Circus

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Theo,

  I have briefly returned to Montecatini, where they are filming a documentary about me. It is a costume picture. In one scene, I wear a pink bunny outfit. In another, I dress as Clytemnestra and slay a circus Agamemnon. Finally, I occupy a ticket booth. Horny pathetic men wearing anoraks wait in line. The movie is an elegy for Mother.

  The crew will follow me to Aigues-Mortes. The documentary, which I fear will remain unfinished, culminates in our performance.

  When we first greet each other and embrace, in the Place Saint-Louis, the camera will record the great moment, beneath the king’s statue. It is crucial that we not meet until the director is ready to film our reunion.

  My performance will be impromptu. I don’t want to give the public a canned Moira. I have always given them the real Moira, even if it hurts them.

  Moira Orfei

  I saw Dr. Crick yesterday for a physical. He asked if I was still seeing blood in the bowl. I said yes, every night, blood in the bowl. We agreed to speed up treatment. I don’t know if my sex is “safe”—no one told me absolute rules. Tricks can be mum about fine points. When Dr. Crick asked me to lower my shorts so he could feel my genitals, I repressed a boner by thinking of Derva Nile’s vocal failure. Dr. Crick knows everything about my condition but he has seen me hard only a few times and I would like to keep it that way.

  Today I enter East Kill Hospital for treatment, registering under an alias: Thom Murdoch. Question: does Aigues-Mortes contain a Hotel de Anza?

  Notebook Twenty-Two

  When I woke in the hospital after surgery I remembered languidly swimming in the Hotel Flora pool, in Portbou, while my father, sitting on the balcony, watched; and I remembered seeing Charlotte Sante’s crotch, across the street, accidentally, while passing her house at night, the bedroom shade momentarily opened, Charlotte standing on a bureau to lower the pull. Facts: loss of circulation, skin discoloration, numbness.

  I left the hospital and returned to Mechanical Street. Then I rimmed Sing, at Statute of Limitations, in the water district, and called Alma in Buenos Aires to ask whether she sleeps with ex-Nazis or their children. Her answer was evasive, but she told me about her special afternoon concert in the Andalucian patio of the Jardín de los Poetas. My family keeps quiet about its sexual practices. Tanaquil never tells me her dreams anymore. Not for years have I shown her my genitals, or she shown me hers. Flashing was equilateral, though I instigated it.

  Dear Theo,

  Back in Aigues-Mortes. Its tiny red-light district won’t sully our festival. Trucks from Montecatini have arrived: ring, tent.

  Moira Orfei

  I saw on the East Kill Times arts page a small informational article, just an inch, announcing the Aigues-Mortes festival, and yet no exact description of what Moira Orfei planned to do. I was distressed to see Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata mentioned. My bulimic student Devorah played it at her botched debut; she vomited on the keyboard. My friendship with words is over. Friedman called from Guadalajara, collect. Stranded, he wanted me to wire him money. He said, “Trust me, I’ll pay you back,” his voice gruff with the lie, the badinage, rings of deceit pulling him down. I can’t save him. Through Western Union I wired him $500. Anita, overhearing, mentioned divorce, not for the first time. Fascist wife, she calls me incomprehensible. I thought she enjoyed confusion. Now she goes to Sunday mass: her Ackroyd roots are showing.

  Theo,

  Greetings from Aigues-Mortes. My circus act will resemble opium and will revive nineteenth-century Paris. I suggested to the Aigues-Mortes town fathers that they rechristen their central arcade “Galerie Vivienne Retrouvée.”

  Moira Orfei

  I’m lost: I should be thinking about Moira Orfei’s Galerie Vivienne Retrouvée, olive-oil soap in the arcades, mille-feuilles she is eating at the Hotel Constance café, increasing racket of the bandstand hammered into place in the town plaza. Instead I spend afternoons lying in bed with Friedman, back from Guadalajara, where a wealthy oil man kept him prisoner for a week. Friedman’s chest hair has begun to go gray, though he is not yet thirty. The Guadalajara oil man was “abusive,” Friedman said, in a drugged tone, as if he were singing Fauré’s “Après un rêve,” and were limited to that song for the rest of his life.

  In Paris, the impasse Maubert, near the former house of a revolutionary poisoner, I learned the news of my ill health, details I promptly forgot. I concealed from Alma my trip’s diagnostic purpose. I told her that I was performing Chopin at the Polish embassy.

  Theo,

  What happened to your “regime of pleasure”? Your two-hour naps on the white sofa in Montecatini?

  Chloe borrowed my green chiffon for her leukemia benefit and hasn’t returned it.

  My spine is sore—lingering after-effect of a road accident in Rome.

  Moira Orfei

  Moira Orfei’s postcards confuse me. An Agrigento postcard is postmarked Barcelona. A Bruges postcard is postmarked Atrani. A Montecatini postcard is postmarked Monte Carlo.

  Moira Orfei must be counterfeiting the postmarks. The international circus cartel has its own mail machinery, protecting Moira Orfei from detection. She can postmark as she pleases. Soon I fly to Nice.

  After reading (without my permission) the Aigues-Mortes notebooks, Anita filed for legal separation. She left the house, and will call later for her possessions. Let’s leave legal quandaries for another notebook. I will give Anita generous alimony, from my “butter” holdings; she can build a new life, as a musical comedy actress on local stages. I’ll miss the occasional good day’s rear entry. Anita once said, “You and A. E. Housman. You and the other boy-lovers. Fine. Just give me an evening’s peace, my TV programs undisturbed.” She considers me a “rape victim, minus the rape.” I tell her not to take the name of rape in vain. She blames her miscarriages on my concert schedule. I was not present to ease her load: in my absence, she moved a refrigerator. I don’t mourn those two fetuses. It’s difficult to mourn a figment, without a career to back it up.

  Friedman brought his mother, Samantha, to an after-hours bar, Destiny, a white stucco cottage in the water district. She looks like Hope Lange, tall, blond, eyelifts, elite jaw. She put her arm around Friedman and seemed his erotic buddy. Suddenly she wept. I assured her that infection was no longer fatal. She said, “Oh, as long as he uses sunblock, I’m not worried about his skin.” I suggested that his medical problems were complicated. She repeated her sunscreen injunction and pointed to a place on her nose where pre-cancer had been removed. She was educated at Salt Manor, a finishing school. She mentioned a daughter, a debutante in Redwood City. Samantha split her time between California and Corfu. She said that I should fly to Corfu and give a concert: “Bring Friedman. If I can drag you boys to Corfu, I’m gonna set you up in a beach hut. Forget the main house. I want you boys in a hut.” I could picture the trail leading from her cottage on Corfu to an impoverished beach shack—without running water or septic system—where Friedman and I would fornicate all day, repairing at night to Samantha’s house for elaborate catered dinners. I could picture her sending a servant in the evenings to fetch us from our hut, and I could imagine her tearfulness, when we arrived at the house. Weeping at the after-hours bar, she said, “I see Friedman as an anthologist, collecting moments in other people’s lives, never his own.”

  I bought a performance outfit for Aigues-Mortes: blue leather moccasins and purple velvet suit. Velvet might be too heavy for spring in the Camargue. If I appear feminine on the Aigues-Mortes festival stage, Moira might get bored in the middle of our act and break off the alliance.

  Theo,

  The world may call you “fortune hunter” but pay no heed.

  At the Hotel de Anza without you I remembered your insistence on being yourself and I could not bear to rue that insistence, though the world regretted it, that “world” you declare your enemy, and mine.

  Moira Orfei

  I am known for delicate touch, but is it any great shakes? When was the last time a revi
ewer praised it? My playing, as a critic in Nice once wrote, “lacks imagination.” I’m preserved only by Alma’s charity, and her coterie’s. I lack proof that my New York debut was not a disaster. My students don’t win international competitions. As sexual dynamo I have a claim to fame, though in Aigues-Mortes I must prove my pianism once more.

  At least I’m not as desperate as Tanaquil, who, late in her reproductive cycle, now wants a baby. I can’t imagine Tanaquil holding an infant, or helping it bloom into a toddler. Thinking aloud, Tanaquil said to me last night, “Would Alma attend the christening? She’d ruin it. I’ll time the baby’s birth so it occurs while Alma tours.”

  Tanaquil and I used to talk about murdering Charlotte across the street—how convenient, we decided, to have a crime under our belts. Murder, a cleansing thought, bleached ambiguities, like the time that Joyce Sante, nude, poured Clorox over my scheming head.

  Theo,

  Your room is booked. I will wear a sari for my final prestidigitation.

  Moira Orfei

  Even though Aigues-Mortes approaches, and even though it hurt, I let Friedman enter me—with one condom. He went more deeply than any escort. As he bumped repeatedly against my insides, I thought about courses I had failed in college. (After the conservatoire, I studied pre-med at East Kill University, to rebel against Guadalquivar tastes.) Chemistry. Calculus. Biology. Perhaps if Friedman regularly humiliated me, my Ravel would improve.

  The next day, I visited Matilda in Boston. While she knitted a ski sweater for Lu, I talked about Anita’s departure. Matilda, relieved, changed the subject: “Some of my anally centered friends are dead, but that’s no reason to starve yourself.”

  Later that afternoon she put her finger up me: Matilda seemed to be expressing Alma’s will, a message from Buenos Aires. (I had indigestion for a few hours afterward.) At this enjoyable, intimate moment, Matilda did not emphasize that she was my aunt—she posed as a neutral helper, a woman with technique. Her finger imitated the pedagogy I was trying to spread through East Kill’s musical circles, an emphasis on initiation. When students play for conservatory juries, they should focus on a melody’s beginning: the first note is the most difficult. At least we pianists don’t have to worry about intonation. I wonder about Aigues-Mortes weather. How many sweaters should I bring?

  Theo,

  While waiting for you, I plan a future without circus. I’ll circulate a brochure: “Psychic Reading by Moira Orfei. You owe it to yourself to consult this gifted lady. Come today to Montecatini.” Why advance?

  Moira Orfei

  I once played the Liszt Sonnambula transcription while Moira Orfei did an act celebrating “The Real.” I understand Moira Orfei’s beauty, so I needn’t sweat over Aigues-Mortes. I can count on her Jean Marais act, trapeze feats timed to film clips. Our performances never include sex, though I played a fellatio recital in Troy, New York: Beethoven’s second piano sonata, its opening theme’s chiming thirds sodomitic.

  Theo,

  I will spin in synchrony with your first memory of the possibility that you were a reincarnation of a former, more humiliated person, whose shame you would reverse in your own hardworking life.

  Moira Orfei

  In high school I had a crush on my geometry teacher, Mr. Leopold Brash, with a French nose. Rosicrucian, he told the class that he was the descendant—nay, the reincarnation—of a man who once owned East Kill’s water district. I started going to clubs when I was fifteen. I must stop relying on Alfonso Reyes as go-between. If I were practical, I would e-mail Moira Orfei, but she has chosen postcards instead, a more passionate route. She, too, fears technology. Friedman once asked why I don’t call Moira Orfei directly. Answer: I don’t have her telephone number. My conversation upsets her. And the documentary filmmaker forbids Moira and me to speak before we actually meet.

  Theo,

  I write to you from the hotel. I can’t say which—not yet. Aigues-Mortes natives don’t understand history. Our performance will help them remember what you called our “imbrication,” our helpless—yet engagé—relation to emergencies, like Montecatini air raids my family endured. Chloe, who has become my manager, wants to begin planning the fall season, but first I must live through Aigues-Mortes, slowly. Chloe has never imbibed circus. She has no eye for the sacrosanct. She demotes my act to “dream.”

  Moira Orfei

  I’ve never used the word “imbrication” in my life. I’d never say “imbrication” in Atrani’s Hotel de Anza while drinking negronis and cheering up Moira Orfei. I know what she means by history, however. I bear its brunt. My father was a small man, and yet my mother believed in his seed’s latent greatness. “I never had a problem getting pregnant with Thom,” she often said. Her lazy eggs could sit around for days, and eventually admit one adequate tadpole. That is the “history” that Moira and I, in performance, will revisit.

  Again I enter the hospital for what Dr. Crick says resembles shock treatment but is not precisely that. He wants to shake up water-logged habits. He is also worried about my blood: “We have entered the unreasonable.” Giving blood, I used to be frightened, until I found a doctor with whom I was half-comfortable being erect. These are not the health and sickness notebooks but I take the liberty of mentioning shock treatment. I wake up afterward dazed but refreshed, ready for Aigues-Mortes.

  Notebook Twenty-Three

  Dear Moira Orfei,

  Dr. Crick gave me shock treatment, but don’t be alarmed. I’m ready for rendezvous. I speed this medical bulletin to Aigues-Mortes with every expectation that you might not receive it before you see me in May, though our postal life, these months, has been charmed, fleet, immediate.

  Slowly,

  Theo Mangrove

  I feel guilty that I haven’t mentioned Moira Orfei’s gladiator films. Listing them might help me behave like a more subservient associate to Moira’s trapeze antics, which she has called, in an earlier postcard, “our circus of memory.”

  The Two Gladiators

  Ursus

  Terror of the Steppes

  Totò and Cleopatra

  Rocco and His Sisters

  Hercules Returns

  The Triumph of Hercules

  The Birds, the Bees, and the Italians

  Samson and the Slave Queen

  In The Triumph of Hercules, playing the sorceress Pasiphae, mother of evil Prince Milo, Moira materializes, ageless, out of a red smoke cloud, and says, “I am Pasiphae, sorceress. I come to you from a cloud, and give you the magic sword.”

  On top of everything I’m coping with (shock treatment, bad blood, disordered stomach, numb extremities), I must take a train to New York City to meet my “butter” executors on Fifty-Seventh Street, to ensure that they keep my accounts liquid. The Aigues-Mortes notebooks need a detailed cash-flow chart.

  Theo,

  I posed on a rock yesterday, outside Aigues-Mortes walls, for a local photographer. The photo will be a study in difference, how I can look like three separate women, how I can face in disparate directions and yet still remain unitary. First (following his instructions) I turned my back to the camera. Then I looked down at the rock. Then I stared up at the sky. I wore a backless dress. Modest, it obliterated my personality. The shoot was a huge production—we spent hours on hair and makeup, three girls helping. I am an old-fashioned star, afraid of haphazard preparations. I arrived in Aigues-Mortes before necessity called—to absorb the view from the parapets, to see where the Crusaders walked, on the verge of inflicting cruelty.

  History slows me down. Tigers, not yet tamed, are quick: they know your tempo.

  Moira Orfei

  From the Guadalquivars I inherited euphemism: I can mingle with all echelons, from café society to the destitute, and can drift in and out of realism with the deftness of Dr. Crick’s tongue depressor. Moira thinks I love her simply because she is famous, but I, child of a musical star, am indifferent to celebrity. I hope the reader (if there is ever a reader) will forgive my occasional use of well-known na
mes, which I include for documentary reasons; real names pacify. Here I give you a semi-public record of how a musician, avoiding and approaching a destination, exists in time.

  “Your tragic months,” Alma calls my current interstice—awaiting Aigues-Mortes. Blank time immobilizes happy me.

  Theo,

  If you find me weeping in the Aigues-Mortes arcades, you will understand how history hunkers down on the circus-affiliated.

  Moira Orfei

  The last time Alma called, she said, “Critics here give me a bum rap.” She said that if I treated Aigues-Mortes as a task, then I would certainly fail. She should record a boxed set of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas, to rival Barenboim’s and Schnabel’s. A going-haywire desire for immortality upsets her platform poise. She has sex-addict tendencies, too. She wants a museum of her own; she is jealous of my plans for a Moira Orfei Living Museum in Montecatini. On the phone I didn’t mention shock treatment, trembling hands, dehydration. Alma had hoped that the Pablo Casals Museum in San Juan would commemorate her—shadow box, vitrine, or wax mannequin, illustrating her sonata work with the cellist. Marta Casals, the widow, nixed the Alma diorama.