Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  My mother, Alma, claims our Mechanical Street house as her legal residence but spends much of the year performing, as pianist, to great acclaim, in Buenos Aires, where she owns a glassy penthouse apartment north of Plaza Palermo Viejo. Bougainvillea and jasmine crawl up the building’s face. Her movement from East Kill to Buenos Aires is so rapid and serendipitous that when I wake, in my puritanically underfurnished bedroom, I can’t remember whether she is there or here.

  Alma insisted that if I write every day in these private notebooks, by the end of the year I will have explained our family to the nation. She understands congenital inarticulateness (she received a dose from her father, Ricardo Guadalquivar). Notebooks are the best way out of the morass. She knows every detail of my private life, musicianship, marriage, breakdowns, and ambitions. She carefully supervised my early education; I starred in her imaginary tableau, “Theo’s Education,” a construction superior, aesthetically, to my actual stumbling apprenticeship. She remembers the time I plagiarized my term paper on the human eye: I stole the descriptions, verbatim, from Encyclopedia Britannica.

  In accordance with her designs, I am keeping private notebooks. We call them “books of nothing.” She says, “Honey, your books of nothing are also my books of nothing.” Their subject is nada—inanition that envelops me when I play piano. I have bought twenty-five blank notebooks, from the conservatoire supply store; I plan, over the next six months, to fill them with random, spontaneous jottings, in fountain pen. The notebooks’ subject will be my comeback. I propose to return to the European stage, this May. The entertainment office in Aigues-Mortes, a tiny village in southmost France, has invited me to perform, and I have accepted. The honorarium will barely pay my expenses.

  Today is November first. Snowfall blankets East Kill, covers my car. Mechanical Street, where I live, with my mother, sister, and wife, is impassable. Constance Antrim, ABC weather forecaster, predicted the harshest winter in three decades.

  Five years of breakdown separate my last piano recital in Europe—a fainting fit at the Montepulciano festival, while playing Liszt’s “Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude”—from my planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, a town known for sea salt, and surrounded by intact medieval walls and flat lugubrious marshes. Guidebooks call Aigues-Mortes the “town of dead water.” I will boost its musical reputation. My European agent, Alfonso Reyes, says that the Aigues-Mortes entertainment office hopes that the return of Theo Mangrove will draw cognoscenti from across the Camargue. For five years, since my final breakdown in Montepulciano, I received no European invitations to perform. In earlier years, Europe was my mainstay: Ferrara, Toulon, Marseille . . . Until now, I never stooped to perform in a village as insignificant as Aigues-Mortes. A comeback should be modest. The Aigues-Mortes spring season brochure already includes my name. Alfonso, optimist, says there is advance “buzz.” I should bring a collaborator—singer, violinist, flutist, dancer, speaker, clown? I may hazard a waltz program, with Scriabin’s tiny “Quasi-Valse” as centerpiece—to celebrate the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite.

  American tongues stumble over the French name “Aigues-Mortes.” Our closest equivalent: “Egg Mort.”

  After onstage amnesia, delirium, hyperventilation, fainting, seizures, convulsions, staggering, palpitations, I endured a five-year forced retirement. When I was first hospitalized, in Viterbo, the mental-health staff separated me from the piano for two months. My sight clouded and I suffered perceptual shifts that my mother later complimented by calling “psychotic,” an honorific. I saw the nurse’s face split in half (a blur to the right of her lips formed a cloud of unknowing); stepping into the bathroom for respite from the hallucination, I thought the mirror had a memory and a mouth, and that it, like fellatio, was swallowing me. I told my reflection, “That’s the devouring scene, right?”—as if the looking-glass were not merely the cannibal, but a commentary on cannibalism, a monologue I could join. In Viterbo, I was kept forcibly away from every source of pleasure and conflict. I received a few visitors, though no family was allowed. My mother, Alma, and my sister, Tanaquil, telephoned once a week. My wife, Anita, telephoned daily. Usually I refused her calls. I never refused Alma’s calls, though they depressed me. To Tanaquil’s calls, I was indifferent. She couldn’t undo the fellatio hallucination in the Viterbo bathroom mirror.

  I was born between two miscarriages. My mother, a more celebrated pianist than I will ever be, conversationally dwells on these misfirings: “The pain during the first miscarriage was almost worse than what I felt delivering you.” After my father’s death, she dedicated a recital to his memory, in East Kill: that night she performed in black, like Clara Schumann post-Robert. For the next concert, not a memorial, in Troy, she wore a gown the color of salmon roe. Her full name is Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove; she has no living rival. Her career and physical appearance beggar my verbal powers. Because she might be the only person ever to read these notebooks, describing her is pointless. She insists I call her “Alma,” never “Mother.” We pity women whose prospects motherhood circumscribes. Our conversations are endless, circular, orphic, psychic, and telephonic, since she spends most of the year in Buenos Aires, and I never leave East Kill. The day my sciatica acted up, her sciatica acted up. Our bodies are in sync, like sisters whose menstrual cycles match.

  Her mother’s name is Gertrude Guadalquivar. My current doctor, Dr. Crick, contraindicates contact with the tempestuous Guadalquivars: whenever I see them, my immune system falls apart. (One other Guadalquivar lives in the United States: my aunt Matilda.) Guadalquivars lack the wealth of my father’s clan, the Mangroves, but my late maternal grandfather, Ricardo, achieved distinction as a minor composer of piano preludes, waltzes, inventions, impromptus, improvisations, and caprices, some published. He locked his daughters in their rooms at night. My mother ran away when she was six, to the grocery store, and asked for the butcher to hide her. He called Ricardo, who came to take her home.

  Last summer, at a garden party, a benefit for East Kill Conservatory, I saw again, for the first time in two decades, my greatest piano teacher, Xenia Lamont, a domineering, temperamental woman with a history of nervous breakdowns. She called herself my “therapist” and charged me for our “sessions”—heavy-duty sex combined with musical instruction. (She disliked the name Xenia: it reminded her of Queen Victoria. Sometimes she asked me to call her “X,” or “Madame X.”) She resembled Ingrid Bergman, or a flushed Romanian empress with a forceps-wide ribcage. At the reunion she stood suntanned in a cubist-patterned caftan by the Conservatory’s garden wall with her two grown sons and her loyal husband, broken capillaries on his martyr cheeks. She told me, excitedly, “I’m writing my autobiography. Early sins.” As a decoy, to prevent her from probing into my European breakdown, I embarked on a long horticultural description (lobelia, allium, iris). My words grew labored and my hands trembled, as if I were having a seizure, a repetition of the Toulon staggering, the Montepulciano palsy. Listening, Xenia looked uncomfortable, like a nurse uncertain how to manage a difficult patient who was going to die soon anyway and didn’t merit attention. Then she said, “Viterbo.” She’d heard about my hospitalization. I turned quickly away from her. I didn’t want to start telling stories, again, of our “therapy” sessions, the smooth slow intercourse, her shaved pubis. A teacher’s vagina has no particular smell, only a reasonableness, ductility and articulateness, like forearms when playing rapid-fire octaves.

  My father’s people, originally dairy farmers, matured into dairy capitalists. My inheritance, based on butter manufacture, is small but secure. Duties come with the sinecure—correspondence, and lunches with estate lawyers in Manhattan, to convince them of my bona fides, and to conceal from them my personality’s gradual disintegration, my incomprehension of what scrupulous Alma calls “reality.” On the telephone to Buenos Aires, I ask Alma about her psychotropics, and she dissembles, as do I, whenever possible, to my reputation’s detriment.

  No one has called me Theodore since ch
ildhood. For a time, at the conservatoire, I went by “Thad,” but “Thad” implies an unhappy paucity of erectile tissue. “Theo,” Alma agrees, is a meditative, masculine nickname. I produce twenty erections per day (all under Alma’s indirect supervision, and some in celebration of my sister, Tanaquil) but I’m not a victim of that unfortunate medical condition known as priapism. Erections aren’t painful. Out of the twenty, my wife, Anita, takes care of two. They prove me a semi-husband. The other eighteen erections are handled by Friedman, Marco, Stefan, Eduardo, Siddhartha, Franco, Isaac, Battista, Sing—friendly hustlers at the East Kill Sauna, Space Bar, Fortune 500, Statute of Limitations, Transit Factory, Contact, Liberty Alley, Stadium, Camera Baths, and other clubs in the water district.

  My libido is out of control. Even ninety-year-old men, when I see them naked, excite me, though I won’t interrupt my piano-practicing to service them.

  Dr. Crick calls me “bisexual.” I married my wife, Anita, during a month-long snowstorm that paralyzed East Kill’s economy and clouded my consciousness. My mother never approved of the marriage: she called Anita “ordinary.” Anita is a tall blonde with a weak chin and strong cheekbones; she walks with the grace of a Kabuki dancer, though she received no training in movement arts. To simulate her coloring, dilute strawberry ice cream with milk, to undo the pink’s intensity, and then love the result. A sun lamp in her private bedroom burnishes her skin. She likes when I use the word “sign”; it makes me seem a sociologist, and she married me for my analytic abilities, not my musical skills. She’d like me to retire, so we could move to Portland, Maine, where the only well-to-do branch of her destitute family still owns a house that could become hers if she sues for it. In New Rochelle, late 1960s, she agitated for nuclear disarmament, and she has an East Kill University master’s diploma in aesthetics. For a time she taught at the East Kill Community College: “Introduction to Aesthetics,” a core course, boycotted. Aesthetics are passé. Students prefer engineering. Contrary to Alma’s critical claim, my wife is not “ordinary.” She is fussy about details and physical sensations. She appreciates my bottom, which she calls “your special provider.” I like intercourse; I am not a fan of the vagina, per se, but I enjoy its tight yet permissive grip. A man’s holes only roughly compare. I was not bad at math in school; Anita’s initial assessment of me as a sociopath in utero does not miss the mark. My groin: an area she wants sole rights to. No one deserves a monopoly. Preoccupied with her collection of dollhouse furniture, she avoids the full-sized. Dr. Crick calls her “obsessive.” From the hobby shop I bring home special-ordered miniature fauteuils and whatnots, to keep her amused. Her late father, Hal Ackroyd, a drunk, ran a tire shop in Manchester, thirty miles from East Kill, and slapped her around the kitchen. Her mother has remarried serially: her current name is Mrs. Wax, and she is indifferent to her daughter’s existence. Anita has a sister, Astrud, whose wine-colored nevis, on her cheek, repulses me; she moved to Taipei to be a missionary. When my wife smiles, her face undergoes reversal, and approximates a frown, so I can’t accurately judge her moods: dejection, joy? Does she hate being married to a two-timing failure? Does she think me a narcissist or does she have other words for what Dr. Crick calls my “malady,” and what my sister, Tanaquil, calls my “squalor”?

  Toward a new philosophy of music:

  I dreamt that, along a factory assembly-line, a hand-made orange metronome moved—a propagandistic inducement to be kind, to care about other people’s rhythms and prisons . . .

  The first time I remember seeing Alma perform, I noted (déjà vu) her relative flatchestedness. (I regret the frequent linkage of “bosom” and “piano” in the musical journals I skim before bedtime.) Alma’s breasts, as I recall them under her saffron gown, were flapjacks, round, palm-sized, not protruding, making no demand on eye or memory. The gown didn’t hug the breasts: it gave them room to breathe, to enjoy their lack of distinction, in privacy. A breast, like a pianist, wants solitude, separation from judge and voyeur. Alma was playing the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy. As she reached the final, difficult, loud pages, endless ascensions toward a C-major climax already reached, her hands seemed fatigued. I connected exhaustion with unprotuberant breasts. Their flatness made me feel superior—undeservedly.

  East Kill residents think it bizarre that I, at forty-three, live not only with my wife but with my mother and sister. Most of the year, Alma is in Buenos Aires; Tanaquil, a recluse, rarely leaves the house. She stays in her locked bedroom, with its wallpaper of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, and amuses herself with Tauchnitz classics, frozen waffles heated in a toaster oven, diet shakes from a private fridge. Demanding, paranoid, she never grew to full height. As a child, she had a nearly fatal fever (Alma called it “red brain”: a combination of meningitis and scarlet fever). Tanaquil is two years my junior, but she skipped two grades, so we were in the same classes; she never went to college or seriously played an instrument, though for a year she tried sax. Quick academic advancement led, by slow degrees, to her perpetual arrest, upstairs, in her bedroom, away from the productive, rebuking world. Tanaquil fears that I will interrupt her progress toward the next drink, the next defecation. We meet in the hallway at midnight to complain about Alma. Tanaquil’s dream: to be a madam in an important bordello. She fastidiously plucks her eyebrows, unto absence.

  I have one pierced ear with a gold hoop, dark hair neatly plastered to my skull, a low brow, well-proportioned legs, clear fair skin, large blue eyes eager for companionship, wide hands, long tapered fingers. I wear Montmorency citrus eau de toilette and black cashmere sweaters, have stiff posture, am rarely depressed, often affect a British accent, speak kindly of “the people,” hate bankers, sympathize with the working class, could easily become a Marxist if I were not a bourgeois Catholic, a conscientious objector, a pacifist, kind to family, especially to Alma; I regret cruelties—erect flashings—administered early in life to Tanaquil, and I am patient with Anita, though I can’t fathom our bond. She married me for “butter” money: separate bedrooms, the lot. For world peace, I keep three cactus plants on my best Bösendorfer and wear black briefs: they give me a voice.

  In an earlier notebook I described the time that Alma took me to the East Kill carnival, but I failed to do descriptive justice to it, and to the fine discriminations that Alma exercised, as we strolled past Ferris wheel, cakewalk, tattoo parlor, freakshow. Tanaquil didn’t accompany us; she stayed home and sulked in her bedroom, reading (she later told me) a nonfiction book about traffic in Tahitian girls. Another year I will have the strength to describe that carnival—Tanaquil’s willful absence, Alma’s pride of place near the Ferris wheel, East Kill’s populace genuflecting to her grandeur. Wise, she cautioned me against snacking on cotton candy, and yet she let me loose in the jackpot area, where I won a sloppily mocha-frosted sheet-cake; a decade ago, I stayed up all night describing, in a notebook, my victory, and the flashing lights, periwinkle and chartreuse, surrounding the merry-go-round. I should have read that description to Alma, but, shy, I hid it from her critique. I am keeping new notebooks to remedy my former, regrettable reticence, my failure, in the past, to describe the many carnivals that have confused East Kill. We are not a pleasure town, but incongruously, without warning, a carnival will lay its tents and freaks upon our public park.

  When I was a teenager, Alma kicked Tanaquil’s pet terrier and then locked it in a cage: more later on this episode. More, too, about Alma’s household rules? The lock on the refrigerator, in the old days, when she was a nearly full-time East Kill resident? Discuss the time that, during an altercation, Tanaquil hit Alma’s left breast, and Alma yelled, “You hit my breast!” Also I must discuss my drunkenness and my evaporated talent.

  Unsurprisingly, I present HIV symptoms. Rashes and sweats. I won’t give details. These are the Aigues-Mortes notebooks, not the sickness notebooks, and Dr. Crick has encouraged me not to dwell on decay. He says I should ignore it, until difficulties reach unbearable clarity. A dreary recital of physical symptoms is the l
ast thing I’ll welcome, when I read these notebooks, later, after my comeback.

  Utopia: Dr. Crick tells me I may be permanently asymptomatic, that I need not fear degenerating organs and faculties. He loads me up with pills. I take them when it pleases me. When I’m not in the mood, I flush them down the toilet, and lie to him. He practices medicine in the water district, his office a freestanding white stucco cottage. Some of the sex clubs have an incongruous Positano appearance, clashing with the neighborhood’s brick vernacular. Going to Dr. Crick’s for a checkup is tantamount to a return to Atrani, on the Amalfi, where once I played Schumann’s Novelletten, and suffered a fainting spell during an undemanding cantilena. Dr. Crick used to be a full-time abortionist, in the years when it was illegal. Right-to-Lifers picketed his office. Dr. Crick has a limited range of facial expressions, and no wrinkles, although he is nearly sixty. A fat face is incapable of crease. He drives a lizard-green jaguar. I drive an ivory Volvo, badly. I nearly crash—from nerves and inattentiveness—every time I take it on the road.