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by Wayne Koestenbaum


  Impregnate Anita? No. She considers herself too old.

  Adopt? No. I am too selfish to be a father. Parenthood will interrupt my career.

  Have a baby with Moira Orfei? Include the baby in future Aigues-Mortes acts? Would Moira permit fertilization? Moira Orfei, please bear my child! Dictatorial tendencies exacerbate my viral load. Alma, are you reading this notebook? Put it down.

  Notebook Twelve

  Letter from Moira Orfei (translated from the Italian)

  Dear Theo,

  In Montecatini I think of you with love. For a time, I needed distance, silence; too much chatter in my life, too many mod orange dolmens. I wanted sexual abstinence, too. Explicitness is unbecoming. Intercourse is not a detail for circus-loving ears.

  Your breakdown shouldn’t worry you. Forget perfectionism. Enjoy retirement, nights of shame! In Viterbo I held your hand while doctors watched, taking notes. Do you have copies of their reports? Did doctors dissuade you from seeing me? They applauded, when I entered the electroshock room. Never before had a circus artiste visited the asylum; never before had a guest been admitted to the psychosurgery chamber. No one considered me a voyeur. Having seen the juggling video, or the live act, they understood my motives, my defiance of gravity. Before electroshock, I fear, they were distracted by my presence and paid me too much heed, attentions preventing them from precisely administering voltage. You seemed to enjoy the procedure. Later, when we spoke, you mentioned a new ebullience. Suddenly you could discuss the past. What you’d forgotten arose into recollection with colorful, falsely vivacious vividness.

  You may marvel, Theo, that I can put together words. Circus is an abstract art and I have never stinted in public exhibitions. Now Chloe is preparing pasta con le sarde; she waits on me during tour hiatuses. She leaves her Lucca palace in trustworthy hands—our other sisters, not worth mentioning. I may never send this letter. I write consolations but rarely mail them. My soul’s largeness, today, is like the St. Eustache church after you took me through Passage de la Reine de Hongrie, Passage de Bourg l’Abbé, Galerie Vivienne, and Galerie Véro-Dodat; you tried to explain the passages, but I couldn’t pay attention. Your hands trembled. That summer, your decline began. I’ve had what critics call “the big career.” Need I prove your existence? Doesn’t circus sentimentality provide you—my failed friend—with an interior? The Aigues-Mortes tableaux require flames. My medium will never be water, though you suggested I attempt marine effects. Do you want to drown? I daren’t imitate a lake. Nor do I wish to burn you with my nearness, as you claim I did, that first day, with a cigarette, in a Montecatini café, when you disturbed my repose, as I browsed through my early career’s forgotten scrapbook—snapshots of incarceration and forced performance. If I seemed to singe you, that is because you approached me the moment I moved my cigarette in a direction I didn’t calibrate as yours until the second you appeared, uninvited, in its lit radius.

  Chloe, lisping, calls; delay offends her. Trust the unseen.

  Moira Orfei

  Time to distract myself from sorrow by calling Lost European Cinema, and mail-ordering bootleg copies of the complete films of Moira Orfei (she has hesitated to send me the gladiator flicks), or else by conceptualizing Moira’s possible contribution to Aigues-Mortes. Repertoire: Chausson, Messiaen, Honegger, Roussel, Auric, Satie. For starters. The second night’s concert will describe my love for Rachmaninoff’s passing tones: clusters of abbreviated, decorative notes wander out of bounds and disobey key norms we once genuflected toward. Moira will tame horses and tigers while I demonstrate passing tones. I wish I were living in the Hotel de Anza on the shores of Lago d’Orta, with Moira, in the adjacent suite, preparing her giddy-goat number.

  Friedman, like me, has shaved off his body hair. I can’t get aroused without an underling’s fur to ground my dreaming. His prick seems longer and darker than the last time I blew it. It informs most pricks I’ve seen, held, tasted, et cetera, in my life, though his is a relative latecomer to my gallery. Retroactively his prick grandfathers every earlier prick I’ve known; today, its darkness—the stained ridge—authors all previous big organs I’ve encountered. N.B.: dank smelly glans.

  Life was supposed to be simple in East Kill, near bodies of water we could never verify (rivers I can’t prove are rivers, lakes I wish were oceans and fear may merely be streams), and surrounded in our house by the sounds of Alma playing Déodat de Sévérac’s Baigneuses au soleil, the occasional zarzuela, the saints of a musical past never dominating us because we had a liberated relation to harmony, a glass of water, like melancholy, always nearby, optimism, too, if we felt like it, and depression if we wanted it, no social obligations interfering. Gone are exuberant days on the town green, when I put up a banner advertising Moira Orfei’s return, a performance that never occurred: she cut East Kill from her tour.

  I bought an hour with rosy-cheeked Franco Idol: Roman emperor bangs. Easy, to tell him about my bleeding, labored swallowing, numb limbs, vertigo. I explained major ninths, and my conviction that I had caused Tanaquil’s “red brain.” I told Franco about outdoor sex with Siddhartha and Sing near attractive family mausoleums. Alma is away on tour, so I can bring escorts home. In Aigues-Mortes I will do a Granados night, trumping Alma. She gets silent on the phone whenever I float the possibility that I might bring Goyescas to Aigues-Mortes. Perhaps I should concoct a program honoring the cocktail piano tradition—Fanny Mendelssohn, Gabriel Fauré, Michel Legrand? I’ll show slides of Alma’s bedroom and explain my grandmother Gertrude Guadalquivar’s incontinence. Of course I haven’t told senile Gertrude about Aigues-Mortes. The last time I spoke to her, in Springs, Long Island, she was in pain. I asked if the pains were specific. She said, “I spoiled you. The pains are everywhere.”

  Impatience will ruin Aigues-Mortes, as cold hands destroyed my Toronto recital. A critic wrote, “He brings the flaws of East Kill to a North that has no need of remembering.”

  I forget my entrance in Nights in the Gardens of Spain. Should I wake Tanaquil and mention the lapse? Dr. Crick says my disease, including neurological complaints, need not be terminal, if I minimize distracting ventures into the outside world. Keep clear of “female” baffles: he believes that the world is “female,” an alembic of forfeited promise. Second themes of sonatas communicate “woman” in available codes. Is it possible to be more emotional, or have I forfeited that right? Must “feeling” be music’s center?

  Nora Sten, bad omen in fringed purple scarf, cowboy hat, and vintage Balmain dress, attended my Scriabin concert in Trinity Church. We conversed afterward at the pulpit. Her hands thrashed nervously at her face, as if to pick off scabs, as if her features were an enemy I’d forced upon her.

  I first met Nora Sten years ago au conservatoire. In the days before the tendency to slobber overtook her enunciation and rendered her beauty farcical, a schoolgirl chum took her on a tram to visit Walter Benjamin’s mistress, Vera Marcus, a German-speaking recluse living in East Kill, subsisting on coffee cake and moldering stories of Kabbalist experiments. The Orfei family were friendly with Walter Benjamin, Moira told me. In Siracusa’s Hotel de Anza, drinking her negroni, she described socialism’s place in circus stunts. She mentioned the Messiah: Moira, suspended upon the trapeze, helped him arrive through the strait gate of circus.

  Someone has been rifling through my notebooks. One possible culprit is Tanaquil; another is Nora Sten, whom I have hired to do occasional, lackadaisical tasks. While she mops, dusts, and launders, she tells stories about Walter Benjamin’s mistress and her lunatic numerological theories.

  Nora Sten, music critic, experiments with social boundaries by housecleaning for pianists as a revolutionary praxis, a form of spying and fieldwork. That Nora’s theories often take the servile form of scrubbing is a paradox questioned by skeptics on the East Kill Times arts page. By pretending to be a domestic, she hopes to undermine Alma’s principles, like a mole, from within, burrowing into Alma’s ideological fortress via Ajax and Bon Ami.


  I must define Nora’s “slobber” more precisely. (Walter Benjamin’s mistress once told Nora Sten, “Only the dead are capable of precise description.”) Spittle collects below the lip and minds its own business and is neither beautiful nor ugly. By offering a Kleenex to wipe the wetness, I offend her, and condescend to her cultural practices. Enthusiasm produces slobber; maybe I, too, drool when I play. (I don’t practice in front of a mirror, and I’ve never seen a video of myself.) Inspiration is disfiguring: the more transported the artist, the more freakish.

  In the kitchen, when Nora thought I wasn’t paying attention, she put on mime makeup and read aloud passages from my Aigues-Mortes notebooks—paragraphs describing bodily functions. (I try to keep physical matters in the sickness notebooks, but sometimes segregation fails.) Nora brought her daughter, Tammy, to the house. Tammy wants piano lessons. She’s only mildly retarded. Start her with Hanon, Anna Magdalena Bach. Time is already ruined, squandered; since I have already wasted my life, there is no point in engineering last-ditch efforts to redeem it.

  Success last night, playing Scriabin in Elmira, New York. My performance of his blankness—the places in his études and preludes when he communicates nothing—met enthusiastic response. The dozen people in the audience appreciated my newfound love of nullity and faux pas. My higher purpose is not to perform the music, but to circumvent it, to describe as wide a circle around it as is possible, within the limits of the plebeian ear’s endurance. Friedman came to the concert, and we spent the night in Elmira. He came inside me as antidote to the quintessential Scriabin prelude never arriving at a still point—so short, so nothing, these preludes, composed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, Heidelberg, Dresden; not one of them important, permanent, describable; not one of them a material object to which words can be attached, despite the occasional urgent affective marking (affetuoso, appassionato, maestoso, contemplatif, belliqueux, douloureux, déchirant). Déchirant means “agonizing,” and indeed my audience was agonized by my performance of opus 74; belliqueux means “bellicose,” and indeed I roused the twelve people in my audience to warlike intensity. An audience never gives me solid proof that they have absorbed my medicine. If, once, an audience reciprocated, I could permanently retire, satisfied. Instead, I must play concert after concert, each time attempting what the last episode failed to accomplish: if rubato is stolen time, time robbed from one beat to give to another, then my business is rubato, redividing time’s wealth, redistributing the durations. I engage, as well, in familial and erotic rubato. I steal love from one body and bestow it on another. Not for expressivity’s sake. Not because I am a noble Robin Hood. Thom taught me reapportionment: when he moved his money from East Kill, before his death, to bank accounts in Europe, private locations we’ve still not tracked down, he gave me a posthumous indication that I should never keep an erotic resource in one place, but, under cover of night, I should move it elsewhere, always guarding against capture, terrorism, monopoly.

  The Middle Eastern man at Fortune 500 is back. He has a hairy chest (the Alaska pattern) and likes my ass but refuses to tell me his name: he is a political honcho, a Tammany Hall type, linked to East Kill Council graft, and he doesn’t want to depress his constituency by “outing” himself. His mid-coital aside: “I remember seeing guys, at the Calistoga baths, with missing hands.” I am attracted to his expertise, the way he precisely compliments my “glutes” and describes remembered amputations. Fisting injuries? I should underline with pink felt-tip pen the notebook entries containing unpleasant sexual resonances, so Alma can skip them.

  Friedman’s loft burned to a crisp. His pet rabbit died in the blaze. Friedman and I met this morning at Jeffrey’s Diner for French toast. He listed his losses. Fat deposits have developed on his neck; his eyelids droop. He is more seriously ill than I had reckoned. In early life I committed small-scale arson—burning Tanaquil’s copy of Little Men, and her “Madame Alexander” Emma Bovary doll. Since then I have apologized for these violations. She is too “scarred” (Alma’s term for Tanaquil’s mental damage, the aftermath of “red brain”) to absorb my contrition. I gave Friedman $1,000, to tide him over. He’s secretly wealthy; he’s mentioned his mother, Samantha, and her house on Corfu. Why he stays here is a mystery. East Kill, however, is a good town in which to be chronically, monotonously ill.

  Strange: as Aigues-Mortes preparations intensify, I think nonstop about my grandmother’s incontinence. On Gertrude Guadalquivar’s birthday, I took a town car to Springs, Long Island, and we went out to dinner. She lost control en route to the restaurant. I can’t bear to describe the humiliating scene in the car: Gertrude sprawled out in the back seat, liquid dripping down her seamed stockings. Tanaquil refused to accompany us; she stayed in East Kill. Alma, neglectful of her mother, was in Buenos Aires. Gertrude said that Alma didn’t even call to wish her a happy birthday. I’m not a dutiful grandson, but at least I traveled to Springs. I exaggerate incontinence’s horror. Gertrude’s accident was my fault: stimulating chatter about crib-death in German art songs overtired her.

  Notebook Thirteen

  Letter from Moira Orfei (translated from the Italian)

  Dear Theo,

  The mails are slow. Word from you is occasional; your letters arrive in floods, and then, without prediction, they dry up. I swallow flame while playing Granados tapes in preparation for Aigues-Mortes. Chloe disapproves of the delight I take in calisthenics. Jealous, she can’t sustain her own circus act anywhere on the Continent, so I am alone with my complexities, no mother, no father, only Italy to protect and comfort me, and my endless paying audiences, never faction-torn, always loyal. Hence I hew close to “publicity” as my primary art form, at the risk of seeming fascist. Italian history contains many circus performers but only one Moira Orfei, who can dance to Mompou, or battle a tiger while making the struggle seem part of the flame. The circus circuit has confined me, sweaty and overburdened, for many years, but until you I never had an appropriate melodic context, an imp to call my own.

  I trust you’re diligently preparing Ravel: you realize my stature in Italian society. Much rests on our level of polish in Aigues-Mortes: we need an ineffable rightness, melismatic, a flourish as of castanets, and an artificiality, so no one believes we are real and rhythmic, though the ill spectator longs for our milieu. Fearful solitude will be my fate if you do not prepare, if you stay out late in your zone of promiscuity, your water district: my health will suffer if you continue to indulge. Heed my warnings. Broadcast this loud truth on your NBC, your ABC: I am your destiny, and only if you are technically competent can you simulate my circus omnipotence, circular as the Colosseum in Father’s tiny desktop model when he was alive and had a desk at which to plan my punishing tours.

  Best circus ideas germinate away from home; here, winter palace, Montecatini, I reproduce gyrations dreamt in the Hotel de Anza overlooking the Necropolis of Tarquinia. Were you staying there, too? Did we walk together along the Via Ripagretta, and, later, on the Lido di Tarquinia, discover salt flats that augured Aigues-Mortes? Do you know how simply I said my prayers, trusting you were their foundation? I fear to end this letter. Birds rise from the salt flats.

  Viterbo’s doctors warned you what distance from me would bring. You and I visited the Tomba del Fiore di Loto, and a cloaked apparition rose from the lotus-flower’s heart, though you, trying to describe it, almost fainted in my circus-weary arms.

  Moira Orfei

  Alma is hospitalized in Lima, Peru: doctors will remove a blood clot from her leg. Although I hope she speedily recovers, I cherish this motherless interlude on Mechanical Street—time to puzzle out the fifth Scriabin sonata’s accarezzevole passage. One day, my recording of Scriabin preludes and études may stand next to hers and not be humiliated by the juxtaposition. Is the Bergamo choir director I fucked fourteen years ago dead? I lied to him and told him my name was Ugo Mangrove. He asked if I was related to Alma Mangrove. I said no, but I was related to Theo Mangrove. That name meant nothing to the choir dire
ctor. I never claimed to have a gift for friendship.

  During rehearsal, Derva Nile, wearing a bronze turban, her face rouge-enhanced, complained of crime in East Kill. She brandished tabloid photos of mangled bodies on bungalow porches. Derva has her own clipping service for violence. Fatigue has become my keynote, fatigue in Fauré’s Valse-Caprices, as if I were racing toward my death—my father’s, reprised. Friedman is missing from town; he left before vetting legal inquiries into his apartment fire. He may have gone underground to avoid prosecution; perhaps he set the fire himself, to collect insurance money, although, as mere renter, he won’t see significant profit. I’ll find him at Space Bar; he sometimes occupies a furnished room on the second floor. Space Bar never charges Friedman for his spontaneous tenancy; he hides to disappear from his own futile longings. Maybe he escaped to Corfu, to spend time with his mother, Samantha. Friedman claims to be going deaf but refuses to wear a hearing aid.

  At Camera Baths, Larry the Egyptian pharmacist removed the towel wrapped modestly around his middle and proved that he is a freak. He has two penises—a major, normal one, with a healthy scrotum, and then, below the balls, a smaller penis, tiny, vestigial, functionless. He is proud of the second penis, which doesn’t get hard. Showing off the twin organs, he stood up from the wooden berth, gyrated his hips, belly-danced, said, “I’m an intellectual.” I used to give Larry piano lessons: he advanced to the level of Aram Khachaturian’s Adventures of Ivan. Home: our dining-room carpet is wet—leakage from Tanaquil’s bathroom. I mopped up the flooded areas. I’ve cleaned up my sister’s floods for decades. She always overstuffs the toilet, as if trying out a new economy. Time passes. Nothing happens: eternal return. Tanaquil flushes the toilet; it overflows; I clean up the mess; repertoire piles up.

 

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