Here's my latest creative essay: An Evening with Juan and Evita
What do you think?
Juan, known to his associates as Generalissimo, but whom I call mi querido esposo, immersed in his golden hour rituals, in our Central Park West penthouse condo, scrolling the glowing tablet with the mechanical grace of a man who thinks by swiping, a desk-bound flâneur of post-soft-landing economic headlines and CNBC market graphs—today’s mix of inflation forecasts and streaming IPO chatter—devours the day’s news with orange juice and Harry’s Deli soft rolls, hiding inner emptiness behind a caricature of command, seeking meaning with daily ritual like a Sisyphus with WiFi, his voice an unbroken thread about deficits, exchange rates, elections, as I, still half a famished revenant of sleep, sit across from him like an echo that hasn’t quite formed, Jamaica Blue Mountain Estate Coffee warming my fingers more than my thoughts, nodding like a metronome, dulled by indifferent ennui, as if to keep time with the Dow, enchanted not by baroque content but ambling cadence, for we were always willing to be ruled by a commonplace rhythm so long as it sounded like vivid certainty and yet in the pause between gulps and headlines I drift—a hush forms, a veil unlifted—and, in mitten drinnen, suddenly, Phillipe R. returns to me—his overcoat shedding faint traces of rain and old tobacco—not as Proustian memory but as that kind of semi-opaque Freudian dream clamoring for interpretation, filtered through present light, the scent of Masseria Caffé & Bakery gourmand-worthy coffee, the murmurous tranquility of a languid morning—a hallucinated arrival stained by yesterday’s ambient longing, a nervous grandeur in motion, a man who seemed always to be departing from the place he just entered, eluding a passing mood of insight, and yet now he sits in me, as I sit across from Juan, and both of them sit within a dimmed dream I once mistook for waking, where I, with a placid surface, mirrored all things strangely like reflections warped by rippled glass, and for a spasm or two I am safe, as if reality had briefly unclenched the talons life wears when enclosed in quotation marks, and I too was nothing more than a vaporous shadow in a library of being, trailing the aura of unpaid bills, unread books, and old cities populated by worldly-wise ghosts—wrapped in that strange comfort of witnessing something at once shameful and profound, caught in the exquisite ache of unfulfilled presence, theatrical and faintly obscene, that paradox that makes you want both to avert your eyes and lean in closer; and how Juan, exact and unstartled by Phillipe’s artistic disorder and banal deflections, had shepherded him through the storm, concluding contracts and cutting deals with the cool steadiness of one who’s rescued more than one flailing genius from the fiscal tide—back in 2006, before the Global Financial Crisis, when Phillipe, already worn thin by literary quarrels and fading memories of showgirl lovers, a somber figure with eyes dimmed by distant grief, found himself under investigation by corrupt and compliant IRS agents for a tax evasion scheme involving “non-disclosed holdings;” and the writer, defiant as ever, then at work on a historical novel about the 1973 coup in Chile that unseated Augusto Pinochet—a project he insisted was about the fragility of power in Latin America, though you could feel Perón brooding at the margins, alongside the stench of irony rising from allusions to “concealed American bank accounts”—lashed out in a New York Daily News interview, accusing federal auditors of deploying “KGB-like tactics,” and Juan, relishing the theatrically lurid spectacle, his win-at-any-cost style and swaggeringly brash love for the spotlight under full klieg lights, stepped into the breach like a Philadelphia lawyer channeling a Sirkian melodrama in federal court, unflappable and spine-thrillingly grand, delivering not just defense but a Capraesque performance rendered in parody—both script and stagehand—and made an impression, no, a permanent mark, on the much older writer, who, having dispatched Chinese take-out as prologue, then entered, as if cued, bearing not dessert but denouement, arriving late, eyes storm-lit, dense and darkish overcoat swinging like a proscenium curtain before the show begins; and even before he said a word, I felt it—that shift in atmospheric pressure, the high-drama lull that precedes a rehearsed stage entrance, the way time stutters when someone too high-voltage walks into your frame—and our loft, spacious and clean-lined and sharp with curated silences—a stage set for a private production where the audience never applauds—the George Nakashima-designed furniture in the “free edge” aesthetic dining room—which Hector the parrot, if you please, had a silly habit of calling el come-come-dor—the table always cluttered with Juan’s latest tchotchkes, reports, invitations, unopened mail—turned soft around his shape, and I (radiant in that way I become when lit by good company and the promise of stories about love, deception, greed, lust, and . . . unbridled enthusiasm—like a nymphet unrecognized, like Humbert Humbert’s parrot, mouthing syllables without understanding—a soul with no grammar, not speaking to persuade but to echo), called him Park Avenue divine and meant it, not as hollow, vain flattery but as recognition, and there we were, gathering martinis and moonlight, caught in a bounded digression in time, the three of us among others, on this fulgent and improbably enchanted evening, but it was always about the three, a triangulated warmth, each of us orbiting the other two without ever quite settling into a line, and the cocktail party that night had a guest list that bordered on the surreal: I, Evita Morales Gelman, a woman of declared freedom but confined by invisible bars, peacocking, a fallen Catholic stripper in imitation jewelry with a secret devotional streak, practicing the unapologetic trade of my own body; Phillipe, a Jewish novelist of Pulitzer distinction, whose gaze could frost glass, whose ideas weighed more than cutlery, and whose eyes, hooded and unreadable, seemed to say, I’ve seen it all—you can’t shock me, you can’t even amuse me; and Juan, who knew how to turn collective breath into a dumb show, who fed awe just enough dread to make it feel like destiny, and when the table fell into a hush and Phillipe turned that intolerably vacant stare on me, I faltered, like someone whose name I can’t remember, fearing I would come across as a tart—I, who was never at the center but knew the warmth of charisma, my arriviste poise wilting, nothing to toss into the spill of choreographed banter absurdly veering and tacking like a sail on windless water, and there I was, mouth half open, searching for something to say, anything—a word or note—while inwardly I felt that old curse stirring again, the mistake of looking too closely at myself, telling myself I was no longer twenty, standing there like a nebbish, of turning the beam of my mind inward when, as I once read, consciousness is a light meant to guide us outward—it blinds when turned inward, as I sat exposed, like a lamb stranded in the windswept emptiness of a Patagonian pasture, and Juan, his cynical grin breaking through, scanned my face nervously for the slightest tremor of collapse, for he had labored mightily to burnish my indiscreet résumé and expended all his persuasive powers translating Vegas-style lap dances into “business transactions,” calling strip club regulars “corporate clients,” and, in a cunning effort at deception, adroitly branding the club itself a “cocktail facility,” an exercise in sustained tact, while I, with mocking sincerity and soft, calculated formality, answered every skeptical query with “yes, señor” and “sí, muy respetado señor R.,” a rhetorically restrained tone I had mastered long ago working with Juan—an assimilated Upper West Side Jew with Orthodox credentials, scion of the Argentine branch of the Gelman clan (who had settled in Argentina’s Entre Ríos Province, one of the colonies established by Baron de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association)—ever the gracious architect of sleek soirees, never raised his voice nor left fingerprints, but once—only once, and it hung in the air like the smoke from one of Juan’s Nicaraguan cigars—he spoke with stoic indifference of a friend who had fallen out of favor, not with anger but with the impassive finality of someone rearranging books on a library shelf, careful to avoid any false notes of betrayal, and after that, the man ceased to be mentioned, like one of Argentina’s Dirty War desaparecidos, his name no longer echoed in dining rooms or afternoon calls, as if time itself had agreed to fold him away, as the Arabs say, as though “what was written” had been erased, and Juan, with that same half-smile he used when explaining wine pairings or stock market trends, simply remarked with a precise, measured gesture, “Some people grow heavy with memory; better to let them drift,” and I remember, even as Phillipe spoke, a flash of doubt rippling through me: were we not, all of us, merely cast members in Juan’s elaborate theater of diplomacy and desire? Had he not shaped each of us to fit the emotional grammar of his private stage play, assigning roles with the elegance of a screenwriter but the mute cruelty of an omnipotent autocrat? I had often sensed it–that curious sensation of being moved, not moving; that the embracing affection I received, the happy talk conversations I joined, the very laughter I offered, were perhaps not mine at all, but echoes from a script I had never read, and those whose judicious voices once strayed from the text, those who failed to deliver their lines as written, were recast in irrevocable wordless pauses or edited out entirely, dissolved into the unseen currents of time, as though Juan’s orbit demanded not authenticity, but obedience–obedience to mood, to the subtle ballet of glances and gestures, to the staging of moments that must never disclose the artifice of their construction, to the illusion of spontaneity curated with military precision, as if he were some private Harold Prince, orchestrating not a Broadway spectacle but the daily pageant of intimacy, rehearsing me for my own Evita, my own performance in a drama whose meaning was always just out of reach, always deferred, yes, Juan had patiently, almost tenderly, tutored me in the rudiments of Jewish ritual and cultural expression, in its rhythms and even in Yiddish phrases, as though I had been taught in the solemn cadences of remembrance, the secret passageways of memory and forgetting, and somewhere in that tension–between the sacred and the staged, between the desire to belong and the fear of vanishing into someone else’s narrative–I realized that power, when unmasked, can still seduce, perhaps even more deeply, when it dares to be cruel without apology, glorious in its lack of disguise, so that now, at any mention of the Holocaust, my eyes misted reflexively—whether from rehearsed piety or true affect, one never quite knew—and Phillipe, a contemporary Karenin, brilliant and severe, a man who had never cracked a joke or dabbled in irony, desperately clutching even the faintest pretense of superiority, something—anything—that let him look down on others, and so holding fast to his brittle certainty as though it were his only lifeline, carrying in him a humorless gravity and a debt to conscience so heavy it seemed to have accrued above prime-rate interest on his soul, and he bore this burden not as doctrinaire affectation but as birthright, so that even his bleakly off-putting silence rang like a confessional priest’s wordless censure, and the insurmountable and morosely ill-fitting guilt he exuded—preposterous and indelibly fixed—felt less like a character flaw than a metaphysical inheritance, and just as Phillipe was about to launch into one of his endless scolding monologues about moral decay and the decline of narrative tension in modern fiction, the parrot Hector—yes, our parrot Hector, brought inexplicably by a minor Italian-descended Argentine saxophonist hanger-on, the “dark and good-looking” Paolo, now long gone, whom no one quite remembered inviting—perched on the dim iron wall sconce, squawked into a smoky ellipses of language bloated with the unbearable intimation of impending farce: “No yores por mí, Argentina,” provoking a stunned pause, the quote—from a Broadway show tune, unmistakably—had been uttered in flawless Judaeo-Spanish, delivered with the guttural, gutting drama of a lapsed Sephardic opera tenor, Phillipe blinked, I tilted my head in mild confusion (though I already knew, I always knew), and Phillipe queried sardonically, “Did the bird just say what I think it said?” and the parrot, now flapping, as if possessed by anarchic whimsy, gently in place as if pleased with its empty attempt to loosen itself from infelicitous bondage, this soft-winged avian phantom gliding over a narrow expanse of forgotten beginnings and smoldering remains, added for emphasis: “Eskodrí la libertá, korrer i prover todo nuevo,” no one laughed, not at first, it was the kind of moment that hovered between surrealism and revelation, between the fey grace of the improbable and the tangle of thorns of the absurd, I stared at the bird with something like reverence (or was it suspicion? even now my cup brims with faint recognition of joyless constraint), Juan, ever the orchestrator, attempted to smooth things over by explaining that the parrot originally belonged to a visiting scholar of medieval Spanish philosophy and had been trained on Ladino proverbs and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, surely the only demoniac parrot to ever haunt these hallowed walls, and it was veraciously whispered, too, that I, ever the dispenser of gifts to the forgotten and forlorn, had once referred to Hector as “mi chiquito plumado”—my little feathered child—fussing over his meals and caged antics with fierce, maternal devotion, Phillipe, uncharacteristically amused, murmured, “Even the parrot has irony now,” and then it happened—the shift, the somnolent recalibration of the night’s energy as Rubinstein appeared, the improvisational jazz pianist, Manuel “Manny” Rubinstein, carrying with him the smell of wool and cigarettes and damp air, the sooty-black-browed figure who materialized stealthily in the doorway as if conjured by collective need, fresh off a Delta flight from his tour of junta-ruled-military-boot-crushed South American capitals where he had been mobbed by enthusiastic throngs and (as muttered furtively in the half-truths we all traded like devalued pesos) covertly surveilled by agents of Argentina’s Secretariat of Intelligence whose suspicion, quite absurdly, held that his irreverently wonky swing, blues, and hip hop-inflected arrangements of the late Beethoven piano sonatas masked some cryptic Marxist subtext, and there by his side was Hermione, of course, the torrid Hermione, dressed up to the nines, whose clingy dress hinted at a disregard for conventional taste and discretion (nu? That’s glamour?), Hermione with her long dancer’s spine and her knowing, languorous smirk, the woman who had pulled him awkwardly into the world of ballroom tap dance, they who had briefly tasted the transient prestige of television notoriety on So You Think You Can Dance, her movements still serenely poised, as if she floated through the gloomy chaos like a sly, unruffled apparition, and when Manny sat at the black-lacquered Fazioli grand it was not ceremony but revelation, beginning the slow arc of his boogie-woogie rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 111, Gatsbyesquely rebranded “Manny Rubinstein’s Jazz History of the World,” those syncopated, Harlem-stride broken chords cascading like someone rambling through a convoluted corridor of their own thoughts, and suddenly the room was no longer a room but a floating acoustic void around a sound, tarnished and spectral, a rapturous emanation laced with jive riffs and post-bop accents, sweeping us backward, without end, into the ghost-thread of memory and resurrected desire, and no one moved—not even Juan, who, after the final notes evaporated like Bourbon Street morning dew into the rafters, surprised us all by crawling, involuntarily and with the solemnity of an African Baptist river-delta baptism, across the wide expanse of Persian carpet spread over Arabescato Breccia marble to where I sat, and kissed the top of my foot with such tenderness and theatricality that Rubinstein, still seated, gave a single audible chortle and then looked down at his own fingers as if unsure whether he had played or merely dreamed, the moment still swaying, unmoored, like a green light blinking across Lake Pontchartrain, and I watched, as I so often did, from a distance within my private consciousness, observing the stemmed martini glasses lifted, laughter folded and unfolded, chatter rising and falling like mild springtime weather, words exchanged like ritual offerings, then quietly filed away for later scrutiny, and Phillipe—always the Nick Carraway-ish novelistic observer, intent on gaining access to the mysteries of social intercourse—his mind already arranging the fragments into pungent narrative, into something that would outlast all of us—said later how these nights were everything, how they fed the machine, how you write until seven, attend a party at eight, and by midnight the voice returns, clearer than before, reshaped by the glancing sentence or the accidental pause; and as we talked, and the evening spun out around us, I found myself sitting not just in a room but at the rosy-hued outer edge of something incandescent, feeling the pull of charisma and hunger and wistful, ashen resentments—the kind that drift wearily through dusk-lit parlors like curtains stirred by a breeze, haunted by glitter and shadows and the shimmer of joy too fragile to name, and Phillipe, who had written us into his novel, called us symbiotic and tormented—like a controlling autocrat and his compliant followers—clinging like barnacles to a rock, and I loved the line and repeated it in the tone of a benediction, though to me it felt more like a verdict, a blurted confirmatory revelation, and, recalling Scott Turow’s line that novelists elevate idiosyncracy while lawyers, like Juan, flatten it, I smiled at Phillipe and nodded, but said nothing—because what could I say to that?—and then he was recounting some fevered scene—someone’s wife, someone’s betrayal, the way everyone performs affection and no one believes it—and somehow the talk turned to Così fan tutte, someone—maybe it was Juan—explaining the plot with a kind of manicured, lewd adolescent glee: the men who wager, the women who fall, the aesthetic masks that collapse into burlesque; and I, remarking that the real point was not the seduction but the fresco-like architecture of doubt, the voluptuous cruelty of watching love become its own undoing, and someone—probably Phillipe—said that fidelity was a farce, and Mozart knew it, knew it with the errant clarity of a rogue scholar, knew it better than most playwrights or poets ever dared, and there was a moment of calm after that, not disapproval, not agreement either, just a shared stillness, like the penumbra after candles fold into darkness, as if history itself had flinched into a semantic vacuum, as if we’d all heard something too true to be repeated, and I touched his sleeve in laughter, and felt something sharp and small break like a draft in the chest, and when the evening finally dissolved—candles melted, glasses empty, silence pooling in corners—Juan offered to drive Phillipe home, and I remember the three of us stepping into the wet, partly moon-lit night, the wind lifting my coat like a sail, and the city gleaming with that damp, sallow light that makes everything feel provisional, the night punctuated by the distant howls of dogs, [essay cut off. too long for SW]
Juan, known to his associates as Generalissimo, but whom I call mi querido esposo, immersed in his golden hour rituals, in our Central Park West penthouse condo, scrolling the glowing tablet with the mechanical grace of a man who thinks by swiping, a desk-bound flâneur of post-soft-landing economic headlines and CNBC market graphs—today’s mix of inflation forecasts and streaming IPO chatter—devours the day’s news with orange juice and Harry’s Deli soft rolls, hiding inner emptiness behind a caricature of command, seeking meaning with daily ritual like a Sisyphus with WiFi, his voice an unbroken thread about deficits, exchange rates, elections, as I, still half a famished revenant of sleep, sit across from him like an echo that hasn’t quite formed, Jamaica Blue Mountain Estate Coffee warming my fingers more than my thoughts, nodding like a metronome, dulled by indifferent ennui, as if to keep time with the Dow, enchanted not by baroque content but ambling cadence, for we were always willing to be ruled by a commonplace rhythm so long as it sounded like vivid certainty and yet in the pause between gulps and headlines I drift—a hush forms, a veil unlifted—and, in mitten drinnen, suddenly, Phillipe R. returns to me—his overcoat shedding faint traces of rain and old tobacco—not as Proustian memory but as that kind of semi-opaque Freudian dream clamoring for interpretation, filtered through present light, the scent of Masseria Caffé & Bakery gourmand-worthy coffee, the murmurous tranquility of a languid morning—a hallucinated arrival stained by yesterday’s ambient longing, a nervous grandeur in motion, a man who seemed always to be departing from the place he just entered, eluding a passing mood of insight, and yet now he sits in me, as I sit across from Juan, and both of them sit within a dimmed dream I once mistook for waking, where I, with a placid surface, mirrored all things strangely like reflections warped by rippled glass, and for a spasm or two I am safe, as if reality had briefly unclenched the talons life wears when enclosed in quotation marks, and I too was nothing more than a vaporous shadow in a library of being, trailing the aura of unpaid bills, unread books, and old cities populated by worldly-wise ghosts—wrapped in that strange comfort of witnessing something at once shameful and profound, caught in the exquisite ache of unfulfilled presence, theatrical and faintly obscene, that paradox that makes you want both to avert your eyes and lean in closer; and how Juan, exact and unstartled by Phillipe’s artistic disorder and banal deflections, had shepherded him through the storm, concluding contracts and cutting deals with the cool steadiness of one who’s rescued more than one flailing genius from the fiscal tide—back in 2006, before the Global Financial Crisis, when Phillipe, already worn thin by literary quarrels and fading memories of showgirl lovers, a somber figure with eyes dimmed by distant grief, found himself under investigation by corrupt and compliant IRS agents for a tax evasion scheme involving “non-disclosed holdings;” and the writer, defiant as ever, then at work on a historical novel about the 1973 coup in Chile that unseated Augusto Pinochet—a project he insisted was about the fragility of power in Latin America, though you could feel Perón brooding at the margins, alongside the stench of irony rising from allusions to “concealed American bank accounts”—lashed out in a New York Daily News interview, accusing federal auditors of deploying “KGB-like tactics,” and Juan, relishing the theatrically lurid spectacle, his win-at-any-cost style and swaggeringly brash love for the spotlight under full klieg lights, stepped into the breach like a Philadelphia lawyer channeling a Sirkian melodrama in federal court, unflappable and spine-thrillingly grand, delivering not just defense but a Capraesque performance rendered in parody—both script and stagehand—and made an impression, no, a permanent mark, on the much older writer, who, having dispatched Chinese take-out as prologue, then entered, as if cued, bearing not dessert but denouement, arriving late, eyes storm-lit, dense and darkish overcoat swinging like a proscenium curtain before the show begins; and even before he said a word, I felt it—that shift in atmospheric pressure, the high-drama lull that precedes a rehearsed stage entrance, the way time stutters when someone too high-voltage walks into your frame—and our loft, spacious and clean-lined and sharp with curated silences—a stage set for a private production where the audience never applauds—the George Nakashima-designed furniture in the “free edge” aesthetic dining room—which Hector the parrot, if you please, had a silly habit of calling el come-come-dor—the table always cluttered with Juan’s latest tchotchkes, reports, invitations, unopened mail—turned soft around his shape, and I (radiant in that way I become when lit by good company and the promise of stories about love, deception, greed, lust, and . . . unbridled enthusiasm—like a nymphet unrecognized, like Humbert Humbert’s parrot, mouthing syllables without understanding—a soul with no grammar, not speaking to persuade but to echo), called him Park Avenue divine and meant it, not as hollow, vain flattery but as recognition, and there we were, gathering martinis and moonlight, caught in a bounded digression in time, the three of us among others, on this fulgent and improbably enchanted evening, but it was always about the three, a triangulated warmth, each of us orbiting the other two without ever quite settling into a line, and the cocktail party that night had a guest list that bordered on the surreal: I, Evita Morales Gelman, a woman of declared freedom but confined by invisible bars, peacocking, a fallen Catholic stripper in imitation jewelry with a secret devotional streak, practicing the unapologetic trade of my own body; Phillipe, a Jewish novelist of Pulitzer distinction, whose gaze could frost glass, whose ideas weighed more than cutlery, and whose eyes, hooded and unreadable, seemed to say, I’ve seen it all—you can’t shock me, you can’t even amuse me; and Juan, who knew how to turn collective breath into a dumb show, who fed awe just enough dread to make it feel like destiny, and when the table fell into a hush and Phillipe turned that intolerably vacant stare on me, I faltered, like someone whose name I can’t remember, fearing I would come across as a tart—I, who was never at the center but knew the warmth of charisma, my arriviste poise wilting, nothing to toss into the spill of choreographed banter absurdly veering and tacking like a sail on windless water, and there I was, mouth half open, searching for something to say, anything—a word or note—while inwardly I felt that old curse stirring again, the mistake of looking too closely at myself, telling myself I was no longer twenty, standing there like a nebbish, of turning the beam of my mind inward when, as I once read, consciousness is a light meant to guide us outward—it blinds when turned inward, as I sat exposed, like a lamb stranded in the windswept emptiness of a Patagonian pasture, and Juan, his cynical grin breaking through, scanned my face nervously for the slightest tremor of collapse, for he had labored mightily to burnish my indiscreet résumé and expended all his persuasive powers translating Vegas-style lap dances into “business transactions,” calling strip club regulars “corporate clients,” and, in a cunning effort at deception, adroitly branding the club itself a “cocktail facility,” an exercise in sustained tact, while I, with mocking sincerity and soft, calculated formality, answered every skeptical query with “yes, señor” and “sí, muy respetado señor R.,” a rhetorically restrained tone I had mastered long ago working with Juan—an assimilated Upper West Side Jew with Orthodox credentials, scion of the Argentine branch of the Gelman clan (who had settled in Argentina’s Entre Ríos Province, one of the colonies established by Baron de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association)—ever the gracious architect of sleek soirees, never raised his voice nor left fingerprints, but once—only once, and it hung in the air like the smoke from one of Juan’s Nicaraguan cigars—he spoke with stoic indifference of a friend who had fallen out of favor, not with anger but with the impassive finality of someone rearranging books on a library shelf, careful to avoid any false notes of betrayal, and after that, the man ceased to be mentioned, like one of Argentina’s Dirty War desaparecidos, his name no longer echoed in dining rooms or afternoon calls, as if time itself had agreed to fold him away, as the Arabs say, as though “what was written” had been erased, and Juan, with that same half-smile he used when explaining wine pairings or stock market trends, simply remarked with a precise, measured gesture, “Some people grow heavy with memory; better to let them drift,” and I remember, even as Phillipe spoke, a flash of doubt rippling through me: were we not, all of us, merely cast members in Juan’s elaborate theater of diplomacy and desire? Had he not shaped each of us to fit the emotional grammar of his private stage play, assigning roles with the elegance of a screenwriter but the mute cruelty of an omnipotent autocrat? I had often sensed it–that curious sensation of being moved, not moving; that the embracing affection I received, the happy talk conversations I joined, the very laughter I offered, were perhaps not mine at all, but echoes from a script I had never read, and those whose judicious voices once strayed from the text, those who failed to deliver their lines as written, were recast in irrevocable wordless pauses or edited out entirely, dissolved into the unseen currents of time, as though Juan’s orbit demanded not authenticity, but obedience–obedience to mood, to the subtle ballet of glances and gestures, to the staging of moments that must never disclose the artifice of their construction, to the illusion of spontaneity curated with military precision, as if he were some private Harold Prince, orchestrating not a Broadway spectacle but the daily pageant of intimacy, rehearsing me for my own Evita, my own performance in a drama whose meaning was always just out of reach, always deferred, yes, Juan had patiently, almost tenderly, tutored me in the rudiments of Jewish ritual and cultural expression, in its rhythms and even in Yiddish phrases, as though I had been taught in the solemn cadences of remembrance, the secret passageways of memory and forgetting, and somewhere in that tension–between the sacred and the staged, between the desire to belong and the fear of vanishing into someone else’s narrative–I realized that power, when unmasked, can still seduce, perhaps even more deeply, when it dares to be cruel without apology, glorious in its lack of disguise, so that now, at any mention of the Holocaust, my eyes misted reflexively—whether from rehearsed piety or true affect, one never quite knew—and Phillipe, a contemporary Karenin, brilliant and severe, a man who had never cracked a joke or dabbled in irony, desperately clutching even the faintest pretense of superiority, something—anything—that let him look down on others, and so holding fast to his brittle certainty as though it were his only lifeline, carrying in him a humorless gravity and a debt to conscience so heavy it seemed to have accrued above prime-rate interest on his soul, and he bore this burden not as doctrinaire affectation but as birthright, so that even his bleakly off-putting silence rang like a confessional priest’s wordless censure, and the insurmountable and morosely ill-fitting guilt he exuded—preposterous and indelibly fixed—felt less like a character flaw than a metaphysical inheritance, and just as Phillipe was about to launch into one of his endless scolding monologues about moral decay and the decline of narrative tension in modern fiction, the parrot Hector—yes, our parrot Hector, brought inexplicably by a minor Italian-descended Argentine saxophonist hanger-on, the “dark and good-looking” Paolo, now long gone, whom no one quite remembered inviting—perched on the dim iron wall sconce, squawked into a smoky ellipses of language bloated with the unbearable intimation of impending farce: “No yores por mí, Argentina,” provoking a stunned pause, the quote—from a Broadway show tune, unmistakably—had been uttered in flawless Judaeo-Spanish, delivered with the guttural, gutting drama of a lapsed Sephardic opera tenor, Phillipe blinked, I tilted my head in mild confusion (though I already knew, I always knew), and Phillipe queried sardonically, “Did the bird just say what I think it said?” and the parrot, now flapping, as if possessed by anarchic whimsy, gently in place as if pleased with its empty attempt to loosen itself from infelicitous bondage, this soft-winged avian phantom gliding over a narrow expanse of forgotten beginnings and smoldering remains, added for emphasis: “Eskodrí la libertá, korrer i prover todo nuevo,” no one laughed, not at first, it was the kind of moment that hovered between surrealism and revelation, between the fey grace of the improbable and the tangle of thorns of the absurd, I stared at the bird with something like reverence (or was it suspicion? even now my cup brims with faint recognition of joyless constraint), Juan, ever the orchestrator, attempted to smooth things over by explaining that the parrot originally belonged to a visiting scholar of medieval Spanish philosophy and had been trained on Ladino proverbs and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, surely the only demoniac parrot to ever haunt these hallowed walls, and it was veraciously whispered, too, that I, ever the dispenser of gifts to the forgotten and forlorn, had once referred to Hector as “mi chiquito plumado”—my little feathered child—fussing over his meals and caged antics with fierce, maternal devotion, Phillipe, uncharacteristically amused, murmured, “Even the parrot has irony now,” and then it happened—the shift, the somnolent recalibration of the night’s energy as Rubinstein appeared, the improvisational jazz pianist, Manuel “Manny” Rubinstein, carrying with him the smell of wool and cigarettes and damp air, the sooty-black-browed figure who materialized stealthily in the doorway as if conjured by collective need, fresh off a Delta flight from his tour of junta-ruled-military-boot-crushed South American capitals where he had been mobbed by enthusiastic throngs and (as muttered furtively in the half-truths we all traded like devalued pesos) covertly surveilled by agents of Argentina’s Secretariat of Intelligence whose suspicion, quite absurdly, held that his irreverently wonky swing, blues, and hip hop-inflected arrangements of the late Beethoven piano sonatas masked some cryptic Marxist subtext, and there by his side was Hermione, of course, the torrid Hermione, dressed up to the nines, whose clingy dress hinted at a disregard for conventional taste and discretion (nu? That’s glamour?), Hermione with her long dancer’s spine and her knowing, languorous smirk, the woman who had pulled him awkwardly into the world of ballroom tap dance, they who had briefly tasted the transient prestige of television notoriety on So You Think You Can Dance, her movements still serenely poised, as if she floated through the gloomy chaos like a sly, unruffled apparition, and when Manny sat at the black-lacquered Fazioli grand it was not ceremony but revelation, beginning the slow arc of his boogie-woogie rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 111, Gatsbyesquely rebranded “Manny Rubinstein’s Jazz History of the World,” those syncopated, Harlem-stride broken chords cascading like someone rambling through a convoluted corridor of their own thoughts, and suddenly the room was no longer a room but a floating acoustic void around a sound, tarnished and spectral, a rapturous emanation laced with jive riffs and post-bop accents, sweeping us backward, without end, into the ghost-thread of memory and resurrected desire, and no one moved—not even Juan, who, after the final notes evaporated like Bourbon Street morning dew into the rafters, surprised us all by crawling, involuntarily and with the solemnity of an African Baptist river-delta baptism, across the wide expanse of Persian carpet spread over Arabescato Breccia marble to where I sat, and kissed the top of my foot with such tenderness and theatricality that Rubinstein, still seated, gave a single audible chortle and then looked down at his own fingers as if unsure whether he had played or merely dreamed, the moment still swaying, unmoored, like a green light blinking across Lake Pontchartrain, and I watched, as I so often did, from a distance within my private consciousness, observing the stemmed martini glasses lifted, laughter folded and unfolded, chatter rising and falling like mild springtime weather, words exchanged like ritual offerings, then quietly filed away for later scrutiny, and Phillipe—always the Nick Carraway-ish novelistic observer, intent on gaining access to the mysteries of social intercourse—his mind already arranging the fragments into pungent narrative, into something that would outlast all of us—said later how these nights were everything, how they fed the machine, how you write until seven, attend a party at eight, and by midnight the voice returns, clearer than before, reshaped by the glancing sentence or the accidental pause; and as we talked, and the evening spun out around us, I found myself sitting not just in a room but at the rosy-hued outer edge of something incandescent, feeling the pull of charisma and hunger and wistful, ashen resentments—the kind that drift wearily through dusk-lit parlors like curtains stirred by a breeze, haunted by glitter and shadows and the shimmer of joy too fragile to name, and Phillipe, who had written us into his novel, called us symbiotic and tormented—like a controlling autocrat and his compliant followers—clinging like barnacles to a rock, and I loved the line and repeated it in the tone of a benediction, though to me it felt more like a verdict, a blurted confirmatory revelation, and, recalling Scott Turow’s line that novelists elevate idiosyncracy while lawyers, like Juan, flatten it, I smiled at Phillipe and nodded, but said nothing—because what could I say to that?—and then he was recounting some fevered scene—someone’s wife, someone’s betrayal, the way everyone performs affection and no one believes it—and somehow the talk turned to Così fan tutte, someone—maybe it was Juan—explaining the plot with a kind of manicured, lewd adolescent glee: the men who wager, the women who fall, the aesthetic masks that collapse into burlesque; and I, remarking that the real point was not the seduction but the fresco-like architecture of doubt, the voluptuous cruelty of watching love become its own undoing, and someone—probably Phillipe—said that fidelity was a farce, and Mozart knew it, knew it with the errant clarity of a rogue scholar, knew it better than most playwrights or poets ever dared, and there was a moment of calm after that, not disapproval, not agreement either, just a shared stillness, like the penumbra after candles fold into darkness, as if history itself had flinched into a semantic vacuum, as if we’d all heard something too true to be repeated, and I touched his sleeve in laughter, and felt something sharp and small break like a draft in the chest, and when the evening finally dissolved—candles melted, glasses empty, silence pooling in corners—Juan offered to drive Phillipe home, and I remember the three of us stepping into the wet, partly moon-lit night, the wind lifting my coat like a sail, and the city gleaming with that damp, sallow light that makes everything feel provisional, the night punctuated by the distant howls of dogs, [essay cut off. too long for SW]
