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 while
d 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.
In September, I gave you a theremin. I had painted small red flowers and small blue flowers and small pink flowers on the panels. I had drawn curlicues in gold ink. By lamplight, I had polished the antennas. I was resting against the kitchen counter as you stepped behind the device, balanced on heels, and you extended your right hand. The theremin yowled at you. You withdrew your hand. You looked at me. You extended your hand again, and again the theremin yowled. You were still looking at me. You were a violinist. You were a violinist with serious, dark eyes. I laughed at my own doggedness; your theremin stayed in a corner of my office. I took the violinist dancing.
At the end of October, America collapsed.
FOUR
TASTE THE FLOOR
IF THE APOCALYPSE COMES, I would not know. In this small steel room, in a boat, on the sea, there is no way to tell if a volcano has belched forth from under Budapest, if the waters have engulfed Venice, if the world has split in two along the line of the Greenwich meridian. Perhaps a leviathan has risen at Stockholm, or a behemoth at Lisbon, or all of Africa has melted, like crayons under a too-hot sun. I do not know. I rely on Red to bring me news. Red relies on the wireless. And if the radio goes dead? If there is a flood, an earthquake, a meteor? We would not know, bobbing here. The sirens would not wake us. The groans would not reach us. Nobody delivers the newspaper. The clouds gather, some days, and then on other days they do not. Red brings me food, and then on other days he does not. It has always been this way. This is not a military ship, strict and regimented. It is just a cargo boat travelling across the water, in which there was room to stow me.
I have not eaten in almost two days. Has Red forgotten me? I wonder if there has been a mutiny. I wonder if there are coyotes outside my door.
IT WAS A LITTLE LIKE THIS, the 1929 Crash. I was alone in my apartment. I did not know that men in ties were leaping from Wall Street windowsills. I had begun creating the fingerboard theremin: a device that’s played upright, like a sort of electric cello. I was searching for a slotted screwdriver. I had set it down somewhere and now I could not find it. I ransacked my rooms. I remember I knocked over a potted lily and then in frustration poured the rest of the soil out onto the carpet. I called down for an egg sandwich but no one picked up the phone. Finally, crazy with irritation, I marched downstairs, past the hotel’s shuttered restaurant, and across the road to the hardware store, the excuse for a hardware store, the little shop on the corner that seemed to sell only brass doorknobs and nails for hanging pictures. The owner was stout, with two baby slaloms of black hair parted exactly in the middle.
“Slotted screwdriver,” I said to him.
The expression on his face was one of terror and bewilderment. I did not know why.
“Is everything all right?” I asked.
He nodded. His eyes remained glazed, glazed like the patina on a porcelain fawn. “How many?” he said.
“How many what?”
“Screwdrivers.”
I fixed him with my severest glower. He did not seem affected. “One,” I said.
He nodded again. It was clear that something was affecting this mole-man. I couldn’t tell if it was miracle or calamity. Had he just been robbed? Was his wife in labour? I allowed my glower to dissipate. “Please,” I said.
The man found a screwdriver. He held it out to me like a dagger. I grasped it by the end.
I paid and got the hell out of there. I went across to the bakery. The door was locked. I rattled it. “Hello!” I called. I really wanted an egg sandwich. I leaned my head against the door’s glass. I took a deep breath. With the screwdriver in my hand, I went back into the Plaza Hotel, climbed the stairs to my room, let myself in. I knelt beside a modulator and removed the mounting. I felt a bloom of deep satisfaction. I disappeared into the afternoon.
It was nightfall when I looked up from the fingerboard theremin. The room was almost completely dark. I moved to stand but my knees shrieked in pain; instead I hobbled to an armchair and sat down. My eyes stung from squinting. I closed them. I rested in the cushions. Behind my eyelids I could see the theremin revolving, doubling, connections joining.
I blinked and looked at the time. After eight o’clock. After eight o’clock and not a single caller. Where was everybody? Normally I would have four, six, ten visitors over the course of the day: students, guests of students, Schillinger barging in with a new chapter of his book. But there had been no one. My stomach made a molten sound. I picked up the phone to ring up an egg sandwich. Still no one was picking up. I sighed. I recalled the tin of potato chips I had finished the night before. I hauled myself to my feet and to a calendar, nailed to a closet door. Was it a holiday? Was it Presidents’ Day? Armistice Day? American Easter? Was it Halloween? Halloween was in October; that holiday with carved squash and fancy costume. But it was not yet Halloween. It was Tuesday, October 24. Outside my window, New York City appeared normal. It was black and white and violet.
Pash came in then, without knocking. He had an enormous briefcase, the largest briefcase I had ever seen him carry, big enough that I could have curled up inside it. His face was drawn. He stopped at the edge of my living-room carpet. The rug was covered in earth and the remains of a potted lily. “What happened here?” he said.
“I have no idea.”
We looked at each other.
“Did something happen out there?” I asked.
Pash showed me his teeth. It was a gesture of exasperation. He came toward me. He put down his briefcase. He snapped on the radio.
I stood and I listened.
THE CHANGES WERE HARD to categorize. Most of my students stayed away only for a couple of days. Henry Solomonoff started to visit even more often. Rosemary Ilova never came back.
I rang your house on Saturday afternoon. “She’s not at home,” your father said. He had the tone of a weary adventurer: respectful, but tired. “Would you like to leave a message?”
“For Clara?”
“Yes, for Clara.”
“Tell her it was Leon.”
“Which Leon, please?”
“Leon Theremin.”
“Ah,” he said. “The scientist.”
“Yes.”
“Will there be anything else?”
I drew a circle on the pad beside the phone. “Does one say ‘Happy Halloween’?”
“What?” your father said. “You mean on Halloween?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose.”
I put down the pencil. “Please also wish her a happy Halloween.”
I was restless. I went out into the city.
I wanted to do something with myself, with my body.
At first I thought maybe I was going to a club. Maybe I would go dancing, with strangers, while the markets shuddered. I walked south, downtown, but as I passed corner after corner I kept on walking, kept on into downtown, continuing under the sagging awnings and blurs of electric light, through clouds of steam; I found I was walking beyond midtown, beyond the nightclubs, past empty restaurants, darkened banks, old men dozing in cars; past Union Square, where a drunkard had just staggered out of the fountain; all the way to Chinatown, where many of the doorways were painted gold or red, and the people moved with a di
fferent tension in their shoulders, in their hips, as if they needed to stay unfamiliar to each other.
Above a stall selling jade trees I saw a sign that read WING-CHUN KUNG-FU.
Almost before thinking about it, I slipped inside.
In Leningrad, the kwoon had always seemed slightly illicit—the hideout for a group of bandits, a Far Eastern cult. There was less mystery here. The stairwell was coal-black stone, swept clean. The upstairs door was smoked glass, with a painted Chinese symbol. I went through and found a wide, square loft, high-ceilinged. The gym felt like a workshop, like a factory. A line of men repeated a sequence of low kicks. Two older students stood wrist to wrist, practising the hand dance. Behind them a group of children passed through the first form, half-expert, half-clumsy, facing a chrysanthemum shrine. The air smelled of frying oil and cut flowers. There were Negro students, Caucasian students, a tall turbaned Sikh talking to a boy who stood up to his chest.
The man who was their sifu saw me by the entrance. He approached me slowly, as if he wanted to give me enough time to examine him, or to prepare my greeting. He was older than my Leningrad sifu, older than my parents, old in the manner of the toothless old men who spent all day at the barber’s. Only he wasn’t toothless, he wasn’t stooped; apart from a small paunch, his body was a straight line, a strong torso under drooping cheeks.
“Hello,” I said, my voice vanishing in the room.
He nodded.
I bowed. I touched my right fist to my open left hand.
He gave half a smile and bowed as well. Then he crouched at my feet, where a marmalade-coloured cat was meandering. He picked the cat up. “Do you know kung-fu?” he said. His accent was mostly New York, only very faintly something else.
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