Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  We rolled up the carpet and propped it on the back veranda. Lucie offered to fan it dry, which made Slominsky crack up again. We went back to the living room and sat in a circle, Indian-style, the drunks with towels over their heads. You seemed a little star-struck, Clara, with a stinking Glenn Miller. It was 3:00 p.m. and I needled them for already being so far gone.

  “What time did you start?”

  “What time would you say, Nick? Eight?”

  “Oh, seven. Six-thirty.”

  “Early birds,” Clara murmured.

  This provoked another giggling fit. “Honey, are you kidding?” Glenn gasped. “We’ve been binged since yesterday.”

  They didn’t want to sleep. They wanted to make chicken soup. They sent me out for parsnips and when I got back you were crowded around the stove, the four of you, plus Missy and Bugs had shown up, and Rosalyn, and Henry Solomonoff with his pet budgerigar, Hamburger. We must have been a strange sight. Ladies in pearls, chopping carrots and celery; drunks in tuxedos, stirring pots of chicken bones; a yellow bird reeling around the room, chirruping “Bingo!” Bugs and I made tea biscuits, flour splashed on our chests. I remember how you ran the water so I could rinse off my hands. Then we sat at the table, waiting. Slominsky fell asleep. Glenn suggested Rosalyn throw another bucket of water on him. On the radio they were talking about Japan. Missy said, “Let’s play some music.”

  There was one piano on the main floor, one upstairs. Bugs sat down at the first and Glenn clapped his hand on the piano-mover’s shoulder. “Play loud, my Negro friend.”

  Bugs said, “Call me Bugs.”

  The rest of us clattered to the second storey. Lucie and Rosalyn at space-control theremins, Solomonoff at the fingerboard. “That’s enough of the damn theremins!” Glenn yelled. Missy found a trombone. Hamburger was a soloist. Glenn plunked himself down behind the Steinway. “What about you?” he asked.

  “Violin?” you said.

  I was already on my way upstairs. Under my bed lay two violin cases, like relics. One of the violins was my childhood fiddle; I kept it under my arm. “Here,” I said, coming down the steps, and handed you the other case.

  “You play?” you said.

  “I did.”

  “ ‘Stardust’!” Glenn declared. “C major!”

  “What?” Bugs yelled from below.

  “ ‘Stardust’!” Glenn shouted.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Dust of the Stars’!”

  “Dust off the what?”

  “ ‘Stars’!”

  And Glenn began pounding out the notes.

  It was a jubilant cacophony. The theremin players were accustomed to this kind of free-for-all, usually late at night, and they leapt into the fray. So did Bugs and Missy, on piano and trombone, a whole floor between them. But you and I found ourselves waiting, side by side, violins under chins, hesitating in the same moment. The music was beautiful and disastrous. At their standard timbres, my ether devices are not suited to jazz; this “Stardust” sounded as extraterrestrial as its title. I began to laugh but you were not laughing; your eyes were upturned; you were listening. Slowly you raised your bow and began to saw low notes, like a comet losing velocity. I joined you. The theremins wailed the melody. Our violins were steady beneath their glissando, giving Glenn a space to sing.

  In the many rooms of the house, amid the salt smell of chicken soup, we played “Stardust.” After “Stardust,” we played “Everybody Loves My Baby.” We played “Blue Skies” and Pachelbel’s Canon. My violin felt like something from a past life. Wood from the taiga, gut from a Romanov sheep. I remembered the rooms in which I had been raised, the varnish on the floorboards. The way I sat in bed with a volume of the encyclopedia and imagined moths, Eskimo, the Taj Mahal. I had not known my future. Now my fingers felt clumsily large on its neck. You too were holding another person’s violin. You too were courageous. You smiled at me and I realized we had never been together like this, not in a place like this, a place without spotlights or hidden corners; a place where you are illuminated only as you are, as bright or as faded. But here we were smiling together and still in colour.

  LATER, WHEN THE LIGHT had changed, and we were sipping chicken broth from Walter Tower Rosen’s fine silver spoons, Missy asked if you had ever tried the theremin. “I tried,” you told her, although it did not sound sincere. “It’s just there is no tether,” you said. Playing violin, the body is a physical connection between bow and strings. The same with trumpet, with clarinet, with piano: lips, tongue, hands on mouthpiece, reed, keys. You are stayed by touch. The theremin player is loose, untied. There is no tether. So how do you find the note? How do you find the chord when there is nothing to touch but air? Lucie said, “You just do.”

  SOMETIMES I BOB in this maritime cell, lying on my back, and I can still hear the studio’s chatter. I can hear midnight wingdings and hungover breakfasts, Bugs banging on the door, Henry Solomonoff knocking over the bottles. Through the Majestic’s ventilation grate come toasts, disputes, speeches. I close my eyes in this stale room and listen to old friends talking about beauty.

  Where are my violins, now? Do they wait for me with Lavinia? Did she burn them? Are they here on the ship, in the room across the hallway, packed into the crates with my equipment? Does Red slip in some nights and take my child’s violin from its case, cradled in his gigantic hands, and play an unhappy ode to Murmansk?

  I wish I had given them to you, Clara, as a reminder.

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, you came back. You left when it was late and came back the next day. I wondered what I had done to deserve this privilege, and then I realized it was not a question of doing: we liked each other, that’s all. That Thursday I worked on the rhythmicon, fingertips stained with flux, and you watched Yolanda Bolotine, ten years old, at the theremin, finding notes in the empty air.

  Before your return, I had been dreaming most nights of my upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall. I had played that gilded room before, played it more than once, but now its darkness plagued me. In my dream, the room was too large. We were on stage, me and Rosalyn and Schillinger and the others, sixteen in all, just like we’d planned. There was a grand piano and a double bass, on its side. The loudspeakers stood like scaffolding. Squinting through the footlights, I could see the audience, but it was so far away; the front aisle of the Carnegie was like a dry riverbed, a valley, separating the stage from the crowd. Whole armies could pass on the red floor between us. Beyond the divide, ten thousand faces faded into shadow. The crowd was yelling something, “Bravo!” or “Encore!” or perhaps complicated boos, except we had not yet begun the performance. It didn’t matter: we could not make out their barking. In that immense room, the shouting peeled away, emptied out, leaving overtones and echo. The only clear sound was the rhythmicon’s count, like an advancing colossus. We remained at our instruments, poised, hands lifted to keyboard theremin and fingerboard theremin and space-control theremin, and we peered into the contorted faces of the distant crowd, silent and roaring, as if they were warning us of doom or a triumph, something we had not seen. At a certain moment I saw Pash among those faces, wordless, pale as a ghost. The two Karls stood on either side of him, just behind, one of their hands resting on each of his shoulders.

  In that instant Carnegie Hall’s electricity went dead, the room went dark, the dream’s whole world flashed out, except for the rhythmicon, the disembodied rhythmicon. It stumbled on, like a wrong heartbeat.

  That was the dream. It was ghastly. It visited me two or three times a week as we prepared for the April performance. I glumly referred to the show as “the last hurrah,” but my friends pretended it wasn’t so: “The best yet,” Mitz said, “emphasis on ‘yet.’ ” This time the focus was on my other creations—the keyboard, the fingerboard, the whirling watcher—and not the original theremin. Lucie Rosen and Henry Solomonoff argued about whether we should use the space-control device at all. I tried to stay out of it. I tried to work, to banish the nightmares with thoughts of voltage, res
istance, the measurements of wooden joints. And then you returned, and made me dream of other things.

  “The Latin name for a gorilla is ‘gorilla gorilla gorilla,’ ” you said. “It’s like the zoologist tossed up his hands and said, ‘I only have one good idea. Let’s use it three times.’ ”

  “Is it really ‘gorilla gorilla gorilla’?”

  “The thing about you,” you said, “is that you have a million good ideas and you use each one only once. Like a tree with a thousand kinds of fruit.”

  “Apples and plums,” I murmured.

  “Apples and plums and grapefruit and lemons and grapes and oranges and limes and pomegranates and figs and dates and pears and peaches and apricots and white nectarines,” you said. “And light bulbs.”

  “Light bulbs?”

  “All Leon Theremin needs is sunshine and a bit of rain.”

  ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I was late returning home. Jin and I had spent ninety minutes grappling, clutching each other and then coming apart, directed by sifu. He wanted us to understand this thing of strength, he said; the way a man can come up against a brick wall. In wing chun kung-fu you are taught to pivot, to shift, to adjust your opponent’s force by degrees. You do not stand and grapple, straining into each other’s shoulders. You do not clench your teeth and push. But sifu told Jin and me to come at each other like this, like sparring grizzly bears, and when we turned he said, “No!” pointing his finger like a dart. “Sometimes it is just strength,” he said. “The only answer is persistence.” There were red marks on my arms, as if I had been seized by a witch.

  After the session I stayed behind to talk with Jin. I did not want to leave the lesson in the silence in which we had spent it. We went for steamed buns at one of the bakeries nearby. Men poured through the shop’s doors, calling out orders, dropping money on the counter without checking to see whether it was correct. The room smelled of beef and perfume. Through the windows I watched women pushing carts of Chinese melons and turnips that looked like wedges of timber. We tore at our steamed buns, spilled barbecued pork, bean paste, lotus. Jin talked about his job at the post office, sorting hundreds of letters on which the address was not clear—envelopes sent from Nanchong, east Sichuan province, to “Mrs Chun, Manhattan” or “Mr Han, Tailor, Mott Street.” The addresses were often written in Mandarin. “They imagine everyone will know him,” Jin said, “Mr Han the tailor.”

  “They think the city is that small?”

  “No! They think Mr Han is so good, so fine a tailor, that of course he will be famous. That the most gifted tailors receive rubies and palaces.”

  “Does that happen in China?”

  Jin laughed. “No. But this is America. The land of opportunity!”

  I was late returning home. The chain came off my bicycle and I had to crouch in the street to replace it, trolleys hustling by, horses kicking up clods of earth. I coasted toward the brownstone, standing on the pedals. I assumed Schillinger or Lucie would have come to practise, and each had a key, but when I arrived at West 54th Street I found the worst thing—you, sitting on the steps, waiting for me; and also Sara Hardy, the dancer, leaning her face on her palm. “Clara,” I said, skidding to a stop. You stood.

  “Hi, Leon.”

  I assumed Sara was one of your friends and went to shake her hand, then realized my fingers were covered in bicycle grease. I offered a bashful nod instead.

  “You must be Dr Theremin,” she said. She was a strange-looking woman, so tall in her beige dress. She looked as though someone had held her at head and feet and pulled.

  “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. My muscles felt overlarge, like clothes I had been wearing for three days.

  “I just stopped by on my way to rehearsal,” you said. “I wouldn’t have waited except I saw this poor girl.”

  “I’m here for the audition,” Sara said.

  I leaned the bicycle against the fence. “The aud—? Oh!”

  She looked stricken. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I had forgotten. I thought you were Clara’s—yes. Just a moment.” I unlocked the front door and ushered you both inside. “Let me just …” I went leaping up the stairs. I had hauled the dance stage all the way to my rooms on the fourth floor. Nobody was using it and it occupied too much space in the downstairs workshops. Now I set about tidying, clearing away empty tumblers, brushing derelict potato chips from the end tables. Huge spools of wire were sitting on the stage itself and I had to roll these away, round the corner to my bedroom, leaving rail tracks in the carpet.

  “All right, all right,” I called. You did not hear and I clattered back down. “Welcome,” I said to Sara Hardy, the dancer, and also a second time, to you. Your smile made me give a weary laugh.

  We climbed to the top floor. Sara seemed bored; she did not even peer around as we alighted on a landing. She had a strange way of breathing through her nose, and I decided between the third and fourth floors that I did not like her. We arrived at the top, and went through a doorway, past my bedroom, and then we were in the “reading room,” which was workshop and drafting room and paint cellar, now with an electronic ether dance stage in the centre of its floor. You seemed faintly horrified, Clara. Admittedly the terpsitone was not at its best. Aborted circuits stuck out like insect antennae from its sides; a loop of wire was caught all across its length; the loudspeaker was not yet properly installed and amounted to an oily copper grille that leaned against the bookshelf. Excess wiring spilled from under the platform, like multicoloured grass. “What is it?” you asked.

  “The ether wave dance stage,” I said, proudly. I gestured to Sara. “Please step aboard.”

  She wavered on her long legs. “What will it do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I snapped the switch on the generator. “Well, it will make a sound.”

  The room filled with a low hum, as if a bassist was warming up next door. Sara was still hesitating. She looked at you, her new doorstep ally.

  “Go on,” you said.

  Clara, I loved you.

  The terpsitone was about the size of a door, perhaps a little larger, upholstered in rosy felt. As she approached, the hum’s pitch began to change. The secret was a metal plate, an antenna, fixed beneath the stage. It sensed the conductivity, the movements, of the person who stood upon it. Sara seemed nervous, like a little girl. But she climbed up onto the platform. Cables snaked from the platform to a box near the doorway, a controller station. I adjusted some dials and the hum became much louder, the vibrato tighter, and the terpsitone’s drone swooped into midrange.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right?” she said.

  You began to laugh.

  Sara Hardy was not the first dancer I had auditioned. She was, in fact, the nineteenth. Six months prior, the terpsitone had sat downstairs, with pride of place in the student workshops. It was my crown jewel, my new infatuation. It felt like an object I had found, an old artifact I had uncovered: dance that makes music. Whereas the theremin reads melody from the gestures of two hands in the air, the terpsitone, the “ether wave dance stage,” interprets the movements of the whole body. The performer’s gestures have a double meaning—the gestures as gestures and the manipulation of sound.

  I had been influenced by Martha Graham’s dance company, the way free movement seemed to sing; and also by our hot nights in Harlem, where the trumpeters invented genius one instant at a time. My vision of the terpsitone saw it used in two different ways: by the most skilled choreographers, adapting composed pieces into motion; and by other dancers, volatile and learning, in improvisations.

  Yet I could not find performers of either type. Dancers came to my door, pliéed at the doorstep, but when they arrived at the dance stage they were cowed by the electronics, or not cowed enough. I posted notices at ballet schools, backstage at the 48th Street Theatre; these dancers hesitated in the terpsitone’s electric field, grimacing at the noise, unable to complete their movements. They sta
rted like birds at every change of pitch. Other dancers, avant-gardists referred to me by Schillinger’s crèche of choreographers, were too liberated. They whirled and twisted across the stage, whipping sirens from the circuits. I thanked them all and said I would be in touch. Then I collapsed into an easy chair, sighing. Eventually I towed the terpsitone upstairs.

  Now Sara Hardy was here, tottering on the charged stage. It was a washout. She moved limply, scared to provoke a sound, provoking sounds all the same. Amid the terpsitone’s high ooooo, supple and responsive, Sara didn’t seem to recognize her own limbs. She lifted her arm and her eyes widened, as if she was horrified by what she had found.

  I turned off the generator. As soon as the hum had left the room, Sara seemed to grow five centimetres. She was again a gazelle, on tiptoes.

  I showed her out. “Thank you,” I said, one hand on the doorknob.

  She slung her bag over her shoulder. “It’s very hard.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I dragged my feet back up to the fourth floor. I found you crouching on the dance stage, arms loosely resting on your knees. “So much for that,” I said. I turned off the room’s lights. I did not like you to see my disappointments.

  “Hey,” you said from the sun-sliced darkness. “Can I try?”

  “Try this?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I left the lights off. The room felt quieter with just sun and shadow. You were silhouetted in the window, still crouching, like a little kid. I squatted beside the generator and flipped the switch. The room filled with sound. You were listening to it. I listened to the sound of the terpsitone as it listened to you listening.

  You raised one hand and then the other, paying attention to the changes. You bowed your head and lifted it. You grinned, and the antenna was not sensitive enough to notice. You wiggled your hips. “Here,” I said. I plugged another cable into the generator. Now a coloured beam shone onto the dance stage from a spotlight above. It flickered, as if it was being run through a film projector. As you moved your limbs, raising hands and bowing head and wiggling hips, the beam changed colour in accordance with the terpsitone’s pitch.