Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Describe the water district. The notebooks must prove its value. But I cannot anatomize a place whose beauty lies in resistance to description. (That is an excuse.) Could I sketch the harbors, the intimations of a port, the inlets and false streams, the real streams confusing the eye? Could I reproduce the canals, the repetitions of Venice, the almost lake, the pond and bridge, the falls, the waterfalls, the trysts beside the almost lake, the paradise of ferns in summer below the falls, the small bridge over the canal, near the highway, forbidding pedestrians? East Kill will not accommodate a flâneur unless I describe him.

  And where does Mechanical Street fit in? Can I describe its distance, mercurial and shifting, from the water district? Carnival nights, the water district forbids foot traffic. How many times have I stood on the bandstand stage, looking out to the falls, when carnival has been canceled but I am hoping it will be reinstated simply because I am waiting there, a fool, below a Fourth of July banner not present in November?

  Once, years ago, when I walked with Alma along the water district’s dangerously uneven brick pavements, toward a carnival that vanished as our longing for its presence intensified, she tripped, and nearly broke her ankle.

  On the water district’s border, the cemetery contains our nest of Mangrove family graves, untended stones defaced by the musically disenfranchised.

  Notebook Ten

  Letter from Moira Orfei (translated from the Italian)

  Dear Signor Mangrove,

  Until now I have been too fatigued to answer your letters. Ordinary American lingo can’t measure my exhaustion. Chloe still can’t comprehend it. My needs and destiny exceed yours. I command more land, more syntax. Methodical, I practice stricter forms. You failed to synchronize your music with my equestrian acts, and yet nostalgically I recall our bizarre wanderings through Les Baux, when circus art—historically speaking—was just getting off the ground. I won’t forget Viterbo, where you coughed, sneezed, swelled, pustulated . . . Chloe called it puerperal fever.

  Bernard Herrmann (“Vertigo” and other treasures) composed for me his finest secret scores; I danced to his “Fantasia in Lilac” (for toy piano and orchestra), and managed animals and flames while Gaby Casadesus played, my movements influenced by Satie and Cage, family sycophants, whose philosophies gave Orfei routines a lazy, arctic purity. Remember Mont Blanc’s theater-in-the-round? That night, you played toy piano, and I forgave you for exaggerating your importance—overstating your imbrication in my sphere, which is “vast as opera,” as your beloved muse once said, in her cups.

  I am tired of ecstasies I produce in others and ecstasies I must manufacture in the Villa d’Este manner as if I were to Villa d’Este born rather than to the hut (reproduced the world over) on Montecatini’s outskirts, far from the ducal palace where I now apparently belong.

  The moat between East Kill and Montecatini protects me from your infection, your nasal disorder, your gastric distress (is it not prevalent among pianists?), your nightly manias, your miscomprehension of what you call “passing tones,” pedantically needing to find le mot juste for every damn shade of your feelings, especially your devotion to me, moving between minor and major key sans detente, like two rivers, the Jura and the Rhine, meeting, when they have no right. Your head-on collisions have led to trouble before, as my splendor endangers me each spring at Auberge La Fontaine, Venasque, where annually I give an all-night demonstration and broadcast it internationally, though in Russia my goose is cooked because I obstruct Galina Vishnevskaya’s arrangement with the Bolshoi to avoid all Orfei-isms.

  I am usually silent, but tonight I feel histrionic, in memory of Father and Mother, their size, how they got me started in things circus. You plan to send us on tour despite my fear of trains and buses, of terminals and loitering sleaze, and despite my wish to stay home, family goats and rabbits wandering our palace as if it were a dirty hut. In Montecatini’s piazza I do a mini-circus, gratis, without clearance from town fathers.

  “Rachmaninoff is not music,” you told me Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove insisted when you presented “Moments Musicaux” at your first recital, but together in Aix we proved his saturnine worth. How large and tulip-like you have convinced me to be in Napoli, Orta, Ischia, where Auden watched me and said not a word: I had silenced him as only Martha Graham had done before, observers claimed. Not that Alma Guadalquivar, as Auden referred to her, refusing the last name, would have noticed my performance’s distinction or thought it deserved your accompaniment. Perhaps my medical crises (dare I specify?) make me a fit companion for you, whose physical condition is subject to alterations, like a gown changed at the last minute for the Black and White Ball. Italy’s recent elections push us close to fascism; Chloe seeks to keep Orfei blood unpolluted by your sexual indulgence’s “passing tones.” I too suffer “sins of the fathers,” but I’ve stayed uninfected, medically normal. Spleen, liver, kidney, uterus, lungs, heart, intestines, et al., are there, and shall always, pray God, remain, but I won’t mention them, not in a letter I instruct you to burn after reading, lest you transcribe it in a notebook meant to keep my nonchalance at bay.

  These Italian subtleties, old as Petrarch, grow labored in translation: that is the problem when an artist enlarges her sphere and communicates to the masses. Speaking of you, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli once told me, “Leave well enough alone”—let your aesthetic mistakes remain unpersecuted; they will turn into my circus terms soon enough. That has always been the Orfei salvation: I can convert any painful subject into circus. Our vocation allows us to travel across Europe in caravans and disguises and confuse everyone we behold by charging a small admission fee and making noise and sending sparklers into the air over the centro storico where medieval streets have seen the persecution of Jews and other outcasts, pogroms and exclusions now reversed through circus generosities. Critics call me, after Scriabin, a “poem of ecstasy,” because I let you illustrate my circus arguments by playing, in piano reduction, that opulent manifesto. Without your musical garnish I deserve ecstatic title, for I am always out-of-place, even when I simulate situation.

  Fan letters reach my Montecatini winter palace, hothouse through which I wander at will, despite heavy circus responsibilities; brooding, I evade tasks and verify what Father told me when he died, a fable that translated thermodynamics into synesthetic atmospheres that Walter Pater praised. Every cream pony I climb upon to dance exacts revenge against Fascists who toppled Father’s sanity.

  Aspirin, taken all day, has not lowered my temperature, 103 degrees. Chloe will lay cold compresses on my face and monitor my pulse so that Aigues-Mortes might come to pass; though I have avoided you for weeks—months—the original dream of a reunion remains a succulence to contemplate. I could concentrate and plan Aigues-Mortes if your letters were not driving me mad; even my visit to Chamonix gave me the shakes. If you lead our Aigues-Mortes demonstration toward Liszt’s Swiss “Années de pelèrinage” I may lose Languedoc credibility; and yet, seeing gentians bloom outside my villa in pointless profusion, I understand the repertoire manias that drove you, five years ago, to a Viterbo asylum where electroshock achieved what my mere words could not.

  You have told me, with unwanted explicitness, about the “water district.” How it must drain your manhood! Montecatini has no equivalent ghetto. Nervous about civil war. Chloe stimulates my flesh with stiff brushes.

  I’m no Marie d’Agoult. Perhaps Liszt won’t ruin me in Aigues-Mortes eyes. Exhausted from tour, I visited cemeteries in nearby Collodi—Pinocchio’s town—and Pescia, where I prayed to the della Robbia Madonna. Respect my fatigue, if you wish to attain circus. Chloe offers whiskey to calm my fevered brain and cold rosemary compresses to clear my passages. Listen to me inhale effluvia. Are you, in East Kill, inhaling fumes self-formed? If you think I don’t exist, think twice.

  Factually,

  Moira Orfei

  Notebook Eleven

  It’s time to list what I must accomplish:

  play Messiaen’s “Les sons impa
lpables du rêve . . .” in Aigues-Mortes;

  research my ancestry, to clear up mysteries (am I a Sephardic Jew, not a Roman Catholic?);

  visit the graves of Moira Orfei’s parents;

  get a colonic;

  discuss drug side-effects with Dr. Crick;

  begin planning the Moira Orfei Living Museum;

  buy a building in the water district and convert it into the Moira Orfei Living Museum;

  clarify Moira’s exact relation to Alphonsine Duplessis and Marie d’Agoult;

  mark up my scores more legibly and donate them to the Moira Orfei Living Museum;

  ask Moira Orfei if she will mind being a museum and if she will contribute memorabilia;

  get a lawyer to draft a contract with Moira Orfei so she will not sue the museum for breach of copyright;

  ask Richard Avedon if we can use his photos of Moira Orfei as permanent installations;

  ask Alma to be honorary president of the Moira Orfei Living Museum board of directors;

  make sure that Alma’s duties are merely symbolic, so that she won’t interfere with day-to-day museum operations;

  choose one composer (Ravel? Poulenc? Scriabin? Liszt?) to preside over the Aigues-Mortes recitals, and quickly communicate the decision to Moira so she can begin coordinating her act (not that she needs much advance warning, so spontaneous are her stunts);

  figure out the Orfei family reaction to my Aigues-Mortes plans (does the Orfei clan object to me?);

  stop communicating with Chloe Orfei;

  clarify my link to circus arts;

  answer Moira Orfei’s letter.

  Anita, vacuuming, found, bedside, a pile of my shaved body hair. I had forgotten to transport the fuzz to the kitchen wastebasket. Now she realizes my recidivism: I’ve fallen into the emasculation habit again. The hair pile upset Tanaquil, too, when Anita told her. Smooth, I lose household authority, and Tanaquil asserts her hairlessness as an antiphonal superiority, according veto power. Body hair is sadism’s origin: we shave it off only to see it regrow in cursed, Esau profusion.

  Does Tanaquil hold my childhood nudity against me? She wanted it, a warlock diversion from Alma’s reign. At the time, Tanaquil seemed indifferent to my penis, and yet I let her witness its frothy glee. Not content with hallway gymnastics, I admitted her to my coded bedroom; wanting to be an ideal brother, a musician, I swallowed every rule and made myself giggly on her behalf.

  Visit to Matilda a failure. It took me one minute to come. She said, however, that she liked my new shaved status—legs smooth as Alma’s. In youth, the Guadalquivar sisters traveled the southern hemisphere together, led by Ricardo and Gertrude—inattentive, cultured vagabonds, locking the girls in the hotel room at night. Ask Alma: did Ricardo Guadalquivar’s phallus resemble ginger root?

  Alma, home from tour, yelled at Tanaquil, who spends every night reading on her rocking chair. Now she is tackling Return of the Native. Last year was Tess of the D’Urbervilles. One book a year, like a Los Angeleno. She intravenously absorbs the text, a substitute for dance hall and gin bottle. Contentious, rheumy-eyed, we Mangroves amend the Bill of Rights to add new luxuries. Tanaquil has a chronically bloody nose. In her bathroom, I see piles of incarnadine washcloths, sinkside. The last housekeeper, Mrs. Freundlich, nearly deaf, left Lemon Pledge stains on the grand pianos, though I told her not to shine them. My unlikeable, snobbish intolerance for disorder: where went Marxism?

  After my all-Poulenc concert in Trinity Church, the only house of worship in the water district, Dr. Crick introduced me to his new patient, Frieda, with fuchsia lips, mahogany triangular eyeglasses, and a kinked nimbus of white hair. She kissed me (“congratulations!”) on the lips, and now I am sick. Dr. Crick calls her “Patient Zero.” She is single-handedly responsible for carrying new contagion from East Hampton to East Kill. A virus on top of another virus is exponentially more lethal. I will lock myself in the house rather than risk running into Frieda on the street.

  I sucked off Friedman in the Fortune 500 sauna and then visited Alma’s birthplace, a white Georgian mansion on East Kill’s outskirts, near torn-down-railroad-station traces. Will Richard Avedon take my picture for Aigues-Mortes? Figure out repertoire. A night of minor American modern composers? Aigues-Mortes, a puny town, has a “major” complex—it despises its own smallness and longs for the big time. When Moira Orfei visited me at the Viterbo asylum, we talked career disparity—wounding, to compare one’s own small accomplishments to someone else’s monuments. Viterbo asylum physicians taperecorded the conversation for future diagnostic study. Moira Orfei asked if I had an odor problem.

  Mid-colonic this morning at Dr. Crick’s stucco office I smoked pot and came up with multiple recital (rectal?) programs. Afterward, I read in the East Kill Times about an Albany maniac who’d murdered five underage male hustlers. Pictures ran: I recognized none of the victims. I never dip below the age of consent. I should transcribe in the Aigues-Mortes notebooks my letters to Moira Orfei, for the sake of scholarly thoroughness.

  I want to screen Moira Orfei’s films in a specially constructed pavilion in Aigues-Mortes. Later tonight if I have the energy I’ll list all her movies, including the ones she made with Chloe, before the boating accident, on Lago d’Orta, that forced Chloe’s premature retirement from the screen. I am tired of Moira Orfei’s filmwork not getting the international attention it deserves, and I am also afraid (to quote Alma) that I am “using up my talent.”

  I will reserve a room at the Hotel de Anza in St. Malo, for Moira and myself, in April, so we might repair our fractured relationship before Aigues-Mortes tests it. The friendship fell apart after the Viterbo institutionalization; returning to East Kill, I stopped communicating with Moira Orfei, on Dr. Crick’s orders. Her presence produced altered “ideation.” That I preferred the new ideation did not dissuade him from banning further contact with my glossolalia’s catalyst.

  In Aigues-Mortes, I plan to revere the passing tone at the expense of the central pitch; to break every chord; to speed up and slow down unpredictably; to emphasize each phrase’s unhappy isolation from its neighbor.

  Alma asked, “What will Moira Orfei perform, and what repertoire will you bring to bear on the salty Bouches-du-Rhône?” My answer was evasive. Every local wants too much of my body. Patient Zero telephoned. She nattered on about Poulenc. Why did Dr. Crick give her my number? I want to hide from the world, but also I want to rule it.

  When sleepy Friedman came in my mouth I felt his testicles rise, reneging on their long-ago descent. I thought of the deep, unexplored gorges surrounding East Kill, and I remembered my father’s memorial service, cold cuts and rolls served afterward in the church basement, momentary sympathy from Miss Kash, Sunday School instructress who preached hospitality: she said that on Easter and other festival days we must open our homes to indigent and ill strangers. The Santes offered no sympathy after my father died. He’d accused them of anti-Semitism, because they tried to prevent a Jew—the psychic, Mrs. Clemovitz—from moving onto Mechanical Street and opening a business that, Mr. Sante claimed, fed the Zionist mafia. I doubt that fortunetelling and Zionism interleave. Mrs. Clemovitz does no harm. She predicted Aigues-Mortes. In her Jewish crystal ball she saw my fate.

  I enjoy a near-constant erection, even when I play piano, in private or in public. Cock has no destination, nowhere to land, and so I resort to silence, imitating my father the night before his death, when (according to Alma) he withdrew money from his savings account and deposited it God knows where, in what secret illegal Continental bank—Marseille, Toulon, Portbou, Girona, Collioure, Bandol, Banyuls-sur-Mer, Viterbo?

  We survivors went out for a pizza the night after his memorial. (The next morning Alma departed on tour to Guam, Tokyo, and Okinawa.) I probably had an erection (why not?), and I may have discussed it with Alma, who liked information about bodily eruption; in our pizzeria booth, Tanaquil and I giggled about the unsightly waitress, who had a third-eye pimple on her forehead. The waitress’s head wig
gled separately from the body as she walked: “head walk.” (Ladies whose heads have independent ambulatory motion are head walkers. Mrs. Sante, across the street, has head walk. Moira Orfei has head walk, a superior variety. It is easiest to head walk if you are wearing high heels.) We’d ordered pepperoni. No lights in the pizzeria. I shouldn’t seek order and counterpoint in every historical event. Why explain pizza after memorial?

  Alma wants me to seek a new physician; she calls Dr. Crick a quack, and threatens to sue for malpractice. Dr. Crick, fawning, heals. He avoids my rectum. I have a disease he calls incurable, though infinitely manageable. He choreographs it so deftly, I hardly need describe its symptoms in the notebooks, which would fall apart if I placed too heavy a medical emphasis.

  It is possible, Alma has often said, for a person of musical gift to run out of ability—to see it vanish. My talent fled when I met Moira Orfei; it soon returned, but it disappears frequently, and I have no control over its exit. It dispersed when I met Moira because I realized her magnificence was larger than I could accompany or narrate with my music, though the contract required me to tranquilize her circus virtuosity’s violence.