Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

The last time I saw Moira Orfei she was sitting, tawny-faced, in an outdoor Montecatini café, recovering from her Sicilian tour, reading yellowed scrapbooks that documented her early servitude to her circus-manager father, who led Moira from town to town, forcing her to perform, locking her every night in the hotel room so her miraculousness could recharge, apart from the soft drinks and nickelodeons of the seaside towns through which their sordid act passed. I stopped by Moira’s table and praised her scrapbooks, but she looked glazed, indifferent, as if I were a billboard on a highway her chauffeured limo sped down. Abruptly, she leaned toward my face and held out a black-and-gold cigarette; she didn’t intend to burn me, though the glowing ash approached my eyes, which I quickly shielded, pretending nonchalance. (I didn’t want to insult her.) I haven’t visited Montecatini in years, and I lack the rigor, after tonight’s bottle of Rioja, to describe the café where Moira sat, leafing through a scrapbook’s doomed early pages, her father dead now.

  Attempting to explain Moira Orfei’s power, I once wrote, in the score of Liszt’s B Minor Sonata (above the irregular theme’s first statement): Consciousness as predicament.

  Matilda is a problem. Anticipating my visit, she pesters me with middle-of-the-night phone calls. And yet have I made a decent nephew’s attempt to understand her sexual rages, or the garret she once slept in, receiving customers, believing true gratification took place only in department stores from which her whore self would be barred? Do I remember the women’s shoes sold in the Matilda-refusing department stores? And do I love these emporia because they once barred her entrance, when she was a teenager? Why is Matilda stained? Do I repeat myself? She may sicken before I arrive. Bedside, I will meekly sit, and she will compliment my comprehension of what she calls “the feminine”—her round red Mary Magdalene face a rebuke. Matilda’s dead husband (she never took his name) bequeathed her—in addition to the Clarendon Street townhouse—a Miami apartment and a Cape Cod bungalow. In Wellfleet, usually she is too tired for a walk on the beach. On good days, when hallucinations retreat, she hunts morels.

  Matilda made me spend years (ages twenty to thirty) catering to her sickbed needs, just because she’d drunkenly promised me concert bookings superior to Alma’s. As if Matilda in Back Bay were the new Sol Hurok! Delusional Matilda, whose agoraphobia I love: gin drives the Clarendon Street version of The Scarlet Letter, a Signet edition in her pocketbook, along with black-market Percocet. She got addicted to Percocet during an episode of lower back pain. The drug mellows Guadalquivar unpleasantness.

  Matilda has a small dark friend named Lu, a skinny French-Algerian girl who wants to study piano with me. She needs the sensual freedom that only a train ride to East Kill can provide. Lu played me a Mendelssohn song without words. My evaluation: “You must break the back of the four-bar phrase.” She may turn out to be a great wallpaper designer. Lu showed me a sample—Jack-and-the-beanstalk motifs—of a design she intends for Matilda’s library. I managed to unclothe myself inconspicuously by the end of Lu’s lesson: I hid the nudity behind a huge armchair. She asked for my nudity, and Matilda OK-ed it, in advance. My action wasn’t statutory rape: Lu, twenty, looks thirteen. Her father’s opinion of the exchange, I don’t know. Matilda prefers girls with dead fathers: they’re easier to train.

  I’ll bring my Super 8 movie projector to Matilda’s and show her the three-minute film I made of nude Lu playing Mendelssohn. Only Tanaquil and I have seen my home-made Super 8 erotica, which we call “Mechanical Street Cinema.” Perhaps I will incorporate the movies into my Aigues-Mortes piano performance, with Moira Orfei’s permission.

  I visited Matilda in Boston. Before going to her townhouse, I stepped into the Copley Plaza public library tearoom and jerked off at the urinals next to a young redhead with acne, whose suddenly revealed, educable penis made me want to send condolence cards to tricks whose identities I’ve forgotten.

  I stared at her townhouse’s Gothic front as if its brick intricacies held keys to my formerly criminal mind. I dreaded buzzing: perhaps Matilda wasn’t worth the bother. Perhaps she’d break down in tears the second she saw me, or start shuddering in sexual ecstasy.

  As I sat in her armchair, listening to her criticize Alma, I knew I had experienced this humiliation (on Alma’s behalf) before, near a swingset, or near a row of pastel classrooms, a fatigued school, a conservatory in the mountains near Biarritz. I listened to Matilda’s abuse: déjà vu. I would continue to fail Matilda. She would not bring me new concert bookings. Clump clump on the stairs leading to the Clarendon Street bedroom: Matilda ascended, and I, for Alma’s sake, paschally followed.

  In bed, Matilda confirmed my “power,” she called it; after showing me her Buddhist prayer rugs and her miniature Noah’s Ark, she said that I was the unimpeachable foundation of Alma’s reputation, that my recent nervous collapse was an irregularity, not a norm. She took off her glasses before we embraced. Her hair coloring was incoherent: should I call it sandy blond, or silver, and shouldn’t she ask her colorist to choose one shade or the other? Matilda told me that composers are superior to performers, and she asked, in a brutish, slurred, drunk undertone, why I wasn’t more famous than Alma, why I insisted on the familial frame of reference, and why I had amnesia about my men. (This forgetfulness was especially intense at those moments when my glance, sated by lovemaking, fell on the Buddhist manuals piled on her armoire, the twin of my Guadalquivar armoire.) Boldly, though with elided vowels and consonants, she murmured that my Granados Goyescas was more daredevil than Alma’s, and I envisioned a time when Matilda might defend my reputation against philistines like Hector Arens, who, in the East Kill Times, called my playing “leprous.” As sunlight lineated the Clarendon Street bed, I regretted my months of inexcusable absence. She called me “show-off.” At first I thought she was insulting me; then I remembered that she loved preeners. She quoted a line that she said was Edwin Arlington Robinson though it sounded like Ogden Nash, and she called me “supernal.” Perhaps her standards are low.

  During sex, Matilda’s cough got on my nerves. Why couldn’t she restrain herself, take Vicks? Her dryness forbade, at first, easy entrance, until she reached for the bedside tube of K-Y. She is a scholar with a great career ahead, if only a career of explicating The Scarlet Letter, and narrating, in videotaped essays, her private history of hospitalizations and libations.

  Exhaustion forced me to cancel Dustin, my potential Dorchester escort. I spent the night at Matilda’s townhouse, armory of anti-Alma balm.

  Today, in the East Kill Times, I read about a cannibal who cooked little boys after molesting them. He prepared “little boy pot pies” and “little boy stews” for his neighbors, who complained about the strange taste.

  Alma called from Buenos Aires, after her concert at Fundación Proa. She said the only reason I didn’t commit suicide was my replenishable optimism, the utopian streak I inherited from her: “You got the bad genes and the good genes. My nerves, yes. But also my gifts.” She mentioned “your birthright reservoir of lifted mood.”

  After a few Xanax I am tempted to write Matilda and ask for help making Aigues-Mortes arrangements. But I must check the impulse. She has enough problems (hallucinations, slurred speech) without being forced to face Moira Orfei’s supremacy. Matilda’s pathological jealousy of other famous women caused her long-ago break with Alma: poisoned oysters were the alibi.

  I spent the night strategizing my next overture to Moira Orfei, the only living epitome of drunken romanticism, a cult I want to lead, if she would agree to share her dimity throne. The climaxes we’d be capable of reaching together! The weird disjunctions between feeling and rationality! Her circus tricks might mingle with my impromptu lectures on hallucinogens—diatribes delivered from the piano during Debussy études. Orfei/Mangrove possibilities flood me as I work on the impressionist’s tricky, unostentatious show-pieces, perfect foil for Moira’s leaps and near-disasters. Hemiola—beguiling distraction from regular beat-division—will fill the audience with panic. How about T
he Moira Orfei and Theo Mangrove Show, a TV variety hour, on cable?

  Fear that we might never meet in Aigues-Mortes, that Moira might misunderstand my instructions, breaks my heart, in advance; I imagine waiting—in boulevard Gambetta’s moldering arcades, after a lunch of monkfish with saffron—for a never-materializing Moira. How much longer can I bear to wait for word? Her pale skin and black hair and large fake eyelashes—where would I be without their corrupt consolation, their telegram of fatigue and repetition, like the same mortadella sandwich I ordered every day in Lucca from the butcher near the Giardino Botanico, even when his sultry daughter watched me order it, and I thought, ashamed, “She knows I’m addicted to mortadella, she knows my weakness, and that’s close to damnation, being known by the butcher’s dark-haired daughter”—assuming she was not his wife or concubine, hanging out near the beaded curtain, observing customers, in an unfrequented part of Lucca, close to the ramparts and the filthy public swimming hole. On the via del Giardino Botanico, outside the butcher shop, I’d found pieces of smut, porn pictures cut into scraps, confetti. Had I torn a magazine, and then forgotten my rage?

  Let me fall more frequently into trance, even at the risk of what Dr. Crick cheerfully calls “psychosis.” France is the answer: Aigues-Mortes, a reunion with Moira Orfei. I will restore her reputation to its lost zenith.

  Notebook Five

  The house smells of asparagus piss. Thoughts of Mechanical Street’s disarray prematurely age me: see my worry lines, crow’s feet, tummy spread. Friedman notices it all. Messy Anita claims to be a “neatnik” but leaves carpets unvacuumed so she can concentrate on her insignificance, which she finds comforting, as do all small people.

  As a teen, I gave recitals at an East Kill rug shop, in the antique district, one block long, not major enough to attract tourists. Temporarily docile Tanaquil handed out programs, took tickets, and poured water into Dixie cups during intermission. Those were my Couperin days: avoiding romantic repertoire, I feared plush sounds, early death.

  Incoherently I lectured Tanaquil last night on tonality. Dissonance isn’t unpleasantness; it’s simply a sign that movement is about to take place. Alma tolerated dissonance because of her Greenwich Village friendships and her schoolgirl participation in Communist cells.

  Before Tanaquil shut her door for the night, she said, “It’s difficult, being the only straight shooter in a household of Malibrans.”

  When I was a cocky teenager, my boxer shorts sometimes served as outerwear. Tanaquil and I rode swan boats at East Kill Public Park. My boxer flap opened as I rowed. She laughed at the display and handed me the joint she was smoking; I wanted to give up my musicianship, at that moment, or take on a major disease, like epilepsy. Also, I wanted my feigned epilepsy to be a guest pass to her forgiveness. No longer to dwell in a false system of downbeats! Regardless how frequently the key signature changes, it always reverts to the home.

  The rooms in which my sexual escapades take place are small, white, rented; given the dimness, I can’t know how many infected people are present. Despite my terminal condition, I am asymptomatic, to a historically unprecedented degree, and resistant to the newer viral varieties, protected though I remain in sexual encounters, within an envelope of “safety” as fictitious or provisional as the belief that forgiving bodies of water surround East Kill. I am the town metaphysician. Every street corner is ineffable, dying to be explained. I travel from bedroom to bedroom, hotel to hotel, keeping praise to a minimum.

  Anita doesn’t want our sexual relations to continue. She finds my coital style vulgar, my mouth and fingers never coordinated. Why not consider Moira Orfei a safety valve, leaving Anita free to pursue local romances with valet-parking attendants? Moira Orfei wears paste tiaras and bangles that look authentic and expensive (some actually are!), while Anita wears basic pearl studs and a fourteen-karat chain that I bought her in Lourdes when I played my Abbé Liszt program, and steak tartare on the Place des Pyrénées poisoned me.

  If I look back at my life, I’m afraid I will see a design. Matilda is empress of patterns. She drafts astrological charts. In her bedroom she spread out my map and said, “Ignore the present moment’s claim to be the only truth. Look at the messy web I’ve drawn.” She pointed to arrows leading off the page. “Your life is smaller than you recognize. Dark forces crimp your borders and cut you down in your prime. I see factions.” She drew the stolen white terry Solhotel (Banyuls-sur-Mer) bathrobe around her shoulders and swallowed another Percocet and said, “Yes, you’ve experienced this rushing sense of power and endangerment before.” In a sleepy fist, she held my cock, and it rose, happy to be recognized as a family member, an international talent.

  My hopes for Moira Orfei are so large and unformed that I fear they will be disappointed. Dr. Crick can’t cure soul-sickness. Later, I must describe Moira’s knees and inky hair, beyond words, but still worth the futile effort.

  Alma is home from tour—cheeks drawn, shoulders slumped. Was she jilted by a Buenos Aires consort? We discussed Aigues-Mortes over codfish lunch, served by silent Tanaquil. (Anita was absent—taking care of a girlfriend hit by a speeding ambulance.) Alma called Aigues-Mortes a mistake: it might pander to voyeurs charting our family’s ups and downs. Aigues-Mortes has a subtlety beyond Alma’s ken. Not for her the trivial festival, the remote gig.

  “Moira Orfei is the enemy of serious music,” Alma said, disapproving of circus/piano hybrids. Hector Arens once called Alma “the Deborah Kerr of the piano.” I’d like to outlaw such analogies.

  I mentioned my plan to compile a glossary of the emotions that classical music catalyzes, and Alma expressed delight: “Then I wouldn’t be responsible for your melancholy!” She compiles lists during consultations with Helen Jole, her Argentinian psychoanalyst. Listmaking cures.

  “Your Milhaud disc,” Alma said, “didn’t sell.” (She was referring to my CD of his small works, including the Rag-Caprices.) “One hundred total. Why not record my father’s nothings?” I love Ricardo Guadalquivar’s piano morceaux (despite their smallness and mediocrity) for their embrace of boredom, waiting, and misapprehension. Why didn’t Alma spend her entire career reclaiming them?

  Alma enumerated problems while chewing cod: “My son’s extravagance, my daughter’s reclusiveness; my son’s reclusiveness, my daughter’s extravagance; my cluster headaches, my son’s cluster headaches.” I found myself falling asleep. It was my turn to ask if she was dating anyone in the southern hemisphere, or to compare numerologically symbolic passages in our repertoires.

  She startled me awake by recapturing, in words, London during the Blitz, the times she helped Myra Hess soothe terrified, bomb-wary listeners. About Myra’s principle of weight transfer, Alma said: “I apply it to late Schumann, withhold it from Fauré. Schumann demands turgidity. Fauré wants sweetness. I prefer Fauré, though the public wants Schumann. Buenos Aires, however, wants what I give her.”

  I should describe Alma’s face, body, and wardrobe, but my readers, if they exist, already know, from record jackets, videos, and live performances, what she looks like.

  Quickly I need to take a trip to one of East Kill’s hustler bars in the water district and remedy the career situation. Find a recommended escort and slowly undress him and bury the indiscretion later in sherry with Alma after dinner and after playing our two-piano repertoire—Robert Casadesus’s Danses Mediterranéennes, Arthur Benjamin’s “Jamaican Rumba from San Domingo,” Ernst Bacon’s “Kankakee River Burr Frolic,” Manuel Infante’s Trois Danses Andalouses, Paul A. Pisk’s “My Pretty Little Pink”—as if no recriminations had earlier been exchanged.

  How can I tell when I am entering the hustler neighborhood? My water district, its borders uncertain: Ocean Drive, River Street, Lake Street, Marina Way. . . . Despite these names, and a purported stream dividing our town, we have no verifiable—no consoling—connection to multiple bodies of water.

  I met Friedman for a session: beyond oral, beyond anal: a practice we call “detente,” or “fract
ure.” Diplomatic, visceral, frightened of the law and yet expert at evading it, he specializes, as hustler, in unknown, painful positions (ads call him “The Wrecker”), positions he renames after legal cases, physical ailments, political maneuvers. Sex’s purpose is nomenclature. Friedman is more interested in words than in sensations.

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Though I tried your patience on earlier tours, let’s work up a minimal program. Move our repertoire toward silence—toward the infantile and the stopped-short. Must loudness be our specialty? Must every piece climax? In the past I never respected the difference between mezzo forte and forte. I’d love to see you inflict expressionism on Aigues-Mortes. If I could lure you there!

  Remember: waltzes sell.

  Picture May in the Camargue, our circus tent surrounded by wild horses, flamingos.

  Love,

  Theo Mangrove

  Alma departs tonight for Buenos Aires. I’ll visit the water district after her limo leaves Mechanical Street. Dr. Crick says, “As long as you’re safe, have as much sex as you want.” But he never defines safety.

  East Kill inspires its residents with ambitions they can never fulfill. No person is at home in a hometown, but this is especially the case in East Kill, where glumness has settled over the rooftops and the cars and the poetic aspirations of the girls and boys at East Kill Prep, and the slow students at the conservatory, learning voice-leading though they will never use it.

  Didn’t Moira Orfei warn me, at Trapani’s Hotel de Anza, against career suicide? Didn’t she urge me to perform Liszt? I may never be as popular as Alma. My staccato octaves resemble hers, though I lack the pioneer grit that sent her career from Peru to Colombia to Venezuela to Argentina to Guam, the Balearics, too, and Sardinia, and the former Yugoslavia. Praising Alma is a ploy. In Aigues-Mortes I may figure out why I flashed Tanaquil and arrested her life.