Mawrdew Czgowchwz (25 page)

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.

“I hope she's got ice cream,” Jacob mused.

Thalia Bridgewood paced the floor, fretting, alone...

She need not have worried so. The dismal failure of
Apart from Anything Else
(“such a foolish enterprise!”—Paranoy, in private) had no effect whatever upon her soiree (“a vivid, magnific occasion!”—Percase), at which each and every guest reveled in the food, the drink, the intercourse, the chitchat, the music, the dancing—and the viewing of the sky over Gotham, ablaze in spectral Technicolor (“Dizzying apocalyptic displays shooting up from scows and barges on all three rivers, creating impressions of Titanic Dialogue, splashing their random designs in clashing bursting across the sable cloak of night, stirring Celestial Riot in defiance of the decrees of such nocturn deities as may have presumed to preside over that single, singular stretch of expanding universe's own space-time”—Paranoy, carried away).

They carried many of Thalia Bridgewood's sodden, squirly guests away that night. Dolores, to her bilious chagrin, lurched awake at noon on the fifth, remembering nothing, not even the contents of those notes she had apparently dropped in the streets—or had her treacherous bearers frisked her?—notes hastily scribbled on the back stairs, on a confabulation held among Rotten Rodney Bergamot, Dolly Farouche, Grace Jackson-Haight, La Bridgewood, Cassia Verde-Dov'è, Boni de Chalfonte, and Gloria Gotham. Naturally, entirely concerned with Czgowchwz and Beltane. There were days when Dolores wondered why she...(That same conversation was “scooped” that same afternoon in Gloria Gotham's “Palpitating Palaver” slot.)

Next day Mawrdew and Jacob went out to row a boat in Central Park. Plying the oars in perfect alternate strokes, Jacob avowed that notoriety of the sort lately dealt him was such a shocking novelty he was increasingly required to combat the inflating effects by “tilting the ambivalence,” a scheme of Gennaio's (whom he had, of course, been consulting) consisting chiefly in alternate thrusts and feints, of the poised maintenance of an attitude balance between defiance and allowance. (Such labor seemed a bit like rowing.)

Mawrdew Czgowchwz merely grinned. Jacob pulled the oars in and lay back to relax with his diva. Alone together, random-adrift, courseless through a perfect summer, in a coracle on placid buoying waters, they voyaged out to some island of delight neither chart nor compass could achieve.

The island Manitoy is situate some forty miles out into the Atlantic. It is normally reached by ferry from the sleepy little town of Larking Landing, itself the terminus of a certain track dallying off the main line between New York and Boston. Manitoy's only real town, Neaport, is a relic of a whaling center. It has been, as well, for an entire century the Percase summer seat and, due to Tangent's proclivities, for some of this century's decades a thriving little colony to which certain select swarms of New York City toilers—toilers in “the arts”—repair at odd intervals of varied duration between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox.

Goodman Tangent Percase conceived his awesome scheme on the Fourth of July, at Thalia Bridgewood's fete. Ideas, notions, schemes, and strategies exploded in his imagination...exactly the way the rocketing, pinwheeling fireworks spilled enchantment over the skies of New York.

Meeting at Magwyck with Czgowchwz, Beltane, Creplaczx, Paranoy, Laverne Zuckerman, Dame Sybil, Pèlerin Deslieux, the Countess Madge, Valerio Vortice, and Arpenik—the Secret Seven and Roxanne Sauvage came later, summoned at midnight, in haste—he became the oracle, proposing a week-long music festival to be held on the island of Manitoy, the final matinee of which would occasion the world première of Creplaczx's new music drama,
NOIA
—for so had Czgowchwz and Beltane named it.

“What an
enchanted
notion,” Dame Sybil enthused.

“You cannot be serious, the pack of you!” The Countess Madge threw down the gauntlet. “We've all been on Manitoy. There exists
no
suitable auditorium on the island for the production of—
anything
! Are you thinking of Neaport's Town Hall? I forbid it! I will
not
attend! Under
no
circumstance! Don't
talk
to me!” (She was again Madge O'Meaghre, declaiming on the French or Irish stage.)

A thunderous silence fell...

In that very same silence Percase seized his moment. Executing a curious little bow meant to betray the casual flourish of down-East noblesse oblige, he faced the quizzical company and announced: “I shall build the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater.”

Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane rushed up to embrace Percase.

“Please,” the gentle man protested, “I am merely doing what I
must
do.”

The rest of the company listened, incredulous.

“A new theater—suddenly—just like
that
?!” Fingers snapped in unison.

Percase snapped back, undaunted. “To do a thing, one
does
it! I choose to build this theater. Please accept my scheme; accept my love. I've always accepted yours!”

The blueprints for a heptagonal structure, concrete and pine—the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater—were promptly displayed. It was to be erected in Neaport, atop Neap Hill, in the middle of a rye field on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic.

They all jumped up. They took turns embracing the munificent Percase. He deferred, characteristically shyly. Then they all went to work.

People began making plans.

The news reached Neaport the next day, to which childhood paradise Jameson had retreated to try to unwind a little; to regroup his forces (such as they might be); to work on the film script of
Pilgrim Soul
; and to think about his ode. A prose ode, or one in verse? What
was
prose, and what was verse?

Sitting alone at a back table on the deck of the Neaport Yacht Club, waiting for twilight to doom the day, to put the lazy harbor to sleep, he drank himself distracted, writing through the afternoon great heaps of notes on
Pilgrim Soul
. And notes on the prose or verse ode: notes he was unable later to decipher. “Love does strange things to us all.”

The First Annual Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust Festival of Music and Dance was announced for the first through the seventh of September. Seven separate entertainments were to be offered. These, listed in the CELT brochure and boxed in the Sunday
Times
, were:

In a fade-out fade-in whiz, the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater was erected that summer on the island of Manitoy. The Percase fortune, wielded in the fist of a townish aesthete suddenly turned stringent overseer (“Some atavistic sortilege metamorphosing dilettante into buccaneer”—Paranoy, in the broadside “Facets of the Fabulous”), commandeered battalions of builder-artisans, massive crews of diggers, platoons of carpenters, prides of technician-designers, day in, day out, sabbath and weekday, around the clock, in all weathers (“We tolerate no smallest degree of foozling!”—Percase) until the impossible surrendered to the proven fact.

Summer foundered. The silly season, the dog days, the ebbing weeks of August passed unmemorably, scarcely felt, lazily, numbly.
NOIA
went into rehearsal in New York.

Finally, one fine day near summer's end, hordes of stylish town types and their various consorts were to be observed carting off steamer trunks stuffed with their many and various wardrobes, either sweeping north in caravans of grand tourers or collecting in the vast Caracalla promenade of the old Pennsylvania Station for departure to Larking Landing. Enthusiasts of lesser means hitched or bused. The expeditious flew to Neaport in seaplanes.

CELT ran its own special train up to Larking Landing on the Saturday before the first night. Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane took it. Jacob Beltane felt kidnapped.

Towns and cities scooted by as the special express sped north-northeast. Careening through New Haven, callow wits among the passengers propounded oblique jests. Lurching past Buzzards Bay, the more seasoned smarties made appropriately deadly remarks. Boston was done in in the jaded abstract the while the afternoon fled by, until the CELT express jogged off the main line onto the track to Larking Landing, where, at cocktail time, the agitated passengers detrained to board the ferry.

A calm voyage lay ahead. Even so, the rigors of sailing were not to everyone's taste. Disembarking dissenting, Trixie Gilhooley staggered down the port gangplank, propped up at a tilt by “that bum” (“Theresa is
not smiling
!”—Paranoy to Pierrot). When finally safely beached, the windblown frail looked about, to assess the lay of the land. Spying the large medallion plaque of the Neaport Yacht Club—its initial letters azure rampant on a clear white field—she swiveled, rounding on her escort: “If I ever knew the
Central
came up here, you'd never have gotten me on that goddamn ferry!” They decided they all needed another cocktail.

The islanders, anxious to please—to swell the economy—retained nevertheless their particular flinty demeanor. They were there and they were not. Dour matriarchs letting out their rooms to elegant and racy slickers—sybarites and happen-worse—locked up their sons and daughters. Old salts on the harbor quay mumbled.

The week-long happening—a chain of gorgeous occurrences —passed dreamily, idyllically. Paranoy recorded it all in
The Neaport Czgowchwz Galliard
. Commenting on the radical effect glamour in the performer makes upon the willing audience, he stressed the socializing factor. People managed to live together in harmony for a week, abandoning for a time their varied aptitudes in the politics of wrangle. Eating, drinking, sailing, swimming, dancing, fucking, attending, the eleven hundred carnivaled.

The “anonymous” recital given by the Aion Music Consort set the tone. The music they offered had been composed for bouts of revelry—music of jongleurs, clowns, masters of revels, and lords of misrule, polyphonic whimsies, the coy complaints of lovers, sardonic reflections on Folly's perennial course, chantings of lust and dalliance, bounding across centuries in celebration of a European Neverworld, fabulous, young, ornate, and imperishable.

Krummhorns, sackbuts, viols, recorders, rebecs, virginals, continuo, and piping oltrano voices, under the baton of Percival Penpraz, seduced the happy auditors, proclaiming joy in consort. The voices of Czgowchwz and Beltane made tender, sinuous, bold, and delicious love, singing one over another, suddenly under, then tumbling over and under, then ultimately converging on some same single tones—resonating, vibrating, arching, plummeting.