Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

This time, Will gave me the upper lines. I watched my friend’s face during the rests. We broke off where the piece did, at the introduction of a surprise new theme, a broad-willed subject that wasn’t exactly “Motherless Child” but might have descended from it, somewhere down the orphaned generations. The song broke away under our fingers, unfinished. We hung in space over the keys, listening, after the fact, to all the things it had sounded like while we were too engaged to hear.

After a silence as noisy as any, I started playing again. I revived the first theme from his exposition. I made a point of refusing the page. After the motive unfolded, I couldn’t have used the page if I’d tried. Will Hart’s tune went down my arm, through my wrist, into my hand, and out my fingertips. Then it took off, with me just within earshot behind it. I heard a sharp intake of breath beside me on the piano bench as I did a number on his number. Then that breath came out a deep bass laugh, one that traveled down Will’s own fingers to freedom. Will ran alongside and hopped on the freight I’d hijacked, shaking his head in amazement at discovering where I’d been spending my weekends.

His surprise subsided, and we flew along side by side. We commenced poking our souls into time signatures the tune on the page had been too shy to try out. Will howled at the change I showed since our last outing. He wanted to stop and razz me, but our hands wouldn’t let him. I dangled dares in front of him, calls whose responses he couldn’t help but pick up and flip back at me. He tested me, too, drawing me deeper into the shade of each idea I launched. Where I couldn’t equal his inventions, I at least embroidered them with curls of counterpoint ripped off from my études, handfuls of bloom to fit the vase he handed me.

He laid down a solid floor with his chords, on which I did my best to spin lines that had never before existed. For a while, for at least as long as our four hands kept moving, the music for writing down and the music for letting loose found a way to share a nest.

I be-bopped us into a three-point landing, stealing a great alto sax riff I’d heard unleashed one night at the Gate. Will was laughing so hard at my full-body, adult baptism that his left hand had to hunt around for the tonic. We needed only a trap-set release, which we jumped up and performed in unison on the piano lid.

“Don’t sue me, Wilson,” I said when we’d caught our breath. “I didn’t see no copyright symbol anywhere on your score.”

“Where in God’s creation you learn to do that, Mix?”

“Oh, you know. Here and there. Around.”

“Get away! On out of here!” He waved me out of his sight. As if only the throwaway gesture guaranteed I’d be back. From a distance, he called, “And don’t forget: You promised me.” I looked back, a blank. Forgotten already. He mimed a scribbling motion. Composing. “Get that all down on a score someday.”

By summer’s end, Jonah had us on a regimen. We left the apartment every morning by the time Ruthie went to school, and returned too late to say good night to her. She complained about our being away, and Jonah laughed at her. Every so often, he sent me home to tell Da we were staying overnight, to hammer out some resistant passage.

We found our rhythm. Jonah’s appetite for work outstripped the available hours. “The man wants something,” I baited him. “He’s hungry.”

“What else are we supposed to do all day long?”

“You’ve never worked this hard in your life.”

“I like working for myself, Joey. More future in it.”

We went deep underground, where music must always go. We went down into places untouched by anyone. We put in such strange, extended hours that the days began to dissolve. Jonah wouldn’t let me wear a watch. He banished any ticker with more memory than a metronome. No radio, records, newspapers, or word from the outside. Only the growing list of notes we made on a canary yellow legal pad, the curl of the sun’s slatted shadow across the floorboards, the frequent sirens, and the muffled battering from the apartments below proved that the seasons still moved.

Harlem wrapped around us. The street outside drowned out our noise with its indifferent survival cries. Sometimes neighbors thumped on the walls or pounded on the door to get us to quit. Then we switched to pianissimo. For longer than the metronome could say, we were dead to the world.

Jonah obsessed on placement, those minute locations of tone that the tiny rented room made audible. He cleared out the uncertainties at each end of his range. We spoke to each other in bursts of pitches, shaping, bending, imitating. Before my eyes, Jonah pushed into an agility in his upper notes that rivaled the precision of my keys.

We were too young to travel alone. Overtrained by any measure, neither of us really knew anything. Great singers sing their whole lives and still want a teacher to hear and herd them. But here was Jonah, who’d barely sung in public, training for the first crucial contest of his life, with no one to correct him but me.

We grated on each other’s nerves. He wanted me to be his harshest critic, but if I faulted his execution, he’d hiss. “Listen to the piano player, will you!” Three days later, he’d be doing what I suggested, as if it had just occurred to him. If I dropped a clunker or struggled with a passage, he assumed a patience so long-suffering that I’d start seizing up on the simplest dotted figure.

Sometimes I couldn’t count to four the same way twice. But now and then, I held up a mirror to his interpretation or brought out some interior ripple he’d never heard. Then Jonah walked behind me at the bench and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in an anaconda squeeze. “Who else but you, brother? Who else could give me everything you do?”

The hours passed, motionless in their expanse. Some days, we seemed to go for weeks before darkness sent us home. Other days vanished in half an hour. In the evenings, both of us punchy with exertion, Jonah grew expansive. “Look at us, Joseph. At home on our own forty acres. And the pair of mules is free.”

We weren’t the only ones singing. Just the only ones locked up, singing to ourselves. Above our “Erl-King” and Dowland, tunes broke in on us from all directions. Don’t forget who’s walking you home. Who’s coming for you, now, when you’re all alone. Soft and clear like moonlight through the pines. Dry and light, like you like your wine. Darlin’, please. Only you. Something you know, and something you do. Come on, baby, let’s do the twist. Take me by my little hand and go like this. Takes more than a robin to make the winter go. You got what it takes, Lord, don’t I know. Come on, baby, now, I’m needing you. Just an old sweet song, the whole night through.

I listened to these tunes on the sly, even as Jonah launched his own bottomless columns of air. Each note that bled into our apartment exposed us. We were some extinct, flightless bird, or that living fossil fish hauled up from the primordial deeps off Madagascar. Da had told us that once we burned the insurance money, there’d be no more. Cash, like time, flowed in one direction: away. If we barreled into this contest and stumbled, we were finished. If we came up empty, we’d have to face the music. The same music everyone else now sang.

Ours was worse than the wildest juvenile fantasy, the ten-year-old on a glass-strewn empty lot behind the condemned tenement, practicing his major-league swing. Worse than a preteen crooner singing into the mike stand hidden in a sawed-off parking meter, the next Sam Cooke, his friends the next Drifters or Platters. Jonah couldn’t distinguish between long shot and shoo-in. Singing was what he did best in this life. Singing outdid the best the world had to give, better than any drug, any sedative. It was in his body. His baseline blood chemistry pumped it out like insulin. Doing something else was never an option. The pleasure of flight was too great in him.