fate. I would distract myself with the prospect of Moonface back on shift, but it was a cheap ruse; and it was rendered all the more cheap by the entrance of Prentiss and Dundarave, quarrelsome and drunk, perhaps. They paid me no notice but they woke Eggy. Without raising his head, he peered, so much as his eyes were able, in all directions. A claw, quite on its own, independent of the Eggy brain, reached for the glass of wine it knew was there. Eggy’s head levitated, as it were, into position so as to receive the libation; and he drank; and he smacked his lips; and he said: ‘Effing hell.’

  Dundarave, rather rudely, informed Prentiss that she was the proverbial whore of Babylon; and one wondered just how well supplied he was with literary allusions. A dull voice boomed with something I could not make out, Prentiss slouched, hands jammed in the pockets of a windbreaker.

  ‘Well, you are,’ said Dundarave, a note of resignation creeping into his tone.

  ‘So what? You knew what you were getting when you got me,’ Prentiss observed.

  Was not honesty the best policy?

  ‘Oh that’s how it is,’ Dundarave shot back with mock-irony.

  ‘Is there any service in this place?’ Prentiss wondered, looking around, her eyes perhaps registering the fact of me and Eggy, but not at all interested.

  Antonio sighed, and he approached the table, a man on the way to a dreaded appointment.

  ‘What you want?’ he put it to them, with a monumental lack of waiterly polish and finesse.

  ‘What we want,’ said Dundarave testily, ‘is something to eat.’

  ‘We got things to eat,’ Antonio asserted.

  ‘Just bring us a couple of burgers,’ said Prentiss, highly irritated.

  ‘Burgers. No problem,’ Antonio answered, happy enough to begin walking away, ‘but how you like?’

  ‘Just whatever,’ said Prentiss, her words clarifying nothing, ‘just bring them.’

  Antonio shrugged. One heard: ‘Effing hell.’

  It was Eggy advising all concerned that, back among the living, he was an hombre with whom to reckon.

  We would not have been surprised—Eggy, Antonio and I—had the couple exchanged verbal remonstrance for a cuff or two; but nothing of the sort happened; and not much changed in the world in the duration. Perdition beckoned from Afghanistan. The radio deejay cavilled against cigarette smoke, her tone de rigueur, proof that there was such a beast as progress in human affairs; and she may as well have been Moses parting the Red Sea, the evil Egyptians now just an evil memory. Next up, the bankers. And life was good. But then between the honeymooners—sartorial Dundarave and his happy hour seductress, she a veteran, apparently, of many campaigns—argument stalled, like an airplane of erring pitch. I could see, gathering force in Prentiss’s eyes, what was becoming the familiar look of one who was fatally abstracted; and it was as if she were regarding shapes as nebulous as swirling fogs as opposed to starkly delineated objects or the lesser beings of her immediate realm. Perhaps she felt overrun by various homunculi—the Eggys, the Calhouns, the Antonios, as well as Elias in the kitchen, and had need of refuge in her architecturally complicated mind. Eggy supposed that though it had snowed, it was but a last hurrah for snow and soon, spring would be busting out all over. And why, as decency demanded it, we should see that those bastards hang by their chinny chinchins—Previous President and his hardboiled sidekick the Previous Veep. It was one thing to have been, boffo-like and buffoonishly, right of centre; it was quite another the sanctioning of torture, so much so, it had become an item of cult ceremony in a hallowed union of states as was America. Prentiss, whose feet shod in half boots had been square to the floor, now slung one leotarded leg over the other and wriggled a little, getting restless, perhaps. Given the sexual traumas of her late adolescence, one could not blame her for her enduring anger; just that she had made of it all a pearl that could not uncommit, and no solvent made of love could undo its lustre. And Dundarave, wearing something like a military field jacket, town and country man, let a cigarette that he would smoke outside dangle from his lips; and he had the air of a man waiting for a storm to blow over. Antonio somewhat stiffly brought this duo their hamburgers which they procee
ded to eat in calculated silence, Dundarave devouring his, Prentiss methodically licking her fingers and blinking. And where they had been oblivious to their surroundings and did not care who knew it, they were now self-conscious, even abashed, customers wandering in for take-out and striding away. All the world knew Prentiss and Dundarave; was savvy to their less than expeditious love of one another. All the world could surmise the nature of their rather ho hum perversions. Eggy, exercised by the recent summit of the heads of the leading economies, said: ‘Yes but, New President, well, that’s what you call him, charmed them out of their socks as did wifey with her bare arms. Will they drop the bomb?’

  He sheepishly extended a claw in the direction of his wine glass. Prentiss coughed. It was a species of sexual irruption, that cough. It was pique as well, the recent election results not to her liking.

  Hanging Suits

  Dubois settled his briefcase on the floor; slung his jacket on the back of his chair; removed his navy-blue tuque, primping his rather sombre bonhomie and vanity all the while.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘good evening.’

  ‘Eff you,’ Eggy responded, breathing wine fumes through ancient nostrils.

  ‘So here you are,’ I said, ‘our Grease Eminence.’

  Dubois guffawed. Ensconced now, he turned to signal Antonio that his attentions were required; but he had his hands full with Miss Meow who was now hissing like a cat in high dudgeon, on general principles. When this woman was displeased with the world, with the errors of its ways, with its increasingly lowered standards, she could also be heard to mutter under her breath dire vocabularies of wrath and ill will at us enablers of sin and corruption.

  ‘Well,’ said Dubois, ‘don’t fall off your chairs when I tell you this, but I’m going to get married and I need a witness for the marriage application.’

  Dubois gave me a significant look.

  ‘Eleanor, I suppose,’ Eggy mused, not in the least impressed.

  ‘Yes, that would be the case,’ said Dubois, somewhat dryly.

  ‘Yes but, you know,’ Eggy went on to say, more emotively, ‘you bed a woman for years, then you marry her, and effing hell, it all falls apart. Is this what you want?’

  ‘The falling apart,’ Dubois countered, ‘is all you know, and it colours your prejudice—’

  ‘Rot your socks,’ Eggy thundered, his finger raised. ‘But if that’s what you want, and Eleanor’s a fine woman, if a little opinionated, then well and good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Dubois said, ‘but look who’s opinionated. You’re one to talk.’

  ‘No comment.’

  A little stunned, I thought to congratulate Dubois, and added that it had probably been a long time coming. I kept to myself the suspicion that marriage would spell the end of Eleanor’s playfulness in respect to me. But it was not as if I always jumped when she barked.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dubois, like the chairman of the board that he could be, ‘I’ll take that as a yes, that you’ll go with me to city hall.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll witness.’

  I was not as drunk as I might have been; and the light outside seemed too brilliant for the hour; and I was aghast, desiring the dark pall of winter and the purity of snow over the all too subtle blandishments of early spring. Antonio, freed up—Miss Meow waddling with stooped shoulders out the door, the world beyond saving—approached Animal Table. Dubois figured that he would start off with soup, then the steak, but that the salad was to be wrapped up as he would eat it at home.

  ‘No problem,’ said our Universal Waiter.

  ‘Well,’ said Eggy, ‘Moonface tomorrow. Well, it’s what they say, I don’t know. Think she misses us?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Dubois answered, ‘she’ll take one look at you and she’ll hop the next plane back.’

  ‘No comment.’

  Monstrous and desolate winds were blowing about within Eggy’s tough old carcass. Perhaps we should have—Eggy and I—made more of a fuss about Dubois’s impending betrothal to his longtime lover, but the man did not seem to mind, he concerned for the fate of his beloved Habs. Would they make the playoffs? They were running out of chances. Hockey? I would like to have had conversing: the guerrilla tactics of 17th century Florentines, the Department of Justice and torture memos, death-bed conversions; but no, we were going to speculate as to whether Montreal would cobble together a sufficient defense and win a game.

  ‘So you’re going to do it,’ Eggy said to Dubois.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Dubois might have been contemplating a merger, a buy-out, a bankruptcy claim with that analytical tone of his.

  Prentiss’s door was open, as was Eleanor’s. I passed through the latter door, a man headed for trouble. I made my way along the outback of Eleanor’s living room until I raised the good woman’s kitchen. She and Prentiss, each with an arm slung around the other’s shoulder, were glassy-eyed, cigarettes and amaretto on the table. Dundarave paced a circle on the floor, beer in hand. I supposed he had no deep thoughts in respect to marriage one way or the other. It was the luck of the draw, just like life.

  ‘Well, look at what the cat drug in,’ Eleanor crowed, and her voice verged on ugly.

  ‘Stag night,’ a dull voice boomed.

  ‘Nobody here but us staggettes,’ Eleanor giggled.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ Dundarave warned, his grin a shambling affair.

  Prentiss regarded me as an entity of indeterminate mass and shape and valences.

  ‘I heard the news,’ I offered.

  ‘I’ll bet you have,’ Eleanor cooed, Prentiss clapping a hand to Eleanor’s bosom.

  ‘We’re losing her,’ a dull voice indicated.

  ‘Going, going, gone,’ Eleanor agreed.

  She removed Prentiss’s hand from her splendid bosom.

  ‘No more hanky-panky,’ she added, looking my way, ‘not that you were ever much good for it.’

  And my, but her voice was thick.

  ‘Yes, it’s a coy fellow, it is,’ Prentiss observed, and not without malice.

  I looked around and was benevolent, happy enough to be judged.

  It had never been a credo as such; just an unswerving conviction that every human soul was isolate and very much alone. In light of it, I reviewed Eleanor’s kitchen as I lay on my couch. All that horseplay between the women. What flabby thighs, my dear. Yes, but they could squeeze the neck off a wild turkey. Now why would you want to go and do that? Because I was raised that way: to the manner born. Giggles. Dundarave good-naturedly tolerant. Had he ever hosed Eleanor? Got his bid in? Desported with the wench? If so, it was not recorded; and Eleanor had always denied it, telling me he had twitted her with Gloria Jarnette that night he and Eleanor were to rendezvous at a motel, he showing up with Jarnette on his arm.

  Another Sort of Nuptial

  Good Friday morning, and in the Blue Danube, I without a religious bone in my body, thought to write Moonface a welcoming missive; had even considered that she might show, chicken-shuffling through the door as an entourage of one, come to reclaim her ancient privileges.

  Dear Moonface, stay away. But if you must come, let it be according to these theatrics: of splashing fountains and terraces of bay and myrtle; cypress grove, faun statuettes. You’ll wear a silver gown, and diamonds and pearls and rubies. Pages in black velvet shall attend you. And so forth and so on. Effigies of the great poets shall surround you. Bells shall ring. White horses. Gold spurs. And so forth and so on. Eggy shall scrape the pavement with his brow. Dubois shall read out a proclamation. I shall simply stand silent, a dignified creature, my eyes applauding your delicate bosom which some mediocre poet, and we shall shoot him in due course, will compare to pigeon eggs. Effing hell, hang the bastard. And then the fuss and bother and pomp of it all over and done, we shall talk, you and I, of pertinent matters. And you shall determine, on this basis, that much has changed and nothing has. ‘Oooooh, Bob and Eleanor are getting married.
How exciting.’ But Prentiss is Prentiss still, and alas, Eggy has thrown you over for a Lithuanian. Can you forgive him? How much did you drink and when did you know it? Did you come across the ghost of Pissaro? What an effer, that guy was.—RQC

  Second Mind

  Gregory, captain of the good ship Le Grec, known to Traymoreans as the Blue Danube, was back from Disneyland, complaining of airplanes and in-flight headaches due, perhaps, to the change of air pressure brought about by landing. He pointed to the middle of his forehead and looked agonized. Moreover, he did not know when to expect Moonface back from Ecuador or whether she would return to work for him.

  ‘Maybe you should take the train next time,’ I suggested.

  ‘Train,’ said Gregory, considering it.

  Dubois had other things on his mind besides trains and airplanes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dubois, ‘if I’m doing the right thing, getting married to her.’

  The man held his head between his hands; and then he blinked, and glittering blues eyes endeavoured to focus. He continued: ‘After we left here, the other night, Eggy and I, I went to see Eleanor, and she was drunk, carrying on with that Prentiss woman. Dundarave was flat on his back on the kitchen floor, tracing patterns on the ceiling. He was probably stoned. “Here’s my conquering hero,” she said, “the pitter of my patter, the butter on my biscuit, the cream in my coffee.” I wasn’t very amused.’

  ‘Oh, she’s just playing with you a little,’ I said.

  ‘I hope you’re right. But I mean, one minute she’s saying, “Oh Bob, we’re going to be happy”, and then the next, and I’m some schmuck who was good for a night’s diversion and nothing more. Thanks for the memories.’