Richard Powers (35 page)

He laid down a solid floor with his chords, on which I did my best to spin lines that had never before existed. For a while, for at least as long as our four hands kept moving, the music for writing down and the music for letting loose found a way to share a nest.

I be-bopped us into a three-point landing, stealing a great alto sax riff I’d heard unleashed one night at the Gate. Will was laughing so hard at my full-body, adult baptism that his left hand had to hunt around for the tonic. We needed only a trap-set release, which we jumped up and performed in unison on the piano lid.

“Don’t sue me, Wilson,” I said when we’d caught our breath. “I didn’t see no copyright symbol anywhere on your score.”

“Where in God’s creation you learn to do that, Mix?”

“Oh, you know. Here and there. Around.”

“Get away! On out of here!” He waved me out of his sight. As if only the throwaway gesture guaranteed I’d be back. From a distance, he called, “And don’t forget: You promised me.” I looked back, a blank.

Forgotten already. He mimed a scribbling motion. Composing. “Get that all down on a score someday.”

By summer’s end, Jonah had us on a regimen. We left the apartment every morning by the time Ruthie went to school, and returned too late to say good night to her. She complained about our being away, and Jonah laughed at her. Every so often, he sent me home to tell Da we were staying overnight, to hammer out some resistant passage.

We found our rhythm. Jonah’s appetite for work outstripped the available hours. “The man wants something,” I baited him. “He’s hungry.”

“What else are we supposed to do all day long?”

“You’ve never worked this hard in your life.”

“I like working for myself, Joey. More future in it.”

We went deep underground, where music must always go. We went down into places untouched by anyone. We put in such strange, extended hours that the days began to dissolve. Jonah wouldn’t let me wear a watch. He banished any ticker with more memory than a metronome. No radio, records, newspapers, or word from the outside. Only the growing list of notes we made on a canary yellow legal pad, the curl of the sun’s slatted shadow across the floorboards, the frequent sirens, and the muffled battering from the apartments below proved that the seasons still moved.

Harlem wrapped around us. The street outside drowned out our noise with its indifferent survival cries.

Sometimes neighbors thumped on the walls or pounded on the door to get us to quit. Then we switched to pianissimo. For longer than the metronome could say, we were dead to the world.

Jonah obsessed on placement, those minute locations of tone that the tiny rented room made audible. He cleared out the uncertainties at each end of his range. We spoke to each other in bursts of pitches, shaping, bending, imitating. Before my eyes, Jonah pushed into an agility in his upper notes that rivaled the precision of my keys.

We were too young to travel alone. Overtrained by any measure, neither of us really knew anything.

Great singers sing their whole lives and still want a teacher to hear and herd them. But here was Jonah, who’d barely sung in public, training for the first crucial contest of his life, with no one to correct him but me.

We grated on each other’s nerves. He wanted me to be his harshest critic, but if I faulted his execution, he’d hiss. “Listen to the piano player, will you!” Three days later, he’d be doing what I suggested, as if it had just occurred to him. If I dropped a clunker or struggled with a passage, he assumed a patience so long-suffering that I’d start seizing up on the simplest dotted figure.

Sometimes I couldn’t count to four the same way twice. But now and then, I held up a mirror to his interpretation or brought out some interior ripple he’d never heard. Then Jonah walked behind me at the bench and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in an anaconda squeeze. “Who else but you, brother?

Who else could give me everything you do?”

The hours passed, motionless in their expanse. Some days, we seemed to go for weeks before darkness sent us home. Other days vanished in half an hour. In the evenings, both of us punchy with exertion, Jonah grew expansive. “Look at us, Joseph. At home on our own forty acres. And the pair of mules is free.”

We weren’t the only ones singing. Just the only ones locked up, singing to ourselves. Above our

“Erl-King” and Dowland, tunes broke in on us from all directions. Don’t forget who’s walking you home.

Who’s coming for you, now, when you’re all alone. Soft and clear like moonlight through the pines. Dry and light, like you like your wine. Darlin’, please. Only you. Something you know, and something you do.

Come on, baby, let’s do the twist. Take me by my little hand and go like this. Takes more than a robin to make the winter go. You got what it takes, Lord, don’t I know. Come on, baby, now, I’m needing you.

Just an old sweet song, the whole night through.

I listened to these tunes on the sly, even as Jonah launched his own bottomless columns of air. Each note that bled into our apartment exposed us. We were some extinct, flightless bird, or that living fossil fish hauled up from the primordial deeps off Madagascar. Da had told us that once we burned the insurance money, there’d be no more. Cash, like time, flowed in one direction: away. If we barreled into this contest and stumbled, we were finished. If we came up empty, we’d have to face the music. The same music everyone else now sang.

Ours was worse than the wildest juvenile fantasy, the ten-year-old on a glass-strewn empty lot behind the condemned tenement, practicing his major-league swing. Worse than a preteen crooner singing into the mike stand hidden in a sawed-off parking meter, the next Sam Cooke, his friends the next Drifters or Platters. Jonah couldn’t distinguish between long shot and shoo-in. Singing was what he did best in this life. Singing outdid the best the world had to give, better than any drug, any sedative. It was in his body.

His baseline blood chemistry pumped it out like insulin. Doing something else was never an option. The pleasure of flight was too great in him.

Our preparation was pure tedium, worse than any I’d ever spent. Sometimes I sat silent, stock-still for twenty minutes as Jonah tamped out a dimple in an appoggiatura. Sometimes I stepped outside, killing time on the corner or walking a few blocks, hoping to stumble upon the woman with the wide navy blue shoulders. Then Jonah would come out after me to haul me back, furious at my desertion.

Sometimes he crawled down a well of despondence and wouldn’t come out, certain that every note coming out of him sounded like dried dung. He’d try singing into a corner. He’d lie flat on his back on the wooden floor, singing to the ceiling. Anything to get his two hundred singing muscle groups to agree.

He’d lie there after I stopped playing, crushed under an ocean of atmosphere. “Mule. Help. Remind me.”

“‘You two boys can be anything you want.’”

He started to suffer from occasional shortness of breath. He: Aeolus’s walking pair of lungs. In the middle of an E-flat major scale, his throat clamped shut as if he were in severe anaphylaxis. It took me three beats to realize he wasn’t goofing around. I broke off on a leading tone and was on my feet, walking him around the room, rubbing his back, soliciting. “Should I get help? Should I call a doctor?”

But we had no phone, and no doctor to call.

He put out his arm and beat time like the conductor of a volunteer community orchestra. “I’m fine.” His voice came from under the polar ice caps. Two more spins around the room and he was breathing again.

He walked over to the piano and built a little cadence to resolve my broken-off leading tone. “What on earth was that?” I asked. But he refused to talk about what had happened.

It struck again ten days later. Both times, he came back quickly from the attacks, his voice clearer than ever. Some film had lifted from it, one I didn’t notice until brightness peeled it away. I even had the guilty thought, If we could only time this…

One evening, walking home, he stopped and grabbed my arm. He stood there on a rough corner of 122nd, his mouth forming a thought, just waiting to be mugged. “You know? Joseph. There’s nothing in the world— nothing…”

“Like a dame?”

“Whiter than singing Schubert in front of five impotent, constipated judges.”

“Shh. Jesus! You’ll get us killed.”

“Nothing whiter in creation.”

“How do you know they’re constipated?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jonah.”

“Name one.”

“How about five impotent, constipated judges judging singers of Schubert?”

“Okay. Name another.”

I was eager to keep moving, placate the street. But Jonah was deep in a kind of interrogation I’d never seen in him. “You know the funniest part of this? If we win…”

“ Whenwe win…” One of us had to be him.

“Think how much darker we’ll seem, to the judges. To everybody but us. If we walk away with their prize.”

The contest rules were mailed weeks in advance. There would be a scale exercise supplied by the judges and a sight-singing exercise of average difficulty. Beyond that, we had to prepare three pieces of varying character, from which the judges would ask for one. Jonah ended up assembling what anyone else would have considered an eccentric lineup. First, we brushed up a Dallapicolla song on a text by Machado; Jonah still lived for the twelve-tone idiom, and he imagined the judges would fall in love at their first whiff.

Then, we tamed the Erl-King, Jonah turning that old warhorse into Pegasus. And lastly, we polished Dowland’s “Time Stands Still” until it vaporized. He knew that few, if any, of the other contestants would reach that far back. With that simple song, he planned to bring stones to life and change lives into mute stones.

The local round for the contest was held at the Manhattan School of Music. We walked across the island that day, Jonah muttering stern encouragements to me. The thing was a cattle call, a fair number of first-timers unrolling their showstopper from Guys and Dolls . Thankfully, the Juilliard faculty had all been shipped out to judge rounds in Jersey and Connecticut.

We were six weeks overprepared. For the first time in his life, Jonah held back onstage. He was almost marking, compared to the full voice he’d given rehearsals. Still, we made it through to the citywide round.

His sight-singing alone almost guaranteed it. It would have taken a catastrophe for us to have been scratched from that preliminary screening. But as soon as we were alone, I lit into him.

“What were you thinking? We’ve been at this for months, and that’s the worst I’ve ever heard you do that stuff.”

“Last-minute decision, Joey. We don’t want to stand out too much at this point. That just increases the odds of some judge going on a leveling vendetta.” He’d learned much at the conservatory.

“Give me a little advance warning next time you go changing the game plan.”

“Thousand pardons, Mule. You played like a dream. Come on! We’re in round two, aren’t we?”

We had two weeks for adjustments and made two months’ worth. We’d heard good singers at round one, including the best of our Juilliard acquaintances and a few impressive unknowns from upper Manhattan. Most had half a dozen more years of experience than Jonah. Aside from a voice that could make lifelong fugitives surrender themselves, all we had was unbroken time.

In Queens for the citywide round, he almost disqualified us. Jonah, drunk on more ability than a twenty-year-old should be allowed, sang through the allotted time. We gave them Dallapicolla, which impressed but did not delight. Then one of the judges asked for a verse of the Dowland, to clear the palate before they dismissed us. We discharged the first verse, but when we reached the double bar, Jonah, shooting me a larcenous glance, pressed on through the end of the song. That tune’s second verse scans like a battered reverse translation, impossible to phrase inside the melody that works so brilliantly with the first stanza. But in Jonah’s astonished tone, the words swung open like a political prison after its illegal regime falls.

We’d clearly violated contest protocol. The judges could have thrown us off the stage, but after an initial murmur, they sat still. When we finished, you could hear the silence hurt them. Had there been a third verse, they’d have suffered it.

They waved us through to the regionals. Many of our Juilliard acquaintances didn’t go forward, even some whose voices could have cured anyone’s need for beauty. Contests, like snapshots, don’t always show their subjects in the best light. They slice time into too thin cross sections. You practice ten hours a day, month after month, in the hopes that a few seconds onstage go something like they did in a year of rehearsal. It rarely did. We happened to sound good, in that vanishing slice of time. We were the judges’

chosen ones, at least for another few days. Back in our rented studio, we allotted two minutes for a postmortem.

“Why do you suppose they love us, Joey? Can we really sound that much better than the others? Or are the judges just grateful we’re the kind of Negroes who won’t beat the shit out of them on the street?”

I ground out a bit of our Dowland, strewn with Parker. “They don’t really know that for sure, do they?”

“You are right , brother. Just because we can do ‘The Erl-King’ doesn’t mean we aren’t out to rape their loved ones. You never know.”

You never knew what was being given you and what taken away. You never knew who the thoroughbreds were seeing when they looked at you. Even I didn’t know anymore who I saw when I saw the two of us.

“So there’re these three guys on death row,” Jonah said, edging us back into the repertoire. “An avant-garde Italian, a Romantic German, and an Elizabethan Englishman…”

For the regionals, we traveled to Washington. We’d reached the stage where even a loss would be bankable. Jonah was the youngest singer left in the running. But Jonah had his eyes on a single distant prize. And the America’s Next Voices competition was just a hostage in that vaster campaign.

The semifinals were held at the auditorium at Georgetown. We stayed in a cheap hotel a good hike to the northeast. Any hotel at all was still a novelty. The clerk at the check-in asked whether we wanted the afternoon rate.