Read Online Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt - Free Book Online Page 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.
    â€œCassia, 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.)
    â€œThis 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