Us Conductors (17 page)

After the session I stayed behind to talk with Jin. I did not want to leave the lesson in the silence in which we had spent it. We went for steamed buns at one of the bakeries nearby. Men poured through the shop’s doors, calling out orders, dropping money on the counter without checking to see whether it was correct. The room smelled of beef and perfume. Through the windows I watched women pushing carts of Chinese melons and turnips that looked like wedges of timber. We tore at our steamed buns, spilled barbecued pork, bean paste, lotus. Jin talked about his job at the post office, sorting hundreds of letters on which the address was not clear—envelopes sent from Nanchong, east Sichuan province, to “Mrs Chun, Manhattan” or
“Mr Han, Tailor, Mott Street.” The addresses were often written in Mandarin. “They imagine everyone will know him,” Jin said, “Mr Han the tailor.”

“They think the city is that small?”

“No! They think Mr Han is so good, so fine a tailor, that of course he will be famous. That the most gifted tailors receive rubies and palaces.”

“Does that happen in China?”

Jin laughed. “No. But this is America. The land of opportunity!”

I was late returning home. The chain came off my bicycle and I had to crouch in the street to replace it, trolleys hustling by, horses kicking up clods of earth. I coasted toward the brownstone, standing on the pedals. I assumed Schillinger or Lucie would have come to practise, and each had a key, but when I arrived at West 54th Street I found the worst thing—you, sitting on the steps, waiting for me; and also Sara Hardy, the dancer, leaning her face on her palm. “Clara,” I said, skidding to a stop. You stood.

“Hi, Leon.”

I assumed Sara was one of your friends and went to shake her hand, then realized my fingers were covered in bicycle grease. I offered a bashful nod instead.

“You must be Dr Theremin,” she said. She was a strange-looking woman, so tall in her beige dress. She looked as though someone had held her at head and feet and pulled.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. My muscles felt overlarge, like clothes I had been wearing for three days.

“I just stopped by on my way to rehearsal,” you said. “I wouldn’t have waited except I saw this poor girl.”

“I’m here for the audition,” Sara said.

I leaned the bicycle against the fence. “The aud—? Oh!”

She looked stricken. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I had forgotten. I thought you were Clara’s—yes. Just a moment.” I unlocked the front door and ushered you both inside. “Let me just …” I went leaping up the stairs. I had hauled the dance stage all the way to my rooms on the fourth floor. Nobody was using it and it occupied too much space in the downstairs workshops. Now I set about tidying, clearing away empty tumblers, brushing derelict potato chips from the end tables. Huge spools of wire were sitting on the stage itself and I had to roll these away, round the corner to my bedroom, leaving rail tracks in the carpet.

“All right, all right,” I called. You did not hear and I clattered back down. “Welcome,” I said to Sara Hardy, the dancer, and also a second time, to you. Your smile made me give a weary laugh.

We climbed to the top floor. Sara seemed bored; she did not even peer around as we alighted on a landing. She had a strange way of breathing through her nose, and I decided between the third and fourth floors that I did not like her. We arrived at the top, and went through a doorway, past my bedroom, and then we were in the “reading room,” which was workshop and drafting room and paint cellar, now with an electronic ether dance stage in the centre of its floor. You seemed faintly horrified, Clara. Admittedly the terpsitone was not at its best. Aborted circuits stuck out like insect antennae from its sides; a loop of wire was caught all across its length; the loudspeaker was not yet properly installed and amounted to an oily copper grille that leaned against the bookshelf. Excess wiring spilled from under the platform, like multicoloured grass. “What is it?” you asked.

“The ether wave dance stage,” I said, proudly. I gestured to Sara. “Please step aboard.”

She wavered on her long legs. “What will it do?”

“Nothing,” I said. I snapped the switch on the generator. “Well, it will make a sound.”

The room filled with a low hum, as if a bassist was warming up next door. Sara was still hesitating. She looked at you, her new doorstep ally.

“Go on,” you said.

Clara, I loved you.

The terpsitone was about the size of a door, perhaps a little larger, upholstered in rosy felt. As she approached, the hum’s pitch began to change. The secret was a metal plate, an antenna, fixed beneath the stage. It sensed the conductivity, the movements, of the person who stood upon it. Sara seemed nervous, like a little girl. But she climbed up onto the platform. Cables snaked from the platform to a box near the doorway, a controller station. I adjusted some dials and the hum became much louder, the vibrato tighter, and the terpsitone’s drone swooped into midrange.

“All right,” I said.

“All right?” she said.

You began to laugh.

Sara Hardy was not the first dancer I had auditioned. She was, in fact, the nineteenth. Six months prior, the terpsitone had sat downstairs, with pride of place in the student workshops. It was my crown jewel, my new infatuation. It felt like an object I had found, an old artifact I had uncovered: dance that makes music. Whereas the theremin reads melody from the gestures of two hands in the air, the terpsitone, the “ether wave dance stage,” interprets the movements of the whole body. The performer’s gestures have a double meaning—the gestures
as
gestures and the manipulation of sound.

I had been influenced by Martha Graham’s dance company,
the way free movement seemed to sing; and also by our hot nights in Harlem, where the trumpeters invented genius one instant at a time. My vision of the terpsitone saw it used in two different ways: by the most skilled choreographers, adapting composed pieces into motion; and by other dancers, volatile and learning, in improvisations.

Yet I could not find performers of either type. Dancers came to my door, pliéed at the doorstep, but when they arrived at the dance stage they were cowed by the electronics, or not cowed enough. I posted notices at ballet schools, backstage at the 48th Street Theatre; these dancers hesitated in the terpsitone’s electric field, grimacing at the noise, unable to complete their movements. They started like birds at every change of pitch. Other dancers, avant-gardists referred to me by Schillinger’s crèche of choreographers, were too liberated. They whirled and twisted across the stage, whipping sirens from the circuits. I thanked them all and said I would be in touch. Then I collapsed into an easy chair, sighing. Eventually I towed the terpsitone upstairs.

Now Sara Hardy was here, tottering on the charged stage. It was a washout. She moved limply, scared to provoke a sound, provoking sounds all the same. Amid the terpsitone’s high
ooooo
, supple and responsive, Sara didn’t seem to recognize her own limbs. She lifted her arm and her eyes widened, as if she was horrified by what she had found.

I turned off the generator. As soon as the hum had left the room, Sara seemed to grow five centimetres. She was again a gazelle, on tiptoes.

I showed her out. “Thank you,” I said, one hand on the doorknob.

She slung her bag over her shoulder. “It’s very hard.”

“Yes,” I said.

I dragged my feet back up to the fourth floor. I found you crouching on the dance stage, arms loosely resting on your knees. “So much for that,” I said. I turned off the room’s lights. I did not like you to see my disappointments.

“Hey,” you said from the sun-sliced darkness. “Can I try?”

“Try this?” I said.

“Yes.”

I left the lights off. The room felt quieter with just sun and shadow. You were silhouetted in the window, still crouching, like a little kid. I squatted beside the generator and flipped the switch. The room filled with sound. You were listening to it. I listened to the sound of the terpsitone as it listened to you listening.

You raised one hand and then the other, paying attention to the changes. You bowed your head and lifted it. You grinned, and the antenna was not sensitive enough to notice. You wiggled your hips. “Here,” I said. I plugged another cable into the generator. Now a coloured beam shone onto the dance stage from a spotlight above. It flickered, as if it was being run through a film projector. As you moved your limbs, raising hands and bowing head and wiggling hips, the beam changed colour in accordance with the terpsitone’s pitch.

“It shows you the note,” you observed.

“Does it help?” I asked.

You came slowly to your feet, the light going rosy. The terpsitone played a C sharp. You pointed at me; your leg swung out in an arc; you showed me your wrist and then the back of your hand. It was not quite a song, but it was a measured, considered singing. Then you laughed and shook out your arms and sent the terpsitone into a shriek. “Well,” you said.

“Well?”

We looked at one another. You were on your feet; I was still crouching. We were allies.

“You are better than any dancer,” I said.

“At this?”

I nodded yes.

You chewed your bottom lip. “It’s interesting,” you said after a moment. “Each movement is a choice. Up or down, elbow or knee.” You moved your elbow, your knee. “Sixteen bars is like a sequence of decisions.”

“Would you play it with us at Carnegie Hall?” I asked.

You seemed surprised. “What? How?”

“You’d learn,” I said.

“Leon, I’m a violinist.”

I still had bicycle grease on my hands. I said, “Then we will have a violinist playing the terpsitone.”

I RECALL ONLY THREE MOMENTS
from the last time I played Carnegie Hall.

I remember all of us standing in the wings at the beginning of the show. We were half hidden in folds of black velvet. Albert Stoessel, from Juilliard, spoke at a microphone. He said, “The instruments devised by Dr Theremin are instruments of feeling; they are instruments of the heart.” Sixteen friends stood beside me. Ten-year-old Yolanda was the first to go out; she opened the concert alone but for an accompanist, playing Glinka’s “Lark.” She was as tall as a young maple. I remember I had a screwdriver in my right hand, which I had used to replace one of the fingerboard theremin’s vacuum tubes. I dropped it to the stage floor as we all began to applaud.

The second moment was yours. You crouched in black on the terpsitone’s platform, as if you were praying, centred in a spotlight. Carlos, the harpist, sat beside you. In the wings, I held my breath.

You stood, slowly, staring into the room’s rapt silence. You arched your back. You were a black-barked cherry tree. You were my one true love.

With Carlos you played Bach and Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” Each note was shown in a beam of light. I had built a loudspeaker, covered it in twill, raised on a simple mount above the stage. Your music pushed like breath against the cloth. It trembled and then sang. You danced, choosing every moment, guiding the melody with a rolled shoulder and the tilt of knee. At the clubs you had not danced like this.

The third moment was hours after the concert, eleven o’clock or midnight. We had just crossed the street, you and I, arm in arm. Our bellies were full of champagne, blini, and chocolate. We were headed to the party at Little Rumania, where we would drink more champagne, toast Wagner and Grieg, listen to old Moskowitz behind the counter, conjuring Gemenc herons on his dulcimer. On the street corner, beside a closed-up newspaper stall, we met a man. He wore an overcoat despite the balmy air. He had a square jaw, wide shoulders. He seemed a full foot taller than I. He had hands like the paddles of a boat.

“Clara!” he said. You stopped and turned. I could not see your face.

“Robert,” you replied.

“Late night at the office?” he asked. He gave an isosceles smile.

You said, “Leon, this is my friend Robert Rockmore. Robert—Dr Leon Theremin.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. As we shook hands I imagined pivoting as I stepped forward, raising the elbow of my arm, striking this man across the chest, then releasing his hand, hooking his right leg with my right foot, and shoving him the
rest of the way to the ground, to where the pavement was stained black.

I wonder if you felt some tensing of muscles. You did not seem to change but there was a subtle adjustment of body language, a rearrangement of planes, and in that second I sensed that we two were one thing and he was another.

Your hand was on my arm. “Robert,” you said, “we need to run.”