Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “Commerce and Burr?”

  The man sighed, as if I were already making him sad. “We’re debt collectors, Dr Theremin.”

  I brought Jim upstairs, as Lucie drilled the back of my head with a very alarmed look. We went into one of the smaller workshop rooms. “Please, sit,” I said. Jim sat in a wooden chair with wheels on casters. Throughout our conversation he was moving, slightly, back and forth, like a weaving boxer or a killer shark.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said.

  I gave him an ironic look.

  “Have you seen our letters?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “What letters?”

  Now Jim gave me an ironic look. He withdrew a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and passed them to me. The letterhead, C&B, in black and red, recalled mortar shells descending upon a city.

  “You are president of the Migos Corporation, yes?”

  “Er …” I said, flipping through the papers. Six months of them, addressed to offices in Manhattan and Queens. A few had been sent to West 54th Street but I had never seen them. Dr Leon Theremin, President, Migos Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Theremin Patents Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Teletouch Holding Corporation.

  “Can you give me an address for Boyd Zinman?” Jim asked.

  “For who?”

  “Boyd Zinman.”

  I had never heard of Boyd Zinman. “Who?”

  Jim sighed. “Dr Theremin, let’s be serious. You have defaulted on debts amounting to almost sixty thousand dollars.”

  My eyes bulged. “Sixty?”

  “Remember Walmor Incorporated, Dr Theremin? Remember International Madison Bank?”

  I did not remember these things.

  “You should speak to my business manager, Julius Goldberg,” I said.

  “Ah yes,” said Jim, “Mr Goldberg. Could I have his address as well?”

  I stammered. “Yes, well, actually no. But let me give you his telephone number.”

  Jim turned slowly in his chair.

  When he departed, he left me with a single typed page. It was an accounting of sixteen separate loans involving six corporations, across nine different lenders. The smallest loan was for $3,000, the largest for $30,001. They dated from as early as 1929. Commerce and Burr, read the top of the letter, WE SETTLE IT.

  I called Pash in a near panic.

  “It’s under control,” he said.

  “Sixty thousand dollars?”

  “Lev, it’s under control.”

  “What’s under control? What is this money?”

  “It’s our business, Lev.”

  “Our business?”

  “The things we do.”

  “Who is Boyd Zinman?”

  “One of your partners. I introduced you. At the Waldorf.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Clearly. That’s why I am occupied with these things and you are not. And I am telling you: it’s under control.”

  “So I don’t need to worry?”

  “Debt collectors are in the business of fear.” He made me take down an address in Harlem. “If they come back, give them that. If Commerce and Burr send you letters, ignore them.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Lev, I have work to do. So do you.”

  I put down the telephone and went back upstairs to my rooms. There was smoke in the air, the smell of pork fat. In terror, I remembered my lunch. I ran to the kitchen, searching for fire. No fire. The sausage still gleamed, hot, in its pan.

  IN MAY 1937, the Hindenburg airship burst into flames, killing its captain and thirty-four others. Not long thereafter I completed work on your new theremin. It was perhaps the most perfect thing I had ever made. The cabinet was made of ash; the circuitry was gold, green and silver. Its secrets were concealed within two hinged compartments. From the outside it was a simple wedge on four legs. The pitch antenna rose in a short straight line. The volume antenna looped at the left side, esoteric and in its way ornate. Where the performer stands, there was a small dial: ten numbered settings for ten different timbres. I had not just made the theremin sing more beautifully—I had given it many voices. Darker, higher, deeper, an instrument of caves, or of woods, or of roads less travelled by.

  I sent it to you with a note, with a leonid:

  Clara this gentle hid-en hum

  all might reach us in the end

  You sent me back an invitation to your performance in Philadelphia on August 14.

  You wrote, I hope you’ll come. Bring a friend.

  I rang Schillinger. “Clara’s playing in Philadelphia.”

  He said: “So?”

  “So I’m going.”

  “Lev, are you sure—”

  “Yes I’m sure.”

  “Lev. You still—”

  “So come with me, Schillinger. Come with me.”

  I would have gone with Pash but I did not want a defender, a guardian; I wanted simply a companion. Someone to go with me on this journey. I hired a car. Before leaving the apartment I looked at myself in the mirror: forty-one years old. I was a whole man. I was small, steady, younger than my years. I was an inventor and a spy. I loved Russia and Clara Reisenberg.

  On the drive to Philadelphia, we talked about old times. We talked about Vinogradov, little Yolanda and the Bolotines, that New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn. We were somewhere in the middle of the journey, near Trenton, when he craned in his seat and said, “So. Tonight.”

  I waited a moment. “Yes?”

  “What’s the piece?”

  I lifted my gaze from the road. “Bloch’s ‘Schelomo.’ ”

  He nodded his head. “Ah,” he said, in a way that was at once friendly and short.

  “Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “And she’s playing the theremin?”

  “Yes,” I said. “My new theremin.”

  He laughed, a little forcedly. “I wish I were so lucky!”

  The car was silent. We listened to the clatter of stones on the underside of the carriage.

  “Are you still in love with her, Leon?”

  I watched the highway into Pennsylvania.

  He rubbed his face, then glanced back at me. “You’re handsome and clever. You’re self-possessed. Generous.” He was trying to smile at me, but I was not meeting his eyes. “There are ten thousand women who would gladly join their particles to yours.”

  He was still trying to get me to look at him. I would not.

  “But then I don’t need to remind you of that,” Schillinger said finally.

  We passed a sign on the side of the road, showing a moose, intimating that a moose could step out into the middle of the highway. I wondered whether I would be agile enough to drive around it or whether it would be better to stop the car.

  Schillinger took a breath and said, abruptly, “Lev, it is dangerous to hope for impossibilities.”

  I felt the flick of lines along the middle of the road.

  “Impossibilities?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  I said, still without looking at him, “Is that what you tell Frances?”

  LATER, AS WE TOOK OUR places in the auditorium, I thought of the first time we saw you play. I had sat in Peveril Hall with Schillinger. We watched the violinist and her sister. This was a different night, now. I knew what you would unveil in my heart. I knew the way the curtain would lift and how we would face each other in this midnight hall, a wind blowing between us.

  You would play the most perfect instrument I had made.

  There was a large crowd, an orchestra’s hundred chairs and music stands. The musicians came and took their seats. The first violinist. Then you, slim and straight, in a white gown fringed with gold. You shook the hand of the first violinist. I wondered if you felt something, shaking hands with your former aspiration. Your hair was pulled back, your face like a drawing. A spotlight illuminated my theremin. You had painted o
ver the ashwood, made it black. You took your place behind the device. DZEEEEOOOoo, very softly, and you held your hand suspended in the air. Somewhere on the reverse of the cabinet, a light glowed. This was another new invention; a signal for perfect A. The musicians tuned their instruments. You looked over your shoulder at the first violinist, at the line of double bassists. I sat with Schillinger in the darkness.

  You were there to perform “Schelomo,” by Ernest Bloch, a rhapsody for cello and orchestra. You presented the complete cello part on theremin. It is a composition of sustained and devastating yearning, a wavering conversation between one voice and the ensemble. Your right hand was a fist. You opened it one finger at a time, asking and withdrawing. The soloist must play in angles, edges, skirting old melodies. You did not close your eyes until the third section, as if suddenly the music was asking something else of you. Only your hands were in motion. In the heart of that hall, you were utterly solitary. I could not have given myself to you even if I had tried.

  You used only one of the theremin’s voices. And you had painted it black.

  At the end of the performance, awkwardly, the conductor turned and made a short speech. He acknowledged the director of the symphony, the attendance of philanthropist Howard Gersheim. Then you said, into a lousy microphone, “And I wish to thank my husband, Robert Rockmore.”

  TEN

  BLANK SHEETS

  LAVINIA WAS MUCH MORE beautiful than you.

  In the second floor of my home she stood on the terpsitone stage and at first she didn’t know what to do with it. Moving, she listened to the way the mechanism’s pitch changed. She was alert and present. She made the beginning of something. Then she stepped down and the next girl got up. I turned to Henry Solomonoff. “Who was that?”

  “Lavinia Williams.”

  I said her name back: “Lavinia Williams.”

  Somehow Solomonoff had become the manager of the American Negro Ballet. He went in to recommend accompanists; he left as their manager. Since then he had not stopped pestering me to bring the dancers to West 54th Street to show them the terpsitone. I told him no. No, Henry. I was living underwater, with dreams of floods and taxes. No one had used the stage since you. Then finally one bare morning I did not know why I was saying no, why I was being ruled by dreams, by memory. I brought nine tall graceful women into my home, the vases filled with flowers. (There were also two graceful men.)

  Lavinia was one of them. Later, I took the dancers into the kitchen and poured them each a glass of cold water. “Spasiba,” she said, Thank you, and I gave a little turn, surprised.

  “Pazhalsta,” I replied.

  She wore a thin dress, lightly violet. “Do you use the dance stage yourself?” She was still speaking in Russian.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you dance on it? To play it?” Lavinia had no earrings, no bracelets, no necklaces, no rings. I found myself thinking of Schillinger’s theories, his multiple formulas of beauty.

  She moved her head so; and so; specifically, as if always considering.

  “No, no,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” she said, with a half-smile. I wasn’t sure if she was making fun of me. She sipped her water. “You don’t ever feel like going up and dancing alone? Making a commotion?” Whereas her Russian had a refined cadence, almost regal, her English was casual. It was the softest part of her.

  “I’m too busy,” I said.

  “Or not busy enough,” she said. She touched my arm.

  I had never met a Negro who spoke Russian. She had learned it from her first dance teacher, in Virginia. She also spoke French, Spanish, Italian and the Haitian language of Creole. She was a good painter and knew how to fish. Her favourite novel was Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. She loved my intelligence, my confidence, the pencil I carried in my shirt pocket. She loved the quiet she saw in me. One week after we met, I took her to watch the boat races in Central Park. Lavinia had a strong chin on a wide face, eyes that narrowed when she saw something that impressed her. The men in their boats swept and swept their oars. Everything was lashed in sunlight. She pointed at one of the smaller boats, tapered, with a blue flag at its prow. “That one looks like a winner,” she said. It won, of course it won.

  That night we went to a games bar in the Bowery, a cellar where visitors could play checkers against small, severe men. You paid only if you lost. Lavinia and I sat side by side, each of us in a game, each of us playing for free.

  LAVINIA AND I WERE married on St. Valentine’s Day, 1938. In a hotel room in Montauk, she danced her love song. I sat on the bed, dry-throated, watching the fan of her limbs. She was gorgeous and unreal. Her arabesque, weightless, rose up in the candlelight. Her straight leg pointed back across Long Island Sound. To you. I rose, in the shadows. I simply stood there, waiting for my wife to look me in the eyes.

  THEY GAPED AT ME across a plate of toast.

  “Who is she?”

  Coolly, I drank the poured vodka. “A dancer,” I said.

  “Russian?”

  I snorted. “She is an American.”

  The Karls did not smile. I measured their expressions. “She supports the class struggle,” I said.

  I had expected them to be pleased. And yet despite their pleadings for matrimony, their warnings about visas, the men now sat staring at where they had written Lavinia’s name in their notebooks.

  “You did not consult us,” said the Karl with the moustache. “I spoke to Pash,” I said.

  Instead of looking chastened, sullen, the Karls seemed merely weary, exchanging glances. “We believe you should leave the country,” one of them said.

  “I am married now,” I said.

  “Even so.”

  My nerves felt as if they were fraying. “There is the new contract with Ossining prison,” I said.

  “Even so.”

  I flexed my jaw.

  “I do not wish to leave.”

  Again those weary glances.

  I stood up. “I am doing vital work here. Work that is vital to the future of our country. To the Soviet project. Remember the investigations I have done into American aeroplanes, into prisons and railroads. You brought me here to do these things. That’s the point of this whole life. How can I replicate such accomplishments from far away?”

  “It is not a question of utility,” said Karl. “There are other reasons to leave a place. There are questions about your visa. We believe you are under investigation.”

  “Investigation? For what?”

  The handlers exchanged a look. “We’re not sure.”

  “I have friends here,” I said. “I have a wife. A family.”

  “A family?” Bearded Karl raised his eyebrow.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Who knows?” Would I now need a son? “My future is tied up in this place. I cannot just disappear.”

  The men folded their arms.

  Darkly, one said, “Tell us more, Lev, about what you can and cannot do.”

  JUST A WEEK EARLIER, Pash had given us the keys to a Cadillac. He smiled. “Belated wedding present.” We went out and stood on the curb. The car was long and low, black, a bullet. I clasped and unclasped my hands. I shook my head. Pash wrapped Lavinia and me in his arms, a business partner with his friends. “A married couple deserves certain privileges.”

  Now I drove the car home from Mud Tony’s. Its engine growled in a way that felt just barely controlled. People watched from the side of the road. I arrived at the house. Lavinia was reading by the front window. She came to me as soon as I walked in the door. She was always so full of desire, tinder on the threshold of flame. “Are you all right?” Her fingertips grazed my cheek. “What’s wrong?”

  I murmured something wordless. I gazed at the perfect ridge of her shoulder. “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  She laid her nose against my nose. “Pash called.”

  “Yes?”

  “He asked you to meet him at the machine shop.”

  For a shor
t moment we held hands.

  I took the car to Frederick’s Garage, where he and I were paying men to assemble metal detectors for Ossining jail, Sing Sing. The wardens wanted arches like the ones at Alcatraz. The contracts were big, but Pash refused to hire a proper manufactory. So I drove across the bridge to Queens, to the deserted end of a dead-end street, where a little Russian garage slouched amid chamomile. As I pulled up, Pash was standing beside a pneumatic lift. One after another, he lifted glass sheets from a crate at his feet, threw them to shatter on the concrete. I approached him gingerly, through the broken glass.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking glass,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He didn’t respond. I watched another strong piece of glass slice through the air and separate into ten thousand shiny pieces.

  Finally I said, “You wanted to meet?”

  He nodded. He looked at me. “Problems in Frisco.”

  I tried to give him a smile. Frisco. As though we were two cowpokes at a saloon.

  He could see there was something else in my face. “What is it?” he said.

  I made a vague gesture.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I told him what the Karls had said. About an investigation. About leaving.

  “Always with the cut and run.”

  “It seems different now,” I said. “There’s something about the visa.”

  Pash clicked his tongue. “A visa’s not why you leave. It’s how you stay.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Americans are on to us?”

  He snorted. “What reason would they have? You’re clean.

  They’re just a gang of skittish lambs. A department of paranoiacs.”

  “Mm,” I said.

  Pash turned to me. “You work for me, Lev. I am your champion and protector. I will carry you on my shoulders through the wolves.” He lifted up a piece of glass. I waited for him to throw it onto the driveway. He did not.

  “All right,” I said finally.

  “All right?”

  “All right.”

  He heaved the glass sheet. It seemed like it was coming apart before it hit the ground. “The metal detectors aren’t working,” he said in a level voice.