Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“It’s…like nothing you can know.”

Thad lay back in bed, kicking the air and howling.

My brother held up a silencing hand. “It’s like total, continuous… It’s like Wagner.”

Not a name we’d dared bring up before coming here.

“Thank God,” Thad shouted. “I’m not missing anything, then. I hate that shit.”

“It’s like beating off on somebody,” Earl explained, “who happens to be beating off on you.”

Jonah went so dark, his color became definitive. If he was doing anything wrong to her, I’d kill him. Close my fingers around his golden throat and stop his sound for good.

Whatever they were doing in their few moments by themselves, their trysts made Kimberly glow. Even Thad West noticed her transfiguration. “Is this some kind of light operetta, Strom One? I mean, what the hell? Look at her. She didn’t look like that before Halloween.”

Jonah wouldn’t be baited. The Chimera was no longer a fit topic for our running commentary. He and his chosen one made themselves invisible, moving in a secret subplot, awaiting the sunlit modulation to E major that would turn them from outlaws to inheritors.

Then a teacher surprised them, seated on the grass behind the trellises at the Rose Garden in the Fens. They were parked over a score — Massenet’s Werther. But their exact condition at the moment of discovery became a matter of endless speculation. Students came up to me for days to settle their raging bets.

Following the scandal, Kimberly relapsed into her congenital anemia, sure the two of them would both be thrown out of school. But even the faculty couldn’t imagine the two of them actually committing such transgression. They escaped without reprimand.

Kimberly was so scared, she dashed off a preemptive note to her father, then in Salzburg, explaining her side of things. The great man laughed it off. “ Sempre libera,” he told her, jotting a few notes of the aria on a scribbled staff in the letter’s margin. “Pick your mates of the moment wisely, and make them value whatever small favors you choose to bestow. ‘Di gioia in gioia, sempre lieta!’ ” She showed Jonah the letter, swearing him to solemn secrecy. Jonah told me, because I didn’t count.

János reprimanded my brother for his extracurricular Massenet. The dressing-down was dry and lofty; Jonah probably didn’t even know how sharp it was meant to be. Reményi began taking Jonah along with him on conducting engagements around the city. He wanted my brother occupied at all times.

Not long after the Rose Garden incident, my trial came. Thad West pushed me into it. “That Malalai Gilani has the swoons for you, Strom Two.”

“That’s right, hep cat,” faithful Earl added. “She does.”

Their words were an accusation, a police raid on innocent bystanders. “I didn’t do anything. I’ve never even said hello to her.”

“Oh, you’re doing something to her, Strom Two. This much, we know as a matter of factation.”

I knew nothing about the girl except the obvious. She was the darkest child in school, darker than Jonah and I combined. I never knew where she came from — one of those mythical countries between the Suez and Cathay. The whole school wanted us paired: two troubling ethnics, safely canceling each other out.

The girl had a solid alto, clear as a carillon in winter. She could count like mad, always entering on time, even in tricky twentieth-century work. She had the kind of voice that stocked decent ensembles. And she’d noticed me. I lay in bed mornings, crippled with responsibility.

From the moment our roommates opened my eyes, mutual knowledge sprang up between Malalai Gilani and me. In choral rehearsals, on performance tours, in the one large class I shared with her, a pact hardened between us without our exchanging more than a single, deniable glance. But with that one look, I signed my name to a contract, in blood.

The day I sat down next to her in the cafeteria, driven by my peers, she seemed not to notice. The first words she spoke to me were, “You don’t have to.” The girl was fourteen. It bound me to her with worse than chains.

We never did things together. She didn’t do anything with anyone. Once, on our way to a performance in Brookline, we shared a seat on the school’s bus. But we took so much abuse on that short ride, we never repeated the mistake. We didn’t talk. She seemed not to trust English much, except in movies and songs. It was weeks before — brief and damp — we even brushed hands. Yet we were a pair, by every accepted measure.

Once, she looked at me, apologizing. “I’m not really African, you know.”

“Me neither,” I said. Easier to misunderstand. All the school wanted was that we not trouble them.

I asked where she came from. She wouldn’t say. She never asked me — not about my home, my family, my hair, nor how I came to be at Boylston. She didn’t need to. She knew already, better than I.

She read about the strangest things — the House of Windsor, Maureen Connolly, the Seven Sisters. She loved fashion magazines, homemaking magazines, movie magazines. She studied them furtively, with an astonished head tilt, puzzling out the artifacts of a fabled civilization. She knew all about the Kitchen of the Future. She loved how Gary Cooper started to tremble a little in High Noon. She suggested I might look good if I grew my hair out a little and slicked it down.

Ava Gardner fascinated her. “She’s part Negro,” Malalai explained. This was when Hollywood could stage a mixed-race musical, but not with a mixed cast. My father believed that time didn’t pass. He must have been right.

Thad and Earl were relentless. “What does she want from you, Strom Two?”

“Want?”

“You know. Have you discussed the terms? What she expects?”

“What are you talking about? She just kind of blushes when we pass in the hall.”

“Uh-oh,” Thad said. “Commitment.”

“Mortgage time,” Earl agreed, giving the syllables a bebop syncopation.

“You better get yourself a good job, Strom Two. Support and all.”

Just before Thanksgiving, I bought a bracelet for Malalai Gilani in a drugstore on Massachusetts Avenue. I studied the options, taking hours to settle on a simple silver chain. The price — four dollars and eleven cents — was more than I’d paid for anything in my life except my beloved pocket scores and a set of the five Beethoven piano concertos.

My hands shook so badly as I paid for the bracelet, the cashier laughed. “It’s okay, dear. I’ll forget you bought it as soon as you’re out the door.” Half a century later, I still hear her.

I put off giving Malalai the gift. I needed to tell my brother first. Just broaching the topic of Malalai Gilani seemed disloyal. I waited until an evening when Thad and Earl were off listening to jazz in the common room. Jonah and I were alone in our cell. “Have you bought anything for Kimberly for Christmas?”

Jonah snapped to. “Christmas? What month is this? Jesus, Joey. Don’t scare me like that.”

“I just bought a bracelet…for Malalai.” I looked up and awaited my punishment. No one else could understand the size of my betrayal.

“Malalai?” I saw my face falling, reflected in his. He shrugged. “What’d you get her?”

I handed over the square white egg of a jewelry case. He looked in, controlling his face. “That’s fine, Joey. She’ll have to like that.”

“You think so? It’s not too…?”

“It’s perfect. It’s her. Just don’t let anyone see you give it to her.”

It took me days to make the presentation. I carried the thing around in my pocket, my leaden penance. I ran into her in the courtyard, long before the holidays, but far and away the best chance I was going to get. My throat rode up into my skull. Stage fright hit me, worse than anything the stage could produce. “I bought you…this.”