Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The one time we were actually accosted, by a spreading middle-aged man who looked as if he had little more left to fear from the threat of mongrelization, Teresa let loose with such a torrent of invective — something about Christ on the cross, gonads, and a meat hook — that even I wanted to turn and run. At her yells, the man backed away, arms in the air. We walked away from the spot, mock-casual. I was stunned into silence, until Teresa giggled.

“Where on earth did you learn how to do that?”

“My mother used to be a nun,” she explained.

But she was an innocent. She could have crawled up underneath the Pope’s cassock and I still would have thought so. We didn’t touch. She was frightened of me. I thought I knew why. But I didn’t, and it took me weeks to realize. I was beyond her, a star in the inverted punch bowl of her firmament. My name appeared in Glimmer Room advertisements in the newspaper. Lots of people in town knew who I was and even heard me play. Most of all, I was a real musician, reading notes and everything, able to play, after one listen, songs just the way they appeared on the radio.

Terrie couldn’t read music. But she was as musical a person as I’ve ever met. She listened to the lightest three-minute chart climber with an ache most people reserve for thoughts of their own death. One diminished chord in the right place could crack her ribs open and force her soul into the air. Music seeped up through the ground into her feet. Deprived for any length of time, she grew listless. Even the most insipid trip from tonic to dominant and back home could perk her up again.

She sucked every calorie out of a song. God knows, she had to get her nutrition somewhere. She lived off chord changes and the fumes from her candy factory. She cooked for me at her apartment on weekends, spending all Sunday with the kitchen radio on, whipping up heavy cream soups or seafood pastas. She made a linguini with white clam sauce like they served in Atlantis before it went under. Then she’d sit down at the shaky brown cardboard card table across from me, a candle between us, my plate heaped high, and hers with a sprig or two that she’d play air hockey with until it vaporized.

Each time I visited her, I had to get used to the smell all over again. The scent of saltwater taffy, all the confections she made on the assembly line, clung to her furniture and walls. When the concentrated sweetness choked me, I’d push for another walk along the freezing boardwalk. We took long rides in her Dodge, down to Cape May and up to Asbury Park. We used the car as a mobile radio platform. The Dodge had an AM with five plastic Chiclet stumps that, when shoved hard, forced the dial’s red plastic needle to jump to the five main frequencies of her pleasure. She loved to hold the steering wheel with her right hand while reaching over — cross-handed, as in some tricky Scarlatti sonata — to find the perfect sound track for any given stretch of road: C and W, R and R, R & B, or, most frequently, decades-old smoky jazz. She could listen to anything soulful and find it good. And in her clear, if fragile, voice, she could make the most derivative tune please me.

Her record collection dwarfed the one Jonah and I had assembled since childhood. It was, like her driving, all over the road. She used some inscrutable organizational scheme I struggled for several visits to figure out. When I at last broke down and asked, she laughed, ashamed. “They’re by happiness.”

I looked again. “How happy the music is?”

She shook her head. “How happy they make me.”

“Really?” She nodded, defensive. “Do they move up and down?” I looked again, and they became a giant Billboard chart tracking the inside of this woman’s mind.

“Sure. Every time I take them out and play them, they go back in another slot.”

I’d seen her do it but had never noticed. I laughed, then hated myself the instant I saw what my laugh did to her face. “But how can you ever find anything?”

She looked at me as if I were mad. “I know how much I like a thing, Joseph.”

She did. I watched her. She never hesitated, either finding or replacing.

I scouted her spectrum of happiness one Sunday evening while Teresa busied herself glazing a ham in her kitchen. The rule I’d noticed in the Glimmer Room spread out before me. Petula Clark was consigned to the far left-hand purgatory, while Sarah Vaughan sat ascendant all the way to the right. This woman had little use for shiny, new, and light. The finish she wanted was smoky and deep, the longer cured the better.

I fell into dark thoughts. I was a fraud infiltrating that apartment while the misled woman labored over a ham for me. I hadn’t considered what game we two were playing, how much she had assumed about me even before we brushed hands. I saw the person she must have mistaken me for all these weeks, the thinnest imposter, and I knew what would happen when she discovered who I really was.

I checked the records at the favored end of her collection, the peak of her pantheon: music being made just blocks from my home while I was growing up on Byrd and Brahms, heavy doses of the Strom Experiment. She loved all the music I’d only brushed up against in those few months when Jonah had gotten restless and we’d knocked around the Village jazz clubs, looking for easy transgression. Teresa thought the music was mine, by blood, down in my fingers, when all I did was steal it off records, as late as the afternoon I came into the club to play it. My sense of deception was so great and my sense of self so weightless that when she came into the front room with her arms full of Sunday dinner, I blurted out, “You like black music.”

She set the hot dishes down on the makeshift dining table. “What do you mean?”

“Black music. You like it better…you prefer it to…” To your own music, was all I could think to say. How came it yours?

Teresa looked at me with a look I’d never seen on her face, the one I’d gotten from shopkeepers, ticket takers, and strangers since I’d turned thirteen, a look that knew, the moment the revolution came, that I would steal back from it all it had stolen from me over centuries. She walked over to where I stood and studied her collection in a way that she never had. She stood shaking her head, fixed by the right-hand side of her records, the tops of her privately owned pops. “But everybody loves those singers. It’s not that they’re black. It’s that they’re the best.”

I was so agitated at dinner, I couldn’t swallow. The two of us faced each other across that card table, each pushing our pink pork pucks around on our plates. I couldn’t ask what I wanted to. But I couldn’t bear silence. “How did you get onto the oldies? I mean, Cab Calloway? Alberta Hunter? Haven’t you heard the word, girl? Don’t you know you can’t trust anyone over thirty?”

She brightened, grateful to be asked an easy one. “Oh! That’s my father.” She spoke the word with that chiding care we give those who’ve committed the gross error in judgment of becoming our parents. “Every Sunday morning of my life. The week wasn’t finished until he spun his favorite records. I used to hate it. When I was twelve, I’d run from the house screaming. But I guess we finally love what we know best, huh?”

“What happened to him?”

“Who?”

“You said ‘spun.’”

“Oh. My father?” She looked down at her food-spattered plate. “He’s still spinning.”

So was I. Teresa could feel how keyed up I was. I’ll forever say that about her. She could hear me, even when I wasn’t playing. “Would you like to go for a ride?” she asked.

“Sure. Why not? Unless you’d rather listen to something here?”

We were off a beat. “Listen to what?”