“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 diaclass="underline" 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 over 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.