Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  I tried to explain away Tanaquil’s wounds. She is at least six inches shorter than I. (Not as small as Alma.) Tanaquil asked me to face westward so she could look out the window onto Mechanical Street. Every time a person passed on the sidewalk, Tanaquil waved. “I’m no longer a shut-in!” she exclaimed, bouncing on my lap. And yet I wished, unkindly, to say, “You’re becoming a miniature.”

  When Mrs. Sante, pretending not to pry, peered in the window, Tanaquil waved and shouted, “When do I get my doughnuts?” (Mrs. Sante occasionally brought us bags of homemade greasy crullers dipped in powdered sugar.) Mrs. Sante couldn’t hear what Tanaquil said. My sister was blocking circulation in my legs, so I pushed her off my lap and followed her into the dining room, where she sat on a normal chair. She agreed that Aigues-Mortes has its own virtue, as ancient Israel had its single god. I nearly wept to hear Tanaquil say “Aigues-Mortes”: by uttering it, she countenanced and forgave my potential glory. I didn’t name a city that pleased her. What is Tanaquil’s Aigues-Mortes?

  My Tanaquil regrets are circular. I hurt her, I hurt her again. I watch her being hurt, I watch the apology. I hurt her again, I watch the apology. As a child, she didn’t mind bending her life to fit Alma’s keyhole, a decent vision, not a punishment: Alma wanted a docile daughter, white on white. I played a record of Venezuelan nationalist lullabies, sung in French translation by Yvonne Printemps. To Tanaquil I explained the differences between Yvonne Printemps singing “Mon rêve s’achève” from the film Je suis avec toi, and the Algerian chanteuse Marie-José (originally Mauricette Lhuillier) singing “Peut-être” from the film Rappel Immédiat.

  Dear Theo,

  I remain in Aigues-Mortes, in debt. I don’t like the Camargue’s flimsy sand wines. Let’s pour Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Sur Lie, free, during our festival, to insure an inebriated audience. Circus requires intoxication. Afternoons, I visit Alfonso. If I answered, when you called his office, my reality would destroy you.

  M. Orfei

  I’ve given up believing that the phrase “cash box” is the key to the proper execution of Ravel’s deceptively simple Sonatine. Its secret is automation, lack of tone. Ravel hewed his Sonatine out of insensitive pylons, not Alma-based chimeras.

  Anita’s moist hard groin pushed into my upper thigh last night in bed. I didn’t reciprocate. The next morning at breakfast, neither of us mentioned the rebuffed advance. We let her crotch drift into the unexpressed.

  Theo,

  I promise to send you a videotape of my Arena di Verona performance, 1978. But first I must find a copy. Where? I have asked Chloe, the disconsolate, preoccupied with planning her upcoming leukemia benefit. I can’t firm up repertoire for Aigues-Mortes until we review what went wrong in 1978. It was a debacle: all Verona trembled.

  I don’t mind repeating my mistakes. I’d be happy to reenact what went wrong in Verona, if I could only remember.

  We could turn Aigues-Mortes into an homage. Homage to 1978. Homage to what went wrong.

  Moira Orfei

  “Sick,” says Anita, when I show her Moira Orfei’s latest postcard. Trusting Dr. Crick, Anita thinks me psychotic. She can’t understand why arts crossbreed: “If you’re a pianist, why fiddle around with a circus artiste?” “Leave her to heaven” is Anita’s philosophy, but I mustn’t be passive about Moira Orfei’s salvation or damnation. Aigues-Mortes approaches; Moira Orfei and I have not yet scheduled rehearsal times. Serendipity may create scandal—our reputations compromised, my vaunted “neatness of execution” (Corriere della Sera) dashed on the rocks of Duchampian déshabillé.

  Theo,

  Chaos must henceforth be my calling-card: an Aigues-Mortes disorder, typified by a performance that has not yet taken place.

  We will take the stage together and lift the movement arts to a new plateau. I pray your parochial critics will not fly to Aigues-Mortes to check out this final installment in a strange career, or two careers, yours and mine, and, by extension, Mother’s, since my every movement implies a movement she did not live to make.

  Moira Orfei

  If I fail in Aigues-Mortes then I will never again have a chance to redeem the coupon that Moira Orfei offered that first time she invited me to Montecatini (she had seen me play Carnaval on Italian TV); though I spilled Brunello on her white leather sofa she immediately initiated me into her cult, of which I was already an avid, invisible member. Her couch is in five sections: a modular modern piece. How documentary must I become in recounting my sad affair with Moira Orfei? Should the reader—Alma, Anita, Tanaquil—fill in the sordid details? Should I describe the time Moira found me lying drunk in my own vomit on her white leather sofa? She consented to perform with me a week later in Marseille, by which time I had dried out and was in top form, playing Gaspard de la Nuit for the first time to a skeptical yet sympathetic audience of fishermen, pimps, gamblers, impresarios, aristocrats, gunrunners, terrorists, and thieves. Time for a morning purgative. Stomach upset is the figure in my carpet. Dr. Crick doesn’t respect my sturdy Guadalquivar physique. He should scan Alma’s brain and compare it to mine. Is it a surprise when someone who is slowly dying finally dies? To regain concentration for Aigues-Mortes, I need to find a medication that will prevent blackouts. And yet Moira Orfei always found a way to work blackouts into her routine, to justify collapse.

  Dear Theo,

  If only I had uninterrupted weeks to prepare for Aigues-Mortes, without needing to consider the public! I am your morphine, but I need morphine, too, and who among my circus brethren can offer it? In Aigues-Mortes I find no Hotel de Anza. Its absence explains the town’s silence, siestas always under way, mules wandering noon streets, clip-clop of indolent hooves. Fork tines sound the midday clash of needs, mother and children wanting opposite respites. Mother in Montecatini had no peace. We exhausted her with rehearsals and tour. And then she died. She was five years older than my father.

  Moira Orfei

  Since my European breakdown I have chosen to ignore the listener. On the phone last night from Buenos Aires, Alma mentioned my “early graves”—my childhood habit of burying dead insects in the backyard and marking their resting places with toothpicks and tiny handwritten memorial pennants.

  Theo,

  Yes to the tigers. Yes to Ravel.

  Moira Orfei

  Expiation of European guilt must begin in Aigues-Mortes; only a circus artiste, and a pianist who loves her, can initiate interrogation.

  In my next notebook, I must flesh out the connection between body odor and ethics: why good people sometimes stink.

  At Jacob’s Ladder I bought orange leather moccasins, for our first night, when Moira will dance with tigers and I will play the Ravel Sonatine.

  Since Alma is away on tour I can hide my notebooks anywhere I wish—including her underwear drawer.

  I telephone the Aigues-Mortes festival office, at 5 boulevard Gambetta. Alfonso Reyes says that absolutely my letters are being forwarded to Miss Orfei, who wants to keep her address a secret. Confidentially he tells me that she is staying at the Hotel Constance, beside the Tour de Constance, on the edge of Aigues-Mortes, beneath the encircling medieval stone rampart. The circus tent has not been assembled. The truck from Montecatini, carrying supplies, is stalled: Italian labor-union strike, roads closed. He is worried that I won’t show. Moira is staking her reputation on my appearance. At least I’m insured.

  Alma, on the phone last night, described her affair with Leonard Bernstein in the 1960s, during one of his “straight” phases. She said, “I could give you quite a list!” She meant a list of her body’s favorite parts, from Bernstein’s point of view. She began the blazon. When she litanizes, and I listen, her voice becomes a heldentenor’s, and my temperature lowers, like East Kill under snowfall when I was a conservatoire impostor, pretending to be Alma’s heir, when in fact I deviated from her noble line.

  Orchestras these days rarely invite me as soloist. Moira Orfei alluded to the cause, when we argued after the Atrani performance: my love of
bent time. Delaying the beat, I confused her; her hunky juggler faltered, dropped a torch. Moira Orfei’s emceeing faltered, too; her eyebrows rose.

  Dear Theo,

  Coincidental one, I’ll marry you—

  For God’s sake don’t take me literally!

  Aigues-Mortes is nature morte, as if painted by Chardin.

  Perhaps you misunderstand.

  I must stop writing postcards. Words eclipse my warm-ups, daily, with tigers. My legs are sore from splints; the anchovies, good; the sand wine, flaccid.

  Moira Orfei

  By delaying arrival, I help Moira Orfei, give her freedom, privacy. Practicing Ravel, I separate each note from its enclosing phrase. I try to apply Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s advice: it is wasteful to accelerate and crescendo simultaneously. Thinking of Michelangeli, that peasant, I find myself reoccupying a moment from 1975, an instant, hard to specify, of moral uprightness, self-control, and a sexual abstinence separate from my current lax state. Battista, who works the towel desk at Camera Baths, experimentally spanks me. Stripped in my cubicle, he shows off hairy upper thighs, flax changing texture and thickness when it reaches the tan line, the contrast between white buttock and dark leg as absolute as a “slant of light” in Georges de La Tour.

  Battista tells me that authorities threatened to close the baths. East Kill elected Mayor Dreyfus on a platform of moral crackdown, and our water district, our pseudo-water district, was his first scapegoat. Bombing raids continue; Dreyfus approves. Political unrest never enters Moira Orfei’s performances. I hope protesters won’t interrupt Aigues-Mortes.

  Yesterday I visited the East Kill Conservatory, where I am on probation. The elevator smelled, inexplicably, of Gertrude Guadalquivar’s hair spray, Secure.

  Some medical material leaks into the Aigues-Mortes notebooks, but I have tried to keep them free of sickness-and-health questions.

  Dr. Crick—histrionic, fallible—trusts phone consultation. No matter what I tell him, he prescribes Jell-O. He is planting a dream garden outside his office window. When I next come to give blood, he’ll show me the regraded rock slopes. He has seen me erect; once during a prostate exam I fell into the error of arousal, and the occasional testicular palpation excites response. His paunch comforts me. A fat doctor can’t lie.

  Dr. Crick asked if I’m still taking my pills. I said yes, though often I skip a dose: they cause vertigo. My condition improves, despite what he has trained me to call the nightly “blood in the bowl,” startling, picturesque. Dr. Gaston Lair recently removed Tanaquil’s fibroid tumor, she said. Why didn’t you tell me about the surgery, I asked. She said, you’re barely alive. We were standing in Alma’s bathroom. Alma was in Buenos Aires; her absence permitted liberties.

  Notebook Twenty-One

  I should be putting all my eggs in the Aigues-Mortes basket, but I can’t help wasting time remembering that Xenia Lamont never liked me to go down on her. She wanted to get intercourse, a trill étude, over with. Tanaquil’s fibroid tumor: benign. I hope I showed concern.

  Dear Theo,

  Italy’s truck-driver strike rages; the sets are stalled in Montecatini. I can’t begin work until they arrive.

  Here in Aigues-Mortes I met a lovely West Indian woman. “My daughter, my daughter!” she screamed, disturbing my prayers; I helped her out of the Chapelle des Pénitents Gris. We walked through the arcades. Wind picked up. “My name is Moon,” she repeated. “Mrs. Moon. And I thank you.” We found her daughter huddled by the Tour de Constance. Alive but crying.

  Mrs. Moon knew nothing of my career!

  Moira Orfei

  I took Tanaquil to East Kill Lyceum; we saw Kitten with a Whip, starring Ann-Margret and John Forsythe. On the walk home Tanaquil discussed poetry. She has a theory about Hart Crane: a Key West male prostitute knifed him, and the wound entered the poems. I telephoned Alfonso Reyes in the Aigues-Mortes entertainment office. No answer. Tanaquil agrees: remedies secretly poison. Mangroves must practice circumspection.

  Theo,

  I’m planning our performance while I wait for the truck strike to end.

  Let’s project a video of me thirty years ago. I’ll sit in the front row, watching, and then I’ll come onstage and join you. Treat the audience first to video Moira, then to real Moira.

  After the video, I’ll pretend to sink into stupor, meanwhile waiting for my cue.

  Moira Orfei

  The story I tell, on the piano, is self-mutilation. Hector Arens wrote: “What is Theo Mangrove’s motive?” I’m sexually attracted to suicides. My conservatoire friend Risa, harpsichordist, had a breakdown when we were twenty. She ran up to me, in the practice-room hallway, shouting “Grandfather!” Then at lunch in the conservatoire cafeteria she sat with asylum staff. Fake jollity: psychiatric nurses pretended to be her friends, but then took her away.

  One day it was ornaments; the next, sanatorium. And then she hanged herself. In Aigues-Mortes my Liszt “Orage” will embody the rope.

  Theo—

  I have returned to Montecatini. As always on Sunday mornings I am depressed because I remember Mother’s death and her disappointment that I was not the sort of circus artiste she had dreamt of me becoming, though I wore the pink sweater set she sewed for me and I did not mock schoolgirls with obvious public illnesses (“Never make fun of a sick person,” Mother told me, and I, listening, would lose track of time, so entranced was I by her compassion). If I can drown in my late mother’s warnings, why can’t you collapse in mine? I don’t predict a long life for you. Witness the dreary world of all that is not circus.

  Moira Orfei

  Conservatoire dean Gustavo Clemens requested my resignation because of on-the-job fainting spells and missed recitals. I wept in his office and refused to quit. Is it a mistake to write down incriminating incidents that Alma and other saboteurs might later read?

  Theo,

  Hello from Verona. Eros Ramazzotti and I performed at the Arena. Newspapers printed false sexual rumors.

  Consider Messiaen’s “Petites esquisses d’oiseaux.” Why not schedule an all-bird evening? I’ll gladly improvise a robin redbreast twirl and take last-minute requests from the audience: choose your bird, I’ll dance to it.

  Moira Orfei

  Yes to Messiaen. Matilda, wearing Joy parfum (no more Charlie), held my cock in her hand and said, quoting Alma, “You are raw ingredients I could never shape into a decent meal.” Then Matilda told me about the time she threw an infant across the room. Babysitting, Matilda imagined herself Mary Magdalene. She said, “I know my meds need to be adjusted when I start thinking about the Lord.” Instead of hitting the wall, the baby boy landed on a beanbag chair. Years later she apologized to him, a stockbroker. She stopped holding my cock. She said, If you don’t want to climax, why bother visiting me? I said, I like buildup for its own sake. I never properly explain Moira Orfei’s grandeur.

  Afterward I climaxed in a stall of the Boston airport bathroom (Delta Shuttle) with a tall young black guy wearing sweatpants: mutual hand jobs. Traffic prevented intricacies. When cum left my system, I regretted the venue and remembered dissonance, my new fad: I am modernizing my ear, removing its anti-Semitism. Also I am boning up on dialectical materialism. When I returned home, I pleased Anita by saying that she resembled Mitzi Gaynor.

  Theo,

  Still in Verona, with Eros Ramazzotti.

  Do you understand CIRCUS? My echelon? Circus largesse enfolds me, when, in the wings, I wait, ready to emcee.

  Moira Orfei

  Rainy afternoon alone at home. Mechanical Street deserted. Drunk on a bottle of Chinon, I wrote Moira Orfei a letter defending my understanding of things circus, rebutting her imputation that I was ignorant, unfit to appear beside her. For our performance, I require a stage; Moira requires a ring. Horses surround Aigues-Mortes. I didn’t tell Moira Orfei, in my letter, that I lack the tonal precision of her illustrious compatriot, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who tried, Lord knows, to teach me “secrets of the line,” those
he didn’t already communicate in pillow talk to Alma, if I believe her philandering tales.

  A wandering bum threatened Charlotte’s daughter, Joyce Sante, my fellow childhood nudist. He had inscrutable hobo reasons to know and haunt Mechanical Street among equivalent local thoroughfares housing world-class musicians who’d give up their careers for love. Joyce is pregnant again; maybe she’ll miscarry. She continues to get knocked up, though the fetuses are never viable. Charlotte is still sick with cervical cancer and ulcerative colitis. Mechanical Street grows seedy; a trannie hustler, Edna du Pré, formerly a regular in the water district, now works our sidewalk.

  Theo,

  Back in Aigues-Mortes. Consider the plight of the world’s forsaken infants, dying from malnutrition, without circus stars to rescue them. I stayed up late last night, depressed, drinking scotch in my hotel lobby. Circus brings me up and down.

  Moira Orfei

  Derva Nile suffered a vocal breakdown last night, at a “performance” of Nuits d’été in my living room (we called it a performance, though only Anita and Tanaquil were present). On the second syllable of “reviens” (come back) in the song “Absence,” her voice broke; a fissure—incapacity—split the pitch, and I traveled miles down it. I called Buenos Aires to ask Alma about tunnels in missed notes. She’d once heard Jussi Björling’s voice crack at the climax of “Di quella pira”: time, a caged lion, shook. Then she told me about her urethra infection, imperiling Goyescas, and about her concert at Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano Isaac Fernández Blanco, and about Gertrude Guadalquivar’s final incontinence. Stoppage, not leakage, worries me. Alma relishes illness, the surrounding talk. I have a melancholy relation to words. They fall away the moment I try to use them. Decline on the pianistic front is all I can foresee.