Mawrdew Czgowchwz (7 page)

“I was only after thinking of that amazing notion of Consuelo's—of staging the Ride of the Valkyries on an actual carrousel.”

The two lovers laughed themselves toward distraction.

The Function of Laughter was at that same moment being analyzed by no one else but Tangent Percase, “the darling of all downtown.” On three afternoons a week at the New School, the modish academic,
philosophe
, “man of the theater” (“lobbies mostly”—Paranoy), and tender angel of mercy among the distressed genteel south and west of Fourteenth Street and University Place (“Boundaries are everything”) held forth on this or that received notion, as if holding back nightfall with a hurricane lamp (of some number of which he was possessed at home on Waverly Place, the Percase family fortune having been based on whale-oil interests up in Ipswich). Percase was telling his class of mainly listless pregnant Village mothers, worn out from their Christmas shopping excursions, that the funniest evening he had ever spent in a theater...

Consuelo Gilligan, sometime seeress and dedicated self-styled diarist, sat at home just then, sixteen stories up on Central Park South, ruminating on the obituaries and the Dakota—whose imposing gables seemed to have been beckoning for years—and listening to the afternoon opera broadcast on WCZG-FM, the newly released Czgowchwz
Salammbô
. (“Lord, what next—
Monna Vanna
?” “No, hon,
Genoveva
!”) At her idle feet, opened to a middle page, lay
Come and Gone
, the memoirs of the fabled “Aigrette”—that Edward-ian amorist-become-evangelist, Margot Chalouie-Duletz (nee Daisy Drear), mistress of kings, lover of queens, and late Founding Abbess of the Holy Brood of the Fortuitous Anointed of St. Mary Moresow at Neasden—whose motto, “A little something daily”...

Consuelo brooded, restless, perplexed. Having long since noon lost track of the tumbling arc of the winter sun, she suffered the gloaming storm, meditating on the frangibility of one's vows to the one sex or the other or the other, passing thence to the
pluribo-uniquity
(proposing the word, she ratified it at once) of a snowflake among snowflakes; thence to cold conceptual rigors, speculating on monologistics; thence to haywire syntax; thence to lacecraft...

Moments later, veering back, Consuelo slipped herself her late-afternoon Veronal and summoned her rational forces to focus on the central dilemma she felt her heart bound to parse: Would she attend the Solstice Feis at Magwyck or no? The “qua” of her pointed, unadvertised hesitation being not so much a disaffection
for
as a nagging disinclination to opt absolutely in favor
of
those persons (many in number and as aleatorily diverse in style and aspect as so many fabrics' shades and tones in some bazaar heralding anarchy) lately, and she did fear hastily, enfeoffed through the overgenerous agencies of the Secret Seven and the Countess Madge to Czgowchwz and the Czgowchwz movement, she tumbled into a noded thicket, ending enmeshed in pro- and contra-distinctions. Nor were these footling concerns. An open door was more to be questioned than the thickest drape three-quarter drawn. Briefly, Consuelo considered, there were at latest count entirely too many hack taxis cluttering the Czgowchwz Way; the sedans and coupes de ville were being obliged to remain in the outer park, making and remaking their ways in ever-diminishing concentricities unto some sinister midpoint, some obscure terminus at dead center; perhaps (she shuddered) to oblivion.

Her distress decided it: she rose to dress. She
would
attend —as she wrote—“festooned in the heroic fardels of the Byzantine forties (no mean gauds) and carrying a beaded bag. And just let anyone say...” She ran a scalding tub, tossing in quantities of mimosa bath salts and restorative dried herbs. She then disappeared into the wardrobe as
Salammbô
finished blazingly on the wireless, all the while racking her now superbly focused brains in order to concoct the best mélange of heady scents to overcome the inevitable soupçon of mothballs and faded musk-rose sachet that would linger in the fabric of her getup.

Merovig Creplaczx, composer (the apparent Hollenius heir), conductor, virtuoso pianoforte soloist, and unique accompanist (exclusive to Czgowchwz), sat poised in a state something akin to terror over the keyboard of a Steinway grand in a certain sublet pied-à-terre on lower Bank Street, near the river. In no time he commenced indulging his genius, hammering out frantic note clusters of the “Amen de la consommation” from Messiaen's
Visions de l'amen
. Outside everywhere the snow went on hurtling down at the same dizzying velocity (precisely) at which the notes rose, concomitant as well in density—relentlessly metaphoric—until, as the doorbell rang, cutting through the din like a shaft of platinum light through murk, he broke off and rose in a profound sweat to open the door. Echoes of overwrought Messiaen vibrated suicidally against the smokeglass hall mirror as Rotten Rodney Bergamot staggered in, caked like the Golem or the Thing in the blizzard's officially noted torrential droppings, which presently fell melting in inch-thick lumps on the durable Azerbaijan carpets.

“So. How did you arrive here?” demanded Merovig, somewhat dully.

“I came all the way down Second Avenue on a troika, hooked to the rear axle of a scarlet
snow truck
, Mona! I
burrowed
across Houston Street with a purpose demented. It's the
end
of the
world
out there! It's ending in
ICE
—they were
ALL WRONG
!”

“Not all,” snapped Merovig grimly. “I am going out quite soon!”

“Oh? Who's taking you, the Snow Queen? There are
no
taxis. There aren't even any more snow trucks. They've
surrendered
! It's no flurry o' feathers out there, Hilda, it's the
steppes
!”

“I am to call for Mawrdew Czgowchwz at half past seven at the Plaza,” Merovig rejoined, unconcerned.

“Skip it, you're late now. And what was that
unearthly
noise you were making when I rang the bell? Thanks, I'd
love
a bowl of the best bourbon. Have you got a bathrobe? Shit, how I
hate
winter!”

“That was Messiaen. I adore Messiaen. I must dress.”

“But I've brought you my
libretto
!”

“You were due for after lunch; you are past late. Leave me what you have; I will think on it.”

“Do me a smart favor, buster! Get me a drink or I'll get myself another, shall we admit lesser, composer. And a word to the wise, Solange: Hollenius wasn't plugged in his high smart prime for no smart reason! Here I come through a holocaust to offer you on a silver cocktail tray the
kickiest
toy idea since
Benvenuto Cellini
. And you treat me like—like Scribe! You try to toss me out in—”

“Pour yourself what you like; I must dress.”

Creplaczx disappeared into the bedroom. Rotten Rodney Bergamot, undressed, prowling about nastily naked, made up a sarong out of an overused leopard-print sheet (the actual tenant's) retrieved from the back of the linen closet. He slipped a worn recording cut by the late Clichette, supreme diseuse, onto the Victrola, poured a brimful snifter of the most expensive Scotch he thought he recognized, and lay back on the indigo suede couch to brood. The record finished in three minutes plus, anguish-ridden, lost. Rotten Rodney loped over to the Steinway in character, sat down to pluck out “Stormy Weather” with two fingers, and moaned along, the way he thought a body should. At length he broke off, thick-voiced and Dexamyl-omnipotent, shouting at Merovig, rooms away: “I swear anything you like, Miro,
Puvis de Chavannes
has the makings of a fucking
glorious
opera!”

Merovig's rotary electric razor droned from the bathroom like a wasp at a distant window. He himself was humming one of the Ondes Martenot lines in Messiaen's
Turangalîla
Symphony, sounding mystically elsewhere and thinking of Mawrdew Czgowchwz under another name: Mawrdew Creplaczx!

Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh and the Contessa Cassia Verde-Dov'è sat slumped together in a stalled gypsy taxi on their mutual way to the Solstice Feis at Magwyck. They had planned on arriving very early. Their furtive driver had disappeared unencouragingly some moments since, leaving the cab close by the park drive exit behind the zoo, with the hood up. Through thickly falling snow, sportive bears could be heard in mildly ferocious sibling frolic (Sybil decided) in the nearby caged recesses. On and on...

Dame Sybil, never having got used to the vagaries of manner New York taxi drivers consider it their stylish duty to perpetrate (she announced), fulminated, outraged.

“Cassia, it's outrageous!”

Cassia grimaced. “It is. I'm
very
annoyed!”

Sybil decided on a statement. “If something doesn't occur—quite soon—I shall relapse.” She declared it with finality. They waited some minutes. There was no remarkable change. Things seemed the same, yet more so. Sybil, spying neither horizon nor relief in the grim prospect (Gotham's winter world, which lay like lacy-shrouded death in frenzied disrepose, she fancied, stretched out beyond the windshield—a vision, she thought, of a Turner tempest viewed in kaleidoscope, counterclockwise, frozen, blanched, like some wickedly animate ice-mirror universe out of a childhood Christmas nightmare), marveled: “How treacherously unlike it is to the gracile abandon of, say, falling russet leaves in Somerset at All Souls'!
Can
it be merely
snow
? It has the definite, sinister look of something fabulously chaotic and wanton—something
scientific
, like atomic fission, something
galactic
, like stars' demises, something redolent of systematic cataclysms—”

Cassia sneezed furiously, dampening her silver fox and the fragile mood in a single convulsive, economic gesture. (In her economy, talk was costly, and small talk, even exquisite small talk, cheap.)

“This is
not
the kind of gonza mess you can talk down, La Farewell, not even with your fabulous lethal tongue. What we need basically is a phone. I'm very annoyed. I can't stand not being very early for these performances—especially now, after having scratched Grace Jackson-Haight's cocktail dance off my calendar so as to be the very first chez Gautier. Of course,
that
would have been death-on-stilts to attend—Jackson-Haight's collection of nobodies that perhaps only the Christian god in his misery could corral...I can't stand not being very early. I'm very annoyed!”

Her dauntlessly comely face set deep inside the raven pagoda of an opulently decked coiffure, Dame Sybil shot ironic sidelong glances at unpresent cameras. (The losses were the cameras'.) Lighting a tipped du Maurier (“They remind me of someone”), drawing her sable closer to a pearl-girdled, swan-white neck, she studied by the frail light of a silver wax match those quattrocento, Cima fingers that were her own, whose deceptively slender, tapered lengths concealed such sensual delicacy locked in docile, tensile mystery: a consummate technique commanding definitive mastery of the arts of the piano, the harpsichord, the psaltery, the lute, the oud, the sitar, and the koto. A small drop of hot silver wax slipped off the spent match onto a star sapphire adorning the left forefinger, recalling her to the swirl of the moment. “What was it you were saying, Cassia?”

Cassia, gathering dismay, turned fully around to face Dame Sybil for emphasis. “I merely said, my dear, that I
loathe
and
detest
the idea of being
late
! Even among friends, my dear, tongues will
wag
, you know, tongues
will wag
!”

Sybil, turning again to look into the storm, blew two thin streams of nostril smoke against the windowpane in which she saw herself, and through which she saw one faithful cabby returning with a large can of something effective-looking. She thought briefly about windows.

“Yes, I suppose so, toots, and wags will
tongue
!” She smirked, only a little. “But what
of
it when nature is so busily vocative, denouncing every scheme? One feels—out-classed—from the start!”

The cab started up again. Cassia sneezed, and grew sullen.

In her tower Mawrdew Czgowchwz pondered it. Playing solitaire Scrabble, the new hard way, waiting for Merovig Creplaczx to call up, she hummed the stanzas of the Liebestod like mantras. She was as yet unable to decide. There was something she wanted to remember...

Meanwhile, Halcyon Q. Paranoy sat at an early-model Dictaphone in an office off the city room. He spoke quickly into the receiver: “I seldom go out—Nobody asks me. Tomorrow or the next day, Nobody Else will do the same. By the end of the holidays, beseeching invites from nobodies everywhere will have piled up in heaps on my desk. But tonight I rush through the biggest blizzard to hit this town since the late forties, to attend the annual...”

While, alone at her faithful Depression Corona, with a bottle of Rock & Rye and a carton of Luckies, Dolores pounded out her column for a tentative tomorrow:

While Gloria Gotham walked out of Grace Jackson-Haight's beige boudoir, having interviewed Thalia Bridgewood, whose fretful search for a new spring vehicle was causing some bizarre ructions on the Rialto. As the reporter walked south down Park Avenue against the blizzard she wondered what to make of things after all. There seemed so little point in recording...

While Tangent Percase wound up his meditations, tumbled down off his head, sprawling naked on the bare pine floor, and pulled his wits together. Rising to don dinner dress for Magwyck, he collected his thoughts concerning the solstice.