Us Conductors by Sean Michaels Read Free Book Online Page B

memoranda of understanding, but also commissions, advances, bankers’ cheques. RCA and Wurlitzer were both contending for the right to sell theremins across America. Eccentrics, heirs and engineers paid exorbitant sums for lessons, for recitals, for the chance to sit with me at a table and discuss collaboration. Pash looked after my bank account; he looked after my immigration status. Whatever hidden business was transpiring on his side of our mission, it was transpiring well. One night he came in with a cheap medal, bought on 38th Street. He pinned it to my suspender strap. “For unwitting services to the country,” he said.
    “I am not so unwitting as all that.”
    He gave me a stern look. “You are more unwitting than you think.”
    Toward midsummer, I played Coney Island Stadium before twenty thousand people. It was a Communist Party event. I shook hands with union leaders, quipped in clumsy English. The demonstration went well. There was nothing overtly ideological about my performance: it was political because of where I had been born. After the concert Pash and I leaned on a wall backstage, on either side of a drinking fountain. We were taking this one small moment before going back into the fray. Out of the hallway, almost invisibly out of it, came a tall man. He was slender, handsome, in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He had a sweep ofblond hair and blue eyes like the flowers on a teacup. I thought he was a fan. “Hello,” I said warily.
    He was quite forward. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and shook my hand.
    He nodded to Pash. “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry; I saw you onstage but I didn’t catch your name.”
    “Yuri,” said Pash. “You are?”
    “Danny Finch,” said the man. “I work with the U.S. government.”
    Instantly Pash was upright, his feet flat on the ground. His face was as relaxed as before but now the rest of him had joined the conversation. He was ready. He was alert.
    “What do you do for the government?” Pash said evenly.
    “I work for the State Department,” Danny Finch replied.
    I was confused. “Which state?”
    “The State Department,” he repeated.
    Pash looked at me. His gaze was heavy, like an iron weight placed into my hands. I glanced back at Finch and at that moment I imagined a pair of binoculars around his neck.
    Finch flashed an impulsive smile. “I wondered whether we could have a conversation sometime,” he said to me. “I’m an admirer of your work.”
    “Perhaps.” I was conscious of the way my lips touched and parted.
    For one more moment, Danny Finch lingered. He seemed filled with cheerful, nervous energy, but at the same time I sensed this energy was not real; that his enthusiasm was deliberate, theatrical, and his heart was beating slowly.
    “Right, well, have a good night,” he said. He gave me his card.
    “Goodbye,” Pash said.
    I added, awkwardly, “Yes.”
    Finch bowed his head to each of us, overly formal. He turned and disappeared around a corner. I held his business card in my hands. It read DANNY FINCH in block letters, with a Washington, DC, phone number. There was no seal or logo.
    “Give me that,” Pash said.
    A few weeks later there was a concert sponsored by a hot-dog company at Lewisohn Stadium, to twelve thousand. Pash organized this after the Communist-run Coney Island gig, after the meeting with Danny Finch. We needed to demonstrate our bland bona fides: the Lewisohn concert was pure scientific spectacle. It was time for the theremin to become an assimilated, red-blooded American.
    “As of today,” Pash said, “we are done with hammer and sickle.”
    He joked about handing out American flags, recruiting baseball-player accompanists. I did not find this funny. He told me, “Put on your best smile.” When I came out on stage, blinded by the lights, I felt as if I might be at the beach: wave upon wave of applause greeted me, like rolling surf. The New York Philharmonic sat behind me, poised. We performed Handel’s