Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt Page B

then the Hotel Earle... Frequent waspish verbal collisions between style and fashion—style’s own slower-witted stepchild—became the general attractive outdoor participation sport. Participation package tours were bought and sold coast to coast to broadcast listeners. Worthies, stationed the seasons through, backs to the wall or backs now and then to the passing, staring, shopping ordinaries, codified stylish behavior. Thus the more the nightly billing changed, the more the pliant, stoic endurance evidenced by these waiting stylists remained the secular discipline it had set out to be. Now and again “the spastic quasi-dactylic squabbles of vagrant hairburners, unsought decorator would-be’s, washout theatricalists, and nowhere display types rent the seams of decorous patience” (as Paranoy observed sourly time and again), but for the best part of the era there was evident, along the length of shopfront and marquee esplanade that made up the precinct of the standing line at that original Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, a kind of solid, committed bearing that gave a dimension far beyond throwaway swank to the politic style of that same town around it, which since the demolition of the Old Met has forever and for ill been lost, forgotten, even forsworn. Paranoy himself decreed: “The end of the Old Met marked the decisive end of Gotham as it was, when it was truly fabulous.”
    The bright, vigilant Riverdale student who had answered the telephone in the arcade earlier had returned to his small circle, a party of Czgowchwz activists composed of his classmates and a group of graduate students from Juilliard. The score of Tristan und Isolde lay open on a campstool in the covered doorway under the marquee. The Narration and Curse were being analyzed in preparation for a canonic set of variant predictions concerning the Czgowchwz realization. The bright captain-student let his companions know, much to their general delight, that Ralph himself had been the early-morning caller, that the solstice celebration at Magwyck had been “flawless” and was over, and that the lady of the moment would soon be safe home and asleep. Neighboring student delegations and hardy perennials, overhearing, passed the word along the line. Students and teachers of psychology, well aware of the crucial importance of the sleeping diva’s dreamwork, chatted knowingly about Isolde, the most potent, magical-archetypal SHE in all opera. (“What about Norma!?” “Oh... well ...”)
    A lesser but no less inevitable question being bruited about at the one and the same time was “What would the Tristan [making his debut] do?” He was called Achille Plonque; was, of all things, an actual Norman; and had never been recorded. He had been heard recently in Avignon as Pelléas (“...!”) and was said to have sung in the Tristan rehearsals very much like a Massenet tenor (“Head tones that sound like French express-train whistles, but sweet!”—Dixie). It was, of course, the diva herself who had engineered his appearance on the bill: they had sung Samson et Dalila together, in Italian, the previous summer at the arena in Verona. No one could say what would be. All that was known for a historical fact was that the aged Fritz Krank, the house Tristan, was enraged at having been politely but firmly chucked out into the cold in favor of “some nasal Frog upstart shit!” (Schwertleite Vogelgesang, secretary of the Fritz Krank Music Society). The Czgowchwz will, adventurous and insistent, had prevailed. The one thing as well that was known everywhere about M. Plonque was that he was, as Alice swore again and again, “beyond belief gorgeous!”
    Ralph: “He looks just like a della Francesca!”
    â€œHe looks better !”
    â€œAlice, don’t lose your whole mind !”
    This prospect, having a Tristan and Isolde, each of comely mien, boasting