Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He’s too small for his shock. He can look at her. All her laugh lines look back, cheering his victory, daring him, asking him, How much would you like to see? All yours, for the gazing and grazing. If his fear were any less, his joy would kill him. The lessons move to her daybed, an antique Viennese unfolding fern whose function in her studio he has always dreamed about. She shows him how to unwrap her. All the while, she babbles senseless things, half-sung phonemes, droplets of words from the damn poem. “‘For no one knows her range nor can guess half the phrases from her fiddle.’”

She is more perfect than he imagined her in his best renditions. As fair as that first anemic girl he never got to see. Her flanks surprise him, the cup of breasts, the dimpling high up on the back of her thighs. She needs to be examined in her studio’s full sun. He feels callow, his slender arms, his tawny, hairless chest, his boyish explosiveness in her hands. No sooner does she take him, body swaying, an impulse gurgle in her throat, than he flows all over her. Even this, she marvels at, and her delight dissolves his shame. “Next time,” she promises. “Next lesson!” She presses his lips, shushes and dresses him, for she has another student coming. This lady who ’fore ev’ry man, breaks off her music in the middle.

She invites him to her apartment, an evening appointment he must clear with no one but me. He wants to tell me but doesn’t. That’s music. That’s his job. To be someone else, someone not him. If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out onstage. Her lair is filled with musical conjuring. The walls are covered with documents — her Paris triumph, a Verdi manuscript page, a photo of Gian Carlo Menotti with his arm around her young waist. The furnishings feel like some museum Da might long ago have dragged him to. She shows him the eighteenth-century virginal with painted underlid and plinks out a gentle, deceptive cadence.

He feels these chords’ coy come-on and reaches for her there as she stands plinking. She recoils, hands up. “You haven’t even sung for me!” Her head tilts back, chin challenging. “How do I know what you’re worth?”

He sings the Holst again. But now he sings as if his life hangs on these words. She rewards him by seeming to reward herself. Something in him that she wants: It works on him, like her creed of maximum need.

She’s his first. It stuns me. For years, I’ve imagined him enjoying a string of casual throwaways. But he’s been saving himself, faithful to this woman in advance of meeting her. They get better, lesson by lesson. They work at it, from the first burst of open throat down to the smallest details of support. They get so good, they must study more. She shows him goodness he never expected: all of life in front of him. They find out places that never were. She turns into his maker, his keeper, his ladder. Teaching him how to touch her, she tenses and subvocalizes, tenders into his hand, sforzando, as if she’s waited all her life to be performed only like this.

His first: She can’t remember what that landmark means. She’s too far down the path of experience. She’s refined all her pleasures already. All her surprise discoveries, long ago lost in perfecting. Or rather, this boy helps her remember — that ambush in his face, sweating, glowing above hers. His body lowers onto hers and freezes, overwhelmed by this prize. His freed gratitude returns her, once more, to that moment when everything might still turn out other than you think. Other than what it has so solidly become.

“Do you hear?” she asks him one night before dressing and sending him home. “Do you hear how big this is making you?”

He snickers, a child. “I didn’t know you could hear it.”

She spanks him. “I mean your voice. We’re growing it.”

He twists between the impossible and the unbearable. Too much; too little: the few minutes of play she restricts him to after every coaching session. His eyes can’t adjust to her. Her arctic whiteness blinds him. He is her puppy, sniffing her thighs, inhaling her hair’s jasmine until she giggles—“Quit tickling!”—and swats him away. His hands explore her skin’s unlikelihood: the rise of her foot, the gather behind her knee, the sag beneath her buttocks, the plates of her shoulder blades jutting from the continent of her back. He can’t stop verifying every inch of her. She takes to dimming the lights, a small shield from the glare of his gaze.

In the half dark, he places his arm along hers. Hers shows him what he looks like to her. And yet his wrist differs from the back of hers less than brother from sister. Where the bruises of their hips come together in the dark, no difference at all. Except for the difference in their passages here.

She sees him measuring, and rolls over on top of him in her joy. “You! How can I show you?” She’s childlike with him. She licks him down like a kitten, working distractedly, as if he won’t notice or isn’t there. Then she tenses, shudders, going off again. She does so easily now, needing little more than the feel of him. She lies with her face in the pillow, talking, her words effaced. Impossible to say what audience she speaks to. He hears her say, “I love your people.”

He freezes. He wants to say, Say that again? But he doesn’t dare.

She talks into the gag, muffled, drunk, liking the words’ blur. His arm, a whipped cord upon the back of her neck, loosens again in her stream of nonsense. She flips over, ready to play some more, one palm on his slight bare chest, staying him. “How can I keep you this way?”

“Potions,” he tells her. “Spells and elixirs.”

“Can you take me home with you someday?” His hand, straying between her legs, stiffens again. “Not as… Nobody would have to… I am your teacher, after all.” He pulls his hand away like a wire off a battery. The current goes dead. She doesn’t notice or admit. “You have a place that we…can’t get to. So rich, so full. I’d just like to sit and savor it awhile.”

What place? What riches? What you? He makes her out in a glint of lamplight: a famine tourist. A slumming succubus, feeding on her victim’s victimhood. He reels from her, but not hard enough to break free. In the moment he pulls away, he feels how cold and airless any escape would be. Where could he go if he stood up now, dressed, walked out of this apartment with its baroque furnishings? Her sickness is also opera’s, the world he has trained for. What other place would even take him in?

He is, to this woman, some thrilling brown thing, an adventure denied her. He can’t tell her how wrong her reading is. The people she loves are not his people. He hates her already for loving any people at all in him but him. But he fails to rise to his hate, to be the nation of one he knows himself to be.

He waits for another night, when she’s naked and satisfied, in his arms. “You said you might want to come home with me someday?”

She turns around, grazes his lips. She can’t remember. Then: Oh. That home. She says nothing. She’s graduated to studying for a different role, some remote Asian beauty, some frail chinoiserie.

“We can. If you want.”

“My Jonie.” His pulse pounds. “Where’s home?”

“Uptown,” he answers vaguely. She nods, knowing. He feels her working up to ask his neighborhood. What rich brown streets might he lead her into? “It’s…only my father now. And I should tell you. He’s — not from around here.”

“Really?” Her enthusiasm revives.

“He’s German.”

The news catches her across the face. Even the actress can’t recover fast enough. “Is he? What city?”

He feels himself losing her, like an audience that comes for Canteloube and gets Shostakovich. She asks what brought his father here. “The Nazis,” he says. Now she’s a lacquered mask.