Sleight (6 page)

Marvel had been golden once. Marvel had done all that was wanted. Marvel had informed on his mother and kept Byrne in line with father-threats. Marvel, by age eleven, could take apart and put back together a ’74 Mustang carburetor in under three hours. Marvel reviled sleight, lived for color. And in spite—or because—of her occasional and embarrassingly typical bruises, their mother loved Marvel with an effort that made the love enviable.

After Marvel effectively put an end to matinees at the theater, the art museum was the refuge of the mismatched trio. It was always just the three of them—there was no extended family, no chatty, cheek-pinching aunts to duck. Byrne sometimes wished there had been. Twice a week all summer long, once school was out, she’d take them on the bus into Milwaukee. Byrne’s father was at work; the museum lobby was free and air-conditioned, and only rarely were they approached by an apologetic docent and asked to either enter or leave. On those occasions they’d hang out at the edge of the lake, Marvel whipping rocks at gulls, Byrne writing his name back and forth across the sand with a stick. Sometimes, their mother would have money for admission to the museum proper. Byrne often brought books, but Marvel could sit inside the same painting for an hour or more. Byrne couldn’t remember what his mother did. Disappear into the art like Marvel? Nap upright on a far bench? He remembered how exhaustion strung her out like paper dolls—how thinly she held onto herself, to imitations of herself. Maybe she went to the restroom to cry noiselessly, like at the dishes. If so, she would’ve reapplied her makeup before coming out. She was always remarkably put together, considering. Her husband worked six days a week as a laundryman at the veterans’ hospital, plus Saturdays at a friend’s garage to get them by, to meet their ends. Didn’t she have lip gloss that smelled like apricots? Byrne thought he remembered that.

Their father knew they sometimes went—the museum wasn’t forbidden, not like sleight. He’d gone himself, once or twice. There were things he’d done for her. Rare, small things. Byrne remembered his father had liked the illustrators Wyeth and Remington. Even the room with the Hopper was okay because you could see what he meant. Byrne would’ve liked to ridicule this, but Gil’s need for meaning had never seemed ridiculous to Byrne. His father cohered, having amputated the parts of himself that bled beyond the frame. Why shouldn’t he expect the same from art? Others? And because his father’s faults accrued with this truncated sort of logic, Byrne’s hatred of him had always remained clean. Surgical.

His mother Byrne hated with less precision. The last time Byrne had been to visit her, at her suggestion they’d gone to the newly constructed monstrosity at the museum, and he’d worked to tune her out as she spoke not of his father’s death or Byrne’s own subsequent aimlessness, but of his brother’s untapped promise. Under the great vault and spine of Windhover Hall, Byrne had felt that he was inside the ribcage of a massive leviathan, an ancient creature washed up dead and fleshless out of the bowels of Lake Michigan. Failing to be uplifted by white columns or the vertical thrust of the hall’s backbone, he dwelled instead on how the opening of the brise-soleil, the structure above the building so reminiscent of a whale’s tail just before a long submersion, left those inside both exposed—and trapped.

His mother had once given him words and Marvel color. She hadn’t been projecting her own artistic nature—she’d never shown any evidence of a nature. She’d moved them through realms banned by and merely unnerving to their father. But for what? She told her two boys over and over how extraordinary they were, until that—along with the statement,
I don’t believe anymore,
which Byrne had heard her say once in hushed vehemence over the phone—became to him the mantras of her identity. And his. Byrne’s mother had given birth to extraordinary sons. And he didn’t believe anymore.

Even when Marvel started going terribly wrong—soon after Gil’s death—she would only say, “Your brother is not of the usual stuff, Byrne. He can’t be held up to the usual mirrors.” And when Byrne asked, “Mom, what other mirrors are there?” she’d answered, “Oh—glass at night, and tinfoil. And some people are. They’re walking knives—you can see yourself in them, but you’re cut up.”

The Theater of Geometry was a shabby one-story near the river. Its bijou was grimy and the graying varnish on its doors was cracking where it wasn’t worn through. Byrne first noted the dilapidation, then turned a loose brass knob, walked in. An information desk sat in the center of a small lobby with a water-stained parquet floor. No one was there. On the desk were a few brochures—local attractions, two area sleight schools, some others—Byrne picked up the nonglossy one with the eyestraining font. He read its brief synopsis before entering the theater. It was succinctly put, if a bit irregular.
¹²

The house wasn’t lit, but the stage was. Byrne found himself a seat in the near-black of the second to last row. He looked down into the space—
there is a funeral here, a funeral for a church.
Byrne closed his eyes and took in the dust and the draft, things without scent that nonetheless trigger memory by moving through the sinus cavities. Byrne found himself remembering not the performances he’d seen as a child but winter in his attic room—hiding out with a book or a pen on the chill slice of floor between his and Marvel’s twin beds. The room had proved an inadequate space for his mind. Like any theater.

Byrne stood and made his way down the central aisle. Not immediately seeing stairs, he threw his leg up and vaulted onto the lip of the proscenium, knocking a few footlights out of focus in the process. Screw the funeral. On the stage were three long glass cases, variously filled with the elements of sleight. Architectures. Costumes. Documents. Folded-over index cards with typewritten descriptions identified each item.

An architecture used in the sleightwork CARAPACE, first navigated in 1896. Color in the glass comes from the incorporation of iron and copper chlorides during the glassblowing process. The use of pigmentation was discontinued during World War I. A needlessly extravagant practice for minimal and tawdry effect, it was never reinstated.

Web worn by Agatha Spalding, founding member of the THEATER OF GEOMETRY and later, the first artistic director of BÖHME. The mirrors in older costumes were shattered and sanded down by the sleightists themselves in a charitable effort to withhold misfortune from the troupe lacemaker.

Accoutrements to Miss Spalding’s web. A flesh-colored leotard and underlay. Modern performers wear nothing beneath their webs, claiming extra garments constrict. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as today, the costumes were not specific to individual works, and so were worn repeatedly. Undergarments helped to maintain decency while minimizing the need to launder, and thus ruin, the intricate tatting.

A page from a Miss Spalding’s diary. Professional diaries such as this one were kept by many of the founding members of the THEATER OF GEOMETRY at Antonia Bugliesi’s behest.

A ticket from a sleight performance circa 1892. Within a decade of its founding, the THEATER OF GEOMETRY was attraction enough to draw private coaches from New York one Saturday afternoon each month, depositing their gentlemen back in Manhattan the following evening. According to the preserved correspondence between the Hon. Louis A. Lumadue and his brother Philip, the men returned from Philadelphia both morally intact and “unquestionably edified.”

Three pages duplicated from the fifty-seven-page document copy for MUSIC 2, one of Revoix’s original structures. Due to copyright regulations and in deference to their ineffable nature, these pages are partial (the precursor has been removed) and nonconsecutive.

Please Note: All of Miss Spalding’s paraphernalia has been donated by her great-great-grandniece, Mrs. Johann Bauer of Bauer’s Pretzel Emporium. We are indebted.

Byrne read these, and the rest. Agatha Spalding’s uninspired prose seemed to consist entirely of one night’s missteps due to “a nagging bladder that may require Miss Eugenia’s nightshade-elixir and a week’s bed rest.” He was trying to avoid growing thoughts of Marvel, left on a curb similar to the one where Byrne had found him. They had ended up walking to a bodega together. Byrne had gotten his brother some smokes. There had been a hug. Marvel wouldn’t take cash. He’d said he didn’t want to compromise his brother, Mr. Rock Steady, and had launched into some ska backbeat. Byrne figured his brother must have had enough speed for the night, or maybe the week, to be so magnanimous. Byrne had left Marvel that afternoon feeling unsatisfied, bitter, tightfisted—and headed back toward the skewered pig.

Save for the scrape of Byrne’s boots as he moved along the length of the glass coffins, the theater was dead, and dry. His throat hurt. Byrne coughed. He tucked Marvel into a less insistent part of his consciousness and walked backstage. Photographs lined the walls, but the light was dimmer. No matter, no captions to peruse. And no performance shots, of course. It was against sleight custom. The ones people managed to snap unofficially didn’t capture much. An odd lighting effect was occasionally in evidence, but no sleightist seemed capable of truly inhabiting a photograph; the camera seemed always to be pointed in the wrong direction.

The prints on these black walls were more formal portraits of early sleightists: one seated on a high-backed wicker chair in front of a potted palm, ankles primly crossed; one standing at a backstage door in a long coat left self-consciously unbuttoned to reveal a flash of web; a male sleightist posed in taut arabesque, an architecture suspended between his right hand and flexed left foot. There was a filmy portrait of a woman Byrne could only assume was Antonia Bugliesi herself. He was held, for a moment, by the intelligent face—its large eyes unusually wide and dark, maybe impossibly so.

Byrne pulled out a small camera to lessen the sudden onslaught of nakedness:
what eyes she had.
He preferred the spy feel—Byrne unknown. He took his third one-handed photograph of the trip. The first: a blond and blushing Amish or Mennonite girl in Lancaster, her braided head lowered, a billboard in the distance. The second: a butcher (mistaken in his perception that this tourist was about to buy a side of pork) jovially presenting the rendered corpse that had a few hours earlier sent Byrne down the alley to Marvel. The third: the portrait of Antonia hanging beside another photograph, that of a fop (handlebar mustache) amid a chorus line of female sleightists, arms so tight around the two on either side of him that their smiles seem forced, pained by the pressure of his cupped fingers on their hipbones.

¹¹
After traveling in and out of oddity collections across Europe, in 1892 most of the document copies were sold to a protomuseum in Philadelphia. It is there they were found and navigated into performance by Antonia Bugliesi, once a student of Marie Taglioni—the first ballerina to have stood en pointe. Charles Dodd, a Philadelphia merchant, owner of the documents, and lover of Antonia, built her a small theater adjacent to his museum, allowing her to maintain its artistic direction. He required only that the performers dress provocatively enough to ensure both a profit and his continuing interest.

¹²
“Sleight is pure, a truly Western art form. Its seminal materials coalesced in the mind of one disturbed but blessed individual, the Jesuit brother Pierre Revoix, during his tenure at St. Magdalene’s mission in Santo Domingo in the late seventeenth century. No other art form can claim such singular beginnings. No other art was created in such divine, misguided mist. Revoix wrote in his journal that ‘these papers have great import, they weigh deeply into the crevices of my hands, but I cannot fathom them ….’ Although he was author of the original structures and precursors, some psychological—possibly spiritual—impediment kept Revoix from disclosing their meanings for posterity, from even recognizing them as his own. Only translated copies of the original documents survived him, patiently making their way throughout Europe during the two centuries after his ultimate dementia and death. It was not until the papers reached Philadelphia, Antonia Bugliesi, and her Theater of Geometry—that sleight bore its fruit. Under Bugliesi’s able direction, sleight attained its current bodily and theatrical incarnation. How she came to lift geometric forms from the page and set them on a group of novices training in ballet and acrobatics is unknown. How and by whom she had the first architectures fashioned is open to debate: a local glassblower named Cullen has been suggested (see area map); alternately, one of her students may have apprenticed in the trade. On the stage some of the original architectures (absent intestinal matter) are displayed, alongside webs (designed and executed by an anonymous but visionary tattress) and copies of the original document copies. Please honor these items as well as the prints lining the backstage walls. Recent vandalism has destroyed some of our most valuable objects. Your donations are appreciated.”