Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Notebook Seven

  I visited Matilda in Boston yesterday, and when I entered her body, she complained of pain. Though the dryness wasn’t my fault, I saw its piano aspects. Alma, if she were here in the Clarendon Street bedroom, would understand. Events derive meaning from adjacencies. No vaginal dryness or penile soreness is disconnected from a fate’s other compartments. The Mangroves do not suffer “dissociation of sensibility.” For us, a spiral staircase links every incident to forgotten dungeons.

  I slept upstairs in Matilda’s house, the bedroom next to hers, my door unlocked. She couldn’t explain why my pillow was blood-soaked this morning. Nor could Dr. Crick. I telephoned him from Matilda’s townhouse, and he hesitated to diagnose. I described her nonviolent core: its pinkness, its immunity. Dr. Crick told me to stop worrying—his usual response, whenever I mention bleeding. Avoiding direct words on my condition, he told me to study Exodus for news about human need and wilderness. His touchstones, like mine, are Semitic.

  When I returned to East Kill, I gave blood and enjoyed a battery of medical tests, including my year’s second colonoscopy. Dr. Crick saw nothing immediately wrong, though he had a troubled look on his face after delving. Maybe I was so “down under” from Valium that I am an inaccurate judge. He described my throat’s laceration and swelling. An infected cut—red, throbbing, on my right hand’s index finger—bears on Aigues-Mortes.

  Today, weak from colonoscopy, I can’t begin to narrate Alma Guadalquivar’s Teatro Colón debut or to describe the fourth-grade cloakroom where my teacher Mrs. Retalbo kept her fur coat, a wrap like the one Moira Orfei wore when she brought her Bengal tiger act to Göteborg.

  Moira Orfei is not my muse. We can’t pinpoint what she is. Nor need we limit her claim. She lives far from East Kill and yet governs my water-district afternoons. Of my escorts she never gets wind; her image sends me to their embraces. Under her spell, I grow afraid of “all,” of totality: I dread summarizing my erotic life and thus ending it.

  Moira Orfei could leave me adrift and what comfort would remain? No engagements in my calendar, except a few Derva Nile benefits. Should I commit suicide before May and leave dramatic word for Moira? Stop exaggerating!

  Perhaps an Orfei sister’s illness explains Moira’s silence—not Chloe, but one of the many other sisters, all jealous of Moira, their perseverations never attaining circus pinnacle. Perhaps Moira is weighing a marriage proposal, or enjoying a religious retreat in Castelfranco. Does my name mean nothing to Tuscan audiences? Her fan clubs have not elected me president. I don’t want her to think me demanding or over-attentive.

  I remember waiting, outside Hotel de Anza in Barcelona, for Moira Orfei to appear; waiting, outside Hotel de Anza in San Sebastian, and outside Hotel de Anza in Collioure . . .

  In Aigues-Mortes I shall play Ravel’s complete works for solo piano, with Moira’s trapeze dance as accompaniment—or Liszt’s Années vol. 2 (Italie) with Moira’s penseroso act, involving flame, swords, lions, hoops, jewels, stillness, chains, obedience, memories of Signor Orfei’s incarceration. Her act is elegiac and doloroso, like Hadrian’s Villa becomes, even without visitors, after she has performed in its vicinity, or like Villa d’Este becomes when she repeats her performance there, despite tour buses, despite Orfei intermarriage with descendants of Liszt’s adulterous mistress, Marie d’Agoult. My busy practice schedule leaves no time to explain the Orfei/d’Agoult calamity. Moira alone has the right to mourn Alphonsine Duplessis, the original consumptive Lady of the Camellias. Moira has the monopoly on remembering Alphonsine, because of their physical resemblance, and because Great-Great-Grandmother Orfei attended the Duplessis salon, or so Moira told me, in Atrani, at the Hotel de Anza, after she led cream ponies on Grand Parade through Positano.

  I’m drinking schnapps at Jeffrey’s Diner. Friedman enters, wearing sweats, tank top, and sneakers, despite snow: heavy late-autumn sludge, paralyzing the roads. Interrupting my meditations, he sits in my booth; soon I must put down my pen. How can I concentrate on Moira’s resemblance to Alphonsine, and on my pipeline to Alphonsine’s grave in Montmartre Cemetery, via my upcoming performances with Moira, when rude, swarthy Friedman has ruptured my hemisphere? He is multi-ethnic, an untraceable hybrid—Palestinian, Algerian, Lebanese? His forehead has permanent welts, as if someone dropped weights on his skull when he was a baby. The men I love are dented.

  Pleasant paid sex with Friedman, regular’s rate. After hamburgers at Jeffrey’s, we went to his loft. I insisted he shower. He is a criminal with a rancid canola oil smell on his person; his attractiveness dismantles my homely attainments. Like many hirsute Levantines, he naturally produces a nutty odor (chickpeas?). As he entered me, I admitted my desire to make a Super 8 film of him, in jockstrap, on the Cross: I have embarked on a series of films, Mechanical Street Cinema, using the Bolex that Thom bought for Alma, on Swiss tour, when she felt a sudden hunger to record the mountains surrounding her greatness. The film I made of nude Lu playing piano is my best so far. In it, she looks punishably diligent, small. Tiny people, like Lu, incite my pity, my wish to bar them from concert stages, and my wish to film them. Discussion of Mechanical Street Cinema has no place in the Aigues-Mortes notebooks. Watch me fail at nudity and music, my twin vocations.

  Another date with Friedman, at his raw loft: regular’s rate, three hours. The more I think about Aigues-Mortes, the more I want to hire Friedman. His treatment bruises my rear, a jiffy pak. He kisses with sloppy gaping mouth and doesn’t compliment my body. Perhaps he hates it, considers it just a john’s. I do Alma an injustice to fetishize Friedman’s secondary sexual characteristics. She will be pleased that I am mastering Ives’s Concord Sonata for Aigues-Mortes. As a teen, Friedman gave tours of Walden Pond and Amherst. This afternoon, caressing his calves, I decided that I have evaded my true work, which is to lie in bed with an escort while contemplating earlier naked bodies I’ve known, and explaining past nude nuances to the present hour’s companion.

  After sex, we walked through the water district and failed to ascertain its borders. Its rowhouses are too near pseudo-water; walking on the gutter, between sidewalk and river, or what passes for a river, I lost gravity (did Friedman push me?) and almost fell in.

  Although elevated trains have been dismantled, our colonial house still remembers their vibrations; rafters squeak and shake. Now I hear a passing train, perhaps carrying Alma home. It brakes at a near station. But this vehicle no longer exists.

  It may be too late to read Nietzsche, as I had meant to, in my youth, when Alma told me that the greater part of a pianist’s education took place away from the keyboard, among books and “the people,” her euphemism for escorts and my other colleagues in the water district, competitive as conservatoire. I could live nowhere but here, in East Kill, the epicenter of the musical uncanny. Friedman is the first hustler whose body I have managed to memorize—as opposed to Marco, Ransom, Siddhartha, Carlos, Stefan, and Friedman’s other cronies, whose names and muscles I forget, despite this documentation.

  An early Mangrove, first settler of East Kill, and his euphony-seeking successors, lived in our Mechanical Street house. Progenitor portraits line our upstairs halls. My studio walls are covered with posters of Moira Orfei’s Italian, French, and Spanish appearances, her hairstyle and maquillage the same in every picture, her circus inventiveness an antidote to Mangrove pomposity, ancestral infatuations dooming me to stay in a town that tolerated my Totentanz concert but otherwise ignores me.

  Listeners may not understand why I resort to a teacher when I am a respected pedagogue and pianist, best known for spectacular failure in Europe, fits of mental absence during performances.

  Advanced, I turn to Fabio Abruzzi to heal my crippled pianism, formerly aristocratic. He helps me forget our infection, the virus given me, or so I reconstruct, at Palmer House, a hotel about which I have no strong feelings. I would not wish to have been infected at a Hotel de Anza.

  Fabio’s penis, its mushroom head, frightened me today, a
fter I played the Liszt B Minor Sonata, unmemorized. I have, at times, enjoyed Fabio’s size; this afternoon I almost choked. He tries to purge my musical faults, though it is improbable that I, Alma Mangrove’s son, a recording artist in my own right, can find a master capable of curing my pathology. For indeed I suffer a malady, an infection of pianistic equipment; spasms and staggerings intrude on my Alma-acquired (genetic?) keyboard athleticism, my way of negotiating leaps, and my ability to curve fingers for incisive sound. If the trance that holds my frail career in place should falter, I will resort to theft, assault—any felony to regain propulsive phrasing, sharp rhythm, messa di voce.

  My oldest student, Rabbi Gershon, eighty years old, will want embraces after tomorrow’s lesson; the bearded sot leaves his fly unzipped.

  When Anita and I were first married, I kept a series of notebooks about our sex life. She read and then destroyed them: left them out on the curb for the garbageman. I was relieved to see the notebooks exterminated.

  I hired a nineteen-year-old boy named Enrico, together with Friedman: work partners. An extra $150 for the younger. I said to the kid, “I wish it were twenty years ago,” and he, misinterpreting, pushed harder, as if he were angling inwardly for some favor—some description—I had no power to reward. I wish I had a photo of Enrico to paste in this notebook. What good would the photo do? Prove Enrico. Help me remember Enrico. Every escort lasts in my memory for one day only. I dread the waylessness between escort appointments. “Waylessness” is Alma’s word. If I think about Buenos Aires, the notebooks will shut down.

  On my behalf, Anita made telephone inquiries about flights to France. I will fly into Nice, then hire a chauffeur for the drive to Aigues-Mortes. I fear my wife’s intentions. She must harbor malign reasons for remaining my buffer. Perhaps she plans eventually to deplete me, turning me into a grisaille automaton, empty as Alma becomes in conversation when home from tour.

  All I care about, tonight, is Géricault’s Raft of the “Medusa,” for Janson’s History of Art is Alma’s toilet reading. In her absence, I take the liberty of using her bathroom, to be near her pipes and porcelain. I am not otherwise permitted in that sanctum. I prefer it to my own, and have admired it since adolescence, when I discovered that her superiority extended from piano to hygiene. She has more fears than I do. Mine are local; hers are international. Her nervousness has spread a mesh—a net veil—over proximate emblems: dying elms, uneven bricks, fog, TV antenna on the grim Sante family’s roof, and the curve in the crook of Mechanical Street, where our block intersects itself, greets its own aborted destination.

  Notebook Eight

  Anita’s stepfather died. No melodrama. Mr. Wax, a postal employee with high cholesterol and prostate cancer, was due for death—no point in keening a foreknown demise. Anita took the news in stride. She’d not spent enough time with Sam Wax to develop a more than perfunctory affection. Stoic Mrs. Wax said her day would go on just the same, despite Sam’s passing. She repeated, “I remember, Anita, when you were little, you’d play on the front lawn and watch the traffic. I wasn’t afraid you’d run into the street. You were happy to wave at the cars and eat your applesauce and fritters.” I caught the mourning undertone. Mrs. Wax has a God-fearing desire to revise Anita’s memories, to erase Anita’s early love of accidents and self-wounding.

  Mr. Wax will be buried tomorrow in Albany. Grief is not my forte. After the funeral, I may look up DeSantos, an Iranian-Cuban escort I’ve been e-mailing. His hips, on the web page, look wide enough to bear a child; his naïve, cheese-like face appeals.

  Why doesn’t Anita divorce me? She needs my “butter” holdings, my ancestral dairy sinecure. Maybe she loves my unnaturally large skull, like Swinburne’s, nearly an anatomical monstrosity.

  Why do I stay married to Anita? My degraded loyalty to what I already know; my addiction to the habitual, the disappointing.

  Montecatini’s old-world lady-of-the-evening glamour outshines Anita’s round-faced, smirking modernity.

  At the funeral, no Wax wept. Anita’s sister, Astrud, stayed away in Taipei. We haven’t seen her since our wedding. Her photo remains on our dining-room hutch. When, beneath the Guadalquivar chandelier, I sit, panicked that suppertime has arrived but I’ve not yet visited the water district to see the sun set over tawdry cat-houses and fish-houses, this photo of Astrud and her burgundy facial birthmark, shaped like Newfoundland, prognosticates my errors. Her nevis, a stormcloud, blocks the sun and casts aspersions on my idiotic heliotropism.

  Hot hour, after the Albany funeral, with DeSantos. He has hairy thighs, and Jung’s Man and His Symbols on his coffee-table. As we split an orange together in bed, I remembered the fresh, illegal oranges that Alma smuggled back from Andalusian tour, when I was a child. My father praised their acidity. I hope DeSantos won’t jinx my potential Liszt grandeur in Aigues-Mortes, where I’d hoped to reverse the hold of the fetish, the bought ass.

  Yesterday while checking out Luigi Nono scores at the East Kill Conservatory library I saw my friend Matteo. Formerly a hustler, currently a music librarian, he uses a cane. He shelves, alphabetizes: light tasks. His ailments include shingles, spinal deformation, and hallucinations—due to pills his mother took while pregnant. Because of his diseased, aristocratic mien, my imagination, in his presence, disembarks; I want suddenly to press his sick face against the Xerox machine’s plate glass and press the copy button. He reminds me of Guadalquivar cousins I knew as a child, frail refugees from Catalan purges. Seeking jobs and renown, my cousins bootlessly congregated around Alma in East Kill.

  Matteo told me that in a few days his girlfriend Solly will become his boyfriend: she is a pre-op transsexual. Matteo considers the operation an “upgrade.” He described how a doctor creates a penis from scratch. He showed me a photo of Solly. She looked as if she’d been hit by a truck, her face then reassembled.

  As a hustler, Matteo was a nitpicker, doing demolition work on my body; during sex, he ignored context and periphery, harped on a detail (abdomen, buttock, nipple), and said nasty things about it.

  I met a percussionist today in a Camera Baths cubicle. He had a large, curved erection, but his chest hair did not conform to my preferred Louisiana pattern: it resembled Rhode Island.

  “I miss melody,” he said. Drums precluded lyricism. He knew I was a bathhouse regular, but he had never succeeded in tricking with me. I apologized for avoiding him. My sexual appetites are irregular, and not within my control. He told me that other percussionists agreed with my self-diagnosis; my hasty arousal, its tendency to happen in any milieu, however inappropriate, led locals to dismiss me as a snobbish Casanova. After 69, I told him my theory of spasmodic erotics, and mentioned (imprudently) my plans for Aigues-Mortes, including a possible recital focused on the spasm. In my studio archive I already have a sizeable “spasm” dossier. The percussionist came, four spurts. The moment a trick comes, I detest him, though I pretend to feel inexpressible love.

  “Parallel fifths are out of the question in proper voice leading,” I told Anita, over swordfish and potato salad. I love inculcation—receiving knowledge, passing it on. After dinner I made an index of Lisztian aspects I must convey—verbally or musically—in Aigues-Mortes, and recited it to Alma, on the phone from Buenos Aires, before bedtime. She described her concert at El Viejo Almacén, her favorite tanguería, and said, “Your eloquence is a fetishist’s game of pick-up-sticks.”

  I should program Mompou’s Suburbis, including Moira Orfei’s favorite piece about the little blind girl. If I cannot mention masturbation in my pre-concert lecture, then I will cancel Aigues-Mortes. Moira won’t mind my adolescent explicitness. Think of the rushed sex she’s witnessed in Montecatini alleys. She stands a head taller than I, and has a football player’s collarbone. She favors off-the-shoulder gowns. Real or fake jewels spangled across the chest define her as Italy’s first treasure, the only hope of contemporary circus art. She hopes not to bungle her responsibilities. Next spring in Italy, her new TV show will air; this low-bud
get revue hour will be directed by a former husband, who tends to film her in unflattering poses. Her Medean intensity compensates for his sloppy eye. On her show, she may interview me—to cement my shaky hold on Italian audiences. I will wear my celery velvet suit and will summarize my method in five minutes, without digressions.

  I rediscovered my Moira Orfei scrapbook, in the upstairs closet, under a pink wool blanket (Alma’s gift from Costa Rica). I hid the scrapbook a year ago, so its messages wouldn’t distract me—photos of tall Moira and her shorter sisters, lined up outside their hut in Montecatini’s ghetto, Moira’s dimples evident. My passion for Moira is the latest and most lasting in a series of what Alma calls “drunken episodes without the drink.”

  I am no longer a child—my primary regret. And yet I don’t envy Moira’s early years in Montecatini, competing for food and attention with her sisters. Eventually she triumphed over them: at town fiestas, her equestrian stunt, harness strung with fairy lights, thrilled vigilantes, who later committed her father to the asylum.

  On the books for Aigues-Mortes is an elegy program featuring Ravel’s Tombeau for soldiers slain in World War I. God knows if amid Moira’s farrago of fakeries, she can find a funeral posture. She is more celebrated for giddiness than for grief, her dead mother notwithstanding. But every artist is an elegist, and Moira will concoct jujitsu pliés to suit artificial Ravel’s rigaudon and forlane. Perhaps she will at last articulate what she felt when her mother died.

  Everyone knew about Mrs. Orfei’s weak heart, and prevented her from circusgoing, its excitement producing palpitations. But, un bel dì, she attended and—watching Moira pirouette with a tiger and a flaming hoop—suffered a coronary. At least Moira believed the autopsy’s hypothesis of cause-and-effect. She told me this tale in the Hotel de Anza lobby, Marseille, as we sat recovering from a less-than-stellar co-performance. (I had suffered a memory lapse during Miroirs.) “Mother loved circus,” Moira said. “No one in Italy felt it more deeply.” If Mrs. Orfei had died watching her daughter perform, how could Moira renounce the ring?