Us Conductors (19 page)

I chided you. “You know as well as I.”

“It’s as if no one here ever learned that there are ways things are supposed to be.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s why I’ve stayed.”

We spoke of the northern lights. In Leningrad, they streak across the entire winter. In summer there are the white nights, long bright midnights. But after the fall equinox come the gold, green, crimson nights, when glimmers lift out of all that blackness, undeniable, secure, fading. The aurora looks like roads, sometimes; bands of light twisting across hilltops. But the hills are not there, the roads are not there—like the paths of ghosts. You forget their routes as soon as you have glimpsed them.

“Roads less travelled by,” you said.

I didn’t know you were quoting Robert Frost. “Travelled by whom?” I said.

You hesitated. After a moment, you murmured, “By us.”

I used to sit and watch the northern lights from my bedroom window, as a boy, and later, as a man, from my dormitory at Petrograd University. As a husband I watched too. I did not tell you this. I would lean my head against the glass and know that behind me, across the room, Katia lay with her eyes closed.

For dessert you ordered a chocolate parfait. I ordered a cup of coffee. I drank it sweet, with two small spoonfuls of sugar. Someone was playing records, one after another. They all sounded like love songs. You hid your grin as you scraped mousse from the bottom of the parfait glass.

When we went back out into the night, crossing the gravel to the car, I think we both expected to see the aurora. But everything was dark. We expected it to be weaving above us in cold blazing splendour. The sky had clouded over. In the darkness I pulled the convertible roof up over the car and then I went over to you and I kissed you.

I remember how later you swept your hair away from where it lay around your eyes. You stretched your arms as though you were waking. When your wrist touched the window glass there was an instant when your mouth moved, almost smiling, and then you said that you felt outside and inside at the same time.

MUD TONY
’
S NEVER CHANGED
. The walls were an overripe lime green, the tiles a weak milky blue. Cooking oil hung like a fine mist in the air. Every two weeks I hunched in a booth with Karl and Karl and they passed me glasses of vodka and I swallowed them without protest. I spilled my guts. I looked around the diner with sad eyes. The salt shaker was always at the same level. The tabletop was covered in a tacky film.

“And so,” asked Karl, the Karl with a moustache, “how are the negotiations with First Bank?”

“Stalled,” I said. My tongue felt slick in my mouth.

“Turn the key in the ignition,” said the other Karl, “and get somewhere.”

I had been in talks with the First Bank of New York about a touchless alarm system. I had been in talks with Brite-Star Toys about a doll that crawled across the floor. I had been in talks with Marzinotto Screws about a theory for preventing corrosion. All of these talks were genuine. They stalled and unstalled. I scored a minor hit with the electric eye, a security device for sleeping children. It was a familiar principle: an electromagnetic field in a ring around the baby’s crib. Enter the invisible field, and a bell sounds.

The greatest calamity of Charles Lindbergh’s life made me a little rich that summer.

For most of these inventions, full of invisible fields and secret activations, I used the name “teletouch.” Teletouch light switches, teletouch alarm systems, teletouch sensors for automatic doors. I had signed a contract with Nate Stone, of Marchands, to develop teletouch window displays. He planned to sell them to uptown department stores: revolving tables and flashing lights whenever a customer passed close by.

The Karls were unmoved. They applauded windfalls, siphoned money from my accounts, but they were not interested in shopkeepers, infants, mechanical amusements. They wanted contracts with major enterprise, corporate skeleton keys. “Have you spoken with General Motors?” they asked. “Have you followed up with Westinghouse?” Even in my intoxication, I knew enough to lead them on, to offer yeses and maybes. I did not believe in their omnipotence, or in the methods of their bosses, but somewhere at the heart of this matter were the best interests of Mother Russia. One day, perhaps, we would want the same things. I might yet be their spy.

ONE DAY YOU SAID
, “Can I show you something?”

There were screws in my mouth; my answer came out mumbled. “ ‘V cur …” I was on my back under a plywood display case, mounting bolts along its lower lip, twisting a screwdriver at an awkward upward-tilted angle. I had the vague feeling there might be ants coming up through the floor. Lucie Rosen had said something about ants next door. Something was at my scalp. Was it ants? I did not know.

“You have to come out,” you said.

I grunted and began extruding myself from under the case. I was thinking of the ants. I sat up, brushing at my hair and neck. You were standing at the far side of the room, behind a space-control theremin.
DZEEEEOOOoo
, it said. If there were still ants on my head, I forgot them.

Later, you told me how you had come to visit the day before. It was the early evening. You let yourself in but the house seemed empty; there was a breeze coming through the first-floor blinds; nobody was practising. I was away at the kwoon. Sifu was tapping the back of my knees with his stick.

You walked into the living room and found Henry Solomonoff and Charles Ives, waiting for their tea to steep. “Hello!” Henry called out. You removed your hat. They invited you to sit with them, the two composers, and you did; you waited together for the tea to steep. They were talking baseball.
Shortstop
, they said,
RBI
, and after a little while you got up. “I’m going to go upstairs,” you told them. On the second floor you wandered through the workshops. You picked through a box of drill bits. You flicked a television screen with your finger. You stood on the inert terpsitone stage, bowed, waved your hand. A theremin sat in the corner, painted flowers on its sides. My former gift to you. You eyed it. “Is everything all right?” asked Solomonoff. He had appeared at the top of the stairs. You looked at him. You were no
longer a violinist. You asked him, “Will you show me how to turn this on?”

Now I sat on the floor, astonished. You plucked nineteen notes from the air. The opening bars of “The Swan”: just nineteen notes, nothing more. The last of these, set apart, came out wrong—a quivering F instead of high C. In spite of this, in spite of sharps and flats (and you grimaced comically with each mistake), in spite of the way you slid between each note, unable to control glissando, I was dumbstruck. Accuracy with the theremin is a learned thing, a knack that comes with practice. But you showed even in that clumsy playing a delicacy of tone like I had never heard. Every player of the space-control theremin draws his or her music from the same loose current, the same air, the same relationship of hands and antennas. We are all siblings, summoning the same songs. Somehow yours are more beautiful.

“Well?” you asked.

I was speechless.

“Well?” you asked again, a crooked smile spreading.

“Clara Reisenberg,” I uttered finally, the only words I could say.

I GAVE YOU LESSONS
in how to hold your hands. There are some bends of wrist, positions of fingers, that work better; others less well. “Like this,” I said. “Like this.” “Like this.” You stood beside me and asked, “What about this,” touching thumb to forefinger, and it sounded finer than anything I had ever heard.

I sent two theremins to your apartment. The car carried my first gift and a new, modified RCA kit; also a sour cherry tart, a bouquet of jasmine, a bottle of bootlegged gin. I am not sure I knew how to do things by half measures. You practised at home;
you practised with me. After the third lesson we went dancing. We played on the Capitol Club’s dance floor, skipping and mirrored, your hair pinned up and me with cufflinks glinting, the whole night glinted, mirroring, and skipped. My hand rested in the fragile strong supple small of your back.

Later, at an automat, I paid a man a dollar and he filled my palm with nickels. The walls had a hundred tiny slots and into these I slipped the coins. Two perfect plates of pie came swinging round on rollers. We poured black coffee from taps, silver spouts shaped like dolphins. We sat side by side. You used a spoon and I used a fork and we ate our pie, speaking of other lemon meringue pies we had eaten, made by bakers in Queens, by hotel chefs, by grandmothers. The automat’s recipes, you told me, were kept in safes. The makers of these mechanisms knew the machines were useless without pie, cake, little pots of crème brûlée. Customers want to spend their nickels on delights. I put my hand on yours. The room shone white and felt like the future. You drew the spoon from your mouth, savouring tart and sun-bright. There, your inclined jaw. We kissed.

We still had more dancing in us. We caught a cab to the Savoy. Harlem’s mixed clubs were our favourites. The air felt thicker, the music better. The big band hollered and you leaned your head into my shoulder. I breathed in, deeply in, gazing into this flowering overgrown throng. We parted. You sparkled on the end of my arm.

We were on the steps outside the Savoy, much later. Lamplight rested on us like a benediction. I could feel the sweat inside my collar, between my shoulder blades, at my wrists. You were tilted away from me. We could hear each other’s breathing, still quick from dancing. The cherry trees were full of petals. The sun was rising. It felt yet like moonlight. I looked toward the city and then back toward you. Now there was a sparrow beside
you. She stood near your heels. She was small; she pecked at the stones.

When you turned toward me, the sparrow stayed. You did not see her. You showed me your happiness, and your dark eyes, and the curvature of your silhouette. There was a sparrow at your heels. You held out your long hand to me.

“Clara,” I said softly.

“Yes?” The word was like a silver link.

“Will you marry me?” I said.

You did not move. You stood on the steps and stared at me with stillness. Your eyes trembled. You began to smile and then you did not smile, but my heart was lifting.

I looked down at the sparrow. The sparrow had gone.