Us Conductors (11 page)

WHEN WE HAD FINISHED
our drinks we went outside. The sky was a dark midnight blue, that strange nighttime blue of big cities, and it seemed so clean. Couples jostled past us, men in dinner jackets and women in dresses, hats, gold at their wrists. They were going dancing. We watched them. “Do you dance?” you said. It was just a question.

“I do,” I said. I tried to speak with the same transparency.

“Do you?”

Your face lit up. “Yes.”

A moment passed. “Would you like to go dancing?”

You hesitated for a second. I don’t know if it was because of me, or of some other beau, or the thought of your parents at home. Then your face seemed to apologize for the hesitation, and you said: “That’d be nice.”

I glanced at the ground, where your feet stood beside my feet, and I thought the silly thought that in that second we were standing perfectly in our own footprints.

I took you to the Make-Believe. It had the largest ballroom in the world, a room as big as Rybinsk’s town hall, the ceiling strung with paper lanterns and the walls done up in stars. We left our coats with the twins who kept the coats, I tipped the maître d’, and he brought us straight to a table and we straightaway got up. For the first time in the history of the world, since the seas cooled and birds alighted in the trees, Clara Reisenberg and Lev Sergeyvich Termen danced together. There was no band at the Make-Believe—there were two gramophones and their minders, a man and a woman, a library of records visible from the floor. The couple moved back and forth across the shelves, choosing the next song. They chose swing from New York and swing from Chicago, swing from London and Paris and Montreal. We stepped together and apart, leapt, grinned. I clasped you in my arms and I threw you away.

Later, breathless, we leaned on the bar and drank long glasses of water. “Now what?” you asked. We grabbed our coats and went to the Roseland. The club was just heating up. A man tossed his partner three feet into the air. A woman slipped beneath her partner’s legs and rose up like a geyser. You asked me where I had learned to dance. I told you in Leningrad, that we did not have jazz but the bands played other quick songs. You danced the Charleston and I followed. You reminded me of Katia—but just for an instant, the way the rain reminds you for a moment of a particular spring. I had been trying not to think of her, the woman who had followed me on a ship. She was in New Jersey. She was, I told myself, a million miles away.

I asked you where you’d learned to dance. You said you had always known and twirled in your skinny dress. The air seemed to whistle. I placed one hand at the small of your back and held one of yours with the other. You breathed against my chest and the source of that breath seemed so close by, rising and falling
in smooth suddennesses. We were skipping ahead of our footprints. The band played a drumroll and my heart played a drumroll. You stepped on my toe. “Whoops,” you said. The bandleader lifted his baton. The trumpeters premiered a rare new racket.

A little while after, you stood fanning your face with a menu. I was sweating in my suit. I couldn’t tell the Roseland’s painted flowers from its real ones. You put down the menu and massaged your right arm near the elbow. There was a shadow behind your eyes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” you said. You shook your arm out and summoned a crooked grin. The grin was unpersuasive at first but then abruptly you seemed to believe it. The grin said:
Now what?
I looked around. The other dancers didn’t seem real. They were paper dolls. I looked at my hands and then I looked at you.

We took a taxi to La Conga. We bought half pineapples full of juice and tipped gracious strangers’ rum inside. I sipped through the straw and gazed out into the room, where the men’s cufflinks were flashing in the lights. There was a woman on the little stage, backed by horns, gyrating to the flexing sax chords. She wore apples, pears and a banana on her head. My first pineapple had been at the Petrograd Agricultural Fair in 1921. My first banana had been in London, three years earlier, divided in two and served as a
split
. You had the hiccups. A man with a brush moustache was playing a pair of tall drums with the flats of his hands, sending the rhythm jumping into our shoulders and heels. We danced so hard my shoes came untied. It was not elegant, not deft, not courtly. We danced so hard my shoes came untied. I wondered if this was what it was like in Cuba. I decided that one day we should go; the two of us.

THAT SUMMER, WE MADE IT
a habit. Once or twice a week I picked you up or you buzzed my door and off we’d whiz, in a taxicab or sometimes a subway car, through the rain or sunset. Perhaps I’d be tired after a long day of work, or you’d be bored, arm hurting from your hours of practice; but the moment we were side by side, looking at each other’s dancing shoes, these reluctances would scatter. “To the Onyx!” we told the cabbie. “To the El Morocco!” “To the Nouveau Palais!”

We danced everywhere. We danced to Benny Goodman’s band at the Philadelphia. We danced to Emile Coleman’s lot at the Green Room. We danced at the Winter Garden, with its horses and clowns and circus stripes. At the Sugar Cane there were plank floorboards, hot barbecue; at the Strand roof, illicit champagne and ginger ale by the bottle. Men’s jackets bulged with flasks, ladies’ gin nestled against chair legs. At the Country Club we played ping-pong, we danced the Blackbottom with Belle Livingstone, luxuriant in red pyjamas, right beside us. We went to Harlem: to the Savoy, on Lenox Avenue; to the Cotton Club, where there were usherettes in pink hunting coats, and a band with a blind piano player, and coloured girls, dancing as if they had been listening to those songs all their lives. At Small’s Paradise, where Charleston-ing waiters served Chinese food, the music was better than anywhere else. Negroes danced with whites as if the Revolution had come to America. We threw our partners, and caught them, and we darted and dipped and breathed hard. I felt richer than I ever had.

Sometimes we’d sit knee to knee and yell into each other’s ears, through the hullabaloo. I remember your earrings dancing on your ears. I remember you told me you wanted to travel.

“Where will you go?” I said.

“I don’t know,” you shouted. “Anywhere, everywhere. Paris, Casablanca, Siam. Why not? I could hop on a tug to Bermuda, ride an elephant in India. I’m done school. I don’t have any obligations, not really. Play some recitals, some premieres. Make some money and book a ticket to Calcutta.”

“Beethoven on the Ganges,” I murmured.

You leaned closer. “
What
?”

“Beethoven on the Ganges!” I yelled.

You grinned. The room was filled with happy tumult. “Or Stravinsky, or Dvořák. Wouldn’t that make a scene?” You grabbed for your glass of cold something. “Where would
you
go, if you could travel?”

“Me?”

“You.”

I laughed. “I came here, Clara. I’d come right here.”

You clicked your tongue. “Leon, you look like you need an elephant.”

Then we danced some more, circling and bumping on the floor, and there were moments in the songs when your face was merry, and moments when your face was serious, or far away.

I thought to myself:

There are twelve notes on the chromatic scale. But music is limitless
.

FOR ALL OUR REVELS
, there was one dance hall that we did not visit: Texas Guinan’s 300 Club. We heard about it together, jammed into a cab with some friends of Schillinger’s. They were stinking drunk. “How about Guinan’s new place?” they said.

“Who?” I asked.

The man hiccupped. “So much for that!”

“What do you mean?” you said.

“Texas Guinan’s 300 Club,” mumbled the woman, “is the most extraordinary and exclusive spot in all the boroughs of New York.”

“But you need an invitation to get in!” said her partner. “We figured mister Russian rocket scientist’d have one.”

“No,” I admitted.

The woman twisted in her seat. She dipped woozily, almost intimately, toward our faces. “It’s got the best music, the best dancers, the best—everything. Live parrots.” She burped. “Magnolias for sale, these Spanish guitarists who roam around. If you fall asleep the waiters blow trumpets in your ears!”

“Sounds like a good time, huh? It’s the promised land,” said the man. “Except the location is a
secret
.”

In the darkness of the cab you caught my eye, or I caught yours, and I decided:
I will find out where it is, and I will win an invitation from Texas Guinan, and then one day, Clara Reisenberg, when we have something to celebrate, I will take you to the 300 Club
.

I would save this pleasure; I would keep the treasure buried. We would have celebrations yet.

BY NIGHT IT WAS
the foxtrot and the shimmy. By day it was deal-making. A dozen deals a week, signed with handshake and signature, with raised glass and copies in triplicate. There were rich deals and poor deals. Simple, speculative, ambitious, aggressive, convoluted and crazy deals. Some of them were big-deal deals. Some were not. We signed my soul away and then signed it right back, richer. Let RCA take the theremin: let them raise up billboards in Boston, Chicago, Detroit. “We are forming a new corporation,” Pash would announce, flourishing paper, spraying
ink, cracking champagne over the bow of a new entity: the Theremin Corporation, the Migos Corporation, the Theremin Patents Corporation. Corporations American, Panamanian, Canadian, real and false, shell companies and whatever hides in shells. The details were Pash’s, the inventions mine. Every time I saw my handler, his silhouette seemed wider, taller, darker, as if it had been gone over in charcoal. I remember how he appeared at my door one night, when I was on my way out to see you.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” I said, cheerfully.

“Out where?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, a little mockingly. “On the town.”

He didn’t seem frightening, just formidable—an officer at peak efficiency. He wore a watch the colour of a Morgan dollar and a ring the colour of a Chervonet. His eyes had the glint of safety deposit boxes.

“A girl?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, and he nodded, without the slightest leer. I finished doing my tie. “Do you need me for something?”

He didn’t answer. I took down my coat, put on my hat. “Pash?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

So I left him there.

While you and I wheeled under chandeliers, I trusted Pash to take care of everything. While we whiled away our days, dreaming of dancing, he sold exclusive patent rights, licensed partial patent rights, engineered royalty payments, purchase options, dividends. The space-control theremin, the radio watchman, even my early television work—all of it split up, subdivided, sold and resold to men in windowless rooms. We jitterbugged beneath the Pirates’ Den’s netting and Pash wrote names in rows, and numbers in columns, and I never looked, never asked, because I was looking at and asking you.

At the Ritz-Carlton’s Japanese Roof Garden, which was neither a garden nor on the roof, my pockets were stuffed with banknotes. You were at the other end of my arm. We ate gigantic Malpeque oysters and drank glasses of cold white wine. There was a gypsy guitarist. He strummed his instrument as though he was shaking a secret loose. We burst, midstep, into song.