smiled. You hesitated. I saw you see the men who were lifting those stinking sacks, and me in shirtsleeves, and you mouthed something. Then the truck started to reverse and I had to move out of the way and when I looked up you were gone.
You went away on tour for huge swathes of 1930. Was it an intentional absence? I don’t know. Had I ruined something somehow? The country was falling apart and you were playing your violin in Illinois. When we did see each other we were careful with our faces. We had come very near to each other and now every look reminded us of this. Sometimes too much seems promised.
In November I knew you were back. I rang your house.
“She’s out with that lawyer,” your sister said. Nadia spoke to me as if we were accomplices. “I don’t trust alliterative names,” she said.
“What?”
“Robert Rockmore.”
I said just: “Oh.”
“They’re at Texas Guinan’s.”
I said again, “Oh.”
So you had gone to Texas Guinan’s.
While you were flying by taxi from paradise to paradise, with another man, I was counting my change. I was riding the subway to the kwoon in Chinatown. The USA’s economy had gone limp, like a flag that is brought indoors. First the RCA devices were rebranded as “budget” Victor Theremins. We released plans for an updated model—a little cheaper, a little simpler, with a loudspeaker built into the cabinet. These were not beautiful or subtle instruments. They were clumsy. But they looked a little like radios—familiar, easy, bestselling radios. At the Providence Home Progress Expo they called this new design “the most amazing invention of modern times.”
Unfortunately, the most amazing invention of modern times never went on sale. On a Monday morning I received a letter from the De Forest Radio Company of Passaic, New Jersey. The letter was on rich, thick paper, paper the colour of a stork. Its letterhead showed the elegant names of three Baltimore lawyers. The signatures were equally elegant. The rest of the words were typed. Everything was spelled correctly. They informed me that the De Forest Radio Company of New Jersey was in possession of several patents concerning vacuum tubes and synthetic sound.
RCA also received a copy of this letter. Their legal team called me to a conference room uptown, where the light cut through the curtains. The sun was in my eyes. My muscles ached from the morning’s workout regimen. They asked me questions. They showed me schematics. The inventor Lee De Forest had taken out patents, decades before, governing the musical use of vacuum tubes. “I was in Russia,” I said. “This is unrelated.” They said it didn’t matter. They said it was related. They said that De Forest had been sitting on these patents, waiting for us, like a bandit. “This is an ambush, plain and simple,” they said, and I wished that Pash was there. RCA sent me home. They sent me a letter, on thin, flimsy paper.
Decisions such as these
, Mr Thorogood wrote,
do not reflect anything except the jurisprudential realities
. RCA settled with De Forest. Every RCA and Victor Theremin was removed from the market.
In all of America, just 485 of my devices had been sold.
WHAT DO YOU DO when you are going broke? You search for your patron. Winter was blowing in and Pash was out there somewhere. But I could not reach him at his telephone number. He did not answer my mail. Three times I visited the apartmentthat was not really his apartment, where I knew he occasionally stayed. There was no answer, just scuffs and creaking behind the walnut door. As a co-director of the Theremin Corporation, his signature was often needed; I faked it.
One day I went to the covert Soviet consulate in midtown. I waited thirty minutes for a someone to emerge, spidery, from a grey door. I asked him: “What am I to be doing?”
He replied: “Please go back to your laboratory, Dr Termen.”
When I came outside I felt all of the city’s steely ambivalence. Office windows
You went away on tour for huge swathes of 1930. Was it an intentional absence? I don’t know. Had I ruined something somehow? The country was falling apart and you were playing your violin in Illinois. When we did see each other we were careful with our faces. We had come very near to each other and now every look reminded us of this. Sometimes too much seems promised.
In November I knew you were back. I rang your house.
“She’s out with that lawyer,” your sister said. Nadia spoke to me as if we were accomplices. “I don’t trust alliterative names,” she said.
“What?”
“Robert Rockmore.”
I said just: “Oh.”
“They’re at Texas Guinan’s.”
I said again, “Oh.”
So you had gone to Texas Guinan’s.
While you were flying by taxi from paradise to paradise, with another man, I was counting my change. I was riding the subway to the kwoon in Chinatown. The USA’s economy had gone limp, like a flag that is brought indoors. First the RCA devices were rebranded as “budget” Victor Theremins. We released plans for an updated model—a little cheaper, a little simpler, with a loudspeaker built into the cabinet. These were not beautiful or subtle instruments. They were clumsy. But they looked a little like radios—familiar, easy, bestselling radios. At the Providence Home Progress Expo they called this new design “the most amazing invention of modern times.”
Unfortunately, the most amazing invention of modern times never went on sale. On a Monday morning I received a letter from the De Forest Radio Company of Passaic, New Jersey. The letter was on rich, thick paper, paper the colour of a stork. Its letterhead showed the elegant names of three Baltimore lawyers. The signatures were equally elegant. The rest of the words were typed. Everything was spelled correctly. They informed me that the De Forest Radio Company of New Jersey was in possession of several patents concerning vacuum tubes and synthetic sound.
RCA also received a copy of this letter. Their legal team called me to a conference room uptown, where the light cut through the curtains. The sun was in my eyes. My muscles ached from the morning’s workout regimen. They asked me questions. They showed me schematics. The inventor Lee De Forest had taken out patents, decades before, governing the musical use of vacuum tubes. “I was in Russia,” I said. “This is unrelated.” They said it didn’t matter. They said it was related. They said that De Forest had been sitting on these patents, waiting for us, like a bandit. “This is an ambush, plain and simple,” they said, and I wished that Pash was there. RCA sent me home. They sent me a letter, on thin, flimsy paper.
Decisions such as these
, Mr Thorogood wrote,
do not reflect anything except the jurisprudential realities
. RCA settled with De Forest. Every RCA and Victor Theremin was removed from the market.
In all of America, just 485 of my devices had been sold.
WHAT DO YOU DO when you are going broke? You search for your patron. Winter was blowing in and Pash was out there somewhere. But I could not reach him at his telephone number. He did not answer my mail. Three times I visited the apartmentthat was not really his apartment, where I knew he occasionally stayed. There was no answer, just scuffs and creaking behind the walnut door. As a co-director of the Theremin Corporation, his signature was often needed; I faked it.
One day I went to the covert Soviet consulate in midtown. I waited thirty minutes for a someone to emerge, spidery, from a grey door. I asked him: “What am I to be doing?”
He replied: “Please go back to your laboratory, Dr Termen.”
When I came outside I felt all of the city’s steely ambivalence. Office windows
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