Free Us Conductors by Sean Michaels Page A

am not much of a drinker, but it saddened me toimagine 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 bluehorse 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 snowywilderness, 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