Her record collection dwarfed the one Jonah and I had assembled since childhood. It was, like her driving, all over the road. She used some inscrutable organizational scheme I struggled for several visits to figure out. When I at last broke down and asked, she laughed, ashamed. “They’re by happiness.”
I looked again. “How happy the music is?”
She shook her head. “How happy they make me.”
“Really?” She nodded, defensive. “Do they move up and down?” I looked again, and they became a giant Billboard chart tracking the inside of this woman’s mind.
“Sure. Every time I take them out and play them, they go back in another slot.”
I’d seen her do it but had never noticed. I laughed, then hated myself the instant I saw what my laugh did to her face. “But how can you ever find anything?”
She looked at me as if I were mad. “I know how much I like a thing, Joseph.”
She did. I watched her. She never hesitated, either finding or replacing.
I scouted her spectrum of happiness one Sunday evening while Teresa busied herself glazing a ham in her kitchen. The rule I’d noticed in the Glimmer Room spread out before me. Petula Clark was consigned to the far left-hand purgatory, while Sarah Vaughan sat ascendant all the way to the right. This woman had little use for shiny, new, and light. The finish she wanted was smoky and deep, the longer cured the better.
I fell into dark thoughts. I was a fraud infiltrating that apartment while the misled woman labored over a ham for me. I hadn’t considered what game we two were playing, how much she had assumed about me even before we brushed hands. I saw the person she must have mistaken me for all these weeks, the thinnest imposter, and I knew what would happen when she discovered who I really was.
I checked the records at the favored end of her collection, the peak of her pantheon: music being made just blocks from my home while I was growing up on Byrd and Brahms, heavy doses of the Strom Experiment. She loved all the music I’d only brushed up against in those few months when Jonah had gotten restless and we’d knocked around the Village jazz clubs, looking for easy transgression. Teresa thought the music was mine, by blood, down in my fingers, when all I did was steal it off records, as late as the afternoon I came into the club to play it. My sense of deception was so great and my sense of self so weightless that when she came into the front room with her arms full of Sunday dinner, I blurted out, “You like black music.”
She set the hot dishes down on the makeshift dining table. “What do you mean?”
“Black music. You like it better…you prefer it to…” To your own music, was all I could think to say. How came it yours?
Teresa looked at me with a look I’d never seen on her face, the one I’d gotten from shopkeepers, ticket takers, and strangers since I’d turned thirteen, a look that knew, the moment the revolution came, that I would steal back from it all it had stolen from me over centuries. She walked over to where I stood and studied her collection in a way that she never had. She stood shaking her head, fixed by the right-hand side of her records, the tops of her privately owned pops. “But everybody loves those singers. It’s not that they’re black. It’s that they’re the best.”
I was so agitated at dinner, I couldn’t swallow. The two of us faced each other across that card table, each pushing our pink pork pucks around on our plates. I couldn’t ask what I wanted to. But I couldn’t bear silence. “How did you get onto the oldies? I mean, Cab Calloway? Alberta Hunter? Haven’t you heard the word, girl? Don’t you know you can’t trust anyone over thirty?”
She brightened, grateful to be asked an easy one. “Oh! That’s my father.” She spoke the word with that chiding care we give those who’ve committed the gross error in judgment of becoming our parents. “Every Sunday morning of my life. The week wasn’t finished until he spun his favorite records. I used to hate it. When I was twelve, I’d run from the house screaming. But I guess we finally love what we know best, huh?”
“What happened to him?”
“Who?”
“You said ‘spun.’”
“Oh. My father?” She looked down at her food-spattered plate. “He’s still spinning.”
So was I. Teresa could feel how keyed up I was. I’ll forever say that about her. She could hear me, even when I wasn’t playing. “Would you like to go for a ride?” she asked.
“Sure. Why not? Unless you’d rather listen to something here?”
We were off a beat. “Listen to what?”
“Anything. You choose.”
She went to the spread of records and wavered. I’d changed her rankings for her, forever. She went to the right and pulled out an Ella Fitzgerald covering Gershwin, Carmichael, and Berlin, pilfering back from the pilferers. Teresa dropped the scratching needle down upon a voice scatting away as if everyone in creation would get his own back on reckoning day. She swayed a little to the beat, lip-synching, as always. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her hips, her own dancing partner. Now and then, an involuntary pianissimo came out of her, trying to find a way back to its own scattered innocence.
She hummed to herself, drifting to her tattered brick-colored sofa. After a song, I went and sat with her. It surprised her. She held still. She’d never said a word about our not touching. I think she would have stayed with me forever, even at that unspoken arm’s length, staying off at whatever distance she thought I needed and not one step farther. She let out a skyful of breath. “Ah, Sunday.”
“Maybe Monday,” I sang.
Teresa segued: “Maybe not.” She turned toward me, pulling her feet up on the sofa underneath her. She looked down at her thighs, a little askew, the color of fine bone china. Her lips moved silently, as they had for so long in the darkness of the club, keeping me company each night. The warmth of the recording came from out of her soundless mouth. Still, I’m sure to meet him one day, maybe Tuesday will be my good news day. My right hand lowered itself onto her leg and began accompanying. I closed my eyes and improvised. I moved from chords to free imitation, careful to keep to a decent range, between her knee and hiked-up hemline.
Teresa held her breath and became my instrument. I hit each note as squarely as if it were real. She heard my free flight in her skin. I could feel her feeling my fingers’ tone clusters. Around We’ll build a little home for two, I built an obbligato line so right, I was surprised it wasn’t in the original. At from which I’ll never roam, I roamed a little, beyond the deniable, up into the hemline octave. On the last two lines, Teresa joined in with a reedy harmony, one she’d sung a hundred times to herself, in this place, maybe even with someone else, before I came around.
When the song finished, I rested my hand on her leg, the silent keys. I couldn’t feel my fingers to remove them. Her muscles twitched in cheerful terror. I could feel my own pulse pounding through my palm. Teresa stood. My fossil hand slid off her. “I have something for you.” She walked across the room to her trinket-covered hutch. From behind a carved Indian elephant, she fished an envelope. It might have been sitting there for weeks. She brought it back to me and set it in my hands. On its white face, it bore the name Joseph, scribbled in childlike balloon letters. My hands shook as I opened it, the way they used to after crucial concerts with Jonah. I struggled to remove the contents without tearing. Teresa sat next to me, reached out, and ran the back of her hand against my neck. Like slipping on a new silk tie.