Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Perhaps in Aigues-Mortes I should play the anti-ecstatic Cheap Imitation by John Cage, while Moira Orfei tames a seal, tap-dances on a hat, and other odd, spontaneous tricks, each a tribute to her mother. Moira rarely talks about her father, and yet his madness explains her commitment to circus. Aristocratic Moira Orfei pretends to be bohemian but dines at Le Grand Véfour on the rue de Beaujolais and travels without me to circus festivals in County Cork and Singapore. Once, when we got drunk together, and argued, over bouillabaisse, at the Hotel de Anza in Nice, she called me “passive,” and accused me of never initiating circus arrangements. I am afraid of Moira Orfei’s temper—afraid that she will lash out at me on the Aigues-Mortes festival stage. Beforehand, she will pretend to be a happy, polite collaborator, but then, unforewarned, in the ring, she will accuse me of under-preparation.

  Time for rehearsal is running out. Unkind, to expect Moira Orfei to improvise in Aigues-Mortes. She is waiting for explicit instructions. Tomorrow I will prepare the battle-plan.

  I drank two bottles of Côtes du Rhône Villages and fell into a stupor at the kitchen table, then summoned the spirit to drive to Jacob’s Ladder, the new men’s clothing boutique in downtown East Kill. For Aigues-Mortes, I bought pink sandals.

  Define musical ecology. East Kill considers me confusing, despite my decades of effort to be clear. “No phrase truly ends on the downbeat,” Xenia Lamont used to say. “Outwit coarse public expectations. Play loud warhorses quietly. Play Mozart like Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff like Mozart.”

  Visions of dead women’s hair, exiled Guadalquivar aunts I never met, accumulate in my notebooks. I plan to be kinder to Alma in the future. I have a creeping suspicion that my European breakdown was the spitting image of Alma’s 1964 catastrophe, when critics implored, “Return Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove to her rightful place as ruler of the piano world!” I shall put an ad in Musical America (under Derva Nile’s name), seeking a videotape—does one exist?—of Alma’s onstage collapse, when she fainted (and more) during Liszt’s “Mazeppa.” I can use the tape as blackmail, should Alma cross the line; I can use it in Aigues-Mortes as visual counterpoint (sound turned off) to Moira Orfei’s Maltese Cross maneuver, and my performance of Poulenc’s “Valse-Improvisation sur le nom de Bach.”

  Tanaquil is coming into her own. In consultation with Dr. Gaston Lair she has upped her dosage of Thorazine and has befriended Derva Nile’s younger brother, Jon, a dissolute ex-hippie with permanent brain damage from LSD. Now, on her invitation, he sleeps in our backyard shed, which Tanaquil has converted into a small guest cottage. Fearing tarantulas, I hadn’t entered it for years. Yesterday she took me into it. Lo and behold, Jon was sitting at a Knabe grand, an old practice piano of Alma’s. I noted Jon’s pigtail and his oily, pimply forehead; he showed me the gun under his pillow. Tanaquil said to him, “You look ten years younger now that you’ve lost the beard.” She’d been nagging him to shave it. Tanaquil and Jon are having a sexual relationship—her first love affair (to my knowledge) since the abortion. Tanaquil wants Jon to gift her with Nile seed. Jon said “faggot” under his breath, referring to me; considering the shotgun, I ignored the insult. I don’t keep close enough watch over Tanaquil’s movements. She has reason to avoid me: she knows that an atmosphere of Theo-as-rapist surrounds me when I give master classes. The rapist nimbus originates with my father; his cheekbones (genetically he was a pan-European amalgam) are vivid to me, today, as I weigh the likelihood of Schoenberg conscripting Aigues-Mortes audiences to my cause, whatever it may be. With Moira Orfei, I want to rehabilitate piano-circus art, to show Ajaccio, Trapani, Montepulciano, and Marseille—cities where I have failed—that I can rise to her level. We’ll test-drive our act in Aigues-Mortes.

  Emergency phone call from Buenos Aires: Alma worries that audiences no longer vibrate to her art. Former fans gathered to complain at the Mausoleo de los Caídos en la Revolución de 1890. I wonder why I don’t spend more time with her in Latin America before she dies. She would be happy for her agent to book me concerts there. Maybe she has male company; she has not mentioned a steady partner, but she must have Argentine admirers. We have only rarely discussed sexuality. In Alma’s opinion, I suppress erotics on the altar of recherché musical tastes—as if Auric and Honegger were not genital profiteers! Alma concertizes exclusively in South America to flee my barnyard sensibility’s limits; I owe her a pathway back into New York State musical life. Absent, she dominates East Kill. On the phone, she complained about Buenos Aires light: it falls on building cornices in the Palermo Viejo and brings on melancholy fits. Psychotropic drugs paradoxically intensify her paranoia.

  Derva Nile and I rehearsed music that others call trivial, that we call meat: Chaminade, Chabrier, Hahn. Because I had a 102-degree fever, she agreed to stay the whole afternoon and answer the phone: “Mangrove household, Derva speaking.” When my fever descends, I will help repair the bad break between her vocal registers. A long-ago dropped anvil left a welt on her right forearm, a triangular gouge I caress in passing. Today she chatted about her big, dead sister, Minerva, slain years ago, on a religion-and-drugs retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains, by a fellow tripper, who, like Minerva, spoke in tongues: cat language. Derva carries in her purse a photo of the murdered sister, a year before the breakdown that precipitated a flight westward, a personality disintegration—from cheerleader to born-again druggie.

  Thoughts of Minerva’s glossolalia, a magnetized dust cloth, wipe clean my delirium. I miss my former gloom, which Moira Orfei appreciated. She wouldn’t want me to cheer up. In Viterbo she said, “You’ve never been more promising as a circus partner.” Lunacy gave me, onstage, a gibbous glow. She held my hand in Viterbo and we planned a tour that never occurred. Without a piano in the asylum, nothing could distract me from her hands, with their glittering rings; from her arms, with their snake-charmer silver bangles; from her hair, with its permanent, paralyzed demeanor, like cuisine or immortality; from her eyes, with their heavily painted outlines; from her lips, with their plump yet flattened appeal to my good nature; from her lips, with their appearance of owning more property than a pair of lips could legally claim; from her nose, with its serene, perfect coating of makeup; from her body, what one could see, in outline and suggestion, through a Pucci dress. Her body, greeting me, held itself inside the Pucci fabric with a stoic, normal reserve. No one would ask her body to do anything. Circus star, she overpowered every echelon of freak, contortionist, and clown. During those few, charmed, scattered days in which I functioned as her pianist, in Ajaccio, Montepulciano, Marseille, Trapani, and other well-placed but evanescent locales, I had the opportunity of being mastered by her, but she did not exercise the iron glove with malice or rage; though I was securely and permanently “under” her, as Beelzebub is under Lucifer, her purposes were not nefarious. Under her training and command, the seals spoke, the lions danced, the jaguars behaved. In Viterbo, during her visit to the asylum, her chest rose and fell as she sighed, in the electroshock chamber, the Pucci fabric seeming to alter and deepen with every respiration. She bore the weight of circus history on her shoulders without complaint. That we ceased to communicate for five years is not a fact I can hold against her. I am equally to blame. I retreated to East Kill, canceled all European performances; and no more Continental offers came, until Alfonso Reyes called, with the good news from Aigues-Mortes. I contacted Moira again; and, when she did not respond, I continued to write, once a week, then once a day, each letter sent to the winter palace in Montecatini, a copy sent to Chloe in her Luccan palazzo. Moira Orfei’s letters, evasive though passionate, indicate willingness to work with me in Aigues-Mortes, though Alfonso tells me that no contracts have been signed. Aigues-Mortes is a small town; arrangements can be last-minute. No one else is booked for May: only Moira Orfei and Theo Mangrove. According to Alfonso, we are the only participants in the Aigues-Mortes festival.

  When I saw Friedman at the Statute of Limitations he babbled about the fire that robbed him of possessions, including
his mother’s rag doll. He is developing the lion face of HIV-positive men: protease inhibitors. I have never developed side effects. Dr. Crick calls me a wonder. I dwell in a fairy tale. And yet everything I say here is true. If it were false, I would not need to waste hours, weeks, on these notebooks—time stolen from the piano, my real art. And yet I enjoy squandering time on the Aigues-Mortes notebooks, indulging a substitute practice. I will donate the notebooks to the Moira Orfei Living Museum, once I organize it. Aigues-Mortes plans take precedence over museum schemes. Moira Orfei has not yet agreed to be a museum, or to lend her name to it, or to donate her film and circus costumes. Without a full collection of her bangles, rings, tiaras, and skirts, the museum will fail to attract visitors. Moira Orfei has not informed me whether she will contribute scrapbooks, posters, and correspondence. She has not stated where she wants the museum located. In a letter, I suggested East Kill. Given her Italian renown, perhaps the museum should be in Montecatini.

  When I spoke to Alma in Buenos Aires last night, after her grueling weekend of concerts at Museo Xul Solar, Hospital Fernandez, Basílica Nuestra Señora del Pilar, and a midnight appearance at the Tangoteca, she mentioned a Sunday morning, long ago, when we had bathed together, or she had observed (déjà vu) me taking a bath. I didn’t sit down in the Easter tub; I half-stood, so I could converse with her while she observed (déjà vu) me. Last night she spoke enviously of Matilda’s big lips, “like a woman in a Gauguin painting”: the lips brought Matilda many marriage offers when she was in her teens. Long ago in her Clarendon Street townhouse bedroom she took my virginity, good riddance. Twenty was a fine age to lose it. Matilda’s Christian Dior pumps and Deco cigarette holders make her a family précieuse, our Dietrich. My tendency (following Alma’s lead) to criticize Matilda must be checked; she never said one negative word to me in my entire life.

  I will not return to East Kill after Aigues-Mortes. I will relocate to that city of salt, ramparts, and arcades. I will buy a house near the Chapel des Pénitents Gris and ask Moira Orfei to move in with me. My lumpish loyalty to East Kill flustered her, when we drank negronis in Ajaccio’s Hotel de Anza, with its atmosphere of the VIP lounge but also of the primordial hut, lizards crawling under the door, and small Paul Klee–like designs of random antic journeys frescoed on the walls. She asked, “Do you want to leave East Kill behind? Are you ready to leap into circus?” She blinked rapidly. An important fence of mascara surrounded her eyes. I nodded. She took a slow breath, as if preparing to chant, and said, “Then you must give me control of the situation.” My hands sweated, trembled, like a bank-robber’s. She leaned closer, held out a cigarette. I lit it. She blew smoke over her shoulder. I thought, but did not say aloud, “You are my demiurge.” The word “demiurge” took my attention, for a crucial instant, away from Moira Orfei. She said, “We can continue our work. Circus is large. Circus includes all kinds.” Pride, within me, swelled, at the thought that she was stretching the word “circus” to include me, despite her doubts. She said, “My family hated Mussolini.” She described her father’s wartime sufferings, his mind’s decay. A sparkling tiara upheld her hairdo. Did the hair keep itself aloft without the tiara’s assistance? I felt privileged to be seated at a table with Moira Orfei, in public. Other guests noticed us. A swarthy gentleman, hair wrapped in a turban, asked to take her picture. Moira politely refused.

  Yesterday I did not memorize the Webern Variations, as planned. Instead, I let Friedman’s new boyfriend, Jacques, finger my ass at the Space Bar urinal. Jacques’s nipples were overly long; his chest hair was not well organized (I prefer the Louisiana pattern). If you are reading this notebook, Anita, don’t be alarmed. The Ives Concord sonata awaits me. I have not abandoned recalcitrant American masters. I will export my crotchety East Kill temperament to Aigues-Mortes. Alma has played almost everything decent written for the piano, but she has never played Ives. I will accept Alma’s Lord; I won’t demand one of my own making. Take no shortcuts to the truth, unless Moira Orfei, princess of dovetailing and compression, commands.

  Alfonso Reyes called. He has moved temporarily to Aigues-Mortes, to handle festival arrangements; he occupies the entertainment office at 5 boulevard Gambetta. Moira Orfei has contacted him. He said, “Moira Orfei seems to be taking Aigues-Mortes more seriously than you are. You’d better settle down to work.” I need a new European agent.

  Gertrude Guadalquivar was not a Marxist but she sent utopia into my bloodstream. Rich, she taught me to despise the market. Alma, too, taught me that commerce was whoredom. Aigues-Mortes is not the market. Moira Orfei is not the market. Thom Mangrove was a practicing socialist. Alma said of him, “Whenever we went on vacation, he had dental emergencies.” I’m sick of lies. I’ve spent my life trusting Alma’s tales of Thom. If I start disbelieving now, I will be forced to reconstruct his entire past. Alma has shown me pictures of their trip to the Golfo dei Poeti—Thom standing upright in a tottering boat. I don’t remember anything of the weeks immediately before or after his death. I don’t remember being told of his death; I remember remembering being told by Alma that my father was dead; that he had died several weeks ago; and that the circumstances of his death could not be precisely determined.

  Gertrude Guadalquivar’s possessions are mine, if I desire. Alma said, on the phone, “Gertrude had fine antiques. She wanted you to have them, not Tanaquil.” Wrong. Tanaquil, the more ingratiating grandchild, deserves love seat, pier table, console, étagère, and schoolhouse globe.

  I remember Gertrude’s nineteenth-century Venetian glass candelabra, now lost. I never saw it in person—only in a photograph of Alma, taken forty years ago. In those days, Gertrude plied ailing Alma with botanical poultices from Florentine labs: herbs to cure a wayward daughter’s melancholy. Alma’s former cheerfulness (so I hypothesized) was the place in my pianism where I stored cardinal treasures, as, in a church, one hides the bones of saints in a crypt; I could not conceive of the relation between melody and accompaniment in romantic music without recalling the photo of cheerful Alma standing beside the Venetian candelabra that might, if I can find it, become my property and prove that Alma was once not miserable. Perhaps I could program Poulenc trivia on my Aigues-Mortes concert as a way to wing this corrective to Alma—making it actual, even if in another hemisphere, even if Alma never hears my performance, in the Aigues-Mortes bandstand, amid smell of burning tar and coal, of Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels accompanying Moira Orfei’s glacial whirling-dervish dance, her spinning body encircled by a corps of camels. Moira Orfei complained to me, in Trapani, of the tumblers. She said they made passes at her. I will never make a pass at Moira. She stood outside my hotel room, in the Trapani Hotel de Anza, after midnight, in a white dress, knocking, I answered, and she remained, holding an ice bucket, in the hall. I thought of inviting her into my room, but she said that she was just passing through and wanted to know if I needed to refresh my own ice bucket. I brought my ice bucket into the hallway and she took a pair of tongs and removed a dozen or so cubes from her ice bucket and put them in mine. Then we said good night and I closed the door. The next morning, at rehearsal, we didn’t discuss the ice-bucket incident. I may be wrong to see significance in it. She knows I like to drink whiskey on the rocks in the Hotel de Anza alone in my room at night while I am writing in my notebooks about performances and rehearsals. At the time, I was keeping a series of notebooks I called the Hotel de Anza Notebooks, which I never showed Moira Orfei, though she appeared in nearly every paragraph. I will donate the Hotel de Anza Notebooks to the Moira Orfei Living Museum, and after my death, she can read them. She will be flattered by most of the references. I discuss in detail the time she came to my hotel room dressed in a white gown and a white coat over it; we sat on the couch and talked about her desire to retire from circus. I urged her never to quit, though circus exhausted her. Her eyes were ambivalent; eyelashes moved slowly up and down, never coarsely, always with refulgence and weight. I looked into her eyes but was unable to speak. That day my paralysis b
egan. The Moira Orfei Living Museum is taking my attention away from Aigues-Mortes. I must concentrate on the future.

  Part Three

  RETRENCHMENT

  Notebook Nineteen

  News bulletin: after a long period of hearing sporadically from Moira Orfei, I am receiving daily postcards, in Italian. Why the sudden regularity? Today, my birthday, I will begin translating Moira Orfei’s postcards and transcribing them in notebooks. Responsibility for errors is mine.

  Theo:

  Do you ever hear voices? Do you answer them, or leave them be?

  Eavesdropping on Vesuvius, I fainted during my Napoli circus.

  Here begins the slow, difficult trip to Aigues-Mortes, against Chloe’s warnings.

  Please rescue me.

  M. Orfei

  Am I capable of rescuing her? Who has kidnapped her? Managers? Rivals? The Wanda Osiris clan? Orfei cousins? Settled onto the train, riding to Boston, I lie in what the sages call “the lap of contentment,” but to what end? I was a complainer at birth, Alma says, and I’ve never stopped. Out the window I see defunct farm, hayrick, stilt-propped barn, red church, white church, apple orchard, harbor, gorge, college, golf course, marsh, cranberry bog. I wish I’d brought my Super 8 Bolex camera. I’ve passed these same vistas many times, but I’ve never noticed the sublimity. “Sublimity” is the nonsense I idealized ten years ago, before I rediscovered Moira Orfei’s magic powers, before I met Friedman and penetrated the water district’s secrets. Time to destroy some local reputations, including my own.