“I hope she’s got ice cream,” Jacob mused.
Thalia Bridgewood paced the floor, fretting, alone...
She need not have worried so. The dismal failure of Apart from Anything Else (“such a foolish enterprise!”—Paranoy, in private) had no effect whatever upon her soiree (“a vivid, magnific occasion!”—Percase), at which each and every guest reveled in the food, the drink, the intercourse, the chitchat, the music, the dancing—and the viewing of the sky over Gotham, ablaze in spectral Technicolor (“Dizzying apocalyptic displays shooting up from scows and barges on all three rivers, creating impressions of Titanic Dialogue, splashing their random designs in clashing bursting across the sable cloak of night, stirring Celestial Riot in defiance of the decrees of such nocturn deities as may have presumed to preside over that single, singular stretch of expanding universe’s own space-time”—Paranoy, carried away).
They carried many of Thalia Bridgewood’s sodden, squirly guests away that night. Dolores, to her bilious chagrin, lurched awake at noon on the fifth, remembering nothing, not even the contents of those notes she had apparently dropped in the streets—or had her treacherous bearers frisked her?—notes hastily scribbled on the back stairs, on a confabulation held among Rotten Rodney Bergamot, Dolly Farouche, Grace Jackson-Haight, La Bridgewood, Cassia Verde-Dov’è, Boni de Chalfonte, and Gloria Gotham. Naturally, entirely concerned with Czgowchwz and Beltane. There were days when Dolores wondered why she...(That same conversation was “scooped” that same afternoon in Gloria Gotham’s “Palpitating Palaver” slot.)
Next day Mawrdew and Jacob went out to row a boat in Central Park. Plying the oars in perfect alternate strokes, Jacob avowed that notoriety of the sort lately dealt him was such a shocking novelty he was increasingly required to combat the inflating effects by “tilting the ambivalence,” a scheme of Gennaio’s (whom he had, of course, been consulting) consisting chiefly in alternate thrusts and feints, of the poised maintenance of an attitude balance between defiance and allowance. (Such labor seemed a bit like rowing.)
Mawrdew Czgowchwz merely grinned. Jacob pulled the oars in and lay back to relax with his diva. Alone together, random-adrift, courseless through a perfect summer, in a coracle on placid buoying waters, they voyaged out to some island of delight neither chart nor compass could achieve.
The island Manitoy is situate some forty miles out into the Atlantic. It is normally reached by ferry from the sleepy little town of Larking Landing, itself the terminus of a certain track dallying off the main line between New York and Boston. Manitoy’s only real town, Neaport, is a relic of a whaling center. It has been, as well, for an entire century the Percase summer seat and, due to Tangent’s proclivities, for some of this century’s decades a thriving little colony to which certain select swarms of New York City toilers—toilers in “the arts”—repair at odd intervals of varied duration between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.
Goodman Tangent Percase conceived his awesome scheme on the Fourth of July, at Thalia Bridgewood’s fete. Ideas, notions, schemes, and strategies exploded in his imagination...exactly the way the rocketing, pinwheeling fireworks spilled enchantment over the skies of New York.
Meeting at Magwyck with Czgowchwz, Beltane, Creplaczx, Paranoy, Laverne Zuckerman, Dame Sybil, Pèlerin Deslieux, the Countess Madge, Valerio Vortice, and Arpenik—the Secret Seven and Roxanne Sauvage came later, summoned at midnight, in haste—he became the oracle, proposing a week-long music festival to be held on the island of Manitoy, the final matinee of which would occasion the world première of Creplaczx’s new music drama, NOIA—for so had Czgowchwz and Beltane named it.
“What an enchanted notion,” Dame Sybil enthused.
“You cannot be serious, the pack of you!” The Countess Madge threw down the gauntlet. “We’ve all been on Manitoy. There exists no suitable auditorium on the island for the production of—anything! Are you thinking of Neaport’s Town Hall? I forbid it! I will not attend! Under no circumstance! Don’t talk to me!” (She was again Madge O’Meaghre, declaiming on the French or Irish stage.)
A thunderous silence fell...
In that very same silence Percase seized his moment. Executing a curious little bow meant to betray the casual flourish of down-East noblesse oblige, he faced the quizzical company and announced: “I shall build the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater.”
Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane rushed up to embrace Percase.
“Please,” the gentle man protested, “I am merely doing what I must do.”
The rest of the company listened, incredulous.
“A new theater—suddenly—just like that?!” Fingers snapped in unison.
Percase snapped back, undaunted. “To do a thing, one does it! I choose to build this theater. Please accept my scheme; accept my love. I’ve always accepted yours!”
The blueprints for a heptagonal structure, concrete and pine—the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater—were promptly displayed. It was to be erected in Neaport, atop Neap Hill, in the middle of a rye field on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic.
They all jumped up. They took turns embracing the munificent Percase. He deferred, characteristically shyly. Then they all went to work.
People began making plans.
The news reached Neaport the next day, to which childhood paradise Jameson had retreated to try to unwind a little; to regroup his forces (such as they might be); to work on the film script of Pilgrim Soul; and to think about his ode. A prose ode, or one in verse? What was prose, and what was verse?
Sitting alone at a back table on the deck of the Neaport Yacht Club, waiting for twilight to doom the day, to put the lazy harbor to sleep, he drank himself distracted, writing through the afternoon great heaps of notes on Pilgrim Soul. And notes on the prose or verse ode: notes he was unable later to decipher. “Love does strange things to us all.”
The First Annual Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust Festival of Music and Dance was announced for the first through the seventh of September. Seven separate entertainments were to be offered. These, listed in the CELT brochure and boxed in the Sunday Times, were:
September 1 at 7 p.m. The Aion Music Consort. Percival Penpraz, leader; Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, oltrani; Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, virginals; in a program devoted entirely to works of anonymous poets and composers of the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries inclusive, from various French, Italian, Flemish, German, Spanish, English, and Irish courts
September 2 at 7 p.m. A Recital of French Songs. Rameau, Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Duparc, Poulenc, and Messiaen. Achille Plonque, tenor; Merovig Creplaczx, piano
September 3 at 7 p.m. An Evening of Songs by Cole Porter. Laverne Zuckerman, falcon; Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, piano
September 4 at 7 p.m. Pèlerin Deslieux and Company. A recital of new dance works
September 5 at 7 p.m. An Evening of Farrago. Improvisations, parodies, travesties, and a supper dance for the entire company of artists and audience
September 6 at 7 p.m. A Duet Recital. Works by Cavalli, Dowland, Mozart, Rossini, Debussy, Britten, and Hollenius. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, oltrani; Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, piano
September 7 at 4 p.m. NOIA. A music drama by Merovig Creplaczx (world première). Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, oltrani; Laverne Zuckerman, falcon; Roxanne Sauvage, contralto; Achille Plonque, tenor; Turiddu Stameglio, tenor; and Odo Bost, bass. Conducted by the composer. Designed and directed by Valerio Vortice
In a fade-out fade-in whiz, the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater was erected that summer on the island of Manitoy. The Percase fortune, wielded in the fist of a townish aesthete suddenly turned stringent overseer (“Some atavistic sortilege metamorphosing dilettante into buccaneer”—Paranoy, in the broadside “Facets of the Fabulous”), commandeered battalions of builder-artisans, massive crews of diggers, platoons of carpenters, prides of technician-designers, day in, day out, sabbath and weekday, around the clock, in all weathers (“We tolerate no smallest degree of foozlin
g!”—Percase) until the impossible surrendered to the proven fact.
Summer foundered. The silly season, the dog days, the ebbing weeks of August passed unmemorably, scarcely felt, lazily, numbly. NOIA went into rehearsal in New York.
Finally, one fine day near summer’s end, hordes of stylish town types and their various consorts were to be observed carting off steamer trunks stuffed with their many and various wardrobes, either sweeping north in caravans of grand tourers or collecting in the vast Caracalla promenade of the old Pennsylvania Station for departure to Larking Landing. Enthusiasts of lesser means hitched or bused. The expeditious flew to Neaport in seaplanes.
CELT ran its own special train up to Larking Landing on the Saturday before the first night. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane took it. Jacob Beltane felt kidnapped.
Towns and cities scooted by as the special express sped north-northeast. Careening through New Haven, callow wits among the passengers propounded oblique jests. Lurching past Buzzards Bay, the more seasoned smarties made appropriately deadly remarks. Boston was done in in the jaded abstract the while the afternoon fled by, until the CELT express jogged off the main line onto the track to Larking Landing, where, at cocktail time, the agitated passengers detrained to board the ferry.
A calm voyage lay ahead. Even so, the rigors of sailing were not to everyone’s taste. Disembarking dissenting, Trixie Gilhooley staggered down the port gangplank, propped up at a tilt by “that bum” (“Theresa is not smiling!”—Paranoy to Pierrot). When finally safely beached, the windblown frail looked about, to assess the lay of the land. Spying the large medallion plaque of the Neaport Yacht Club—its initial letters azure rampant on a clear white field—she swiveled, rounding on her escort: “If I ever knew the Central came up here, you’d never have gotten me on that goddamn ferry!” They decided they all needed another cocktail.
The islanders, anxious to please—to swell the economy—retained nevertheless their particular flinty demeanor. They were there and they were not. Dour matriarchs letting out their rooms to elegant and racy slickers—sybarites and happen-worse—locked up their sons and daughters. Old salts on the harbor quay mumbled.
The week-long happening—a chain of gorgeous occurrences —passed dreamily, idyllically. Paranoy recorded it all in The Neaport Czgowchwz Galliard. Commenting on the radical effect glamour in the performer makes upon the willing audience, he stressed the socializing factor. People managed to live together in harmony for a week, abandoning for a time their varied aptitudes in the politics of wrangle. Eating, drinking, sailing, swimming, dancing, fucking, attending, the eleven hundred carnivaled.
The “anonymous” recital given by the Aion Music Consort set the tone. The music they offered had been composed for bouts of revelry—music of jongleurs, clowns, masters of revels, and lords of misrule, polyphonic whimsies, the coy complaints of lovers, sardonic reflections on Folly’s perennial course, chantings of lust and dalliance, bounding across centuries in celebration of a European Neverworld, fabulous, young, ornate, and imperishable.
Krummhorns, sackbuts, viols, recorders, rebecs, virginals, continuo, and piping oltrano voices, under the baton of Percival Penpraz, seduced the happy auditors, proclaiming joy in consort. The voices of Czgowchwz and Beltane made tender, sinuous, bold, and delicious love, singing one over another, suddenly under, then tumbling over and under, then ultimately converging on some same single tones—resonating, vibrating, arching, plummeting.
Achille Plonque’s French song recital delighted chiefly by dint of its elegant assurance and elegiac tone, its wistful evocations of haunted memories, its tender sadnesses. The effect the singer sustained was most like that one experiences sitting looking through a quivering window at rain on a November afternoon. The audience, reacting in empathy, consented to ask itself what it was to live a life, and not to answer itself. Creplaczx’s accompaniment, supportive, plaintive, complemented the tenor as only a genius’s must.
Laverne Zuckerman, with Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh, went to town next night in fulfilling performances of Cole Porter’s most telling miniatures. The hit of the evening was Laverne’s “All through the Night,” during which many eyes, awash, looking backward as far as they must, saw and heard their pasts.
Pèlerin Deslieux and Company cut loose on the fourth night in a program of original works constructed by the group, danced to electronic tapes. Ritualized boundings, turns, leaps, and embracings charged the theater with that particular current—aesthetic/athletic/abstract/sexual—that dance sparks when it succeeds. Limbs sculpting angular formations flung provocation and frustration back and forth in mimetic combat: agitations, calmings, inflictings, caresses. The four pieces (Abraxas, Borealis, Cataton, and Dances of Divided Selves) wound up and down the aisles. The pas de deux between Pierrot and Carmen in Cataton scarified. An audience aroused and provoked returned great thundering rounds of applause, augmented by the clatter of stomping feet.
The farrago soiree, next, was best remembered for the spontaneous creation and “production” of the mock operas Savonarola (after Verdi), Morphine (after Massenet), Plotziful (after Wagner), and La Farfalla di New York (after Puccini). Dame Sybil’s faultless pastiche accompaniment underpinned the erratic, batty numbers the singers improvised, first in hasty “rehearsals,” then again, after a breather, in “performance.” Beltane’s collaboration with Dame Sybil in the Savonarola—the frantic scena, aria, curse, and cabaletta, “Tutt’ è vanità e smut!” ending in a celestial oltrano top F—drew gasps, cheers, hoots, and cackles. The doleful Czgowchwz offering, “Le chemin assez connu” from Morphine, sung faultlessly one tone flat throughout, took more than one giggling listener wobbling briefly back to the Neri Era. Achille Plonque’s bombastic, insipid, delightful “Ach, er hat mir gewesen” from Plotziful touched a few sensitive nerves, but succeeded. In finale, Laverne Zuckerman’s overwrought “O mio un bel sogno” from La Farfalla di New York, sung gloriously one tone sharp, and acted out verismo with a cigarette, caused yelps of glee and demands for encores.
The supper dance went on all night.
The Czgowchwz-Beltane recital proffered various delights. Most memorable were the “Duetto per due gatti” by Rossini, to which a whole new interpretation was impishly given; the Diana-Endymion scene from Cavalli’s La Calisto, querulous, tender, suave, prickly; the anonymous sixteenth-century fragment “The Unicorn and the Lady without Shame,” a forth-right staccato piece, fretted with oblique meaning; and Hollenius’s treacherous cantata The First Meeting of Narcissus and Echo (in the revised Creplaczx version for two oltrani). Again the oltrani achieved perfect communion. The recital, wider in scope than their first, demonstrated Czgowchwz’s continuing and Beltane’s quick-evolving mastery of coloration, each piece exactly imbued with the shading it required. Invisible, perfect technique—breathing, phrasing, pointing, rounding—achieved another time that rarest effect, the wedding of word to music, the contoured interlock of syllable and sound.
All that was left thereafter was NOIA.
The weather on Manitoy had been quite perfect, parading seasonal varieties of light and air across the spans of successive late-summer, sun-drenched days. That all blew away in the early-morning hours of the festival’s seventh day.
Walking with his lady along the beach from the Neaport Yacht Club to the Stein beach house (the Steins were stay-ing at Neap Inn), Jacob Beltane waded into the shallow surf under a crescent moon. Halting at once in the sudden rip tide, he cocked his majestic head slightly to the left and listened. Looking straight up at the moon the way children look up to a parent—with an apprehensive trust—the tall oltrano spoke out.
“Well, batten down the hatches!”
Mawrdew Czgowchwz drew a breath. “Batten down the ... What, a storm?”
Jacob beamed in frank delight. “Within the hour. Wow, how apt!”
The diva shivered aptly. “‘Wow,’ in a word. O Weather!”
Waxing enthusiastic, Jacob discoursed on Huracan, the Mayan “triple heart
of the universe.” They reached the beach house. Insisting on sitting up to wait, he relished the suspense, marveling at the luck: a chance to compare a western Atlantic storm with the great North Sea gales.
Hurricane Amneris blew in like a judgment.
Jacob stood lost in wonder at an unshuttered back bay window while the beach house shook violently around him. Then the bay window blew in...
Jacob stood marveling, quite unharmed, absolutely satisfied. The room lay awash in destruction. Mawrdew Czgowchwz lay asleep upstairs, dreaming sweetly. “What a magnificent tempest,” the warlock proclaimed.
Communications severed, it became impossible to learn what a person was expected to do (or not). Then, gradually, some untold psychic mechanism commenced exerting binding force on the entire, frightened festival audience. To the incredulous stupefaction of the townsfolk of Neaport, thirteen-hundred-odd persons clad in fashionable assortments of weatherproof gear gathered on street corners to form arm-locked groups and make their utterly determined way up Neap Hill to the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater, in defiance of Amneris’s howling fury. Led on by ropes, tumbling in and out of the shrubbery, ducking falling trees, no one was harmed. Singing together like the last, beatified elect, artists and audience convened in a hurricane, to make and to hear music drama.
The wind and the rain’s demented force diminished slightly during this astonishing progress, as if Amneris, her bluff called, had decided to go menace elsewhere. She weakened steadily thereafter throughout the afternoon, until in the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater atop Neap Hill at Neaport on the island of Manitoy, in the final moments of Creplaczx’s NOIA, the hollow sound of the perishing tempest moaning in eerie imitation of the woodwinds supporting the final Czgowchwz-Beltane duet died away altogether. Nature’s thrust met art’s and surrendered, kneeling.
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