Richard Powers (33 page)

With the settling of his voice, Jonah landed most of the plum parts he set himself after. Two years into the bachelor’s, he was singing with graduate productions. If the part called for weightless precision, all pretense of democratic auditions broke down. He had a flair for the comic—the eighteenth-century page boy whose ditsiness is surpassed only by his heartbreaking zeal. He sang a Bach Evangelist that had half the agnostics in the house ready to convert, at least for an evening. He learned how to act. By nineteen, he’d mastered that devastating sucker punch, the one that lulled audiences into thinking they were watching some other poor bastard’s life, only to zap them at the flick of an invisible switch into realizing just whose story this was.

He performed hungrily. He’d sing anything written since the war. He had his pick of premieres, as few other students wanted to kill themselves learning new, extended techniques for a one-shot deal. But he’d also sing little bits of French fluff he could have ripped through at age six. Up on Claremont, he sang everything from Celtic folk songs to Russian liturgical monody, with Sturm und Drang, buffa, and High Renaissance hankie flirtations littered along the way. He couldn’t distinguish between a funeral mass and a flippant encore. He sang every tune as if it were his swan song. He could make stones weep and guiltless animals die of shame: the Orpheus that Peri, Monteverdi, Glück, Offenbach, Krenek, and Auric had in mind.

In life’s opening few years, everything you hear, you hear for the first time. After a while, the ear fills in, and hearing turns back from the future and into the past. What you’ve yet to hear is outstripped by what you already have. The beauty of Jonah’s voice lay in its running backward. With every new phrase that came out of him, old notes lifted off of his listeners and they grew younger.

People actually turned up to hear his degree recital. He insisted I accompany him. We worked for weeks on the pieces, mostly mainstream nineteenth-century German lieder. He mocked the melodramatic crowd-pleasers we had to do: “Aural Novocain.” At our dress rehearsal, we scrambled to put the last desperate touches to the “Will-o’-the-Wisp” from Schubert’s Winterreise . I was halfway into the second verse, the almost nihilistic

Bin gewohnt das Irregehen,

’s fürhrt ja jeder Weg zum Ziel:

Uns’re Freuden, uns’re Leiden,

Alles eines Irrlichts Spiel!

All our joys and sorrows a will-o’-the-wisp, when I heard Jonah singing: Pepsi-Cola hits the spot-ta,

Twice as much for a nickel, too.

Twelve full ounces, that’s a lot-ta,

Pepsi-Cola’s the drink for you!

I slammed down the lid and shouted over the last words. “Damn it, Jonah. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He saw my face, and couldn’t stop cackling. “Joey, it’s a fucking school recital. We can’t let them bust our nuts with it.”

I was sure he’d repeat the stunt in recital, if not deliberately, then by practiced accident. But he sang the words as written, an old man twice Da’s age, who knew from bitter experience that every path leads to the same sea and every urgent joy and sorrow are just phantom lights on the far side of an uncrossable channel. He passed the recital, with honors.

The Sammy’s crowd threw him a little bash a few days after our performance. My brother still hung with that crowd, for whatever sense of freedom they gave him. I’d fallen away, out of disgust. I preferred running through the coda of my current Beethoven sonata another thousand times to hearing my competitors evaluated even once more.

But Jonah wanted me to put in an appearance at this celebration. When I arrived, Brian O’Malley was holding forth, the way he had for most of our college career. His routine turned toward race at my entrance, as it often did when I was around. Proof of O’Malley’s enlightenment. For our amusement, he launched a burlesque of the shit-kicker soda jerks behind the Woolworth counter in Greensboro: “Seein’

as how y’all are gonna be settin’ here a spell, you want somethin’ cold to drink? Y’all will have to drink it outside, of course, but you can come on back in soon as you’re done!”

I stared out the window with a deflecting smile, doing my best to outlast this humor. Across the street, a woman stepped from behind a delivery truck and passed uptown. She was wearing a navy blue midcalf-length dress with wide, pointed shoulders, decades out of date. Her hair was a wren’s nest of soft black thread. I had only a glimpse of her face. She was a tone I’d given up on ever finding. Seeing her like this, at large, heading north, free to be anything, I knew she’d been put there for me to discover.

I tripped getting up, wrecking O’Malley’s punch line. I faked some excuse and bolted. Outside, I found her again. She was sailing uptown, a beautiful navy blue cutter against the afternoon current. I followed her up Broadway, where she made a right on LaSalle. She turned again up Amsterdam, a hundred yards ahead of me. I tried to close, but she walked so fast, I worried that she was fleeing me.

Still chasing her up toward City College, I felt myself start to dissolve. I looked on myself from above, a teenager chasing a total stranger. Each step added to my abasement. What drove me wasn’t lust, but some need simpler than I’d felt in my life. A woman whom I knew better than I knew myself had been walking around Claremont, the blocks around my school, looking for me. She couldn’t have known I was sitting in a nearby coffee shop, the captive of fools. She’d given up trying to find me. It was up to me to redeem myself.

The buildings alongside me closed into a tunnel. I could no longer feel the air against my skin. I urged myself on, from miles above myself in space. I was my own marionette, the central character in my own life, a story whose plot had just revealed itself to me. I hadn’t felt so focused, so alive, since earliest childhood’s music evenings. Everything was well. All lines would finally resolve and reach cadence. Every person on this packed street had some note to hand the chord.

All the while, my tow bobbed in front of me, her walk tailored and purposeful. So long as I kept her in sight, I had no other needs. I drew close enough to make out her neck underneath that perfect fall of hair.

For a moment, in the thinning afternoon light, I panicked. Her skin shifted, as if by some trick of protective coloration. The tinted glass window at Sammy’s had misled me. My sense of recognition vanished. Then she turned and looked my way. So much certainty filled me that I almost called out. Her face inhabited that place I thought I lived in alone.

She bore right and I followed, so focused, I forgot to notice the cross street. Runners in the middle of a turf war tensed as I slid past them. Two heavyset men glared at me from their doorway lookout. All eyes up and down the block picked me out as an intruder. Ahead, that navy blue coat moved deeper into this injured neighborhood like a ghost over a battlefield.

She veered twice more, and I kept to her trail. Some nearby motion distracted me. When I looked back ahead, the navy-dressed woman was gone. She disappeared into a doorway that I searched for but couldn’t find. I stood on the corner, stupidly waiting for destiny to return and claim me. People pushed past, impatient and indifferent. Busses disgorged their contents a hundred feet away. The neighborhood turned malevolent, smelling my fear and sensing I had no right to be here. The intersection closed in around me, and I bolted.

The streets I fled back down felt more hostile than the ones I’d come up. I turned west too early, on a street that, after a block, veered diagonally through the grid, back uptown. I stopped, turned, took a few steps, and turned back again, confused. I clipped along the edge of a long, scorched parkway. My body took over, and I sprinted back toward what I hoped was Amsterdam.

All at once, I wasn’t in New York. I felt myself in a herd of people not from around these parts, moving too slowly for 1960. I can’t say how long I stood there. The question had no measure. I was out on the streets of a city I didn’t recognize, in a crowd of people who weren’t mine, on a day I shared with no one around me.

I cursed myself for losing everything. The woman still felt so present that I felt sure I’d find her again, as soon as I was supposed to. I knew her neighborhood, where she walked, how she moved. My finding her could not have been a one-off chance. I was eighteen years old. And I’d waited until that moment to fall in love with an image even more fleeting than music.

Jonah lit into me when I got home. “What the fuck do you think you were doing back there?” It took me a while to remember: the scene at Sammy’s. Jonah was merciless. “What was that all about? Were you deliberately trying to humiliate me with those people?” He needed an answer. I had none.

“Jonah. Listen. I just saw the woman I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.”

“Oh?” All those classes in dramatic presence. “Your whole life? Starting when?”

“I’m serious.”

“Of course you are. Little Joe is no kidder. You will be sure to let the woman know, right?”

I went to Sammy’s the next day, and every afternoon at that hour for two weeks. I suffered through the worst that high culture had to offer. Jonah thought I was doing penance, and he doled out little verbal awards. But I was keeping my vigil, as regular and necessary as sleeping or eating. She’d have to be back. She couldn’t have been dangled in front of me, only to disappear for good. That afternoon, or the next, by month’s end at the latest…

When she didn’t appear again, I grew edgy. Impatience became confusion. Confusion turned desperate without any help from me. After a week, I tried to retrace my route north, through blocks I couldn’t resurrect. I stopped going to Sammy’s, stopped doing anything except sitting in a practice room, paralyzed, the last holdout case of polio, brought on by a glimpse of this girl, whose name I had no chance in hell of discovering.

After a month of seeing me like that, Jonah began to believe me. One night, from nowhere, he asked,

“What did she look like?”

I shook my head. “You’d know her. You’d know her the minute you saw her.”

This is how the dream of the 1950s ended for me, before I could wake myself from it. Around us, in New York and farther, the whole key signature changed from one measure to the next, as if that swap of digits really meant something. The year the decade changed, I turned adult. Revolutions sprang up everywhere, except inside my brother and me. At the flick of that invented calendar switch, the world went from black and white to colored. And by some law of conserving physics, Jonah, Ruth, and I went from colored to black and white.

The bald general gave way to the thick-haired, hatless boy. The super-powers edged toward the nuclear brink, each one willing to go down without blinking. The arms race moved into space. Black students moved into white establishments. I spent less time inside my practice room fallout shelter and more hours above ground, waiting for the perfect-toned, navy-dressed woman to come claim me before the world went up in mushroom clouds.

The nation—the white part anyway—sang along with Mitch, following a ball that bounced across the lyrics at the bottom of the television screen. People really did this. Maybe not New Yorkers, but out over the Hudson, to all points west: the entire country, singing out loud in front of the TV, a chorus of millions of living rooms in one vast, last, if isolated, sing-along, where nobody could hear one another, but where, for a final moment, everyone kept to something like the same key.

Lenny Bruce played Carnegie Hall, performing my brother’s all-time favorite routine. Jonah bought the record, his first comedy disk, listening to the shtick until the vinyl wore out. He studied the inflections with his perfect ear, cackling at the cadences no matter how many times he listened: I’m going to give you a choice, your own free will, of marrying a black woman or a white woman, two chicks about the same ages, same economic levels…whatever marriage means to you—kissing, and hugging and sleeping together in a single bed on hot nights…fifteen years…kissing and hugging that black, black woman, or kissing and hugging that white, white woman… Make your choice, because, see, the white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne.

Jonah played it for me, joining in on the punch line. “You dig, jig? The whole thing’s not really about race after all. It’s about ugliness! So let’s go string up all the ugly people, huh?” But Jonah repeated the routine only in private performance. For the better part of thirty years—and the worse part, too—he never recalled the joke for anyone but me.

Down in the Village, music was having quintuplets. From the insidious Seeburg jukebox at Sammy’s, from little trickles of radio on our way to the Met broadcasts, and from wilder dispatches in the streets all around us, we finally heard. Something had been happening, for years. At last, Jonah wanted a listen. We went downtown, sat in on two progressive jazz sets, had the tops of our heads taken off, then headed back home. Jonah waved the whole scene away. Then, a month later, he wanted to go back.

We fell into a semiweekly ritual, sneaking into the hot spots I wasn’t legally old enough to enter. The bouncer saw that hungry musician’s gaze and looked the other way. We’d hit the Village Gate one week, the Vanguard the next. While the jazz giants gathered at the Gate, the folkies took up across the street at the Bitter End: two furious scenes that couldn’t have been further apart in every way except distance. The mind-warping Vanguard sound had rumbled around for years, old inland blues swelling, flowing, coming back east to get cool and urbane. The older club regulars told us we’d already missed the peak. They claimed that the real gods had already passed from the face of the land, and that 1960 was already nothing but an echo. But to Jonah and me, here was the air of a planet newer than Schoenberg, with an atmosphere far more breathable.

I couldn’t hear it then, the re-creation in our recreation. That sound had filled the house once, pouring out of the radio on Sunday mornings. We had never eaten one of Da’s elaborate experimental omelettes except to jazz. It was never really ours, not like the stuff we sang every other day. Never home to us; more like a wild two-week summer rental on the Strip. But our parents had listened. Only Jonah and I had fallen away. We didn’t feel our prowling around the Village as a return. We thought we’d stumbled onto a place we’d never been.