Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The softest possible ending, the simplest kind of start. The house erupted before my last chord died away. We hadn’t planned an encore; Jonah refused to tempt fate. So it wasn’t until the applause died down and we were alone on the brutal stage that Jonah whispered, “Dowland?” I nodded without registering. Thank God he also chose to announce the choice to the house, so I could hear. And time stood still again, as it did each time my brother said so.

Without doubt, Jonah’s was one of the strangest New York debuts ever. I’d have called it courageous had I thought he knew what he was risking. He simply picked what he liked to sing.

I saw Lisette Soer in the back of the hall as we took our bows. It’s impossible to make out faces when the lights are trained on yours. But it was her. She wasn’t applauding. She was holding one hand over her mouth and with the other, on her breast, flashing an awed victory. If Jonah saw her, he made no sign.

Backstage was giddy. I’d stumbled into a documentary film about myself. Every year of our lives was present in cross section. At one point, I stood pumping the hand of a stranger who praised me at length before I registered him as Mr. Bateman, my longtime piano teacher at Juilliard. Jonah did worse: A middle-aged woman cornered him, repeating, “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t recognize me!” Jonah stalled, wagging and grinning, until the woman started to warble. Her shot voice hinted at a vanished glory, ruined by nothing but accumulated days. She burbled up the line “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” We rush with faint but earnest footsteps. Jonah still didn’t remember the name Lois Helmer, even as her voice’s imprint came rushing back to him. He remembered that first public performance but couldn’t remember the boy who had sung it. The joy, the trust, the total ignorance: Nothing visible remained, from this distance. All he had left were the lines of that great duet. So the two of them stood and sang through the first four entrances from memory, under the noise of the buzzing, embarrassed crowd, one voice headed toward gravel, the other sailing past the furthest point that the first had reached in her prime.

A thin man with sparse but luxurious goatee wandered around on the edges of the gathering, standing out among the sea of dark suits in his tight black jeans and a headache-inducing green-and-blue paisley shirt. In a lull, he crossed the room toward me, smirking behind the facial hair. “Strom Two. What’s on, brother?”

“My God. Thad West!” He felt like some supporting opera buffa figure squirreling off the stage to greet me in my aisle seat. I clutched him by his elbows, which hung cool and loose. “Jesus, Thad. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Had to come hear you cats play. You two stomped. Have to tell you. Really stomped.”

“Where are you living?”

“You know. Here and there. Mount Morris Park.”

It flashed through me: He meant in it. “You’re living in New York? And you’ve never… What are you doing with yourself?”

“Oh. Making music. What else?”

“Really? What are you playing?”

He laid some names on me I’d never heard. He mentioned some clubs, gave me addresses. I didn’t know how to respond. I stood staring at my old childhood roommate. Adulthood sat on me like a toad. “We’ll come listen soon.” In some other, better-executed life.

“That’s right. Come soon. We’ll blow you something cool.”

“Has Jonah seen you yet? Does he know you’re here?” I looked around the room and spotted him, surrounded by old Juilliard classmates already working him.

“I’ll catch up to the master when he’s not so mobbed.” He didn’t say it cruelly, but I was getting my lie back. Thad still loved my brother. But plainly, he no longer cared for him.

I felt myself grinning too much. “So where the hell is Earl when we need him?”

“Earl’s in Nam, man.”

“ Vietnam?”

“No, man. The other one.”

I couldn’t grasp it. Earl the irreverent, the invincible, caught up in something so stupidly real. “They drafted him?”

“Oh, no. Earl enlisted. Wanted to see the world. He’s seeing it now, I guess.”

The joy of smacking facefirst into my own past ground to a standstill. “Thad, Thad, Thad. I’m going to come hear what you’ve got going.”

He smiled, unfooled. Then, from nowhere, he said, “You remember that thing they painted on our door? The red fingernail polish?” Buried in childhood, and yet the drawing was still there, after a decade, defacing the door we shared. “Remember? Nigel.” I didn’t even have to nod my head. “That your first time, for something like that?”

I shrugged and flipped my palms. Every time’s the first. It was still a thrill to him, that anonymous assault. A badge of honor. Downtrodden by association. Thad didn’t have a clue. He didn’t want the everyday human idiocy. He wanted some darker, more soulful suffering, some grand affliction to redeem his fatuous Ohio past. Now he had that, living in Mount Morris Park, blowing cool, scraping by. The only thing was, he could have his fill and walk away anytime.

Thad gestured around the room at all the old folks in suits. He shook his head. “Look at you, Strom Two. What the fuck, huh? What would Nigel say?”

I looked down at the shine of my Italian shoes. I wanted him to be proud of me. He wanted me to be my color. He, too, wanted me to leave Town Hall to its owners.

“Do me a favor, Strom Two?” He looked around the room, smiling through the side of his mouth. “Keep this scene hopping, will you? Shit’s dying on the vine.”

“Hopping.”

“That’s right.” Thad slapped my proffered hand and vanished.

Jonah and I made it home after 3:00A.M., worthless and still wired. There was nothing left to do but try to sleep and hope there’d be a newspaper notice. Not even necessarily a good one. Just some acknowledgment that something had taken place. Jonah might have sung the stars down from heaven, but if the house critic had been suffering from reflux, the lifeline unrolling in front of us would have unraveled. My job that next day was to venture outside and buy every newspaper I could find. Jonah’s was to lie in bed and come up with how we were supposed to make a living now. He kept returning to the idea of night watchmen.

He was still planning when I threw the crumpled-up Times on top of his prostrate form. “ Wachet auf, you bastard. Arts section, page four. Howard Silverman.”

“Silverman?” He sounded frightened. No, he’d claim later. Only groggy. He tore through the pages and found the short review. “‘A near-perfect voice, and Mr. Strom’s ‘near’ is no cause for regret.’” He looked at me over the newsprint. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I think it’s supposed to be positive.”

It sounded, in fact, as if the man were writing with an eye toward the blurb on Jonah’s first recording. “‘While wrapped in consummate technique, this young man’s sound has something deeper and more useful in it than mere perfection.’” Jonah’s eyes glinted with total larceny. “Holy shit.”

“Keep reading. It gets better.”

Silverman went on to note our buckshot programming, calling the second half “a breath of New World fresh air, and a convincing rejection of today’s too-predictable approach to the art song.” He threw in the obligatory cavils — something about occasional eccentric phrasing, something about losing a little velvet in the fast passages. The core reservation came just before the end. According to Silverman, the youthful magic needed more real-world run-ins, more headfirst tangles with experience to ripen into full emotional complexity. “‘Mr. Strom is young, and his slightly callow loveliness wants maturing. Lovers of voice will wait eagerly to see if the freshness of this remarkable sonority can survive the deepening of years.’”