am embarrassed to admit this, knowing that it reveals some essential lack or selfishness in my nature, and aware that it runs contrary to the instincts of most, whose passion for something leads them to want to share it, to ignite a similar passion in others, and that without the benefit of such enthusiasm I would still be ignorant of many of the books and much of the music I love most, not least of all the third movement of Opus 132 that bore me up one spring night in 1967. But rather than an expansion, I’ve always felt a diminishment of my own pleasure when I’ve invited someone else to take part in it, a rupture in the intimacy I felt with the work, an invasion of privacy. It is worst when someone else picks up the copy of a book I’ve just been enthralled by and begins casually to thumb through the first pages. Simply reading at all in the presence of another did not come naturally to me, and I suppose I never really got used to it, even after years of being married. But by that point S had been hired as a booking manager of Lincoln Center and his work required longer hours than it had in the past, and sometimes even took him away on trips to Berlin or London or Tokyo for days at a time. Alone, I could slip into a kind of stillness, into a place like that bog those children once drew, where faces rise up out of the elements, and all is quiet, like the moment just before the arrival of an idea, a stillness and peace I’ve only ever felt when alone. When at last S came through the door I always found it jarring. But in time he came to understand and accept this, and took to entering by whichever room I wasn’t in—the kitchen if I was in the living room, the living room if I was in the bedroom—and occupying himself there by emptying his pockets for some minutes, or organizing his foreign change in little black film canisters, before gradually merging into wherever I was, and this small gesture always melted my resentment into gratitude.
When the movement came to an end I turned off the stereo without listening to the rest, and went to the kitchen to start a soup. I was cutting the vegetables when the knife slipped and sliced deeply into my thumb, and at the instant I shouted out I heard a double of my cry, one belonging to a child. It seemed to come from the other side of the wall, in the next apartment over. I was overcome by a feeling of regret, so sharp that I felt it as a kind of physical pain in my gut, and I had to sit. I admit that I even cried, sobbing until the blood from my finger began to drip onto my shirt. After I’d gotten control of myself and wrapped the cut in a paper towel, I went to knock on my neighbor’s door, an old woman named Mrs. Becker who lived alone. I heard her slow footsteps shuffling to the door, and then, after I announced myself, the patient unlocking of various bolts. She peered up at me through enormous black glasses, glasses that somehow made her look like a small, burrowing animal. Yes, dear, come in, so nice to see you. The smell of ancient food was overwhelming, years and years of cooking odors clinging to the rugs and upholstery, thousands of pots of soup that allowed her to scrape by. I thought that I heard a cry coming from here just a moment ago. A cry? Mrs. Becker asked. It sounded like a child, I said, peering past her into the dark recesses of her apartment, cluttered with claw-footed furniture that would only be moved, with great difficulty, when she died. Sometimes I watch the television, but no, I don’t think it was on, I was just sitting here looking at a book. Maybe it came from downstairs. I’m fine, dear, thank you for your concern.
I didn’t tell anyone what I’d heard, not even Dr. Lichtman, my therapist of many years. And for some time I didn’t hear the child again. But the cries stayed with me. Sometimes I would suddenly hear them within me when I wrote, causing me to lose my train of thought or become flustered. I began to sense in them something