Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

You gave me a long, level look. “How are yours?”

There was a commotion from below and we ran down the stairs. Glenn Miller and Nicholas Slominsky, the journalist, had burst through the front door and collapsed together in the parlour. Lucie had mistaken the lolling for fisticuffs. She’d fetched a bucket of cold water and sloshed it over them. Now they all sat splay-legged on the rug, sodden, laughing their heads off. “Don’t be angry!” Glenn shouted as I came down the steps. “There could have been a fire!”

We rolled up the carpet and propped it on the back veranda. Lucie offered to fan it dry, which made Slominsky crack up again. We went back to the living room and sat in a circle, Indian-style, the drunks with towels over their heads. You seemed a little star-struck, Clara, with a stinking Glenn Miller. It was 3:00 p.m. and I needled them for already being so far gone.

“What time did you start?”

“What time would you say, Nick? Eight?”

“Oh, seven. Six-thirty.”

“Early birds,” Clara murmured.

This provoked another giggling fit. “Honey, are you kidding?” Glenn gasped. “We’ve been binged since yesterday .”

They didn’t want to sleep. They wanted to make chicken soup. They sent me out for parsnips and when I got back you were crowded around the stove, the four of you, plus Missy and Bugs had shown up, and Rosalyn, and Henry Solomonoff with his pet budgerigar, Hamburger. We must have been a strange sight. Ladies in pearls, chopping carrots and celery; drunks in tuxedos, stirring pots of chicken bones; a yellow bird reeling around the room, chirruping “Bingo!” Bugs and I made tea biscuits, flour splashed on our chests. I remember how you ran the water so I could rinse off my hands. Then we sat at the table, waiting. Slominsky fell asleep. Glenn suggested Rosalyn throw another bucket of water on him. On the radio they were talking about Japan. Missy said, “Let’s play some music.”

There was one piano on the main floor, one upstairs. Bugs sat down at the first and Glenn clapped his hand on the piano-mover’s shoulder. “Play loud, my Negro friend.”

Bugs said, “Call me Bugs.”

The rest of us clattered to the second storey. Lucie and Rosalyn at space-control theremins, Solomonoff at the fingerboard. “That’s enough of the damn theremins!” Glenn yelled. Missy found a trombone. Hamburger was a soloist. Glenn plunked himself down behind the Steinway. “What about you?” he asked.

“Violin?” you said.

I was already on my way upstairs. Under my bed lay two violin cases, like relics. One of the violins was my childhood fiddle; I kept it under my arm. “Here,” I said, coming down the steps, and handed you the other case.

“You play?” you said.

“I did.”

“ ‘Stardust’!” Glenn declared. “C major!”

“What?” Bugs yelled from below.

“ ‘Stardust’!” Glenn shouted.

“What?”

“ ‘Dust of the Stars’!”

“Dust off the what?”

“ ‘Stars’!”

And Glenn began pounding out the notes.

It was a jubilant cacophony. The theremin players were accustomed to this kind of free-for-all, usually late at night, and they leapt into the fray. So did Bugs and Missy, on piano and trombone, a whole floor between them. But you and I found ourselves waiting, side by side, violins under chins, hesitating in the same moment. The music was beautiful and disastrous. At their standard timbres, my ether devices are not suited to jazz; this “Stardust” sounded as extraterrestrial as its title. I began to laugh but you were not laughing; your eyes were upturned; you were listening. Slowly you raised your bow and began to saw low notes, like a comet losing velocity. I joined you. The theremins wailed the melody. Our violins were steady beneath their glissando, giving Glenn a space to sing.

In the many rooms of the house, amid the salt smell of chicken soup, we played “Stardust.” After “Stardust,” we played “Everybody Loves My Baby.” We played “Blue Skies” and Pachelbel’s Canon. My violin felt like something from a past life. Wood from the taiga, gut from a Romanov sheep. I remembered the rooms in which I had been raised, the varnish on the floorboards. The way I sat in bed with a volume of the encyclopedia and imagined moths, Eskimo, the Taj Mahal. I had not known my future. Now my fingers felt clumsily large on its neck. You too were holding another person’s violin. You too were courageous. You smiled at me and I realized we had never been together like this, not in a place like this, a place without spotlights or hidden corners; a place where you are illuminated only as you are, as bright or as faded. But here we were smiling together and still in colour.

LATER, WHEN THE LIGHT had changed, and we were sipping chicken broth from Walter Tower Rosen’s fine silver spoons, Missy asked if you had ever tried the theremin. “I tried,” you told her, although it did not sound sincere. “It’s just there is no tether,” you said. Playing violin, the body is a physical connection between bow and strings. The same with trumpet, with clarinet, with piano: lips, tongue, hands on mouthpiece, reed, keys. You are stayed by touch. The theremin player is loose, untied. There is no tether. So how do you find the note? How do you find the chord when there is nothing to touch but air? Lucie said, “You just do.”

SOMETIMES I BOB in this maritime cell, lying on my back, and I can still hear the studio’s chatter. I can hear midnight wingdings and hungover breakfasts, Bugs banging on the door, Henry Solomonoff knocking over the bottles. Through the Majestic’s ventilation grate come toasts, disputes, speeches. I close my eyes in this stale room and listen to old friends talking about beauty.

Where are my violins, now? Do they wait for me with Lavinia? Did she burn them? Are they here on the ship, in the room across the hallway, packed into the crates with my equipment? Does Red slip in some nights and take my child’s violin from its case, cradled in his gigantic hands, and play an unhappy ode to Murmansk?

I wish I had given them to you, Clara, as a reminder.

AFTER THAT NIGHT, you came back. You left when it was late and came back the next day. I wondered what I had done to deserve this privilege, and then I realized it was not a question of doing: we liked each other, that’s all. That Thursday I worked on the rhythmicon, fingertips stained with flux, and you watched Yolanda Bolotine, ten years old, at the theremin, finding notes in the empty air.

Before your return, I had been dreaming most nights of my upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall. I had played that gilded room before, played it more than once, but now its darkness plagued me. In my dream, the room was too large. We were on stage, me and Rosalyn and Schillinger and the others, sixteen in all, just like we’d planned. There was a grand piano and a double bass, on its side. The loudspeakers stood like scaffolding. Squinting through the footlights, I could see the audience, but it was so far away; the front aisle of the Carnegie was like a dry riverbed, a valley, separating the stage from the crowd. Whole armies could pass on the red floor between us. Beyond the divide, ten thousand faces faded into shadow. The crowd was yelling something, “Bravo!” or “Encore!” or perhaps complicated boos, except we had not yet begun the performance. It didn’t matter: we could not make out their barking. In that immense room, the shouting peeled away, emptied out, leaving overtones and echo. The only clear sound was the rhythmicon’s count, like an advancing colossus. We remained at our instruments, poised, hands lifted to keyboard theremin and fingerboard theremin and space-control theremin, and we peered into the contorted faces of the distant crowd, silent and roaring, as if they were warning us of doom or a triumph, something we had not seen. At a certain moment I saw Pash among those faces, wordless, pale as a ghost. The two Karls stood on either side of him, just behind, one of their hands resting on each of his shoulders.