Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Define the Guadalquivar attitude toward escort escalation, moving from the $120 category to the $300. Define the Guadalquivar attitude toward the ecstasy obtainable only from paid partners. Define the Guadalquivar attitude toward DeSantos’s cock filling my mouth, the very orifice that must explain the history of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage to Aigues-Mortes audiences, but first to Anita, and then to Moira Orfei, so she can develop suitable circus moves. Define the covert lure of Aigues-Mortes, the logic of its seedy, rarefied arcades, and the aroma of dead water, salty and murmurous, that infiltrates the cafés.

  Notebook Nine

  “Buenos Aires, as a musical locale, is superior to Aigues-Mortes,” Alma told me at dinner. Angry, she is back from tour: no escorts allowed in the house. Argentina reacted badly to news of her imminent retirement. She presumed that they would sympathize with her career’s natural termination, and yet they griped, like the Peruvians the year before: in Lima, she’d proclaimed the limits of nineteenth-century music (“I’ve exhausted the romantics, I can play no more”). Scoffers left the concert hall before she’d finished the Schumann Fantasy.

  After dinner she practiced Ravel in her upstairs coign. Concerto in G is my piece. I need to steal it back. I don’t wish her to flop, but I can’t be known solely as “the guy who writes Alma Mangrove’s liner notes.”

  I visited Friedman, who tied me up and experimented with my perineum, which, as Dr. Crick attests, is to the buttocks what a Bach prelude is to the fugue. I hope this analogy won’t offend Alma, should she choose, later, unbeknownst to me, to read this notebook, or the others stacked on my bedroom’s Guadalquivar armoire. I don’t care if Anita reads the notebooks. Tanaquil may read them if she wishes. She would understand their contents; and she keeps rival notebooks, which intend to assassinate Alma’s career. If I am not more precise about Tanaquil’s role in recent events, I will not have fulfilled my long-ago promise to repair her wounds by careful description.

  I told Friedman that he could come over to tea, that I would endeavor to introduce him to Alma. He has no wish to finagle a backdoor entrance to the Mangrove clan. As an adolescent he spent time in the Marseille skin-trade. Moira Orfei is no stranger to Marseille—it was a live-action site for her TV pilot (The Moira Orfei Show). Her father, leading the Montecatini partigiani, knew members of the French Resistance hiding (in full view) on the Quai de la Fraternité. Our Aigues-Mortes program will celebrate Orfei anti-fascism.

  I persuaded Friedman to visit Mechanical Street and hear me play Liszt’s B Minor Sonata. He showered in the private bathroom adjoining my studio. I diligently soaped his crack and asked him to remain unclothed while he listened to Liszt: nudity constituted his “punishment,” though I was the humiliated party.

  After I finished, Friedman said, sitting judgmental and naked on the Queen Anne daybed, that he admired my flow. I asked him why he used abstractions to evade simple praise. All music flows, so to make a sonata flow is no virtue. He said that Liszt performances often stagnate: I’d impregnated the dead silence between recitative’s spasms. Alma knocked. I told her (through the closed door) that now was not a good time. Friedman, screwing me, said, “You’re moving in circles.” I threw the accusation back at him, told him he was penetrating in circles, like a convict tunneling an escape by means of ratiocination. I heard scuffling at the door: Alma had returned. Friedman and I got dressed. I opened the door and introduced him to Alma. Wearing the cheap blue glass necklace I’d given her, she pretended interest, and asked about Friedman’s background. Later he told me that she was much more attractive in person than in photos. He said “whore” was just a word, like “cocotte” or “lioness.”

  Alma at dinner discussed her happy early years with Thom.

  “Our relationship boiled down to buttons,” she said. “Opalescent. When we made love, they broke off my blouse as he undid them.”

  I told her, “I want to understand Scriabin’s cloudy essays on falling—as Emma Bovary or Mary Magdalene fell, but also as a suicide falls from the top of the Empire State Building.”

  “Yes,” she said, with customary, comprehensible weariness. Everyone is tired of my theories.

  Scriabin incarnates his falling essays as preludes, études, and “poèmes” for solo piano, the mystic chords descending in arpeggios from sky to ground, like a nose-dive into identification with someone’s father’s autoerotic asphyxiation, a death I once read about in a memoir.

  No one on the local front is prepared for the splash I will make in Aigues-Mortes, bringing the bounty of a new interpretive style, schmaltz refigured as analysis. Unsympathetic East Kill deprives me of venue, and limits the time I can spend in water-district acts of drunken fornication.

  Alfonso Reyes says that the Aigues-Mortes entertainment office expects to unleash a blitz of publicity on the South of France—signage, skywriting.

  I don’t think our concerts are as important as the Aigues-Mortes folks make them out to be; I’d prefer the performances to remain low-profile.

  My inability—in Tanaquil’s sloe-eyed opinion—to have a “normal” human relationship, without the infection of power, detaches me from regular concert-hall gigs, so I have sought alternative sites: at first, rug stores in East Kill; and now, the obscure arcades of Aigues-Mortes, rivaling Paris. Over coddled eggs this morning Alma said that I exaggerate the prominence of the Aigues-Mortes arcades. I showed her a map. Aigues-Mortes is the original experimental community, like Fourier’s—a socialist dream.

  Derva Nile came over for rehearsal. We worked on Liszt’s “Oh! quand je dors” and “Comment, disaient-ils,” her Fracas perfume an abundance I could lose my mind contemplating. She said I was playing too loudly. Her nervous addiction to the limelight prevents her from accurately judging volume.

  Her breasts, if I were predisposed toward them, would entice me. Theoretically desirable, they remind me of pleasures I had with Anita in Beaugency, on the Loire, near the Tour du Diable, where we had our only entirely satisfying intercourse—it lasted three hours, an ideal, even by Alma’s standards.

  Anita left for a musical-comedy coaching session with Ross Sachs. Slowly, she is developing her own act, which will recycle material she aborted earlier in life.

  Derva and I have nothing to show for our labors, though we still hope to do a program of Fauré mélodies that will draw critics who have long avoided our concerts. I wonder why I am taking Derva’s talent seriously and placing it above my own. Her tempi are slow and mannered, however much I try to prod her to the next beat. My metaphysical urgency—God-fearing haste—led Moira Orfei to notice me in the first place, among all the pianists who sent study tapes so she could prepare circus accompaniments to Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt songs and choose a pianist who would reveal the underground link between circus and lied.

  Alma suggested I commission a piano sonata inspired by Catullus epigrams. Good idea. Brad Olney, a local composer who physically resembles me, deserves my commission. Because Brad can’t make a living as a composer, he runs a boutique for men and women, Olney Clothes, and designs the garments himself. He’s better known for his shirts than for his sonatas, though both show the same concern for laborious pattern. We had sex a few times in the changing rooms. He clips his silver chest hair, as if he were auditioning for a role in one of Moira Orfei’s gladiator pictures. He wants to join the Israeli army, though he’s not Jewish. He believes in aggression, lost causes, and apartness. He told me that he composes music because he wants to separate himself from the world. Moira Orfei is the major contemporary exponent of l’art pour l’art.

  Tanaquil should get a job. She has worked at makeup counters; she has worked washing floors at ballet studios; she has worked as a security guard at a women’s psychiatric residence. Tanaquil’s range of career accomplishment is staggering, if we believe the jobs she says she’s held. No one tries to check up on her stories, and why should we? Isn’t it your privilege, as adult, to lie about your vocation if you’re ashamed of the truth and want
to invent something more glamorous or else (in her case) something lowlier and more linked to masturbation, the family trademark?

  Silence from Moira Orfei. Has she reconsidered Aigues-Mortes? Is she undergoing emergency surgery, as her sister Chloe intimated when we last spoke? Chloe never had a significant career on the Continent—sure, the odd appearance in India, on a talk show, confessing travails of living with a famous sister, but no genuine circus appearances, no effort to give posthumous satisfaction to their mother, who died of circus delights.

  Chloe, in a convent school when Mrs. Orfei died, rushed to the funeral in Montecatini, but never figured out how to pay tribute to her mother’s memory; every deviation from circus insulted the maternal ghost, and yet Chloe lacked trapeze talent. Her main interest was leukemia, and the Italian battle against it.

  My distance from Moira Orfei turns East Kill’s boulevards, as I drive down them, into rows of soldiers felled in forgotten battles: why bother being a pianist if I can’t imagine that there are Camargue flamingos nearby?

  Some talents ask to be squandered—and if Moira is the means I employ to waste what Alma has given me, then I am fulfilling her gift’s secret purpose, self-extinction.

  “You were nearly a caesarean,” Alma said last night at dinner, veal stew with frozen peas. “I was in terrible pain. But nothing as intense as the earlier miscarriage, the first. Your father thought I was going to die. He hated bloodshed and screaming, so he stayed away from the hospital.”

  After the Industrial Revolution, Branch Way was rechristened Mechanical Street, because of East Kill’s burdened consciousness of factories, not enough degradation, a hunger for more assembly lines, so that the working classes could be ground even farther into the dirt.

  The sun is setting over the water district, which I can see from the window, here on Mechanical Street, in the private garret where I write my Aigues-Mortes notebooks, and where no one ever disturbs me, not even to say an exciting new or old movie is playing at the Empire and do I wish to interrupt my meditations to catch the late show? I don’t live in the water district, but its sunsets are my property; from my window I can see the rosy-fingered vulgarity and know that my house and the hustler neighborhood occupy one city, one time, and in God’s eye are the same—a single experiment in dying near what passes for a body of water, or what is believed, by most of us, to be a body of water, with pleasure- and fish-houses along its shores, despite inclement weather, the Provençal mistral shaking the weak buildings and giving pneumonia to the prurient patrons. My ecstasies are false, despite Alma’s claims, whispered to me since adolescence. “You’re no Rachmaninoff,” she said recently, “but nor am I. We’re imitation Rachmaninoffs, which is nobler than being a real Stokowski or a real Leinsdorf—or a real Clara Haskil. I was fond of Clara, but I can’t claim that her Mozart was my Mozart.” I took this advice as encouragement: I needn’t be Rachmaninoff, I need only impose his personality on my entire repertoire. Thus I habitually transported the water district’s coloration into my playing: I smuggled chance encounters, fatal windstorms, and declining property values into musical phrases composed long before rigid modern zoning divided our city into sectarian parts.

  I have empathy with underdogs, although I’ve been accused, in print, and on radio, and by Alma’s fans, of cultural imperialism, a charge she skirts because of her loyal Latin American following. Ignorant of Buenos Aires folkways, Alma stuffs Western art music down proletarian throats.

  Tonight Anita and I celebrated our anniversary. She cooked us a two-pound lobster. Alma, steering clear of the celebration, took a limo to New York and met with her agent to discuss the next farewell tour. I have become a dirty and unpleasant middle-aged man of no interest to Alma, and yet perhaps I can save face in town, make her proud when she gets wind of my accomplishment—not directly from me, I’m not a braggart, but from others in the area, family, the East Kill Times; or perhaps she’ll intuit kudos from the silence surrounding me locally, no one wishing to speak to me in public. I need a chihuahua to walk every morning after I play Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels, the only divertissements that can get me out of bed. Suicide would be one easy and dramatic solution to the Aigues-Mortes quandary, though I doubt it would please Alma or the peoples of East Kill or any other American and European cities in which I have performed or resided during my long career, now petering out.

  Before nightfall, I must memorize Scriabin’s Vers la flamme, on the program tomorrow at the East Kill Home for the Blind (duo recital, benefit, with Derva Nile); but first I must write to Moira Orfei. If I publish an open letter in the Corriere della Sera, then Italy will notice my endangerment and Moira’s callow abandonment of our cause. Possibly she will telephone tonight and prevent me from publicly denouncing her perfidy. I don’t want to badmouth Moira, I merely want to send the love note she has been waiting a decade to receive. She is jittery from réclame. Each new ad is a slap in the face, a reiteration that she is known. And to be known is to be underestimated.

  If the keys obeyed me when I played the Fauré Ballade, then I wouldn’t need to grovel before Moira Orfei. Even now, I am failing her, and I haven’t begun writing the letter denouncing her for having failed me—and yet I meant to reverse that hypothetical letter’s burden, and compose a statement so brief and loving she’d want to thumbtack it to her closet door, as, once, Alma taped to her studio mirror a note I wrote her from Portbou, the last time I visited it, a message I presumptuously called “My Life and Work,” as if private correspondence needed a title.

  I may begin the letter to Moira Orfei in a fortnight, if she hasn’t faxed a firm pledge to appear with me in Aigues-Mortes, to achieve our public reunion, a rendezvous in a seaside bandstand so much like Montecatini’s, one might be forgiven for thinking Aigues-Mortes an Italian protectorate.

  Fabio lay nude on his living room rug while I struggled to play the Scriabin Black Mass Sonata. Scriabin requires a teacher’s nudity for reasons I can’t explain: Ajaccio violets, tropical stars. Fabio doubts I have the sonata’s mechanics down pat enough to perform it in Aigues-Mortes. He called my playing “fatally hesitant.” He thinks I should play Bartók’s “Diary of a Fly” instead. Anything can qualify as a god, if I am in the mood for worship.

  Toxins from the pesticide plant have left chalky deposits on our windows and on Mechanical Street’s elm tree leaves. My molecules are fake, infected, and porous, unlike those nights of endlessly postponed sunset, of waiting for Moira Orfei outside Trapani’s Hotel de Anza, beneath its orange awning.

  Now Alma is back in Buenos Aires, spreading good news to the masses. I miss our hectoring dinners, arguments over Aigues-Mortes, a comeback she wants me to abort.

  She told me last night, on the phone, about her childhood deprivations, sensual pleasures that her father, Ricardo, piously disliking popular songs, forbade. Economies to extinguish the flesh: she wanted a white silk communion dress like her best friend Rosa’s, but she got a drab cotton hand-me-down from the church organist’s daughter. Alma’s flesh rose in rebellion. For revolt, she chose conservatoire. Now I’m discarding gifts she planted—Guadalquivar seeds. She said, “I must run through de Falla before orchestra rehearsal tonight. I always look at the score to refresh the memory. I fear technical mishap, ghosts of my forefathers. The bottled water tastes bad.” Her melancholy is East Kill’s climate: I can’t interpret snow or rain apart from Alma’s early losses. If I could turn back the clock and give Alma the dress she’d wanted as a girl, the dress her father refused to give her, then I wouldn’t need to be a pianist; music’s purpose is Alma-reparation, and if I could directly make amends, I wouldn’t rely on the keyboard.

  If I don’t buckle down and memorize Scriabin’s Black Mass Sonata I will humiliate myself in front of the discerning Aigues-Mortes populace and Moira, who may then decide never to work with me again. Moira Orfei is my ideal woman if I imagine someone else watching us cross a street in Les Baux-de-Provence together: we clutch each other when the wind nearly knocks u
s down, and laugh, pace the mistral, as we contemplate our upcoming string of recitals and shock appearances—a Mangrove/Orfei blitzkrieg in the Languedoc. Moira Orfei is my ideal woman if I imagine myself ten years ago watching someone in Les Baux watching us walk hand-in-hand to a bistro with a corner banquette which we regularly claim; seated there, under this person’s jealous surveillance, we order our usual negronis. (Alma once told me that negronis were the cocktail-of-choice for the Abstract Expressionists. Moira Orfei’s beauty embodies the Abstract Expressionist mandate to combat entropy.) While someone watches Moira and I drink our negronis, we discuss Baltic political disintegration, the religious observances of subaltern tribes. Moira has pan-European sympathies. Watchdog agencies urge her to mourn deaths in Jerusalem and Beirut. Moira Orfei is my ideal woman if I imagine someone watching me help her pick a belt and apply jasmine eau de toilette behind the neck at a department store counter in Paris. I needn’t merely imagine this scene: it happened, the last time Moira and I were in Printemps together. We chose a jangly belt to uphold her harem pants; a man with black briefcase and aviator sunglasses watched us at the belt department and followed us to the perfume counter. I put down my credit card and asked if my presence fatigued her. With a Die Fledermaus laugh, inoffensive and flirtatious, she deflected the question. I have not succeeded in justifying myself to Moira: Chloe, in her Luccan palazzo, refuses to give me Moira’s phone number. Is Moira staying with Chloe, or living alone in Montecatini? I misspoke when I said that Moira is my ideal woman if I imagine: wrong. She is real, and I should stop pestering her with letters. If Moira hadn’t once nearly overdosed on sleeping pills, I wouldn’t worry about her current disappearance. Someone should telephone the Montecatini chamber of commerce.