Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Many pseudo-friends have died of AIDS: now I needn’t fear their recriminations. Todd Brest, with fine white-blond hair, looked like Baby Cadum—the broad, doughy, dropsical face of Down syndrome. He graduated from Oxford and wrote a study of Sanskrit spiritual texts (translated into ten languages). His grandmother Velma Brest, a dowager, owns half the town, though no one wants to have anything to do with her. After one impeccable blow job, I shunned Todd—but first I memorized his buttocks’ abstention from the sun. When I refused to hug him at Jeffrey’s Diner, he called me a “shunner.” Others have leveled the same accusation. After I’m finished with a “boyfriend,” I consign him to the dustbin; an ex-trick dies, and I think, “Another person out of the way.” Heartlessness is a symptom.

  Thom Mangrove, my late father, crowded with visions, didn’t like my glints of promise; he ignored my first fugues, bold, on the Guadalquivar Bösendorfer. Alma called him a liar, and yet she liked the financial package. My “butter” inheritance comes to me not directly through his estate but through a dead uncle’s bequest, and no other family member can touch the funds. Alma makes her own money in Buenos Aires, every weekend playing at a different theater, church, museum, plaza, or tango palace. I fritter away my income on water district sex. Thom liked to “brain” me: squeeze my forehead hard, affectionately, to obliterate my wrong, invasive, curious thoughts about Tanaquil’s body, or about how Alma deserved death for not enjoying my youthful (at age seven!) performance of Cécile Chaminade’s “Scarf Dance” at East Kill Public Library.

  I am working up to my Aigues-Mortes comeback by playing petty concerts in East Kill. Each has a theme. Recently I played a Totentanz evening at the Lyceum. Katharine Hepburn, elderly, in the front row, beamed. Afterward, she came backstage. I studied closely the celebrated face and realized that she wasn’t Hepburn, just some local woman with mange. Fullness enveloped her rear: diapers? She whispered, “Mom’s cerebral today,” which, someone explained, was a distortion: her “Mom” was long dead, but her daughter had a brain tumor. No one famous ever comes to East Kill. Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove is undisputed empress of the town, and I am crown prince. Half of East Kill hates our family.

  Hermaphroditism of the appoggiatura:

  After breakfast I felt dizzy, and, napping, dreamt that Alma grew a beard. She still wore concert gowns and pretended to look the imposing matriarch. No one dared mention the amply downed chin.

  Alma’s opinion: I should stop practicing for a year and let the nerves heal. If I were to consider her point of view, the notebooks would suffer a breakdown. And yet why not respect her verdicts? Didn’t she once meet Princess Radziwill, after a benefit concert in Monte Carlo? Fatal flaw: the notebooks have no desire to figure out whether she enjoyed meeting the Princess. Nor have the notebooks tried to imagine Alma’s emotions while she lies on the couch and smokes Camels while listening to unreleased tapes of her concerts, turning off the machine so she can dip back into her Agatha Christie mystery and reapply lipstick and adjust her bathrobe and then put down the paperback and switch on the tape again, the piece containing too many dissonances this time, forcing her to turn it off and say, “This performance we shall leave unreleased, even though in principle I insist that each of my taped concerts is remastered on CD and offered to the public.” Dissonances discomfit listeners, so she purged discord from her repertoire; she did not rewrite the music to make it more churchy, but chose pieces that kept at bay the maddening minor second. I cannot tolerate music that moves forward; my Aigues-Mortes recital must eddy and retreat.

  Don’t get your hopes up. The object in your hands is not a novel. Call it a still life: sentences without development, incident, or kindness. I wish I could speak with greater forbearance about the people I know, and about my own fate. Instead, I atomize noxious events and unwanted persons, turn them into particles.

  Definition of the lyric:

  Snow outside my window is lyric because I pay no attention to it.

  Our dead-end block, Mechanical Street, mostly residential, has some specialty businesses: a nougat and spice dealer, a toy railroad repair shop, and a psychic, whose red neon sign has a missing p, so it flashes sychic. When I last visited the psychic, Mrs. Clemovitz, she said I had no future, only a past, and the past was not the province of clairvoyants.

  Notebook Two

  I have never been to Aigues-Mortes. I remember my late father drinking café con leche on a second-floor hotel balcony in Portbou, a tiny Spanish town bordering France; while Alma was away on tour, Father often took Tanaquil and me on vacation to Portbou, a few hours from Aigues-Mortes. We never bothered to drive to Aigues-Mortes, and he never described it as desirable. Portbou colleagues clamored for his ambiguous services, despite his bantam-weight smallness; about size, Alma said, he was always defensive. He had shell-shocked cousins in Portbou: I can’t remember their names. One had a withered arm. Another had a large rear-end. After Thom’s death we never tracked them down.

  In Portbou, at the unprepossessing Hotel Flora, Father watched Tanaquil and me swimming, below the balcony, in the meager pool. He had no desire to join us; he preferred to watch. He called Portbou magnetic: it had some mysterious connection to the Guadalquivars. Though eager to escape Alma’s tempestuousness, he was happy to research her origins. I, however, found nothing to recommend Portbou. There was no cinema, race track, or concert hall. Thom spent the nights gambling at cards in a local bar. Tanaquil and I wasted every afternoon by the dull pool, a few hundred yards from the Mediterranean. If the Hotel Flora has been torn down, I want to write its epitaph. My sister and I failed our father, slowly, and he let us know; we apologized every morning, on the Hotel Flora balcony, as we sat on folding chairs, looking out at the ocean. Are Guadalquivars buried in Portbou? Ask Alma.

  Yesterday, my favorite escort, Friedman, at his water-district loft, its window overlooking the almost lake, burned incense cones and played Mozart’s Zaïde while roughhousing me. Friedman, who looks like an extra in a Pasolini film, is educated: he hustles for information. He wants a wide experience of the world so he can write about it later. Other careers that Friedman has pursued (flute-playing, spying, gardening) no longer interest him; though he may return to law school, he has temporarily “retired” into hustling, as others retire by opening a rural bed-and-breakfast.

  Friedman took a Polaroid of me, for his collection: he intends art, not blackmail. I spilled cum (three spurts) on his unshaved buttocks, worthy of ruining (by desiring them I desecrate them). He told me that his first reading experience was comic strips and that his worldview was based on square frames, articulation bubbles, outlined figures, punch lines, and superheroes, and that I seemed to him a “Sunday Funnies” character who appears only in a single episode and is never again heard from but is more intensely loved than the regulars. A tone color surrounds me, he said. He forgave me for romanticizing his temporary profession, hustling. He sometimes follows my wife to the grocery store and surreptitiously watches her wandering the aisles and pushing a cart.

  After an intense orgasm, we produce voice from our head rather than our chest. I went to the window to see what passed as a body of water. To be surrounded, in the water district, by water, and yet to doubt its existence, is the East Kill dilemma.

  Chicago’s best hotel, the Palmer House, might have been where I caught HIV from Fabio Abruzzi, my current piano coach, a slim native Italian, my age, asymptomatic. We were playing a four-hand concert (including Poulenc) at the university; in our hotel suite he told me about his infection but I asked him to enter me without condom anyway. It may seem odd that a professional pianist has a coach, but everyone, no matter how advanced, needs instruction. A teacher can correct bad habits. Fabio, who looks like a shopworn Alain Delon, or a partially erased Picasso harlequin-urchin, studied with a pupil of the great Egon Petri, himself a Ferruccio Busoni protégé. I might have already been infected, before Fabio. Infection’s origin doesn’t concern me.

  Possible repertoire for the Aigues-Mortes rec
ital includes Rachmaninoff’s Moments Musicaux, which lasts twenty-six minutes. Extra notes fool the listener into thinking the piano a monstrous new step in human evolution. There’s too much ecstasy in Rachmaninoff—an atmosphere of Chanukah, of soiled time. I’m Catholic, but my references are Semitic. Tanaquil insists that we are indirectly Sephardic Jews, through the maternal line. Alma has a hush-hush relation to genealogy. About Mangroves she is silent, and about Guadalquivars she likes to be obfuscating and theatrical, claiming family origins in Pamplona, Buenos Aires, Lisbon, anywhere she has been applauded.

  My Aigues-Mortes comeback will be recorded, so that, as CD, it might be sold by subscription to members of “Alma’s List,” a mail-order club of listeners loyal to her career. In Aigues-Mortes I should avoid programming any music that Alma has already monopolized. She’s made more than forty discs, everything from Haydn to the Spanish masters—Mompou, de Falla, Montsalvatge. Alma says I lack microphone experience—hence the importance of the Aigues-Mortes recital, which I have the power to cancel. My hands, from over-practicing, are rediscovering their primary ruin, the damage they sustained years ago, under Alma’s tutelage, and then afterward, au conservatoire, near the East Kill Pantheon, ten hours a day until I could no longer concentrate, and then tea in a chipped bowl at Jeffrey’s Diner, where I still repair for refreshment—Jeffrey’s, with opaque windows, on the corner of Lucinda and Lavinia, the center of the water district; Jeffrey’s, the only eatery obscure and dingy enough to mirror my insignificance and secretly reverse it (turn it into magnificence) via the deceitfulness of mirrors. A reflective surface lies: pretending to send back the same, it pollutes the original.

  After playing Liszt’s “Funérailles” for Fabio yesterday I stepped into the Roman Catholic church on the corner of Mechanical and Vine; I wanted to see God in the light or dark of Fabio’s prescriptions. I told the Lord’s likeness, “Give me a romantic sound, like Artur Rubinstein’s. Give me the sound that Alma once envied.”

  I could play more than one comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes. The second program could consist of two mammoth works, Schumann’s Fantasy in C, and Liszt’s B Minor Sonata, plus an impromptu lecture explaining how words fail to describe water. I must find the score for Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night in piano reduction, or if such a score doesn’t exist, I must do the reduction myself. I want my listeners to be frightened, worried that I might go into platform convulsions. Breakdown bestows clout on a performer. Audiences are frightened that the crisis will repeat, and this fear rivets their attention. Alma became kinder to me after my Viterbo institutionalization. She no longer harped on the maleficent tendency of my left hand’s second finger’s first joint to collapse during passagework. Whenever she is in East Kill she watches me practice. I beg her to watch. She doesn’t impose the surveillance. She may well be reading this notebook.

  I have asked France to sponsor my Aigues-Mortes concert, but France is reluctant. I have asked New York to sponsor my Aigues-Mortes concert, but New York is reluctant. I alone hold the power to wrestle the recital—should there be two, or three?—into existence.

  Failures are intricate, and not each earns fossilization; not each deserves its Vedantic diorama.

  Six years ago in Toulon, I performed Il Trovatore in piano reduction. One critic called my performance “cancerous,” and wrote, “Find a way to let him end his career with dignity.”

  I should arrange a piano reduction of the Verdi Requiem and play it in Aigues-Mortes to end my career with dignity.

  Alma briefly intersected with the American avant-garde: she was pianist mascot for Abstract Expressionism and for Fluxus, though artists eventually found her too rigid and monarchical. My temperament’s most revolutionary aspect is lack of follow-through. I abandon my statements, midstream. Would Alma consider Scriabin avant-garde? Until today’s practice session, I never understood his silences—trills and triplets accelerating toward flame. Alma said, “We need more silence in our family.” She praises reticence yet performs raucous Iberia.

  My recitals reflect a subway aesthetic. Aigues-Mortes is a tiny town, mostly pedestrians and bicycles. Public transportation must push its way into Aigues-Mortes’s heart.

  My favorite hustler, Friedman, resembles a vintage porn star, Bruno, a 1960s legend in San Francisco and New York, an “all-over” porn star like the “all-over” Abstract Expressionist paintings that Alma loved (and, with her performances, brought to life). I keep Bruno’s photos in the Guadalquivar armoire: unsafe hiding place. Bruno took a few customers. I came of age too late to hire him.

  I will never live long enough to perform the complete works of Liszt. Influenza worsening, I’m woozy from three glasses of port tonight and sore from Friedman’s back-door invasions. I feel the urge to end my life, but first I must describe it, so that readers who care to look for a pattern in the last days will have the resources to find it. If I could wear Liszt’s ratty, repetitive, lovesick compositions like dahlias in my hair, then I’d have the confidence to present myself to Europe again: the problem with music is that I must play it, not wear it.

  Chopin’s music communicates zal, which Liszt defines as “inconsolable regret after an irrevocable loss . . . a ferment of resentment, premeditation of vengeance . . . sterile bitterness . . .”

  Alma says I shouldn’t burden the Aigues-Mortes notebooks with scholarly quotations.

  Friedman visited Mechanical Street but instead of following me into my bedroom he went to Tanaquil’s lair and disappeared for an hour. Ignored, I ran through my Liszt program—“Orage” from Années des pèlerinage, “Pensée des morts” from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, and “Bagatelle sans tonalité.” When Friedman reappeared to say goodbye to me and ask for payment ($100), his palms (I kissed them) were fragrant and sticky. I may never again hire him for an in-call. I don’t want Tanaquil to become sexually three-dimensional on my dollar. I remember shouting “Tanaquil has tits!” an eternity ago, humiliating her, in a public place.

  My European agent, Alfonso Reyes, called to ask whether he should bill me as a Liszt specialist, a Scriabin specialist, or a master of blurry twilight illusions—because of the “brush” or “melting” touch I learned au conservatoire, and because of my taste for slow, eviscerated tempi, wandering in the suburbs of continuity. I hate noise! Fragmentation has invaded my playing. I told Alfonso to advertise me as a French pianist with an Italian temperament, or as a social theorist disguised as a Liszt specialist. Performing his Années, I give a disquisition on chill. Voyage anesthetizes: reapparreling sewage in filigree, Liszt’s curlicue circumnavigations imitate Chopin copying Bellini.

  The classical music industry, in which I play a minor part, is the last bastion of whoredom; after my European seizures, amnesias, and palpitations, and after my Viterbo hospitalization, I staged a monastic withdrawal from the concert-giving world. If I outlive Alma, I may sell our pianos and take a vow of silence. Meanwhile, I could learn a sweep of the Busoni oeuvre and wow Aigues-Mortes. Alma cautions against excess repertoire. Her magic number, she says, is four, not five. “Instead of five cities, Theo, play in four. Instead of five sonatas, play four.” I ignore her advice: I pity the fifth city, the fifth sonata.

  Was it twenty-five years ago I debuted at Alice Tully Hall? Had Alice Tully Hall been built? I don’t keep careful records. Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, Alma’s friends, understood the necrophiliac properties of the Fauré nocturnes I played. Con amore, Liszt indicates, in Vallée d’Obermann, but I don’t caress the keyboard’s soprano register. I don’t make friends with the C above middle C. Xenia Lamont, my first master, taught me how to curve the finger but not so rigidly that it becomes a claw; she taught me how to keep fingerpads alert to Liebesträume’s lyric dangers. Xenia’s breasts reminded me of flesh-toned water balloons. Powerful muscles held them up.

  Revelation: I shall not perform solo in Aigues-Mortes! I shall do a song recital with loyal Derva Nile! Tonight we will sort through repertoire in my studio. Fauré, Debussy, Po
ulenc, Satie? We must include Reynaldo Hahn: his piano parts are negligible, but the tessitura suits Derva’s troubled voice. Two years ago she broke down, singing Rachmaninoff in Tulsa, but she has a good muscle memory, and she consulted a laryngeal specialist, Madeline Tarnow, in New York. (I daren’t hurt Derva by admitting I want to go solo in Aigues-Mortes.) We will repeat the program in Aix-en-Provence and Bergamo. I will call Alfonso, but first I must ask Alma in Buenos Aires whether she thinks it unwise to share the Aigues-Mortes concerts, on which my career depends, with Derva. Alma’s rule: “Never waste time trying to please a fickle public.” And yet audiences love a pretty soprano. Buxom, dark-haired Derva, posed next to the piano in the posture of Ingres’s La Source, will doll up my autoerotic folderol, which fooled San Antonio, where the memory of Van Cliburn is vivid, but may fail in Aigues-Mortes, a town with a conquering spirit. I must go to church, on the corner of Mechanical and Vine, and pray for guidance.

  Last night, after reading songs with Derva Nile, whose voice has improved so radically, I fear she’ll overshadow me in Aigues-Mortes, I went to Friedman’s loft, and he gave me a regular’s discount. He said, “You have red bumps on your ass.” Irritation, from sitting too long at the piano. My excitement level was abnormal, Aigues-Mortes-endangering. From Friedman I received an orgasm, the usual tugging sensation, like a major seventh held overlong by flute and oboe, flutist and oboist naked, oboist a sixteen-year-old boy with untidy pubes, and flutist a seventy-year-old woman, slender, silver-haired, happy to hold the major seventh for its full duration. When I come, I contain hemispheres. Wars are fought, countries demolished, during my least orgasm. I have nothing better to offer you, Alma. Didn’t you want to murder me last Christmas, when I insisted on playing Scriabin preludes before breakfast, and then, after dinner, I screened the BBC documentary about preparations for my Barcelona consecration, the time I dedicated Bach’s partitas and Well-Tempered Clavier to a new god, one I was inventing that afternoon, for the film’s sake, script worked out in advance with the director, though we pretended the performance was unpremeditated? I wanted to sexualize Bach in honor of Barcelona. I’d received many propositions on the Ramblas; I’d squatted in the trenches with Bach long before Bolshevik strains in modern Baroque performance practice rendered me unfit to play partitas in public—exiling me to vulgar, amorphous nineteenth-century works, perverse dream-pieces in the spirit of Massenet’s Hérodiade.