Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

In the lobby, Jonah’s voice veers. “She’ll have her pick tonight, won’t she, Mule?” He doesn’t want an answer. He only wants me to get him home, down to Bleecker. “Let’s take a cab.”

“Sure,” I say. But I steer him to the subway.

When Jonah goes to his Wednesday lesson, she rages at him. “I give you tickets to opening night, the biggest role of my career, and you don’t care enough to come backstage to tell me what you think? Go on. Get out of here. Just get out!” She slams her studio door on him and will not open it.

He comes back home in agony. He sits me down and dictates a review of her performance, note by note, muscle by electrifying muscle. His letter is a masterpiece of exacting musicology. Its observations surpass anything that newspaper reviewers can even hear. His judgments are so closely grounded in musical specifics, they take on the air of universal truth.

“I was afraid to come see you afterward,” he has me write. “I just wanted to feel your transcendence a little longer, before rushing it back to earth.”

She writes him back. “Your letter is going into my first-rank scrapbook, next to the note from Bernstein. You are right: We must sustain the aura as long as we can. I wish I could have done so, with you. Would my greatest student accept a special lesson as my apology?”

Dignity has never meant much to Jonah. Now it’s not even an impediment. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule.” We’re trying to practice. His concentration is shot. He’ll wander off and mark pitches for several measures, before remembering what we’re doing. I’ve learned to play through his vacancies. But when he talks, I stop. “Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”

“She’s not evil. Just manipulative. She knows everything there is about…performing. But she doesn’t know much about people.”

“What do you mean by that?” He sounds hurt, ready to charge out of his corner swinging at the sound of the bell.

“She wants you to adore her. She’ll do everything in her power to keep you on your knees in front of her.”

He studies me over the music rack. His face is a mask. Another thing she’s taught him: Never telegraph emotions. “What the fuck do you know about anything?”

“Nothing, Jonah. I don’t know anything.”

I stare at the keyboard, he at me. We sit for a long time, a fair rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. I only wish we had a tape recorder; our first take would have been a wrap. I won’t speak first. I think he’s staring me down. Then I realize he’s just elsewhere. At last, he murmurs, “Wouldn’t mind being on my knees in front of her, come to think.”

I hammer out a little Scriabin, an on-the-fly Poem of Ecstasy. He doesn’t need the program notes. His head bobs up and down, his grin private. “Know what the problem is, Mule?”

“What’s the problem, Jonah?”

“The problem, since you asked, is she’s manipulative.”

I start a slow, seductive “Dance of the Seven Veils,” ready to throw on an overcoat at the first wrinkle in his brow.

“I know, I know. I have to get a handle on my life. Otherwise…” He raps the music stand, our shattered rehearsal. “Otherwise, we might never be able to perform Schubert in good faith again!” He giggles like a lunatic. For an awful moment, I think I’m going to have to call Da, or Bellevue. My alarm only makes him worse. “Yeah, I’m a goner,” he says when he comes back. “I’ve got to get the woman out of my blood.”

“There is a way. Call her bluff.”

“Oh.” Pianissimo. “Turns out…it’s not a bluff.” He mitts my shoulder, contrite now, inspecting the damage. “I’m sorry, Mule. I wanted to tell you. I tried a while back. I didn’t know how.”

“Are you… How long?”

“I don’t know. Weeks? Look. I said I’m sorry. Don’t try, Mule. You can’t make me sorrier than I already am.”

But I’m not angry. Not even betrayed. I’m cut free, lost in the inconceivable. My brother has learned how to act. He wanted to tell me. Tried but couldn’t. He’s slept with a thing fresh out of a sinister fairy tale, nearer our mother’s age than ours. I’ve been denying everything: his finicky distraction, our growing tension over the last weeks. He gives me the details, the ones I should have guessed weeks ago. Most of them float by in my disbelief.

The first time, it’s just like part of his lessons. She’s showing him Holst’s “Floral Bandit,” as always, with her hands. Pushing here, rounding there. Let every muscle serve the needs of the words. Well, the words are musty and suspect at best. She knows he doesn’t buy them. “Mr. Strom.” She pinches his flank, an aggressive sneer on her lips. “If you don’t believe the song, what right do you have to ask a roomful of people to believe you? Yes, I know. It’s sentimental rubbish, already archaic when the man wrote the words five thousand years ago. But what if they weren’t? What if the sun rose and set around this poetry?”

“That’s what you call this?”

“You don’t get it.” She stands six inches in front of him, grabs his armpits, and shakes him like a terrified mother might shake a child who has just survived death. “And you won’t be more than a pretty-throated boy until you do. Your personal taste means nothing. What you think of this frilly twaddle doesn’t count. You must make yourself someone else’s instrument. Someone with different needs and fears. If you’re trapped in yourself, screw art. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage.”

She draws him closer, placing both palms on his breasts. She has done so before, but never so tenderly as now. “Music is something we aren’t. It comes from outside and must go back there. Your job is notness.” She shoves him, then yanks him back by the shirt as he reels. “It’s why we bother to sing at all. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine”—she brutalizes his chest with each digit—“percent of everything that has ever happened, happened to someone who isn’t you and who’s centuries dead. But everything lives again in you, if you can clear enough room to carry it.” She jabs him in the sternum, and he catches her hand. “Ah!” she says, delighted, twisting back against his grip. “Ah! Want to fight me?”

He drops her wrist, surprised.

“Aw! Not this time?” She takes up his hand again, lifts her eyes, looks about the room, distracted. “‘Have you seen her? What is her name?’”

He thinks she has gone mad, another weak-gened Ophelia wracked up on the fey waywardness of Western high culture. Then he places the words: the damn Floral Bandit. The pathetic, pale, wilted thief of spring.

She closes his hand into her soft cushion. The scent of jasmine is her sweat. She snares his gaze. Her eyes, incredible, are jade against the amber of her hair, green as the words of the song she now degrades him with. “‘Who is this lady? What is she? The Sylvia all our swains adore?’” She smiles up at him, on her toes, drawing one finger down the cliff of his throat. She pinches his chin jut, swings his hand in hers like a little girl, the innocent, anemic girl he once was bound to.

This is a slaver’s game. This art only works by denying the desperate. But he feels her breath on him and stays as silent as the condemned. She puts that denying finger on his lips: “‘For human tongue would strive in vain to speak the buds uncrumpling in it.’”

Laugh lines light up every corner of her. She draws up level to his face. He hears her add, “Do you want me?” She’ll deny ever saying this, though there are no words in the poem he might have mistaken for them.

This is her lesson in making songs real. And what happens next is just another. When he folds into her, he thinks it’s his own daring. She’ll draw away, outraged. She doesn’t draw away. Her mouth is waiting, an old familiar. He holds his skin on hers, moist-to-moist. Any taste of her would seem forever, and he gets twice that. When they stop, he turns his head away. She draws his face around, forces him to look. It’s her. Still her. Still smiling. See?