Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The mahogany stuff was richer than I could do justice to. But sometimes, as the place was closing up and the last few lushes downed one more round, I launched one of Mr. Silber’s requests and lost myself altogether. I’d layer it with improbable counterpoint until I was back in the unburned apartment of my childhood, my mother and father making all tunes and times lie down with one another. I’d feel myself sitting on the bench alongside Wilson Hart, in a practice room at Juilliard, tracing hidden bloodlines. Then one night, as my fingers were about to secede from my hand and find their way back at last to that source of all improvisation, the escaping slave, I looked up and saw him, sitting by himself, the first black man to enter the Glimmer Room other than to wash dishes or play piano.

He was bigger than when I’d seen him last, almost a decade before. His face was fuller and sadder, but by the look of his clothes, he’d done all right for himself. He wore a slight, sad grin, all alone in this place in listening to every note I made. The sight of the man so stunned me, I stopped playing in midchord and let out a whoop, in key. I lifted off the piano bench. Wilson Hart, the man who’d taught me to improvise, had somehow tracked me down, even to this godforsaken place, had found me where I couldn’t even find myself.

My fingers started up again, stuttering with shame. I’d made him a promise once, in a Juilliard practice room, to write down all the notes inside me. To compose something, music for the page. And here I was, a hack with a tip jar on my music rack, playing in a time-warp lounge, decomposing. But Wilson Hart had traced me here. He’d come by to listen, as if no time at all had passed since we’d last sat down to improvise together. All those notes were still in me somewhere, intact. Everything I’d ever lost would come back to me, starting with this man I’d never thanked for all he’d shown me. I wouldn’t lose the second chance.

My hands, flushed off the keys, landed back on the suspended chord and bent it open. I’d been strolling through a kicked-back “When a Man Loves a Woman,” mostly because I could make it last for fifteen minutes, the perfect antidote to the Nancy Sinatra navel lint a drunk had requested and then walked out on. When my hands landed back on the tune, they took possession, laying it out on a silver platter for my old friend. I was Bach at Potsdam, Parker at Birdland: there was nothing I couldn’t do with this simple chord sequence. I wove in every countersubject from Wilson’s and my shared past. I threw Rodrigo into the hopper, Wilson’s beloved William Grant Still, even bits of Wilson’s own compositions he had worked on so methodically in the years I knew him. I spun out references only he would place. For a few measures, keeping that ostinato figure as regular as a heartbeat—“when a man loves a woman, down deep in his soul”—I could have made any melody at all fit that one and complete it.

Across the dim room, the full figure of Wilson himself ate up my playing. His smile lost its sadness. His great arms clasped his table, and for a moment I thought he was going to lift it up in the air and twirl it in tempo. He recognized every message I threaded into the mix. I brought the thing into a hilarious homestretch, ending with a fat plagal cadence, a big old amen that left my old friend shaking his head in pleasure. In the Glimmer Room’s darkness, his eyes asked, Now how’d you learn to play like that?

I bounded up from the bench and made for him. It wasn’t time for my break, but Mr. Silber was free to replace me with the mod-chart crawler of his choice. Wilson’s head shake swelled as I came near, and as I closed the distance, I felt how much I’d missed his deep charity toward the species — the only man I’d ever felt completely comfortable with. He smiled in more quizzical surprise as I approached, a smile that only broke when he saw mine crack and fall. In the light of his table’s candle, Wilson Hart vanished and became someone from Lahore or Bombay — some land I’d never laid eyes on. I stopped ten feet from him, my past broken in front of me. “I–I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“But I am someone else,” the fellow protested with a bewildered, unplaceable accent. “And you play like no one else!”

“Forgive me.” I retreated to the safety of my piano. Of course it wasn’t Wilson Hart. Wilson Hart would never have entered a club like this, even by accident. He’d have been stopped before reaching the door. I fell back on the bench and launched into a brutal, humiliated “Something.” When I dared to look up again at song’s end, the stranger was gone.

Maybe because they’d never heard any quotations quite as crazed, or maybe under the mistaken impression that I was inventing something, a small circle of patrons actually started to listen. They’d sit at tables close to the piano and lean forward when I played. I thought at first that there was something wrong. I’d gotten used to sending my phrases off into the farthest reaches of space. Now, somehow, word had gone out. I wasn’t sure I liked having an audience. All this avid listening reminded me too much of the world I’d come from. It disconcerted me.

Mr. Silber took me aside before I went on one night, toward the end of the summer. The season was ending, and I’d done nothing to prepare for winter. I felt incapable of moving out of Atlantic City. I was unable even to think of looking for work again. Returning to the music I’d betrayed was impossible. I suffered from a massive fatigue, many times bigger than my body. For the first time since birth, it felt simpler not to be alive at all. Mr. Silber held me by one shoulder and examined me. “Boy,” he said, or maybe “My boy.” He used them both. “You’ve got something.” He tried for some tone of approval that wouldn’t tip his hand. “I know we only contracted for the high season, but if you’re not going anywhere, we could probably keep using you.”

I wasn’t going anywhere. This year or ever. All I wanted was to be used.

“With your playing, we can bring in listeners year-round.”

“I’m running out of ideas,” I warned him. “I’m out of touch.”

“You know that stuff you’ve been playing? The crazy stuff? Your music? Just keep letting it flow. Wherever the spirit moves you! Make it up as you go along; then don’t change a single note. Now, I’ll have to cut you to one hundred, during the off-peak season, of course.” But in a preemptive move, lest I head down the road to play at the Shimmer Room, he promised that the ginger ale would, forever onward, be complimentary.

The summer ended and the tourists disappeared. The town turned harder, inward. But Mr. Silber had guessed right: Enough people kept coming to the Glimmer Room to subsidize live music. I placed the faces of repeat offenders. Atlantic City residents: The concept seemed too sad to consider, though I now was one myself. Sometimes the regulars approached me during breaks. They’d speak in short, stressed words as if I couldn’t quite follow their tongue. As if I were in and out of heroin-recovery programs. I’d do my best to accommodate, keeping my voice low and my answers peppered with mangled Brooklyn street slang. Mumbling always works wonders — an authenticity all its own.

One woman started showing up every weekend night. I noticed her the first time she came in, on the arm of a mallet-headed man four inches shorter than she was. I’d stopped noticing the striking women after a few months, but this one got me. She had that bruised hothouse flower look that always caught Jonah’s eye. I wanted to run and find him, lure him back to America with a full report of this chess-piece creature. Her face was small and flawless, the color of spun sugar, trimmed by high cheeks and a magazine nose, with unnervingly straight glossy black hair that fell in a pert Prince Valiant helmet. She dressed against the times, in dated colors, with a taste for white blouses and hunter green skirts above dark stockings and granny boots.