Mere Anarchy

  “‘Just one more strudel,’ the fragile tunesmith replies. ‘I need the blood-sugar high to keep me from sinking into my quotidian preoccupation with mortality.’

  “Meanwhile, while this is going on,” Wunch elaborated, “Gropius is giving Alma the eye, which she’s turned on by, and she sings, ‘I’d Love to Be Groped by Gropius.’ Scene One ends with a blackout and when Scene Two lights up, she’s living with Gropius and cheating on him with Kokoschka.”

  “What happened to her husband, Gustav?” I queried.

  “What do you think? He’s eyeballing the Danube, nursing a big jones for Alma, and ready to do a Brodie when who bicycles by but Alban Berg.”

  “No!”

  “‘What obtains, Mahler? Not looking to take the coward’s way out, are you?’ he inquires. Mahler lays his marital meshugas on him, and Berg tells him he’s got just the thing. Berg says there’s this bearded cat, lives at 19 Berggasse, and for a few pfennig an hour—which for some reason the guru has emended to fifty minutes, don’t ask me why—he can get his sconce tightened.”

  “Nineteen Berggasse? Wait a minute, Mahler was never a patient of Freud’s,” I protested.

  “It’s OK. I made him a compulsive stutterer, which piques Freud. A childhood trauma. Mahler once witnessed a local burgomaster drown in Schlag. Now he relives it. A couch is lowered, center stage, and Freud sings a great comedy number, ‘Just Say the First Thing That Comes to Mind.’ Naturally, being Freud, it’s all double entendre and we take the mickey out of Viennese mores, showing that even a great writer of symphonies like Mahler is subconsciously hung up on corsets, beer, and ragtime, albeit he sets his table mining the sublime. Freud unblocks Mahler so he can write again, and as a result Mahler triumphs over his lifelong fear of death.”

  “How does Mahler triumph over his fear of death?” I asked.

  “By dying. I figured it out—it’s really the only way.”

  “Fabian, there are a few holes here. You didn’t give Mahler a writer’s block. You said he was despondent over losing Alma.”

  “Exactly,” Wunch said. “That’s why he sues Freud for malpractice.”

  “But if he’s dead, how can he sue?”

  “I didn’t say the story didn’t need a polish, but that’s what Boston and Philly are for. OK, so at this point Alma is shacking up with Kokoschka, but now she’s diddling Gropius. You get the irony? She sings ‘Cozy with Kokoschka,’ but a minor chord in the verse tells the audience different. Plus I wrote this killer scene when Gropius accuses Kokoschka in a café of defacing his recently completed office building. ‘So, Kokoschka,’ he says, ‘it’s you which slathered an opaque ichor on my latest architectural breakthrough, the new Chozzerai Towers.’ Whereupon Kokoschka goes, ‘If you call those dull boxes of yours architecture, then, yes, it was me.’ Enraged, Gropius hurls his portion of Tafelspitz at Kokoschka, momentarily blinding him, and demands satisfaction.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Those two great giants never fought a duel.”

  “Nor do they in our little cash cow, because at the last second Werfel arrives, disguised as a chimney sweep, and Alma goes off with him, leaving the pair of heartbroken swains to sing what may be the most biting piece of sophistication in Broadway history: ‘My Pretty Little Schnitzel, You’re the Wurst.’ End of Act One.”

  “I don’t get it. Why would Werfel be disguised as a chimney sweep? And I still say if Mahler is dead, how will he and Alma get back together the way they actually did in life?”

  I was full of probing questions; much better to ask them now before a less tolerant paying audience elected instead to pass out disemboweling equipment.

  “Werfel had to conceal his identity,” Wunch explained, “because Kafka’s in town and wants back an only copy of his new short-story masterpiece, which he lent Werfel, and which Werfel, short of confetti for a parade, was forced to dice. As far as Alma and Gustav’s rapprochement goes, in Act Two she cheats on Werfel with Klimt and then betrays Klimt by posing nude for Schiele.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t tell me it never happened. All those broads in garter belts Schiele drew—why couldn’t one be of Alma Mahler? But it doesn’t matter, because before you can say ‘Franz Josef’ she cops a sneak on Schiele and Klimt, and as we come to the middle of Act Two she’s cohabiting with none other than his nibs Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein. The two duet on ‘Of Things We Cannot Speak We Must Remain Silent.’ But it doesn’t work out, because when Alma says ‘I love you’ to Wittgenstein, he parses the sentence and disproves the definition of each word. The chorus dances the birth of linguistic philosophy, and Alma, hurt, yet with her libido intact, belts out ‘Pet Me, Popper.’ Enter Karl Popper.”

  “Hold it!” I said, with visions of an audience fleeing up the aisles en masse like migrating caribou. “You never explained to me, since when have you turned author? I always knew you to be happy with a producer’s credit.”

  “It’s since the accident,” Wunch replied, meticulously spooning up the last few molecules of profiterole. “The beloved and I were hanging a picture when she tried driving a nail into the wall and inadvertently coldcocked me with a ball-peen hammer. I must’ve been on queer street a good ten minutes. When I awoke, I found I could write every bit as well as Chekhov or Pinter. This whole shmegegge I just walked you through was created during a single shave. Hey, isn’t that Stevie Sondheim just came in? Count to fifty, I’ll be back. Want to lay a notion on him before he vanishes on me again. Poor guy must be aging. Last time he gave me his phone number, one digit was off. Settle up and I’ll detail the finale for you over a Courvoisier.”

  And with that he table-hopped his way over to a man who resembled the author of A Little Night Music. The last image I had as I pricked my finger and signed the check in O-negative was of Wunch lowering himself uninvited into a booth amid the cacophonous objurgations of its abashed occupant. As far as me backing Fun de Siècle, there’s an old theater superstition that any show in which Franz Kafka sprinkles sand on the stage and does a soft-shoe is just too big a risk.

  ON A BAD DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER

  MEMBERS OF ONE fairly tony New York health club dove for cover this summer as the rumbling sound that usually precedes a fault separation reverberated through their morning workout. Fears of an earthquake were soon allayed, however, as it was discovered that the only separation was a shoulder of mine, which I had mangled trying to tickle pink the almond-eyed fox who did push-ups on the adjoining mat. Eager to catch her eye, I had attempted to clean and jerk a barbell equal in weight to two Steinways when my spine suddenly assumed the shape of a Möbius strip, and the lion’s share of my cartilage parted audibly. Emitting the identical sound a man makes when he is thrown from the top of the Chrysler Building, I was carried out in a crouch and rendered housebound for all of July. Utilizing the enforced bed rest, I turned for solace to the great books, a mandatory list I had been meaning to get to for the past forty years or so. Arbitrarily eschewing Thucydides, the Karamazov boys, the dialogues of Plato, and the madeleines of Proust, I hunkered down with a paperback of Dante’s Divine Comedy, hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulfur and chains. Unfortunately, the author, a stickler for the big questions, quickly dislodged me from that gauzy dream of erotica, and I found myself gadding about the nether regions with no steamier a persona than Virgil to broadcast the local color. Somewhat of a poet myself, I marveled at how Dante had brilliantly structured this subterranean universe of just deserts for life’s mischief makers, rounding up various poltroons and miscreants, and doling to each his appropriate level of eternal agony. It was only when I finished the book that I noticed he had left out any special mention of contractors, and with a psyche still vibrating like a sock cymbal from having renovated a house some years prior, I could not but wax nostalgic.

  It all began with the purchase of a small brownstone on Manhattan??
?s Upper West Side. Miss Wilpong, of Mengele Realtors, promised us it was the buy of a lifetime, priced modestly at a figure no higher than the cost of a stealth bomber. The dwelling was drumbeat as being in “move-in condition,” and perhaps it was, for the Jukes family or a caravan of Gypsies.

  “It’s a challenge,” my wife said, breaking the women’s indoor record for understatement. “This will be so fun to redo.” Sidestepping some loose floorboards, I tried to remain upbeat and likened its charm to that of Carfax Abbey.

  “Picture we lose this wall and make a big California kitchen,” the distaff ranted. “There’s space for a study, and each child can have her own room. With a little plumbing work we can have separate bathrooms, and I bet you could even have that game room you always wanted—to leaven your more philosophical moments with some pinball.”

  While fantasies of the beloved’s architectural megalomania raced unchecked, the wallet in my breast pocket began to flutter like a hooked flounder. Visions of squandering all I’d carefully husbanded over years of labor while punching up eulogies for the Schneerson Brothers Burial Home caused me to take issue in the upper register of the piccolo. “You really think we need this place?” I said, praying the urge to own would abate like a petit mal.

  “What I love about it is that it has no elevator,” the Better Half cooed. “Can’t you just picture what going up and down those five flights will do for your ticker?”

  Short of embezzlement, the means to pay for this new venture were beyond me, and it took a song-and-dance man’s personality to secure a mortgage from skeptical bankers, who at first waved me off but softened when they found a loophole in the usury laws. Selecting an appropriate contractor came next, and as the bids drifted in I couldn’t help noticing that most of the prices quoted seemed more appropriate for a renovation of the Taj Mahal. In the end I settled on a suspiciously sensible estimate originating from the office of one Max Arbogast, alias Chic Arbogast, alias Specs Arbogast—a waxy little ectomorph with the glinting eyes of a claim jumper in a Republic western.

  When we met at the premises, some inner voice told me I was face-to-face with someone who would indeed blow up the silver mine while coolies toiled innocently within rather than stand them their wages. My wife, marinated by Arbogast’s oily chemistry, was all eagerness, and leaned on me while she succumbed to his Coleridge-like view of what transmogrifications could be effected given the contractor’s genius. Our dreams, he assured us, would be realized within six months, and he offered his firstborn as human sacrifice if the budget strayed above this projection. Groveling in the presence of such expertise, I inquired if it were possible that he might give priority to our bedroom and bath so we could move in, thus manumitting us from an overzealous vigorish at the Dilapidado Hotel, our interim fiefdom.

  “It’s not even a question,” Arbogast snapped, producing a contract from a valise stuffed with contracts for every conceivable transaction, from selling a used Cord to enlisting in the Mummers. “Autograph this, and the assorted particulars can be buffed down the line,” he said. Thrusting a pen into my hand, he guided it across the dotted lines of a document with large blank sections, whose import, he assured me, would become manifest later by simply holding it over a low flame.

  Following apace came a dizzying round of check signings by yours truly, to bind the deal and secure various materials. “Sixty thousand dollars for molly screws seems high,” I bleated.

  “Sure it is, but then again, you don’t want the work held up while we’re combing Gotham for one.”

  Affirming our camaraderie, we all shook hands and went around the corner to Drinks “R” Us, where Arbogast treated all to a magnum of Dom Pérignon, realizing only after the cork had been popped that TWA had mislaid his luggage and that, even as we toasted, his billfold languished in Zanzibar.

  • • •

  THE FIRST TIME I REALIZED we had thrown in our lot with crass bunglers came three months later, when, hours after we had actually taken possession of our under-construction domicile, I attempted to use the stall shower. Heeding our supplication for speed, Arbogast’s myrmidons had bashed the original bathroom to protons and hastily fabricated a substitute. Using as their model the lengthy gash in the hull of the Titanic, they had transformed the entire bathroom into an undersea kingdom, should my wife or I attempt to turn on the tap. For lagniappe, the pipes had been meticulously calibrated to produce water pressure of such caloric intensity as to reduce any unfortunate beneath the showerhead to the status of lobster thermidor. After my squealing leap through the plate-glass door, I was assured in several Baltic tongues that all would be rectified with the expected arrival of a state-of-the-art plumbing part from Tangier, which would happen the moment certain political exiles could safely be smuggled out of the Casbah.

  The bedroom, by contrast, did not quite meet our accelerated target date, owing to an outbreak of dengue fever in Machu Picchu. It seemed, in fact, that no serious work could begin in our sleeping quarters until we received vital shipments of wengé and bubinga that had somehow been misdelivered to a couple in Lapland with the same last name as ours. Fortunately, a crude pallet on the floor was arranged for us, under some falling plaster, and after a night of being martyred by asbestos dust and the sounds of Hurricane Agnes from a toilet that would not stop flushing, I lapsed at last into a hypnagogic trance. This was shattered at daybreak by a battalion of craftsmen demolishing a pilaster with pickaxes, to the tune of “Casey Jones.”

  When I pointed out that this particular alteration was not in the original proposal, Arbogast—who had popped in to see that none of his minions had been shanghaied the prior night at any of the louche venues they watered at after hours—explained he had taken it upon himself to install an elaborate security system.

  “Security?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was more vulnerable in a brownstone than in our old co-op, where affable white-haired doormen were lavishly tipped to take a bullet for the tenants.

  “Absotively,” he rejoined, wolfing back his matutinal portion of sturgeon direct from Barney Greengrass’s numbered vaults in Geneva. “Any serial killer can just walk into this place. Maybe you want your throat sliced while you sleep? Or your main squeeze should get her brains scrambled by some drifter with a ball-peen hammer and a grudge against society? And that’s after he’s had his way with her.”

  “Do you really think—”

  “It’s not what I think, pilgrim. This town is awash with diabolical mental tinderboxes.”

  With that, he scribbled in an additional ninety thousand dollars on the estimate, which had waxed to the girth of the Talmud while rivaling it in possible interpretations.

  Not wanting to be smirked at by the workers as an easy mark, I insisted that before I could agree to any new costs I would have to peruse the nuances of the risk-reward ratio, a formula that I understood with the same firm grasp I had on quantum mechanics. Since several hot stocks I had invested in recently had vanished without a trace into the Bermuda Triangle, I finally told the work foreman I couldn’t dredge up another penny for a burglar-alarm system, but when night fell I froze in bed hearing what I concluded was a homicidal maniac unscrewing the front door. With my heart pounding like the bombing of Dresden, I got Arbogast on the horn and green-lighted the installation of a set of pricey, high-tech Tibetan motion detectors.

  • • •

  AS THE MONTHS PASSED, our completion date, already postponed half a dozen times, kept receding like a six-pack in the desert. Alibis abounded to rival the Arabian Nights. Several plasterers went down with mad cow, and then the boat carrying crates of jade and lapis lazuli to line the nanny’s room was sunk off the coast of Auckland by a tsunami; finally, a crucial motorized device needed to elevate the TV from a trunk at the foot of the bed turned out to be hand-fashioned exclusively by elves who worked only by moonlight. The microscopic amount of work that actually took place was shoddy, as I learned in the midst of a sparkling exchange between myself and a Nobel contender in
our brand-new study, when the floor buckled, costing the potential laureate his two front teeth and earning me the honor of sponsoring a record settlement.

  When I confronted Arbogast with my disenchantment over cost overruns that were challenging the German inflation of the 1920s, he laid it off to my “psychotic demand for change orders.”

  “Relax, cousin,” he said. “If you’ll stop your tergiversating, Arbogast and Company will be history in four weeks. My hand to God.”

  “And not a moment too soon,” I fumed. “I can’t coexist another second with this infestation from Stonehenge. There’s not a scintilla of privacy. Just yesterday, after finally filching some measure of lebensraum, I was about to consummate the sacred act of love with my one and only profiterole when your workers picked me up and moved me so they could hang a sconce.”

  “See these?” Arbogast said, flashing a smile usually employed by men who are about to commit mail fraud. “They’re called Xanax. Dig in—although I wouldn’t take more than thirty a day. The side-effect studies have been inconclusive.”

  That midnight, a susurrus triggered the downstairs motion detector, causing me to leap directly upright out of bed and remain there like a hovercraft. Convinced that I could make out the sounds of a salivating lycanthrope vaulting up the stairs, I flailed through unpacked cartons in search of some silver object with which to defend the family. Stepping on my glasses in panic, I bolted face-first into a porphyry dolphin Arbogast had imported to complete the maid’s bathroom. The blow caused my middle ear to ring like the Arthur Rank logo and rewarded me as well with an unimpeded view of the aurora borealis. I think it was then that the ceiling collapsed on my wife. Apparently the pilaster Arbogast had removed to install the security system had been a supporting member, and a number of cinder blocks had chosen this moment to abdicate.