“It’s wonderful. I can’t believe it. You shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve this. We have to send it back.” A look came over her like I’d killed her dog. “Of course we’ll keep it. Come on. Let’s sing.” Leaden-fingered, I spun out a few arpeggios and launched into “Honeysuckle Rose.” All she’d hoped for. I could do that much.
The short, black, crippled handbag of a keyboard became my penance. I came to prefer playing on it over playing a real keyboard, the way a person with a sprained back might come to prefer sleeping on the floor over sleeping on a mattress. I liked playing it without turning the power on. The keys made a muffled, thumping pitch, their sound buried under a bushel. I wanted to shrink down, into a miniature shoebox performance. If I had to play, the smaller the better.
Teresa wanted nothing from the gift except to please. That’s what destroyed me. She thought I missed playing, that I needed some lifeline to keep me afloat. A woman with her work history should have thrown me out on my ear. But so long as she could help me keep my music alive, she didn’t care if I ever went back to work. We had our piano. For a while, we sang almost every evening, now that my performing didn’t get in the way. For the first time since childhood, I played for no reason but playing. When Jonah and I had toured, we were never alone. We were always answerable, first to the notes on the page and then to the bodies in the auditorium. Even when we rehearsed, twisting around the tune in lockstep, other ears were already listening between us. Teresa and I were all alone. We collided into each other, faltering and finessing our way across a finish line, each deferring to the other. We had no printed notes to prop us or impede us, no listening ear, no living audience to interfere. Nobody to hear but each other.
She’d get sullen and apologetic when we didn’t swing. She had this little stutter-step thing she’d picked up from Sarah Vaughan, who’d picked it up from Ella Fitzgerald, who’d picked it up from Louis Armstrong, who’d picked it up from the deep recesses of his orphanage’s singing school. I’d follow out the phrases, thinking, She’s never going to make it. It made her nuts every time I’d try to hook up with her hiccups. She was all rhythm and line, the syncopated flight from the rest of her life. I was all harmony and chord, packing each vertical moment with sixths, flatted ninths, more simultaneous notes than the texture would bear. But somehow, we made music together. Our tunes turned their back on the wide outside, willfully ignorant and almost too beautiful, some nights, in pleasing no one but their makers.
While Teresa was at the factory packing taffy, I read the news or watched daytime television. I no longer practiced, aside from picking up a song or two in the late afternoon, before Teresa came home. I took the time to learn what had happened in the world since the death of Richard Strauss. The television jumbled my viewing days, until I didn’t know how many months had passed. I watched the My Lai trial and the crumbling of peace with honor. I watched Wallace get shot and Nixon get reelected and go to China. I watched the Arabs and Israelis recommence their eternal war, pushing the world to the unthinkable brink. I watched Biafra die and Bangladesh, Gambia, the Bahamas, and Sri Lanka get born. I sat still while a handful of pre-Americans declared their own breakaway, recovered country, which lasted for seventy days. And I felt nothing but anesthetized shame.
For one brief moment, it was nation time, crowds of people chanting, their voices shaking with the belief that their hour had finally come. Then, just as quickly: no nation. Systematically, the U.S. government buried Black Power. Newton and Seale, Cleaver and Carmichaeclass="underline" The movement’s leaders were jailed or driven from the country. Scenes from Attica leaked out, an inferno deep enough to match any nation’s. George Jackson was killed by prison guards in San Quentin. He was exactly Emmett Till’s age, my brother’s age. The official report said he was leading an armed revolt. Fellow inmates said he was set up and murdered. SNCC was broken up for parts and the Panthers destroyed by COINTELPRO. Somewhere out there, my fugitive sister and Robert were hiding, among the other twice-defeated, all those who worked to steal their country back and were destroyed in the process.
When I could not dose myself with current events, I flipped through sitcoms, game shows, and soaps. Nothing Jonah and I were guilty of in all our performing years could match, in sheer flight from the present’s nightmare, the best of contemporary culture. Armstrong died, and then Ellington. The heartbeat of what should have been my country’s music changed. The thing that replaced it, the official sound track for all seasons that overgrew every cultural niche like kudzu claiming an abandoned vehicle, declared that rhythm consisted of slamming down hard on beats two and four and harmony meant adding a daring seventh now and then to one of two combating chords. There was no place in earshot I wanted to live. It was impossible even to think about performing in front of other people, ever again.
“Have you ever thought about composing?” Teresa asked one night as we were drying dinner dishes.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I can get a job.”
“Joseph, that’s not what I’m asking. I just thought that maybe, with all this time, you might have something…”
Something inside me, worth writing down. It hit me — why I was afraid to get another nightclub job. I was afraid that Wilson Hart might really show up someday, wherever I was noodling, and ask to see the portfolio of pieces I’d promised him to write. You and me, Mix. They’re gonna hear our sounds, before we’re done with this place. I was destined to disappoint everyone I loved, everyone who thought there might be something in me worth composing.
Terrie’s patience with me was more deadly than any racial assault. I went out the next day and bought a box of pencils and a sheaf of twenty-inch cream-stock music paper. I bought paper with grand staff systems, paper with treble staffs and piano systems, paper with unmarked, unjoined staffs — anything that looked remotely serious. I had no idea what I was doing. I stacked up the blank scores on the electric piano and lined up the pencils in neat rows, each one sharpened to a lethal weapon. Teresa’s barely suppressed excitement at my fortress of composition supplies hurt me more than my father’s death.
All day long while I waited, jittery, for Teresa to come home, I pretended to write music. Fragments of phrases crawled in clumps here and there across the cream stock, like spiders making nests in the corners of abandoned summer homes. I’d jot down a strain, motif by motif. Sometimes the strains would collide together into near melodies, every articulation literally spelled out. Sometimes they stayed nothing more than a series of tetrachords without rhythmic values or bar lines. I was writing for no ensemble, no instrument at all, not even piano and voice. My imagined audience was spread all over the map, and I could not tell if I was writing pop songs or thorny, academic abstraction. I never erased a note. If a phrase hit a wall, I’d simply start over again somewhere else, on an unused staff. When a page filled up, I’d flip it over and fill the back. Then I’d start another.
These were the longest days of my life, longer by far than my days in a Juilliard practice room, longer, even, than the days I’d spent at the side of my father’s hospital bed. I worked it out at one point: I was writing down about 140 notes an hour — two and a third triads every three minutes. Sometimes the act of filling in a single note head could absorb me for half an afternoon.