Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The secret to the music I’d played at the Glimmer Room was that it never committed. My professional survival consisted of playing a music that belonged to no one. Maybe every tune I played could be blood-typed, aligned with some warring faction. But I played with a strange, nonnative accent no one could quite place. By the time I’d put a song through the wringer of my self-taught riffing and seasoned it with the scraps of three hundred years of forgotten keyboard works, nobody could quite name it to claim or blame.

I couldn’t bear to return to playing. The house in Fort Lee sold. I paid the taxes on it and put the balance of Da’s assets in three accounts, one for each of us. My share meant that, for some finite but considerable number of months, I didn’t have to make a living by faking musical pleasure. Teresa encouraged me to languish for as long as I needed. She thought I was in mourning. She thought I only needed time to get my feet on the ground, and for that, she made me the most solid base imaginable. Saint T. cooked and took me outside for walks and warded off with a glance the gatekeepers of pedigree who might otherwise have beaten me to a pasty pulp.

Those weeks were much like real life, except for my constant flinching. “Sweet?” I said to her in the dark, on my half of her borrowed pillow. We got to the point where she could name that tune in one note. “You have to make up with your father. I can’t take it anymore. It’s on my conscience. You have to. There’s nothing more important.”

She lay on the bed next to me, silent, hearing what I was afraid to say. We both knew the only way that reconciliation could happen. She’d already written her father off, had already given up her family for a higher ideal. I could almost live with a choice that good. Except that her higher ideal was me.

She bought me a little Wurlitzer electric piano. It must have cost two years of saltwater taffy savings, and it was only a tenth of the instrument that I had sold for a few hundred dollars after my father died. She showed up at my place the day of delivery, hiding her face in excitement and fear. “I thought you might want something to practice on. And to work with. While you’re…while you aren’t…”

She couldn’t have hurt me more with a knife to the chest. I stared at the piano in its shipping container, the open casket of a lynching victim. I couldn’t tell her. The little thing was a double amputee. It had only forty-four keys, half what I needed to believe in it. Even the simplest arrangement would scrape its head on the ceiling. The thing’s action was like a screen door that wouldn’t close. I felt I was playing in winter gloves. It resembled a piano less than the Glimmer Room resembled those concert halls Jonah and I had once played. As I looked at her gift, Teresa sat hunched, a hand to her mouth, afraid to breathe, estranged from her family, her savings account wiped out. We’d all die of unreturnable kindness. Misplaced love supreme.

“It’s wonderful. I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this. We have to send it back.” A look came over her like I’d killed her dog. “Of course we’ll keep it. Come on. Let’s sing.” Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into “Honeysuckle Rose.” All she’d hoped for. I could do that much.

The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.

Teresa wanted nothing from the gift except to please. That’s what destroyed me. She thought I missed playing, that I needed some lifeline to keep me afloat. A woman with her work history should have thrown me out on my ear. But so long as she could help me keep my music alive, she didn’t care if I ever went back to work. We had our piano. For a while, we sang almost every evening, now that my performing didn’t get in the way. For the first time since childhood, I played for no reason but playing. When Jonah and I had toured, we were never alone. We were always answerable, first to the notes on the page and then to the bodies in the auditorium. Even when we rehearsed, twisting around the tune in lockstep, other ears were already listening between us. Teresa and I were all alone. We collided into each other, faltering and finessing our way across a finish line, each deferring to the other. We had no printed notes to prop us or impede us, no listening ear, no living audience to interfere. Nobody to hear but each other.

She’d get sullen and apologetic when we didn’t swing. She had this little stutter-step thing she’d picked up from Sarah Vaughan, who’d picked it up from Ella Fitzgerald, who’d picked it up from Louis Armstrong, who’d picked it up from the deep recesses of his orphanage’s singing school. I’d follow out the phrases, thinking, She’s never going to make it. It made her nuts every time I’d try to hook up with her hiccups. She was all rhythm and line, the syncopated flight from the rest of her life. I was all harmony and chord, packing each vertical moment with sixths, flatted ninths, more simultaneous notes than the texture would bear. But somehow, we made music together. Our tunes turned their back on the wide outside, willfully ignorant and almost too beautiful, some nights, in pleasing no one but their makers.

While Teresa was at the factory packing taffy, I read the news or watched daytime television. I no longer practiced, aside from picking up a song or two in the late afternoon, before Teresa came home. I took the time to learn what had happened in the world since the death of Richard Strauss. The television jumbled my viewing days, until I didn’t know how many months had passed. I watched the My Lai trial and the crumbling of peace with honor. I watched Wallace get shot and Nixon get reelected and go to China. I watched the Arabs and Israelis recommence their eternal war, pushing the world to the unthinkable brink. I watched Biafra die and Bangladesh, Gambia, the Bahamas, and Sri Lanka get born. I sat still while a handful of pre-Americans declared their own breakaway, recovered country, which lasted for seventy days. And I felt nothing but anesthetized shame.

For one brief moment, it was nation time, crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come. Then, just as quickly: no nation. Systematically, the U.S. government buried Black Power. Newton and Seale, Cleaver and Carmichael: The movement’s leaders were jailed or driven from the country. Scenes from Attica leaked out, an inferno deep enough to match any nation’s. George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin. He was exactly Emmett Till’s age, my brother’s age. The official report said he was leading an armed revolt. Fellow inmates said he was set up and murdered. SNCC was broken up for parts and the Panthers destroyed by COINTELPRO. Somewhere out there, my fugitive sister and Robert were hiding, among the other twice-defeated, all those who worked to steal their country back and were destroyed in the process.

When I could not dose myself with current events, I flipped through sitcoms, game shows, and soaps. Nothing Jonah and I were guilty of in all our performing years could match, in sheer flight from the present’s nightmare, the best of contemporary culture. Armstrong died, and then Ellington. The heartbeat of what should have been my country’s music changed. The thing that replaced it, the official sound track for all seasons that overgrew every cultural niche like kudzu claiming an abandoned vehicle, declared that rhythm consisted of slamming down hard on beats two and four and harmony meant adding a daring seventh now and then to one of two combating chords. There was no place in earshot I wanted to live. It was impossible even to think about performing in front of other people, ever again.