Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Anything. You choose.”

She went to the spread of records and wavered. I’d changed her rankings for her, forever. She went to the right and pulled out an Ella Fitzgerald covering Gershwin, Carmichael, and Berlin, pilfering back from the pilferers. Teresa dropped the scratching needle down upon a voice scatting away as if everyone in creation would get his own back on reckoning day. She swayed a little to the beat, lip-synching, as always. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her hips, her own dancing partner. Now and then, an involuntary pianissimo came out of her, trying to find a way back to its own scattered innocence.

She hummed to herself, drifting to her tattered brick-colored sofa. After a song, I went and sat with her. It surprised her. She held still. She’d never said a word about our not touching. I think she would have stayed with me forever, even at that unspoken arm’s length, staying off at whatever distance she thought I needed and not one step farther. She let out a skyful of breath. “Ah, Sunday.”

“Maybe Monday,” I sang.

Teresa segued: “Maybe not.” She turned toward me, pulling her feet up on the sofa underneath her. She looked down at her thighs, a little askew, the color of fine bone china. Her lips moved silently, as they had for so long in the darkness of the club, keeping me company each night. The warmth of the recording came from out of her soundless mouth. Still, I’m sure to meet him one day, maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. My right hand lowered itself onto her leg and began accompanying. I closed my eyes and improvised. I moved from chords to free imitation, careful to keep to a decent range, between her knee and hiked-up hemline.

Teresa held her breath and became my instrument. I hit each note as squarely as if it were real. She heard my free flight in her skin. I could feel her feeling my fingers’ tone clusters. Around We’ll build a little home for two, I built an obbligato line so right, I was surprised it wasn’t in the original. At from which I’ll never roam, I roamed a little, beyond the deniable, up into the hemline octave. On the last two lines, Teresa joined in with a reedy harmony, one she’d sung a hundred times to herself, in this place, maybe even with someone else, before I came around.

When the song finished, I rested my hand on her leg, the silent keys. I couldn’t feel my fingers to remove them. Her muscles twitched in cheerful terror. I could feel my own pulse pounding through my palm. Teresa stood. My fossil hand slid off her. “I have something for you.” She walked across the room to her trinket-covered hutch. From behind a carved Indian elephant, she fished an envelope. It might have been sitting there for weeks. She brought it back to me and set it in my hands. On its white face, it bore the name Joseph, scribbled in childlike balloon letters. My hands shook as I opened it, the way they used to after crucial concerts with Jonah. I struggled to remove the contents without tearing. Teresa sat next to me, reached out, and ran the back of her hand against my neck. Like slipping on a new silk tie.

I worked at that envelope until I thought she’d take it from my hands and open it for me. I got the card out at last. Ter had made the thing herself, a cartoon of two tigers warily chasing each other around what looked like a palm tree. Inside, the same childlike scribble read “I will if you will.”

It might have sat unopened on the hutch forever, waiting, for all time, for my hand to graze hers, even by accident. But it was ready the moment I did. The hidden patience of her hand-drawn prediction broke over me and I sat on her sofa, crying. She led me to her bed and put me in those sheets that smelled of saltwater taffy. She slipped from her clothes and stood open to me. I could not stop looking. I sat high up on a rock bluff, looking out on a surprise, twisting river valley. I’d thought she was cream, muslin, porcelain. But her body — her slender, sloping, undulating body — was all the colors there were. I moved over her, tracing with my fingers, my face up close to every inch of terrain, the light cerulean of her veins below her neck, the terra-cotta of her breasts’ tips, the pea green smear of a bruise just above her hip. I gorged myself with looking at the spreading rainbow of her, until, shy again in the face of my pleasure, she leaned over and doused the light.

All that night, she brought me back to myself. I was in bed with a woman. I’d never before heard the whole tune, beginning to end. But I knew enough bars to fake it. I felt the muscles just under her thighs hunch up in surprise under my hand. Our skins pushed up against each other, shocked by the contrast, even in the dark. She hummed, her mouth to my belly; I couldn’t make out the song. Her mouth opened in awe when I went into her. Her throat kept timeless time, and every one of her murmurs was pitched.

Afterward, she held on to me, her discovery. “The way you play. I knew it. Just by the way you play.”

“You have to hear my brother,” I told her, half-asleep. “He’s the real once-in-a-lifetime musician.”

I fell unconscious and slept the sleep of the dead, Teresa’s hands still thawing out the crevasses of my back. When I woke, she hovered over me like Psyche, a glass of orange juice in her hands. The room was blazing. She was fully dressed, in her candy-factory clothes. My honeysuckle rose. I made space for her on the bed’s edge. “I’m almost late. The key’s in the music box on my dresser if you need it.”

I took her hand as she stood. “I have to tell you something.”

“Shh. I know.”

“My father is white.”

It wasn’t what she expected. But her surprise vanished quickly enough to surprise me. She rolled her eyes. Solidarity of the oppressed. “Tell me about it. So’s mine.” She leaned back down and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel her lips, wondering how mine felt to her.

“Are you coming tonight?” I asked.

“That depends. You playing the good stuff?”

“If you’re singing.”

“Oh,” she said, heading out the door. “I’ll sing anything.”

I dressed and made the bed, pulling the sheets over our still-fresh stains. I walked around her apartment, happily criminal, just looking at this new world. I stared at her collections, taking my own private tour of a distant ethnographic museum. Her life: ceramic frogs, a clock in the shape of the sun, purple bath soaps and sponges, slippers with crossed eyes stitched into their tops, a book on the picturesque barns of Ohio, inscribed “Happy Birthday from Aunt Gin and Uncle Dan. Don’t forget you promised to visit soon!” Each of us is alien to every other. Race does nothing but make the fact visible.

I opened her closet and gazed at all her clothes. A line of slips hung on hooks against one wall, black and white sheathes whose edges I’d seen sticking out under her dresses, clinging to and imitating her. I went into the kitchen and sliced last night’s ham for breakfast. I ate it cold, afraid to dirty her pans. I’d been here often, but never alone. I knew what the police would do if some law-abiding neighbor tipped them off to me. Just being here by myself in this alien woman’s rooms was a life sentence. Safety meant leaving. But I had no place to go except back to my life.

I went to her record collection, the safest ground in this booby-trapped place. There wasn’t a piece of classical music on her shelves except the hepped-up thefts of tunes long out of copyright. I started from the tops of her charts, looking for a song to play her at the club that night, something I might learn just for her. I slipped on a disk of Monk’s and knew that everything on it was beyond my meager fake technique. Oscar Peterson: I laughed after four measures, exhilarated and demoralized. I played an Armstrong Hot Seven recording that Teresa had worn almost smooth. Everything I thought I knew about the man and his music vanished in a river of sound. I sampled people I knew only by reputation: Robert Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Charles Mingus. I stood surrounded in the wall-wide, rapturous choruses of Thomas A. Dorsey. I broke into Teresa’s cache of blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Ma Rainy. Junior Wells’s harmonica cut me into thin strips and passed me through the reeds. Up at the very top of the collection were all her master women spell-casters. Carter, McRae, Vaughan, Fitzgerald: In each one, I heard Teresa twirling and wailing, losing herself in imitative ecstasy every night that she came home from the factory, singing her real image into being, alone in the dark.