Us Conductors (10 page)

On the reverse of the card, below date and details, it read:

“
DON
’
T FORGET
!!”
YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO A LEMONADE SOCIAL
MARKING THE EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY
OF
MISS CLARA REISENBERG.

R.S.V.P.

I tapped the card against the counter, then found I was picking up the telephone receiver.

Our conversation began like this:

“Is that Clara?”

“Yes, who is this please?”

“This is Leon Theremin.”

What did my name say to you? Did it speak merely of science, engineering, and that snowy afternoon? Did it say something else?

You said: “How is all that electricity doing, Leon?”

I could not attend the party. I had an appointment with RCA that same day, slated to go until dinner. Perhaps I could have cancelled it but really I was not sure what to do, at that moment, talking to you on the telephone. I hesitated. I invited you to tea, the day after. A tardy birthday. “Sure,” you said. We both put down our phones.

The elephant seemed to be staring at me.

There were other girls, then. I don’t mean Katia. I felt young, arriving in America. I felt new. There were flirtations, exchanges of affection. Discreet ministrations. My valentines were associates, students, chance acquaintances. One drowsy evening with a friend’s ginger wife. I write this not to embarrass you, or out of a need to confess, but to say that in the week between that phone call and your visit to my apartment, every other face disappeared, at once, from my thoughts. It was as if I had plunged my head into a bucket of seltzer: everything fluttered up and then was gone.

On your eighteenth birthday, a collection of friends and family visited your parents’ home for lemonade. You played charades and musical chairs. There was dancing. I am given to understand that Schillinger performed an air on his Arabian
mijwiz
. I was not present. I was with Pash and Mr Thorogood and later I was alone in my workshop, holding a screwdriver between my teeth, working on your birthday present.

You arrived at two the next day. I wondered if you would come alone but there you were with your mother and also a gang of friends, girls and their dates, all crowding together in my doorway. “Look at that,” I said clumsily.

You smiled. You said: “Hi, Leon.”

I had put on a new Paul Whiteman record. The maid had cleaned the carpets. The blinds were raised. My studio seemed like a chamber at the top of a tall tower. All the vases were filled with tulips. There was a telescope by the window, a large jade plant, a crate filled with piano keys, a tapestry in lace that depicted the makeup of an atom. Your group gathered twittering around each object. You seemed older than your friends. This time you were more careful in your admirations. You gazed at a childhood photograph of me, an old portrait from Leningrad. I was eleven or twelve, with a volume of the encyclopedia wedged clumsily under one arm. White stockings were hiked to my knees. In the camera’s long exposure my face seemed ghostly, already distant.

“What were you scared of?” you asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

You found Schillinger’s frog and it chirped in your hand. You gave the happiest laugh. The lock of hair slipped from behind your ear.

“Have it,” I said.

“You mean it?”

“Happy birthday.”

I called everyone into the parlour. On a table sat a round, iced cake. I had supervised its assembly in the Plaza Hotel’s kitchen. Now I stepped behind the rose-coloured confection and twisted together two trailing wires, closing the circuit. Your mother watched me as one would watch a magician, waiting. I moved away; I invited you to read the cake’s inscription;
I felt a nervous thrill. You stepped closer. Beneath the strata of buttermilk, sugar and chocolate, a mechanism invisibly stirred. A motor whirred. The oscillator in the buried radio watchman sensed your body’s electrical capacity, sent electricity along a wire into an illuminating vacuum tube, which set an axle spinning. The top layer of the cake swivelled clockwise on its axis, all the way around, a pastry shell on a hidden platform, a secret door—and revealed a copper birthday candle. The flame lit by itself, darted and danced. It wished.

“Oh!” you said. You clasped your hands, you bent, you blew it out.

“Happy Birthday,” we sang.

It was you I felt in my electromagnetic field.

TWO MONTHS
went by.

I REMEMBER I NOTICED
a quarter on the pavement. I bent and picked it up, held it glinting in the lights of the Great White Way. There I was on Broadway, in the spring of 1929, a shining silver coin between my fingers. I slipped it into my pocket. I began to walk. I bumped into you.

“Pardon me,” I said, shaking my head clear.

You tugged at the collar of your sky-blue coat. “No, no, it was my fault.” You bent forward to walk on; and stopped. “Dr Theremin?”

I blinked. “Clara,” I said.

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

A smile grew on your face. “I’m good.”

I had seen you only once since your birthday, at an anniversary party for the Kovalevs. You were with your parents. We waved across the room. The two of us had never had a private conversation. I would be out in the city, waiting for an elevator or passing through Central Park and I would recollect suddenly the angle of your gaze. I would wonder whether you ever thought of me. Now we stood facing each other on the sidewalk and you had swinging pearl earrings. I saw the slightest tremor in your brown eyes.

“It’s a pretty night,” I said.

“Yes.”

Broadway is no place to stand still. We were being bumped and bounced by the throngs. Cars roared past, honking; men shouted after other men; you could hear the distant crash of trains. Signs shone over and around us, projected hazy words onto our raincoats. BARBERSH read the red letters on your left sleeve. A neon dollar sign hid in the gloss of my right shoe.

“Would you like to get a coffee?” I asked.

“Could we make it a drink?”

On the boat to New York, I had been told the city had no nightlife left. This was the scuttlebutt from the bankers and salesman aboard the
Majestic
. They raised toasts of vodka, burgundy and calvados, told me to sip the good stuff while I could. “Prohibition,” complained a luggage baron from Tallinn, “has ruined the merry USA.”

“It’s not Prohibition,” grumbled a jeweller from Omsk. “Drunks aren’t afraid to break the rules. The trouble is
enforcement
.”

All of their favourite bars were shuttered: a speakeasy discovered in springtime would disappear by the time they returned in fall. I am not much of a drinker, but it saddened me to
imagine a city without taverns, without the free sound of a bottle being unstoppered.

But neither Prohibition nor enforcement had banished liquor from New York. Manhattan came alive after dark. I could stand at my apartment window and watch couples pirouetting into the street, into taxis. I could see the streaming lights of cabs heading east and west, and in the wee hours north, to Harlem. I had been in New York two months when I asked my new friends about drinking. Henry Solomonoff scribbled down the number for a bootlegger. “Cheap!” he said. “Rum, gin, rye. Seven bucks a bottle.”

“But where do you go for …” I hesitated.

“For a good time?” Solomonoff laughed. “Get your coat.”

Around Broadway, the speaks were tucked just down, just around, folded behind shopfronts. At some, visitors rang a bell and showed their face, or placed their hand flat again a frosted-glass window. At other doorways one had to murmur a pass-phrase. Although Schillinger kept a notebook of secret codes, I was not so thirsty that I required an almanac. I knew several spots, here and there, and in with my other papers I carried six or seven members’ cards, but mostly I smiled, and I was polite, and my accent refuted any suspicion that I was a cop.

We went down into a place without a sign. Light fell from the windows in gauzy shafts. The bartender was dark and extremely handsome, but slight, as if proportioned for the dreams of a twelve-year-old girl. His name was Tony. Most bartenders’ names were Tony. This one felt more like an Anthony. There were two other couples already there and a table with four men in suits. Schillinger called this place “The Blue Horse,” for the murals that curved and galloped around the bar’s other fittings. The images were dreamlike, surreal, visions from a Krazy Kat cartoon. A blue
horse reared up at the left side of the bar, its mane like the tossing of the sea. You ordered a gin fizz, Clara, and I took a rum and Coke. The glasses were cold. We drank in near silence.

After a little while you asked whether I had baked any cakes recently. There were very fine creases at the corners of your eyes. You rested your elbow upon the table and your chin upon the heel of your hand and I noticed the curve where your jaw met your neck. I imagined your violin cradled there. I imagined snowflakes touching the wide white courtyard that lay outside our windows, growing up.

“I have been drawing,” I told you. “These days, it is all drawings.”

“I didn’t know you drew.”

A drawing was in my jacket pocket, folded into eighths. I took it out, opened it in the space between us. The paper crackled.

“The RCA Theremin,” you read aloud from the corner.

“Shhh,” I said, with false gravity. “These things are secret.”

We looked at the arcs and contours and corners of my schematic. The table was painted with wet circles where our drinks had sat. Shreds of rubber eraser still clung to the page. This was a plan for the principal cabinet of the space-control device, the proposed RCA model. I would turn it in to the RCA engineers, this drawing and others like it, and they would take out their rulers and adding machines and materials books and spec manuals, and they would build prototypes, and ring up factory foremen, and perhaps they would even fly to hardwood forests, to nickel mines, to rap on tree trunks and chip at ore, evaluating whether all these things could be adequately smelted, sawed, and assembled into America’s new favourite musical instrument.

You sipped your fizz. “If you were trapped in a snowy
wilderness, just you and a winter coat and a cabin full of electrical equipment—would you be able to build a theremin? Just with this plan?”

“If nothing were missing?” I asked.

“If nothing were missing.”

“Then yes,” I said.

YOU WERE IN THE CITY
to meet an accompanist. He had ended the rehearsal early. He was young, you said, and arrogant. You were eighteen years old.