The Time of Our Singing

  “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.

  “You’re not Jewish?”

  This is what makes him tell me, at last. He falls back on the bond bigger than any secret link the two of them could grow. “Tell me she’s evil, Mule. Tell me the woman’s no damn good.”

  I do. And he ignores me.

  “She’s going to stab me,” he says. “I’m going to blunder around for half an hour in act four, spewing blood from my gut.”

  “Just be sure you do it with breath support.” I don’t know what else to give him. His eyes fill. He tries to laugh and flip me the bird at the same time. We go back to practicing. Somebody else’s music. Some other people.

  The effect on his voice is electrifying. He can harrow now, leave you for dead. His passage work is as clean as ever. But his phrases push into new, awful places. On tour, he sings the same numbers as ever, each time stumbling on some further climax. He no longer settles weightless onto Brahms’s long, dark suspensions from above. He severs them, leaving them helpless, in midair.

  We perform “The Floral Bandit”—a piece of time-marking fluff before the intermission. One night, camped out in a small campus hall in the guts of Ohio, we drop through a hole in the stage and lay open the song’s veins. I’m still pressing the keys. Sounds must still be exiting the instrument, but I can’t hear them. There’s only Jonah, that fleshed-out voice drawing remorse out of lifelong repeat offenders. His pitches float in the ether, hovering at sound’s motionless center.

  “What the hell was that?” I ask afterward, hiding in the wings from the applause. He only shakes his head, stumbles back out onstage, and takes another bow.

  Those reviewers who a year ago faulted his cold precision now proclaim his passion. Sometimes the notices mention me: “a synchrony that could only exist between blood relations.” But often they write as if Jonah could sing lieder to a ballpark organ. “Emotional, profound,” the Hartford Courant says, “giving a precocious insight into the depths and heights in each of us.” All this, Lisette does for him. No teacher ever gives him more.

  But his education isn’t finished yet. She moves his lessons back to the studio, saving the apartment for special invitations. The invitations come syncopated now. He may go dancing, but she calls the tune. Still, she goes on dancing with him. Something in him still wakens her. She needs him to help her remember what only feels like, what always was. The force of his desperation is what so moves her.

  She still touches him while he sings, still locates muscles he didn’t know he had. She dangles new parts in front of him: Don Carlos, Pelléas, juicy tenor roles men ten years older are afraid to tackle. One afternoon, she tells him, “We need to find you someone.”

  “Someone for what?”

  “Someone for you, Jonie.”

  His voice deserts him. “You mean another teacher?”

  She mews back in her throat, puts a hand on his. “You’ll probably teach her a few things.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “Oh, caro! Don’t worry.” She leans in toward his ear and whispers. “Whatever you learn from her, you’ll come show me.”

  He’s worthless for a week. It takes me until noon to get him out of bed, then another two hours to get him to the breakfast table. I have to call Mr. Weisman with two cancellations. I tell him Jonah has a bronchial infection. Weisman is furious.

  Soer calls. I almost refuse to put her through. But Jonah knows even before I can say two words to her. He’s on his feet and bowling me over for the receiver. He’s dressed and at the door in minutes.

  “We need to rehearse,” I say. “We’re in Pittsburgh next week.”

  “We are rehearsing. What do you think I’m doing?”

  When he comes back, after midnight, he’s ready to kill giants again. When we do rehearse, the next day, his voice sound
s strong enough to heal the sin-sick world.

  But the world doesn’t want healing. In June, while fishing for the Philharmonic radio broadcast, we hear Kennedy make a belated speech for civil rights. Four hours later, the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary is shot in the back and killed in front of his home by a waiting gunman. He’d been working on a voting drive. The killer goes free. The state’s governor enters the courtroom during the trial and shakes the man’s hand.

  This time, Jonah and I sing no special encores. “Tell me what we’re supposed to do, Mule. Name it and I’ll sing it.” I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. We go on doing what we’ve trained for. Holst and Brahms.

  Jonah and Lisette fight over his auditioning for opera roles. The money from our mother’s insurance, which supplements our meager concert fees and helps pay our rent, is running out. Jonah grows restless with nineteenth-century German lieder recitals.

  “Not yet, caro. You’re getting there. Right now, you have the perfect lieder sound.”

  “But it’s getting fuller, fleshier. You said so yourself.”

  “You’re building an audience out there. Getting good notices. Take your time. Enjoy it. You only begin life once.”

  “My voice is in bloom.”

  “And it will be for another thirty years, with care. You’re almost ready.”

  “I’m ready now. So ready, I can’t tell you. I need to audition. I don’t care where. I can land some stage part.”

  “You’re not singing ‘some stage part.’ Not while I’m your teacher. When you make your debut, you’ll do it right.”

  “You’re afraid I might land a plum, aren’t you?”

  “You are a plum, chum. Jonie? Train for the day.”

  He chafes, but he does as she tells him. He trusts this woman, after everything. “She’s my only real friend,” he tells me.

  “I see,” I say.

  The two of us, constantly in transit, parading in front of rooms of people, are at the mercy of her slightest shift. Jonah’s old Juilliard cronies—those who have stayed in town, those who haven’t trickled into education or insurance—try to drag him up to Sammy’s for reunions. Brian O’Malley, singing in choruses at City Center, still presides. Jonah is that circle’s only remaining lottery ticket to real fame. But they feel the change in him as well, the darkening. We see no one else close to us aside from Da and Ruth, only rooms full of admiring strangers. Our only calls are from Mr. Weisman and Lisette Soer.

  We do socialize with strangers. Lisette drags us to parties—massively cultured affairs where whole social solar systems of spinning planets spread through the rooms, orbits that range from the day’s reigning sun at the center to the furthermost icy asteroids. Jonah and I are usually banished out somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. At one, a guest addresses us in blundering Spanish, assuming we’re two self-improving. Puerto Ricans.

  We’re dressing for one of these pointless parties, a reception for The Ballad of Baby Doe, when I balk. “What the hell are we going to another one of these for, Jonah? Three hours, minimum. That’s three hours we could be learning new rep.”

  “Mule, jobs come from these things.”

  “Jobs come from people who hear us perform.”

  “These parties are crawling with the most powerful musical people in this country.” He could be Lisette talking. “They need to see us up close.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure we’re not savages. They don’t want us sneaking up behind Western civilization and mugging it at gunpoint.”

  “I’m a whole lot darker up close, you know.”

  My brother, in black jacket, fiddles with his tie. He smoothes down his lapels and inspects the results. He turns and glides my way until his face hovers inches from mine. He peers at me, inspecting the problem. “Huh! Would you look at that! How come you never told me this, Joey?”

  “You’ve got a lot of confidence in folks with a bad track record.”

  “Come on, brother. We’re uplift. We’re moral advancement. The coming fashion.”

  “Don’t want to be the coming fashion, Jonah.”

  He cranes his neck back. “What do you want?”

  “I just want to play the music I know how to play.”

  “Come on, Joey.” He grabs my strip of tie out of my hand, wraps it around my neck, and begins tying. “We’ll tell them you’re my chauffeur or something.”

  At one evening gathering in late June, I’m standing in a corner, smiling preemptively, counting the rests until Jonah’s ready to leave. Over the burr of the conversation, like a radio station bleeding through static, something hits me. The party’s sound track switches in my head from ground to figure. The jazz coming through our host’s expensive speakers is state-of-the-art Village, the innovations Jonah and I so recently learned to follow.

  I listen, the melody slipping me, like a name too familiar to recover. I close my eyes and surrender to this agonizing sense of known unknown. I’m sure I’ve heard the piece, tracing in advance its every modulation, but just as sure it’s nothing I could have heard before. I drift to the turntable. The prospect of cheating kills all chance of naming that tune.

  A tall guy in green jacket and plastic horn-rims, skinny and pale even by these parties’ standards, stands by the hi-fi equipment, nodding in time to the music. “What is this?” I surprise us both with my urgency.

  “Ah! That’s my man Miles.”

  “Davis?” The trumpeter who dropped out of Juilliard ten years before we started and who went on to turn bebop cool. The man who, just a few years earlier, was beaten by police and jailed for standing outside a club where he was slated to play. A man so dark, I’d cross the street if I saw him coming.

  “Who else?” Green Jacket says.

  “Friend of yours?” First-name basis. A fair assumption, at this party of music’s elite.

  But the face behind the horn-rims turns hostile. “I dig the music, man. You have problems with that?”

  I back off, palms up, looking around for my big brother. Who does this skinny, pale guy think he is? Even I could beat him senseless. My rage builds, knowing all it can do is back off. This punk owes me an apology, one he expects me to offer him. But all the while, it eats at me: more grating than my humiliation by this white Negro. The music. I need to know how I know it. I’ve heard lots of Miles Davis, but never this. Yet these scorched chord clusters, modal, atavistic, play through my head as if I wrote them. Then it dawns on me: transcription. The piece is not for trumpet; it’s for guitar. It isn’t Miles I recognize. It’s Rodrigo.

  I take the record sleeve from the pale guy’s hands. My excitement keeps him from taking a punch at me. I fumble with the cardboard, wondering if two independent people can stumble on the same fact independently, like those souls wandering in the scientific wilderness Da used to tell us about over dinner. The sleeve calls the music Sketches of Spain. I’m the last man on earth to hear of it: a Juilliard School dropout’s treatment of Aranjuez. Music has to sit around for at least a hundred years before I get it. It feels to me at least that long since Wilson Hart and I sat down to see what was hiding in this tune, more than a century since we played four-hand and I learned to improvise.

  Will was right about the Reconquista, right about the uses this tune could be put through. Yet everything about these trumpet-led sketches is different from what Will and I made that day—everything but the theme. The lines play back and forth from Andalusia to the Sahara and southward, all cultures picking one another’s pockets, not to mention the pockets of those who only stand and listen.

  I listen, in tears, not caring if this white Negro sees me. I hear the loneliest man I’ll ever meet, transcribed from his world into another, loving a music that had no home, huddled in a practice room writing orchestral suites he knew would be the ridicule of any group he showed them to. And he showed them to me. A man who made me promise to write down the tune inside me. And to date, I’ve written down not a single note—exactly what’s in me. r />
  I hear the fact in every reworked Spanish note: I failed to become my friend’s friend. I don’t know why. I haven’t tried to contact him since our good-bye, and I know I won’t, not even when we go home tonight, my heart full of the man. I don’t know why. I know exactly why. That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion. This is my way: lieder recitals in Hartford and Pittsburgh, and Upper East Side dress-up balls full of the musical elite. The cardboard record sleeve shakes in my hands. Andalusia via East St. Louis washes out of the speakers, the trumpet discovering its inevitable line, and all I can do is stand here, shaking my head, sobbing. “It’s okay,” I tell Green Jacket, his glare turned to fear. “It’s cool. There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred.”

  We see Da and Ruth at least once a week, up in Morningside, for Friday dinner, if we’re not on the road performing. Ruth’s growing up fast, under the care of our father and his fifty-year-old housekeeper, Mrs. Samuels, against whom Ruthie now wages continuous war. She has a pack of girlfriends I can’t keep straight, who’ve tried to fix her hopelessly hybrid hair into a slightly limp globe and who dress her up in a shiny, vinyl way that Mrs. Samuels calls “criminal.”

  Ruth’s all set to go to college in the fall, over at NYU Uptown, in University Heights, where she’s planning to study history. “History?” Jonah asks, surprised. “What possible use is there in studying that?”

  “Not all of us can be as useful as you are, Jonah,” she mimics in her best FM announcer style.

  We meet most of her inner circle one night, when they come by to drag Ruth to the movies, three black-dressing girls. The lightest of them makes Ruthie look vaguely Latina. They can barely contain their mirth at me and Jonah, and they start shrieking the moment Ruth follows them out the apartment and pulls the door shut. Ruth grows tighter with them until, over Da’s objections, the weekend outings become regular and she’s rarely there anymore when Jonah and I do make it uptown for Friday dinner. Over the course of the summer, we manage a full reunion only three times. But all four of us, and Mrs. Samuels, too, are sitting eating together in the same room in early August when Da announces, “We are going to Washington!”