Richard Powers (44 page)

We do socialize with strangers. Lisette drags us to parties—massively cultured affairs where whole social solar systems of spinning planets spread through the rooms, orbits that range from the day’s reigning sun at the center to the furthermost icy asteroids. Jonah and I are usually banished out somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. At one, a guest addresses us in blundering Spanish, assuming we’re two self-improving Puerto Ricans.

We’re dressing for one of these pointless parties, a reception for The Ballad of Baby Doe , when I balk.

“What the hell are we going to another one of these for, Jonah? Three hours, minimum. That’s three hours we could be learning new rep.”

“Mule, jobs come from these things.”

“Jobs come from people who hear us perform.”

“These parties are crawling with the most powerful musical people in this country.” He could be Lisette talking. “They need to see us up close.”

“Why?”

“To make sure we’re not savages. They don’t want us sneaking up behind Western civilization and mugging it at gunpoint.”

“I’m a whole lot darker up close, you know.”

My brother, in black jacket, fiddles with his tie. He smoothes down his lapels and inspects the results. He turns and glides my way until his face hovers inches from mine. He peers at me, inspecting the problem.

“Huh! Would you look at that! How come you never told me this, Joey?”

“You’ve got a lot of confidence in folks with a bad track record.”

“Come on, brother. We’re uplift . We’re moral advancement. The coming fashion.”

“Don’t want to be the coming fashion, Jonah.”

He cranes his neck back. “What do you want?”

“I just want to play the music I know how to play.”

“Come on, Joey.” He grabs my strip of tie out of my hand, wraps it around my neck, and begins tying.

“We’ll tell them you’re my chauffeur or something.”

At one evening gathering in late June, I’m standing in a corner, smiling preemptively, counting the rests until Jonah’s ready to leave. Over the burr of the conversation, like a radio station bleeding through static, something hits me. The party’s sound track switches in my head from ground to figure. The jazz coming through our host’s expensive speakers is state-of-the-art Village, the innovations Jonah and I so recently learned to follow.

I listen, the melody slipping me, like a name too familiar to recover. I close my eyes and surrender to this agonizing sense of known unknown. I’m sure I’ve heard the piece, tracing in advance its every modulation, but just as sure it’s nothing I could have heard before. I drift to the turntable. The prospect of cheating kills all chance of naming that tune.

A tall guy in green jacket and plastic horn-rims, skinny and pale even by these parties’ standards, stands by the hi-fi equipment, nodding in time to the music. “What is this?” I surprise us both with my urgency.

“Ah! That’s my man Miles.”

“Davis?” The trumpeter who dropped out of Juilliard ten years before we started and who went on to turn bebop cool. The man who, just a few years earlier, was beaten by police and jailed for standing outside a club where he was slated to play. A man so dark, I’d cross the street if I saw him coming.

“Who else?” Green Jacket says.

“Friend of yours?” First-name basis. A fair assumption, at this party of music’s elite.

But the face behind the horn-rims turns hostile. “I dig the music, man. You have problems with that?”

I back off, palms up, looking around for my big brother. Who does this skinny, pale guy think he is?

Even I could beat him senseless. My rage builds, knowing all it can do is back off. This punk owes me an apology, one he expects me to offer him. But all the while, it eats at me: more grating than my humiliation by this white Negro. The music. I need to know how I know it. I’ve heard lots of Miles Davis, but never this. Yet these scorched chord clusters, modal, atavistic, play through my head as if I wrote them. Then it dawns on me: transcription . The piece is not for trumpet; it’s for guitar. It isn’t Miles I recognize. It’s Rodrigo.

I take the record sleeve from the pale guy’s hands. My excitement keeps him from taking a punch at me.

I fumble with the cardboard, wondering if two independent people can stumble on the same fact independently, like those souls wandering in the scientific wilderness Da used to tell us about over dinner.

The sleeve calls the music Sketches of Spain . I’m the last man on earth to hear of it: a Juilliard School dropout’s treatment of Aranjuez. Music has to sit around for at least a hundred years before I get it. It feels to me at least that long since Wilson Hart and I sat down to see what was hiding in this tune, more than a century since we played four-hand and I learned to improvise.

Will was right about the Reconquista, right about the uses this tune could be put through. Yet everything about these trumpet-led sketches is different from what Will and I made that day—everything but the theme. The lines play back and forth from Andalusia to the Sahara and southward, all cultures picking one another’s pockets, not to mention the pockets of those who only stand and listen.

I listen, in tears, not caring if this white Negro sees me. I hear the loneliest man I’ll ever meet, transcribed from his world into another, loving a music that had no home, huddled in a practice room writing orchestral suites he knew would be the ridicule of any group he showed them to. And he showed them to me. A man who made me promise to write down the tune inside me. And to date, I’ve written down not a single note—exactly what’s in me.

I hear the fact in every reworked Spanish note: I failed to become my friend’s friend. I don’t know why.

I haven’t tried to contact him since our good-bye, and I know I won’t, not even when we go home tonight, my heart full of the man. I don’t know why. I know exactly why. That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion. This is my way: lieder recitals in Hartford and Pittsburgh, and Upper East Side dress-up balls full of the musical elite. The cardboard record sleeve shakes in my hands.

Andalusia via East St. Louis washes out of the speakers, the trumpet discovering its inevitable line, and all I can do is stand here, shaking my head, sobbing. “It’s okay,” I tell Green Jacket, his glare turned to fear.

“It’s cool. There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred.”

We see Da and Ruth at least once a week, up in Morningside, for Friday dinner, if we’re not on the road performing. Ruth’s growing up fast, under the care of our father and his fifty-year-old housekeeper, Mrs.

Samuels, against whom Ruthie now wages continuous war. She has a pack of girlfriends I can’t keep straight, who’ve tried to fix her hopelessly hybrid hair into a slightly limp globe and who dress her up in a shiny, vinyl way that Mrs. Samuels calls “criminal.”

Ruth’s all set to go to college in the fall, over at NYU Uptown, in University Heights, where she’s planning to study history. “History?” Jonah asks, surprised. “What possible use is there in studying that?”

“Not all of us can be as useful as you are, Jonah,” she mimics in her best FM announcer style.

We meet most of her inner circle one night, when they come by to drag Ruth to the movies, three black-dressing girls. The lightest of them makes Ruthie look vaguely Latina. They can barely contain their mirth at me and Jonah, and they start shrieking the moment Ruth follows them out the apartment and pulls the door shut. Ruth grows tighter with them until, over Da’s objections, the weekend outings become regular and she’s rarely there anymore when Jonah and I do make it uptown for Friday dinner. Over the course of the summer, we manage a full reunion only three times. But all four of us, and Mrs. Samuels, too, are sitting eating together in the same room in early August when Da announces, “We are going to Washington!”

Jonah is eating latke off the tip of his knife. “Who do you mean ‘we,’ Da?”

“We. Us. This whole family. Everyone.”

“First I’ve heard.”

“What’s in Washington?” I ask.

“Lots of white marble,” Ruth answers.

“There will be a great objection movement.”

Jonah and I exchange shrugs. Mrs. Samuels clucks. “You boys haven’t heard about the march? Where have you been keeping yourselves?”

Turns out everyone has been alerted but us. “Jesus, you two. There are leaflets all over town!” Ruthie shows off a little metal button, which cost her twenty-five cents and which is funding the enterprise. She’s bought one for each of us. I put mine on. Jonah does coin tricks with his.

Da holds up ten fingers. “The one-hundred-year marking of the Emancipation.”

“Which freed no one, of course,” our sister says. Da lets his gaze fall.

Jonah raises his eyebrows and scans the table. “Someone? Anyone? Please.”

Ruthie volunteers. “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mr. A. Philip Randolph has organized—”

“I see,” Jonah says. “And might anyone here know exactly when this manifestation is planned?”

Da lights up again. “We go down on the twenty-eighth. You come stay here the night before, so we can catch the early bus they are sending down from Columbia.”

Jonah flicks me a look. Mine confirms his. “Can’t make it, Da.”

Our father, the solver of cosmic puzzles, looks more confused than I’ve ever seen him. “What do you mean?”

“They’re busy,” Ruth sneers.

“We’re booked,” Jonah says.

“You have a concert? There’s no concert for August twenty-eighth on the list you gave to me.”

“Not a concert, really. Just a musical obligation.”

Da scowls. He looks like the famous bust of Beethoven, only angrier. “What kind of an obligation?”

Jonah doesn’t say. I could break rank, say I have no obligation. I’ll march for jobs and freedom. The instant lasts so long, all my crossed loyalties turn murderous. Then it passes, and I lose my chance of saying anything.

“You should give up this musical obligation. You should go with us for this March on Washington.”

“Why?” Jonah asks. “I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get?” Ruthie says. “Everybody’s going.”

“This is civil rights,” Da tells him. “This concerns you.”

“Me?” Jonah points at his chest. “How?” Trying to force Da to say what he has never, in our lives, come out and said.

“This march is the right thing to do. I am going. Your sister is going.” Ruth fiddles with her twenty-five-cent Freedom March button, incriminated.

“Da!” Jonah says. I stand and start stacking dirty plates. “Are you getting political on us in your old age?”

Da looks past us, a quarter of a century. “This is not political.”

“And your father isn’t old,” Mrs. Samuels says.

Ruth glares at the woman. “What’s wrong with politics?”

A week after the disastrous dinner, Jonah comes back late from Lisette Soer’s. Something has happened. He stands in our doorway, wavering. At first, I think he’s told her we aren’t going to her little gathering after all, that we have to go to Washington with our family for a march that concerns us.

Perhaps they’ve fought over this, even broken. I want to support him, to tell him how good he has always been. As good as his voice. Maybe even better. But his stare stops me.

“Well.” His voice sounds shaky and untrained. “It’s happened. She’s having a kid.”

I think, She’s seduced someone even younger than he is. Then I figure it out. “She’s pregnant?” Jonah doesn’t even acknowledge. I’m just distraction while he scans the apartment for a surface that will hold his weight. “Are you sure that you’re…”

He stops me with his eyebrows. “You trying to save my good name, Mule?”

I make him lime juice in hot water and sit on the floor across from him. It’s not what I think.

“A baby , Mule. Can you imagine!” He sounds like the boy who once scribbled the “Ode to Joy” under a photo filled with stars. “I told her, ‘The perfect thing about marrying me is that I can pass for the father, whatever color the kid is.’” His eyes gleam as if he’s onstage. His nostrils flare with that crazed intensity she has taught him. “You can’t say that about everybody, Joey!” He snickers and drops the cup. It shatters, and he laughs even harder. I clean up the mess while Jonah keeps talking. “She’s gone insane.

Off her nut. She just kept screaming, ‘Do you know what this will do to my voice?’”

He calls her repeatedly over the next few days but gets no answer. “She’s doing Così again. I’m going to go wait for her afterward.”

“Jonah. Don’t be crazy. A black guy waiting out on the street by the Met stage door? We don’t have the bail money.”

I talk him into waiting for her soiree, that intimate gathering of one hundred of her closest friends that keeps us from marching on Washington with Da and Ruth. By the time we arrive at the Verdian nightmare, things are in full swing. Lisette moves around the room in a violet strapless sheath that hangs to her by animal magic. She looks as if she’s never been touched by man. She flits from guest to guest, spreading license and joy—all but belting out the aria that will fatally break her weakened heart.

I know with one look into the room. We should never have come. We slink to the drinks table, keeping together. A black man in black-tie regalia stands behind the table. He takes our orders, all three of us avoiding eyes. Jonah’s glance keeps darting out to his walking secret, waiting for a chance to corner her.

She hits a lull in her rounds, and, cutting through the room’s cocktail haze, he materializes at her side. Her hands go out to push on his chest, but I can’t read the gesture. The room is riddled with conversation on all sides: a dozen manic topics crawling over one another. But raised on counterpoint and drifting near, I pick his tenor line out of the chorus of noise.

“Are you okay?”

“Brilliant. Why do you ask?”

“Do you think you should be—”

“That’s Regina Resnik over there. Isn’t she lovely? I’m so glad she’s gone over to mezzo. It so suits her.

Come with me, boy. I’ll introduce you.”

“Lisette. Stop it. I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

“Ooh. Where’d you learn all that fire?”

They lean against the wall, each aping casual. Both whisper, but even the whispers of a trained voice carry. He grips her wrist. On the wall behind Lisette hangs a photo of her as Dido, singing “When I Am Laid in Earth.” “Talk to me,” he orders.