by John Keene
our fearlessness locked together
as we fly, and I think
about that moment almost a year ago when a pallid, absinthe-cheeked frequenter of the local cafés ferreted his way in and asked her, as I sat beside her in the chamber where we ready ourselves and retire afterwards, about a new trick in which she spun like a corkscrew in the air before I snatched her from certain oblivion, What does it feel like to touch her, hold onto those muscles, do your fingers melt into that skin, his gaze never grazing hers but grappling in its designs upon me, Do you all live together here in the Montmartre district, can I come visit you in your lodgings, and Kaira is shivering with embarrassment as my own regard hardens to wrought iron, They say that you may be closer than sisters, is that true? the drunkard winking, fingering his lapel and drawing his chalky digits down to the open button at the head of his fly, not once releasing his stare from me, even after I dip my kerchief in the glass of peppermint water and bring it to my tongue and arcade, letting the muscles in my throat relax as I turn away; and I have heard everything, far worse, sometimes making me laugh aloud as I lie on my cot for want of weeping, but much better too, here and everywhere we have toured, greetings and grace notes of gratitude and praise from people I could have never imagined as I scrubbed the kitchen floorboards beside Mummi or walked from the schoolhouse in silence watching the carriages clatter up the Grabowerstrasse in Stettin or sitting eating taffy with Lili and Ulli and Maria in Töpffer’s Park, I write them all whenever I can about everything, they have heard every possible new technique I’ve acquired, every wire I’ve walked, every new member of the company or employee of the Cirque Fernando, though so as not to bore them I began to concentrate on the noteworthy things, such as how at the end of a performance last spring—May 18, 1878, I wrote out the letter before bed—I received a peck on the cheek from elderly M. Dumas fils, received a little melody, with camellias, from M. Saint-Saëns, how I have been feted in Lisbon and Antwerp, bathed in a bath of gifted rosewater and roses in London, how in Budapest a prince or count, I cannot remember, offered me his wizened gray palm and the castle and estates he held in it, how in Naples, that ancient, southerly city, a gentleman who I was told is richer than their king handed me a pouch of velvet as light as breath and in it sat a band of gold crowned by a sapphire; but I would never want to be entombed in a palazzo, however grand, however many jewels in my tiara or necklaces, and I already am being courted again by a former acrobat from England, my Toffee, with his buttery voice and supple juggler’s fingers, and I have not yet seen the busy streets of New York or the palaces of Saint Petersburg; and I also write about the daily miracles with the war now over and barely a memory, the Paris sky like a winter crocus, and the serpentine Seine under evening lamplight, and the thousand unforgettable treasures secreted—the restaurants, the cabarets, the music halls—along the byways radiating out from Boulevard Haussmann, and I write about the ugliness too, the throwaways sleep-standing in the nearby doorways, the streetwalkers hurrying past with their frayed hems down the rue des Martyrs, all the people from the colonies looking and wandering as if perpetually lost, so like and yet so different from the Kaiser’s capitals, and I detail the indignities also, the haggling over sous and Marks despite my contract, the pain that radiates throughout my collarbone, the battles to keep my costumes immaculate, acquire new ones, my inexhaustible appetite for new boots and perfumes, my hunt for the best maquillage for my complexion, pomade for my hair, the too-rich soups and meat dishes in sauces and the lure of sweets on every other corner, how last fall because of an extra-heavy flow and no time to get back to my rooms I had to stuff any gloves I could find into my tights and only Kaira knew, and we prayed like Catholic girls to the saints that there would be no accident—there wasn’t, though their letters in return never mention those bits, nor do they repeat a single word about all the other things I relate to them, how I intend to spend every waking hour in the air, to soar with the brio of a sparhawk and glide with a sparrow’s ease and float, as Kaira and I do, as the audience perches on the tips of their seats, with the lightness of two creatures who have fully emerged from the chrysalis, how I want to suspend the entire city of Paris or even France itself from my lips if I could achieve that, how I aim to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom, that I have gathered around me people who understand how to translate fear into possibility, who have no wings but fly beyond the most fantastical vision of the clouds, who face death daily back out into the waiting room, and I am one of them, Olga, the kleinste Bräunchen, but no, Mummi—since Vati has only ever penned one letter I recall—never repeats any of this, instead writing The night, especially in the city, is the Devil’s playground and A groschen set aside keeps you out of the almshouse and Remember that not only an accordion makes a pretty song and Don’t forget your family and your Prussian, though how could I, whenever I hear that accent I pause to remind myself where I am, like the night a week ago when after our performance Jean-Michel said that several notable Parisians were waiting to meet us, meet me, one of them a poet I had never heard of and I prefer German novels anyway, I read the American and British ones in translation though I speak that language, my daddy’s, fluently, and all he had to say to me was Guten Abend and instantly I knew, a Pomeranian, living in Berlin, a publisher’s agent, he and one of the Frenchmen handed us each flowers and they all invited us to dinner the following night, then another group mentioning a salon exhibition that we absolutely must attend, and another with a journalist who asked me a few questions about my sense of balance, poise, not listening to a single one of my answers, and as I was heading back into our dressing room another man drew forward, bent down, gray threading his beard, his large, lidded eyes hard at me like lead shot, he introduced himself as M. Edgar Degas, a painter, he said, Kaira, I noticed, had moved to my side, I have not missed a single performance of yours these last few days, and I have been sketching you, here and at the Nouvelle Athènes, and I nodded, smiling and waiting to see his drawings, saying, Merci, M’sieur, ça me plaît beaucoup, but he did not show the sketches as he glanced from K to me and back, his eyes returning to my own, I would like to invite you to my studio on the rue Fontaine, bis no. 19, I will show you the drawings, I would even like to paint you but I know they will not allow me to set up an easel here which would be so helpful because of the complicated nature of the perspective and architecture, and I looked at K who looked at me, neither of us understanding what he was talking about, so I’ll have to work from the drafts, I already have several, even in pastels, I nodded again, noting he barely blinked,
his eyes pressing into me
and tracing not only
my outlines as if his gaze
were a pencil but my inner contours
as if they themselves were wet clay and I backed away, Oui, M’sieur, I would like that, and he extended his hand, which was trembling, in it a carte de visite, with his address, I will even make sure you have a chance to chat with my friend Gervex, also a painter, who is often here, and M. de Goncourt, do you know his work? he is writing a story on the circus, and I smiled and brought my palms and fingers together, and assured him I would call upon him as agreed, telling myself I would bring Kaira with me, and the strange, intense man bowed and seized my hand and kissed it hard, whispering Fort enchanté, African Princess, muttering something else beneath his breath then he spun on his heel, vanishing past a small new cluster of people waiting to speak with us, and it is early on a Thursday morning that I am now writing to Lili recounting the incident, though at first I
sincerely could not remember his name, even though I will go to his studio the following day to meet him and his friend and see his drawings and exchange pleasantries, all I could recall was that he had claimed to have been drawing me, and how the next night after that encounter as I rose up on the tether, watching Kaira standing in anticipation below I remembered that after the painter left she said, Ooh La La they always come looking for you and I replied to her as I sipped my cup of tea, Yes, they do, they find me too, always, and as I rose, amid that collection of expectation and excitement, the gas lamps raking waves of shadows over them, there, in the ring’s front row, to my right, I could have sworn I saw the board which held the paper, the hands moving furiously across it, the eyes darting from it to me, his eyes, large and tourmaline and climbing their own invisible ladder, trying to seize and hold onto my waist, my ankles, the perfect aerial cross of my body, this space, performance, the one whose name I could not remember, then I do, as I elude him and all of them, gliding higher, toward the freedom of the dome, high as the summit of Mont Blanc, the mouthpiece tightly in my bite, the name, severe and aristocratic in its brevity, reappears, him, the painter,
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COLD
It’s fastest, someone once warned you, when you let go. Here, in the sweltering dining room, you recognize no one, not a soul. Your mother took her supper at the usual hour and has already returned to her room. When you’ve come with her before or alone you’ve usually spotted at least one familiar face, from the City, or Philly, or Baltimore, since from June through the first turning of the leaves people arrive every weekend from all over. Like several other hotels in Catskill, Miss English’s has welcomed you, your mother, almost all who’ll pay, permitting stays without incident. There have, however, been a few: whenever one of them who has no clue about how the subtler rules this side of the Mason-Dixon line function, how the law sometimes falls on the other side. There was that time in the hotel on Kauterskill when you were asked to vacate your room and move to the other wing because the Carolinian took grave offense that you shared the same linens and dishes, that you might brush against his wife in the hallway or stairwell, as if you could not walk a straight or even angled line away from her, as if you had no will, as if you ever cast a second glance at her or any white woman, and that hotel’s owner, a round, pasty little man with a voice like a duck call had said that he wanted to avoid any trouble, please just go, he’d throw in a free whiskey as consolation. That afternoon in what felt like a stupor you had packed up and settled into your new chamber over here, from which you could see the creek and the mountains instead of your previous ampler river view, the one you’d reserved half a year in advance, and you fumed for a while until a bar, oh yes Lord, then the full song belled in your head and you spent the entire afternoon in bed scoring it. Even here you know better than to linger when the dancing begins or challenge one of them on the tennis court. The New Yorkers, city dwellers or upstaters, native or immigrant, do not so much as blink when they see you, staring mainly at the cut of your full dress suits and shoes, your mother’s elegant’s day ensembles and summer gowns, as if viewing an exhibit. Only one or two of them has ever known whom they were looking at, or, for that matter, uttered more than a simple slur.
The surface appears tranquil, beware the undertow. The tanned hand slides the bowl of soup beneath your chin. You return what feels like a smile but almost isn’t. Vichysoisse. For the last month or two, or five, has it been year—why can you not remember?—these newest melodies you cannot flush from your head, like a player piano with an endless roll scrolling till infinity. Songs have always come, one by one or in pairs, dozens, you set them down, to paper, to poetry, like when you took the solemn melody of the spiritual Rosamond was whistling as you walked up Broadway and in your head and later on musical paper clothed it in brand new robes. Then somewhere along the way after the first terrible blues struck you tried to hum a new tune, conjure one, you thought it was just exhaustion, your mind too tired to refresh itself as it always had, that’s why the old ones wouldn’t go away. A few memory games, like rambling inside the rooms of your vast mental castle on the Nile, as you called it and the one song that resulted from it, filling each one with various quilts of harmonies from throughout your life, the sound of an engine starting, horses galloping up the road, boat horns from the direction of the Hudson: keys to release you from the musical bondage, from any of a thousand things you spot and listen to as you stroll up 136th Street, all the conversations, personal or overheard, hymns, ditties, stomps, work songs, quadrilles, cakewalks, rags. None of those could dispel these new ones until they did, then more appear, stuck as if a band has struck up the opening notes to the Black Four Hundred in your skull and decided to keep playing it forever . . . we have your trials here below, what’s a poor brother to do? You fear you can sometimes hear the upper octaves combining toward a crescendo that, soon as you open your mouth, might explode.
Close your eyes and lay your head back. For a few seconds you recline in your seat, suppressing a cry, rise, eyes shut, after only a few spoonfuls. Your fingers trace canons around your temples. You should head up to your mother’s room and tell her that it’s getting worse, again, let her minister to you, she used to know how to calm you down with words, a touch, Mrs. Isabella, he’s rattling on about something can’t no one understand, settle what between your ears only once in a while back in the day became a racket. You should hurry to the phone in the alcove and have the operator connect you to Rosamond or his brother Jimmy, your big sister down in Atlanta, call Aida Walker or Bert Williams, whose traveling schedule you can’t remember though you wrote down the dates in your notebook, even Erlanger or Klaw, at least leave word for them all, it wouldn’t take that long for someone to drive up or hire a car or take the elevated to Grand Central and be here before the night is out. Fact is you should not have told the attendants at the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane you were free of the interminable internal bellowing, you should not have assured them you’d be fully in Mrs. Isabella’s care, that the tempest of those songs had died down, these ones like January storms that grind on all through the morning and evening, so persistent and fortissimo at times you can feel them chattering like piano hammers along your crown. As you stand at the table you recall that moment when you couldn’t stop caterwauling them, sometimes you’re on the floorboards, how the neighbors banged on the walls, the front door, gathered on the stoop as they came and carried you downstairs, saying, “Mr. Cole, you alright?”—“poor thing, you know he wrote the ‘The Girl With Dreamy Eyes’”—“I’ma pray for the man, er’rybody can see how bad off he is”—“my sis saw his Sambo Girls Company in Hartford and just keeping them in line’s what broke him in two”—“Inky Dink sold his soul to you know who to line them damn pockets” . . . all those comments tipped with interest, yes, and cheek, contempt twinned with compassion, to the accompaniment of that sonorous, infernal drone. Devil’s arias, you penned them. Showfulls. In your twenties it had all flowed so easily, you’d sealed the deal, the singing, the wisecracks, the dancing, all those godforsaken songs, that cooning and crooning minstrelsy copping a mountain of green in return, concreting a vision of you, of all of you
in their heads, your own, the nigger who could do no wrong with the Creole Show, the All Star Show and later Black Patti’s Troubadours, before you turned it inside out again, alone and with Rosamond, his brother Jimmy, these songs unlike the previous ones, these were yours, nothing to feel the slightest pang of shame about, any colored person could whistle them without a pause, did whistle them as you heard yourself on the IRT. So easily, until these newest ones, undreamt, unsummoned, sonic suns blasting behind your eyes, these terrible samplings of the old and the unfamiliar. You should have told the attendants how your agent and the publishing firm’s representative had said in almost the exact same words about your newest pieces, “Bob, what has gotten into you, these notes together don’t make any melodic or harmonic sense,” how the arranger had cackled with reproach, “Cole, you have four or five different polyrhythms running concurrently, no man can play this,” how Rosamund himself whispered, this side of sorrow, as he clasped your hand, “Bob, this mess on the other side of sound.” Everyone began to train the same look on you, the bank cashier, the postman, the barber, the Bajan shoeshine, the tiny boy black as a crow with the crowbar who cranks cars for a cent on Lenox, the humpbacked begger guarding the curb hollering, “Mister, you need my help?” as you sat there on the front steps trying to massage the rondos out of your brow, your sinuses, your freshly trimmed and pomaded locks, trying to express them out—“Mister, you need me to call somebody? Excuse me, officer, but I think that gentleman sitting over there humming and crying to himself need. . . .”
Allow the foliage below an easy embrace. You mop your forehead free of the film of sweat the August heat has pasted there, wipe the dew from your chest’s silver curls, crumpling the napkin beside the untouched knife and fork. Somehow the heat down in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, like this interior clamor, has followed you north, everyone around you is fanning themselves, reclining on benches or couches, already displaying like the underarms of your violet linen suit the dark, wet badges of the season’s relentlessness. Your mother, no stranger to heatwaves, has taken to afternoon naps in the still silent dark. Bad as it is up here, though, it’s worse, you know, far worse down in Manhattan. You gulp down a glass of water warmer than the soup, polish off a second soon as it’s poured. Sometimes the songs make you so dizzy you forget where you are, you’ve tried every manner of patent medicine, the one that tastes like licorice and the one that tastes like silver, the one that’s made from coal ash and the one that’s made from pine resin, neither whiskey nor gin nor cocaine nor hemp nor hashish does the trick, you can’t easily get your hands on opium—only sleep, morphine and the unknown dulling potion the orderlies provide temporarily blot it out. Then soon as you stir you’re back at this internal concert, on stage again inside your head as Willy Wayside, performing with Billy at the Standard in Kansas City, twirling that mahogany cane and jigging at the Pekin and Savoy in Chicago, only without the corked mask and zinced lips and red wig and patchwork coats and satin lapels and tails and popped top hat and tap shoes polished to the consistency of glass and the orchestra, without the after-parties and champagne breakfasts, without the evening ending and you being able to sleep a whole night through, without these notes pealing into bedlam nobody knows, why did you ever write them, who did you write them for, yourself and them, more them than you you did not want to, do now dare to admit, these songs still reeling and unreeling, unreal, daily, hourly, by the minute, in you, your head, and you can’t, simply cannot, can no longer bear it.