Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Why hadn’t I studied the violin instead, as Alma once advised, trying to steer me away from imitating her career? She would have liked a string player in the house, to relieve the horrors of equal temperament; she would have enjoyed a son’s vibrato. She worried about my infant earaches; she told an interviewer, “I kept watch over that child every moment during his first four years.”

  I haven’t shaved in two weeks, not since my night with Friedman at the Empire Motel, outside East Kill, on Highway 15, leading nowhere. I don’t know what’s wrong with me this year—something Friedman said, at the motel, the lobby desk manned by an emaciated, gap-toothed cowboy with a lopsided beard, who seemed not intelligent enough for the job, and apologized to us for the malfunctioning thermostat. Atavistic Friedman had depressive circles under his eyes. He didn’t want me to suck his cock, only to stroke the area behind it, a transition—Dr. Crick calls it the “perineum”—that makes masculinity a hallway rather than a throne-room.

  I spent a lovely evening alone at home on Mechanical Street, eating complimentary chocolates. That’s the only pleasant recent event—the arrival of one pound of free chocolates in the mail from Siddhartha, who’d offended me at our last tryst by refusing to kiss though we’d worked out the scene in advance.

  My slow student Reuben, a redhead struggling to learn the complete Chopin études, has a blurry, damp, erased complexion. I fear for his safety. He motorcycles, without helmet, on Lucinda Way, in the water district; he wants to impress functionaries at the plant where his father manufactures pain-management kits. The mayor and Reuben’s father are having an affair. Mayor Dreyfus would stop at nothing to keep Reuben’s father happy, to keep the pain-management business in East Kill, rather than see it relocate to West Kill, a more logical home.

  Tanaquil ventures downstairs: upset, glowering, rereading Ivanhoe but not concentrating, she sits on the pink damask sofa. I should permanently retire from performing. After my nervous collapse, which she called an “auto-da-fé,” she said I should limit myself to Totentanz recitals in East Kill, and teaching private students, like slow Reuben and nude Lu.

  I used up too much sperm last night at Friedman’s. There’s none left for escorts who might call back—Max, Stefan, Siddhartha, Brett, Isaac, Aaron, Tucker, Ransom. Wouldn’t Alma, if she were home, permit my trip tonight through snow to the only neighborhood I like, the water district? I want soft-shell crabs at Jeffrey’s, the diner where I am known to staff—forgiven, my mediocre aspirations.

  The first time I saw Moira Orfei at home in Montecatini, she was sitting around with nothing to do. Touring season hadn’t started. Her shiny circus slacks were fathomless turquoise, like the bottom of a shallow East Kill stream where I used to wade, afraid of rocks yet drawn to them, curious about drowning. Her open-toed sandals proved a few points, or would, later, when I remembered them. On her right index finger, a ring sparkled. (Gem specifics elude me.) She wore a striped turtleneck: brown and blue, a non-intuitive combination, ensured circus success. Her lip gloss, white-pink, suggested flamenco capabilities; her black sunglasses, large and interfering, carried, on their temples, the Orfei family crest. Her jet hair, teased into a triumphal puff, avoided movement, and she lay on a chaise longue near cacti and palm trees; she was waiting for meaning to arrive, or else a phone call, a visitor from the past, anything to wake her from stupor, anything to suggest bazaars, glasswort, caprioles. She wasn’t fussy.

  Years ago, before my career was ruined by scandal (escorts, drunkenness, hand paralysis), I met Moira frequently for high tea at the Hotel de Anza, when we were touring together and found ourselves in any European or American town that featured one of this famous chain of luxury hotels, noted for its Jugendstil lobby furniture and its exotic finger sandwiches. In any Hotel de Anza we would meet, snack, waltz (if a ländler were playing), plan films (sci-fi or romance), discuss Orfei scandals (always in danger of resurfacing) and acts we might try out together. False gaiety punctured our afternoons, damaged my equilibrium, thrust me farther into the past than I wished to go, back to the bandstand where I first saw Moira dance, a park in Montecatini, remote and unpopular, where a clarinetist and guitarist were playing, and Moira was two-stepping, lost, separated from her father and her early training: she was a replica of Lola Montès, seasoned spectators said, unafraid to go out on a limb. After her debut in the bandstand, Moira became a subject of manifestos, aesthetic dicta circling around the miracle of the Montecatini bandstand and around my involuntary spectatorship, which tastes, when I remember it, of baked meringue. Simple conversation with Moira was a strain; my comments were hesitant, for her reputation dwarfed mine. My hands shook when I stood in the bandstand and saw Moira twirl and shimmy in a modern, unprecedented pavane. (I’d traveled to Montecatini, without Alma’s knowledge or consent, to take healing baths.) I wanted to introduce myself to Moira but didn’t know how. Eventually the crowd dwindled to four elderly men watching her slow rotation, and I summoned the courage to approach her and describe my musical aspirations and how she might become part of them. She was indifferent to my schemes, narrated with old-world stiffness. Her modernity shamed my East Kill persiflage. Later, when we toured together, she forgave me for disappearing to find an escort; such diversions neutralized the minimal sexual charge between us. In all our years of tour, I never made a pass at her: commendable restraint.

  Touring with Moira Orfei, I could use my imagination, enjoy pastiche, and taste brittle candy—slim pink boxes of white-chocolate-coated almonds, sold in Hotel de Anza lobbies. If a Hotel de Anza opened in Montecatini, I’d book a room and wait for Moira’s reappearance. But the Hotel de Anza may never start a franchise there—just as it may never spread its regality to East Kill. And so I must live perpetually distant from the Hotel de Anza, and the moods its lobby allows: Saturn and Mars, frescoed on blue ceilings.

  Moira’s hairstyle, at every stage of her career, has always been the same, which affords her management the ease of not needing new posters to advertise her circus spectaculars. She performs conventional stunts (mastering dangerous animals), but also tableaux that border on the musical, requiring drums, triangles, whistles, castanets, and repetition, always the same sound-effect repeated frequently enough to prod listeners into lachrymose imaginings of earlier times they heard those sounds, produced not by Moira but by women who looked like Moira, whose earrings always seem to be the agent—the activator—of the music-box effect. Tone seems to emerge not out of her percussive bijoux but out of her flesh, her musculature the resonating instrument for sounds paradoxically mechanical, silvery, originating in metallic and man-made substances, like maple armoires, or amber jewelboxes fashioned to resemble human skulls and coconut gourds.

  I was unshaven when I first met Moira in Montecatini, but my three-days’ growth of beard and my sloppy attire didn’t stop her from being polite. She acknowledged that I, male but unexemplary, stood in her vicinity; she performed no obeisance and advanced no hostility. She rotated in a bizarre galliard on the bandstand, and palm trees swayed like warnings; her cloudy skirt seemed grass or beads. Posters around Montecatini advertised a rags-to-riches aspect of her stage persona. I gleaned, from the chatter of four elderly men, watching, that she came from affluent Montecatini’s poor periphery, and that the town fathers, noticing Moira and her talented sisters, assisted Signor Orfei in organizing his daughters into a group act, dramatizing their successful battle against poverty; but I distrust any account of Moira Orfei that does not originate in her own words. Without her language, I am forced to speculate, and I dislike hypotheses. In the Hotel de Anza, whichever Hotel de Anza we chanced to find, during our slow peregrination of a Europe that had limited patience for our effects, she would tell me parts of her story, but they never added up, and, intoxicated, I probed no further. I was grateful that Moira Orfei was endless, and that she never told me the true story of her difficult life.

  Notebook Six

  Tanaquil, hunting for boyfriends in the water district, caused a minor car a
ccident this morning, but she escaped unharmed. She left our totaled Volvo on River Street, to be towed. The smashed car’s connection to water never quite present in the presumptively named water district reminded me of the time that Alma and Tanaquil and I drove to a Finger Lake, parked at the shore, and waded into sludge, whose instability disturbed my sister—she lost balance and fell down. Thirsty now, as I sit in my studio, looking out to ceaseless downpour on Mechanical Street, I recall my many bodies of water, and the harm I have done Tanaquil, and how, in Aigues-Mortes, I might make amends by entrusting Moira Orfei with the secret, and assisting (through dextrous piano playing) her trapeze dramatizations of Tanaquil’s trauma, repealed. How can I convince Moira Orfei to wend her way through Tanaquil’s intricacies, not as “psychotic” (says Alma) as mine, but still deserving respect, contrition, and triage?

  Today, anticipating Aigues-Mortes, I practiced Debussy preludes. To be a worthy customer of local hustlers, I must develop chest and shoulders. Also I must memorize the second volume of Liszt’s Années, because he exploits the keyboard’s mephitic lower register. Aigues-Mortes needs to hear about the bottom. My right hand’s second finger has cracked open at the tip, thanks to Liszt; hustler jism could enter the cut and compromise my immunity. I should program preludes by Debussy, Bach, Chopin, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Griffes, and Gershwin. How will Moira Orfei demonstrate prelude? While wire-walking, she could discuss her friendship with Catherine Deneuve when Catherine was still a Dorléac, not yet famous, her sister, Françoise, not yet dead. Moira is best at fugue.

  Last night Friedman, in his water-district loft, deprived me of orgasm, though I paid full price. He thinks it therapeutic if I don’t conclude. He claims to be part Algerian. After sex, we walked along what passes for a river, and, while we looked into black water, or pseudo-water, he described his literary ambitions. He calls himself “the new Mary McCarthy.” With kohl-circled eyes he resembles a weary Cocteau. His surly speaking voice, low as the left-hand murmurings in Liszt’s Années, attracts customers. Chain-smoking, he bragged that his roman à clef will blow the lid off East Kill’s secrets. Balderdash. I doubt that Friedman has the discipline to be a writer.

  I complained to Friedman about blue balls. Near water, or pseudo-water, Friedman finished me off: he clutched my head, squeezed it, as if wanting to strangle me, but also as if to forgive whatever I did, earlier, to earn his wrath.

  We ended the night food shopping at Lucky. We talked to the good butcher, Vincent Crick. Physically and temperamentally he resembles his brother, Dr. Felix Crick, my internist, with stucco freestanding office on Lucinda Way.

  I visited Eduardo, former escort, at the public hospital, where he was dying, helped into afterlife by his long-suffering mother. (He retired, at thirty, from hustling, and became—under the name Eduardo Ochs—a well-known local painter of still lives; then he got sick and lost his sight.) His mother, in the hospital room, said, “Breathe, Becky.” Incomprehensibly, she called her son “Becky.” “Becky, do you want more drip?” she asked. To ease the way to death, Eduardo sang, wordlessly, with shamanic virtuosity. His unscripted moaning sounded like Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.” He was heading to heaven. I had no part in sending him there.

  He was trying to die in a sideways posture, as Dr. Crick had recommended. The mother soothed his bedsores; he was small and shriveled, like a rag doll on Tanaquil’s bureau once. Dim, the room in which Eduardo met death: I couldn’t see accurately.

  I held Eduardo’s hand, rubbed his shoulders: he shuddered at my insensitive touch. One of his paintings hung on the wall: nature morte of apple, knife, book. While I massaged Eduardo, his mother complained, “Damn it, Dr. Crick, Becky needs a painkiller.” The doctor was absent, so she took out a hypodermic and gave Eduardo a shot. “It’s the strongest morphine in the western hemisphere,” she said. Dr. Crick tolerated sexually profligate patients, but he was chintzy with morphine. Sometimes the family had to supply it.

  When I see Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, we will play cards. I will bring my Tiffany deck. My fellow conservatoire students were card sharps: any cheap amusement to distract them from mastering impossible instruments.

  Moira Orfei’s knees, when she wears a skirt, are attractive and legendary enough to justify any hyperbole, and they explain her ungraspable, tumultuous career. The knee is not a vivid, memorable, or sexually charged portion of anatomy, and yet Moira’s knees establish a compromise formation between plumpness and boniness—a middle ground that makes me jealous: envious not of her skirts, their cut and comeliness, but of the knee’s immodesty beneath the hemline. The knee, when I look at it, or at a picture of it, proves that Moira Orfei has the right to ignore me—and that she is younger and more beautiful than most circus followers realize. Why didn’t her friend Eric Rohmer call his film Moira Orfei’s Knee?

  When Moira is seated, she presses knees together: she respects Montecatini’s conservatism. Before Aigues-Mortes I could use a trip to Montecatini, to stoke up on Orfei moral fiber.

  Moira’s knees are almost as big as her head. Have other suppliants noticed this fact?

  Debase myself before Moira’s knees. Be nervous, so my behavior will be impressively deferential. She could tell me, when we meet, that I lack discipline, but I will distract her by flashing my playing cards and my willingness to deal.

  Every performance must do its humble best to remedy some historical catastrophe. I must figure out whether Jews or other ethnic groups were persecuted in Aigues-Mortes, and then dedicate my performances to them. Perhaps Messiaen wrote a solo piano piece that would be an appropriate elegy for Aigues-Mortes’s war dead. Moira wants our act to honor the memory of her mad father in Lucca, locked in the asylum where the Giardino Botanico meets the ramparts; his hallucinations paled, she said, beside her circus eminence’s tragic magnitude.

  Mechanical Street holds a block party every July fourth. One year, a neighbor boy—Arnie, one of the slummy Sante family—lost a fingertip. The amputation made him more attractive, more sought after, by his entrepreneurial father, for illicit photo shoots: Arnie starred in pictures accompanying his father’s porno novelettes. This year I will stay in Aigues-Mortes until August, despite humidity and mosquitoes; Tanaquil could be the block party’s star, without my overshadowing presence. She has not attended a block party in years, ever since the July fourth she tripped on a curb and split open her lip.

  Alma wastes time on the phone with me; last night she called, fresh from a walk along Buenos Aires’s seedy Calle Necochea. After praising Cantina Rimini’s orchids, she tried to manage, from afar, my technical crisis. A piano note cannot be altered once it has sounded, but Alma has achieved the illusion of vibrato through pedaling, not pressure. I, too, could simulate vibrato, if I followed Alma’s late-night advice from Latin America.

  Alma said, “Have you finished memorizing the Liszt Sonata?” No, I told her; I have also forgotten Au bord d’une source and Gaspard de la nuit, my repertoire’s discomfited core. She mentioned the water district. I said, “My good friend Friedman is twenty-eight.” Well past the age of discretion. Tomorrow night, Alma will play at Planetario Galileo Galilei.

  In early life, I wanted the easy outlet of elegy and murder—first, murder, so, afterward, I could indulge in elegy, my favorite posture.

  I considered murdering Tanaquil because her protuberant genitals, casually revealed in restaurants, cut into my tranquillity. I remember the crack, and her habit, when bored or nervous, of handling it. If she were wearing a skirt, her hand would reach toward the hidden place. These genital explorations reinforced Alma’s prominence; Tanaquil, pressing a palm against her crotch, was playing a duet with Alma’s fame. I considered murdering my sister—ridding us of the embarrassment. I never mentioned my plan or pushed it to fruition. Simple eye contact between Thom and me (Father I never called him) sufficed to communicate my plots.

  As a child, I held Thom up as my model prisoner and model jailor. In conversation he threw around the words “Nobel Prize” a
nd “suicide,” as if the concepts were twins; no one we knew had committed suicide or won a Nobel Prize. His vocations were vague, plural, promiscuous: he had been the president of a chain of music conservatories; a rare book dealer; a forger of paintings and documents (portraits, passports, treaties, star autographs); a financial consultant to lesser-known French vineyards. His death was mysterious. We experimented with at least five versions. None pleased Alma, who wanted to homogenize them into a single, graspable truth. He drowned off La Spezia; he committed suicide in Rome; he died of exposure, homeless in Bryn Mawr; he died of autoerotic asphyxiation in our house on Mechanical Street; he died as a mercenary, fighting in Egypt. No tale of his death had the monopoly on veracity. Pleased by his posthumousness, we watched rumors multiply. I don’t want a conventional death; I’d like to split my demise into a dozen explanations. Unsteady, Alma drifted toward South America because she never knew exactly how Thom died; if she could fix the facts of his termination, she might have been content to remain on Mechanical Street. She dislikes East Kill because Thom’s ancestors, dairy farmers, founded it.

  Thom never met Moira Orfei; he died before she entered my life. He might not have appreciated her—or he might have claimed her as his investment, his discovery. I have failed to avoid mentioning my father. Thoughts of long-ago events in Montecatini—revolutions that provoked Moira’s repeated descents into circus danger—are my only protection against Thom’s return into this still life’s expanding frame.