Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  My house has historical consequence. I directly descend from East Kill’s founding father, who slept in this very room, sired my ancestors on a bed that stood exactly here. On Mechanical Street we are quiet and artful. We enjoy our lack of drama, though the town’s economy, spiraling downward, depresses business. The psychic, Mrs. Clemovitz, still does a thriving trade. She helps me keep track of you.

  Love,

  Theo Mangrove

  Anita wants to commit me to an asylum. I sat next to a dwarf on the bus to New York City last week when I went to check out strippers at the Gaiety, but I didn’t talk to him. Moira Orfei never fired me; she only suggested I retire. She’d seen me tremble, faint, forget. But then, after Viterbo, didn’t she write me, and encourage me to plan a comeback? After Aigues-Mortes I may have the confidence to play Goyescas in Madrid and Bilbao, and then in Seville and Cádiz.

  Anita escapes my control. She adopted a stray kitten. It urinated on our vestibule’s Persian runner. Building a wooden birdhouse, Anita cut her arm, lightly, on a power saw. I dressed the wound. I publicly acknowledged Anita when I played pieces by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco at the East Kill Public Library, but Anita wasn’t in the audience to hear: “I’d like to dedicate the next piece, La Sirenetta e il Pesche Turchino, from 1920, to my wife.” Now she is off to Aruba for a weekend of snorkeling. I try to ignore her lies and her racism.

  Yesterday, when Anita returned from Aruba, we crossed Mechanical Street to offer condolences to our ratty-haired neighbor, Charlotte, who has cervical cancer and ulcerative colitis. She lives with a houseful of grandsons: hoods. Five cars in disrepair are parked outside their house. Arnie, a redhead, sat nearest the door, always open, even in winter; with a lazy eye, he seemed half-dead, mouth agape, brooding, I suppose, on Charlotte’s Ma Barker aspects—skinniness, permissiveness. Maybe Arnie was reminiscing about his years as model, posing for his father, Moe, a sanitation engineer and part-time pornographer. He was the first corpse I’d ever seen; at his wake, in a bad tux, he seemed still a pornographer, posing this time rather than snapping the picture, a docile husband, because dead, to Charlotte of the open-door policy and the fresh-baked tea cakes always on offer to neighbors.

  Mechanical Street mixes classes: Mangroves are rich, Santes are not. Economic gulfs draw Italian audiences to Moira Orfei—she is “the princess,” but also one of the earth’s legendary “wretched.”

  Alma called from Buenos Aires, after a concert at the Basilica Nuestra Señora del Pilar. She asked about my upcoming Copland recitals. Gently I said, “No, Alma, these are the Frank Bridge concerts.” She told me that I lack the large duende eyes of the Guadalquivars. I plan to play Frank Bridge’s “The Dew Fairy” and “The Midnight Tide” in Aigues-Mortes, but I did not tell her. I hid my desire for grilled cheese sandwiches, bread generously buttered, boys in their camp bunks, no longer afraid of the deep end or the lines they must memorize for tonight’s performance of William Tell. Over-practicing Rachmaninoff’s Études-Tableaux, I damaged my wrists. Abstinence and repentance may repair the tendons. What if you always thought your name was spelled a certain way and then one day you realized you were mistaken, there was an “i” before the “e,” and no one had ever told you?

  Two scrawny cats—owned by Charlotte Sante, dying of cervical cancer—walked down Mechanical Street this afternoon. I regret that Anita and I have no children, that Tanaquil will probably have none, and that Alma’s line of succession shall have reached a miserable dead end, unlike the hamburger stand, with its promises, that once operated in the water district, at a time when it was still possible I might not turn into “that pianist who fainted and lost his memory on the stage in Aix-en-Provence and other cities less significant on the international circuit, and was fired by Moira Orfei.” Her recent letters imply that I’ve been admitted back into the fold. I did nothing to damage her ex-husband’s reputation. I never publicly said that he was bi. The Guadalquivar-Mangroves, though not reactionary, prefer the past to the future: the determining events have already occurred, but we can’t picture them.

  Joyce Sante, Charlotte’s daughter, a redhead with buckteeth, overcame her speech impediment by turning it into a charming feature; she wanted French fries with every dish, whether or not fries were appropriate. Between ages five and ten, we were fellow nudists, scientific partners. Intellectually slow, she kept up with me in sexual action but couldn’t analyze it afterward. Her mother, Mrs. Sante, hair a cap of red curls, was a cat-keeper, disciplinarian, and waterer, never content to let Joyce out of her sight. Joyce and I stripped within Mrs. Sante’s watering purview: on the lawn she’d stand, holding a garden hose, and in her deadened eyes (not immediately recognizing me) I’d detect insult. She hated Mangrove wealth, airs, fame—perpetual music out our open windows in summer. Alma, suspecting that Mrs. Sante wanted to poison us, never ate the doughnuts and tea cakes that she offered on snooping visits. Mrs. Sante once showed me photos that her husband, Moe, took of their son, Arnie. Some appeared on the covers of pocket-sized porno novelettes, stored in a cabinet in the toolshed where Mr. Sante parked his racing-green Sprite convertible. I told Mrs. Sante that Arnie’s legs had a precocious allotment of hair, and she said, “That’s why we hire him.” Standing in the toolshed with Mrs. Sante, talking about Arnie’s masculine legs, I learned to sap the vitality out of my surroundings, so they could match my desiccation. The toolshed, after I vanquished it, became a blank cardboard box without images or inscriptions; the Santes, standing beside me, were no longer people, but fellow obelisks who could make no demands and accept no offers.

  I held a small dinner party at a local Chinese restaurant. Bloated, Mrs. Sante came. She brought her twin sister, equally bloated. I invited five of my most promising students, including Rabbi Gershon. Even at eighty, he improves. I introduced my students to Mrs. Sante and her twin. Pointing to the twin, I said, “Here is Ayesha, she doesn’t speak.” Ayesha, a factory worker from North Kill, a poor satellite of our town, was an elective mute, though Mrs. Sante insisted on taking her to parties. Mrs. Sante told me that her brother Cappy had been kidnapped in El Salvador: she said, “The CIA got Cappy.” I spent most of the banquet staring at Mrs. Sante’s forearms, muscular despite cancer.

  Later, when Alma telephoned, I was at a loss to defend the party’s legitimacy. She said, “If Charlotte Sante has cervical cancer, why are you taking her out for Chinese?” Alma said that her penthouse was drafty, and that she could hear violent lovemaking in the apartment below. After our conversation she will knock on their door and tell them to hush. Alma’s performance of Gaspard de la nuit and Estampes went well, she said, but she felt empty when she contemplated her accomplishments. Dr. Helen Jole, her psychoanalyst, is retiring. I fear the repercussions: a Jole-free Alma could be dangerous.

  In Aigues-Mortes I want to program Morton Feldman’s “Last Pieces,” with Moira Orfei’s non-genuflecting circus commentary. She should wear a black gown with demarcated zones of her famous spangles. I forgive her for not responding to my last two letters. Circus eminences have the right to remain in perpetual trance, without responsibility to fact. She hired me back; I am not forcing my services on her. In fact, I’m doing her a favor: Aigues-Mortes never before invited Moira Orfei, and now, thanks to me, she’ll find a new audience for her glittering tricks. Moira Orfei and Theo Mangrove are a two-way street. I’m no interloper, no drain on a great circus artiste’s resources.

  Last night Tanaquil paced the hall outside my studio. I peered out the door and saw that she was nude. I have not seen Tanaquil’s breasts for several years. Despite her beauty, she shouldn’t parade naked through the house. When Alma dies, if Tanaquil and I survive her, we’ll have won. What’s the point of victory? There’ll be no recumbent, apologetic Alma left to gloat over.

  East Kill’s leading music critic has accused me of limiting my emotional range, especially in Liszt, to “exclamation.” Xenia Lamont called my playing too “inner” but Hector Arens finds it ostentatious. He says I project every
phrase on the same level, despite my link to the Tobias Matthay tradition of exacting, suicidal nuance. The question is not (pace Hector Arens) whether I fail, in my programs, by overzealous devotion to “exclamation,” but whether I care about this putative failure or whether I am indifferent to it, and to Arens’s well-publicized, repeated aspersions. I must obliterate futurity by constant performance and constant, grueling, ecstatic preparation, regardless of whether Mr. Arens approves. In Aigues-Mortes, I will exhibit fruitless enthusiasm, under the punished sign of what Arens calls my “cult of exclamation.” (I wrote this sentence long ago, by moonlight, on a ripped paper bag, with a failing pen.)

  This morning I blew Friedman in his loft—gratis—and he came plenteously within four minutes. Abstinence yellows the cum. He put two, three fingers in my ass. I felt a wave of reminiscence, of layaway. I was being price-slashed. New merchandise will replace me. Friedman said, “You’ve apologized to everyone else, but you’ve never apologized to me.” More gray hairs on his chest. He’s only twenty-eight: premature aging will force him to retire from hustling and go back into the more legitimate professions that his mother, Samantha, long ago urged him to take up—law, gardening, spying. He has worked for a detective agency. He did time in Marseille’s skin industry: I’ve seen film stills. Arnie Sante’s efforts can’t compare. Arnie was an amateur, Moe Sante’s porno novelettes a mere home industry, while Friedman appeared in major, forgotten productions.

  Did Alma whisper il miglior fabbro over my cradle? And did she surround me, as she claims, with geraniums in ceramic pots “thrown” by Gertrude Guadalquivar? Milhaud wrote difficult, esoteric, unpublished bagatelles for Gertrude. When Alma performed them, public response was lukewarm. She donated the manuscripts to the East Kill Conservatory Library, which lost them in the fire that destroyed a wing of their archive. No one should entrust precious cargo to the Conservatory, and yet Alma has bequeathed them her papers, to be deposited posthumously. I am her half-unwilling executor. When I die, my executor is Dr. Crick, good at figures.

  On the phone, Alma told me that, in Buenos Aires’s ice rink, the Palais de Glace, she played a program of Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Clara Wieck, and Amy Beach—conservative fare, with a laudable feminist slant. Alma did not tell the audience that the concert was a memorial for Gertrude Guadalquivar; the commemorative aspect remained secret. As encore, Alma played Liszt’s “Fantasia on Themes from Bellini’s La Sonnambula.” On the phone, I talked about my spiritual evolution: I used the phrase “the compost heap of the unheard.” She called me “prissy.” After talking to Alma, I paid an emergency visit to Dr. Crick. I don’t want Anita to see the bruises on my arms so for a few days I am wearing long-sleeved oxford-cloth shirts.

  Notebook Eighteen

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Thanks for your condolences. Yesterday I saw Dr. Crick. Resolutions: no more drinking, no more water-district nights, no more East Kill recitals. And I must no longer throw out the medicine Dr. Crick prescribes.

  Please ask your ex-husband to videotape our Aigues-Mortes appearances for later release.

  How is Chloe? The animals? Is the winter palace cold? How are your sinuses? Have you found the missing scrapbooks? Are contracts in order for Aigues-Mortes? Do you understand the game plan? Are you comfortable with “winging it,” or would you like more explicit directions? We’ll set up your circus tent in the Place Saint-Louis. The town has agreed to take down temporarily the statue of the armed king ready to embark for the Crusade. We’ll begin the Grand Parade at La Tour de Constance. Don’t be afraid of the marshy ground. Before the show begins, we can climb the tower together and blow a trumpet of doom out the grilled lookout post, the “Farot.” Drums and tambourines will supplement my numbers, your flotilla of dancers, your hoops and mirages.

  You should lead your Grand Parade along the sentry-walk, upon the town’s southwest ramparts. We could meet up again in the Place d’Armes, the circus tent set up in the esplanade, where troops once gathered. There, I could play bits from Années de pèlerinage. Or, if you wish, something lighter. You could banter with clowns and jugglers, introduce and tame the seals, somersault, let your dancer protégée do her upside-down blindfolded tango. Will you merely be emceeing, or will you attempt strenuous stunts? When we last spoke—in Viterbo—you told me that you were eager to segue from stunts into emceeing. Perhaps you said that merely to comfort me. At the time, I was segueing from piano into electroshock.

  I will play a few of Rachmaninoff’s Études-Tableaux as centerpiece of the Saturday night program. The études, like anything real, make incompatible demands: stillness and motion, recollection and amnesia. We discussed those paradoxes in Ajaccio, at the Hotel de Anza. We found a snake curled (dead or alive?) outside the hotel entrance. We stayed a week in Ajaccio. For the final night, we did our “unconsciousness” program. Your performance received delirious, salacious praise—references to your breasts implicit in the critics’ prose. That was six years ago. Why did Ajaccio never invite me back?

  Love,

  Theo Mangrove

  Last night, I fainted while attending an amateurish performance of Verdi’s Nabucco at the East Kill Lyric Opera. I faint twice a day, after urinating: my pulse feels slow. Blood pressure problems, warns Dr. Crick. Weakness overcame me midway through Abigaille’s first furious cabaletta. During the stretto, I saw black spots. When I regained sense, the opera had moved on to the next scene. Derva Nile, when her voice recovers, should be cast in an East Kill Lyric Opera revival of Charpentier’s Louise. Derva’s “Depuis le jour” has a pathos that proves Alma, who criticizes Derva as “voiceless and debauched,” wrong.

  Alma complimented my virility, the few times she saw it in action, because she considered it the most rigorous exercise of sloppiness in East Kill musical history. Originally I wanted to be a singer, but Alma discouraged me: she recognized that my only register was falsetto. Tanaquil hoped for an acting career; Alma’s realism intervened. In our house, ruined dreams have a precise location. Tanaquil’s ambitions, or their vestiges, live in the upstairs hallway connecting our bedrooms. Anita lacks her own bathroom; itinerant, she shuttles between mine and Tanaquil’s, but finds widest berth in Alma’s—Diorissimo bottle on the glass shelf above the john a beacon.

  Matilda finds my foreplay too rough and anally centered. She said to me, yesterday, when I visited Clarendon Street, “Put your hand there. Stop scheming about repertoire. You spend too much time giving free concerts at the East Kill Home for the Blind. My backyard garden is flooded.” I changed my angle. About my hardness, she said, “At least we have something to be thankful for.” Then she switched: “Stop acting. Don’t imitate Tanaquil’s dreams—aren’t yours unreachable enough? As a child, you bought me a bottle of Charlie by Revlon. Did Alma tell you it was my scent? She forbade me to visit, after your father died.” Post-sex, Matilda and I ate chicken sandwiches. I expect to be lacerated in Aigues-Mortes for artistic liberties. Matilda described my pianism as too “autochthonous.” She praised me as “the only beatnik classical pianist in the western hemisphere.” Reclining on her Sarouk rug, she told me that she was keeping a detailed journal of responses to my visits. She read aloud an entry: “He fails as a person and a pianist because he can’t tell the difference between reality and dream.” Listening, I realized that Matilda had psychological acumen, though the journal made too frequent mention of her property. It was marvelous that she could see the ocean from her apartment in Miami, where she planned to spend her old age; but did her sea view need to appear in every sentence?

  Logan Airport: in the Delta Shuttle bathroom a man in the next stall smelled like my father. Suddenly I recognized that odor, as if from the Portbou hotel corridor—mélange of tobacco, rose petals, dung, and ash. Did his father smell the same? For such genetic legacies, there is no proper way to express gratitude, except by practicing good hygiene and good posture, and by paying a call on bygone grade-school teachers when the year is up and we pretend to have transcended former instruct
ors but secretly want to visit them and are also afraid to advertise our longing, lest we become known as “the one who wants to visit his sixth grade teacher,” or, worse, “the one who visited his sixth grade teacher, unannounced, after class, when she was erasing the blackboard.” I knew I’d be laughed at for visiting a teacher who was no longer my current flame, and so I never went back to see Mrs. Campion, she of the wide Australian need, she who’d accused me of plagiarism. Did she ever show up at one of my concerts, unannounced, in the back row? Mrs. Campion claimed to have had polio as a girl—a sympathy ploy, to dress up her dull, disorganized lessons. Instructing us to build a dodecahedron from plastic drinking straws, Mrs. Campion made art seem a matter of blindly following complicated directions.

  Vance Brown, a nerdy twenty-three-year-old from Queens, devoted to Schoenberg and the Frankfurt School philosophers, never sucked my cock. (He had a strange “finky” smell—halfway between “funky” and “sink.” Bacon lodged in his smell—maybe because the plumbing company Fink and Bacon services Mechanical Street.) The night after hearing Vance play Ernst Krenek’s Little Suite, I saw him suck off a Scarlatti specialist in Space Bar’s backroom. I tried to enter their scene, but Vance scowled. (In an earlier notebook, I described my love for him. That description didn’t suffice.) Since then, I have never seen his name in Musical America. I wonder if he died of AIDS. That can happen.

  Perhaps I should stage Satie’s Socrate in Aigues-Mortes. First, do a dry run in East Kill. Use Derva Nile as the singer. Derva isn’t up to Aigues-Mortes standards. Moira Orfei will upstage her. Derva will insist on doing her inutile Lana Turner imitation. Derva in a blond wig gilds the lily. The Jews will despise Derva Nile’s Lana impersonation, nested within (and ruining) Satie’s hemlock scene. Shall we ask Merce Cunningham to choreograph Moira Orfei, or shall we leave her alone? Who is the ideal witness to Moira Orfei’s Socrate, as sung by Derva Nile, with piano accompaniment by Theo Mangrove?