Mawrdew Czgowchwz Page 18

  “Ladies, ladies, the hors d’oeuvres!” Consuelo became fretful.

  G-G brought the gavel down at once. “I wouldn’t say this inquisition is leading in directions that are either pertinent, entertaining, kind, or in the best taste to pursue. Now that our ‘broken goddess’ is restored, let us discuss locations—of various sorts. I think we may safely assume that the objects of Cassia’s somewhat forward interest hang in their proper location. Okay. From anatomy, let us proceed—as if metaphorically—to geography, in town. Now the question first at hand would seem to be, where in the night, where in relation to the Plaza and the opera house, to Arpenik’s, to Cashel Gueza, to Magwyck, to here and there, and to each river—where the hell do those two stay?”

  Dame Sybil found this approach more apt. “They cohabit in a loft on Twenty-eighth Street, over a flower emporium, on the top floor with a nice southeast view of the East River, and no view at all across the Hudson, which I find is just as well, since views of the Midwest do nothing to settle the taxed mind, whereas views of Brooklyn and the East River are both charming and mysterious. Mawrdew and Jacob are in fact living in Jameson O’Maurigan’s loft. She had a gallant note from Jameson. He, by the way, is up at Neaport at that charming beach house where Lavinia’s wedding was given—you remember, Mawrdew sang ‘L’Invitation au voyage.’ He is waiting there for Mawrdew’s prose translation of Miro’s music drama.”

  G-G toasted empty space. “To the news of the great world.”

  Cassia reared up her head, to roar. “Talk to me of good and bad taste! Herself breaks a sweet tot’s heart and then prances off to live with her trick in the same rejected tot’s loft—and you bitch me from bad taste.” She guffawed like a racy old tart.

  The foursome wrangled through a long lunch. Dame Sybil, pressed for adjectives to invest Jacob Beltane with some shape beyond that described by the enticing mystery of his tall, dark, otherworldly mien and haunting, aching, florid, protean voice, avowed him: shy, bosky, fervent, blithe, lissome, articulate, and stellar. “In a word,” she summed up, “complex.”

  “And what about Creplaczx,” Cassia challenged, defiantly.

  “From what I observed that night at Town Hall,” Consuelo advised, “Miro was in his way as taken with the new oltrano as was the vanquished Czgowchwz!”

  “You mean that he too fell—”

  “...!”

  Cassia’s eyes glistened on.

  “What seems to be evident to me,” Sybil interjected soberly, “is that Miro’s genius has been extraordinarily affected by Jacob’s. I would say affected to the point which in composers may be said to most resemble that state of excitement most often visited upon poets, teachers, fishermen, and lovers. It is altogether evident to me that Miro intends them to sing together in his mysterious new work.”

  G-G toasted empty space. “That is fucking fabulous!”

  Reiterative mumblings, buzzing on over rounds of cocktails, fish entrées, salads, and desserts, continued orbiting in emotive force fields around the crucial issue: the eventual effect in art, life, space, and time of the Czgowchwz-Beltane liaison. Just what would their duets sound like? How would they move about in public? How long in life could it continue? Would she live with him, permanently, abroad? The public foursome quacked on and on.

  The Secret Seven meanwhile met privately with Laverne Zuckerman on St. Marks Place. They drank Cel-Ray tonic and ate delicatessen food. Their conversation, somewhat less surgical than the New Weston quartet’s, was nonetheless purposed and agitated.

  (Laverne wondered silently how her own career might be affected by this sudden shift in the Czgowchwz interest. She suspected, correctly, radically.)

  Ralph held the floor—for dear life. His monologue wound on through the entire afternoon, searching out that single clue which, once processed, would solve the mystery: What was it to be Mawrdew Czgowchwz?

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane lay together laughing. Jacob had just returned to the loft from Herald Square with a selection of late-edition New York newspapers. (He wished to learn the town’s ways.) Together they had discovered Dolores’s column speculating dizzily on questions supposedly relative to the various libidinal quests and successive findings of one Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano. Its shadowy references to Czgowchwz meetings, matings, partings, and reunions were so transparent, so easily traceable to the movie-mad reporter’s obvious passion for Middle European espionage melodramas, exotic Byzantine epics, the trials and tribulations of love goddesses, and Midwest roadhouse tragedies, that the one recumbent oltrano spent more than a single merry hour deciphering Dolores’s rodomontade for the other—for Czgowchwz, the more informed cinéaste, could easily and unerringly spot each derived notion the mad-woman was propounding.

  Jacob lay luxuriously naked, feeling recast as some Balkan saboteur on the Orient Express, some courier smuggling volatile secrets between Istanbul and Paris, then making his utterly determined way back across the turbulent Atlantic to New York City, and then by bus to a throaty restless obsessed temptress “thrush” slouched in mortal danger atop a white piano, singing the blues and chain-smoking, somewhere in the long, dark, wet, and winding night between Chicago and “the Coast.” (He knew there was only one “coast.” In America the other was a “seaboard.”) The new oltrano drank in the speaking voice of the woman he felt he now possessed—as her singing voice had possessed him—and laughed the laugh of pure submission. Possession/submission simultaneously informed oltrano and oltrano.

  The Countess Madge, wearing an almost sacerdotal quantity of green moiré silk, poured Hennessy into a large three-handled meadar, which she and Pèlerin Deslieux passed back and forth, sipping. The while they sipped, she remonstrated.

  “I couldn’t go to that hat-lunch—and how right I was! Sybil has only just phoned in details. Apparently the entire confabulation was overheard. They might as well have broadcast it! It isn’t enough that that drooling crone in ‘the wipe’ possesses license to scatter her pernicious blarney—fantasies of Czgowchwz affaires with Russian marshals, French ministers of the Fourth Republic, secret agents of thirteen hostile nations, and anonymous hotel personnel coast to coast. We, the stalwart intimates, must now hear as well of the convulsive loudmouth blather, the ravings and rantings in the public arena, of supposed Czgowchwz champions—which might proliferate, is it, in any number of wild mutations. A hurricane of gossip. What is the point!” The Countess stood, imperiously, theatrically, enraged.

  “The point is do you approve, Magdalen?”

  “Approve! Approve this gossip?”

  “Non, Altesse, approve Czgowchwz and Beltane.”

  “I don’t know that it applies.”

  “The more you evade, Magdalen, the less—”

  “I don’t evade—I simply don’t reconcile...”

  “Shall we wait then, till you may?”

  “You have the enduring patience of Job.”

  “And you have the will of Eve!”

  The weeks fell from the face of time like veils. Isosceles and Calypso swung back into Gotham with their booty: stacks of fat checks from bigwigs; wads of bills in small denominations lovingly donated by enthusiasts of lesser means; scads of store-bought and homemade bagatelles; snatches of ecstatic lyric and epic verse; thousands of letters seeking the Mawrdew Czgowchwz autograph on photos from her repertoire; hundreds of proposals, ranging from ordinary marriage to implorings that she consent to be declared the principal deity in a new earth religion being founded in the Painted Desert; and most interestingly, a sincere (“Where is the ‘sin’ in ‘sincere’?” [!]) proposition from an oil millionaire calling himself Tulsa Buck O’Fogarty, coupling marriage with his solemn promise to have constructed an opera house of her own, in the shape of a geodesic dome, seating forty thousand souls, to be erected at a site of her choice in the state of Oklahoma.

  This vast, various yield was deposited by Percase in the Plaza’s vaults. Mrs. Grudget’s sole comment on recent developments was: “It’s them as gossips as
feels left out.” The rest of the staff and Mawrdew Czgowchwz herself knew the woman was bursting with secret pride that “her charge” had taken to “keeping company” with a dashing Englishman, whom she herself fancied the spitting image of that Reggie Revell in the pictures years ago. Regarding “free love,” she found herself in curious agreement with another compatriot, that what’s-his-face atheist lordy philosopher and public scold—and wasn’t he a dashing creature for a thinker: “If it isn’t free, it isn’t love.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane came to be seen daily in Central Park, bemused by those first irretrievable discoveries passion squanders on the fortunate. One violently warm evening—in one of those crepuscular New York intervals when storm clouds scud across a graying sky, creating impressions of impending cataclysm—the consorts attempted forecasting the eventual ways in which they would come to quarrel. Failing, they agreed it was fitting not to know. They remained in ignorance.

  The Countess Madge, finally entirely reconciled to the Mawrdew Czgowchwz–Jacob Beltane liaison, fetched her nephew back from Neaport to New York. She installed him at Magwyck, where he began to consider his duties. One warm, peaceful afternoon in middle June, a week or so before the telecast, he met, bravely, with Czgowchwz and Beltane, and although alive to desolate, wracking pain, felt the entire perfection of the match so clearly, his poet’s soul embraced it. Jameson embraced Jacob as well, certainly, lovingly, seeing perfected—so magical was the man—the male reflection of his Mawrdew Czgowchwz. (Jameson was not a twin for nothing.) He came to care for him fiercely. He surrendered, wondering...

  Jameson forced his mind to new work. Meeting daily on Bank Street with Czgowchwz, Beltane, and Creplaczx, he envisioned his English verse libretto, which, with the Creplaczx score in one hand and the Czgowchwz translation of the Creplaczx Czech text in the other, he must construct, as close to perfection as he might manage. Percase consulted each collaborator once a day. (His monograph Thereby: The Making of a Music Drama came to be considered a classic of its kind.) Percase, adoring Czgowchwz, had come to cherish Beltane. It did seem much like witchcraft.

  When Creplaczx, staring messianically above and beyond, detonated the first chords of the score, Jacob Beltane blanched, for his was to be the first voice heard. This music topped the most diabolic demands yet made in the twentieth century, even those made by the mad Hollenius. It was too impossible. Yet he must, he knew, sing it.

  The first part of the Czgowchwz role—the twin sister of the Beltane character—was, in contrast, curiously formal. Demanding sustained intensity, subtle shading on certain liquid vocalics, and fil di voce projection meant to suggest absence, it resembled Gregorian chant. The other roles, assigned to Laverne Zuckerman, Roxanne Sauvage, Achille Plonque, Turiddu Stameglio, and the massive Cornish bass Odo Bost, varied in their demands. The Zuckerman seemed to be the most steadily taxing after the fiendish Beltane; it contained wild leaps, melismatic arabesques, occasional requirements for singing off pitch, and rhythmic aberrations verging on deliberate travesty. (All of this was to a point.) The Sauvage was a conventional, melodic cinch. (“Mary, was I not relieved!”) The Plonque and the Stameglio were set at odds to occasion a gladiatorial combat. The Bost seemed at first merely monotonous, until its majestic, obsessive, diatonic character became apparent.

  Late spring passed into opulent summer.

  Creplaczx, forging the orchestration, worked on as compulsively as any deranged scientist, as sweatedly as any Bohemian peasant threshing the harvest. For sixteen hours each sweltering day, he drove himself to storm those heights he knew he must achieve—inventive heights vaulting, he reckoned, even beyond those attained by Hollenius. The music drama assumed substance, fleshing out, out of a silent void, in fulfillment of such laws as regulate that anthropoid disposition the learned have chosen to entitle “the creative unconscious.” The libretto, a dream allegory fraught with shadow subtexts, swelled Creplaczx’s pride to perilously vast dimensions.

  Jameson lay sprawled on the solarium floor at Magwyck, loyally versing the Czgowchwz translation. The libretto told (in details as intimate as the knowledge flesh succeeds in gaining of flesh, in metaphoric cunning transparent as windows, in plotted dramatic incident obvious as mirrors, in a denouement as inverted as words beyond mirrors) of the capitulation of twin brother and sister through a whirlwind into salvific madness, of their headlong retreat from this world of causes and effects into that silent, mute, subworld paradise where all affect is abandoned. It was the “mad scene”—their duet—that Jameson was so quickly versing in a sure hand when the first firecrackers began to be heard, set off by children—evidently risen up at dawn—in the streets outside. It was Jameson’s birthday.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane rose early in the heat of that Fourth of July to take a ferry to Hoboken, to stand on what Jacob called “the keys,” to look back across the river at the contours of New York’s unyielding skyline, and to return by ferry as if pretending to arrive for the first time. Jacob listened in wonder, as the ferry slid smoothly out of the slip, to Mawrdew’s tale. How she had come upon the city of the World’s Majestic Dreams from Hoboken, across this same river, in a condition of curious calm, escorted by the Secret Seven, soon after to be greeted at the Plaza by all sorts of seekers flailing her with proposals. Resting her head on Jacob’s welcome shoulder, the original oltrano spoke of true vows, voicing in firm constancy one certain conviction: this crossing of theirs, on that day—her own second as against his first—ratified, fortified, re-enacted, symbolized... He silenced her with kissing, with caresses. Yet she insisted, declaring. (“Reality does not occur; it is enforced”—Jan Motivyk, in Were It But So.)

  Back on their side of the river, they took a gleaming orange taxi from the pier to the Park, stopping off briefly at Reuben’s to pick up a box lunch and a bottle of chilled Bohemian hock. They climbed the gray rocks they favored. Atop one, they discussed Creplaczx and the work, as yet unnamed. For the next two months, they realized, they must give themselves over entirely to its preparation. Jameson was near to concluding his versing. Creplaczx had promised completion in four weeks. There would remain a month for rehearsals.

  Then and there Czgowchwz changed the subject.

  “Jacob, it seems you are an enigma.”

  “Imagine! An enigma! Wow, how very tantalizing!”

  “Be serious, darling. Now, for my sake.”

  “I am always altogether serious, ma’am.”

  “They now suddenly know all about me. Everything I have told you about myself. Now they want to know about you. Try not to blame them. They deserve—”

  “What is it they want to know?”

  “Oh, how you are. What you’re like.”

  “Then you must tell them that I am frankly fabulous, like no other man on this earth. You may tell them I’m a war-lock. Oh, and tell them I worship you.”

  “Don’t worship me—love me, without question!”

  “I love you the way the moon—”

  “Truly, Jacob, I sometimes find it difficult conceiving what you are in the least like, underneath.”

  “Underneath? Underneath what?”

  “Skip it. I love you. That’s all.”

  “Oh, I like that. Let’s do that.”

  “Here and now, on these rocks?”

  “Is there a cave?”

  “There was one; they shut it up.”

  “That sounds oddly familiar.”

  “Kiss me, fool—for so you are.”

  “I was born on All Fools’ Day.”

  “So. So. I adore you so, Jacob.”

  “Adoring is akin to worship. Love me.”

  “What if we scrap? What if, when—”

  “Each of us must lose to win.”

  “What am I to tell them, then?”

  “You may tell them that I am seventy-three inches in height; that I weigh 169 pounds by your way of reckoning, naked, and sopping wet; that I am by providence a warlock; that I love lovely and loving animals.
I believe in the vanquishment of despair—labor omnia vincit. I believe in the earth, its seas, its guardian the moon, and in all the stars in heaven. But, forsaking all others, I love you. Don’t tell my age.”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz felt everything coming true. “When you put things in that way...”

  “Must I silence you again with kissing?”

  “No, not yet. There’s more to say.”

  “You must summon your gossips to discuss me one day over endless rounds of cocktails.”

  “Prevaricator! You are worse than Oberon himself!”

  “Are we in a row? I thought—”

  “No, we are not in a row!”

  “How do I seem to you now?”

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz drew a long, deep breath. “You seem perilously close to perfection.”

  Jacob Beltane looked away. “The perfection of my seeming is Czgowchwz.”

  They slept together, briefly. When they woke, they discussed the Creplaczx opera. She felt indeed that the entire piece—words and music—was beseeching them. Then, at once, informed by the subtle probing of Beltane the while they lay together in a shaded cleft of volcanic rock, Mawrdew Czgowchwz realized that Creplaczx, wordlessly, as befits a composer of genius, was asking them to give his work its name.

  The day waned, celebrating. They went off to buy ice cream. Jacob’s enthusiasm for Yankee confectionery had reached its zenith in a wild craving for every extant flavor of ice cream. There he stood at a sidewalk stand devouring two double-scooped cones, great globes of cherry-vanilla, fudge ripple, peach, and pistachio. Meanwhile, the English oltrano warlock wondered out loud about the Fourth of July.

  “What does it mean to them, Maev?”

  “I believe it means they must survive.”

  “They have done! Must it mean imperium?”

  “Some say yes, and some say no.”

  They enjoyed a festive dinner at Arpenik’s and then made off for the party the whole of Gotham seemed to have been asked to attend—Thalia Bridgewood’s Fireworks-Viewing Glowing Gala.