Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Alma has returned from Peru to recover from her blood clot. She shouldn’t be playing—she should be sleeping—but she is practicing Falla in her studio. Work ethic can’t remedy mental deficiencies. Did she really go blind for a few days in 1938 or did she invent that childhood incident to dress up her Teatro Colón program notes? Dr. Crick says I have incipient cataracts. Without disease I would have little to say to Alma. I sat on the foot of her bed last night; we discussed her former blood clot. I expected her to make light of it. Instead, she described it as a catastrophe, worse than the two miscarriages that framed my birth. At least she is not incontinent. That would stop her career.

  Tanaquil and I argued in the hallway connecting our bedrooms. We talked about my daily nausea. She said I should go to Paris for treatment. I defended Dr. Crick’s adequacy. She claimed that Aigues-Mortes lagoons were bad for my respiration. I asked her if she enjoyed keeping silent. She insisted that Anita looked like a drugstore Indian. I was distressed that Tanaquil didn’t automatically understand by osmosis everything I said: after forty years together in the same house, shouldn’t our thoughts be synchronized? We mentioned degenerative diseases that run in our family: hemochromatosis, psychosis. She asked whether the medications Dr. Crick prescribes impair my sexual function. I asked Tanaquil if she had the power to enter a trance state. She expressed her dislike of my “sleazy” friends, and confessed, “I don’t like to perform, and I don’t like to watch. I struggle hard enough just to experience time’s ebb.” She reacts weirdly to Alma. Years ago, Tanaquil tore to pieces Alma’s signed score of Goyescas. My reactions to Alma are not normal, but they sustain my career. I want to finish the Aigues-Mortes notebooks but I will be dead when they are completed. Their aim is perpetual, futile composition. I don’t have any photos of Tanaquil or I’d include them in the notebooks. She bears an uncanny physical resemblance to her ballerina namesake, Mme. LeClercq, a friend of Alma’s from Abstract Expressionist days, when Alma’s performances changed the future of painting. Everything I say is in the past tense. Am I incapable of describing present action? History goes backward before it goes forward. The prospect of Aigues-Mortes arrests progress. There is no such thing as decline, and there is no such thing as advancement. I am the metaphysician of Mechanical Street. Tanaquil flushed the toilet.

  In a poor housing project I visited an incompetent hustler—Guillermo, a cheap dyed blond, who moonlights as an operatic baritone; he recently appeared in the East Kill Lyric Opera production of Manon. His flabby ass flexed at will, a dull and winking mouth. I found value in his worthless hole: I relished thinking, “Your hole is worthless,” while preparing to enter it. His buttock skin felt like breakfast cereal that clings to the bowl when I have not done the dishes until the afternoon and I can’t help but rub my index finger along the rim of the bowl to feel the dried bits. His body hair was shaved: shoulder stubble remained. He opened the bedroom window to the winter air though I asked that he close it. His strong right thumb, without love, dug into my crevices. Superficially kind, he had anchovy breath, long nipples, and a drooping cock—not as dark as Friedman’s, though thicker than Franco’s. Fatigue stops me from describing the disappointing session. He gave me rough cheap torn towels to mop up leftover cum. I have many escorts at my disposal—why bother with Guillermo? Perhaps he is a carrier. Can I tolerate a disease on top of a disease? Why include Guillermo in the Aigues-Mortes notebooks? I should tell Alma about Guillermo. Alma and I watched Jules et Jim together on her bedroom’s TV when she was recovering from an infection of the urethra. The set was so small, it cut off the subtitles. Alma’s French was excellent, so she offered a nearly simultaneous translation.

  Tanaquil and I had a second argument. She wants me to see outside events as real. I told her that the outside is not musical, and that in Aigues-Mortes I will experiment with silence. Tanaquil said, “Experiment first in East Kill before you show off in Aigues-Mortes.” I told her that in this dark hallway she resembled Moira Orfei. Tanaquil said that everyone resembles everyone. I reminded Tanaquil that I’d already apologized, a long time ago. She said, “Yes, you’ve apologized, but you haven’t described the violation.”

  I visited Matilda on Clarendon Street. At the bathroom mirror she filled with concealing-stick the crease between her plucked eyebrows and said, “I can’t badmouth Alma’s banality, though I wander through her contradictions in a fog.” After sex she put on brown hose, and tucked her feet under her rear-end as she sat in a Biedermeier armchair (stolen from Gertrude Guadalquivar) and scolded me for exaggerating the seriousness of Alma’s blood clot. Matilda said that there are always sick relatives to nurse, just as there are always TV programs to watch. She lectured me on my broken nature: a repeated diatribe. She said: “You have the Guadalquivar nose, the concentrated brow, and a cowlike tendency I remember in my mother, hesitating on the border of the dining room as if afraid of the nutrition she was about to give and receive.” More opus 5 of Webern is what Matilda needs, to cut through the fatty and undigested parts of her thinking.

  Matilda came to East Kill for a repeat performance. She stayed at the Hotel Westphalia, near the water district. She wore a pink plaid Burberry-esque dress and I made the mistake of calling her “Pinkie,” which she said was racist. Her bubble-gum face sweated; cat spectacles blurred and magnified her bloodshot eyes. Fashion hound, she took a sleeping potion with aphrodisiac properties. Our embraces intensified; I told her that I’m certain her breasts have more sensitivity than Alma’s. I will never outgrow my love of a simple unhurried ejaculation in Matilda’s presence—a climax that begins in one country (hilly) and ends in another (rivery). I plan to end my love affair with tonality but I may not be ready for withdrawal rigors, the post-tonal DTs. Is it possible to concentrate so deeply on a piece of music that the world around the listener dissolves? Dr. Crick once suggested that I was autistic. Crick rarely sticks with a diagnosis; medical nomenclature for him is like flower arranging, a temporary art.

  The second night with Matilda, I withheld my orgasm. Be brief, Matilda said, as she sunk into chemically assisted slumber. (Her sleeping potion—she let me sip it—tasted like ginseng.) Possibly she woke hungover, but I had left the Hotel Westphalia, afraid she would berate me at breakfast for my missing orgasm. Last night I didn’t want her to see my face contort with conventional pleasure. I look ugly when I come.

  Long ago my school chum Freddy Ippoliti disappeared; the “kidnapping” made the papers, his body never found. He was also Tanaquil’s friend, though I tried to interrupt: carpe diem, an arrow through a snake. Furtively reading my notebooks will not ease your path toward health, Alma. Keep notebooks of your own if you want entertainment or catharsis.

  I played Scriabin’s Vers la flamme competently for Alma after roast chicken and plum crumble. She said listening would speed up her blood clot’s healing. No Orpheus, no fée, I didn’t demand perfection. I offered notes in reasonable order, a bare-minimum communicative intensity. Scriabin didn’t settle Alma’s stomach. She dislikes pedantic lectures, but I tried to explain my new discovery: “A walk-around harmony seeks no obvious resolution but exhibits a paltry stasis, so we, listeners, walk around the chord rather than insist it move forward. A walk-around chord lets us circle it—did Keats call it a ‘brede’?”

  Underrated Frank Bridge: I may program his character pieces in Aigues-Mortes. “I see no virtue in Bridge,” said Alma, as I brought lapsang tea and cream biscuits to her room, where she is convalescing. Alma had a psychic visitation from my father last night after she went to bed. Helen Jole, Alma’s Buenos Aires psychoanalyst, says that ESP is an epilepsy symptom. Dr. Jole may have a beautiful office off Plaza Güemes north of Villa Freud in the Palermo Viejo, but she lacks a spiritual temperament. She is no artist. Alma said, “I’m sick of the pedestrian. I’ve been surrounded by it my whole life.” I haven’t broached the Frank Bridge question with Moira Orfei. Perhaps she should add Art Nouveau aspects to her kangaroo monstrances. The Orfei connection to Art Nouveau passe
s through the indirect filter of Mallarmé, whose open forms appealed to Moira’s grandfather Umberto Orfei, when he read “Un Coup de Dés” in Italian translation and intuited that Mallarmé was predicting the future of circus. I never told Moira Orfei much about my father, though I mentioned to her the early trips to Portbou, the experience of swimming, watched by my father, in the meager pool; his gambling; his secret deposits; my occasional evenings with Thom in darkness, our mutual delving; being “brained” by Thom, an experience leading to higher musicianship; his boxer shorts and then my briefs, their overlap and mutual prediction. Did his boxers predict my briefs, or did my briefs, as a future idea, exist before the supposed “past” of his boxers?

  Last night, Alma-style, I had a psychic visitation from my greatest piano teacher, Xenia Lamont. (Pedagogic aetiology: Fabio Abruzzi infected me, but Xenia gave me pianistic foundation. She taught me how to approach big chords: from above. She taught me how to create a singing tone: through fakery. She taught me how to falsify a composer’s intentions and how to make an “inner crescendo,” a manipulative tactic to frighten the gullible listener. She taught me how to memorize a piece—in sections.) When she visited last night, she had nothing to say. She was simply a body, a bovine effigy in a Lanz nightgown, floating horizontally above my bed. I tried to recover from the apparition by staring in the bathroom mirror. The antidote failed. I drank a special solution picked up in a Portbou pharmacy: codeine-laced cough syrup. I remembered what Xenia once told me: “You’ll never play Liszt properly unless you overcome your love for my body.” Then she helped herself to my cock, which I was willing to offer. It exorcised her power. The more she wanted my cock, the less powerful she became. Erections grow on trees. She knew how to master Liszt’s Transcendental Études but I had a useful cock, more alert than her soporific husband’s. My cock cut through music’s obfuscation; my cock had the momentary power to neutralize radioactivity.

  I overheard a conversation between Anita and Tanaquil: rare colloquy between enemies. They stood by the microwave; unseen, I hovered at the threshold.

  Anita said, “Whenever truth is told, Theo shuts the door.”

  Tanaquil replied, “The door’s open now.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Escaping claims.”

  I retreated to my studio, practiced Carnaval, made mincemeat of the passage in which Schumann imitates Chopin, Alma’s favorite: it portrays Schumann as unmanly. Listening is not the same as love. I’m not drunk enough. I should open a second bottle of Syrah and begin reading a biography of Schumann so I can figure out how he ruined his hand, lost his mind, and died of tertiary syphilis. Did Schumann have BO, like Nadia Boulanger pupils I slept with in the 1970s? I should send Moira Orfei a detailed chart of my sexual past, so she can decide whether she still wants to work with me.

  Notebook Fourteen

  Letter from Moira Orfei (translated from the Italian)

  Dear Theo—

  Just a quick note from Montecatini to East Kill, an undated goodnight, undisciplined and rash, without particulars to relate, only a sense of perpetual festival and religious admiration, size and wonder beneath the carnival tent I travel with, city to city, searching for the perfection my late father claimed was the lost essence of circus art, which I am lucky enough to practice with the largest possible sphere of influence and more spectators than ever before in the Italian republic’s history.

  I spent three days in Atrani. Its sunsets convinced me I could reclaim my past by reconnoitering with Ernesto, old friend I met by chance, beside the gold-domed basilica where the Mediterranean meets the man-made ramparts upholding the town. Reunited, Ernesto and I imagined a permanent alliance, as if I were not married, widowed, married again, and now refusing conventional arrangements, like the courtesan Father feared I would become. Ernesto proposed, but I woke from infatuation: I need new men in my life, not revived romances with boys from my childhood who now are repentant adults wanting to hook up with me because of my circus eminence.

  Given the late hour, I have no time to record the ways your secret influence has elevated my art to the level of esteem it now enjoys in Italy. I must retire, though I regret the necessity—shades drawn in my front parlor, as when Father died.

  Moira Orfei

  Time to buy outfits for Aigues-Mortes. At Olney Clothes I chose two tight shirts: a black and a white. A black for my death. A white for my life. A black for Aigues-Mortes, if it fails. A white for Aigues-Mortes, if it fails. In the changing room I sucked Brad Olney’s cock—prophylaxis against Aigues-Mortes failing. I asked him to write a piano sonata based on Catullus epigrams. He said that he had retired from composing: he was sick of critics castigating him. I said, why not compose “nothings,” like my grandfather Ricardo Guadalquivar? If you compose a “nothing,” no one can insult it.

  Theo Mangrove and Moira Orfei at Aigues-Mortes: The Boxed Set. I’m salivating, I need to eat a hard-boiled egg, quick, for protein. Perhaps bourbon is indicated. Malnourishment destroys my Aigues-Mortes notebooks. Tanaquil had an anorexic year: her eighteenth. Then I took her to Jeffrey’s for “Mental Health Day” and she binged on glazed crullers. She spent all year reading The Bell Jar. She complained nonstop about her aborted musical-comedy career—Alma’s fault. Tanaquil never made it past the semi-finals in the East Kill Lyric Opera auditions for Li’l Abner. I play Liszt like a sister-ruiner. Moira never mentions Chloe Orfei’s needs. Moira’s infatuation with Ernesto foretells a season of new amours.

  Friedman reappeared. He quoted today’s East Kill Times—an article I’d overlooked, Hector Arens criticizing “the Mangrove monopoly on the modern.” Friedman, formerly a Montessori student, told me how orgasms reverse his self-image, unpocking it. Ever since the apartment fire, my esteem for him has fallen. He suffered no skin burns. Moira Orfei’s cigarette, held out to taunt or entice, did not singe me. I misinterpreted the gesture.

  Derva Nile arrived from New London. Plastic surgery: widened cheekbones improve her tone production, though the doctor should have adjusted her chin to match the cheeks. I coached her on Fauré’s “Les roses d’Ispahan.” She wants to program “Give Me My Robe” from Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. We consummated our relationship. Her vagina’s angle was satisfactory, its texture moist. She provided the slot I require. Mid-intercourse she mentioned her abusive father, who used to smack her face and call her “oceanic.” She said, “I didn’t want you as coach, but Madeline Tarnow told me about your charms . . .” Edgard Varèse is the only solution to the ruckus on Mechanical Street. I will immerse myself in making a piano transcription of his Ionisation and Octandre. How will I convert the flute in Density 21.5 to piano form? I can’t ask Derva. Derva and Varèse—ne’er the twain shall meet. Derva’s final smile implied that more intercourse is expected, though not essential. We work well together because we don’t insist on the sexual; if it comes, it comes. Morris Nile is out of the picture. Men can have dowager humps, too. I like to blow men I pity. I pity Dr. Crick’s brother, Vincent, the butcher.

  Alma has recovered, thanks to my bedside manner and Dr. Crick’s. She agreed to consult him, despite her conviction that he’s a quack. First she called Helen Jole, in Buenos Aires, who said mysterious things about the essential mind. Dr. Jole had separation anxiety, countertransferential. Tomorrow morning Alma returns to South America. Tonight she hangs between life and death: at supper, her face ashen, she removed her dentures and held a handkerchief to her mouth. During the soup course (cream of cucumber), Alma said that my playing, at its best, resembled shock treatment. She knows about Viterbo. I responded well to the treatment: historic paragon of receptivity to electroconvulsive therapy. Moira Orfei visited Viterbo, her all-white outfit Carmelite; convent-like, too, her perfume—nasturtiums, verbena, myrrh, rose, orchid, orange peel, grapefruit. Once Alma departs, I can have sex with escorts in the house. She might suffer a stroke in her glassy Buenos Aires penthouse. Dr. Helen Jole calls Alma “stroke-prone.” Alma’s stomachaches are as severe as mi
ne. I treat her unkindly in the notebooks. My chest is in knots. I should be saving these details for the sickness notebooks. The Aigues-Mortes notebooks, not sacred, keep me alive.

  Matilda drove me, in her Dodge, from Clarendon Street to her Zen master’s country house in Beverly. She stopped several times to vomit on the side of the highway. We sat in the Zen master’s living room, choosing CDs from his operetta collection. He was busy in the winter garden; a sudden warm spell had provoked the crocuses. We listened to excerpts from Suppé’s Boccaccio. Matilda walked me to the gazebo and sat on the swingset. No underwear: her vagina’s coral sufficiency regaled me. I looked at my watch and said, “Matilda, we should be getting back to Boston. Your psychoanalysis-and-Buddhism reading group meets tonight at seven.” She kept swinging. “Tonight we’re reading Bachofen on matriarchy,” she said. She hasn’t spoken to her mother in twenty years. Matilda is smarter than Alma, though Matilda doesn’t know how to use facts. Watching Matilda swing, I tried to describe my devotion to Moira Orfei, and failed: I suffer spasms of inattention and can’t complete a sentence . . . If only Moira Orfei could initiate me into her Wiccan mysteries!

  After sex, I played Friedman my home-made cassette of the Fauré Ballade, and he inspected my body for infractions, bugbites, pimples, ingrown hairs. He gives my bleeding rectum appropriate treatment. I like the feeling of a tended prostate; sensation wanders through my body, like Debussy’s description of Fauré’s undulating, feminine Ballade, a description Alma recited. If Alma were to suffer a heart attack by reading these notebooks, I would destroy them. Each year I tear my Schnabel edition of Beethoven sonatas into pieces, and then buy a new one. I don’t ask to be powerful. I only ask to be clear.