Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Have you ever thought about composing?” Teresa asked one night as we were drying dinner dishes.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I can get a job.”

“Joseph, that’s not what I’m asking. I just thought that maybe, with all this time, you might have something…”

Something inside me, worth writing down. It hit me — why I was afraid to get another nightclub job. I was afraid that Wilson Hart might really show up someday, wherever I was noodling, and ask to see the portfolio of pieces I’d promised him to write. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. I was destined to disappoint everyone I loved, everyone who thought there might be something in me worth composing.

Terrie’s patience with me was more deadly than any racial assault. I went out the next day and bought a box of pencils and a sheaf of twenty-inch cream-stock music paper. I bought paper with grand staff systems, paper with treble staffs and piano systems, paper with unmarked, unjoined staffs — anything that looked remotely serious. I had no idea what I was doing. I stacked up the blank scores on the electric piano and lined up the pencils in neat rows, each one sharpened to a lethal weapon. Teresa’s barely suppressed excitement at my fortress of composition supplies hurt me more than my father’s death.

All day long while I waited, jittery, for Teresa to come home, I pretended to write music. Fragments of phrases crawled in clumps here and there across the cream stock, like spiders making nests in the corners of abandoned summer homes. I’d jot down a strain, motif by motif. Sometimes the strains would collide together into near melodies, every articulation literally spelled out. Sometimes they stayed nothing more than a series of tetrachords without rhythmic values or bar lines. I was writing for no ensemble, no instrument at all, not even piano and voice. My imagined audience was spread all over the map, and I could not tell if I was writing pop songs or thorny, academic abstraction. I never erased a note. If a phrase hit a wall, I’d simply start over again somewhere else, on an unused staff. When a page filled up, I’d flip it over and fill the back. Then I’d start another.

These were the longest days of my life, longer by far than my days in a Juilliard practice room, longer, even, than the days I’d spent at the side of my father’s hospital bed. I worked it out at one point: I was writing down about 140 notes an hour — two and a third triads every three minutes. Sometimes the act of filling in a single note head could absorb me for half an afternoon.

My bits of graphite scratching remained stubbornly wooden. The puppet refused to sit up and speak. But now and again, at enormous intervals, always when I’d lost track of myself and forgotten what I was after, the edge of something truly musical would shake loose. I’d feel myself racing ahead of myself, out beyond the phrase, into the next arc of a line whose accidentals were there even before my pencil could fix them. My whole body would rally, drawn up into the forward motion, throwing off the leadenness I’d felt for years, without feeling. I’d flood with more ideas than I could hold, and I had to force my pencil into a panicky shorthand just to keep up. For the length of this rush of notes, I owned music’s twelve tones and could make them say what life had only ever hinted at.

But then I’d make the mistake of going back and playing these self-propelling themes out loud. After a few chords, I’d begin to hear. Everything that I wrote down came from somewhere else. With a rhythm slightly bobbed or taken out, a pitch swapped or altered here and there, my melodies simply stole from ones that had used and discarded me sometime in the past. All I did was dress them up and hide them in progressive dissonance. A Schütz chorus we sang at home, pieces from Mama’s funeral, the first Schumann Dichterliebe, the one that Jonah loved, split ambiguously between major and relative minor, never to resolve: There wasn’t an original idea in me. All I could do — and that, only without knowing — was revive the motives that had hijacked my life.

When Teresa finally did come home after work, she’d try clumsily to mask her thrill at my growing stack of penciled-up pages. She still couldn’t read music very well, and there wasn’t much music there for her to read. Sometimes, even before she’d changed out of her briny factory clothes, she’d stand at the piano and ask, “Play a little for me, Joseph.” I’d play a bit, knowing she’d never hear the rip-offs hidden in it. My scribbles made Teresa so happy. Her $120 weekly wage was barely enough to support her on her own. But she gladly floated me, and would go on doing so forever, all in the belief that I was making new music for the world.

Our shared fantasy of two-part harmony would start up again each night, tiding us over until the next morning. Sometimes the two of us could find nothing better to do together than watch television. Dramas about white people suffering the hardships of rural life, miles from civilization, years ago. Comedies about working-class bigots and the lovably hateful things they said. Epic sporting conflicts whose outcomes I can’t remember. The national fare of the 1970s.

Teresa didn’t like watching the news, but I pushed. Eventually, she caved in and let us watch David Brinkley over dinner. My sense that the world was ending slowly died out, leaving me with the sense that it already had. I fell into the most powerful of addictions: the need to witness huge things happening at a distance. I had the zeal of a late-day convert, my whole sheltered life to make up for. Here were storm and stress, all the violent, focused disclosures of art, on a scale that left the music I was fiddling with flat and pointless.

We were watching one night when I found myself staring down Massachusetts Avenue, past the drugstore where I’d once bought an ID bracelet for Malalai Gilani and failed to get it inscribed. My path up to that very evening seemed, for a moment, to be the piece I was so desperate to write, the one I’d set down in memory during all those hours in the practice rooms at Boylston. Teresa was the woman Malalai had grown into, or Malalai the girl I’d thought Teresa had been. Of course the bracelet wasn’t inscribed; it had been waiting for my adulthood to inscribe it.

The camera panned down Mass. Ave., the tunnel of my life unfolding on Teresa’s eleven-inch television screen. Then by some nonsensical cut meant to deceive those who’d never lived there, the camera jumped impossibly from the Fens to Southie, the other side of Roxbury. Children were getting off a bus. The voice of invisible network television authority declared, “Children bussed to their first day of school were met with…” But the sound track meant nothing. We had only to look: rocks and flying sticks, a fury-twisted mob. Teresa clamped down on my arm as children outside the arriving busses gave a delighted, drunken first-day welcome: “Hey, nigger! Hey, nigger!”

It read like some primordial, inbred scene that was supposed to have died out in the swampy South, back before my childhood’s end. I forgot what year we were in. This year. This one. Teresa’s eyes stared straight ahead, afraid to look at me, afraid to look away. “Joseph,” she said, more to herself than me. “Joe?” As if I could be her explanation. A white girl from Atlantic City, watching this scene. A girl whose father had for years told her where all the trouble came from. And in her look, I saw what I looked like to her. She wanted the news story to end and knew it couldn’t. She wanted me to say something. Wanted to pass over, as if nothing needed saying.

I pointed at the screen, still excited by the sight of my old neighborhood. “That’s where I went to school. The Boylston Academy of Music. Six blocks up that street and make a left.”