Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I listened for hours. I switched tracks so fast, they piled up on top of one another. The whole claustrophobic classical catalog could not surpass this outpouring for breadth, depth, or heights. A massed hallelujah chorus poured out of Teresa’s speakers, a torrent flowing over every riverbank the country could invent to hold it. This wasn’t a music. It was millions. All these songs, talking to one another, all insinging and outsinging, back and forth at the party to end all celebration, into the wee hours of a suppressed national never. This was the house at the end of the long night, inviting, warm, resourceful, and subversive. And I was standing on the stoop, locked out, too late to bluff my way through the party’s doors, listening to the sound roll through the windows and light the streets in all directions. I heard the play of voices through the shutters from the back alley. I eavesdropped shamelessly, not caring if I got arrested, caught in a sound that, even at this muffled distance, was more vital and urgent and jammed to therapeutic capacity with pleasure than any I’d ever make.

In that voyeur’s elation, a single-word song on a 193 °Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recording stopped me cold. I read the title twice, fumbled the disk out of its jacket, put it on the player, and managed to bring the needle down on the cut without gouging the vinyl. There was Calloway, doing what sounded like a bad Al Jolson imitation, wailing away on a song called “Yaller”:

Black folk, white folk, I’m learning a lot,

You know what I am, I know what I’m not,

Ain’t even black,

I ain’t even white, I ain’t like the day and I ain’t like the night.

Feeling mean, so in-between, I’m just a High Yaller…

I listened through three times, learning the song as if I’d written it. I don’t know what possessed me, but I played it that night at the Glimmer Club, after Teresa arrived. Hope is never more stupid than when it’s within striking distance. She took her seat, up close to the piano, glowing with our new secret. She looked heart-stopping in a short brown tube dress I’d seen in her closet. I slipped the song late into the last set, when nobody was left to hear but her. I watched her face, knowing in advance what I’d get. Those lips that mouthed along with every other tune that evening, lips that had hummed wordlessly as we made love, held still and bloodless throughout my rendition.

She didn’t wait for me at the end of that set. But she showed up the following night, so tentative and apologetic, I wanted to die. I went back with her to her apartment, although we had just a few hours before she needed to leave for work. We lay with each other again, but the song was stillborn between us. When I looked over the record collection after she left the next morning, the Calloway was gone.

We fell into a tradition. Every night she came to the bar, I’d get her up to sing for at least one song. At first, it made Mr. Silber crazy. “You don’t think I have money to pay for two performers in the same evening?” I assured him he was getting the thing all my father’s colleagues swore was impossible in our little neck of the universe: something for nothing. When Mr. Silber saw how much this thrill-nervous girl’s clear old torch songs pleased the audience, he spun doughnuts. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he took to announcing, “please welcome the Glimmer Room Musical Duet!”

We never rehearsed. She knew all her songs by heart, and I knew all her songs from her. I could anticipate what she was going to do, and on those rare occasions when her nervous enthusiasm tipped us over, our craft was easily righted. We weren’t talking Scriabin, after all. But Teresa tapped into a musical ecstasy Scriabin only hinted at. Her whole body took up the pulse. With my chords solid beneath her, she let go — sexy, sultry, loose on a first-time spree. She had a lower register, a growl almost androgynous. The audience ate her up, and each night that she sang, at least a couple men in the darkened house would have given years for one taste more.

She was on the floor one night, singing Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” as if it were a controlled substance. We’d found the groove, sailing along in the full soul of the thing, when our hull scraped on some reef, forcing me to look up. Teresa was back on the beat almost instantly; no one had heard her bobble but her accompanist. She stiffened through the rest of the song. I traced her weird vibe to an older man who’d entered in midstanza and sat down in the back of the room, a man whose rifle-bore gaze Teresa studiously avoided.

He wasn’t the mallet-headed escort I’d first seen her with. But he was another white man, one whose massive claim on her was obvious, even to the piano player. Teresa sang, “I don’t like you, but I love you.” I tagged along underneath, resolving stray dissonances, wondering whether her bridling was meant for me or this other fellow, a man I’d never seen before and felt no need to see again. “You really got a hold on me.” Every demon music was supposed to banish, all the things that held her took hold in the melody. She limped through to the end, almost whispering the last phrase, afraid to look up. When she did, the man was standing. He seemed to lean over and spit, though nothing come out of his mouth. Then he made for the door.

Teresa turned to me and called out. I couldn’t hear her, over her panic and the applause. She called again: “‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’” The only time she ever spoke to me in command. I started up the tune, my fingers in a forced march. But it was too late. The man was gone. Teresa, having ordered the melody, gagged it down. She sang her way through to the end. But the innocence in the song came out of her mouth twisted.

She waited for me afterward, as if nothing had happened. I suppose nothing had. But it ate at me, and when she asked in her shy, frightened way whether I wanted to go home with her, I answered, “I don’t think you want me to.”

She looked as if I’d just blackened her eye. “Why are you saying that?”

“I think you’d rather be by yourself.”

She didn’t ask for a reason, but went away in silence. That only enraged me. She came back to the club a few nights later, but I avoided her during breaks and never asked her up to sing. She stayed away for a week. I dug in and waited for her to call. When she didn’t, I told myself that that was that. We never know. Nobody knows the first thing about anyone else.

She was waiting for me outside the club when I went to work the next week. She was in her candy-factory clothes. I saw her from a block away, time enough to prepare for the downbeat. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

“Joseph. We have to talk.”

“Do we?”

Suddenly, I was that thug who’d assaulted us on the freezing beach the winter before. She narrowed herself to the smallest slit and threw her words at me. “You smug little son of a bitch.” She grabbed and pushed me. Then she buckled against the front wall of the club, sobbing.

I refused to touch her. It pretty much killed me, but I held to myself. I’d have given her anything, and still, she refused to tell me. Righteousness had me by the throat. I waited for her to catch her breath. “Is there something you want to say to me?”

This started her gasping again. “About what, Joseph? About what?”

“I’ve never asked anything from you, Teresa. You have unfinished business in your life? The least you can do is have the decency to tell me about it.”

“‘Unfinished…’”

She wouldn’t own up. I felt betrayed — by her, by the rules of decency, by her pretty singing, by that bending rainbow landscape of her body. “Want to tell me about the guy?”

“Guy?” Her confusion was complete. Then her face broke and rose. “Joseph! Oh, my Joe. I thought you knew. I thought…”