Richard Powers (72 page)

I needed to get out of New York. By luck, I learned they were looking for barroom pianists for the season down in Atlantic City. Being dark would almost be an asset. I went down to a club that was advertising, a place called the Glimmer Room. The bar was something stuck in the La Brea tar pits—a complete sinkhole in time. Nothing had changed in the place since Eisenhower. The walls were full of signed black-and-white pub shots of comedians I’d never heard of.

I did a five-minute audition for a man named Saul Silber. My wrists still bothered me, and I hadn’t improvised since my days in a Juilliard practice room with Wilson Hart. But Mr. Silber wasn’t looking for Count Basie. The crowds had been ebbing in the Glimmer Room ever since the transistor. Woodstock was a wooden stake in its heart. The place was dying even faster than the city itself. Mr. Silber didn’t understand why. He just wanted to staunch the bleeding any way possible.

He was a cauliflower of a man. “Play me what the kids are listening to these days.” He might have been my father’s more assimilated uncle. He had the accent—the ghostly highlights of Yiddish filtered through Brooklyn—that Da’s kids might have preserved, had Da stuck with his people and had different kids.

“Something out of sight, why don’t you start me with.”

I waited for him to name a tune, but he just waved me to go, his fisted cigar a conductor’s baton. I sunk into a beefy “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” a tune I’d heard on the radio driving down. Since my brother had abandoned me for another country, I was safe in liking it. I savored the descending chromatic left hand, pumping it out in soulful octaves. Two strains in, Mr. Silber grimaced and waved his hands for a time-out.

“Naw, naw. Play me that pretty one. The one with the string quartet.” He hummed the first three notes of

“Yesterday,” with a schmaltz three years too late or thirty too soon. I’d heard the tune thousands of times. But I’d never played it. I sat there in the Glimmer Room at the height of my musicianship. I could have reproduced any movement of any Mozart concerto on first hearing, had there been any I hadn’t already heard. The problem with pop tunes was that, in those rare moments when I did recreate them at the piano, as a break from more études, I tended to embellish the chord sequences. “Yesterday” came out half Baroque figured bass and half ballpark organ. I covered my uncertainty in a flurry of passing tones. Mr. Silber must have thought it was jazz. He broke into a show biz smile as I hit the final cadence.

“I can give you one hundred ten dollars a week, plus tips, and all the half-price ginger ale you can drink.”

It felt like a lot of money, compared to washing dishes. I didn’t even negotiate. I signed a contract without consulting anyone. I was too ashamed to run it past Milton Weisman, who, in a just world, should have had his cut.

I rented an efficiency a short walk from the Glimmer Room. I got my things from the Village apartment out of storage, sending the piano to my father’s. He now had two keyboards and no one to play either of them. I set up our old radio next to my bed and tuned it to an AM countdown station. With my first two weeks’ salary, I bought a trash can full of LPs—not a single track older than 1960. And with that, I commenced my education in real culture.

I played from eight at night until three in the morning, with a ten-minute break every hour. My sets for the first few weeks were shaky. Mr. Silber got on me for playing too much Tin Pan Alley. “Enough with the old people’s music. Nix the Gershwin. Gershwin’s for people dying of shuffleboard injuries up at the Nevele. We want the new stuff, the mod stuff.” The man did a little dance step he mistook for the frug.

Had I been able to do a deafening “Purple Haze,” I would have, just to make Mr. Silber beg for a little Irving Berlin.

I learned more melodies in one month than I’d ever learn again. I could listen to an album of funk, folk, or fusion all afternoon and perform a reasonable facsimile that evening. My problem was never the notes.

My problem was how to keep my performances as free and rangy as the originals. Up until midnight, I sounded pathetically trim. But I counted on late-night fatigue to kick in and help me find the groove. The tunes I played into the early-morning hours strained toward rules of harmony they didn’t quite grasp. I let them yearn, rough, aching, and tone-deaf.

It took me months in the Glimmer Room to realize that what most people wanted from music was not transcendence but simple companionship, a tune just as bound by gravity as its listeners were, cheerful under its crushing leadenness. What we want, finally, from friends is that they have no more clue than we do. Of all tunes, only the happily amnesiac live forever in the hearts of their hearers.

Every hour I was off duty, I listened to the radio. I had two lifetimes to make up for. With my brother on the other side of the world, I moved through my days, humming all the hooks. Once I overcame my body’s clock and learned the secret of the graveyard shift, I could play deep into the night, unafraid of ever being heard. Sometimes the keyboard felt like one of those cardboard foldouts that teachers in poor school districts use in group music lessons. Even on slow nights, the Glimmer Room was so choked with clinking glasses, catcalls, wolf whistles, hoarse laughter, cigarette-thickened coughs, waitresses calling drink orders out to the bar, air-conditioning kicking on and off, and the fused buzz of lubricated shaggy-dog stories that no one could hear me even if, out of some drunken nostalgia, they were actually trying to. I was just part of the general background radiation. That’s what Mr. Silber was after. He didn’t even want me using the short stick on the baby grand’s lid. Hunched over the keys, I sometimes doubted that any sound came out of the instrument at all.

Even so, I felt guilty if I played a song the same way from one night to the next. You never knew what someone might hear by accident. I reinvented every fake-book trick of barroom pianists all the way back to slave days. A dry-ice version of “Misty.” A slightly dyspeptic “I Feel Good.” A “Love Child” agreeing to drop the paternity suit.

The Glimmer Room was white, as white as the dying resort town of Atlantic City pretended to be. But with the rest of dying whiteness, it wanted not to be. For the length of one dress-up evening anyway, the Glimmer Room’s cash customers wanted out from under their long sickness, the rectitude that had kept their spines straight and their rights preserved for generations. They wanted a night out. They saw me and longed for the blues that had evacuated the jook joints fifteen years earlier. Unable to hear half the notes over the din, they thought they could make out the strains of real soul.

I played what I imagined they wanted. All I had to draw on was an out-of-tune baby grand and an incomplete Juilliard education. But the thing about music is that its tool kit is so small. Everything comes from everywhere. No two songs are further apart than half cousins by incest. A raised third or an augmented fifth, an added flat ninth, a little short-leg syncopation, an off-the-beat eighth note, and any tune could pass over the line. Music at night in a noisy bar didn’t stop at two colors; it had more shades than would fit into the wildest paint box. If the Supremes could do the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook, even I could do the Supremes.

Tucked away in the corner of the Glimmer with a music-stand light, a tumbler of ginger ale, and a tip glass seeded with a few impudent dollar bills, I’d lose myself for weeks at a time. My wrists healed, and I filled with anonymous comfort. The great enemy was 2:00A .M., when I’d hit a wall, my brain bleeding and my fingers numb. I’d be in the middle of a tune by some suburban quintet who thought they’d invented the submediant, when I’d completely lose my way. My fingers persisted after I forgot where the tune was going, and free association would lead me into half-remembered Czerny études. For lack of material, I’d put the strains of unrequited love through augmentation and diminution, stretti and inversions, as if they’d escaped from The Well-Tempered Clavier. I fished up old Schubert songs from my Jonah days and dressed them up like Top 40 hits, padding out the set until quitting time. Then I’d go home to my efficiency and sleep until afternoon.

When I got too strange in my tonal mixings, Saul Silber rode me back into the corral. “Play what the kids want to hear.” “Kids” meant prosperous couples in their late thirties, looking for aura out in Pageant City.

“Play the chocolate stuff. The mahogany stuff.” Silber ordered music the way an interior designer bought books for nouveau riche libraries: by the size and color of the spines.

The mahogany stuff was richer than I could do justice to. But sometimes, as the place was closing up and the last few lushes downed one more round, I launched one of Mr. Silber’s requests and lost myself altogether. I’d layer it with improbable counterpoint until I was back in the unburned apartment of my childhood, my mother and father making all tunes and times lie down with one another. I’d feel myself sitting on the bench alongside Wilson Hart, in a practice room at Juilliard, tracing hidden bloodlines. Then one night, as my fingers were about to secede from my hand and find their way back at last to that source of all improvisation, the escaping slave, I looked up and saw him, sitting by himself, the first black man to enter the Glimmer Room other than to wash dishes or play piano.

He was bigger than when I’d seen him last, almost a decade before. His face was fuller and sadder, but by the look of his clothes, he’d done all right for himself. He wore a slight, sad grin, all alone in this place in listening to every note I made. The sight of the man so stunned me, I stopped playing in midchord and let out a whoop, in key. I lifted off the piano bench. Wilson Hart, the man who’d taught me to improvise, had somehow tracked me down, even to this godforsaken place, had found me where I couldn’t even find myself.

My fingers started up again, stuttering with shame. I’d made him a promise once, in a Juilliard practice room, to write down all the notes inside me. To compose something, music for the page. And here I was, a hack with a tip jar on my music rack, playing in a time-warp lounge, decomposing. But Wilson Hart had traced me here. He’d come by to listen, as if no time at all had passed since we’d last sat down to improvise together. All those notes were still in me somewhere, intact. Everything I’d ever lost would come back to me, starting with this man I’d never thanked for all he’d shown me. I wouldn’t lose the second chance.

My hands, flushed off the keys, landed back on the suspended chord and bent it open. I’d been strolling through a kicked-back “When a Man Loves a Woman,” mostly because I could make it last for fifteen minutes, the perfect antidote to the Nancy Sinatra navel lint a drunk had requested and then walked out on. When my hands landed back on the tune, they took possession, laying it out on a silver platter for my old friend. I was Bach at Potsdam, Parker at Birdland: there was nothing I couldn’t do with this simple chord sequence. I wove in every countersubject from Wilson’s and my shared past. I threw Rodrigo into the hopper, Wilson’s beloved William Grant Still, even bits of Wilson’s own compositions he had worked on so methodically in the years I knew him. I spun out references only he would place. For a few measures, keeping that ostinato figure as regular as a heartbeat—“when a man loves a woman, down deep in his soul”—I could have made any melody at all fit that one and complete it.

Across the dim room, the full figure of Wilson himself ate up my playing. His smile lost its sadness. His great arms clasped his table, and for a moment I thought he was going to lift it up in the air and twirl it in tempo. He recognized every message I threaded into the mix. I brought the thing into a hilarious homestretch, ending with a fat plagal cadence, a big old amen that left my old friend shaking his head in pleasure. In the Glimmer Room’s darkness, his eyes asked, Now how’d you learn to play like that?

I bounded up from the bench and made for him. It wasn’t time for my break, but Mr. Silber was free to replace me with the mod-chart crawler of his choice. Wilson’s head shake swelled as I came near, and as I closed the distance, I felt how much I’d missed his deep charity toward the species—the only man I’d ever felt completely comfortable with. He smiled in more quizzical surprise as I approached, a smile that only broke when he saw mine crack and fall. In the light of his table’s candle, Wilson Hart vanished and became someone from Lahore or Bombay—some land I’d never laid eyes on. I stopped ten feet from him, my past broken in front of me. “I—I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“But I am someone else,” the fellow protested with a bewildered, unplaceable accent. “And you play like no one else!”

“Forgive me.” I retreated to the safety of my piano. Of course it wasn’t Wilson Hart. Wilson Hart would never have entered a club like this, even by accident. He’d have been stopped before reaching the door.

I fell back on the bench and launched into a brutal, humiliated “Something.” When I dared to look up again at song’s end, the stranger was gone.

Maybe because they’d never heard any quotations quite as crazed, or maybe under the mistaken impression that I was inventing something, a small circle of patrons actually started to listen. They’d sit at tables close to the piano and lean forward when I played. I thought at first that there was something wrong. I’d gotten used to sending my phrases off into the farthest reaches of space. Now, somehow, word had gone out. I wasn’t sure I liked having an audience. All this avid listening reminded me too much of the world I’d come from. It disconcerted me.

Mr. Silber took me aside before I went on one night, toward the end of the summer. The season was ending, and I’d done nothing to prepare for winter. I felt incapable of moving out of Atlantic City. I was unable even to think of looking for work again. Returning to the music I’d betrayed was impossible. I suffered from a massive fatigue, many times bigger than my body. For the first time since birth, it felt simpler not to be alive at all. Mr. Silber held me by one shoulder and examined me. “Boy,” he said, or maybe “My boy.” He used them both. “You’ve got something.” He tried for some tone of approval that wouldn’t tip his hand. “I know we only contracted for the high season, but if you’re not going anywhere, we could probably keep using you.”