“Where on earth did you learn how to do that?”
“My mother used to be a nun,” she explained.
But she was an innocent. She could have crawled up underneath the Pope’s cassock and I still would have thought so. We didn’t touch. She was frightened of me. I thought I knew why. But I didn’t, and it took me weeks to realize. I was beyond her, a star in the inverted punch bowl of her firmament. My name appeared in Glimmer Room advertisements in the newspaper. Lots of people in town knew who I was and even heard me play. Most of all, I was a real musician, reading notes and everything, able to play, after one listen, songs just the way they appeared on the radio.
Terrie couldn’t read music. But she was as musical a person as I’ve ever met. She listened to the lightest three-minute chart climber with an ache most people reserve for thoughts of their own death. One diminished chord in the right place could crack her ribs open and force her soul into the air. Music seeped up through the ground into her feet. Deprived for any length of time, she grew listless. Even the most insipid trip from tonic to dominant and back home could perk her up again.
She sucked every calorie out of a song. God knows, she had to get her nutrition somewhere. She lived off chord changes and the fumes from her candy factory. She cooked for me at her apartment on weekends, spending all Sunday with the kitchen radio on, whipping up heavy cream soups or seafood pastas. She made a linguini with white clam sauce like they served in Atlantis before it went under. Then she’d sit down at the shaky brown cardboard card table across from me, a candle between us, my plate heaped high, and hers with a sprig or two that she’d play air hockey with until it vaporized.
Each time I visited her, I had to get used to the smell all over again. The scent of saltwater taffy, all the confections she made on the assembly line, clung to her furniture and walls. When the concentrated sweetness choked me, I’d push for another walk along the freezing boardwalk. We took long rides in her Dodge, down to Cape May and up to Asbury Park. We used the car as a mobile radio platform. The Dodge had an AM with five plastic Chiclet stumps that, when shoved hard, forced the dial’s red plastic needle to jump to the five main frequencies of her pleasure. She loved to hold the steering wheel with her right hand while reaching over—cross-handed, as in some tricky Scarlatti sonata—to find the perfect sound track for any given stretch of road: C and W, R and R, R & B, or, most frequently, decades-old smoky jazz. She could listen to anything soulful and find it good. And in her clear, if fragile, voice, she could make the most derivative tune please me.
Her record collection dwarfed the one Jonah and I had assembled since childhood. It was, like her driving, all over the road. She used some inscrutable organizational scheme I struggled for several visits to figure out. When I at last broke down and asked, she laughed, ashamed. “They’re by happiness.”
I looked again. “How happy the music is?”
She shook her head. “How happy they make me.”
“Really?” She nodded, defensive. “Do they move up and down?” I looked again, and they became a giant Billboard chart tracking the inside of this woman’s mind.
“Sure. Every time I take them out and play them, they go back in another slot.”
I’d seen her do it but had never noticed. I laughed, then hated myself the instant I saw what my laugh did to her face. “But how can you ever find anything?”
She looked at me as if I were mad. “I know how much I like a thing, Joseph.”
She did. I watched her. She never hesitated, either finding or replacing.
I scouted her spectrum of happiness one Sunday evening while Teresa busied herself glazing a ham in her kitchen. The rule I’d noticed in the Glimmer Room spread out before me. Petula Clark was consigned to the far left-hand purgatory, while Sarah Vaughan sat ascendant all the way to the right. This woman had little use for shiny, new, and light. The finish she wanted was smoky and deep, the longer cured the better.
I fell into dark thoughts. I was a fraud infiltrating that apartment while the misled woman labored over a ham for me. I hadn’t considered what game we two were playing, how much she had assumed about me even before we brushed hands. I saw the person she must have mistaken me for all these weeks, the thinnest imposter, and I knew what would happen when she discovered who I really was.
I checked the records at the favored end of her collection, the peak of her pantheon: music being made just blocks from my home while I was growing up on Byrd and Brahms, heavy doses of the Strom Experiment. She loved all the music I’d only brushed up against in those few months when Jonah had gotten restless and we’d knocked around the Village jazz clubs, looking for easy transgression. Teresa thought the music was mine, by blood, down in my fingers, when all I did was steal it off records, as late as the afternoon I came into the club to play it. My sense of deception was so great and my sense of self so weightless that when she came into the front room with her arms full of Sunday dinner, I blurted out, “You like black music.”
She set the hot dishes down on the makeshift dining table. “What do you mean?”
“Black music. You like it better … you prefer it to …” To your own music, was all I could think to say. How came it yours?
Teresa looked at me with a look I’d never seen on her face, the one I’d gotten from shopkeepers, ticket takers, and strangers since I’d turned thirteen, a look that knew, the moment the revolution came, that I would steal back from it all it had stolen from me over centuries. She walked over to where I stood and studied her collection in a way that she never had. She stood shaking her head, fixed by the right-hand side of her records, the tops of her privately owned pops. “But everybody loves those singers. It’s not that they’re black. It’s that they’re the best.”
I was so agitated at dinner, I couldn’t swallow. The two of us faced each other across that card table, each pushing our pink pork pucks around on our plates. I couldn’t ask what I wanted to. But I couldn’t bear silence. “How did you get onto the oldies? I mean, Cab Calloway? Alberta Hunter? Haven’t you heard the word, girl? Don’t you know you can’t trust anyone over thirty?”
She brightened, grateful to be asked an easy one. “Oh! That’s my father.” She spoke the word with that chiding care we give those who’ve committed the gross error in judgment of becoming our parents. “Every Sunday morning of my life. The week wasn’t finished until he spun his favorite records. I used to hate it. When I was twelve, I’d run from the house screaming. But I guess we finally love what we know best, huh?”
“What happened to him?”
“Who?”
“You said ‘spun.’”
“Oh. My father?” She looked down at her food-spattered plate. “He’s still spinning.”
So was I. Teresa could feel how keyed up I was. I’ll forever say that about her. She could hear me, even when I wasn’t playing. “Would you like to go for a ride?” she asked.
“Sure. Why not? Unless you’d rather listen to something here?”
We were off a beat. “Listen to what?”
“Anything. You choose.”
She went to the spread of records and wavered. I’d changed her rankings for her, forever. She went to the right and pulled out an Ella Fitzgerald covering Gershwin, Carmichael, and Berlin, pilfering back from the pilferers. Teresa dropped the scratching needle down upon a voice scatting away as if everyone in creation would get his own back on reckoning day. She swayed a little to the beat, lip-synching, as always. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her hips, her own dancing partner. Now and then, an involuntary pianissimo came out of her, trying to find a way back to its own scattered innocence.
She hummed to herself, drifting to her tattered brick-colored sofa. After a song, I went and sat with her. It surprised her. She held still. She’d never said a word about our not touching. I think she would have stayed with me forever, even at that unspoken arm’s length, staying off at whatever distance she thought I needed and not one step farther. She let out a skyful
of breath. “Ah, Sunday.”
“Maybe Monday,” I sang.
Teresa segued: “Maybe not.” She turned toward me, pulling her feet up on the sofa underneath her. She looked down at her thighs, a little askew, the color of fine bone china. Her lips moved silently, as they had for so long in the darkness of the club, keeping me company each night. The warmth of the recording came from out of her soundless mouth.
Still, I’m sure to meet him one day, maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. My right hand lowered itself onto her leg and began accompanying. I closed my eyes and improvised. I moved from chords to free imitation, careful to keep to a decent range, between her knee and hiked-up hemline.
Teresa held her breath and became my instrument. I hit each note as squarely as if it were real. She heard my free flight in her skin. I could feel her feeling my fingers’ tone clusters. Around We’ll build a little home for two, I built an obbligato line so right, I was surprised it wasn’t in the original. At from which I’ll never roam, I roamed a little, beyond the deniable, up into the hemline octave. On the last two lines, Teresa joined in with a reedy harmony, one she’d sung a hundred times to herself, in this place, maybe even with someone else, before I came around.
When the song finished, I rested my hand on her leg, the silent keys. I couldn’t feel my fingers to remove them. Her muscles twitched in cheerful terror. I could feel my own pulse pounding through my palm. Teresa stood. My fossil hand slid off her. “I have something for you.” She walked across the room to her trinket-covered hutch. From behind a carved Indian elephant, she fished an envelope. It might have been sitting there for weeks. She brought it back to me and set it in my hands. On its white face, it bore the name Joseph, scribbled in childlike balloon letters. My hands shook as I opened it, the way they used to after crucial concerts with Jonah. I struggled to remove the contents without tearing. Teresa sat next to me, reached out, and ran the back of her hand against my neck. Like slipping on a new silk tie.
I worked at that envelope until I thought she’d take it from my hands and open it for me. I got the card out at last. Ter had made the thing herself, a cartoon of two tigers warily chasing each other around what looked like a palm tree. Inside, the same childlike scribble read “I will if you will.”
It might have sat unopened on the hutch forever, waiting, for all time, for my hand to graze hers, even by accident. But it was ready the moment I did. The hidden patience of her hand-drawn prediction broke over me and I sat on her sofa, crying. She led me to her bed and put me in those sheets that smelled of saltwater taffy. She slipped from her clothes and stood open to me. I could not stop looking. I sat high up on a rock bluff, looking out on a surprise, twisting river valley. I’d thought she was cream, muslin, porcelain. But her body—her slender, sloping, undulating body—was all the colors there were. I moved over her, tracing with my fingers, my face up close to every inch of terrain, the light cerulean of her veins below her neck, the terra-cotta of her breasts’ tips, the pea green smear of a bruise just above her hip. I gorged myself with looking at the spreading rainbow of her, until, shy again in the face of my pleasure, she leaned over and doused the light.
All that night, she brought me back to myself. I was in bed with a woman. I’d never before heard the whole tune, beginning to end. But I knew enough bars to fake it. I felt the muscles just under her thighs hunch up in surprise under my hand. Our skins pushed up against each other, shocked by the contrast, even in the dark. She hummed, her mouth to my belly; I couldn’t make out the song. Her mouth opened in awe when I went into her. Her throat kept timeless time, and every one of her murmurs was pitched.
Afterward, she held on to me, her discovery. “The way you play. I knew it. Just by the way you play.”
“You have to hear my brother,” I told her, half-asleep. “He’s the real once-in-a-lifetime musician.”
I fell unconscious and slept the sleep of the dead, Teresa’s hands still thawing out the crevasses of my back. When I woke, she hovered over me like Psyche, a glass of orange juice in her hands. The room was blazing. She was fully dressed, in her candy-factory clothes. My honeysuckle rose. I made space for her on the bed’s edge. “I’m almost late. The key’s in the music box on my dresser if you need it.”
I took her hand as she stood. “I have to tell you something.”
“Shh. I know.”
“My father is white.”
It wasn’t what she expected. But her surprise vanished quickly enough to surprise me. She rolled her eyes. Solidarity of the oppressed. “Tell me about it. So’s mine.” She leaned back down and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel her lips, wondering how mine felt to her.
“Are you coming tonight?” I asked.
“That depends. You playing the good stuff?”
“If you’re singing.”
“Oh,” she said, heading out the door. “I’ll sing anything.”
I dressed and made the bed, pulling the sheets over our still-fresh stains. I walked around her apartment, happily criminal, just looking at this new world. I stared at her collections, taking my own private tour of a distant ethnographic museum. Her life: ceramic frogs, a clock in the shape of the sun, purple bath soaps and sponges, slippers with crossed eyes stitched into their tops, a book on the picturesque barns of Ohio, inscribed “Happy Birthday from Aunt Gin and Uncle Dan. Don’t forget you promised to visit soon!” Each of us is alien to every other. Race does nothing but make the fact visible.
I opened her closet and gazed at all her clothes. A line of slips hung on hooks against one wall, black and white sheathes whose edges I’d seen sticking out under her dresses, clinging to and imitating her. I went into the kitchen and sliced last night’s ham for breakfast. I ate it cold, afraid to dirty her pans. I’d been here often, but never alone. I knew what the police would do if some law-abiding neighbor tipped them off to me. Just being here by myself in this alien woman’s rooms was a life sentence. Safety meant leaving. But I had no place to go except back to my life.
I went to her record collection, the safest ground in this booby trapped place. There wasn’t a piece of classical music on her shelves except the hepped-up thefts of tunes long out of copyright. I started from the tops of her charts, looking for a song to play her at the club that night, something I might learn just for her. I slipped on a disk of Monk’s and knew that everything on it was beyond my meager fake technique. Oscar Peterson: I laughed after four measures, exhilarated and demoralized. I played an Armstrong Hot Seven recording that Teresa had worn almost smooth. Everything I thought I knew about the man and his music vanished in a river of sound. I sampled people I knew only by reputation: Robert Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Charles Mingus. I stood surrounded in the wall-wide, rapturous choruses of Thomas A. Dorsey. I broke into Teresa’s cache of blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Ma Rainy. Junior Wells’s harmonica cut me into thin strips and passed me through the reeds. Up at the very top of the collection were all her master women spell-casters. Carter, McRae, Vaughan, Fitzgerald: In each one, I heard Teresa twirling and wailing, losing herself in imitative ecstasy every night that she came home from the factory, singing her real image into being, alone in the dark.
I listened for hours. I switched tracks so fast, they piled up on top of one another. The whole claustrophobic classical catalog could not surpass this outpouring for breadth, depth, or heights. A massed hallelujah chorus poured out of Teresa’s speakers, a torrent flowing over every riverbank the country could invent to hold it. This wasn’t a music. It was millions. All these songs, talking to one another, all insinging and outsinging, back and forth at the party to end all celebration, into the wee hours of a suppressed national never. This was the house at the end of the long night, inviting, warm, resourceful, and subversive. And I was standing on the stoop, locked out, too late to bluff my way through the party’s doors, listening to the sound roll through the windows and light the streets in all directions. I heard the play of voices through the shutters from the back alley. I eavesdropped shameless
ly, not caring if I got arrested, caught in a sound that, even at this muffled distance, was more vital and urgent and jammed to therapeutic capacity with pleasure than any I’d ever make.
In that voyeur’s elation, a single-word song on a 1930 Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recording stopped me cold. I read the title twice, fumbled the disk out of its jacket, put it on the player, and managed to bring the needle down on the cut without gouging the vinyl. There was Calloway, doing what sounded like a bad Al Jolson imitation, wailing away on a song called “Yaller”:
Black folk, white folk, I’m learning a lot,
You know what I am, I know what I’m not,
Ain’t even black, I ain’t even white,
I ain’t like the day and I ain’t like the night.
Feeling mean, so in-between, I’m just a High Yaller …
I listened through three times, learning the song as if I’d written it. I don’t know what possessed me, but I played it that night at the Glimmer Club, after Teresa arrived. Hope is never more stupid than when it’s within striking distance. She took her seat, up close to the piano, glowing with our new secret. She looked heart-stopping in a short brown tube dress I’d seen in her closet. I slipped the song late into the last set, when nobody was left to hear but her. I watched her face, knowing in advance what I’d get. Those lips that mouthed along with every other tune that evening, lips that had hummed wordlessly as we made love, held still and bloodless throughout my rendition.
She didn’t wait for me at the end of that set. But she showed up the following night, so tentative and apologetic, I wanted to die. I went back with her to her apartment, although we had just a few hours before she needed to leave for work. We lay with each other again, but the song was stillborn between us. When I looked over the record collection after she left the next morning, the Calloway was gone.
We fell into a tradition. Every night she came to the bar, I’d get her up to sing for at least one song. At first, it made Mr. Silber crazy. “You don’t think I have money to pay for two performers in the same evening?” I assured him he was getting the thing all my father’s colleagues swore was impossible in our little neck of the universe: something for nothing. When Mr. Silber saw how much this thrill-nervous girl’s clear old torch songs pleased the audience, he spun doughnuts. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he took to announcing, “please welcome the Glimmer Room Musical Duet!”