If an unhappy marriage was my father’s lasting failing, his last failure, and the one that offered another type of poignancy, a new kind of pain, was demonstrated by his increasing dependence on music. My father had always appreciated music, but now he began to cherish it, pouring his emotion and energy into it and using it to fill the vacuum left by love. When he listened to ‘O Mio Babbino Caro’ in our living room, his handsome face became equal to the most beautifully crafted cinematographic shot of weeping Mafiosi in La Scala. But he didn’t simply weep -he was transported. He became more democratic in his tastes, now treating jazz and opera, pop and soul, and classical Indian melodies as equal in his own United Nations of Music. It was a bittersweet gift as, despite all his efforts, his gift was simply that of knowing and appreciating great music - he played a little, but he was acceptable rather than good. He could strum a sitar, a guitar, and he even learned to play something recognizable on keyboards, but he could never play a tune as he would want it heard. He could never write a melody that would transport him. His displaced yearning for the love he had lost made him a musical dilettante - a jack of all instruments but a master of none.

My father didn’t lose his love for music, but his resentment about his mediocrity added to the unhappiness he already felt. His wife was withdrawing, remaining close to him only in her sleep, and his musical mistress had only held up another mirror to his shortcomings. He played up a very slight deafness in one ear, hoping this might suffice as the excuse for this lack of talent, and listened to Beethoven like a martyr. But the bitter truth was, he could not pretend to have any cultured skill or aesthetic gift that might win our mother back; he could not claim to be an unfulfilled artist who had just played at business for her sake, to give her back the material comfort she had given up when she chose him. The unfortunate truth was that he was a businessman who played at art.