Mawrdew Czgowchwz (27 page)

Well before dark, the evening took off and flew away. The gypsies wove in and around the throngs, scaring sociables to distraction. The bears got drunk. (They would go swimming during the revolving regatta, provoking disruption afloat and merriment ashore.) The flamenco dancers practically caved the bandstand in, stomping berserk under a “blood moon.” The midget clowns made naughty mischief together under the tables in the wine tent.

Pèlerin Deslieux's mime troupe proved to be the most fantastical of all. Erecting a tiny platform at the north end of the meadow, the “Campo Czgowchwz,” the comedians reread the exquisite pantomime style of the nineteenth-century Parisian Funambules. Pèlerin, playing the white-faced Pierrot, hypnotized throngs with his luminous anguish. The troupe turned every ancient Commedia
lazzo
—pratfalls, somersaults, mocking
duelli
, improbable recognitions. Yet it was always Pèlerin, desperate Pierrot, the audience would best recall.

Groups representing every county in Eire came, loquacious crowds sporting green-plaid kilts and Tara brooches, tuning their skirling bagpipes, dancing the Stack o' Barley, reciting their bardic tales, singing ballads, laughing-weeping, drinking the beer kegs bone dry.

For if anyone enters Love's door when he has not been admitted from within, this cannot be accounted Love: it is either Deceit or Force
.

The sun had set. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, sitting dreamily, contentedly alone at the long window of her tower suite looking down on Central Park, thought: “
Enfin!
This time tomorrow—” Then she stopped, remembering:
There can never
be
this time tomorrow
. (Her father had insisted that in
Were It But So
.) She reflected: In the next brilliant sunset, oltrano for oltrano, they would be together out upon the Atlantic making for Ireland, intending a perfect life. The New York/ Neaport idyl, a truly enchanted patch, must give way, she reasoned, to some calmer, gentle, whispering stretch. A quiet, evolving constancy must operate, binding them together in privacy. They must scheme to shut out glare.

A knock sounded at the door—four formal, inquiring raps, steady, firm, and civilized. Czgowchwz thought fleetingly of Creplaczx and his commanding habit of rapping once, then barging straight in. She rose, saluting Fortune.

Soon they were together at a window.

Jacob stood devouring a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream.

“You will one day quite soon turn into ice cream, my singing warlock.”

“Then you may eat me with a spoon.”

“Yuk! Good thing we can't be heard!”

“Good job we can talk at all.”

“All that is changing. Why tomorrow at this time—Oh!”

“Oh, come, come. We
say
‘This time tomorrow,' after all!”

“What we don't
say
!” She corrected Jacob on the nice point.

“Bewitching scion of a Fenian firebrand and a Bohemian metaphysician!”

“Oh, why don't you...what was it?”

“Why don't you
belt up
, disruptive Beltane?”

“Yes, I love that. Do ‘belt up!'”

“
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo
.”

“That's better. You do that entirely well.”

“I learned it from a lady oltrano.”

“Being with you resembles...”

“Life in the nineteen forties—‘stylish, smart.'”

“Oh, you—malapert upstart!”

“
Soit
. Popinjay. Gigolo. The Pretender. The Rake. The Parvenu. The Enigma. The Kid.”

“You're full of quarts of ice cream.”

“Cherry-vanilla. Have some.”

“Do I look the cherry-vanilla type?”

“You look your part: Titian Love Goddess.”

“Oh,
do
go on!”

“Look at yourself. Resplendent!”

“Resplendent? Be more precise.”

“Look in the mirror at the mass of that thick, rich, real, gorgeous bog-Irish hair.”

“You're impossible. Get out!”

“I'm gone...I'm back. Kiss me! Capitulate!”

They lay back together. In the next while, the while they moved into one another in the shadowy room, blue street lights outside below, white park lights, mellow rose lights in windows, and the freaked clusters of carnival lights on the Campo Czgowchwz flashed on to burn into the growing dusk.

She spoke to him on their way. “That's perfect. That manages.”

“You don't prefer baritones?”

“No, oltrano man. Do you, all told?”

“No, woman. Too dominant.”

“We agree on essentials. I find that
so
consoling. In this world of so many collisions...”

“I couldn't be happier.”

Now interlocked in darkness, lying north-south along the polar force lines, they voyaged. Flaring, they vanquished time against all odds, then slept a little while. Waking, they found one another—just there.

“Jacob, let's go anywhere.”

“We must go to them, and to this do, this one last time.”

“I love them all—but do you?”

“Teach me how to love them all.”

They bathed, dressed, and put on scent. They were to attend the do as Oberon and Titania. Before leaving, they stood there embracing at the window.

“Jacob, I cherish the absent-minded constancy, the unstated promise, the lilt of you—the insistent courtesy.”

“I love comprehending you. I love knowing you, all told. I love your voice. I love Czgowchwz, finally.”

“And no one is listening at all.”

“No one may. No one is here.”

Moments later, walking over the bridge across the Pond, amazing creatures—he got up in pale green and black, she involved in gray and gamboge, both costumes diaphanous, both figures regal, seemingly unreal—they halted, turned, looked back up at the tower window they had so lately stood behind exchanging their vows. The skyline, vaulting in silhouette against a falling horizon to the west, piercing a blue-black eastern sky with stone-slab shafts illuminated randomly, lying banked to the south beneath an indigo expanse midway between the dusk and the dark, embraced the Park. To the north as they turned, masses of amorphous trees and low-slung opaque clouds reflecting splashings of light beckoned the guests of honor. A brilliant orange moon rose over the town. The nearer they came to the meadow, the louder the music and the merriment clarioned, until before they knew where they were, they were there—at the center of a splendid assembly of frolicking courtiers: the Italians, the flamenco dancers, the Armenians, the midget clowns, the bears, the reeling Irish, the raucous show-biz troupers. Stars, co-stars, chorus, and extras, the Funambulistes of old, society dames, socialite debs, college kids on a dizzy “sophisticated” spree,
everyone
from the Village, genial mounted police (“How chic. They've laid on the hussars”—Dame Sybil, to Cassia Verde Dov'è) made carnival together throughout the Equal Night.

The variegate costumes: the Countess Madge as Norma; Ralph as Falstaff; Alice as mad Amneris; Carmen as Black Swan Odile; Dixie as Fafner; the remaining Secret Seven as Mime, the Forest Bird, and Nothung; Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh as Astrafiammante, the Queen of the Night, in sequins; Gaia della Gueza as Thaïs, in paste jewels; Cassia Verde-Dov'è as demented Donna Elvira; Consuelo as Dido, lachrymose, all in black; Arpenik as Anoush, Oriental; Paranoy as Don Giovanni, bent on conquest; Percase as Prospero, wielding a long wand; Dolores as Cio-Cio-San, drunk and lost; Gloria Gotham as the Girl of the Golden West (or else Annie Oakley); Trixie Gilhooley as the Lady of the Camellias—“Such a swell tragic story!”; Dolly Farouche as the Lady in the Dark; Rotten Rodney Bergamot as Héloïse, the nun, wearing black fishnet hose; Grace Jackson-Haight as Lady Bountiful (benign); Boni de Chalfonte as Capability Brown (smug); Roxanne Sauvage as Azucena—looking the part; Achille Plonque as Achilles (causing certain eyes to roll); Laverne Zuckerman as Puck (causing eyes to pop right out); Annamae as the Lost Chord, revealing...; Leah Lafin and Moe Mohr together as Gothic gargoyle bookends, giggling, impish; Jameson O'Maurigan as the Roman actor Mnester, his two masks set front to back; Jonathan and Lavinia as Bacchus and Ariadne; Creplaczx as proud Orpheus; Thalia Bridgewood as Jack the Ripper; Valerio Vortice as Caligula... Others came as other heroes and villains.

Perched at the top of a gigantic rainbow Ferris wheel while throngs below danced and sang, ate and drank, won and lost cash, laughed and cried, Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, like twin aerial monarchs, looked down upon creation.

There was the Countess Madge doing the Stack o' Barley like a wanton washerwoman, her flowing costume hitched up to her thighs. There was Consuelo Gilligan conceiving definitive reality. There was Ralph, devouring sausage and peppers, meanwhile holding forth to a mindful claque of rapt tots. There—over there—was Pèlerin Deslieux, onstage at the Funambules, acting Pierrot. They observed him, feeling just like the Children of Paradise, in the topmost reaches of “the gods.” There, behind them, was the great regatta being assembled on the Lake. Again there—just below—was Achille Plonque, dancing (almost naked) with Laverne Zuckerman (almost entirely so). There was Trixie, cavorting. There were the remaining Secret Seven, arguing. There sauntered Jameson, his comic-tragic masks seeming irretrievably at odds in mute, defiant, agonized argument. There was Rotten Rodney Bergamot, chastising himself outrageously with crepe-paper flails to the raucous applause of the show-biz crowd. There was Dolores, her wig askew, sozzled. There was Arpenik dancing intricate, grave, arching, twirling patterns, with an attendant group of Armenian women, accompanied by their fluting voices. There glowered Gloria Gotham, pointing a mocking finger at Dolores. There sat regal Dame Sybil in a quiet glade, strumming a lute for an audience of acolytes. There stood Percase, enraptured of the night. There stalked Cassia Verde-Dov'è, seeking something. There stood Paranoy, taking it all in.

The rainbow Ferris wheel lurched forward, downward, carrying the oltrano couple back to earth in order to allow the waiting crowd to ride up in pairs to the top of the town to look down upon them. (They
were
the talk of the town.)

Down on the ground again, pacing about the electric Campo Czgowchwz, Jacob quizzed. “What do you think of it all?”

“I think it goes its own way.”

“Yes. Don't you think that's a sign?”

“More. I think it's an absolute command.”

The regatta was launched. Czgowchwz and Beltane boarded G-G's opulent barge. (G-G, supine on a rose-velvet couch, attended by her many rhinestone-cocaine minions, drifted along in dreamland, puffing away on the best Moroccan from a long, silver pipe.) All around the Lake, under bridges, past pagodas, dozens of metamorphosed rowboats floated through the equinox carrying hundreds of costumed revelers from nowhere to nowhere else, in ellipses, to their general bemused delight.

From the shore the regatta seemed a dream collection of giant fluorescent toys. Revelers kept on waving and shouting at the crowd of boaters out on the Lake. On the gondolas, they crooned of love. On the floating norimons, they enacted pastiche Kabuki. On every toy trireme, singing salty sea chanteys off-key, they wrestled. On the Polynesian rafts, they danced about, in and out of their flowery garlands and sarongs.

It was, as luck would have it, Cassia V-D's gondola the bears capsized. Cassia and her guest, Thalia Bridgewood, lay slouched together, drifting under a discreet willow on the south bank of the Lake near the boathouse, when the two drunken bears took a notion to frolic in the shallows. Donna Elvira and Jack the Ripper were seen together one moment sipping Asti Spumante, listening dreamily to their brazen young boatswain strumming a
mandolino
and crooning a provocative barcarolle, and the very next flapping about in the brackish waters like a pair of wounded sea lionesses, barking hysterically, deserted by their gallant (glimpsed briefly fleeting past the boathouse in the general direction of Fifth Avenue). Rescued by four sturdy mounted police, each of whom experienced a deal of difficulty keeping a straight face, the sopping dames retired wrapped up in blankets, sipping brandy, dignified, while Bertram and Matilda were led away, and the party went on.

The regatta anchored at the boathouse. Soon the large collection of strange little craft lay bobbing together, awaiting restoration. The maskers made their way back to the Campo Czgowchwz, where the Adorato Opera Company were just opening their gala.

On through the magical night they listened—to Pagliaccio, to Butterfly, to Turandot, to Iago, to Figaro, to Dalila, to Ariadne. The familiar, relaxing music, earnestly if not quite perfectly sung by studious amateurs with hearts aflame, pleased everyone, drawing sincere applause. The midget clowns put on their act, a display of robust agility and comic panache. The flamenco dancers encored, howling once again up at the moon, which now hung smaller and silver in the graying sky. The Armenians and the Irish, finding common ground, danced together. The Italians along the midway went on giving away toys and dolls and hideous plaster statues of the Virgin (whose sign was just then declining). “Wherever we looked, masked faces shone under lights of various colors. ‘Rampant glamour,' we were informed, ‘in triumph'” (The Talk of the Town).

People were dancing the Madison, all synchronized. Jameson, his masks removed, sat down to look at them. His eyes fixed on Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, laughing, dancing face to face in the two seemingly endless lines—Czgowchwz facing in Jameson's direction. He began seeing other figures dancing awkwardly
in words
in the middle distance. Lurking there, glaring past these at his subject (Mawrdew Czgowchwz), he commenced to hear his own voice reading his own ode in his own head, as if it were another voice (on its own). The dancing figures in the words in the middle distance grew even sharper in their definitions. Their movements grew elegant. The colors of their raiments stood out against the ground of the dawn.