be the end of it. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you, Ezra.”
“You’re velcome,” they said simultaneously.
The concert was a special guest piano performance by a young Japanese woman who’d already played auditoriums in London, Paris, Vienna, and Milan—although from where they sat now she looked like a child of nine approaching an instrument large enough to be a baby giraffe’s coffin. The first three notes sounded like day dawning, day or time itself; then the music exploded into the battering wind and rain of a violent squall, the girl’s fingers darting and leaping and trilling at implausible speeds even as her face remained smooth and neutral as a mask. This was followed by two brief Stockhausen pieces, which by contrast sounded to Alice like a cat walking around on the keyboard; between them, during the stern lull in which everyone knows not to clap, a spate of coughs rippled through the audience, as though the dissonant tones still hanging in the air were not what remained of the music but an irritating gas.
During intermission, Ezra was greeted by a friend, a man with white leonine hair and a turquoise handkerchief sprouting from his seersucker pocket. “Ezra my dear. What do you think?”
“She’s wonderful. Though perhaps a little aloof.”
“Stockhausen is aloof. How’s your book?”
Alice hung back, sipping white wine and gazing coolly out toward the bay; behind her, two female students were discussing triads, and fermatas, and then, a touch more cagily, who might be chosen to solo in the benefit concert the following month. Alice finished her wine and was about to move off altogether when Ezra touched her elbow and said, “Cal, this is Mary-Alice.”
“Oh,” said Alice. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“I was just telling Cal about how I heard Maurizio Pollini play The Tempest a hundred years ago, at the Louvre. His tails were as long as a freight train. Darling, you really must try to see Pollini one day.”
“You like music?” Cal asked.
“Oh yes,” said Alice.
“Mary-Alice is an editor,” said Ezra.
“Well,” said Alice, “an associate editor.”
“How fine,” said Cal. “For which house?”
“Excuse me,” said Ezra. “I’m just going to get a Diet Coke.”
“Gryphon,” said Alice, stepping closer to make room for the people filing behind her.
“You must be very clever then. Roger doesn’t hire dummies.”
“You know Roger?”
“Of course. Brilliant man. Brilliant editor. Is that what you want to do? Edit?”
A woman carrying a baby excused herself to squeeze between them. Recognizing her, Cal leaned in for a kiss. “Felicity! This is Mary-Alice. Ezra’s friend. And this?”
“Justine.”
“Justine . . .”
Alice found Ezra outside, sitting on a bench under a maple’s canopy, his freshly shaven face looking drawn and gray in the dying light. “Sorry honey. I suddenly felt a little light-headed.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, I’ll be all right. I want us to have a nice night out together. We can stay.”
Sitting beside him, Alice said, “Cal knows Roger. My boss.”
“Oops. Oh well.”
Alice nodded. “Oh well.”
A few yards away an elegantly dressed couple passed a cigarette between them. The woman said something in French that made Ezra look over and the man smoking with her laugh.
“What are you thinking?” asked Alice.
Ezra turned back to her, surprised. “I was thinking about my book. About a scene I haven’t got right. Not that you ever get them right, mind you. You might as well write about the Hutus for all you’re going to get right about them.”
When they’d thrown their plastic cups away and pushed politely past the others back to their seats, the pianist returned to her bench and stared at the keys reflected there in the high ebony gloss with what seemed a superhuman concentration. Then she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage: a great rumbling rigorous pounding that was anything but aloof; on the contrary, the woman’s shoulders rocked forward and back, her foot pumped the damper pedal so emphatically that even her heel cleared the floor, and her head jerked wincingly up and to the side as if sparks were flying off the keyboard and threatening to enter her eyes. The effect, on Alice, was dazzling and demoralizing all at once: reverberating in her sternum, the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her