Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Would you like to get a coffee?” I asked.

“Could we make it a drink?”

On the boat to New York, I had been told the city had no nightlife left. This was the scuttlebutt from the bankers and salesman aboard the Majestic . They raised toasts of vodka, burgundy and calvados, told me to sip the good stuff while I could. “Prohibition,” complained a luggage baron from Tallinn, “has ruined the merry USA.”

“It’s not Prohibition,” grumbled a jeweller from Omsk. “Drunks aren’t afraid to break the rules. The trouble is enforcement .”

All of their favourite bars were shuttered: a speakeasy discovered in springtime would disappear by the time they returned in fall. I am not much of a drinker, but it saddened me to imagine a city without taverns, without the free sound of a bottle being unstoppered.

But neither Prohibition nor enforcement had banished liquor from New York. Manhattan came alive after dark. I could stand at my apartment window and watch couples pirouetting into the street, into taxis. I could see the streaming lights of cabs heading east and west, and in the wee hours north, to Harlem. I had been in New York two months when I asked my new friends about drinking. Henry Solomonoff scribbled down the number for a bootlegger. “Cheap!” he said. “Rum, gin, rye. Seven bucks a bottle.”

“But where do you go for …” I hesitated.

“For a good time?” Solomonoff laughed. “Get your coat.”

Around Broadway, the speaks were tucked just down, just around, folded behind shopfronts. At some, visitors rang a bell and showed their face, or placed their hand flat again a frosted-glass window. At other doorways one had to murmur a pass-phrase. Although Schillinger kept a notebook of secret codes, I was not so thirsty that I required an almanac. I knew several spots, here and there, and in with my other papers I carried six or seven members’ cards, but mostly I smiled, and I was polite, and my accent refuted any suspicion that I was a cop.

We went down into a place without a sign. Light fell from the windows in gauzy shafts. The bartender was dark and extremely handsome, but slight, as if proportioned for the dreams of a twelve-year-old girl. His name was Tony. Most bartenders’ names were Tony. This one felt more like an Anthony. There were two other couples already there and a table with four men in suits. Schillinger called this place “The Blue Horse,” for the murals that curved and galloped around the bar’s other fittings. The images were dreamlike, surreal, visions from a Krazy Kat cartoon. A blue horse reared up at the left side of the bar, its mane like the tossing of the sea. You ordered a gin fizz, Clara, and I took a rum and Coke. The glasses were cold. We drank in near silence.

After a little while you asked whether I had baked any cakes recently. There were very fine creases at the corners of your eyes. You rested your elbow upon the table and your chin upon the heel of your hand and I noticed the curve where your jaw met your neck. I imagined your violin cradled there. I imagined snowflakes touching the wide white courtyard that lay outside our windows, growing up.

“I have been drawing,” I told you. “These days, it is all drawings.”

“I didn’t know you drew.”

A drawing was in my jacket pocket, folded into eighths. I took it out, opened it in the space between us. The paper crackled.

“The RCA Theremin,” you read aloud from the corner.

“Shhh,” I said, with false gravity. “These things are secret.”

We looked at the arcs and contours and corners of my schematic. The table was painted with wet circles where our drinks had sat. Shreds of rubber eraser still clung to the page. This was a plan for the principal cabinet of the space-control device, the proposed RCA model. I would turn it in to the RCA engineers, this drawing and others like it, and they would take out their rulers and adding machines and materials books and spec manuals, and they would build prototypes, and ring up factory foremen, and perhaps they would even fly to hardwood forests, to nickel mines, to rap on tree trunks and chip at ore, evaluating whether all these things could be adequately smelted, sawed, and assembled into America’s new favourite musical instrument.

You sipped your fizz. “If you were trapped in a snowy wilderness, just you and a winter coat and a cabin full of electrical equipment — would you be able to build a theremin? Just with this plan?”

“If nothing were missing?” I asked.

“If nothing were missing.”

“Then yes,” I said.

YOU WERE IN THE CITY to meet an accompanist. He had ended the rehearsal early. He was young, you said, and arrogant. You were eighteen years old.

WHEN WE HAD FINISHED our drinks we went outside. The sky was a dark midnight blue, that strange nighttime blue of big cities, and it seemed so clean. Couples jostled past us, men in dinner jackets and women in dresses, hats, gold at their wrists. They were going dancing. We watched them. “Do you dance?” you said. It was just a question.

“I do,” I said. I tried to speak with the same transparency.

“Do you?”

Your face lit up. “Yes.”

A moment passed. “Would you like to go dancing?”

You hesitated for a second. I don’t know if it was because of me, or of some other beau, or the thought of your parents at home. Then your face seemed to apologize for the hesitation, and you said: “That’d be nice.”

I glanced at the ground, where your feet stood beside my feet, and I thought the silly thought that in that second we were standing perfectly in our own footprints.

I took you to the Make-Believe. It had the largest ballroom in the world, a room as big as Rybinsk’s town hall, the ceiling strung with paper lanterns and the walls done up in stars. We left our coats with the twins who kept the coats, I tipped the maître d’, and he brought us straight to a table and we straightaway got up. For the first time in the history of the world, since the seas cooled and birds alighted in the trees, Clara Reisenberg and Lev Sergeyvich Termen danced together. There was no band at the Make-Believe — there were two gramophones and their minders, a man and a woman, a library of records visible from the floor. The couple moved back and forth across the shelves, choosing the next song. They chose swing from New York and swing from Chicago, swing from London and Paris and Montreal. We stepped together and apart, leapt, grinned. I clasped you in my arms and I threw you away.

Later, breathless, we leaned on the bar and drank long glasses of water. “Now what?” you asked. We grabbed our coats and went to the Roseland. The club was just heating up. A man tossed his partner three feet into the air. A woman slipped beneath her partner’s legs and rose up like a geyser. You asked me where I had learned to dance. I told you in Leningrad, that we did not have jazz but the bands played other quick songs. You danced the Charleston and I followed. You reminded me of Katia — but just for an instant, the way the rain reminds you for a moment of a particular spring. I had been trying not to think of her, the woman who had followed me on a ship. She was in New Jersey. She was, I told myself, a million miles away.

I asked you where you’d learned to dance. You said you had always known and twirled in your skinny dress. The air seemed to whistle. I placed one hand at the small of your back and held one of yours with the other. You breathed against my chest and the source of that breath seemed so close by, rising and falling in smooth suddennesses. We were skipping ahead of our footprints. The band played a drumroll and my heart played a drumroll. You stepped on my toe. “Whoops,” you said. The bandleader lifted his baton. The trumpeters premiered a rare new racket.