Richard Powers (82 page)

The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.

Teresa wanted nothing from the gift except to please. That’s what destroyed me. She thought I missed playing, that I needed some lifeline to keep me afloat. A woman with her work history should have thrown me out on my ear. But so long as she could help me keep my music alive, she didn’t care if I ever went back to work. We had our piano. For a while, we sang almost every evening, now that my performing didn’t get in the way. For the first time since childhood, I played for no reason but playing.

When Jonah and I had toured, we were never alone. We were always answerable, first to the notes on the page and then to the bodies in the auditorium. Even when we rehearsed, twisting around the tune in lockstep, other ears were already listening between us. Teresa and I were all alone. We collided into each other, faltering and finessing our way across a finish line, each deferring to the other. We had no printed notes to prop us or impede us, no listening ear, no living audience to interfere. Nobody to hear but each other.

She’d get sullen and apologetic when we didn’t swing. She had this little stutter-step thing she’d picked up from Sarah Vaughan, who’d picked it up from Ella Fitzgerald, who’d picked it up from Louis Armstrong, who’d picked it up from the deep recesses of his orphanage’s singing school. I’d follow out the phrases, thinking, She’s never going to make it. It made her nuts every time I’d try to hook up with her hiccups. She was all rhythm and line, the syncopated flight from the rest of her life. I was all harmony and chord, packing each vertical moment with sixths, flatted ninths, more simultaneous notes than the texture would bear. But somehow, we made music together. Our tunes turned their back on the wide outside, willfully ignorant and almost too beautiful, some nights, in pleasing no one but their makers.

While Teresa was at the factory packing taffy, I read the news or watched daytime television. I no longer practiced, aside from picking up a song or two in the late afternoon, before Teresa came home. I took the time to learn what had happened in the world since the death of Richard Strauss. The television jumbled my viewing days, until I didn’t know how many months had passed. I watched the My Lai trial and the crumbling of peace with honor. I watched Wallace get shot and Nixon get reelected and go to China. I watched the Arabs and Israelis recommence their eternal war, pushing the world to the unthinkable brink. I watched Biafra die and Bangladesh, Gambia, the Bahamas, and Sri Lanka get born.

I sat still while a handful of pre-Americans declared their own breakaway, recovered country, which lasted for seventy days. And I felt nothing but anesthetized shame.

For one brief moment, it was nation time , crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come. Then, just as quickly: no nation. Systematically, the U.S. government buried Black Power. Newton and Seale, Cleaver and Carmichael: The movement’s leaders were jailed or driven from the country. Scenes from Attica leaked out, an inferno deep enough to match any nation’s.

George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin. He was exactly Emmett Till’s age, my brother’s age. The official report said he was leading an armed revolt. Fellow inmates said he was set up and murdered. SNCC was broken up for parts and the Panthers destroyed by COINTELPRO.

Somewhere out there, my fugitive sister and Robert were hiding, among the other twice-defeated, all those who worked to steal their country back and were destroyed in the process.

When I could not dose myself with current events, I flipped through sitcoms, game shows, and soaps.

Nothing Jonah and I were guilty of in all our performing years could match, in sheer flight from the present’s nightmare, the best of contemporary culture. Armstrong died, and then Ellington. The heartbeat of what should have been my country’s music changed. The thing that replaced it, the official sound track for all seasons that overgrew every cultural niche like kudzu claiming an abandoned vehicle, declared that rhythm consisted of slamming down hard on beats two and four and harmony meant adding a daring seventh now and then to one of two combating chords. There was no place in earshot I wanted to live. It was impossible even to think about performing in front of other people, ever again.

“Have you ever thought about composing?” Teresa asked one night as we were drying dinner dishes.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I can get a job.”

“Joseph, that’s not what I’m asking. I just thought that maybe, with all this time, you might have something…”

Something inside me, worth writing down. It hit me—why I was afraid to get another nightclub job. I was afraid that Wilson Hart might really show up someday, wherever I was noodling, and ask to see the portfolio of pieces I’d promised him to write. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. I was destined to disappoint everyone I loved, everyone who thought there might be something in me worth composing.

Terrie’s patience with me was more deadly than any racial assault. I went out the next day and bought a box of pencils and a sheaf of twenty-inch cream-stock music paper. I bought paper with grand staff systems, paper with treble staffs and piano systems, paper with unmarked, unjoined staffs—anything that looked remotely serious. I had no idea what I was doing. I stacked up the blank scores on the electric piano and lined up the pencils in neat rows, each one sharpened to a lethal weapon. Teresa’s barely suppressed excitement at my fortress of composition supplies hurt me more than my father’s death.

All day long while I waited, jittery, for Teresa to come home, I pretended to write music. Fragments of phrases crawled in clumps here and there across the cream stock, like spiders making nests in the corners of abandoned summer homes. I’d jot down a strain, motif by motif. Sometimes the strains would collide together into near melodies, every articulation literally spelled out. Sometimes they stayed nothing more than a series of tetrachords without rhythmic values or bar lines. I was writing for no ensemble, no instrument at all, not even piano and voice. My imagined audience was spread all over the map, and I could not tell if I was writing pop songs or thorny, academic abstraction. I never erased a note. If a phrase hit a wall, I’d simply start over again somewhere else, on an unused staff. When a page filled up, I’d flip it over and fill the back. Then I’d start another.

These were the longest days of my life, longer by far than my days in a Juilliard practice room, longer, even, than the days I’d spent at the side of my father’s hospital bed. I worked it out at one point: I was writing down about 140 notes an hour—two and a third triads every three minutes. Sometimes the act of filling in a single note head could absorb me for half an afternoon.

My bits of graphite scratching remained stubbornly wooden. The puppet refused to sit up and speak. But now and again, at enormous intervals, always when I’d lost track of myself and forgotten what I was after, the edge of something truly musical would shake loose. I’d feel myself racing ahead of myself, out beyond the phrase, into the next arc of a line whose accidentals were there even before my pencil could fix them. My whole body would rally, drawn up into the forward motion, throwing off the leadenness I’d felt for years, without feeling. I’d flood with more ideas than I could hold, and I had to force my pencil into a panicky shorthand just to keep up. For the length of this rush of notes, I owned music’s twelve tones and could make them say what life had only ever hinted at.

But then I’d make the mistake of going back and playing these self-propelling themes out loud. After a few chords, I’d begin to hear. Everything that I wrote down came from somewhere else. With a rhythm slightly bobbed or taken out, a pitch swapped or altered here and there, my melodies simply stole from ones that had used and discarded me sometime in the past. All I did was dress them up and hide them in progressive dissonance. A Schütz chorus we sang at home, pieces from Mama’s funeral, the first Schumann Dichterliebe , the one that Jonah loved, split ambiguously between major and relative minor, never to resolve: There wasn’t an original idea in me. All I could do—and that, only without knowing—was revive the motives that had hijacked my life.

When Teresa finally did come home after work, she’d try clumsily to mask her thrill at my growing stack of penciled-up pages. She still couldn’t read music very well, and there wasn’t much music there for her to read. Sometimes, even before she’d changed out of her briny factory clothes, she’d stand at the piano and ask, “Play a little for me, Joseph.” I’d play a bit, knowing she’d never hear the rip-offs hidden in it.

My scribbles made Teresa so happy. Her $120 weekly wage was barely enough to support her on her own. But she gladly floated me, and would go on doing so forever, all in the belief that I was making new music for the world.

Our shared fantasy of two-part harmony would start up again each night, tiding us over until the next morning. Sometimes the two of us could find nothing better to do together than watch television. Dramas about white people suffering the hardships of rural life, miles from civilization, years ago. Comedies about working-class bigots and the lovably hateful things they said. Epic sporting conflicts whose outcomes I can’t remember. The national fare of the 1970s.

Teresa didn’t like watching the news, but I pushed. Eventually, she caved in and let us watch David Brinkley over dinner. My sense that the world was ending slowly died out, leaving me with the sense that it already had. I fell into the most powerful of addictions: the need to witness huge things happening at a distance. I had the zeal of a late-day convert, my whole sheltered life to make up for. Here were storm and stress, all the violent, focused disclosures of art, on a scale that left the music I was fiddling with flat and pointless.

We were watching one night when I found myself staring down Massachusetts Avenue, past the drugstore where I’d once bought an ID bracelet for Malalai Gilani and failed to get it inscribed. My path up to that very evening seemed, for a moment, to be the piece I was so desperate to write, the one I’d set down in memory during all those hours in the practice rooms at Boylston. Teresa was the woman Malalai had grown into, or Malalai the girl I’d thought Teresa had been. Of course the bracelet wasn’t inscribed; it had been waiting for my adulthood to inscribe it.

The camera panned down Mass. Ave., the tunnel of my life unfolding on Teresa’s eleven-inch television screen. Then by some nonsensical cut meant to deceive those who’d never lived there, the camera jumped impossibly from the Fens to Southie, the other side of Roxbury. Children were getting off a bus.

The voice of invisible network television authority declared, “Children bussed to their first day of school were met with…” But the sound track meant nothing. We had only to look: rocks and flying sticks, a fury-twisted mob. Teresa clamped down on my arm as children outside the arriving busses gave a delighted, drunken first-day welcome: “Hey, nigger! Hey, nigger!”

It read like some primordial, inbred scene that was supposed to have died out in the swampy South, back before my childhood’s end. I forgot what year we were in. This year. This one. Teresa’s eyes stared straight ahead, afraid to look at me, afraid to look away. “Joseph,” she said, more to herself than me. “Joe?” As if I could be her explanation. A white girl from Atlantic City, watching this scene. A girl whose father had for years told her where all the trouble came from. And in her look, I saw what I looked like to her. She wanted the news story to end and knew it couldn’t. She wanted me to say something. Wanted to pass over, as if nothing needed saying.

I pointed at the screen, still excited by the sight of my old neighborhood. “That’s where I went to school.

The Boylston Academy of Music. Six blocks up that street and make a left.”

I’d known for a long time, but it took me years to admit. War. Total, continuous, unsolvable. Everything you did or said or loved took sides. The Southie busses were only news for a quarter of a minute. Four measures of andante. Then Mr. Brinkley went on to the next story—the crisis in the space program. It seemed humankind had walked on the moon half a dozen times and brought back several hundred pounds of rock, and now it didn’t know what else to do with itself or where else in the universe it wanted to go.

I lay next to Teresa that night, feeling the length of her tense with me. She needed to say something, but she couldn’t even locate the fact inside herself. In that silence, we belonged to different races. I didn’t know what race I belonged to. Only that it wasn’t Ter’s.

“God should have made more continents,” I said. “And made them a lot smaller. The whole world, like the South Pacific.”

Teresa had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t sleep that night. I know—I was awake to hear her. But when we asked each other the next morning, we both said we’d slept fine. I stopped watching the news with her. We went back to singing and playing cribbage, working at the factory and plagiarizing the world’s great tunes.

Another year collapsed, and I heard nothing from my sister. Wherever she and Robert were hiding, it was nowhere near my America. If they’d risen again in the already-amnesiac seventies under assumed names, they did not risk notifying me. Somewhere during those missing months while I’d watched TV, I’d turned thirty. I’d celebrated Jonah’s the year before that, sending him a little cassette of Teresa and me performing a Wesley Wilson song, “Old Age Is Creeping Up on You,” with Teresa doing a scary Pigmeat Pete and me supplying a little Catjuice Charlie in the response. If Jonah ever got the tape, I never heard. Maybe he thought it was in bad taste.