Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

A FEW YEARS LATER I sat with Mr Thorogood from RCA as he asked, “Would you like to be a millionaire?”

He opened his attaché case and I saw that it was almost empty. It contained two copies of a contract, which he withdrew, and a dozen pens, flashing like electric components. I wondered which was his favourite colour of ink. I liked dark green. Lenin was always said to write in red. Pash used either black or blue.

I didn’t sign his contract. I told him I would be in touch. I told him I was a scientist. That night, at the Plaza restaurant, I conveyed our conversation to Pash. He was cracking crabs’ terracotta shells with his bare hands, sopping crabmeat in butter. His suit looked bulkier than it used to; I wondered if he was carrying a flask, or a gun.

Pash wiped his mouth with his sleeve and put down the fractured crab. “Let me tell you something, Lev,” he said, “and listen very closely.”

I remembered that I did not know where this man had come from: where he was born, where he was taught, which Moscow spire held the safe that held the dossier that held his real name. Whenever we dined, Pash’s right hand did not stray far from his knife. “Thorogood asked you if you would like to be a millionaire?” Pash looked at me, dead straight. “Yes, you would.”

ONE MORNING A CARD without a stamp arrived for me at the Plaza Hotel. LEON THEREMIN, it said. I slit open the envelope and found a printed drawing of an elephant, in pen and watercolour. The elephant seemed friendly and wise but very old, very tired, with hundreds of lines in his skin. In his trunk he held a lemon.

On the reverse of the card, below date and details, it read:

“DON’T FORGET!!”

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO A LEMONADE SOCIAL

MARKING THE EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY

OF

MISS CLARA REISENBERG.

R.S.V.P.

I tapped the card against the counter, then found I was picking up the telephone receiver.

Our conversation began like this:

“Is that Clara?”

“Yes, who is this please?”

“This is Leon Theremin.”

What did my name say to you? Did it speak merely of science, engineering, and that snowy afternoon? Did it say something else?

You said: “How is all that electricity doing, Leon?”

I could not attend the party. I had an appointment with RCA that same day, slated to go until dinner. Perhaps I could have cancelled it but really I was not sure what to do, at that moment, talking to you on the telephone. I hesitated. I invited you to tea, the day after. A tardy birthday. “Sure,” you said. We both put down our phones.

The elephant seemed to be staring at me.

There were other girls, then. I don’t mean Katia. I felt young, arriving in America. I felt new. There were flirtations, exchanges of affection. Discreet ministrations. My valentines were associates, students, chance acquaintances. One drowsy evening with a friend’s ginger wife. I write this not to embarrass you, or out of a need to confess, but to say that in the week between that phone call and your visit to my apartment, every other face disappeared, at once, from my thoughts. It was as if I had plunged my head into a bucket of seltzer: everything fluttered up and then was gone.

On your eighteenth birthday, a collection of friends and family visited your parents’ home for lemonade. You played charades and musical chairs. There was dancing. I am given to understand that Schillinger performed an air on his Arabian mijwiz . I was not present. I was with Pash and Mr Thorogood and later I was alone in my workshop, holding a screwdriver between my teeth, working on your birthday present.

You arrived at two the next day. I wondered if you would come alone but there you were with your mother and also a gang of friends, girls and their dates, all crowding together in my doorway. “Look at that,” I said clumsily.

You smiled. You said: “Hi, Leon.”

I had put on a new Paul Whiteman record. The maid had cleaned the carpets. The blinds were raised. My studio seemed like a chamber at the top of a tall tower. All the vases were filled with tulips. There was a telescope by the window, a large jade plant, a crate filled with piano keys, a tapestry in lace that depicted the makeup of an atom. Your group gathered twittering around each object. You seemed older than your friends. This time you were more careful in your admirations. You gazed at a childhood photograph of me, an old portrait from Leningrad. I was eleven or twelve, with a volume of the encyclopedia wedged clumsily under one arm. White stockings were hiked to my knees. In the camera’s long exposure my face seemed ghostly, already distant.

“What were you scared of?” you asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

You found Schillinger’s frog and it chirped in your hand. You gave the happiest laugh. The lock of hair slipped from behind your ear.

“Have it,” I said.

“You mean it?”

“Happy birthday.”

I called everyone into the parlour. On a table sat a round, iced cake. I had supervised its assembly in the Plaza Hotel’s kitchen. Now I stepped behind the rose-coloured confection and twisted together two trailing wires, closing the circuit. Your mother watched me as one would watch a magician, waiting. I moved away; I invited you to read the cake’s inscription; I felt a nervous thrill. You stepped closer. Beneath the strata of buttermilk, sugar and chocolate, a mechanism invisibly stirred. A motor whirred. The oscillator in the buried radio watchman sensed your body’s electrical capacity, sent electricity along a wire into an illuminating vacuum tube, which set an axle spinning. The top layer of the cake swivelled clockwise on its axis, all the way around, a pastry shell on a hidden platform, a secret door — and revealed a copper birthday candle. The flame lit by itself, darted and danced. It wished.

“Oh!” you said. You clasped your hands, you bent, you blew it out.

“Happy Birthday,” we sang.

It was you I felt in my electromagnetic field.

TWO MONTHS went by.

I REMEMBER I NOTICED a quarter on the pavement. I bent and picked it up, held it glinting in the lights of the Great White Way. There I was on Broadway, in the spring of 1929, a shining silver coin between my fingers. I slipped it into my pocket. I began to walk. I bumped into you.

“Pardon me,” I said, shaking my head clear.

You tugged at the collar of your sky-blue coat. “No, no, it was my fault.” You bent forward to walk on; and stopped. “Dr Theremin?”

I blinked. “Clara,” I said.

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

A smile grew on your face. “I’m good.”

I had seen you only once since your birthday, at an anniversary party for the Kovalevs. You were with your parents. We waved across the room. The two of us had never had a private conversation. I would be out in the city, waiting for an elevator or passing through Central Park and I would recollect suddenly the angle of your gaze. I would wonder whether you ever thought of me. Now we stood facing each other on the sidewalk and you had swinging pearl earrings. I saw the slightest tremor in your brown eyes.

“It’s a pretty night,” I said.

“Yes.”

Broadway is no place to stand still. We were being bumped and bounced by the throngs. Cars roared past, honking; men shouted after other men; you could hear the distant crash of trains. Signs shone over and around us, projected hazy words onto our raincoats. BARBERSH read the red letters on your left sleeve. A neon dollar sign hid in the gloss of my right shoe.