Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Theo,

  In Aigues-Mortes, I begin to flower, behind your back, though I don’t mean to deceive or precede you, or commence performance without your in-person assistance, ambiguous friend.

  Moira Orfei

  Despite dehydration, I visited Matilda: philanthropist, cultural leader, erotic chameleon. Practicing mime, she wore all-white makeup. As we took off her kimono, she murmured, “I want a vacation.” I remembered, with an unpleasant flash, the first time I caressed her breasts beneath her Louise Brooks hairdo. My foreplay bored her. She said, “Lu thinks I’ve had a face lift.” Indeed, her forehead had lost its frown lines. We began our sporadic, sacrosanct liaison soon after I turned twenty. Yesterday her breasts seemed to melt: guttering-candle hallucination. Xenia Lamont’s breasts also melted in my hands. Dissolving breasts might ruin my Liszt performance in Aigues-Mortes. Moroccan fabrics cloaked Matilda’s walls and floors. She said, “I’m not a gay man, Theo,” but turned over anyway. I committed the usual desecration. Suddenly she played the incest card, calling our behavior indecent. I told her that I am above the age of discretion. Ritual heals. I pointed to the parlor, which she calls the masturbation shack. Each room in her house is consecrated to a separate function: a room for studying, a room for screwing, a room for designing.

  If I have ruined my relation with Matilda, then I will memorize Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto tomorrow: expanded repertoire equals ethical bulimia.

  Theo,

  Aigues-Mortes, soon to occur, is life or death, not casual, not incidental, not a mere stop on a tour. Its largeness appalls me when I sit on my hotel balcony and look at the tower, the marshes—toward Spain and other confusions.

  Please verify my vision.

  Moira Orfei

  I wrote back to verify. The town walls of Aigues-Mortes are fortified and composed of towers, so there are no ambiguities about being in Aigues-Mortes. Aigues-Mortes is like a hotel room; you have either checked in, or you have checked out. There is no middle ground. I lack a complete list of Aigues-Mortes hotels. A Hotel de Anza in Aigues-Mortes would rescue me from this dismal situation.

  Tanaquil and I drove to Long Island and visited Gertrude Guadalquivar’s house, recently sold. Her furniture was still there. Pain medications on a Bauhaus bedside table. Her own paintings—André Derain imitations. On a prie-dieu, books mentioning her: novelettes by Salvador Dalí, Darius Milhaud, Simone de Beauvoir. Gertrude liked leaflets: they moved quickly. As I looked out her bedroom’s window onto the park, its fruit trees unblooming (the coldest winter in decades), I recalled my ungenerous distaste for Gertrude’s final incontinence.

  Downstairs, on the way out, Tanaquil and I found the Venetian glass candelabra that appears in the photograph where Alma seems happy. I took the contentment candelabra back to East Kill.

  Gertrude’s death-hallowed chamber moved me, but I will be unable to explain this experience to Moira Orfei. Fatigue eats away at my feeble, undemonstrative playing. My recent Scriabin run-through at Trinity Church gave pleasure (so Derva said) to AIDS sufferers and their compatriots, gathered in the church, by arrangement with the hospital, to hear the effeminate Russian’s excursion beyond the tonal pale. For encore, I played Liszt’s “Au lac de Wallenstadt.” During passagework, a catastrophe occurred, just as in Monte Carlo six years ago: I felt a spasm of immobilizing panic, and for a fraction of a second—no more—my fingers stopped midair, uncertain where next to proceed. I regained control, but the lapse haunts me; when I mentioned it to Tanaquil, as we stood in our late grandmother’s bedroom, she said, with uncharacteristic seriousness, “What Jews went through in World War Two keeps repeating, throughout the world, onstage and off, and will never cease its repetitions until the sins of the perpetrators have been expiated.” Tanaquil rarely mentions Jews; I didn’t know that she cared about destroyed people. She said that my lapse, during Liszt, was not an accident. God planned it.

  When, later, I told Alma about the lapse, she said, “How like you,” and mentioned her planned trip to Iguazú Falls. I vow to restrain my effusions.

  Theo,

  Mystery!

  Your last letter was illegible.

  I never wanted to mention this to you before: you appear to me as a blur, more often than as a person.

  Where “person” should be, sometimes I find mist.

  Moira Orfei

  Dr. Crick wants me to fast. I ignored the tray of breakfast dainties that Derva Nile brought to my bed, where I am convalescing. Black tea will satisfy, and a Fleet Phospho-soda purge at 5:00. Aigues-Mortes demands austerity. Derva has become aesthetically opinionated. Tonight, her face seems divided, one half smiling, the other frowning, like schizophrenic patients attending my Trinity Church concerts. Derva says that pastiche is our time’s reigning art form. I disagree. Pastiche is tresses caught in your mouth when you air-kiss a great lady at a cocktail party.

  Theo,

  Aigues-Mortes is “on”—alive with wonders and visitors.

  I am sitting in a nightclub, Passé Composé, outside the walls of Aigues-Mortes, in the new development: sometimes I need to breathe recent, other air.

  Genius has been rebestowed to me, under the aegis of downfall. Call it rage, fear, premonition: it rushes back into my hands and legs, as I see trapeze artists warm up and elephants circle the ring, dancers upon them—a rehearsal so rigorous it seems our final performance.

  A storm knocked down Aigues-Mortes telephone lines for a few days but that did not matter, because I have not used the phone in a full year. Can you imagine my peace of mind? The quiet, in which to contemplate what went wrong!

  Moira Orfei

  I demonstrated spectacular competence in my Aigues-Mortes run-through (the Liszt program) at a church in Springs, a memorial concert for Gertrude Guadalquivar. Few attended. Tanaquil made the trip. Her presence was enough. Though I began life loving the baroque, near the end I prefer Liszt’s sick insincerity. Music is acoustics, not willpower: music exists in space only because time already gave its retractable blessing.

  Theo,

  Do you remember the first “splash” we made—how noisy and unheralded it was, and how it threatened to overhaul our past and send it in an opposite, painful direction, as at the roadside restaurant you took me to, outside Catania, after we played the opera house, shocking the Catanese with our conflation of opera and circus, our theft of Britten’s “Rape of Lucretia”?

  May I occupy your ear?

  The longer I spend here, alone, preparing, the more my old spirit emerges, and I become the flame, not merely its witness.

  Moira Orfei

  Moira Orfei won’t be offended if I discuss erotic grooming rituals. Working with Kirk Morris, Dan Vadis, and other gladiator he-men, she witnessed shiny oiled male smoothness. At his loft, Friedman shaved off most of my body hair; we are eager to see me resemble a boy. Now his masculinity exceeds mine, as Alma’s recording of Milhaud’s Cinq études outshines mine. I don’t wish to overpraise Friedman’s penis size and semi-Semitic features, or to take seriously his claims to be a healer. He said that I looked fatigued, after my recent “shock treatment,” to use Dr. Crick’s phrase. My last exam showed micropolyps and abrasions. I blew Friedman, while, in a cubbyhole, his mother slept off her hangover.

  Dear Theo,

  The other evening at the Aigues-Mortes Cinémathèque I saw René Clair’s 1930 film “Sous les toits de Paris,” starring Albert Préjean in the role of Albert, and Pola Somebody in the role of Pola. I remembered a Europe ruined by war, and my family’s connection to Albert Préjean’s music-hall artistry and to such forgotten trifles (they nourish me!) as Reynaldo Hahn’s operetta “Ciboulette.”

  I finally understand my fatherland. Europe was torn apart, made wintry, at the end of WWII; each family, including mine, saw its edges frayed.

  Thank you for the Satie morceaux. I will devise movements—war-torn leaps—to accompany them.

  Moira Orfei

  The early pin-up stars of Mandate—Max Jord
an, Lee Ryder, Miles O’Keefe, Bob Free—could not have helped my career or saved me from disease. Illness taught me how to play Chopin. Reading Moira Orfei’s letter, thinking of war as our modus operandi, I remembered that pianism equals epilepsy—not mine, but Wendy’s, the sheet-pale girl who fell on the conservatoire lawn in an unchecked fit because she had worked too hard preparing Beethoven sonatas for junior-year juries. Rumor: she miscarried. I, her teacher, had demonstrated the Appassionata Sonata’s last movement; after the lesson she convulsed on the lawn. Looking out my studio window, I saw her contortions. My tyrannical approach to the Appassionata was to blame. It inflicted Guadalquivar standards on an innocent junior not ready to play three sonatas, the Appassionata, the Pastoral, and op. 110. A conservatoire nurse put a dowel between Wendy’s teeth so she would not bite off her tongue.

  The next week, Wendy returned for a lesson. We replaced op. 110 with Chopin’s First Impromptu, which she had learned over the summer. Surveillance destroys artistry: unsupervised students do best work. Wendy’s boyfriend was a large-limbed trombonist, Manfred. I’d seen them necking in the Navajo hut, a refreshment stand in the conservatory atrium, while I snacked on sweet coconut shavings.

  Theo,

  Only Aigues-Mortes—city we must face, never turning away—is the properly austere backdrop to what Chloe calls our lewdness. What riposte can I give the precipice? Let lewdness be the fins of our transit through Aigues-Mortes’s blue, dead, salt waters.

  Moira Orfei

  Sinus headache. Alma called yesterday from Buenos Aires. She told me that she played a disappointing concert of Haydn sonatas at Nunciatura Apostólica. Charlie Chaplin’s death was, for her, a fresh wound; he attended her recital at Wigmore Hall, and, afterward, at dinner, groped her under the table, despite Oona’s presence. I told Alma I was diligently preparing Aigues-Mortes, and she said, “Diligence won’t help. Rely on lightning bolts.” She never properly trained me to use thumb as impersonal masculine lever rather than as sensitive girl-digit. Although she must guess that I have squandered my Guadalquivar mind, she mentioned Milhaud’s opus 295 piano concerto as a possibility for Aigues-Mortes; I told her that opus 295, a staple of her repertoire, was not part of mine. I would make do with the catchy Poulenc, its first movement suggesting a Citroën I will never drive, a nude race-car driver I will never lie beside. Perhaps I will attempt the piano solo role in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, with pick-up band, and Moira Orfei’s trapeze oscillations and interpretive tamings.

  I reminded Alma of my multiple infections: bad blood and nerve decay might impede my return to the European concert stage, even with a circus star shielding me from critique. Sage Alma said, “Reality never stopped a Guadalquivar,” her voice low and sultry, below the bel canto “break,” the tightrope of shame. She called me “naïve” (was she drunk?) for loving reality.

  Alma, don’t vanish forever into Argentina’s pampas. When you describe your blissful isolation, I picture tundra. Let me join you. Do you notice how I spring to life when I hear your advice, how I return to what you kindly (delusionally) call my “gift”? You make me wish that Tanaquil and I had installed a spiral staircase on Mechanical Street, in your absence, to inspire you, upon return, with a wish to overcome vertigo, a syndrome you acquired as a girl in Paris, atop the Tour Eiffel, before the first time you played the Fauré Ballade (solo version) for Nadia Boulanger. Henceforth Fauré’s spiraling passagework numbed your masculine wish for outcome, samba, tango—a rhythm you impose on any piece, even Mozart or Caplet. “Let it seem a tango,” you told me, when I played the Webern Variations.

  Alma, the azaleas on Mechanical Street are in bloom. When you played Rachmaninoff’s First Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony, I stood, a schoolchild on vacation, mesmerized, watching in the wings. Touring Appalachia, you brought piano to the underprivileged and the bored.

  Theo,

  I reign over circus, whose ring divides my heart. Trapped in trapeze, I long to imitate your free rendition (in Marseille) of a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, its trumped-up patriotism. Dispossession’s anthem: Father taught me to forget the country one hates to love.

  In Aigues-Mortes, please play the piano fantasy based on Georges Auric’s score to “Lola Montès,” the movie that describes my situation, that paints Father, Mother, Chloe, me. Auric’s piped-in music, my Muzak, confines me in things circus.

  Moira Orfei

  I spent my evenings this week in Friedman’s loft, getting sucked off by his friend Manny, an HIV-positive stud sleeping there for a few nights while waiting for side effects of his latest medications to calm down. I fear him and his devoted mother, Ada, staying in Friedman’s loft to supervise her ill son. Once a top-flight modern dancer, she retains a good figure; she walks around the apartment naked. I barged into the bathroom and caught her in medias res. She is a good friend of Friedman’s mother, Samantha, also in temporary residence. Too many mothers crashed in the loft: must I please them all? After I intruded on Ada’s bathroom repose, Manny said, “Let me suck your cock”—within Ada’s hearing!—but I said no, it was irritated, I need to return home to work on the Lola Montès medley. My forearms are rigid with tendinitis, a paralysis recalling my breakdown five years ago in Carpentras, where marauders desecrated Jewish graves; playing Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto with the Carpentras Chamber Orchestra, I lost my place in a vivamente cadenza. Years ago, at a Fontainebleau memorial concert for Wanda Landowska and her loyal girlfriend, whose name I can’t recall, my teacher Nadia Boulanger warned me against the repertoire of excess. She also said, “Didn’t you sometimes want to spank Wanda, despite her greatness?” How right Nadia was; I should have followed her advice and avoided Carpentras.

  Theo,

  Yes to the Ravel “Sonatine”! I seek indifferent fields, wet Cádiz, penal Seville, specious Bruges, anywhere but France, any outposts where crusaders could forget their pledge not to dwell on the past. I’m a women felled by “religioso” swords. Are trances good for my career, Chloe wonders, but I have stepped beyond “career,” beyond audience, hoop, elephant, and trapeze; I now reach toward flames I long ago vowed to stop swallowing, and toward baubles encircling my neck—gems not paste, not real.

  Moira Orfei

  A Russian pianist I once loved, Peter Razumovsky, who looked like Rudolf Nureyev, died on the rue de Seine two years ago; Peter’s Slavic face (shaped like the marriage of parallelogram and egg), his Czerny-won finger independence, and his shirt opened to the waist—fashionable then—“slayed” me, though he was just an American Gigolo likeness, not an original, not a husband. He called my sexual style “immature.” To Alma, I described Peter Razumovsky’s charms, but they failed to interest her. Now I find, on www.internationalescort.com, an Aix-en-Provence stud (Fabien) resembling the Peter Razumovsky who wore Knize Ten cologne and called me “Ice Princess,” the Peter Razumovsky I’ve failed to render in decades of notebooks: before the Aigues-Mortes notebooks, I kept Marseille notebooks, Trapani notebooks, Nice notebooks, Montecatini notebooks, Portbou notebooks.

  Notebook Twenty-Four

  Theo:

  One word.

  Barcelona.

  M. Orfei

  The Orfei cartel dominates the Barcelona circus underground. Perhaps Moira’s been kidnapped. She may have already returned to Aigues-Mortes or Montecatini. I’m hemorrhaging. Given my recent paralysis at the Liszt run-through in Springs, Long Island, should I cancel Aigues-Mortes? Absolutely not. Cancellation would be career suicide. Aigues-Mortes, swallow me with adulation. Moira Orfei has spent weeks there, preparing clowns, mules, tumblers, elephants, horses, midgets, zebras, dogs, sea lions, monkeys, Brazilian mules, brown and black bears, jumping llamas, cream ponies, and white doves.

  Theo,

  I keep a publicity photo of myself on my hotel’s bedside table, to remind me of the past. But I think of you, not only of myself: I get choked up when I remember your Viareggio “Carnaval.” In Aigues-Mortes you’ll regain that level.

  Why isn’t a Nob
el Prize awarded for circus? Swedes short-change acrobatic sublimity. Didn’t the Flying Concellos deserve lauds? Babette? Agube Gudzow? May Wirth?

  People falsely assume I’m jealous of Wanda Osiris.

  When I enter, a flock of white doves surrounds me, their feathers a cloud.

  Moira Orfei

  From Buenos Aires, Alma described a potential ulcer and a miserable afternoon spent wandering the cemetery, La Recoleta, seeking Guadalquivars. Gaining weight, she may be barred from concert stages. Untrustworthy Buenos Aires physicians find her ailments psychosomatic, and so she wants to return to East Kill to see Dr. Crick; she tires of Helen Jole’s psychoanalytic listmaking, despite the bougainvillea-clad office near Plaza Güemes. Alma mentioned her upcoming concert at the Musée Saint-John Perse in Guadeloupe. A louche branch of the Guadalquivars settled in Basse-Terre and remained ne’er-do-wells, prostitutes. If Alma had moved us to Basse-Terre, she said, I’d be selling underwear, not playing piano.