Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove's last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo's wife, aside from servicing two of Theo's twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen—taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students—contribute to Theo's sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960's, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira's guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite."

Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of four collections of poetry, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, The Milk of Inquiry, and Model Homes. Among his works of cultural criticism are The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; the Penguin Lives biography of Andy Warhol; and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. Wayne Koestenbaum lives in New York City.

See the Soft Skull Events page for details on Wayne's launch party at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as readings in San Francisco and Los Angeles!

Excerpts (from Notebook 1):

Last summer, at a garden party, a benefit for East Kill Conservatory, I saw again, for the first time in two decades, my greatest piano teacher, Xenia Lamont, a domineering, temperamental woman with a history of nervous breakdowns. She called herself my "therapist" and charged me for our "sessions"—heavy-duty sex combined with musical instruction. (She disliked the name Xenia: it reminded her of Queen Victoria. Sometimes she asked me to call her "X," or "Madame X.") She resembled Ingrid Bergman, or a flushed Rumanian empress with a forceps-wide ribcage. At the reunion she stood suntanned in a cubist-patterned caftan by the Conservatory's garden wall with her two grown sons and her loyal husband, broken capillaries on his martyr cheeks. She told me, excitedly, "I'm writing my autobiography. Early sins." As a decoy, to prevent her from probing into my European breakdown, I embarked on a long horticultural description (lobelia, alium, iris). My words grew labored and my hands trembled, as if I were having a seizure, a repetition of the Toulon staggering, the Montepulciano palsy. Listening, Xenia looked uncomfortable, like a nurse uncertain how to manage a difficult patient who was going to die soon anyway and didn't merit attention. Then she said,"Viterbo." She'd heard about my hospitalization. I turned quickly away from her. I didn¯t want to start telling stories, again, of our "therapy" sessions, the smooth slow intercourse, her shaved pubis. A teacher's vagina has no particular smell, only a reasonableness, ductility and articulateness, like forearms when playing rapid-fire octaves.

*

Dr. Crick calls me "bisexual." I married my wife, Anita, during a month-long snowstorm that paralyzed East Kill's economy and clouded my consciousness. My mother never approved of the marriage: she called Anita "ordinary." Anita is a tall blonde with a weak chin and strong cheek bones; she walks with the grace of a Kabuki dancer, though she received no training in movement arts. To simulate her coloring, dilute strawberry ice cream with milk, to undo the pink's intensity, and then love the result. Sun lamp in her private bedroom burnishes her skin. She likes when I use the word "sign"; it makes me seem a sociologist, and she married me for my analytic abilities, not my musical skills. She'd like me to retire, so we could move to Portland, Maine, where the only well-to-do branch of her destitute family still owns a house that could become hers if she sues for it. In New Rochelle, the late 1960s, she agitated for nuclear disarmament, and she has an East Kill University master's diploma in Aesthetics. For a time she taught at the East Kill Community College: "Introduction to Aesthetics," a core course, boycotted. Aesthetics are pass. Students prefer engineering. Contrary to Alma's critical claim, my wife is not "ordinary." She is fussy about details and physical sensations. She appreciates my bottom, which she calls "your special provider." I like intercourse; I am not a fan of the vagina, per se, but I enjoy its tight yet permissive grip. A man's holes only roughly compare. I was not bad at math in school; Anita's initial assessment of me as a sociopath in utero does not miss the mark. My groin: an area she wants sole rights to. No one deserves a monopoly. Preoccupied with her collection of dollhouse furniture, she avoids the full-sized. Dr. Crick calls her "obsessive." From the hobby shop I bring home special-ordered miniature fauteuils and whatnots, to keep her amused. Her late father, Hal Ackroyd, a drunk, ran a tire shop in Manchester, thirty miles from East Kill, and slapped her around the kitchen. Her mother has remarried serially: her current name is Mrs. Wax, and she is indifferent to her daughter's existence. Anita has a sister, Astrud, whose wine-colored nevis, on her cheek, repulses me; she moved to Tapei to be a missionary. When my wife smiles, her face undergoes reversal, and approximates a frown, so I can't accurately judge her moods: dejection, joy? Does she hate being married to a two-timing failure? Does she think me a narcissist or does she have other words for what Dr. Crick calls my "malady," and what my sister Tanaquil calls my "squalor"?

*

When I was a teenager, Alma kicked Tanaquil's pet terrier and then locked it in a cage: more later on this episode. More, too, about Alma's household rules? The lock on the refrigerator, in the old days, when she was a nearly full-time East Kill resident? Discuss the time that, during an altercation, Tanaquil hit Alma's left breast, and Alma yelled, "You hit my breast!" Also I must discuss my drunkenness and my evaporated talent.