Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  I am Alma’s emissary on the world’s stages. No: only in cities like Aigues-Mortes, in which she refuses to perform because she is too choleric and they are too insignificant. She will appear in Marseille but not in Aigues-Mortes; in Cannes she adores a light she calls “reverberant”—Mediterranean sun frescoing the overpraised Hôtel Martinez. Château d’If’s darkness stimulates her. She lacks visual acuity. My father was attuned to retinal stimulation. He described Alma playing Schumann’s “Abegg” Variations in São Paolo—her voile gown’s nectarine folds, her hands indicating dictatorial semi-circles over the keys. Thom’s death is not yet, to me, a fixed event: it shimmers in February. Three months have elapsed since I began these notebooks. Three more months to go, before Aigues-Mortes. I should look for Thom’s death certificate, among Alma’s papers.

  Alma called from South America: she asked me to ghostwrite Alma Guadalquivar Mangrove’s Easy Cookbook. I said I was too busy preparing Aigues-Mortes. She asked if the Aigues-Mortes recitals were family events. I said their content was appropriate for all ages. She asked if they were scatological. I said they included romantic repertoire. She asked if I’ve begun learning the Diabelli Variations. I said that I had given up all hope of ever playing Beethoven again, after what happened to my Hammerklavier in San Martino di Castrozza.

  Tanaquil and I argued in the upstairs hallway between our bedrooms. She said, “How can I get a job when I need fourteen hours of sleep a night?” I suggested she do telephone solicitations. I reminded her that I hit puberty early. She said that Alma loved a precocious maturation. I said that my puberty had a tornado’s charm. Under the green blanket, hand on cock, I cut an adventurer’s path through the world by dispensing with it, undoing it with each stroke; jerking off, I canceled reality, bore holes in it, drove it into hiding. Tanaquil once inscribed a litany of complaints in acrylics on her bedroom walls. Alma instructed me to paint the walls blue, covering up what Tanaquil had written. These simple anecdotes wish you to behave.

  To repeat the Palmer House infection moment, I offered my body to Fabio yesterday. I played the five Fauré impromptus and then lay naked under Fabio’s covers, below his photo of the great Egon Petri’s hands. Fabio sat on the quilt. Once he saved a minor composer’s diary from the conservatory library fire. My thumbs—the hand’s thick, stupid fulcrums—have grown lazy. Fabio took off his running togs and boxers and lay beside me. His nudity never fatigues me. His lean body means education to me when it does not mean infection. My finger in his ass was a sign of uneducated, froward haste. My penis felt detached from proceedings it had instigated. When his fingers tugged listlessly at the root, I thought, “Is Teacher faking it?” He pushed the balls upward, to clear room around the rear; this renegotiation of testicular position upset my stomach. I had a noncommittal climax, anyway, as did he, and then I looked out his window at the facing apartment: three blond women and one tall dark man, in bed, beneath a chandelier. My performance falls short of a combinatory Casanova’s. Sex is a terrible, unforgiving master. I may retry the Hammerklavier.

  Last night, walking down Stream Drive with Friedman, I noticed an aristocratic memorial doorway. Above the heavy ornamental tarnished brass knocker, a small peephole gave onto a further room, like Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, an artwork which had scandalized my grandmother, Gertrude Guadalquivar, on first viewing, although later she grew friendly with Duchamp and bought a third-generation replica of his Fountain. I looked into the peephole but saw nothing: dust, stones, cobwebs, dimness, branches, leaves, pottery shards, newspaper scraps, tin cans, bottles, broken appliances. An advertisement for nothing, the memorial was in disrepair, on the verge of being torn down to make room for a new ambiguous doorway with a new uncertain peephole. I wondered why the memorial didn’t say what duchess or socialite it was commemorating. In the enigmatic doorway there hung a pair of headphones, so passersby could listen to taped messages about—a sticker proclaimed—“the healing properties of impeccable taste.” Friedman and I put on the headphones and heard nothing. Once, Alma described her brief stay in a White Plains asylum: to recover from shock treatment, as per the doctor’s instruction, she listened, on headphones, to tapes of her own performances, and, if she found fault with them, she had the option of erasing the tapes. We must destroy music—tear it to pieces—while we interpret it.

  After Fabio and I lay together again in bed, he thought my performance of the Aaron Copland Variations much improved. Alma studied with Copland: he made her over as a modern, without tears. The surgery wasn’t painful. She’d overvalued lucidity. I envy her friendship with homosexual modernists. Alma is mentioned in their memoirs. She falls apart when she remembers her importance: and yet, when the sun sets in Buenos Aires, she must remember her father’s nothings, which earned little fame. I wish Alma would call me at those moments when she discovers that she is nothing. Once she fed me a soft apple that I refused to eat. I watched Tanaquil being fed the same apple and eating it.

  I took the train to Boston to see Matilda. She received me in a bathrobe, loosely shut. I played the clotted Rachmaninoff Prelude in B-flat to warm up, while she mopped the townhouse and repaired the ravages of an equinoctial party she’d thrown the night before. I demonstrated a decent inattention to downbeat. “Well-trained,” she said, tightening her terry robe. “We can thank Xenia Lamont, not Alma.” Matilda asked me to play the first movement of Schubert’s penultimate sonata (A major), its first theme a reversed, autocratic bugle-call. She led me to her daybed and we kissed. I narrowed my mouth’s opening, but her tongue insinuated a path inward, past my teeth. (I hadn’t played her the Copland Variations, the purpose of my pilgrimage.) Matilda’s tongue haunts me as I rememorize Fauré’s underrated preludes. I will play them in Aigues-Mortes. In Fauré and Liszt, the “sigh” predominates. I am beholden to its void.

  I sat in Friedman’s interim apartment with his fellow escort Marco, three of us naked on the futon. I was paying. Friedman likes to work with a second hustler. Both Marco and Friedman are hirsute, but Marco has a more attractive hair pattern (the Louisiana arrangement). I tried to point my erection at him, so he would forgive my diffidence, but there were limits to how articulate I could make my cock. I haven’t described Marco’s or Friedman’s bodies adequately in this notebook, and so I won’t be able to remember them in later years, when I have moved on to other men, if I ever progress; and yet my concern is not exact description, but evasion of exactitude, for the pleasure of escaping it. I smeared Marco’s ethnically imprecise ejaculate over his back, shoulders, stomach, thighs: fastidious reclamation of the dispersed. The sixth-floor restroom at the East Kill University library is a reliable place to find young men to blow. I am forever tinkering with the unformed. After Derva and I play Fauré, I will visit that restroom and will satisfy nineteen-year-olds, who, later, I hope, will write about the experience in their own notebooks. I’ve fired our unpaid housekeeper, Nora Sten; she spilled coffee in my good Bösendorfer and was rude to Derva Nile. Derva will now help me housekeep; after our inconclusive rehearsals, my mind bears a perilous shine, like a skating rink. Before departing, Nora Sten told me another story about Walter Benjamin’s mistress, Vera Marcus. Vera waited for him, like a mystic, to return from the formless. In 1950, she realized that he would never come back, and that she was wasting her life. She sold his letters to a Frankfurt library. She bought a new dress, new scent, got her hair done. At night the memory of the sold letters returned.

  I lead my days in A-B-A form. Section A states the problem; section B presents its antithesis; and then section A returns, in a different key. The valuable material occurs in section B. Fabio said that when I repeat A, I need to add new flavorings—brighter attack, accelerando, bombast. Music in A-B-A form sounds simple, but its performance is difficult. One must rearrange and reoutfit the already heard, disguise it as new material, convince the listener that the music moves forward. No listener will tolerate retreat, backtracking, regression. I, too, detest drone.

  I woke from
a long afternoon nap. Have I already described my theory of A-B-A form? A is the past. B is the present. When A returns, it thrusts listeners, again, into the unpleasant anterior. Another interpretation: A is now. B is then. A, when it repeats, is the returned “now.” Another explanation: A is waking life. B is dream. A, when it returns, is reawakening. I could discuss A-B-A form in Chopin nocturnes. Another day, I will describe again my breakdown in Europe, my spasms, seizures, absences, staggerings, fits; another day, I will describe again the healing properties of electroconvulsive therapy in Viterbo, and Moira Orfei’s fragrant, ministering visit. Those experiences are shut away from memory, and so I can’t narrate them. I can only mention them, repeatedly, as in a flag-waving ceremony, attesting a patriotism one doesn’t feel. I could analyze A-B-A form’s relation to a church’s apse and nave. If Alma were here, she might wax ecclesiastical. May I speak candidly? My first and greatest teacher, Xenia Lamont, died four months ago, October 14, though I didn’t hear the news until today. She died seventeen days before I began keeping Aigues-Mortes notebooks. I haven’t frequently mentioned her, and so the reader, should there be a reader, other than Alma (who already understands everything), won’t know why Xenia’s death distracts me from Moira Orfei. When Xenia Lamont lifted up her nightgown and showed me the hysterectomy scar, I was past the age of consent. I was twenty-two. She was fifty. She said, “Come here.” I approached the hospital bed, put my hand on her vagina, as instructed. I enjoyed the act, a cross between conquest and capitulation. I didn’t mind stopping my life: my hand, Xenia’s crotch, a teaching hospital. Fourth floor. Room with a view of the stream. My hand hoped, like a savior, like a cooperative student, to move her genitals somewhere else (toward a fresh angle, a new phrase, a finer argument), to make the ailing, itchy, uncomfortable groin more pleased with its locale, more saturated with its moist stasis. I’m writing these words in the past—alone on Mechanical Street. I tend to get abstract at a notebook’s end. The narrator is not me.

  Part Two

  DISPERSION

  Notebook Fifteen

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Xenia Lamont, the first piano teacher I ever had sex with, died. She resembled Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia.

  Xenia’s passing will not obstruct Aigues-Mortes.

  Love,

  Theo Mangrove

  The Aigues-Mortes notebooks, blank, lined, come in many colors. This notebook has a red cover. Others are green, yellow, silver, white. I buy them at the conservatoire supply shop. Purchasing a notebook and planning to write in it can be more rewarding than the words one finally chooses.

  I wish the notebooks could include candids of wide-faced drunk Xenia Lamont, but I threw out my Polaroids. “Oh, just call me X,” she’d snarl. To show respect before sex I sometimes called her “Madame X” so she would believe I was an obedient, trustworthy receptacle. She said a “susurration” surrounded her playing. She had a lateral lisp. Struggling to say “susurration” highlighted the deformity. When she kissed me, her upper lip sweaty, my body dissolved into nonresisting molecules. Touching her breasts, I felt them melt, like a wax candle: hallucinations saved me from the coarse, the actual. To the right of her naked body, I saw blur. I stared more at the blur than at her. Just as my penis entered her, a burning sensation assaulted its tip; I asked to drown in Xenia, to dowse the flame in an unknowing that only she could provide. I lack patience to trace connections between each knot of incomprehension. Right before I entered Xenia, a cold sensation, like dry ice, enveloped me. When not melting, her breasts seemed tires—durable, full, unyielding. Unpleasant, to dwell on memories, and yet the only way I can appear on the Aigues-Mortes stage without humiliating myself is by first undergoing petty catharsis. My notebook behavior must be strict, cold: rigidity is prelude to circus fortitude. Tonight: resee Moira Orfei’s great 1964 film, Terror of the Steppes.

  I did not know Xenia was dead until yesterday, months too late, I discovered her obituary in our alumni journal (she’d studied and taught at East Kill Conservatory). I checked my notebooks and discovered that the night she died, October 14, I was out of town, performing, at the Key West public library, the Beethoven Pastoral Sonata, the Ned Rorem Barcarolles, and Schumann’s Papillons, and that afterward I rented an escort (Alex Uptown), his blond body hair obeying the Nevada pattern: equidistance, blandness, divorce, medication, askesis, dehydration. I memorize hair arrangements.

  Blur neighbored Xenia’s nakedness. When I discovered that she was dead I did research on the Internet and learned that most of my teachers are gone. Poor stinking corpses, someone said: maybe Heinrich Heine.

  Xenia suggested, years ago, that I be her psychiatric patient, though she was not trained or licensed. She wanted to experiment, to become a lay analyst; she hoped I’d volunteer as her first client. I refused treatment. She took me out to fancy Saturday-night dinners at Chez Madeleine—butter-garlic escargots, coquilles St. Jacques, sautéed morels, Grand Marnier soufflés, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. She said that although I was under six feet, I held myself like someone with Marfan’s syndrome (Franz Liszt). She regretted her husband’s impotence, a decade of no penetration; she missed the sight of a penis stiffening in her honor. She said, “It breaks my heart to see you get hard.” I wanted to reply, “But the hard-on isn’t ‘about’ you! It’s nonspecific!” She did a competent job sucking: if, before I was born, Xenia sodomized pianistic idols like Solomon and Edwin Fischer, then I belong to a lordly daisy chain. Getting blown by Madame X saved me from a nothingness that now, in notebooks, I seek. Cunnilingus with a teacher turned me into an unfeeling cartoon. After I went down on her, she said, “How strict Alma must have been!” It was my birthday; Xenia bought me the Don Giovanni score. Vaginal dryness plagued her. She enjoyed my aggressive “Toccata” from Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin. She bought sugar-and-jam cookies at the East Kill Bakery while I waited in her double-parked Saab, and we ate them by the almost lake. Cookies proved she had a thoughtful, nurturing streak. I’m too cerebral about my former fucks.

  It is always easier not to feel, not to remember. Memories of Xenia, like matinees at East Kill’s Paris Theater, formerly a vaudeville house, stretch out the afternoons before Aigues-Mortes. The Paris Theater, a year ago, burnt down—arson. No one was apprehended: I pasted the crime-report clipping in an early notebook. Vaudeville is dead, circus is dying, and the Paris Theater will never be replaced.

  Split pea soup tonight, Anita says, and asks if I am wasting money on escorts. I’ll let her think I’m impotent; truth is, I’m avoiding her, diverting spunk to the water district.

  Alma once said my playing must convey objects, not ideas: “Pretend the audience isn’t listening. Conquer their indifference by raising your voice, speaking clearly.” Alma taught me concision, though I rarely credit her. She showed me how to dominate experience. Describing an undertaking—drawing a circle of imprecise words around it—I slay it. Tonight: resee Moira Orfei’s 1964 gladiator film, Triumph of Hercules, and send her a fan letter, rehashing pivotal scenes.

  Last night, long-distance, Alma reminded me that at birth I had an oversized brain and perfect pitch. We talked about career silences: Argentines resent her imminent retirement. Despite the Buenos Aires climate, she wears her mother’s green fur coat: “I make an impression. Mother wants me to be a regular woman, though I don’t like woman, the strictures it implies. Mother can’t accept that I’m an artist.” I may not call Alma “Mother.” Rules divide Guadalquivars. I should ask Dr. Crick for stronger psychotropics, like Alma’s. At least syntax no longer exhausts me. Tonight: beets and lentils.

  Xenia’s Boston Brahmin accent—gone. Xenia’s taste for escargots—gone. Xenia’s fugal voicing—gone. Xenia’s presence at dying Dinu Lipatti’s last recital—gone. Xenia’s descriptions of anti-Semitic Cracow—gone. Xenia’s 1977 candlelit Trinity Church performance of Brahms intermezzi—gone. Xenia’s refusal to call me “visionary”—gone. Xenia’s urging me to walk through parks alone after midnight so I could experience the dar
kness and hopelessness of the poor—gone. Xenia’s kindness after I tripped down her spiral staircase and got a concussion—gone. Xenia’s fantasy (murmured post-coitally) that a world-without-tonality is quiet, large, manageable, empty—gone.

  Alma, you may not believe it anatomically feasible for a woman to rape a man, but it happens: I am always erect, so erection does not signify (Emily Dickinson would say “signalize”) consent. Xenia Lamont claimed there was more pianistic wisdom in Dickinson than in all the misguided teachings of Theodor Leschetizky.

  Madame X derided my melancholy disposition: “Destroy it,” she’d say. She hated sad pianists, platform mannerisms. When speaking to her, I became retarded; my mouth grew detestable, uneducated—thick stumbling tongue. She disliked my self-chastisement: she’d say, “The degradation Alma drives you to!” Once I lightly slapped Xenia’s face and she applauded; she said, “Now you’re acting like a man.” I never again slapped her. She held the sore, struck side of her face. She disliked when my playing became “inner”; I took too literally Schumann’s innig indication in Fantasiestücke (“Evening”). My hand still smells of Friedman’s cum, despite pine soap.