Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“I suppose.”

I put down the pencil. “Please also wish her a happy Halloween.”

I was restless. I went out into the city.

I wanted to do something with myself, with my body.

At first I thought maybe I was going to a club. Maybe I would go dancing, with strangers, while the markets shuddered. I walked south, downtown, but as I passed corner after corner I kept on walking, kept on into downtown, continuing under the sagging awnings and blurs of electric light, through clouds of steam; I found I was walking beyond midtown, beyond the nightclubs, past empty restaurants, darkened banks, old men dozing in cars; past Union Square, where a drunkard had just staggered out of the fountain; all the way to Chinatown, where many of the doorways were painted gold or red, and the people moved with a different tension in their shoulders, in their hips, as if they needed to stay unfamiliar to each other.

Above a stall selling jade trees I saw a sign that read WING-CHUN KUNG-FU.

Almost before thinking about it, I slipped inside.

In Leningrad, the kwoon had always seemed slightly illicit — the hideout for a group of bandits, a Far Eastern cult. There was less mystery here. The stairwell was coal-black stone, swept clean. The upstairs door was smoked glass, with a painted Chinese symbol. I went through and found a wide, square loft, high-ceilinged. The gym felt like a workshop, like a factory. A line of men repeated a sequence of low kicks. Two older students stood wrist to wrist, practising the hand dance. Behind them a group of children passed through the first form, half-expert, half-clumsy, facing a chrysanthemum shrine. The air smelled of frying oil and cut flowers. There were Negro students, Caucasian students, a tall turbaned Sikh talking to a boy who stood up to his chest.

The man who was their sifu saw me by the entrance. He approached me slowly, as if he wanted to give me enough time to examine him, or to prepare my greeting. He was older than my Leningrad sifu, older than my parents, old in the manner of the toothless old men who spent all day at the barber’s. Only he wasn’t toothless, he wasn’t stooped; apart from a small paunch, his body was a straight line, a strong torso under drooping cheeks.

“Hello,” I said, my voice vanishing in the room.

He nodded.

I bowed. I touched my right fist to my open left hand.

He gave half a smile and bowed as well. Then he crouched at my feet, where a marmalade-coloured cat was meandering. He picked the cat up. “Do you know kung-fu?” he said. His accent was mostly New York, only very faintly something else.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where did you learn?”

“Russia.”

This surprised him. “How much kung-fu is in Russia?”

“Not much.”

He appraised me with his rheumy grey eyes. “What style?”

“Wing-chun.”

“Hm.” The cat was motionless in his arms. It blinked as he petted it. It seemed to be watching me too.

“Do you fight?” sifu said.

I considered this. I looked into the wide kwoon, where men were punching and kicking, pivoting, holding their fists like heavy lake stones. “That’s not why I came,” I said.

Sifu put down the cat. “Dollar twenty-five a month.”

“You mean—?”

“Take off your shoes,” he said. “We are open from ten to ten.”

I was taking off my shoes. “Closed Sundays. I am sifu.”

“Thank you, sifu.”

“Jin!” he shouted. He rubbed his eyes with his wrist.

One of the men doing chi sao broke away from the hand dance. He was close to my size, with a high waist. He had gentle features. He jogged to where we were standing, sifu and me, the to-dai , and the orange cat.

“Jin,” sifu said, taking a step back, “see if you can knock this Russian down.”

I swallowed. “Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Jin said.

He knocked me down, but only eventually. After we had seen and evaded each other, touched and come apart. I had missed this physicality, this duel.

As I hit the floor, I found I was smiling.

Jin remained in a defensive pose, bai jong .

I propped myself up on my hands.

“Good,” sifu said.

FOR HALLOWEEN I WENT to Schillinger’s and we carved squash. He was spending much of his time in Cleveland, preparing the first major work for space-control theremin and orchestra. The country didn’t know yet the trouble it was in; despite Wall Street’s calamity, this concerto was due to premiere in Cleveland in November, with a repeat performance in New York. Schillinger named his piece the Airphonic Suite . He carved an intricate happy face into the orange flesh of the squash. It was grotesque in its happiness. “What is that thing?” Frances asked him.

“It is the face of bliss,” he said.

The other squash depicted a cat. Frances and I had designed it on paper. I held a ruler while she applied the knife, tongue hooked in the corner of her mouth, her red hair in a bun. There was a certain tension in the air. Schillinger had wanted to perform the theremin solo at the suite’s premiere. The director of the Cleveland Orchestra preferred to have the inventor, which is to say myself, play the solo. When the director rang me I had no idea of Schillinger’s desire — he had been in Cleveland, shivering over his pierogies. By the time he and I spoke, the composer and the soloist, it was too late; the contracts had been signed.

“I could play it badly,” I suggested.

“Play it badly in Cleveland,” he agreed, “but not in New York.”

Rehearsals kept me in Cleveland for several weeks. Instead of billeting in Schillinger’s rented cottage, the director put me in a hotel across the road from Terminal Tower, which was under construction. Every morning I would divide the curtains and look up at the skyscraper. Every morning it seemed taller. All this time I had been living in America, running my masters’ errands, and this tower had been getting taller.

At the orchestra’s first rehearsal, with loudspeakers wedged between the double bassists, I activated the theremin’s coils. DZEEEEOOOoo , it said. There was an immediate brassy bang from the far side of the room. A French horn player had fainted. Her instrument lay on the floor, mouthpiece tilted toward the ceiling. My theremin meekly warbled. I switched it off. We gave her smelling salts.

People began to tell me I seemed distracted. I lost track of sheet music. I neglected to exit elevators. Cars honked as I stood at the corner of the street, forgetting to cross. “What’s wrong with you?” Schillinger asked one day, after I brought a rehearsal to a standstill.

“I’m preoccupied.”

“Preoccupied with what?”

“With Clara Reisenberg,” I admitted.

“She’s eighteen years old and she’s miles away,” he said. “Go dancing with someone else tonight. Clear your cloudy damn head.”

I introduced myself to a secretary at the symphony, asked her out on a date, and forgot where we had agreed to meet.

On the train back to New York I resolved to try to keep my head clear. You were a dance partner, an eighteen-year-old girl. You were a diversion, and there was important work to attend to. I remembered Katia in New Jersey. Ten thousand waiting trees passed on the other side of the window.

Arriving in Manhattan, New York seemed more or less the same as when I had left it. A depression does not show itself instantly. The banks had not been replaced with soup kitchens. The clock towers had not stopped. But there were more men sitting in the streets, on stoops and curbs, even on that icy Tuesday. Like in the days after the Revolution settled, in Leningrad, weather seemed less important. People walked in the rain. They shivered in the sun. They scanned newsstands’ newspaper headlines with fragile faces, awaiting disaster.