The Traymore Rooms: A Novel in Five Parts

THE TRAYMORE ROOMS

a novel in five parts

Quebec, America and Rome

Norm Sibum

BIBLIOASIS

WINDSOR, ONTARIO

Copyright © Norm Sibum, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

first edition

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sibum, Norm, 1947-

The Traymore rooms / Norm Sibum.

Electronic monograph.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-927428-23-8

I. Title.

PS8587.I228T73 2012 C813’.54 C2012-907648-1

Edited by Dan Wells

Typeset by Chris Andrechek

Cover Design by Kate Hargreaves

The author wishes to acknowledge Michael Carbert, Marko Sijan, Don McGrath, Dan Wells and Marius Kociejowski for services rendered as copy-editors. Also, he would like to thank Richard Labrosse for his translation of Ballade pour mes vieux jours, by Luc Plamondon and André Gagnon, found on page 692.

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Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

In Memory of Peter MacFarlane,

b. 1927, d. 2010 at 902 years of age

Part One:

THE TRAYMORE ROOMS

Book I—Against Chronology

To Begin

Now Edward Sanders, aka Fast Eddy, hatless in winter, beetle-browed and barrel-chested, shows up in the Blue Danube, the left side of his face inflamed. He is not happy; deep-set eyes accuse. Silent, he joins us at our table. A round of greetings. He raises his hand to check our effusions. He will make the most of this moment, encased in layers of sweatshirts, nylon coat, baggy denims, his pale blue eyes registering what had been cataclysmic. Those eyes are absolutes, so complete is his revulsion for all accidents of time and space, he claiming a sparrow flew into his mug.

Well, how? He was turning a corner at the back of his duplex just as a bird endeavoured to do the same, its flight path minimizing the possibilities of attack from predators. Chicago School of Physics: two solid objects cannot, at one and the same time, inhabit the same space, unless one is to speak of hand-to-hand combat or acts of passion.

Eggy, old and decrepit, snorts, octogenarian bravado and envy asserting: ‘She must’ve squeezed too hard.’ Yes, there it is, what explains Fast Eddy’s wounded pride. But Fast Eddy’s love of our waitress Moonface is pure, as the girl is a noble creature. Eggy’s hand begins its journey to his glass. Eventually, the glass secured, wine is consumed. Says Eggy, ‘Just trying to cheer you up. Effing hell.’ The old man would sow the wild oats he had failed to sow in past years long since dissolved in the wake his passage has left on the broad sea of life, the Ebenezer—his willie, his Priapus—now inert. One day, perhaps, Fast Eddy will declare to Moonface his love of her, and she will grant him the justice of his argument. He might have to see a doctor, his left ear shiny red, grown enormous.

It did not augur much then, the scene described above. It came about early in my Traymorean existence. Congratulations are in order, I think. Not only have I managed to take root in the Traymore Rooms, I have survived its inhabitants: Eggy, Moonface, Dubois and Eleanor R, Mrs Petrova our live-in landlady and others. In the end, they did not see fit to turf me into the street. They had threatened to do so now and then.

What has been more spectacular than spectacular failure, than the truths that did not quite endure, than the lies that all too often succeeded? I would put such questions to myself in the Blue Danube while filling up notebooks with my infernal chatter. I would observe the snow falling, how it settled on fur hats and tuques and caps; how a wind drove it against scarfed shoulders. I observed what, beyond the cold café window, had all the attributes of a dream: the afternoon commute, its sounds muffled. Though it has since changed, its dimensions, its floor-plan altered, the Blue Danube when I first knew it was not much more than a hole-in-the-wall. A few tables. A pair of coolers for keeping pastries semi-fresh and bottles of water and juices on the cool side of lukewarm. A tapestry I despised. The TV at ceiling level was usually switched off, the screen staring down at us a pallid eye. A small galley I never examined. A restroom off to its side. Potted plants came and went like literary experiments. Stacks of newspapers and magazines situated on a broad window sill. A hookah, so Dubois once said, commanded that window, its only reason to exist being to perplex passersby. Until a Slav took over management, the place had been a home away from home for Iranians. They consumed cow brains and sheeps’ balls, so Eggy insisted, and Dubois did not gainsay him. The owner went to visit family in Tehran and was never seen in these parts again.

I believe, and you might agree: time is anything but linear, except perhaps when it comes to train schedules and the like. And yet, one might easily enough succumb to a memory or two while on the overnighter from Vienna to Venice. There you are, looking out the window under a dawn sky, brooding on the Italian landscape. And if you are not that child in your thoughts holding a sprig of meadow-clover to your nostrils; if you are not that wretch engaged in yet another miserable love affair, why then, you must be one of those Caesar fellows from a page of Tacitus. Here we go again, and though I am, so far as I know, in no train barreling along through two thousand years of time, I am back in the Blue Danube on the occasion of Fast Eddy’s adventure with a bird. There are three bottles of wine on the table, two of which are empty, one half full. I, Randall Q. Calhoun, in addition to Fast Eddy, Dubois and Eggy, am a regular here, the café but a short stumble of a return to the Traymore Rooms.

Aphrodite’s Little Helpers

At his table a leather-jacketed Slav is Lord Hades surveying his dreary underworld. His eyes evince mild contempt for us who have no idea as to how anything works, be it molecules attracting molecules, be it pay-offs in a dark lane. Moonface brings him his beer, she wearing a dark chemise under a coarse white shirt. Her countenance anxious, she had an attack earlier in the day, a fit. More physics, like those that confounded Fast Eddy in the body of a sparrow: she rubs her forehead where it banged against the loveseat in her Traymore digs. Well, sparrows in mythology carry the souls of the dead away. They are also Aphrodite’s little helpers, emblematic of both lustful and spiritual unions. There is Lesbia’s pet sparrow in the poem Catullus wrote, and it is known that small birds like sparrows and thrushes and such represented to the ancient Romans certain male body parts. But we are getting rather far afield here—

And the snow out there keeps coming down, passersby bent to the wind. Dubois gives me a look. He is right: there is no hope for me. Eggy, raising an admonitory finger, points out: ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. There’s poetry for you.’ Moonface, pressing her hips against the edge of our table, offers me comprehending sympathy. She knows what an orphan poetry is. What colour are her eyes, today? Two pools of rainwater set in weathered marble.

Fast Eddy still frowns, still suffers. I do not have the heart to rag him as Eggy had. Instead, I ask, ‘So how did the bird fare?’ ‘Hoo hoo,’ Eggy chimes. Fast Eddy glares. Then to Dubois I say, ‘The first crossbow was most likely a Chinese invention.’ He is incredulous: ‘Are you serious?’ Moonface rolls her eyes up and to the side, a characteristic gesture, she a chameleon. She is appealing. She is sullen and feckless. It perplexes her that she, waitress and Latin scholar, has the power to charm a special category of men—half-baked intellectuals who distrust intellectuals, her jeans skin-tight, her soft boots streaked with salt. Eggy’s squint gaze is all over her and she surely knows it, now proud, now self-conscious, Eggy such a horror at times. And when I suggest that I knew Buffalo Bill’s great-granddaughter, Eggy interjects: ‘Why, did she squeeze too hard, too?’ ‘Don’t know,’ I answer, ‘but she was intense.’

And then Dubois who, in his youth, hung around with Chrétien, asks, ‘What has this got to do with anything?’ The man knows his politics; but regarding life on the American plains, he is in over his head: all that nasty and brutish stuff of conquering space one Indian and one buffalo at a time. Moonface pretends she has no idea of the import of ‘squeezing too hard.’ ‘The rain in Spain,’ says Eggy, this West Virginia-born homunculus who seems to have been everywhere, he no sparrow such as accosted Fast Eddy, but a sparrow of a man.

Thought-World

How often in the Blue Danube I would pitch headlong into a thought-world perhaps peculiar to me, history as ineffable an item as consciousness explained by a specialist. What about Josephus the Jew, his Roman monicker Titus Flavius Josephus? History qua history does matter to this writing, as you will see. But say that at a time of weak political control in the American West, a man like Buffalo Bill Cody could pretty well do as he wished, polite society be damned. Could hunt and happily go on benders. Meditate on mass and energy. Could scalp Sioux braves and make theatre of it while his biographer inflates the Cody reputation with exaggerated accounts of derring-do, titillating the fantasies of the well-heeled of the east. Enough. Dubois, his blue eyes glittering, abstracted himself, hears my inaudible sigh. ‘There you go again,’ he says, ‘you’re somewhere else.’ No, nowhere else but here. And if I were to say I am a poet, it is easy enough to say. Say it once, it gets easier to say, and the rest of one’s transgressions will follow in their own sweet time without hindrance or hitch, the way greased, as it were, by the first calumny. And the ice has no sparkle and the snow is already tinkled on by dogs. As previously pointed out, but a few steps separate the Blue Danube from the Traymore Rooms where my brine-caked body from another life came to rest. To Mrs Petrova I pay rent, she eighty-some, eyesight and hearing sound. Born and raised in what had been Tsar Peter’s town, such heartache traces remain of her youthful beauty. How often I have waved to her in her street-level shop. How often I have pushed through a door, separate entrance. Here are the mailboxes and a radiator that gives off Saharan heat in a tiny foyer. Another door of dimpled and tinted glass, sheen of rose petal, fleurs-de-lis; and I climb the stairs to the carpeted hall that runs between the Traymorean apartments, three on each side. The wainscoting on the walls is probably bronze under the lavender-coloured paint, and it dates the building, this according to Dubois. How often I have unlocked the door of my digs and pretended I belong.

Moonface

How did Emma MacReady come to be Moonface? It is not even now clear to me, but Eggy is, no question, suspect in the matter. Moonface. She made a show of worrying for her men: Eggy, Dubois, her latest boyfriend of the hour, and yes, sometimes even me. And then, she could not give a toss for the lot of us. Of Fast Eddy who, so soon after I arrived on the scene, was to die of a diabetes-induced episode, Moonface said, ‘I wish he’d seen a doctor when he had the chance.’ I might have answered, ‘Could be I love you. The odds are, I don’t. As Brando said in Last Tango in Paris, men will worship at the altar of their John Hancocks. When people start talking life-affirmation, run for the hills. Now, what’s this about Fast Eddy?’

She was right, of course, about our friend, but I can understand why he decided to give the doctors a miss. His world would become their world, no place in it for dalliance with Moonface. Once I thought her eyes were black; then I saw they were a golden brown. Russet has come to mind, russet against late autumn green. Virgilian.

And almost Virgilian in his own right, another regular—Blind Musician—would occupy a corner of the Blue Danube and get on his high horse about cigarette smoke. He was always recently returned from one of those tours by which Yukoners or North Saskatchewanites receive their cultural upgrade. Brahms and Delius. I would have the pleasure of women with parasols, men in pin-stripes doffing straw boaters as I looked upon Blind Musician who had not that pleasure; who did not like me; who did not like people, period. Well, would that a bear of the territories had got him. The Slav would continue to survey his Dis, his massive brow meditative, though five will get you ten he really was a thug involved in the drug trade. Once a poem of mine was accepted by a cheesy journal. Unusual. Portending what? I said as much to Moonface, her voice a rising note as she responded, ‘Cool.’ Infuriating. Her brows had gotten extra dark, the mascara on her lashes clumsily applied. In my span of years I had passed from the company of sophisticated women, and how can I put it kindly, to the allure of a girl who was far from having accomplished accord with her body. Now she was fatal; now she was as ordinary as a flash of sparrow feathers in alarmed flight.

On Being Unique

It is a question that has been plaguing me of late: are there ordinary readers? Are we not all of us in our waking lives unique, as most spiritual systems tell us; as bank ads tell us; as your army recruiting officer might have told you? Your book club, no less? Hear yourself described as unique and know you are being targeted by market forces. I ask because the question following has been put to me (and perhaps it was Dubois, that rotter, who put it to me): ‘What ordinary reader would trouble himself with this writing of yours? You can’t even decide where your story begins.’ It is true: I cannot decide. I am not even certain where I begin. The day I first drew breath outside my mother’s womb? That day that probability dozed off, and I scored a touchdown? The moment I lost, as it is vulgarly said, my cherry? Some fatal hour when the government began to complicate my life? How about when I defied my father and thereafter was stuck with the fact I am not entirely devoid of backbone? One might say I was not a shell of a man when I moved into the Traymore, but I was getting there, me and my manuscripts of musings. I refer to them as Calhoun’s Follies because, in all likelihood, they confuse a great deal more than they clarify. Who is this Calhoun? Is this me—so flighty in mind? So, at bottom, insincere? No, I am not insincere. I am nothing if not painfully sincere, even when I am most glib and flippant. The age wants a stand-up guy. There is not going to be any stand-up guy. The age wants its lies and adores its perversions. Perhaps, you have your own ideas as to what the age wants. This is as it should be. Ah, electric cars. Guilt-free sex. A Perfect President. All the pleasures without the pain. God without religion.

For a while there, distant wars, profligacy, and Eggy’s old age were to be my literary themes. Love, too, if you choose to believe that love conquers all. Now, I cannot say. If I remain unable to find traction by way of a beginning to the tale I have to tell, how can I presume to speak of themes? Even so, I expect showers of rose petals, roars of acclamation to greet my prowess, come the moment when I will eventually extract order from chaos. I expect horses, chariots, even elephants, barbarians bent under the weight of heavy chains, the vulgar masses jeering at them, to honour my triumph. I expect lounging temple whores and grinning gods to accord me a thumb’s up. I expect celebrities to drolly remark on what will have been my freakish rise to celebrity status. Are we so removed from the splendour of processions?

So then, patience. You will get to know, in time, so far as any of us can ever know anyone, Traymoreans, as well as Fast Eddy. You will learn how I came to discover the true colour of Moonface’s eyes. You will hear of the pseudo-Traymoreans, the Lamonts and Osgoode; of future residents such as Marjerie Prentiss, she and her Cleopatra bangs and knobbly toes and militant free will. There are non-Traymoreans to consider. The names come fast and furious. How I deferred to Gareth Howard’s moral authority even as I joshed him, the quality of my pessimism dubious to him. Vera Klopstock, amiable predator, married, is an old part of my life. How I had nothing to say, really, to Minnie Dreier. How I always have plenty to say to Bly, he who has the cloven hooves of the public intellectual. How I would, now and then, post letters to a dead man. How there was Echo, and how she faded. You will come across bells and whistles such as my notebooks of musings spawned, eccentric turns of mind that conform to no rational purpose, none that will rid the world of what ails it or retrieve the natural order from extinction. What, in any case, is the natural order? Moonface may or may not throw light on the matter. I will invoke the spirit of Sally McCabe, cheerleader of my high school days who, in her spirit-guise, was, on occasion, a structuralist. ‘Structure? Chronology? Subject matter? Didn’t you learn anything?’ She will dock me points for my latter-day Neo-Platonism, one all too often hung-over. She will tickle my chin as I make mention of the screed of Eunapius of Sardis against chronology, yes, as if Socrates were only wise in the dry season. And were I to say ‘Iraq and quagmire’, she would answer, ‘You expect me to explain why?’

Evening, and in the upper-storey hall of the Traymore Rooms where a window looks out on brick edifices, leafless maples and back lanes, I will watch the new snow coat stale deposits of the same banked against fences, each drift now a new-minted sculpture, a white dune. My name is Calhoun, Randall Q. But have we not done this, already?

Errant Memory

So many years ago, after having left the U.S., I departed British Columbia for this eastern province, for this island city in which I have skipped like a stone from one lodging to another. I flitted from affair to affair, disillusioning women as well as myself. I live among the generalities that inhabit my mind like a junkman’s oddments; I lie about in my digs, listening to symphonies. And memory, dragging its lame foot, is hauled along by that music. Just now, I recall making love to one woman in particular. We managed what we could in the broom closet of her art gallery, the mops helping to render some discretion to our fervour, like so many postillions securing privacy while newlyweds eyeballed the artwork, looking for that something which would complement their furniture. (Soon after, the gallery closed for lack of sales, and the woman absconded, owing her artists.) What does any of this mean? Good fun, yes, but perhaps we are not moral creatures? In the morning, Mrs Petrova will clear the snow away from her shop downstairs and the effort will not faze her in the slightest, a curl the colour of burnt cinder loose on her forehead. When did I write the words that follow? Moonface, my immediate neighbour in the adjoining apartment, is not quite sleekly full value for her self-empowerment, but she is getting there.

No, there is no use pretending that the image of Moonface, lying about in her pajamas, committing Traymoreans to her diary pages (the act of which distracts her from the classics she reads at university), did not add a certain frisson to my capacity for lust. There is no use pretending that Eggy will not start early on his wine intake. Eleanor R shall whip something up in her kitchen or go out in the world and scratch an itch. Dubois shall pound his keyboard, besotted with his mind, his neck craned, his glittering blue eyes spooning at the computer screen. He will calculate that things will change not necessarily for the better but to the benefit of some. It is what we knew as history. Will the future offer us plutocracy light? Economic populism? Theocratic state? The slow burn of decline and fall? Comedy jamborees? If you must know, I direct you to Dubois. I, too, took to heart the professed ideals of the Great Society. Well, almost, I a skeptic counselled in my mother’s womb—she who had not the sweetness and light of, say, a giggling starlet, my skepticism ratified by my father’s reptilian brilliance. Fat lot of good it has done me, going around appalled.

Calhoun’s Military Service

Momentous decisions are sometimes spur of the moment. Life is random except when it is not. There was a war in Asia; I went north. I opted out of military service, not a moral agent as such; rather I was a blind particle looking to collide with its fate. I claimed to understand what I did not understand, the year 1968, chasms in the national fabric both widening and deepening. My parents, most nominal of Christians, rendered unto Caesar. Of that period in my life, a great deal is now mercifully hazy. I recall the pre-induction physical. Along with my fellow cannon fodder, I was poked, prodded and otherwise examined like so much beef. If, for some, this exercise christened their love of country, I only got cold feet. The historian Tacitus would have sympathized with the demands of the state. He would have had little good to say of me; and he would have concurred that the war was pointless. Much in life is pointless for all that there are the campaigns of the hour: military incursions, new fruit drinks, corporate raiding, self-promotional stunts. Political progressives would arrange my thoughts to suit their pleasures, the reactionaries, likewise. Not much remains of any middle ground, and what remains is a sinkhole for makeshift consciences. Cynic, I please myself.

In Vancouver, B.C., a city double-parked by the sea, I married for complicated reasons, citizenship one of them. I could not hold down a job; I was all thumbs at the game of snooker. We divorced in short order, she and I; and I went off to Europe and further complicated myself. She threw herself out a window, and I must not think it had anything to do with me.

It is the old story of one’s demons. They might be but garden variety demons, but even so, mine in perpetual Mardi Gras mode, I was, and I remain, a walking festival of them. I certainly do have pedigree of a modest sort, to wit, that I, the father of no one so far as I know, the son of Edna née Avesbury, socialite of minor magnitude, and Harry P for Prince Calhoun, chemical engineer and something of a Genghis Khan cum Scrooge when it comes to rapine and bank balances, am the spawn of an understanding. It does not deny the possibility of love, God, redemption and other intangibles; just that such concerns are better left to other people. The less said about my parents, the better, I in my 6th decade. If we are not moral creatures, I, for one, have endeavoured not to hurt anyone. A spectre in my mind that I name Boffo the Clown holds his belly and guffaws. Of course, it was not always the case that I was so high-minded; and one always hurts some unsuspecting soul simply by drawing breath. Generally, sex was the weapon; and when one had been on the receiving end, it sometimes afforded one a glimmer of the consequences. To be sure, I have indulged my share of delusions, among them the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds; that evil is a treatable condition; that America is blessed, her democracy a state of grace. Bent backs and the pieties of whores built the country. I would rather believe that than believe social justice had anything to do with it. The lone prairee demanded improvisational skills. So when I stand on a street corner and smoke a cigarette, my middle finger in full index position, what you will see is not the athlete I was, however brief that career, but an aging boulevardier in American tweed, a kind of patchwork Main Street of an aesthetic sunset. I have had peculiar friends.

Jack Swain

Jack Swain was one of these peculiar friends. His mother, an Albertan, rolled cigarettes with one hand, even on horseback and in a wind. The father, Idaho born, knocked around with a toolbox. So that it was in Palo Alto where Jack, in his senior year, quarterbacked the high school football team. He resolved to write poetry, finishing up university in Vancouver, B.C. He went on to teach, to drink liberally and wench like a fool; he published once and never again. Too other-worldly for his Marxist-Leninist colleagues, for Billy Bly who described the Jack Swain verses as limpid and of no use to the working man, Jack came to spend his last years in Sicily, as far away from this continent as he could manage, for no other reason than that he could not stomach an actor become Commander-in-chief, first among equals. If Bly was the cool professional, Jack’s sense of injustice was heartfelt. Even so, I thought the Sicilian idyll extreme. But to the memory of the man dead now these twenty years, I say, ‘Jack, I’m afraid the Fat Lady still sings. Can you hear her, you know, the one who drove you around the bend?’

Jack was partial to plump women, yes; but that one, that porker, as she bellowed from sea to shining sea under spacious skies of onerous greatness, was more than a lover boy and a self-deprecating bard could bear. To put it vulgarly, and he did put it vulgarly, ram a fist up an intimate part of her anatomy and she would never notice, keeper of the American flame, the Eternal Comeback. When America invaded Iraq, do you not suppose she invaded herself?

And you, Gareth Howard, deceased, would you prefer I forget these initials stabs at an accounting of some sort? Your mother and father, both Canucks, were reinforced by seven generations of colonial circumspection. For all that, it was in the U.S. where we first met and promptly got drunk on some vile muscatel, having just lost each our ripe cherries. You were a prospective journalist and a polymath. You were soon to pass through your first gateway to hell—there in Asia.

These lugubrious musings on the nature of time—Yes but, it snows as if it has never snowed before. It may never snow again. The white stuff comes sideways out of the wind. Plastered to awning and tree branch and parked car, to a jumbo-sized Christmas wreath affixed still to a lamp pole, it muffles tires and human tread. Gar, I have been to Rome and back in the past weeks but you could care less. ‘Oh?’ you would say like a man who had been there many times, ‘how was the old girl?’

Smoking Towers

I did not know, once I had transferred myself to the Traymore Rooms and gotten to know its residents some, that I would take to writing them letters, slipping the missives under their respective doors. I had always written voluminous mail to old friends and longtime enemies; but I suppose Gar, Vera, Bly and Minnie—to name a few friends and enemies—were too used to me and my wiles for me to pull any wool over their eyes, as when I might claim I had, at last, seen the light. They certainly did not believe, for instance, that I was any genius. Just prior to taking up Traymorean life, I sat there in the basement suite I was about to vacate, my belongings packed, waiting for Reginald and his van. I was tired and down at heart and confused, a more than middle-aged man of no accomplishments, chary of principles, bedeviled by the smoking towers of an America I had only known by way of TV screens for the better part of my adult life.

I am caustic in regards to the notion that America is always able to reinvent herself. ‘Out of what?’ I ask. Hopes and dreams, as ever, for which someone will pay. I console myself Montreal is an old city, older than most cities on this continent. I trust nothing new.

Introductions All Around

It was Robert Dubois, impossibly handsome and rather vain, who introduced me to Traymorean society. On the following afternoon after my arrival, he knocked on my door, told me to get my coat, and he would treat me to a glass of wine at a nearby café. He would brook no refusal. Lucille Lamont, sticking her head through her door, made note of this invitation, and I could not be sure, but it seemed to me she scowled. The look in my new friend’s eyes instructed me to pay her no mind, those glittering blue eyes companionable. ‘We’re all pretty friendly here,’ Dubois said, ‘and we’re friendly there, too, in the Blue Danube.’ He gave me a hand to shake, a somewhat worn attaché case in his other. On his head was slopped an outlandish tuque, creamy white with red stripes. He had the air of a man who had enjoyed modest success in life and was comfortable with his lot. I detest smugness. ‘Well,’ said Dubois, ‘what are we waiting for?’ I shrugged my assent to the man’s proposal. I grabbed a coat and let myself be led down the Traymore stairs and out the door and to the corner where the Blue Danube was, a small café beneath some seedy-looking apartments where Moonface was pleased to serve us. Arthur Eglinton, wizened old runt of man whom Traymoreans affectionately called Eggy, had been awaiting our company with some impatience. Dubois having said that he had brought the new guy in for interrogation, Eggy hoo-hooed in my direction and said, ‘How do you do?’ And then he asked, ‘And what do you do?’ ‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘Well, that’s something,’ Eggy replied. ‘Come on, now,’ said Dubois, ‘you must do something.’ ‘The nothing I do,’ I responded, ‘is to write verse. Oh, I read a little but mostly I sit around and brood.’ ‘I’m a reader, too,’ Eggy volunteered, ‘but brooding—that’s too much heavy-lifting for me. Verse, you say? Problematic.’ He reached to pinch Moonface’s bum and missed. I thought perhaps something had moved in her eyes at my mention of the fact that I wrote, but I could have been mistaken.

Perhaps the wine went straightaway to my head; before long I blurted out a compressed life history, how I played football in high school—a depressing experience; how I left the States for Canada, knocked about the various provinces and Europe, as well; knocked about this island city; and in conclusion, could not make sense of myself. ‘Welcome to the club,’ Eggy laughed, not unkindly. ‘It is what life’s for—to come to know there’s no sense to be made. The rain in Spain and all that.’ ‘Yes, it’s all pointless,’ Moonface pitched in with exaggerated solemnity, the timbre of her voice a little thin but musical. The look on Dubois’s face said that, on the contrary, life has a point. ‘I beg to differ,’ he said. ‘Beg all you want,’ said Eggy, ‘but it won’t do you much good. Moonface, I can see the bottom of this glass.’ She rolled her eyes upward and to the side as if in exasperation, and I could see she was touchingly oblivious to her charms. She replenished Eggy’s glass. Dubois advised us, ‘Eleanor should show up soon. She’s one of your neighbours, too, Randall.’ ‘Hell of a woman,’ said Eggy, ‘but a trifle argumentative for my taste. Of course, the Lamont woman takes the cake in that department.’ ‘You just want women reduced to the level of slaves,’ said Moonface. ‘But of course,’ said Eggy, ‘the more the merrier. Hoo hoo.’

Eleanor’s entrance broke up this exchange. ‘Ah, the new Traymorean,’ said Eleanor R, she sizing me up as she occupied a chair, setting three grocery bags on the floor, supper, so she explained. Dubois grunted. Evidently, Dubois and Eleanor were an item. She was not bad looking, on the plump side with frosted curls, her eyes intelligent. I read in them that, though she was no bully (as was Lucille Lamont, most likely), she was used to getting her own way. Here was a woman who might have spun Jack Swain around. ‘Well,’ she said to Moonface with a startling sharpness of tone, ‘do I get a glass or do I have to fill out an application form for one?’ An eclipse of sorts darkened the waitress’s pale visage, her pleasant existence called into question.

A Prettier Truth

Perhaps, at bottom, everything is sex; but if so it is an ugly truth for an ugly world. I prefer a prettier truth, one infinitely riskier to my well-being: that there is something noble circulating in the Moonface brain.

She often began her day with Eggy, taking coffee with him in his rooms. What could they possibly talk about? There was certainly nothing noble in his disintegrating sack of a brain. Despite all his reading, he was interested, really, in nothing but wine and Moonface’s bosom, of which he would get the full measure before he died. Moonface, he said, had promised him this. She did not mind he would try and grope her. I doubted that she did not mind. ‘However,’ so she let me know, ‘I’m too quick for him. He treats me to dinner once a week. He considers you a rival, an interloper on his privileges. He wishes the best for me and I really do believe he means it.’

I would slip notes under her door. They amounted to no more than idle chatter. Dear Moonface, trees aflame. Tulips in their tulip rows. Is the face of spring a young woman glad-footing around some maypole? Is it an old man with salty tears? Listening to Gianni Schicchi just now. The wise dude prepares for the fact he’s never prepared. Wings it. Shall we meet? You tell me. Under your door.—RQC

I would tell her about my Vancouver life, how I barely got by. How I married and how my father deemed the woman unsuitable. He cut my subsidies. Difficulties. The inevitable divorce. Her suicide that I must not think had anything to do with me. Reinstatement in father’s books. The rain, the mist, the cavernous beer parlours. Loggers, miners, prospectors some of whom quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley for the price of a beer. The Poet wandering on, through Arabic and Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste. The bird cacklings of Chinese matriarchs. The tribes down from their islands, each Indian locked away in his or her inner being. The half-savage daughters of the well-to-do. It might surprise you how we carried on: moonlit back roads up the mountainous coast. Bottomless whiskey flask. I would tell her Montreal is a cosmopolitan burg of cosmopolitan stalwarts, Francophobes sniffing, Anglophobes hauling English trash off to some landfill. I would tell her that Virgil, whose poetry was the object of her Latin studies, had been on a suicide mission. He meant to please Caesar but would stay true to his dark vision of what was shaping up. Some sickness got him, yes, but he died of the book.

Mostly though, I would, by way of a note, just invite her out. She almost always wore black denims and red sneakers, her hair done up in a ponytail, her shoulders hunched. I lacked the courage to steal a kiss. Once in a while she would give me a look. It said: ‘I know what you’re thinking. I won’t think anything bad of you but I won’t think anything good either. Poor man.’ She had me over a barrel of some sort.

‘Guess Who?’

Eleanor liked to talk sex and politics. Mid-morning, and I would put aside my notebooks in good, healthy, writerly disgust, and gravitate up a carpeted hall in the salacious light of early spring to her digs, the good woman greeting me, pompadoured. Often, she wore summer frocks. She, on the plump side, was supple and devastating. It would seem she enjoyed my company for all that I wondered what it had to do with me in the particular; just that I was male and could carry a conversation. Was Dubois so vain he was incapable of jealousy? Did he harbour secret torments, her body welcoming every sailor? What sort of arrangement had they fashioned from a messy froth of desire and trust? She would finger the spit valve of her trombone as I held forth. She would blow through it now and then as if to caution I was on shaky ground when it came to my reminiscences of Sally McCabe, who in high school allowed me to steal a kiss for which I had paid a heavy price. ‘Goddess?’ Eleanor queried. ‘Goddess,’ I affirmed, ‘prime mover and shaker in the operations of the American mind such as manifest in every election cycle.’ ‘Oh, we’re half Americans, anyway,’ Eleanor said, half-relenting, ‘Bob and I. Spent half our lives in Florida.’ Bread was baking in the oven. The kitchen was all too often a disaster, Eleanor grimacing, ‘It’ll take me all day to clean up the aftermath.’ It was very odd then, how she rose once and stood behind my chair, clapped her warm hands to my eyes and said, ‘Guess who?’ Her perfume overwhelming my thoughts, I went along with her caper, in any case, and then she backed off; and it was as if she sprang away, like a wrestler breaking a clinch and looking for a new hold. ‘What you call goddesses,’ said Eleanor, ‘are made of clay. Teases and sluts. I was one of those, I don’t mind telling you.’ I pretended to be shocked. ‘But if Bob,’ she continued, ‘were to start getting extracurricular, I’d break his kneecaps.’ ‘I bet you would,’ I said out of respect.

I wrote Eleanor notes, too, and slipped them under her door. I’ll be there or I’ll be square. By the way, I do want to hear out this notion of yours that Lucille L is a murderess. Really? How so?—RQC

And then there was the night Moonface and I got back late from an evening out. It seemed Eggy had had a stroke and there was a commotion of Traymoreans and paramedics in the hall. The look on Eleanor’s face wondered if Moonface and I were lovers. The look on mine suggested otherwise, and what is more, I was keeping a faith so obscure it was not worth explicating the matter, no, not to anyone; not even to a good woman who would serve me coffee and biscuits five days out of seven and go where I went in my conversational spacewalks. I was flattered, of course, that she made a pass at me. I was relieved, too, that Dubois would never know. I was taking my celibacy seriously, though a woman like Eleanor who played the trombone and baked cherry cobbler was not to be lightly denied. Every town in America has its Sally McCabe. That she was ageless, wise, cruel, free of doubt and self-reproach. I would say to Eleanor, ‘This creature wandered to this continent on a Phoenician barge. I’ve told you already how, in the Utah desert, she took up with Coop and his pale red crew cut hair. They’d ride around in his pale blue Chrysler car. They’d listen to Cathy’s Clown. To Teen Angel. North to Alaska. Sixteen Tons. The Monster Mash Me, I gummed up the works. Wrote poems to her. This made everyone nervous. And the more I was mocked the more I wrote, and it pleased her. I caught a football for her I wasn’t supposed to catch. I was only following my own nature. Everyone around me, true to their natures, made me pay for my presumptions. Perhaps Sally McCabe caused Mr Jakes, our history teacher, to blow out his brains, who knows, proving the power of myth over the historically-minded mind, the petty materialist? Would I have lived another year if my father hadn’t been transferred out of that hell-hole of a state? Now, as for your idea that we form a salon and have weekly get-togethers either here in your kitchen or in the Blue Danube, I’ll think on it. I’m not at the moment keen.’ And Eleanor grinned, saying, ‘Mr Calhoun, you’re one of a kind. Maybe with you I’m out of my league.’ Oh no, I would protest. If anything, it was the other way around.

Bats

And I slipped notes for Dubois under his door, the fact of which bemused him. ‘Randall,’ he said to me, one spring afternoon in the Blue Danube, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ Another voice: ‘Yes, what’s with all these notes, lately? And why haven’t I been getting any?’ That voice accusing me—was Eggy in his 8th decade, sensing treachery everywhere. ‘Why nothing, Bob,’ I answered Dubois, ‘it’s just that I know you think me extreme in my views. I applaud that you retain your faith in the innate good sense of the American people. It’s a faith I lack.’ ‘As much as I hate to say it, I’m inclined to agree with you,’ said Eggy, raising his glass to me, a collegial but wary gesture. A table of Slavs on the other side of the café regarded us with some derision. ‘Bob,’ I continued, alluding to previous business between us, his invitation to have me come and drink with him, ‘your request is under consideration. My Internal Review Board is certainly taking it seriously. Whiskey? Enlightened discourse? Tempting. It’s just that I’ve become such an autodidact of late I don’t believe I can play the scholar and speak dispassionately on Caesar’s lost legions, let alone current events. Then, too, knowing you, you’ll wish to expatiate on gravity and anti-gravity, on Jesuits, on Mayan numbers while I struggle with the sum of my parts and the whole seems altogether short-changed. Is this a fair assessment of your druthers? And you, Eggy, how is it you’re so besotted with My Fair Lady when you are, as you put it, the scion of a switchman and a roadhouse Jezebel? Why not Richard III? Whence the high Tory? Or is it just that we’re out of earshot here of the Reveres and the Thomas Paines and Tinpan Alley?’ ‘You,’ said Eggy, ‘are going to take some getting used to. You do have a peculiar way of talking. Well, are you boffing Moonface? Because if you’re boffing Moonface, I might have something to say on the matter.’ ‘Eggy, Eggy,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ ‘I’ll bet,’ said Dubois, much entertained.

Bob, I enjoyed the other evening immensely, the warm evening, the bats flitting between the maples, the whiskey. Especially the latter. Oh yes, and the talk, you attempting to convert me to materialism and me letting you know I’m 99.9% there, just that I reserve the last one-tenth of it all as a means of keeping the house honest, though the house always wins. Does this sum up my spiritual position? And when Eleanor joined us and let out one great bleat of her trombone and then apologized to the world at large, I thought to myself life’s worth living and it’s good, on occasion, to kid around. I’ll endeavour to reciprocate. But entre nous, I’m not all that keen on her plot to organize a salon.—RQC

For the Record

Twice in the course of a year, Eleanor will have come across corpses: Marcel Lamont, and soon, Edward Sanders aka Fast Eddy. Whom she will find in pantyhose with a grimace on his face. Here is the Keats he was reading: La Belle Dame Sans Merci. ‘Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?’

§

Book II—Follies Ho!

Calhoun’s Follies I

—I have settled down somewhat in the Traymore Rooms. I write a little every day, if diffidently. I do not expect I will add to the sum of human knowledge. I do not expect I will entertain that much. It is always a wilderness for others, pleasing oneself. But were I to write up this place, were I to present a stage set to the world at large of unassuming rebels and cultists, who among my characters could best plead our case? Eggy with his death-is-just-over-the-horizon-for-me eyes? Moonface keeping a schoolgirl’s diary?

Was up at five to catch the fabled worm. Grabbed empty air, the thought of my mortality just then a depressing thought. I laid down on the couch, switched on the TV, heard out a televangelist. ‘Believe you me,’ he chortled, ‘when Christ comes, you will know it.’ He was wearing a blue suit with a pink tie and silver clasp, an American flag pin affixed to his lapel. I pictured swarms of angels darkening the sun in advance of judgment. I switched off the TV. Sometime later, and I was, perhaps, in a sort of yogic trance as I brewed coffee and smelled toast and the homemade marmalade of Eleanor R that she foisted on me. Or perhaps I managed to hypnotize myself, turning the pages of my notebook, each page of it a sail otherwise becalmed, but each a testament to offenses against some tut-tutting Poseidon of a critic. In other words, in my endeavour to make sense of things, I had gotten to the bottom of exactly nothing.

The name Lucille Lamont was scrawled on one of those pages. Question marks followed. Was she, on that page, seeking intellectual justification for the murder of her husband? ‘Evolutionary opportunism,’ I imagined she said of a force she thought she could enlist to her advantage. I chose not to respond; she might have bested me in a quarrel. How does one rebut evolutionary drift? All the machete work I would have to do, hacking through the lost byways of God and free will and any number of related considerations. Was not up for it. Nor did I care to reassemble the fallen down pieces of the old patriarchal hegemony, if for no other reason than that one cannot turn back the clock. Still, it had been a power with which one could argue, however unsuccessfully; it is all that one can ask of power—that it listen. Well, it usually does not unless its own interests are involved. Lucille Lamont, no feminista, certainly no ballerina, no drawing card for some independent production company, no cutting edge of a turning tide, was just another broker of the everyday and the humdrum, petty cruelties her currency (as they are for you and me), the new pieties and platitudes of the hour hers to massage as she saw fit. I went for a walk.

Oh, but it was a glorious day, indeed. The early weeks of Traymorean existence had made spring seem a promise. Then summer and terrasses and flirtations. Now autumn. Now and then glimpses of Moonface passing beneath the yellow leaves of maple boughs, of a girl steeped in ancient verses. Yes, even as she was fatally of her time, as stretched and consequently frayed as a rag pulled at by the contending forces of a blank politeness and a rage she barely suspected her body harboured. Processions might prance and reverence gods; oracles might sing and pronounce, but she in her black denims and red sneakers was hunched at the shoulders and non-committal, the world of ancient verses less an injunction against our stale hypocrisies and more a theme park. More depressing than any thought of my mortality was to know I could do nothing for her, could shine no light on various confusions of intellect, the old benedictions and accidents of lust discredited. And even if this were not it at all, I was simply too long in the tooth for this young woman. It had been one thing to depart the Old World for the New; now it was a weary, fed-up new world; and every day dawning was already some bleached skull of an animated cartoon’s desert floor. So it seemed. Glorious day, indeed.

To be sure, Lucille Lamont, as we all are, was guilty in her thoughts and at one with her urges. But could she be charged with a deed born of a plan? A method, not immediately apparent to her, was always right in front of her nose. Did she hate her husband so much? Was it the way he chewed his food? His smell? His snoring? Perhaps it is too easy, throwing the word hate around. Why not pity? Pity is an emotion that attracts its own dark arts. My exposure to her was limited to chance meetings in the Traymore hall. To the hello’s, the how are you’s. To, well, things are not bad but I have seen better. A tinge of whine in an otherwise all-knowing tone of voice—

We were trying to have it too many ways. Always in America the trumpets and cavalry of the triumph and the escape clause. A coffee machine in the window of a specialty store stopped me in my tracks. It was a beautiful machine shining with a bronze burnish. I would buy it just to have it for its own sake; that I might actually use it was another matter. Here was my materialism and my spiritual side. I stood there, admiring spigots and valves. What had Pompeii that could compare to this? But could Caesar have been a mystic by virtue of the fact Rome had no machines (siege engines excepted) and slaves did the work? A smartly-dressed woman was now beside me, inspecting the object. ‘It’s quite the thing,’ I ventured to say. The look she shot me suggested I had just invaded her space.

Returned from my walk, and no more the wiser for it, I sit here performing the same old lustral rites, marking boundaries with words; I kid myself I am breaking ground. A bowl of orange slices, banana. Yellow foolscap, gray pen; the rolling tobacco, the amaretto. How precious, itemizing objects on a desk, itself a tawdry piece of furniture not Regency. A contemporary symphony, the music of which is not easy listening, produces an image in my mind of a heavy crock. Tipped on end, it allows so many yellow demons to stream out that had been pent up. It is as if they skitter now through some citrus grove such as I saw once in Sicily, the almond trees in blossom; the sea sparkling all the way to Africa, the island once as lusted after as was California. Geo-politics 101 is Fate. Eggy, whom I saw earlier in the hall, went on about Moonface, and how he expected to get the measure of her bosom.

—My first impression of Lucille Lamont was not favourable, she bored, clever, disputatious. Her idea of flirtation was Stalinist. I could not imagine her in flattering dress, her attire aggressively drab and shapeless; and yet, clearly and unaccountably so, she wished to be thought of as fetching. Yes, and given her boasting as to what a high roller she once had been, a winner and not a loser, why then had she married Marcel, good sport but self-destructive by the looks of it? That these thoughts enter my head at all give me pause, more reason to despair of myself for giving those thoughts the time of day. Is there more to add to them without resorting to damnable ologies, those articles of faith which claim to know why people gravitate to people who can do them no good?

Dubois, Eggy and I would discuss the war, afternoons in the Blue Danube. Well, sometimes we did, so as to fill in lulls in the conversation that, on occasion, arose, Eggy losing his train of thought. ‘Hoo hoo,’ he might say, ‘I’ve mislaid my wits.’ Moonface listened in now and then. She would only look puzzled as we pronounced on this and that, our grasp of current events coloured by our view of previous debacles that had transpired before she was born. If the war in Iraq was a staple of Traymorean discourse, I did not wish to know Lucille’s point of view. I assumed it was a liberal point of view, but I could have been wrong. One evening, I heard through the walls of the Traymore, a Lamont shouting match in progress. There was mention of Graham Greene the famous novelist. A pair of drunken voices, one hissing, slurring heavily (Lucille); one in full-throated contempt of the lack of true sensibility anywhere (Marcel). I am sorry to report that, perhaps, Lucille had some justification for describing the writer as a muddleheaded mystic. Marcel argued otherwise, though I could not make out his every word. Just that Mr Greene had divined the human soul. And that was that. Then silence. Then, you gin-soaked Catholic stooge. Then, up yours. Then, worse, as Lucille was likened to an intimate part of her anatomy, and something made of glass was smashed.

There is no causal connection between the war and the death of Marcel Lamont; between the war and a belief by the police that Marcel’s death was the result of ‘misadventure’; between the war and the fact Sinatra might now sing: ‘It’s witchcraft, crazy witchcraft’. There is no causal connection between the war and the belief ordinary people have that this world is the best of all possible worlds, and they may well be right, just that they are not. History the tale of unfolding progress, surely evil comes along for the ride, moral outrage the luxury, spinnaker, the cherry on the cream. If Lucille had not set a trap for Marcel, gin the bait, she did not seem all that eager to dispel our suspicions.

—And so, in March, I moved to the Traymore. April had hardly come around, and Marcel Lamont was dead. Moonface and I converse. Often I drop in on Eleanor R. Sex is no mystery for her; it is physio. Eggy is quite the character, Dubois another egotist of conventional depths. Which is to say he assumes we live in the best of all possible worlds as there is no other. None. Of course, one may imagine worlds. One may deduce their possible existences by way of mathematical formulations. ‘Bonjour, monsieur, ça va bien? Shall we talk red-shift stars? Iraq is nothing. No, really, it’s nothing.’

And so, on a moving day, I had the intention to do something serious with my life. Ah, creative non-compliance. I knew instantly, as soon as I saw her in the hall with her copy of Virgil’s Eclogues, that I was going to allow Moonface to distract me from my grand purposes. Just the sight of that book told me I was a fraud in any case. And was Lucille, in her own way, playing a similar game of non-compliance to the prevailing orders, Marcel her proof of sincerity, and she had the courage to expend him?

Evil is sometimes cause and always a consequence. The yellow wasps of September dart about in the deep peace of a late summer afternoon. Sparrows and squirrels lark about as if a life and death struggle were just that—a lark. So many middle-aged women in the streets seem so tired. If men can always plead their maleness, what can women plead? Is not Lucille Lamont entitled to her excuses? But she never looked tired, and I do not imagine she does now. Heavy of body, Lucille Lamont is as empty of soul as a hot air balloon.

But suppose Marcel had been trying to dry out, as it were, and get a grip on his life, get out from under? He had, in fact, checked into a clinic before I showed up at the Traymore as a raw recruit. Suppose Lucille, at first all for it, realized she could have none of it? Who could she then despise if, in fact, she did despise an innocent or a Marcel who, at times, was brutal to her; but who gave one and all the benefit of his doubt; who liked his sailboat, his booze and hearty laughter? Life is random except when it is not.

I have been much put out by Marcel’s death; it is not because the man meant anything to me. It is just that his demise swamps me with a glut of Lucille Lamont thoughts. Have not written anything worth a damn. (To Charlottetown: infinitive bespeaking a Canadian jig.) Lack of knowledge. Lassitude. As Bly would say: amateur.

—It is quiet in the Blue Danube. Moonface sits, turned sideways on her chair, one leg slung over the other, her torso square with the book she reads. Her left hand is flush to the table, her right hand resting on top of it, bony elbows suspended in space. I cannot claim for her any elegance of body but the length of her thigh is terribly elegant, suggesting power and grace and promise beyond the scope of words. It almost seems that her lips move as she reads the Latin of Publius Vergilius Maro, as she employs skills I have long since lost, I now unable to coax latinities into accordance with English sense. Yes, she is having at the Eclogues, some lines of which render Scylla and powerful whirlpools and frightened mariners, her lips parted, she fully focused. She is no innocent, but she has much to learn. My eyes lock on a tapestry tacked to the wall, one depicting a snowy alpine scene. It speaks of no perils; there is in it none of life’s chanciness. Demented landlocked item. As if it would sell more bratwurst and schnitzel to the Slavs who meet here, to whom I am indifferent. I cannot tell myself why this should be. They seem too comfortable with their uprooted lives, and smug. In walks Eggy, or rather he totters through the door with his cane. ‘Wine,’ he says to Moonface, ‘toot dey sweet.’ I rate a nod as he says, ‘Oh, you here?’

Eggy is in a reminiscing mood. He starts up, saying, ‘A few years back, I and My Fair Lady, why, we took a long drive. I footed