Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Xenia chain-smoked Marlboros. In the hospital she lifted her Lanz nightgown and showed the hysterectomy scar. Repeatedly, I deposited semen in her vagina, without condom. She didn’t suggest protection. I hated being taken over, but I also felt honored: how many student penises did she solicit? Did attentions paid to penis mean my piano playing would cease being arduous and unrewarded? During sex, her Yorkshire terrier barked at the foot of the bed. Alma knew Xenia, and thought highly of Xenia’s treatise on how to play Jeux d’eau, Xenia’s Bloody Marys, Xenia’s handknit cardigans, Xenia’s criticism of my self-indulgent rubato, Xenia’s distaste for my phrasing’s fragmented arrhythmia. The last time I saw her was summer, the East Kill Conservatory garden party: she looked suntanned, unlined, healthy, a silver headband pulling dyed black hair away from her wide, upper-crust face. Once, after sex, when I told her that I’d recovered from gonorrhea, given me by a guy, Xenia said, “Don’t bring your filth into my clean marriage.” I wonder if she ever told her faithful, impotent husband about our affair.

  When my heart palpitations subside, I will visit the East Kill cemetery and look for her monument. Gone, she distracts me from Aigues-Mortes preparations, Moira Orfei reparations.

  Twenty years ago at a funeral parlor, Xenia said, watching me write in a notebook, “You’re an observer.” I remember the inadequate air-conditioning. I was overcoming the Guadalquivar curse by recording mortuary details in a notebook under Xenia’s approving eye. My flaws were numerous and would not be easily corrected, though a line of hair (Cape Cod) connected my navel and groin: hirsuteness proved immunity to trespasses I perversely enjoyed. At the wake, I wrote down Xenia’s worst features in a notebook. I merely imagined her culpability. I’m not an apologizer, though dispensing a few—to Alma, Tanaquil, Friedman, Moira Orfei—wouldn’t hurt. I haven’t had an orgasm in twenty-four hours.

  When Xenia heard me play the Schumann Fantasy, at her house, she noticed faulty voicing (too much soprano, not enough alto) and rhythmically unstable left hand. She declared Schumann my “lonely vocation.” She was drinking her third Bloody Mary of the afternoon. Expertly she choreographed our sex—slowness, rapidity. She wanted to make our intercourse New England. The more geographically located the coitus, the more therapeutic. She repeated, “You don’t know what it’s like living with an impotent husband.” She pointed out his cot in the study, and his model sailboat, paternal heirloom. Xenia profited from accurate sexual placement, pubic hairs aligned, meshing, as in her cerebral Schoenberg performances, rests durable as notes. I can’t define her mound of Venus, plumped up, like a pillow; high and orthodox; a Roman Forum, visited.

  Once, when I was hiding from Xenia, not returning her calls, wanting to break off our relation, she telephoned Matilda: “Hi, I’m Theo’s therapist. Where is he?” Matilda refused to reveal my whereabouts. She considered Xenia “psychotic,” catalyst of my nervous collapse during Anton Rubinstein’s First Concerto with the East Kill Conservatory Orchestra. My aunt sometimes uses “psychotic” as a term of praise. She gives glowing reports of my “psychosis” to her psychoanalysis-and-Buddhism reading group. Alma on the phone from Buenos Aires told me that she was performing tomorrow with Lolita Torres at the Teatro Avenida, a program titled “Gitano Jesus.”

  I sucked Friedman in his new loft, third floor, River Way, overlooking the almost lake. Regular’s discount. I was shy about taking the whole organ in my mouth: I call his penis “diasporic” because it leaves my mind’s Levant when I stop loving it. He claims to be Middle Eastern, from several broken homes. I licked the balls, failed to come: he held me at the brink for an hour. When I told him I was writing about him in my Aigues-Mortes notebooks, he seemed offended. I admire his earned muscles, not merely his inherited hirsuteness. Animation left my body. Discuss Hollywood royalty’s unkind treatment of Moira Orfei after release of Terror of the Steppes.

  Available on the Internet: a memorial Xenia Lamont bootleg CD: her 1955 Hollywood Bowl performance (with unnamed orchestra) of Franck’s Symphonic Variations, Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasia, and Chopin’s Fantasia on Polish Airs. I ordered ten copies, gifts for students, to show dynamic gradations (a mile of nuance, between mezzo piano and mezzo forte) Xenia Lamont could coax from a Steinway. Her finger went to the key’s bottom.

  Moira Orfei hasn’t responded to my letter. Perhaps she considers Xenia’s death irrelevant to the Aigues-Mortes reunion. Death shouldn’t obstruct my zealous preparations. I elevate zeal above every human art. Snow burdens Mechanical Street’s elm tree branches. I am learning three Busoni elegies: “Turandot’s Room,” “Apparition,” and “After the Turning.” Practicing, I exist in a metaphorical cubicle. The closer I come to performance, the more invaded the cubicle, the more naked its walls. I pretend to crave performance but secretly I would rather retire forever. Moira Orfei, too, is weary of what my muse calls “circuit,” which means “dreary repetition of the same.” Need gloom be the center of the Aigues-Mortes notebooks?

  Irene Fitts, nurse, on Long Island, called. Alma’s mother hangs on the verge of death, in a Cutchogue hospice, her pain eased by a morphine drip. Sometimes the patient is coherent (so says Irene) and at other times sees apparitions in her room. Tonight, Gertrude asked for applesauce instead of her usual hospice dinner.

  I consider going to Cutchogue. Alma on the phone says the trip would be futile; she doesn’t plan to visit. She is playing Villa-Lobos’s “The Little Rubber Doll,” “The Little Paper Doll,” “Native Planting Song,” and “Joy in the Garden” in Buenos Aires at Sinagoga Central de la Congregación Israelita de la República Argentina. She cannot cancel the concert and fly to Cutchogue to supervise a treatment that, she says, “could go on for weeks, months, years. There’s no hurry.” Despising myself can’t elevate me to the position of “Alma’s favorite.” How “inner”—Xenia’s word—the notebooks have become, to their detriment. She taught me how to stage-whisper: play the melody loud enough, even when it’s marked pianissimo, for drunks in the balcony to hear.

  Gertrude, dying, is over one hundred years old. I recall she wore a Murano glass bead necklace and called me “foolish time-waster.” Her long white hair, piled in a bun, seemed heavy as a fat angry cat I once locked in the bathroom all night.

  One person at a time, the unspeakable departs. I am a new location of muteness, which hasn’t been cleansed from the Mangroves. My blood and conduct may be polluted, but at least I’m speaking.

  Only in retrospect may we call a body masculine or feminine. Xenia Lamont’s body had masculine as well as feminine aspects. Now that she is dead, she hardens, in memory, as “woman.” She becomes absolutely that. When the circus departs is a bitter day in New England. I should move to Boston, to be near Matilda. Her hand-me-down transcendentalism could correct my failures. I’ll invite Friedman over to make a Super 8 film tonight. His nudity always cheers me up, if I punish it, pay him for it, or film it.

  Alma has not wasted her life. I may be wasting mine. Xenia Lamont has two grown sons, handsome—a criminal lawyer, an anesthesiologist. What have I accomplished, playing Falla’s “Dance of Terror” on cruise ships to Barbados and the Virgin Islands? This morning Friedman shaved my body: sacrilegious, to indulge in erotic grooming while Gertrude Guadalquivar expires in a Cutchogue hospice.

  I was wrong to play two Vincent Persichetti sonatas at Derva’s Trinity Church recital, upstaging her rendition of Rachmaninoff’s “Dans le silence de la nuit mystérieuse.” Last year Hector Arens criticized my performance of the Leon Kirchner sonata as “implausible” and “infantile.” I never congratulated Derva on divorcing moody Morris Nile. If Alma were to read my Aigues-Mortes notebooks, she’d think me misogynist and hypercritical. I never mentioned her work on behalf of civil rights in the 1960s: memorial concert after the death of Dr. King. Recall the photos of Alma hugging Coretta, widow.

  Tanaquil, skeptical about Aigues-Mortes, wears lederhosen. Every Guadalquivar has a tongueless disposition, however talkative we appear on the surface. Thom had alm
ost no family. I do not consider myself a Mangrove; my melancholy is 100% Guadalquivar. I will destroy my notebooks, page by page. What will decimation prove? I can’t appear in Aigues-Mortes unless I have described, in advance, the preparations. My secret economy: (a) describe; (b) disappear. Tanaquil never grew to full height. Who determines maturity?

  Yesterday afternoon I played Mompou preludes and Suburbis to an inattentive audience at Trinity Church, half of them homeless. This unwise gig will not afford me national exposure. Breakdown was a boon: a chance to hibernate in East Kill, apart from limelight. After the concert I met the first man Alma ever kissed. Artie Rann introduced himself. A linguistics teacher at East Kill Community College, unattractive, with a grizzled, unkempt beard (Alma hates facial hair), he said that my mother was “the love of his life.” Arnie led me out of the church, to the corner of Lavinia Way and Stream Drive, and said, “I’ve often stood here, thinking of your mother.” Afterward I called a new escort, Alejo, Argentinian. We partied at Empire Motel. His pectorals are more pronounced than Franco Idol’s. Alejo noticed, after sex, my bleeding ass. Many of his bottoms have been bleeders. I need to revise my conduct.

  Gertrude Guadalquivar is in a coma. Irene Fitts says that Gertrude, supported by machines, could last for months.

  My grandmother had many loves. She loved colored cheap glass, crowded paintings, naked spankings, and cling peaches. My merely sporadic masculinity bored her: her eyes glazed over as she watched me not be a he-man. I memorize womanly looseness and tautness.

  Gertrude loved paintings when they were crowded: she enjoyed a profusion of rendered objects, no separation. She loved “things of this world,” as she called them, repeating the phrase as if it were “Jingle Bells.” She will donate her art collection to the East Kill Museum. Last year she bought a Brice Marden. She said to me, during one of her last lucid moments, “In Brice’s painting, I love the way the lasso hugs the edge.” When I repeated this comment to Alma last night, she said, “That’s why she can’t understand my playing. There are no lassos in my work, not even in my Goyescas. Music is abstract. Mother was stuck in the representational moment.” But then Alma mentioned her mother’s cling peaches. Sickness helps performance, bolsters its claim to be real. Cling peaches.

  Notebook Sixteen

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Alma’s mother—Gertrude Guadalquivar—died yesterday. She never told us her exact age. We surmise it was 101.

  In Marseille, accompanying your cream pony stunt, I played an assortment of my grandfather Ricardo Guadalquivar’s piano nothings: waltz, improvisation, prelude, étude, caprice, tango. Did you meet him in Tangier? His compositions are minor, but his “Alleluia Rag Waltz” has an afterlife.

  Please do not forget Aigues-Mortes!

  Love,

  Theo Mangrove

  Gertrude Guadalquivar died yesterday morning at 11:15 a.m. (after a “valiant struggle,” said Irene Fitts), in Cutchogue, near corn fields and the Long Island Sound. She died in winter. No panorama. No last luxury. Alma’s face will look slack and fallen at the funeral, and afterward I will rent a water-district escort: amoral antidote.

  At least Gertrude didn’t die slowly of cancer; she died in a coma after no particular disease. The organs failed.

  Her husband, Ricardo, died long ago. In recent years I have not played his nothings with sufficient passion.

  Gertrude’s surviving sister, Ruby, is handling post-mortem secretarial tasks. (No one cares about Ruby, the family drudge, ninety-five-year-old workhorse.) Gertrude prepared carefully for death; the papers are in order. She had no connection to my butter inheritance, purely Mangrove. How I keep my dairy money separate from Alma is a confusing topic.

  Gertrude Guadalquivar’s ghost has entered my studio; she hangs, a trapeze artist, from the chandelier. I am an amateur spiritualist. Why did I not repair Alma’s amorality and push her in an ethical direction? Now Gertrude’s spirit crouches atop the plaster bust of Brahms and enters my spinal cord. Her doctrinal ghost is warm, like a down sleeping bag, and wet, like a deep sea fishing trip, or an essay.

  Matilda refuses to attend the funeral.

  The last thing Gertrude said to me, in her extreme sickness: “I can’t talk to you now.” And then she hung up.

  I never slept with anyone underage, though I misled an impressionable fourteen-year-old pupil, Marcie. I held her hand in the conservatoire elevator. She considered me her “boyfriend,” though I was twenty years older, and married.

  I dusted off the green Aigues-Mortes notebook and read it, with displeasure. At present I am writing in a silver notebook. Type these fragments after my death, Anita, if you wish. Or destroy them.

  I repeat: Gertrude died at 11:15 a.m. In our last conversations, she was weak, so I avoided mentioning Aigues-Mortes. She died without hearing my ambitious plans for a comeback, Moira Orfei proving to crowds that I can excite a response if I have corybantic assistance. Moira is Greek for “fate.” I pronounce “Moira” correctly: “Moy Ra.” Moy as in boy.

  I performed Chopin’s B Minor Sonata at Gertrude’s funeral. I doubt my memorial gesture’s moral probity. Gertrude told me that I am a finer teacher than pianist but that it is horrible to be forgotten and that it is better to be remembered as a teacher than not to be remembered at all. At forty-three, I still lack method. After the funeral I went to the water district; at Camera Baths, I met a man with a micro-penis. I didn’t catch his name. He’d come to East Kill from Lansing, Michigan, because he wanted to “make it in the arts”: découpage. He complained of mood swings. His sister recently died in a train crash. Out of pity I blew him; my teeth nicked his cockhead. Men with micro-penises shouldn’t be picky. Sycophant, he asked whether I’d appeared in porn.

  When I came home, Alma was still awake, sitting in the kitchen, eating canned peaches over vanilla ice cream. She might have been drunk: she started talking about my bowels. They were problematic during the first two weeks of my existence: my movements had an odd color. The discoloration “devastated” her. She sent me back to the hospital for supervision; after the doctors assured her that I was intact, she brought me home again.

  The night after the funeral, Tanaquil and I rented a disappointing video, Copulation, about policemen and reincarnation. It had no frontal nudity. I don’t like being forced to imagine things. I’m hungover, this morning, from Forteto della Luja.

  In the mail from Alma’s subscription list: dismal sales report for my Poulenc CD. Twelve sold. I won’t fill Aigues-Mortes seats. Anita, recovering from the funeral ordeal, has boycotted Mechanical Street: all day she walked aimlessly through gorges surrounding East Kill. I spent the afternoon doing laundry. Sorting, folding, ironing: activities like Poulenc’s delicate mismanagement of the ordinary.

  Mourning period over, Alma leaves for South America: a midnight concert, next week, in Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Merced, and then a screening, in the Museo Etnográfico Juan Bautista Ambrosetti, of a special silent version of Lolita Torres’s 1944 film, The Dance of Fortune, directed by Luis Bayón Herrera. As live piano accompaniment, Alma will play José María Castro’s Sonata de Primavera. Anita baked a bitter greens pie for dinner. My sexual life, aside from Friedman, is at a standstill: I’ve lost whatever minor attractiveness I once possessed. Anita, home from gorge-wandering, served me chocolate ice cream in bed, where I convalesced after the vertigo attack I suffered during the ten o’clock news. We’re bombing another country.

  Xenia taught me to imitate portamento through rhythmic crookedness. I’m no longer attracted to Mozart, but I must pretend to love his music, for the sake of my students. I’d rather everyone learn the Berg sonata.

  I stayed up until dawn, making piano transcriptions of Webern string quartets and trios: Anita calls my ardor “naïve.”

  Tomorrow is Tanaquil’s forty-first birthday. I will pick up a cake from Lesquel Bakery. Pink boxes dress up the lackluster pastries inside. Lesquel’s strawberry cake is adequate. Birthday dinner will be small: Tanaquil and
I. Anita is away, pursuing pedestrian experiments, walking through drought-cracked riverbeds. Alma is hobnobbing with Lolita Torres in Buenos Aires. I’ll heat up a chicken pot pie from Lucky. I’ll give Tanaquil one thousand dollars, from the “butter” holdings. I paid for the abortion, five years ago. Tanaquil may have wanted to keep the baby, but she had no independent means to care for it. With Alma’s cooperation I arranged for the abortion with Dr. Crick. Quick procedure. No complications.

  Notebook Seventeen

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Again I write. I haven’t heard from you. Did you receive my letter? Two deaths: Xenia Lamont, Gertrude Guadalquivar. I stumble. Excuse my forwardness. Circus detains you, and I’m detained by waiting for May, for Aigues-Mortes, when we’ll work together again, after abstinence and retreat. Trapani was our last performance. I played a Steinway in the center of the ring, below the trapeze, beside juggler and clown: Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels, three times in a row, between your Preliminary Parade, when you led troops around the ring, and the Final Grand Parade, when the gang at first dematerialized in clouds of your making and then returned to substance. The evening ended with your galliard on the back of a cream pony. Supine Bengal tiger, jumping llama, and rearing zebra encircled you and formed your primary audience. After the performance you mentioned that my services would not be required next season.

  I worry about my wife, who shows signs of unpredictable, independent action: she moves through gorges to document them. She has the grace to mention her adventures afterward, but not the wit to describe them comprehensibly.