Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I was back in a cold December in Kenmore Square in Boston. My brother, slapped down for kissing a girl of another caste, the first wrong turn of his life, was telling me that we were the only race that couldn’t reproduce ourselves. I’d thought him crazy. Now it seemed obvious. Of all the music Teresa and I might raise our children on, there wasn’t a single tune that could be theirs, unquestioning, unquestioned, sung the way they breathed. Teresa thought she’d gone beyond race. She thought that she’d paid already. She had no idea. I had no way of telling her. “Teresa. Ter. How can we?”

I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. But Teresa was. She flung her head up. “‘How can we?’ How can we? ” Her words were terrible, drugged. I thought she might be cracking up. I looked around, scouting for the nearest public phone. “How can we sit here?” Her enraged red face swung back and forth, a refusal so violent, it begged for restraint. Her words slurred crazily. “How can we live together? Talk to each other?” She half-stood, then slammed down again. She turned away from me, suffocating, her lips twisting without sound. Her arms were in front of her, tearing in disgust at the air. I wrote big, cursive, reassuring O ’s into her back until, in a fury, she wheeled around and flung my hand at me. I didn’t dare move. Toward or away — equal disasters. My head was blank, pitchless, colorless. If she’d had a knife, the woman would have used it. Then Teresa calmed. That’s what time is. Da explained it to me once. Time is how we know which way the world runs: ever downward, from crazed to numb.

We went back to Atlantic City together, obeying some force one notch down from choice. We resumed living together in a kind of suspended motion of dead people. The battered wedding plans never arose again, except in our thoughts, every minute we were in each other’s presence. Time did its randomizing run. Two more months down the further slope, my brother called. Teresa picked it up. By that electric pause after she said hello, I knew it was him. Her receiver hand started to shake, excited: Yes, it was Teresa, yes, that Teresa, and yes, she knew who he was — all about him, where he was — and yes, his brother was there, and yes, no, yes, and she giggled, completely seduced by whatever little halfhearted sweet talk he worked on her. She handed the phone to me, soft as she hadn’t been since we took our death holiday in the city.

“She’s got a pretty voice, Mule. You sing with her?”

“Something like that.”

“What’s the top of her range?”

“How you doing, Jonah?”

“You sure she’s Polish? She doesn’t sound Polish. What’s she look like?”

“What do you think? How’s Celeste?”

“Not taking to Belgium too well, I’m afraid. She thinks they’re all savages here.”

“Are they?”

“Well, they do eat fries with their mussels. But they sight-read like nobody’s business. I want you to come see for yourself.”

“Whenever. You got a ticket for me?”

“Yep. When can you leave?” We hit one of those big rallentando measures, the kind we used to take so effortlessly together, in late Romantic lieder. Mutual mind reading, under the gun, two moving targets. We still had it. “Need you, Mule.”

“Have you any idea what you’re asking? You haven’t a clue. It’s been years since I’ve played anything real.” I glanced up, too late, at Teresa, who was fussing with the coffeemaker. Her face was broken. “Anything classical, I mean.”

“No, bro. You don’t know what I’m asking. There’re pianists on every street corner here, selling little ivory-coated pencils to make ends meet. That, or they’re on the National Arts Register dole. I wouldn’t be calling if all I needed was a damn piano player.”

“Jonah. Just tell me. Make it fast and painless.”

“I’m forming an a cappella group. I have two high voices that’ll make you want to take your own life. Gothic and Renaissance polyphony. Nothing later than 1610.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. “And you want me to — what? Keep your books for you?”

“Oh, no. We’ll hire a real crook to do that. You, we need for the bass.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You know the last time I sang seriously? The last voice lesson I had was sophomore year in college.”

“Exactly. Everyone else I’ve listened to has been ruined by training. You, at least, won’t have anything to unlearn. I’ll give you lessons.”

“Jonah. You know I can’t sing.”

“Not asking you to sing, Mule. Just asking you to be the bass.”

He went through the arguments. He was after an entirely new style, so old that it had passed out of collective memory. Nobody knew how to sing this stuff yet; they were all improvising. Power was dead — vibrato, size, fire, lacquered glow, all the arsenal of tricks for filling a big concert hall or soaring above an orchestra had to be killed off. And in their evacuated place, he needed lightness, clarity, pitch, angels on pins.

“Imperialism’s over, Mule. We’re going back to a world before domination. We’re learning to sing like ancient instruments. Organs of God’s thoughts.”

“You’re not going spiritual on me, are you?”

He laughed and sang, “Gimme that old-time religion.” But he sang in a high, clear conductus style, something from the Notre Dame school, eight hundred years ago. “It’s good enough for me.”

“You’re mad,” I said.

“Joey, this is about blending. Merging. Giving up the self. Breathing as a group. All the things we used to think music was, when we were kids. Making five voices sound as if they’re a single vibrating soul. So I’m out here thinking: Of everyone I know in the world, who reads me the best? Who do I share the most genetic material with? Whose throat is closest to mine? Who has more musical feeling in his little finger than anyone else has in their whole—”

“Don’t patronize me, Jonah.”

“Don’t argue with your elders and wisers. Trust me on this, Mule. Have I ever not known what I’m doing?” I had to laugh. “I mean, recently.”

He talked logistics. What he wanted to sing; how to best lift this new, unborn group into orbit. “Is it viable?” I asked.

“Viable? You mean can we make a living?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

“How much money did you say we ended up with, from Da?”

I might have known: funded, our whole lives, by our parents’ deaths. “Jonah. How can I?”

“Joey. How can’t you? I need you. Need you in on this. If this thing happens without you, it’s meaningless.”

When I hung up, I saw Teresa cowering in the corner, an old white lady whose home had just been broken into by a dark young man. She waited for me to explain what was happening. I couldn’t. Even if I’d known.

“You’re going to him, aren’t you? You’re going over there.” I tried to say something. It started as an objection and ended up a shrug. “Fuck you,” Saint Teresa said. My honeysuckle rose. “Go on. Get out. You never wanted me. You never wanted to make any of this happen.” She leaned forward, her head darting, looking for a weapon. Teresa shrieked at me, full voice, for all the world to hear. If our neighbors called the police, I’d spend the rest of my thirties in jail. “From the beginning, I’ve made myself over for you, for anything that might…” She broke down. I couldn’t take one step toward her. When her head came up, her words were brittle and dead. “And all along, you were just waiting for him to call with some better offer.”

Conviction entered her, the true fire of performance. She ran to the shelf that carried her hundreds of LPs, and with the kind of strength mothers tap into when they lift automobiles off their pinned children, she tore the shelf out of the wall and filled the room that had been ours with a trash heap of song.