by Norm Sibum
And we repaired to her kitchen, the most commodious of all the Traymore Rooms. Or so I would always believe. It was commodious not in the sense of size but in what it permitted by way of free-ranging discussion. And she began to discuss. She confessed she had fallen into a funk (only a funk?), hence the early hour at which she had taken to her bed with a book in the hopes that a history of the emperor Constantine might induce sleep. It almost worked. Then she said: ‘Did I say funk? More like a waking dream. Awful things, waking dreams. Kind of like jetlag, only a thousand times worse.’ And I saw in her, perhaps for the first time (though I must always have seen it, just not with such clarity) how happiness coincided in her with the operations of disappointment. It is to say the good woman had the gift of happiness, but that, somehow, things had never worked out for her as she might have wished. She said, fixing those intelligent eyes of hers on me: ‘I’ve certainly jacked Bob around, haven’t I?’
And how was Bob? He had, for the moment, slipped the Traymorean orbit. His sister rang him, come into town from the state of Texas where she resided, and she was troubled and had need of a shoulder on which to cry. Eggy? Perhaps he had finally dropped dead, but Eleanor had had enough of stumbling across corpses, and if I wanted to investigate things Eggy, well, it was alright by her, but I would be doing so on my own. Prentiss and Dundarave. Silly people. They’d looked almost noble, lying there—Torture memos, the economy, here and there some international crisis, the uneasy presidency of New President—all of it would come more readily to our minds than an explanation for an instance of apparent ritual suicide on our doorstep, even if Prentiss breathed yet. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Eleanor said, ‘just before you walked in like a burglar on the prowl, I was thinking how I used to lay awake at night listening to the peepers in the country when I was a girl. It was all the world there was, and all the world one needed. I don’t know what changed and when it changed, but change it certainly did. Then I came to the city, I guess, hotshot me ready to grab a cyclone by the tail. And then things changed for everyone, not just for yours truly.’ Eleanor spoke these words and sucked on her cigarette. It was going to be one of those rare evenings in which, no matter how much amaretto she knocked back, her eyes were not going to get glassy; her voice was not going to drop seductively. On the other hand, it might be one of those evenings when I might say something stupid, as in, maybe you ought to write some of these things down, and she respond: avuncular, Randall. No, she made scarce mention of Phillip Dundarave except to say that, in her opinion, he was more country than town, and that was the tragedy of his life, as if, what, he were a star-crossed crooner of sad songs on the order of a Hank Williams; and that Ralph, well, now Ralph had even more on his plate, for Eleanor figured that Prentiss’s condition of mind was probably as bad as it had ever been. ‘Yes, she said, ‘I’ve even had words with the woman’s mother, and the mother informed me that Marjerie’s sedated, otherwise she’d be distraught. Ain’t that rich—distrawt? The loon. And you? How’s all this sitting with you?’ And I answered that I had not the words; that I felt numb to some extent, the numbness a convenience. Or else it had now passed forever, the feeling that if I could put my foot down and signal that enough was enough, I could initiate change. I said to dear Eleanor, ‘Not that I’m the type, you know, to throw in with a cause, but the Traymore has been something of a cause, only I think Moonface is drifting away from us.’ ‘What did you expect?’ was Eleanor’s tart reply. It was in the nature of a rebuke, that reply, Eleanor, however, not unkind. ‘You think me a silly man,’ I said, ‘but you don’t know the half of it. Live long enough, and I thought I’d be able to see the shape of things on the way. If anything, it’s even murkier. For sure, it’s staring me right in the face: doom, revolution, regrouping, renaissance. But all I can see is my little life and little mortality. I’ll hear Eggy hoo hoing on the stairs. Won’t be hearing Moonface’s chicken shuffle much longer, I guess. Maybe you’ll want me to kiss you, maybe not.’ ‘Hell’s bells, Calhoun, roll me another cig. And that’ll be it for me. I just want to keep it simple from here on in. I think I can sleep. And if Mr Dubois wants to pop in, well, fine and dandy, but he won’t find me waiting up for him at all hours.’ And that was that. We smoked and we drained each our snifters. Now she was getting that look in her eyes, but she was only pulling my leg. And now I sit here in the Blue Danube, presenting my review of things to my notebooks, Cassandra and Elias laughing in the galley. Good to hear. I anticipate that, for them, the day will bring them plenty of customers, church-goers especially who will be hankering for pizza.
Silent Eggy
We gathered, as arranged, in the Blue Danube on a rainy evening. Dubois called Animal Table to order. He read a poem on the origins of the Peruvian flute, the subject matter of the poem and the rendering macabre. And then he enjoined Miss MacReady to take it away. Eggy, for the most part, managed to behave. He had been under standing orders not to speak. No interjections. No rabbit leaps of logic, especially between the hours of six and seven when Moonface was to have the floor. But perhaps her experiences were still unassimilated; she spoke and not much came of it; just that water behaved no differently in toilet bowls on the equator than it did in the toilet bowls of the True North. And when she stated that, in certain Argentinian restaurants, she may as well have been in Europe, she seemed to have exhausted her repertoire. So she produced photographs of exotic landscapes. She was partial to Bolivia. ‘It was like Mars,’ declared her Champagne Sheridan. Yes but, even on Mars, Venus would seem to have had her innings; and it was perhaps grossly frivolous, those photos Sheridan had snapped of Moonface (ones in which she struck certain poses as could only be described as girlie shots) popping up amidst the views of misty Machu Picchu. They were kept, however, from Eggy’s eyes lest they trigger a heart attack. Still, at one point in the proceedings, the old man’s maw parted and his gut erupted; an up-gushing of wine poured like lava down his chest. Editorial comment? He seemed incredulous that he was capable of such mischief. On the TV the Habs looked to be going down for the third straight playoff game, their chances for capturing the Stanley Cup dimming by the minute. I could not say that Moonface was embarrassed by the pictures that featured her tush and other parts of her anatomy, meant for a strictly limited audience, to be sure; but she was not selling tickets, either. But was Eggy alright? Moonface ministered unto him with a handful of serviettes and some alacrity. With what eyes did she behold the homunculus? With dutiful eyes? With eyes unintimidated by reality? Eyes in which disgust was repressed? Eggy assured her that he was, hoo hoo, alright, thank you very much. Dubois and Sheridan were, at this time, out on the terrasse smoking the last of Sheridan’s South American cigarettes, a cloudburst spent. So much for the seminar. Yes, well. And was not experience wasted on the young? If the Moonface eyes had been open, had they seen? With what registrations were they now turned inward?
What conclusions would she draw at some future date? Or would her travels have been no more, in the end, than the chucking of a pebble in a lake? Still, time, distance and experience had done their work; she was not quite the same Moonface we once adored; Eggy’s left eye drooping more than ever; Champagne Sheridan playing the young man who had found approval in the eyes of his intellectual betters (and it was not at all clear that he was entitled). Moonface reverted to answering the telephone when Antonio had his hands full with customers. Miss Meow now delighted in pronouncing menu as may-noo. She thought it a wonderful joke, even if the Antonio did not seem to get it. What did it mean when one admitted to oneself the transitory nature of things? That one had gotten full of oneself on account of one’s perspicacity? I had had enough to drink. I had failed to educate Moonface in anything worthwhile. And yet, when she and I stepped out to the terrasse for a puff—she was taking up cigarettes in earnest—and I told her I was proud of the fact she had undertaken her travels, I got by way of an answer something more than ‘Avuncular, Randall, avuncular.’ There was fright in her eyes, but there was also desire, a determin
ation to meet life, whatever the terms; whatever the extent of her confusions. For all that this resolve might run its course by the weekend, it was heartening to see. Indeed, she was downright shy and not at all smug. One could almost take seriously the prospect of her as a lover; the fact that it was not in the cards and had not ever been really in the cards of no matter for the moment. Were the Moonface eyes post-apocalyptic, she the proof that even a humankind stripped down to the quest for food and the pornographic and the endless ologies, nonetheless still has legs? As I stood there in the street with Moonface, she getting a bit restive now, as if expecting something to happen that was never going to happen, McCabe arched her brows at what was now forming in my thoughts: Eggy’s latest episode and how there would be others until he finally ran out of them. McCabe spoke: ‘No, he’s good for another 900 years or 20. And what’s with this Moonface? Do you think she actually has a clue as to what’s at stake? Well, you’ve had your fun with her, but enough’s enough. How convenient for you that Dubois, in the aftermath of one of his cluster headaches, will have a stroke of genius. He’ll persuade Eggy to alter his will, to leave what loot he has to dispose of to Moonface so that she can become the old wise woman of that song Dubois translated for the benefit of all you dull, English-speaking Calvinists. I can see it, can’t you? Shall I paint you the picture? Hospital room, for starters. And maybe Eggy is or is not in his final hour, but he’s the centre of attention, in any case, and enjoying it to the hilt; Haitian Nurse attending him, Dubois there, even a somewhat skeptical Eleanor. There’s Moonface, to be sure, seated on the bed, looking really rather fetching for once in a skirt. She does have charms, you know, that a change in the attitude of her soul would bring out more. Eggy all the while is trying to be serious; it’s his last shot at the grand gesture. It’s hopeless. Still, the scene is rich with comic possibilities. That he wants his IV spiked. That he wants to see a few bastards hang, but, oh yes, right, the matter at hand is Moonface and how she’s going to live her life. It has long been a staple of conversation at Animal Table. And there she is, the girl, so close to him, and he hasn’t far to reach, but he’s not quite up to it, though his voice is still capable of thundering: “Look, girl, you’ve got to get serious. And I’m offering you the means and the wherewithal. Study your classics. Open up a jazz cabaret. Travel. Whatever you choose. Just don’t blow it all on your Champagne Sheridan. Nice enough lad but a bit weak.” Randall, Randall, really. As Moonface will have it, avuncular.’ That was it then, McCabe having had her say. She departed my mentations. I gave Moonface a look she could not possibly interpret as it would entail her to have knowledge of the future. Then I draped an avuncular arm along her shoulder, she flinching a little. False move, false note, but that, sometimes, one has to risk it and suffer the consequences. I directed her attention to the doings in the café. ‘What a crew,’ I said. She agreed, yes, with a sigh that suggested her overlong familiarity with the place and its denizens. Dubois was carrying on with Champagne Sheridan; no doubt, they were discussing Camus or corporate business models. Eggy was fast asleep, his profile suggesting he had attained something like a measured peace. I let my arm fall away from the woman at my side. Was there a poet in her? I figured she truly was embarrassed by the photographs I had seen earlier. Perhaps she should have been, I did not know. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to see if Eggy is alright.’
Ballade pour mes vieux jours
—by Luc Plamondon and André Gagnon, freely translated by Robert Dubois as:
A Ballad for my old days
For my old days, I wish
That all the men I loved
Come sit by my side
In an ancient tea-salon
And that we talk all together
Of what we have been
For my old days, I wish
That all the men I loved
Come walk by my side
In a garden full of pansies
For us to pick together
As flowers of times gone
As flowers of eternity
For my old days
My loves
I wish you
All around
All of you around, all around
All around me
For my old days, I wish
That all the men I loved
Come lie by my side
On the bridge of an English boat
And that we sink all together
Far out on the Aegean Sea
On a beautiful end-of-summer morning.
Eggy’s Coda
Eggy was not so immortal, after all. He got away from us following a brief but heartfelt funk in which he stated to a new girl on the scene that he didn’t give a tinker’s cuss, anymore. It is unknown to us whether he on his hospital bed recognized in this girl fresh talent; whether the prospect of it had afforded him one last sliver of delight in a world in which so much delight is bogus. In any case, the terrasse at Le Grec aka the Blue Danube was not the same without the homunculus and his cane and his bell and his thunder. And yet, or so it struck Dubois and me, one afternoon in recent memory, Eggy might not have wandered that far away, even so. There was, directly across the street from the terrasse, and in front of the liquor outlet, a small scrawny thing of a tree that had, now and then, been the object of Eggy’s speculation and his sympathy. Would this runt make it? Would it come to enjoy life as a full-fledged boulevard nobility, majestically branched and leafed? The thing, of a sudden, did seem to be doing rather well. It looked to be filling out. It might actually sport splendid autumn colours come September. As it tremulated in a breeze, did it not seem to be waving at us? Or had we just been imperiously dismissed? But for everything gained, sometimes there is loss, and I believe Eggy, or some part of him, at least; that part of him that did care when he was not thundering his indifference, would have been pained to see Moonface beginning to signal that she intended to live life on the cheap in a spiritual sense, she and her Champagne Sheridan. Their relationship might have legs and they stick to one another; it might fall apart by winter; but the thing was she could not seem to stick to anything else: certainly not the Latin studies, and probably not ever the writing of poetry. There was perpetual apology in her rich golden eyes for the fact she had only ever been pretending accomplishment so as to buy herself some regard. She hardly ever spoke of Eggy now. If he had been a trial to her when he lived, he was no good to her dead now, was he? Traymoreans still looked out for one another, but with Eggy gone, one might observe less wind in their sails, so to speak, less reason to give mediocrity the slip. Dubois, I think, missed Eggy more than anyone. They had entertained one another royally for a long time. They had helped one another through a great many rough patches with a minimum of fuss, never mind that Eggy was forever fussing and thundering his disenchantment with idiots. Was he in his person the last of a kind? It is a question, among others, I often put to myself. Was Moonface, in her own right, a warning of a sort, someone whose frustrated existence says that something has died out of the world perhaps never to return? Were we all of us that? Perhaps that is why Dubois and I continued to make a point of meeting on the Blue Danube terrasse so as to clink whiskey glasses and either say bunk to all that nonsense of a diminution of standards or to wear sentience of the finer things as a badge of honour. Perhaps Eggy had worn it, for all the good it did him. “Don’t look now,” said Dubois to me on the day we were parked on the Blue Danube terrasse, the tree opposite us very much on our minds, looking awfully familiar, as it were, my companion on the verge of a guffaw and something else—some upsurge in him of an unclassified emotion, “but I think I hear the effer. Wants his wine. Doesn’t care who knows it. Get those child-bearing hips moving. Hang the bastards. Will they drop the bomb?” No, Dubois was not the type to wax sentimental (though he might go on about his Shawinigan youth now and then), but that he had just come close to shedding a tear seemed to have shocked him and his countenance shatter by way of the hairline cracks of his cheek
s. I looked away. Best to let the man have his moment and be done with it. It is what Eggy would have recommended, though he might have wondered why we were in no hurry to go deeper in our cups. Why, were we so cheap we could not toast his memory with another round of libations? Well, will they, in fact, drop the bomb, he would like to know? And now—what’s this? The old woman and her schatzi right on schedule, the wiener of a dog giving that tree across the way a good sniffing over—Something familiar registering in that dog’s tiny brain—As for the old woman, it did seem there was one less old man about with whom she might come the harpy, forever reminding him how shy of the mark he had always been, even as Zeus—
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over thirty years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah, and Washington before moving to Vancouver in 1968. He has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England of which Girls and Handsome Dogs won the A.M. Klein Prize in 2002. Sub Divo (Biblioasis) is his latest collection of poems. The Traymore Rooms is his first novel.