The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  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 2:00 A. 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.”


  I wasn’t going anywhere. This year or ever. All I wanted was to be used.

  “With your playing, we can bring in listeners year-round.”

  “I’m running out of ideas,” I warned him. “I’m out of touch.”

  “You know that stuff you’ve been playing? The crazy stuff? Your music? Just keep letting it flow. Wherever the spirit moves you! Make it up as you go along; then don’t change a single note. Now, I’ll have to cut you to one hundred, during the off-peak season, of course.” But in a preemptive move, lest I head down the road to play at the Shimmer Room, he promised that the ginger ale would, forever onward, be complimentary.

  The summer ended and the tourists disappeared. The town turned harder, inward. But Mr. Silber had guessed right: Enough people kept coming to the Glimmer Room to subsidize live music. I placed the faces of repeat offenders. Atlantic City residents: The concept seemed too sad to consider, though I now was one myself. Sometimes the regulars approached me during breaks. They’d speak in short, stressed words as if I couldn’t quite follow their tongue. As if I were in and out of heroinrecovery programs. I’d do my best to accommodate, keeping my voice low and my answers peppered with mangled Brooklyn street slang. Mumbling always works wonders—an authenticity all its own.

  One woman started showing up every weekend night. I noticed her the first time she came in, on the arm of a mallet-headed man four inches shorter than she was. I’d stopped noticing the striking women after a few months, but this one got me. She had that bruised hothouse flower look that always caught Jonah’s eye. I wanted to run and find him, lure him back to America with a full report of this chess-piece creature. Her face was small and flawless, the color of spun sugar, trimmed by high cheeks and a magazine nose, with unnervingly straight glossy black hair that fell in a pert Prince Valiant helmet. She dressed against the times, in dated colors, with a taste for white blouses and hunter green skirts above dark stockings and granny boots.

  She looked out of herself, as through a picture frame: Maybe she’d come to Atlantic City to take part in one of the beauty pageants and just stayed on. Maybe she was some third-generation clammer’s daughter, or the scion of a ruined gambling family. I guessed something different every night. I felt myself grow happy when she walked in. Nothing more. Just a good warm sense of playing the way I liked to, as if the best set of the night could now begin. I was happy, too, when the mallet-headed man stopped showing. I didn’t like how he steered her, using the small of her back as the wheel. Call it racism, but I didn’t like someone who looked like him liking my music.

  She’d sit at a tiny two-person table almost in the crook of the piano. The hostesses saved it for her. She’d sit and nurse an amaretto stone sour for hours. Men came by and mashed on her, sitting across the little table, their backs to me. But she always got them to leave within fifteen minutes. She wanted to sit by herself. Not alone, but with the tunes. I’d noticed it for weeks. Even when she stared into space, her straight black hair blocking her profile, I could still see it. She sang along. On almost every song I played, no matter how deep I buried the melody, she found and unearthed it. She even knew the second verses.

  I tested her, taking her out for spins without her ever knowing. Her repertoire was huge, bigger than mine. I was learning the tunes, often as late as the afternoon I came in to work. This velvet-haired woman knew them all already. When I slipped in a jazzed-up, transmogrified Schubert or Schumann—imposters passing, for an evening, in that smoke-filled room—she’d sit and listen, cocking her head, puzzled that there could be a pretty tune she’d never heard. I studied her for the covers she liked, the ones that made that linen-colored face go Christmas. She whispered almost gravely to “Incense and Peppermints.” But to “The Shoop Shoop Song,” she positively squirmed in place. “Monday, Monday” left her subdued, while “Another Saturday Night” got her hopping. It took me a while to figure out the key. But once I did, the pattern rarely failed. Her musical passion obeyed the simplest rule in the world: She wanted to shim-sham-shimmy with the black and tan.

  Once I figured out her songs of choice, I favored her with them. Without our exchanging a glance—for she had a heart-stopping ability always to be staring at some distant place whenever I looked up—I made her know I was playing for her. I ran whole musical commentaries to her evening, playing “Respect” when guys tried to pick her up, “Shop Around” when I caught her checking out the men, “I Second That Emotion,” early in the morning as she stifled a yawn. She loved when I dipped back into the thirties and forties—Horne, Holiday, all the contraband material Mr. Silber put on the forbidden list. She sat icy and statuesque, mouthing tunes from the year I was born. She herself couldn’t have dated to a minute before the stroke of 1950. But the further back in time I reached, the more she delighted in the journey.

  I stumbled onto her signature tune by trial and error. I’d played to her for about three months, maybe twenty visits all told. The two of us hadn’t shared anything beyond one or two accidental, instantly impounded smiles. Yet I knew, if only because she’d rarely left mine, that I’d been in her thoughts for weeks. We had some destiny and were only sniffing around it, deciding how to draw near.

  I’d been trying to put my left-hand strength to work by imitating Fats Waller, with limited success. Mr. Silber relaxed a little on the old stuff in the winter, when the clientele themselves turned nostalgic. I could get away with a few each night without reprimand. I lacked only Jonah to resuscitate those great lyrics by Andy Razaf, the prince of Malagasy, to turn my little fireside glow into barn burners. I sang them myself, under my breath, or watched them form on the lips of that white chess queen with the jet helmet hair. “Oh what did I do to be so black and blue?” Working through that glorious catalog, I came to “Honeysuckle Rose.” My arrangement was so filled out with nectar, pistils, and stamens that Mr. Silber wouldn’t have made out the tune, even if he’d been listening by mistake. But the effect on my private audience of one was electric. How she’d come to own the song, I couldn’t imagine. But at the first chords, she turned into the sultriest of silent sirens. The tune went right into her, and she couldn’t help herself. As I headed into the break, she chose that moment to smile right at me, cheeks tipped a little wickedly, lips announcing, Don’t need sugar; you just have to touch my cup.

  Yours? my eyebrows asked. She smiled, half coy and wholly terrified. Yes, mine.

  I asked her, with a head flick, to get up and sing. I hit a right-hand riff that freed my left to crook an index finger at her. She pointed to herself, and I nodded gravely. She pointed to the floor, that odd reflex gesture: Now? I nodded again, graver still: When else? I kept the harmonies vamping, circling around the leading tone, filling for the two measures it took her to work up the courage and get to her feet. I’m not sure what she was worried about. She was wearing a long, straight burgundy slip dress that clung to her greedily, and she moved like a colt discovering her legs. She stepped into the piano curve and swung into a sweet, clear, sturdy alto. “Every honeybee fills with jealousy.” Confection, goodness knows. My honeysuckle rose.

  One or two cocktail loungers, surprised by the sound of a singing voice, spattered applause when she finished. She gave a quick flushed bow and looked about to free herself from the snare. I stood up and stuck my hand out at her before she could bolt. “I’m Joseph Strom.”

  “Oh! I know!”

  “You do? Well, I don’t.”

  “Excuse me?” Her speaking voice shocked me: a honking Jersey nasal that completely disappeared when she sang.

  “I don’t know. Who you are, I mean.”

  She smelled of something sweet I couldn’t place. She blushed the color of hibiscus, twirling her hair’s razor blackness around a shaking finger. And Teresa Wierzbicki told me her name.

  Winter had set in meanly by then; the town was dead. But we began taking walks together along the ocean, as if it were the height of spring. She’d grown up near town and worked days at the saltwater taffy facto
ry, the thing, after shellfish, that had birthed this place. Taffy was her twenty-four-hour perfume. She got out of work at five, we’d meet at six, walk until seven, and I’d go in to work at eight. Without any planning, it became our twice-weekly routine. I could lose myself in listening to her, or watching her walk. She walked sideways, staring at me as if I might disappear, moving with a clumsy fur-lined wonder.

  I tried to take her to dinner a couple of times, but she seemed not to eat. She was shy when talking to me. “I hate my speaking voice,” she apologized to the sand under her feet. “You talk. I love it when you talk.” Mostly, Teresa wanted to breeze up and down the windy, deserted shore, scrawny and underdressed, leaning into the wind, humming constantly, and I, colder and more conspicuous than I can remember being in my entire life.

  I was afraid to be seen with her. This town was not New York, and walking on the beach was asking for trouble. In season, I’d have been lynched, Teresa would have been thrown back on solo beachcombing, and Mr. Silber would have had to close up shop. Off season, there were fewer people around to care. And still, we drew enough venom-filled look-aways to stock the Garden State Snake Farm for years to come. This was what my parents had lived with every day of their lives. Nothing in me could have loved strongly enough to survive it.

  The one time we were actually accosted, by a spreading middle-aged man who looked as if he had little more left to fear from the threat of mongrelization, Teresa let loose with such a torrent of invective—something about Christ on the cross, gonads, and a meat hook—that even I wanted to turn and run. At her yells, the man backed away, arms in the air. We walked away from the spot, mock-casual. I was stunned into silence, until Teresa giggled.