Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Time to reenter my orgone box.

  Notebook Three

  I drank two bottles of Rioja last night while watching a 1962 videotape of Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus, dancing in sync with Mozart’s “Là ci darem la mano.” Moira’s head wiggled: is she double-jointed? Proprietor and protector of her legend, I fear that I will drop it, that it will crack. “Moira Orfei is a beautiful woman and also a major circus artiste,” Anita said, begrudgingly, as we watched the video. Anita in the boxy armchair was falling asleep. Poor Anita, enslaved by my circus connoisseurship. I woke her when Orfei tightrope-walked to a potpourri from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Later, Orfei swallowed fire to “Mi chiamano Mimì.” I was tempted to telephone Moira in Montecatini (if I only had the number!) and say that her circus artistry was still appreciated, that she would be named a national treasure of Japan or a Dame of the British Empire, that her beauty would be visited on unsuspecting third-world nations, and that I would write think-pieces on her behalf in the East Kill Times if the right-wing editor would step down: in these squibs, I would say that circus is currently in shambles, and that new, infuriating artistes try to claim techniques that Moira Orfei invented when she was a child star, never paid enough for her troubles, traveling from piazza to piazza in Italy.

  Montecatini Terme, a spa town in Tuscany, between Pisa and Pistoia, was the place I first saw her perform, in the 1970s, when I was visiting the healing baths. Moira Orfei was considered, at the time, merely second-rate, and yet she had been a star for years. Watch the 1962 Mimì fire-eating act: she seems ready to eat spectators. Moira Orfei is my original Cimmerian shore, superior to any pretender to her circus throne. And yet in Catania she was reported to have slept among the tigers. She had nowhere else to rest. Circus conditions in those days were a scandal.

  Anita won’t tolerate another evening of Orfei reclamation—so tonight alone I will watch the forgotten Jean Renoir melodrama starring Moira Orfei. Moira sent me an armful of her obscure lost videos, and I am systematically watching them, trying to rise to her defense, once again, even if this effort compromises the health of my Aigues-Mortes comeback.

  Last night I saw the rare Renoir opus Massage, starring Moira Orfei. She plays a Basque masseuse, Tania, working in Morocco. Locals don’t appreciate her feline beauty and therapeutic skills. She turns her lack of renown into a political cause. Sublimating her unhappiness, morphing it into idealistic fervor, she mobilizes indigenous peoples against French colonial oppression. Mostly the film is long shots of angry Orfei against sand dunes and ships. She relies on silent pantomime. Renoir didn’t trust her with dialogue.

  Her nipples, exposed in the film, upset me. They visually rhyme with her left shoulder’s two beauty marks. Why did she feel compelled to do a nude scene? No matter the climate or scenario, in every film Moira performs an obligatory, knee-jerk, nouvelle vague striptease, usually as finale. In Massage, topless, she serves drinks on the joint’s patio; male intellectuals, Che Guevara types, nudge her ribcage and make snide, weighty, historical-materialist comments on her breasts, as if her nipples were political ripostes. In my favorite scene, the screen Moira Orfei flips through movie magazines, looking at pictures of the real Moira Orfei.

  This afternoon I must accompany Derva Nile, soprano, in Hugo Wolf songs at the East Kill Home for the Blind. I should save my hands for Aigues-Mortes instead of frittering them away on Derva Nile. An East Kill resident, she splits her time between teaching at the Rorschach Musical Institute in New London (she commutes biweekly) and giving free recitals for the elderly and handicapped. Her husband, the moody, barrel-chested Morris Nile, disapproves of my alliance with Derva, and finds me “uppity,” but I almost blew him (steam-room backrubs crescendoing to a kiss) last year in the East Kill YMCA’s locker room. Afterward we ate stale carrot cake at the café.

  It would be a mistake to bring Derva to Aigues-Mortes. I got involved with her because we both have been visited by technical disaster, and because she resembles Moira Orfei—the same heavy-lidded eyes, square jaw, tiny nose, gazelle neck. I needn’t describe Moira Orfei, because she is acknowledged queen of the Italian circus, and pictures abound. I have pasted her photograph on each Aigues-Mortes notebook’s front cover. Let these pictures replace my paltry verbal evocations. Alma (in her Marxist phase) told me that pictures will bring on the revolution long before words.

  A few years ago I met Moira Orfei in Rome, at the Hotel de Anza; and after leisurely tea (we talked of elephants, ponies, circus travails, tightrope-walking, flame-swallowing, man-eating beasts, wrist bangles, the difficulty of pleasing one’s father), we went to Bulgari, where she tried on rings. I wanted to buy her a modest tronchetto. My “butter” money permits extravagance. The clerk bungled the sale; ignoring us, he played poker with the janitor in the shop’s rear. I told the rude clerk, “The great Moira Orfei is here. I’m ready to purchase a ring. If only you’d treat us with respect!”

  I must begin planning the Aigues-Mortes festival: the historic reunion of Moira Orfei and Theo Mangrove. I haven’t yet told Derva Nile. I will share the intricate, foolproof plans with no one except Mangrove family members and my international agent, Alfonso Reyes. Nor will I surrender to grandiosity. Arrangements will be practical, concrete. If Moira decides to tell the press, I can’t stop her, but I’d like Aigues-Mortes to remain our secret. Our choreography must incorporate Aigues-Mortes’s arcades, of which I have, alas, no knowledge.

  Notes for further discussion:

  (a)Moira’s nipples in the Renoir film;

  (b)the Aigues-Mortes arcades;

  (c)stiff wrists when I play Liszt;

  (d)my left pinkie’s near-paralysis.

  Moira Orfei has more talent than all the circus upstarts you could name. She is equal to anyone in the Carré family, and superior to Babette, the Talo Boys, and Miss Renee Jolliffe. Move over, Elsie Wallenda! Moira Orfei’s ensemble outclasses the Poutier and Clasners touring companies. Moira feels circus in her veins; she swallows flame in dotted rhythm. Her can-cans have more charm than Rigolette’s or Frichette’s. Moira’s eyes (in documentary footage) express unfeigned panic when she approaches the jaguar’s cage. Her emotions are genuine, she told me, when we ate oysters in Marseille; she feels what she pretends to feel.

  When her ex-husband, a gay set-designer for the circus, first saw her perform, he called her (the description appeared in Oggi) a “gold mine,” a rare combination of stunt-artist and sexpot, and he immediately put her on Italian TV, rechoreographed her act, and gave pointers on how to tightrope-walk with breasts pushed forward as if they hurt her feelings and she wanted to shed responsibility for their beauty.

  Perhaps I will lower my immunity and bring on convulsions by involving Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes.

  I must retreat from East Kill locals by intensifying my love for Moira Orfei. I repeat: no circus star of the current generation can match Moira’s authentic artifice.

  Only now, at this advanced age, am I executing the elementary lesson Alma taught me as a child: drop the hand’s weight, without forcing. My left pinkie this month is virtually paralyzed. It forgets to seek in key-beds a velvety launchpad for leaps.

  I learned technique from Alma; I could use a brush-up, but she has departed for South America. My European breakdown satisfies her, because it bolsters the family legend: in musical-gazette interviews, she describes my memory lapses and fainting fits as if they redounded to her credit. Palpitations and seizures I experienced in Aix-en-Provence, Carpentras, Toulon, Montepulciano, Ferrara, and elsewhere, resemble Alma’s 1964 São Paulo “nervous breakdown,” onstage, in the midst of playing Liszt’s “Chasse-neige” from the Transcendental Études—a collapse that did not end her career, but catapulted her to tabloid immortality.

  “I am God,” Scriabin once said, and I understand: while our lordly sight expands, it narrows to a claustrophobic, smelly extent.

  If I could find a hustler this afternoon I’d be happy. Every escort in East Kill is booked—I’ve pa
ged them all. I should have prepared for this eventuality. Horniness jeopardizes my Aigues-Mortes concerts as well as the interim’s piddling engagements. If I were at Marseille’s Hotel de Anza with Moira Orfei, we’d drink a bottle of Petit Chablis and eat a platter of raw Marennes-Oléron oysters and criticize the circus performers she’s surpassed—Mesquita, Mary Patricia, the Canadian Wonders. But I am home on Mechanical Street.

  I telephoned Derva Nile and told her that she could not accompany me to Aigues-Mortes. She didn’t mind. She respects Moira Orfei’s priority.

  Long ago, beside schoolhouse bushes, I found a dead Protestant boy, Tom Watley, his face bloody, gouged, disfigured. I didn’t report the body. When I returned later, he was gone. I’ve often wondered whether I knew his murderer, unapprehended: perhaps the culprit was Miss Kash, freckled redhead teacher whose Sunday-school description of limbo made sick sense.

  How vulnerable was young Chopin to sexual assaults? Did young Scriabin experience mild molestation at the home of his revered teacher Mr. Zverev, perhaps in the presence of Siloti, to whom Rachmaninoff dedicates his unpopular preludes? My interpretation of the sixth prelude, in E-flat major, fumigates lyricism by suggesting graves and cradles. In Aigues-Mortes, I will lecture on Mr. Zverev’s sexual appetites.

  Alma, on tour in Rio, telephoned from Hotel Valetti, while preparing for the evening performance of de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain. She wants to forget gowns and friendliness, to skip hair-washing: “If you think you’ve wasted your life, honey, then I’ve wasted mine, too.” She speaks with a smacking sound: dentures? I once saw them in a cup beside her bed. She threatens to cancel her tour, return to East Kill, and supervise the household, which, in her absence, careens out of control. Tanaquil’s room smells of rotten apples. I mentioned to Alma my epicurean afternoon at the East Kill Sauna; she approves. She frowns on Aigues-Mortes: “It’s a career-wrecker.” Why not, instead, the nearby Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where gypsies—apropos to Liszt!—gather every year on May 24 and 25 to celebrate the feast of Black Sarah? The gypsies could be chorus for Scriabin’s Poem of Fire, featuring me as piano soloist. Alma bragged about her 1960s civil rights activism, her Lady Bird Johnson medal. She was photographed with Malcolm X outside the Hotel Bon Soir on the Lower East Side, near the pickle shop.

  I like discussing, with Alma, my sex life, using an illogical code we have perfected over the years. I never say “fellatio”: I say “Granados.” If she were a doctor, she would prescribe the water district as anodyne: it corrects cramped phrasing. Let’s hope I can unparalyze my left pinkie by the time I walk onto the Aigues-Mortes stage and face my executioners.

  When my father lay down in bed with me, his chest was an electric fence whose electricity had been temporarily turned off for safe climbing. We rested together like two AA batteries snugly powering a transistor radio. Alma barged into the unlit bedroom and asked if we had sanitized our position, reduced its intimacy, after she’d entered. Alma wore glittering “Bridge of San Luis Rey” eyeglasses—a special pair for score-studying. Despite darkness, she could probably see Father’s portly chest and the thrifty place, below, where my hands delved; and she could guess I enjoyed special treatment, a chance to “take cuts” in line, ahead of competitors.

  My father, asleep beneath earth’s ultimatum . . .

  These and other nostalgias, useless . . .

  Notebook Four

  In a week, I fly to Boston to try a new hustler, Dustin, whose photo, on the web, resembles Friedman: Sephardic-Lebanese. I had three orgasms based on Dustin’s photo. While in Boston I’ll visit Alma’s younger sister Matilda, sphinx of Back Bay, who lives in a Clarendon Street townhouse near Joan Kennedy’s. The Guadalquivar sisters haven’t spoken in ten years—not since Alma suffered food-poisoning after Matilda served suspicious oysters at brunch. My mother insists that Matilda is an adopted—not biological—Guadalquivar. My aunt is freckled, fat, her coiffure a cumulus cloud; my mother, like her mother Gertrude, is gaunt, pallid, unblemished, with a long rope of straight hair sometimes rolled into a ponderous bun and pinned up with a silver barrette.

  Matilda, a decent pianist, still capable of executing Mozart’s “Duport” Variations if she hasn’t started tippling, let her talent rot by never practicing. She reads tarot cards. Through psychic tricks, a Guadalquivar Santería, she hopes to decimate Alma from afar. A gossipy Musical America article once spotlit Matilda’s grudge.

  The state of music today is Alma’s to adjudicate; Matilda’s to envy; mine to destroy. (Here comes a forgetful fit.)

  On my nuclear family’s behalf, soon I will make the monthly, propitiatory journey to Clarendon Street. Matilda will ask about hustlers I’ve been hiring. Will she countenance my notebooks, or will she want me to siphon strength into preparing Aigues-Mortes?

  I mustn’t tell jealous Alma about the visit. She said, once, intercepting a gushing note my aunt had written me: “Don’t trust Matilda. She fawns over you to irritate me.”

  Prodigal aunt, I picture you, lonely in brown leather armchair, your swollen feet propped beside unsent letters on an ottoman: Sister, I will never forgive you for stealing the career that should have been mine . . .

  I miss Alma, off to South America. I wish she’d return. I’d help her unpack. Anita could fetch take-out from Juanita’s Pizza, and we’d let Tanaquil lock herself upstairs. Tanaquil, a fainter, doesn’t deserve the cruel treatment I dish out. Later I’ll try to make amends for flashing her in the hallway long ago.

  Alma rarely writes letters. Why not an occasional get-well card, to cheer me up, when she is abroad, on her perpetual, Mechanical Street–denying tour? And yet, if she remained here, year-round, our house would no longer be the ideal place for planning triumphal Aigues-Mortes comebacks.

  Tanaquil’s door is locked—from the inside. I press my ear to it and hear a Sinatra record, and then, in the pauses between songs, her stertorous breathing. I could use a sister’s counsel. Playing possum, she wants sympathy and a boyfriend.

  Carcinogens in our house: I can smell them. Ash from the fireplace. Household cleansers and disinfectants. No way to rebegin with an ecologically safe environment—invasive agents have already corrupted my cells. I want to pen-knife my arm and gouge out the damaged molecules.

  How can I become more likeable? By diligently describing Aigues-Mortes preparations in these notebooks. I wish I had Moira Orfei’s telephone number. An immediate conversational fix would do me good. Thinking of her dimples cheers me up.

  Try to work from what I already know of Scriabin, rather than start from scratch, like a schizophrenic. Don’t behave like a leper if you don’t want to be treated like one. Imitate Alma. Copy anyone but yourself. Be disciplined, and notice how a good composer develops material and avoids tubercular fantasia. Don’t behave like a toccata. Prance like the sonata-allegro form. Ask basic questions about your musical conduct: Is it real? Does it help society? Can it be repeated? What would Busoni have said about your behavior? Don’t make grandiose plans. Treat morning work-hours as they were treated by wise Christians in the nineteenth century, when Wagner wrote Parsifal, and Liszt wrote “The Lugubrious Gondola.”

  I paid Friedman for an all-night “party.” We discussed Moira Orfei’s greatness while he twisted my cock. I showed him the 1962 videotape. He said, “Moira’s amazing,” a punishably meager tribute.

  To quote Alma, I’m wasting my life and I don’t know how to stop wasting it. Only Moira Orfei can help, but she has forgotten my existence. For a few years I had her phone number, and then she went into hiding. I know her sister Chloe’s number, but Chloe won’t help.

  On a parchment scroll I want to diagram every musical affect: one hundred types of emotion and gesture, as rendered in Western tonal composition. With this master plan, I could ride triumphant to Aigues-Mortes. First I will show the chart to Matilda, who will function as cambio, changing the dogged list into a tithe, payable toward my crimes against Tanaquil.

  I don’t know how to tell Matilda
the tragic fact that I’m not an ideal interpreter of Liszt. His “Forest Murmurs” woke me to puberty and the legs of Frank Stark, the first legs I had an orgasm in front of, but I could never do justice to the étude’s left-hand ostinato, despite my local success with technically taxing Iberia, Alma’s property.

  Matilda hates her mother, the grumpy, imperious Gertrude, still alive, over one hundred. Tended by expensive nurses, she dwells in Springs, Long Island (not far from the grave of her former friend Jackson Pollock); Alma never visits. Alone, Gertrude broods on disloyal daughters, maniacal grandchildren (me, Tanaquil), and her conceptual art collection, including Duchamp readymades. My grandfather, the composer Ricardo Guadalquivar, died a long time ago: cherry chewing tobacco, long yellow fingernails. I play his virtuoso nothings as encores.