Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

We don’t get out of Durham without a deck of business cards, people who want us to call them. Ruth says, “So look at my brothers. Does this mean the two of you are big-time?” Jonah ignores the question. But her words are the most professional pressure I’ll ever feel.

Jonah’s in the catbird seat: People in big cities all across the country ask him to come sing, sometimes even offering to pay enough to cover expenses. All at once, he has a future to decide. But first, he must find a new teacher. He’s thumbed his nose at Juilliard, pulled off his parting snub by winning a nationwide competition against countless older and more experienced singers, all without any vocal coach. But even Jonah isn’t crazy enough to imagine he can move much further on his own. In his line, people keep studying until they die. And maybe even night school, after that.

His new prize credential gives him a shot at working with the town’s better tenors. He toys with the idea of Tucker, Baum, Peerce. But he rejects them all. As far as he’s concerned, his greatest asset is his tone, that pointed silver arrow. He’s afraid the famous males will turn him grotesque, wreck his growing sound. He wants to stay clear, fast, light. He wants to try the recital route, honing his chops in various halls, returning to his deferred dream of opera when he figures out how to fatten up while keeping the purity intact.

He picks a woman teacher. He picks her for all sorts of reasons, not least her aggressive strawberry hair. Her face is a boat’s prow, cutting through rough seas. Her skin is a curtain of light.

“Why not, Joey? I need a teacher who can give me what I don’t have yet.”

The thing he needs, the thing Lisette Soer can give him, is dramatic instruction. A lyric soprano sought after in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, she’s not yet in permanent orbit. But the rockets are firing. She’s just a few years younger than Mama was when she died. Just a dozen years older than Jonah.

If her voice can’t match the leading divas, she has begun to land those roles whose sexiness is usually confined to insistent program notes. She’s more an actress who can sing than a singer trying to act. She walks across a room like a statue turning flesh. Jonah comes back from his first lesson, raising his fists underhand to his eyes, growling with bliss. He finds, in his new redheaded trainer, the intensity he’s after. Someone who can teach him all he needs to know about the stage.

Miss Soer approves her new student’s general plan. “Experience is all,” she tells him. “Go out and play every stage you can. East Lansing. Carbondale. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. All the places where culture is auctioned piecemeal on the spot market. Let them see you naked. Learn your grief and fear in situ, and what you don’t get under your belt on the road, your teacher will feed you upon your return.”

She tells him straight out: “Leave home.” He passes the command on to me, as if he’s invented it. You can’t expect to sing yourself forward while still rooming with your family. Can’t get to the future while living in the past. The arrow of growth points one merciless way.

She’d do away with me, too, I’m sure. But Lisette stops short of planting that idea in Jonah. Together, they decide I’m to leave with him, find a place where we can grow into our promise. Ruth sits in the kitchen, pulling her pigtails. “It’s stupid, Joey. Move downtown when you can live here free?” Da just nods, like we’ve deported him, and he’s seen it coming all along. “Is it because I bring my friends home sometimes?” Ruth asks. “Are you trying to get away from me?”

“How about our studio?” I ask Jonah. But it’s way too small to live in. “How about a larger unit in that building?”

“Bad location,” he says. “Everything’s happening in the Village.” And that’s where we find our new quarters. The Village is pure theater, the greatest practice in what Madame Soer, in her favorite refrain, calls “living at maximum need.”

Maximum need is Lisette’s most teachable skill. She keeps it deep in her body. Her voice is a beam that cuts through the thickest orchestral fog. But voice alone can’t account for her success. The dancer’s body doesn’t hurt. She oozes anticipation, even in trouser roles, her blazing hair balled up under a powdered peruke, charged, prehensile, ambiguous. Her most casual stroll across the set is satin hypnosis. Even her fidgets are a leopard’s. This is what she means to give my brother: a tension to gird up his muscle-free tone.

At Jonah’s third lesson, she walks out on him. He’s left perched over the black music stand, trying to guess his sin. He waits for twenty minutes, but she never returns. He comes back to our new one-bedroom down on Bleecker in a cloud of wronged innocence. All weekend long, it’s my job to tell him, “It’s just a misunderstanding. Maybe she’s ill.” Jonah lies in bed, tensing his abdomen. He’s deeper inside the shock of his body than I’ve ever seen him.

Lisette floats into the next lesson, beatific. She crosses the room and kisses him on the forehead, in neither forgiveness nor apology. Just life in its inexplicable fullness, and “Can we take the Gounod from your second entrance, please?” He lies in bed that night in another riot of feeling, working his muscles in long-unexercised directions.

Singing, Soer tells him, is no more than pulling the right strings at the right time. But acting — that’s participating in the single, continuous, million-year catastrophe of the human race. Say, for argument, that the gods have conspired against you. There you are, alone, front and center, on the bare stage, in front of five hundred concertgoers who dare you to prove something to them. Hitting the notes is nothing. Holding a high, clear C for four measures can only go so far toward changing anyone’s weltanschauung. “Go where the grief is real,” she tells him. Her right hand claws at her collarbone in remembered horror. Is there a place yet, in your young life, where you’ve known it?

He knows the place already, its permanent address. Better than she can know. He has spent years trying to escape every memory of it. But now, under Lisette, he learns to revisit it at will, to turn the fire against itself and fashion it into its only answer. Under the woman’s fingers, his voice lays itself open. She readies him for the Naumburg, for Paris, for whatever awards he might care to shoot for.

She introduces us to the agent Milton Weisman, an old-school impresario who signed his first talent before the First World War and who still works on, if only as the least offensive alternative to death. He demands to see us in his cluttered warren on Thirty-fourth. The eight-by-ten glossies Lisette takes of Jonah are not good enough; he wants to see us in the flesh. I’ve lived my whole life under the illusion that music is about sound. But Milton Weisman knows better. He needs a face-to-face before he can begin to book us.

Mr. Weisman is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit with shoulder pads, almost Prohibition era. He ushers us into the office, asking, “You boys want a root beer? Ginger ale?” Jonah and I wear black lightweight jackets and narrow ties that would seem conservative to anyone our age, but which, to Mr. Weisman, brand us as beatniks or worse. Lisette Soer wears some diaphanous Diaghilev fantasy of Mogul India. One of her lovers, we think, is Herbert Gember, the hot costume designer at City Center, though the affair may be a mere convenience match. She’s one of those opera personalities who must dress down when they’re onstage.

We chat with Mr. Weisman about his client lists from the golden age. He’s worked with half a dozen front-rank tenors. Jonah wants to know about these men: what they ate, how much they slept, whether they talked at all the morning before a concert. He looks for a secret formula, that little extra leverage. Mr. Weisman can vamp on the topic for as long as he has listeners. All I want to know is whether these famous men were kind, whether they cared for their families, whether they seemed happy. The words never come up.