Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Our preparation was pure tedium, worse than any I’d ever spent. Sometimes I sat silent, stock-still for twenty minutes as Jonah tamped out a dimple in an appoggiatura. Sometimes I stepped outside, killing time on the corner or walking a few blocks, hoping to stumble upon the woman with the wide navy blue shoulders. Then Jonah would come out after me to haul me back, furious at my desertion.

Sometimes he crawled down a well of despondence and wouldn’t come out, certain that every note coming out of him sounded like dried dung. He’d try singing into a corner. He’d lie flat on his back on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. Anything to get his two hundred singing muscle groups to agree. He’d lie there after I stopped playing, crushed under an ocean of atmosphere. “Mule. Help. Remind me.”

“‘You two boys can be anything you want.’”

He started to suffer from occasional shortness of breath. He: Aeolus’s walking pair of lungs. In the middle of an E-flat major scale, his throat clamped shut as if he were in severe anaphylaxis. It took me three beats to realize he wasn’t goofing around. I broke off on a leading tone and was on my feet, walking him around the room, rubbing his back, soliciting. “Should I get help? Should I call a doctor?” But we had no phone, and no doctor to call.

He put out his arm and beat time like the conductor of a volunteer community orchestra. “I’m fine.” His voice came from under the polar ice caps. Two more spins around the room and he was breathing again. He walked over to the piano and built a little cadence to resolve my broken-off leading tone. “What on earth was that?” I asked. But he refused to talk about what had happened.

It struck again ten days later. Both times, he came back quickly from the attacks, his voice clearer than ever. Some film had lifted from it, one I didn’t notice until brightness peeled it away. I even had the guilty thought, If we could only time this…

One evening, walking home, he stopped and grabbed my arm. He stood there on a rough corner of 122nd, his mouth forming a thought, just waiting to be mugged. “You know? Joseph. There’s nothing in the world— nothing…”

“Like a dame?”

“Whiter than singing Schubert in front of five impotent, constipated judges.”

“Shh. Jesus! You’ll get us killed.”

“Nothing whiter in creation.”

“How do you know they’re constipated?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jonah.”

“Name one.”

“How about five impotent, constipated judges judging singers of Schubert?”

“Okay. Name another.”

I was eager to keep moving, placate the street. But Jonah was deep in a kind of interrogation I’d never seen in him. “You know the funniest part of this? If we win…”

“ Whenwe win…” One of us had to be him.

“Think how much darker we’ll seem, to the judges. To everybody but us. If we walk away with their prize.”

The contest rules were mailed weeks in advance. There would be a scale exercise supplied by the judges and a sight-singing exercise of average difficulty. Beyond that, we had to prepare three pieces of varying character, from which the judges would ask for one. Jonah ended up assembling what anyone else would have considered an eccentric lineup. First, we brushed up a Dallapicolla song on a text by Machado; Jonah still lived for the twelve-tone idiom, and he imagined the judges would fall in love at their first whiff. Then, we tamed the Erl-King, Jonah turning that old warhorse into Pegasus. And lastly, we polished Dowland’s “Time Stands Still” until it vaporized. He knew that few, if any, of the other contestants would reach that far back. With that simple song, he planned to bring stones to life and change lives into mute stones.

The local round for the contest was held at the Manhattan School of Music. We walked across the island that day, Jonah muttering stern encouragements to me. The thing was a cattle call, a fair number of first-timers unrolling their showstopper from Guys and Dolls. Thankfully, the Juilliard faculty had all been shipped out to judge rounds in Jersey and Connecticut.

We were six weeks overprepared. For the first time in his life, Jonah held back onstage. He was almost marking, compared to the full voice he’d given rehearsals. Still, we made it through to the citywide round. His sight-singing alone almost guaranteed it. It would have taken a catastrophe for us to have been scratched from that preliminary screening. But as soon as we were alone, I lit into him.

“What were you thinking? We’ve been at this for months, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard you do that stuff.”

“Last-minute decision, Joey. We don’t want to stand out too much at this point. That just increases the odds of some judge going on a leveling vendetta.” He’d learned much at the conservatory.

“Give me a little advance warning next time you go changing the game plan.”

“Thousand pardons, Mule. You played like a dream. Come on! We’re in round two, aren’t we?”

We had two weeks for adjustments and made two months’ worth. We’d heard good singers at round one, including the best of our Juilliard acquaintances and a few impressive unknowns from upper Manhattan. Most had half a dozen more years of experience than Jonah. Aside from a voice that could make lifelong fugitives surrender themselves, all we had was unbroken time.

In Queens for the citywide round, he almost disqualified us. Jonah, drunk on more ability than a twenty-year-old should be allowed, sang through the allotted time. We gave them Dallapicolla, which impressed but did not delight. Then one of the judges asked for a verse of the Dowland, to clear the palate before they dismissed us. We discharged the first verse, but when we reached the double bar, Jonah, shooting me a larcenous glance, pressed on through the end of the song. That tune’s second verse scans like a battered reverse translation, impossible to phrase inside the melody that works so brilliantly with the first stanza. But in Jonah’s astonished tone, the words swung open like a political prison after its illegal regime falls.

We’d clearly violated contest protocol. The judges could have thrown us off the stage, but after an initial murmur, they sat still. When we finished, you could hear the silence hurt them. Had there been a third verse, they’d have suffered it.

They waved us through to the regionals. Many of our Juilliard acquaintances didn’t go forward, even some whose voices could have cured anyone’s need for beauty. Contests, like snapshots, don’t always show their subjects in the best light. They slice time into too thin cross sections. You practice ten hours a day, month after month, in the hopes that a few seconds onstage go something like they did in a year of rehearsal. It rarely did. We happened to sound good, in that vanishing slice of time. We were the judges’ chosen ones, at least for another few days. Back in our rented studio, we allotted two minutes for a postmortem.

“Why do you suppose they love us, Joey? Can we really sound that much better than the others? Or are the judges just grateful we’re the kind of Negroes who won’t beat the shit out of them on the street?”

I ground out a bit of our Dowland, strewn with Parker. “They don’t really know that for sure, do they?”

“You are right, brother. Just because we can do ‘The Erl-King’ doesn’t mean we aren’t out to rape their loved ones. You never know.”

You never knew what was being given you and what taken away. You never knew who the thoroughbreds were seeing when they looked at you. Even I didn’t know anymore who I saw when I saw the two of us.

“So there’re these three guys on death row,” Jonah said, edging us back into the repertoire. “An avant-garde Italian, a Romantic German, and an Elizabethan Englishman…”