Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  My glasses look like Mondrian paintings. Any nerd glasses look like Mondrian paintings, and therefore like the rediscovery of America, as if the United States had converted from imperial entity into carbonation factory, tonic and inoffensive.

  Maybe my glasses (blue/black rectangles with a perverse undercover striation of nothingness sewn into their hard identity) look like a Monopoly game’s Marvin Gardens and Park Place, or like the beguiling notion of lined-up hotels and houses, Chunky chocolate-bar real-estate tokens.

  The man glasses I’m wearing contain secret boy identity—boy playing man, boy dressed up as man, boy dressed up as Get Smart’s Barbara Feldon. Turn Barbara Feldon’s personality into rectangles I can buy and wear. Turn Barbara Feldon’s sidekick mentality—her underratedness—into a square entity, an abstraction (Alber’s Homage to the Square) reincarnated as purchasable quiddities on my face.

  The glasses, two rectangles, have curvy undersides. The outside of the glasses looks rectangular, but when you knock on the door and enter, you discover that they are secretly circular, or contain intimations of ovals. The glasses strive toward the oval (Ovaltine) but never arrive at that milky hereafter.

  I feel like I’m spitting on someone’s grave by writing enthusiastically about a mere object. Don’t grow too attached to your glasses; someone might steal them. I left a pair on the bench outside a steam room in 1990, and when I emerged from steam the glasses were gone. I presumed someone had stolen them because he hated me, considered me intellectually or politically inferior, too big for my britches. Those Robert Marc tortoiseshells were my britches: prescription ovals, irreplaceable.

  And now I feel a wave of nostalgia for another pair of glasses, a pair I won’t describe because they are too refined, too Eiffel Tower, too El Greco, too wiry, too Philippe Petit, too Jean Cocteau, too Alexander Calder. How can I describe my Cocteau/Calder glasses, changeable as a mobile; skittering as Kandinsky lines shooting jizz-like into space; grounded yet airborne, like John Glenn, hand-shaken by JFK?

  My new glasses are not reincarnations of those Calder/Cocteau astronaut items, whose rectangular oddity I can’t describe. My current glasses—the blue/black rectangles made by Alain Mikli’s son, and therefore incarnating son—are Carlo Ponti trustworthy emblems. But not clodhoppery. Not lame-duck. They are not like the boot of Italy, not downtrodden, not Calabrian; they are Duomo-like, if the Duomo were smashed onto its side and turned into square pellets. Two Duomo sausage patties. Brunelleschi patties.

  “Don’t get too excited about your glasses—we may need to kill you.” Who is scolding me? Some schoolyard bully? A warden who wants to scapegoat me for disseminating what I once called “fag ideation”? I spread fag ideation around like a Diptyque room spray, to conceal the “head farts” (as Antonin Artaud put it) that normative logic imposes on the trippy dreamworld of enlarged thought.

  When a woman suddenly wears glasses (Maria Callas at her Juilliard master classes), a newfound fox-trot cheerfulness illuminates her face. Charlotte Rampling is the female equivalent of my new glasses. She has a sournois demeanor. Sournois, my new favorite French word, means sly, underhanded. The mouth, expressing slyness, frowns to make a semicircle—a curlicue—that typifies sournois. Charlotte Rampling in Life During Wartime is the living dream of sournoiserie, the state of being underhanded. My glasses are sournoiserie practiced like the Goldberg Variations to become a feminine/masculine compromise.

  I google-imaged “Jeremy Tarian,” patron saint and creator of my new frames. Turns out he is a glam-nerd doppelgänger dream: big nose, corkscrew-curly hair, thin face, only twenty-three years old, Jewish-looking, but maybe something else beyond Jewish, to spice it up. He might not be Jewish. I want the right to use Jewish as airborne signifier, an adjective as duty-free and pleasure-giving as oval or gleaming or statuesque or ambidextrous. Just a word, a word with a history, an adjective I can throw onto any noun. My glasses are empty, like all good nouns. My glasses aren’t Jewish, but the semiotic ladder they climb (via Jeremy Tarian’s corkscrew curls) leads to Jewishness as grief-free signifier.

  Also, I want the liberty to use the word penis as a mutating signifier, not as the tried-and-true motherlode of obviousness that wears us all down.

  Glasses, crystallizations of wish, perch on my big nose—sprained when I played Steal the Bacon in third grade and ran smack into my friend Jimmy Sims. Years later I walked into a glass door in an LA hotel near Japantown. That collision further enlarged and hardened my nose. On its fattened bridge (fatted calf?) sit my Jeremy Tarian glasses, a precious weight, bearing lightly down.

  I love their sleek matteness, their lack of shine when inappropriate and their sudden efflorescence when appropriate, the alternation of shine/not-shine, a polite counterpoint. The sides don’t shine, but if I wiggle my head the shine emerges and then disappears. A sliced hardboiled egg’s cold flatness resembles the matte sheen of my eyeglass wings, their flight toward the sectioned and the mesa-like, or toward Prague Deco furniture—not as stern as the Bauhaus, but lopped off, like most modernist pleasures. In the spirit of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s phrase “the senile sublime,” or of Willem de Kooning’s late paintings, let’s reconceptualize mental slowness as a form of intelligence; let’s reroute lunacy toward the parallelogram. Imagine what the Jetsons might have chosen for dining-room furniture, if they’d lived in Prague in 1922, and if their cartoon heads hadn’t been filled with Sputnik propaganda, but instead had been programmed with Kafka.

  (2014)

  OF SMELLS

  . . . my mustache, which is thick, performs that service. If I bring my gloves or my handkerchief near it, the smell will stay there a whole day.

  —MONTAIGNE, “Of Smells”

  I told my boyfriend, “Smell this paper.” Customers came to our apartment to drop off handwritten manuscripts, which I converted, via my IBM Selectric, into presentability. One client’s pages—untyped rough drafts—stank of Stilton and Sobranies. I wanted my boyfriend to smell the paper, its malodorousness a freak show. He said, “No! Please! Don’t make me!” He ran away. I was behaving like Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu: agent of olfactory torture.

  Montaigne mentions hairy armpits as particularly blameworthy. Several times I’ve googled the connection between body hair and odor; the results are never conclusive. Crotch follicles stink, one website said. Fact? Mentioning hair makes me a stinky speaker.

  Blindness: I smelled it in a pine cabin where a blind flutist lived. I was her accompanist. That summer, I attempted masculinity by using Irish Spring soap. A trumpet player with hairy armpits (I idolized him) also used Irish Spring: he looked like John Davidson (costar of The Happiest Millionaire) crossed with Roger Federer. Throw in Franco Nero, who, in Camelot, had roundelay hair: a shag, songful and circular.

  Montaigne mentions incense. Barbara, the first girl I’d heard confess that she loved masturbating, invited me to a Buddhist temple in Berkeley, but my parents didn’t approve. (I was fifteen.) Maybe LSD corrupted the temple, a cult epicenter, where I could be kidnapped. Barbara, who gave me a copy of Baba Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, burned incense. At her Buddhist temple, I might have met men who placed sex ads in the Berkeley Barb, sold outside Carol Doda’s strip parlor, its va-va-voom neon twinned with beatnik espresso.

  Montaigne mentions perfume. I’m trying to cultivate distractibility, to fray the edges of consecutive thought. Smell is a highway for destroying punitive logic-rivets. Travel the Smell Highway to leave behind your ideas.

  The blindness nebula of the piney cabin, amid redwoods: the cabin’s boards—if indeed they were pine—smelled flat, hard, tonic, like The Bad Seed. And there I arrived, with my salubrious, cheeky Irish Spring, as if with Franco Nero’s Lancelot urge to triangulate, to pierce, to flash monogamy-defying curls.

  Incense, you were packaged in triangles, gray or umber, which slowly turned to ash. Incense, you resembled canned pet food, resistant to the human mouth. Incense, in your solid form, unburnt, you were like tropical-fish food, or do
ggie biscuits, or human throat lozenges (Sucrets?) that were not candy but medicine—a distinction that my mother preached and that I still practice. Civilization depends on these rivalries. Candy versus medicine. Raw versus cooked. Men’s bathrooms versus women’s. The stink of a corpse versus the sweetness of perfume: Absynthe, by Christian Lacroix. I appear to be waging a holy war between perfume and death.

  I ran away from home—at seven years old—and sought shelter in a Safeway supermarket. I stole a roll of Certs: nourishment for the prodigal. Upon my return home, my father served me Campbell’s tomato soup, which smells indelibly flat, like blindness in cabins. Tomato soup’s cardboard odor doesn’t tremble into a Debussy-style cloud. Certain pale reds—as they edge toward pink—are horizontal smells, like underripe members of the nightshade family.

  My great-aunt Alice worked as accountant at a tomato-canning factory. At a workday’s end, we picked her up—in our buttermilk Rambler—from the factory. Hello to Tante Alice, as she emerges at dusk, like cigarette girls in Carmen’s Seville. By the factory doorway, the tomato odor blooms in its flattest guise, as if the tin can had communicated Martian depthlessness to the soup within.

  Yoplait on the tongue has the flatness of that tomato cannery’s smell at workday’s end: you want the flavor to ripen, but it remains unaccommodating, like a yard-duty woman I knew in first grade. Around her neck she wore a whistle, an instrument to terminate recess and to arrest malefactors. She looked like the butch secretary Jane Hathaway (played by Nancy Kulp) on The Beverly Hillbillies. Nancy Kulp, you were a shining force for good! Our yard-duty smelled (as Montaigne put it) “of nothing.” Better to smell of nothing, Montaigne says, than to stink. I had kiddie odor, the stench of a boy exploring a supervised yard.

  I wonder about the texture of Montaigne’s mustache. Was it straggly or thick? Odors, according to Montaigne, remained in his mustache for days. The mustache was Velcro to visiting aromas. Did the mustache proceed seamlessly into his nostril caverns, or did he enforce separation? I hope for French literature’s sake that he shaved a Maginot Line between mustache and nostril.

  Walt Whitman: “the scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer.” He boldly refuses unnecessary words between “arm-pits” and “aroma.” The head-on collision between “arm-pits” and “aroma”—alliterative—intensifies the blasphemous assertion of BO’s sacredness.

  Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together, “arm-pits” and “aroma” colliding. Smell amplifies collision. By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse. I want to press my forehead against a flat surface, like a foam wall. And if the surface—whether door or page—smells like Yoplait or a tomato cannery or piney blindness or neon topless incense, so much the better.

  Laundry odors, though seductive, may be poisonous. I surrender to the possibly toxic perfume of Bounce sheets, those questionable yet addictive leaves tossed into the dryer to prevent unspecified damage. The most romantic moment in my childhood might have occurred during a Cub Scouts camping trip, when I brought a towel and soap to an alpine creek for morning ablutions. My mother had packed the towel in my rucksack: maternally laundered towel, aroma finer than Ruby Keeler’s return to the Broadway stage, “Take a Little One-Step” her anthem.

  My pal in fourth grade had stinky feet, I discovered when sleeping over at his house. Maybe he bragged, “I have stinky feet,” and suggested that I smell them to verify; or else I came to this conclusion myself, and taunted him with the verdict. His feet were large, as were his cheekbones; our mutual competitiveness was large, as were our growing stamp collections. Doggishness suffused his feet, though he didn’t own a dog. The concept of “another boy’s house” came with “dog” built into it, and therefore “turd.” Onto the feet of a young Christian descends (in my Jewish brain) an abject avalanche. Twice, we fell into foreplay. Our erotic incidents took place in a bathroom and involved a cup and a rug. Did I insert my penis in the cup? Did I command him to lie on the rug? Did he sprinkle talcum powder on his rank feet? Was I the ringleader? Did I have a plan? Was I inspired by And God Created Woman on Channel 36, a UHF frequency from distant Stockton? Did our foreplay interrupt tournaments of Battleship and Clue and other board games, like landscape-feigning jigsaw puzzles overlaid with Kissinger-style statecraft-in-utero?

  Smell is syntax, is grammar, is the copula, the “is,” the copulating verb, the intercourse sign of =, the stink of equivalence, the stink of enforced likeness and its pleasures, whether fecal or ambrosial. Anywhere I go with smell (and we can go everywhere with smell) I owe to the permissive powers of the copula, the “is,” the stick-shift-in-neutral power of olfactory suggestiveness. We could therefore call smell “the whore of grammar.” Or “the fall into false closure.” Or “the rapid departure into cloud consciousness.” Or “a sudden dilapidation.” Smell locks us into words but also helps us to escape them.

  __________

  Annex: What I Took from Montaigne

  From Montaigne, I took hairy armpits. I took mustache. I took the desire to smell of nothing. I took perfume, incense, seasoning, gender. I took brevity. I took casualness. I took a tourist’s tone. I took sex. Sex I can take from anywhere; I don’t need Montaigne for sex. But I’m glad to find it in his sentences. From Montaigne, I took disgust: sex’s doppelgänger. From Montaigne, I took randomness and decisiveness. I took easy movement. I took permissiveness toward in medias res. We enter an idea in its middle. We leave before the idea can reach completion. We lean into the idea from above or below. We don’t greet the idea directly. Ten cents a dance with the idea. Toward the idea we express reverence but also eventually dismissiveness. We don’t allow the idea to tire us, and we try not to ruin the idea by pressing too hard against its vulnerable surface.

  (2013)

  GAME OF PEARLS

  1.

  “Game of pearls,” my teacher said. “Play the notes like a game of pearls. That’s the well-known term for the sound you want. Jeu perlé.”

  My ideal piano moment is after dinner: a few glasses of wine, and then some easy Chopin mazurkas (with soft pedal to protect the neighbors). I call these inebriated experiences the end of time.

  2.

  My Mason and Hamlin baby grand is a minor angel of devastation: against the apartment’s eventless hush (punctuated now by a police siren), the instrument asserts the percussive clamor of a Rachmaninoff prelude. Its opening passage makes no sense to me; it reminds me of a loud, public cough, without a touch of the lachrymose, only of the interruptive and the contagious. I can’t master the coughing phrase, but I like to impose it on my living room, to hurl it against the white walls as an aggression or a proposition: take me up on it! The passage also reminds me of cranking an old-fashioned ice cream churner, its inner chamber surrounded by rock salt.

  3.

  Playing the piano is a supremely lazy occupation, and yet it mimics a dutiful form of mechanical diligence—a chore, like mowing the lawn, folding laundry, counting pennies, or typing a form letter someone else has composed. When I play the piano, I am doing nothing, but I am also working—a treadmill, a task never completed, like writing in a diary whose pages I burn after finishing them.

  4.

  Later I will systemize my impossible subject, but for the moment I want to enjoy a tentative movement between its different chambers. I am not certain which are important and which are extraneous. Nor am I certain whether this topic is one that I have the strength to pursue.

  Just as every piece I play has already been played by someone else, every fragment I write in this essay is something I have already written. I have been secretly composing (or avoiding) this meditation for over twenty years. Long pauses frame its tentative articulation.

  5.

  I have a French sound. That’s what I choose to remember a teacher saying. Perhaps he said, “You have a sophisticated sound.” I don’t drop my weight naturally to the bottom of the key.
Instead, afraid of uncontrolled deposits, I suspend weight in my elbow.

  6.

  In an unsettled 1933 performance of the first Chopin prelude, recorded by Alfred Cortot, a Frenchman who later became a collaborator with his country’s occupying enemy, he moves forward in agitated waves but then backtracks, self-consciously retracting his rash upheavals.

  Looking at my score of the preludes, I find a few handwritten notations. Above the opening phrase of the “Raindrop” Prelude, twenty-seven years ago, my teacher wrote in red pencil one simple, enigmatic word: “tone.” She meant: make a pleasant, rounded, singing sound. Toward the end of the fourth measure of another prelude, she drew an arrow in red pencil and wrote, “don’t stop.” I still have a deplorable tendency to arrest phrases before they are completed.

  At the top of the next page, my teacher wrote, in black pencil, “weight transfer”—one of her favorite terms, and one of her most mysterious. It meant: don’t attack each note of the melody separately, but distribute the hand’s gravity evenly from finger to finger.