Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She looked out of herself, as through a picture frame. Maybe she’d come to Atlantic City to take part in one of the beauty pageants and just stayed on. Maybe she was some third-generation clammer’s daughter, or the scion of a ruined gambling family. I guessed something different every night. I felt myself grow happy when she walked in. Nothing more. Just a good warm sense of playing the way I liked to, as if the best set of the night could now begin. I was happy, too, when the mallet-headed man stopped showing. I didn’t like how he steered her, using the small of her back as the wheel. Call it racism, but I didn’t like someone who looked like him liking my music.

She’d sit at a tiny two-person table almost in the crook of the piano. The hostesses saved it for her. She’d sit and nurse an amaretto stone sour for hours. Men came by and mashed on her, sitting across the little table, their backs to me. But she always got them to leave within fifteen minutes. She wanted to sit by herself. Not alone, but with the tunes. I’d noticed it for weeks. Even when she stared into space, her straight black hair blocking her profile, I could still see it. She sang along. On almost every song I played, no matter how deep I buried the melody, she found and unearthed it. She even knew the second verses.

I tested her, taking her out for spins without her ever knowing. Her repertoire was huge, bigger than mine. I was learning the tunes, often as late as the afternoon I came in to work. This velvet-haired woman knew them all already. When I slipped in a jazzed-up, transmogrified Schubert or Schumann — imposters passing, for an evening, in that smoke-filled room — she’d sit and listen, cocking her head, puzzled that there could be a pretty tune she’d never heard. I studied her for the covers she liked, the ones that made that linen-colored face go Christmas. She whispered almost gravely to “Incense and Peppermints.” But to “The Shoop Shoop Song,” she positively squirmed in place. “Monday, Monday” left her subdued, while “Another Saturday Night” got her hopping. It took me a while to figure out the key. But once I did, the pattern rarely failed. Her musical passion obeyed the simplest rule in the world: She wanted to shim-sham-shimmy with the black and tan.

Once I figured out her songs of choice, I favored her with them. Without our exchanging a glance — for she had a heart-stopping ability always to be staring at some distant place whenever I looked up — I made her know I was playing for her. I ran whole musical commentaries to her evening, playing “Respect” when guys tried to pick her up, “Shop Around” when I caught her checking out the men, “I Second That Emotion,” early in the morning as she stifled a yawn. She loved when I dipped back into the thirties and forties — Horne, Holiday, all the contraband material Mr. Silber put on the forbidden list. She sat icy and statuesque, mouthing tunes from the year I was born. She herself couldn’t have dated to a minute before the stroke of 1950. But the further back in time I reached, the more she delighted in the journey.

I stumbled onto her signature tune by trial and error. I’d played to her for about three months, maybe twenty visits all told. The two of us hadn’t shared anything beyond one or two accidental, instantly impounded smiles. Yet I knew, if only because she’d rarely left mine, that I’d been in her thoughts for weeks. We had some destiny and were only sniffing around it, deciding how to draw near.

I’d been trying to put my left-hand strength to work by imitating Fats Waller, with limited success. Mr. Silber relaxed a little on the old stuff in the winter, when the clientele themselves turned nostalgic. I could get away with a few each night without reprimand. I lacked only Jonah to resuscitate those great lyrics by Andy Razaf, the prince of Malagasy, to turn my little fireside glow into barn burners. I sang them myself, under my breath, or watched them form on the lips of that white chess queen with the jet helmet hair. “Oh what did I do to be so black and blue?” Working through that glorious catalog, I came to “Honeysuckle Rose.” My arrangement was so filled out with nectar, pistils, and stamens that Mr. Silber wouldn’t have made out the tune, even if he’d been listening by mistake. But the effect on my private audience of one was electric. How she’d come to own the song, I couldn’t imagine. But at the first chords, she turned into the sultriest of silent sirens. The tune went right into her, and she couldn’t help herself. As I headed into the break, she chose that moment to smile right at me, cheeks tipped a little wickedly, lips announcing, Don’t need sugar; you just have to touch my cup.

Yours?my eyebrows asked. She smiled, half coy and wholly terrified. Yes, mine.

I asked her, with a head flick, to get up and sing. I hit a right-hand riff that freed my left to crook an index finger at her. She pointed to herself, and I nodded gravely. She pointed to the floor, that odd reflex gesture: Now? I nodded again, graver still: When else? I kept the harmonies vamping, circling around the leading tone, filling for the two measures it took her to work up the courage and get to her feet. I’m not sure what she was worried about. She was wearing a long, straight burgundy slip dress that clung to her greedily, and she moved like a colt discovering her legs. She stepped into the piano curve and swung into a sweet, clear, sturdy alto. “Every honeybee fills with jealousy.” Confection, goodness knows. My honeysuckle rose.

One or two cocktail loungers, surprised by the sound of a singing voice, spattered applause when she finished. She gave a quick flushed bow and looked about to free herself from the snare. I stood up and stuck my hand out at her before she could bolt. “I’m Joseph Strom.”

“Oh! I know!”

“You do? Well, I don’t.”

“Excuse me?” Her speaking voice shocked me: a honking Jersey nasal that completely disappeared when she sang.

“I don’t know. Who you are, I mean.”

She smelled of something sweet I couldn’t place. She blushed the color of hibiscus, twirling her hair’s razor blackness around a shaking finger. And Teresa Wierzbicki told me her name.

Winter had set in meanly by then; the town was dead. But we began taking walks together along the ocean, as if it were the height of spring. She’d grown up near town and worked days at the saltwater taffy factory, the thing, after shellfish, that had birthed this place. Taffy was her twenty-four-hour perfume. She got out of work at five, we’d meet at six, walk until seven, and I’d go in to work at eight. Without any planning, it became our twice-weekly routine. I could lose myself in listening to her, or watching her walk. She walked sideways, staring at me as if I might disappear, moving with a clumsy fur-lined wonder.

I tried to take her to dinner a couple of times, but she seemed not to eat. She was shy when talking to me. “I hate my speaking voice,” she apologized to the sand under her feet. “You talk. I love it when you talk.” Mostly, Teresa wanted to breeze up and down the windy, deserted shore, scrawny and underdressed, leaning into the wind, humming constantly, and I, colder and more conspicuous than I can remember being in my entire life.

I was afraid to be seen with her. This town was not New York, and walking on the beach was asking for trouble. In season, I’d have been lynched, Teresa would have been thrown back on solo beachcombing, and Mr. Silber would have had to close up shop. Off season, there were fewer people around to care. And still, we drew enough venom-filled look-aways to stock the Garden State Snake Farm for years to come. This was what my parents had lived with every day of their lives. Nothing in me could have loved strongly enough to survive it.