Richard Powers (83 page)

He did write. Not often, and never satisfactorily, but he did let me know what was happening. I got the story in bits and pieces, in clippings, reviews, letters, and bootleg recordings. I even heard accounts from envious old school friends who’d stayed in the classical ghetto. My brother was making his way, stepping into the world he knew would eventually belong to him. He was one of the new wave’s newer voices, a breath of fresh revision from an unexpected quarter, a rising star in five different countries.

He lived in Paris now, where no one questioned his right to interpret any piece of vocal music that fell within his copious range. No one challenged his cultural rights except, of course, on national grounds. The reputation that had plagued him in the States—that his voice was too clean, too light —melted away in Europe. There, they heard only his limber soar. They handed him a beautifully furnished future to move into. They called him “effortless,” Europe’s highest compliment. They said he was the concert tenor the 1970s had been waiting for. They meant that as a compliment, too.

Now that he had no bad rap of lightness to overcome, Jonah often soloed with orchestras. The reviews adored how he could make even the most complex, thickly layered twentieth-century textures feel airy and audible. He soloed under the same conductors whose recordings we’d grown up on. He performed Hindemith’s Das Unaufhörliche with Haitink and the Concertgebouw. He did the tenor solo in Szymanowski’s Third Symphony— The Song of the Night—with Warsaw, standing in for the ailing Józef Meissner, who let the understudy do the role only twice before racing back to reclaim it. The French critics, suckers for discovery, praised the still-little-known piece as “voluptuous” and the increasingly visible singer as “floating, ethereal, and almost unbearably beautiful.”

But Jonah’s new signature piece was A Child of Our Time , Michael Tippett’s haunted wartime oratorio, the present’s answer to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion . Only Tippett’s protagonist was not the Son of God, but a boy abandoned by all divinity. A Jewish boy, hiding in Paris, enraged by the Nazi persecution of his mother, kills a German officer and touches off a pogrom. In place of Bach’s Protestant chorales, Tippett sought something more universal, more able to cross all musical borders. His material reached him by chance, on a wartime radio broadcast: the Hall Johnson Choir performing Negro spirituals.

Here was the hybrid piece Jonah was born to sing. How the Europeans connected him to the music—what they heard or saw—I can’t imagine. But over the course of a few years, my brother sang the massive work with four conductors and three orchestras—two British and one Belgian. He recorded the piece in 1975 with Birmingham. It made his name, everywhere except in his own country. In the wads of newspaper clippings he sent me, often with not even a note, he was depicted as a still-young voice pushing outward, threatening to become a secular angel.

He’d called me from Paris, back in 1972, in tears at the news of Jackie Robinson’s death. “Dead, Mule.

Rickey threw the poor bastard into the cauldron and wouldn’t let him do anything but hit the ball. ‘I want a man who’s brave enough not to fight back.’ What shit is that, Joey? A lose-lose situation, and the man won .” I couldn’t tell why he was calling. My brother knew nothing about baseball. My brother hated America. “Who’s hot now, Mule?”

“You mean singers?”

“Ballplayers, you bastard.”

I hadn’t a clue. The Yankee broadcasts were hardly on my daily diet.

Jonah sighed, his breath echoing down the transatlantic delay. “Mule? It’s a funny thing. I had to move here to learn how hopeless I am. This whole City of Light crap? Total fabrication. One of the most smugly racist towns I’ve ever lived in. New York makes this place look like Selma. They want to see a birth certificate before they’ll sell me cheese. I got beaten up by this guy down in the Thirteenth. Really beaten. Don’t worry, bro. I’m talking six months ago. Went at me with fists. Broke a molar. I’m sitting there slapping him like some gonad-clipped castrato, thinking, But they don’t have a Negro problem here! I’m thinking Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Jimmy Baldwin. I’m telling this guy, ‘Your people love my people.’ Turns out—the accent, the heavy tan—he thought I was Algerian. Punishing me for the revolution. Jesus, Mule. By the time we’re dead, we’ll have paid for every sin on earth except our own.”

Riffing for me. But who else would buy this performance? Paris was no better or worse than any capital.

What crushed him was the loss of his would-be hideout. He’d dreamed of total self-reinvention, a home that would grant him a permanent reentry visa. No place on any implicated continent would ever give him that.

“I don’t know how much longer I can live here, Joey.”

“Where would you go?”

“I’m thinking maybe Denmark? They love me in Scandinavia.”

“Jonah. They love you in France. I’ve never seen such notices.”

“I’m only sending the good ones.”

“Are you sure that leaving Paris is smart, professionally? How will I reach you?”

“Easy, fella. I’ll be in touch.”

“Do you need cash? Your share…your account with the money from the house…”

“I’m flush. Let it ride. Play the market or something.”

“It’s in your name.”

“Great. So long as I don’t change my name, I’m in business.” He made a quick accelerando—“Miss you, man”—and hung up before I could miss him back.

The longer I composed, the more fraudulent I became. My notes were going nowhere but backward.

Even I couldn’t abuse Teresa’s arts grant forever. Unfit for any honest work, I advertised for piano students. I worked forever on the ad: “Juilliard-trained”—I never claimed to have graduated —“concert pianist, good with beginners…” It amazed me to think how the words concert pianist still conjured something in this country, long after concerts ceased to draw.

Sometimes parents jerked when they met the man behind the ad. They let their child take a token lesson.

Then they apologized, explaining that their child really wanted to study the cornet. It never bothered me. I wouldn’t have studied piano with me, either. I couldn’t see why anyone wanted to study piano anymore anyway. In another few years, we’d all be replaced with Moog synthesizers. To the electronic future, the best musicians already proclaimed, Those of us already dead salute you.

But somehow, I managed to draw students. Some of them even seemed to enjoy playing. I got eight-year-old working-class kids who hummed over the keys. I got middle-aged recidivists who simply wanted to play the “Minute Waltz” again in something under a hundred seconds, before they died. I taught natural talents who got by on an hour of practice a week and earnest acolytes who’d go to their graves trying to play those lines that taunted them in their sleep, floating just out of reach of their fingers.

Not one of my students would end up onstage except at their school’s talent show. They or their parents were still victims of that discredited belief that equated playing a little piano with being a little more free. I tried to fit the student to the path, to have each one pick his or her own way through the centuries of overflowing repertoire. One little middle-class Mayflower descendant caught fire with his father’s old John Thompson method, striving to play every poky folk tune at flat-out prestissimo. The daughter of two Hungarian escapees who came over in the wake of ’56 giggled her way through Bartók’s Mikrokosmos

, screwing up her face at the gentle dissonances in the contrary motion, hearing some dim echo that wasn’t, any longer, even racial memory. I had no blacks. The black students of Atlantic City studied in some other classroom.

I worked to make the dying notes come alive. I had my students play at glacial speeds, doubling the tempo every four bars. I sat next to them on the piano bench, playing the left hand while they played the right. Then we switched and started over again. I told them this was an exercise in developing two brains, the clean split of thought needed for independent equal-handedness. I tried to make them see that every piece of music was an infant uprising that stumbled onto democracy or died on the page.

I taught one girl, a high school junior, named Cindy Hang. She wouldn’t tell me her real first name, her birth name, although I asked her several times. She said she was Chinese—the answer of easiest resort.

Her father, a loan officer from Trenton who’d adopted her, along with a younger Cambodian boy, said Hmong. Her English was a soft-pedaled mezzo piano, although her grammar already ran rings around her native-born classmates. She spoke as little as possible, and when she could get away with it, not at all.

She’d come to the piano late, starting only four years before, at thirteen. But she played like a crippled cherub.

Something in her technique startled me. Out of pure greed, I gave her ridiculous pieces—Busoni, Rubenstein—show pieces and schmaltz I had no stomach for. I knew they’d come back in a few weeks, pulsing as I’d never heard them. Like the Bible translated into the clicks and hums of whales: incomprehensible, alien, but still recognizable. Her fingers invented from scratch the idea of harmonic structure. She listened with them, a safecracker feeling the tumblers through gloves. She stroked the keys as if apologizing to them in advance. But even her lightest touch had the force of a refugee displaced by organized violence.

Every lesson with Cindy Hang left me feeling criminal. “I’ve got nothing to teach her,” I told Teresa.

Saying even that much was a mistake.

“Oh, I bet there’s all sorts of things you can teach her.”

Her voice fell into a note it never sounded. But I refused to be baited. “Anything I teach her will destroy what she does. She has the most amazing touch.”

“Touch?” Like I’d hit her.

“Ter. Sweetie. The girl is only seventeen.”

“Exactly.” Her voice clutched tight to nothing.

Things got worse. After Cindy’s lessons, I felt Teresa straining for the ordinary. She’d ask, “How’d it go?” And I’d answer just as casually, “Not bad.” I had a lengthy mental list of pieces I couldn’t assign the girl— Liebesträume, the Moonlight , “Prelude to a Kiss,” any Fantasie . All the while, Cindy Hang worked harder and played more dazedly, no doubt wondering why the better she performed, the more remote her teacher became.

I had felt no desire for the child until Teresa suggested it. Then, in the smallest, deniable increments, she grew to consume me. I’d meet her nightly in my dreams, the two of us thrown together in some mass wartime deportation, reading each other’s needs without the weight of earthbound speech. I dressed her in navy blue, a midcalf dress with wide shoulders, now four decades out of date. Everything was right, except the hair, which curled in my dreams. I’d put my ear to that brown ravine beneath her clavicle, the one I saw in waking, while she sat upright on the bench, playing for me. When I touched my ear to her skin, the blood coursing underneath it sounded like chant.

Cindy Hang’s skin was perfect—that nonaligned brown belonging to half the human race. I loved the girl for her vulnerability, her total bewilderment at where she’d landed, the tentative attempts at recovery in her fingers’ every probe. I loved how she sounded, as if she’d come from another planet—something this planet would never house. I told myself for weeks there was no problem. But I wanted something from Cindy Hang, something I didn’t even know I wanted until Teresa’s jealousy pointed it out to me.

We played together, Mozart’s D Major Sonata for piano four hands, Köchel 381. I assigned the piece just to allow me to sit by her on the piano bench. There are only four profound measures in the piece; the rest is mostly note spinning. But I looked forward to it as to nothing else in my life. It brought me back da capo, to where I’d started. We played the middle movement together, a little slower than it should go.

She took the upper part and I supported her. My lines were full and broad. Hers were the lightest exploration, like a bird foraging. I felt I was striding through a crowded fairgrounds with a happy child on my shoulders.

One lesson, we played it perfectly. Under our fingers, the modest little piece completed what it was meant to do in this life. We finished playing, my pupil and I both aware of what we’d just done. Cindy kept still on the bench next to me, head down, looking at the keys, waiting for me to touch her. When I didn’t, she looked up, her mouth a crooked smile, desperate to please. “We can try it again? From the beginning?”

I called her father. I told him that Cindy was extremely talented, “a real musician,” but that she’d outgrown everything I was able to teach her. I could help him find someone who’d move her forward. In fact, I felt secretly sure any other teacher would kill all that was strangest and most luminous in her playing. That scumbled virtuosity of the nonnative speaker wouldn’t survive her first real lesson. But whatever another teacher might do to her was better than what I would, if she studied with me another week.

Cindy’s father was too confused to object. “Would you like to talk to her? Explain this to her yourself?”

I must have said something absurd, because I can’t remember it. I got off the line without talking to her.

For months afterward, I said nothing to Teresa. My telling her would only confirm her fears. When I told her at last, she was truly miserable, all the misery that only truth can bring. She dragged around for two weeks, trying to fix things. “Maybe you should give up teaching, Joseph. You haven’t worked on your own music since you started.”

I stopped dreaming of Cindy Hang, except for that strange, surgical otherworldliness of her playing. In her hands, the long lines of Europe became something they’d never recognized in themselves. I never heard the likes of her sound again. Alone of all my students, the girl might have learned to make music at will. But the way she played would have had to die, on the way to any real stage.

Banishing Cindy brought Terrie and me closer for a while, if only in shared guilt. Teresa had given up more to live with me than I could ever repay. I carried that fact around with me like a prison record. I grew daily more certain that she couldn’t afford to be with me. She wanted to devote herself to someone who’d devoted himself to the thing she loved most in all the world. She wanted to marry a musician. It was that simple. She wanted me to marry her. She thought that signing the papers, making it official, would destroy our perpetual anxiety and bring down all walls. He’s my husband, she could explain to the venomous cashiers, to the men who followed us down the street, threatening, to the police cars tracking our public movements. He’s my husband, she’d say, and they’d have no comeback.