as was possible before we each had to turn off in separate directions. As we said goodbye, the dancer bent down and removed a piece of fluff from the collar of my coat. The moment was tender and almost intimate. I took it down off my wall, you know, he said softly. What? I said. After I read your story, I took the painting down off my wall. I found I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. You did? I said, caught off guard. Why? At first I wondered myself, he said. It had followed me from apartment to apartment, from city to city, for almost twenty years. But after a while I understood what your story had made so clear to me. What was that? I wanted to ask, but couldn’t. Then the dancer, who though older was still languid and full of grace, reached out and tapped me with two fingers on the cheek, turned, and walked away.
As I made my way home, the dancer’s gesture first baffled and then annoyed me. On the surface, it had been easy to mistake for tenderness, but the more I thought about it, the more there seemed something condescending in it, even meant to humiliate. In my mind the dancer’s smile became less and less genuine, and it began to seem to me that he had been choreographing the gesture for years, turning it over, waiting to run into me. And was it deserved? Hadn’t he gamely told the story, not only to me but all of the dinner guests that night? If I had discovered it through surreptitious means—reading his journals or letters, which I couldn’t possibly have done, knowing him as little as I did—it would have been different. Or if he had told me the story in confidence, filled with still-painful emotion. But he had not. He had offered it with the same smile and festivity with which he had offered us a glass of grappa after dinner.
As I walked, I happened to pass a playground. It was already late in the afternoon but the small fenced-in area was full of the children’s high-pitched activity. Among the many apartments I’ve lived in over the years, one had been across the street from a playground and I’d always noticed that in the last half an hour before dusk the children’s voices seemed to get noisier. I could never tell whether it was because in the failing light the city had grown a decibel more quiet, or because the children had really grown louder, knowing their time there was almost through. Certain phrases or peals of laughter would break away from the rest, rising up, and hearing one of these I would sometimes get up from my desk to watch the children below. But I didn’t stop to watch them now. Consumed by my run-in with the dancer, I barely noticed them until a cry rang out, pained and terrified, an agonizing child’s cry that tore into me, as if it were an appeal to me alone. I stopped short and jerked around, sure I was going to find a mangled child fallen from a great height. But there was nothing, only the children running in and out of their circles and games, and no sign of where the cry had come from. My heart was racing, adrenaline coursing through me, my whole being poised to rush to save whoever had let loose that terrible scream. But the children continued to play, unalarmed. I scanned the buildings above, thinking that perhaps the cry had come from an open window, though it was November and cold enough to need the heat. I stood gripping the fence for some time.
When I got home, S was still out. I put on Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, a piece I’d always loved since a college boyfriend first played it for me in his dorm room. I still remember the knobs of his spine as he bent over the record player and slowly let the needle down. The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I’ve never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling. Like most music that affects me deeply, I would never listen to it while others were around, just as I would not pass on a book that I especially loved to another. I