She grabbed a hold of my hand and led me through the entryway to the big main room. Twenty-foot ceilings, brick walls, casement windows on one side of the room, an upright piano in the corner next to the windows, stuffed bookcases and piles of CDs and records. In the center of the room, there was a huge trestle table with her desktop computer, some synthesizers, and a pair of expensive speakers. It was like a temple to music. Having Erin around all these years, I knew about a whole other province of experience, one I could never satisfactorily play the right part in. What was new was a big projector screen installed on one side of the room. I loved this room, and wanted to get a good look at it for the last time.

“I have to work, unforch,” she said. “But I can still talk.”

“Totally,” I said. “What’s all this?”

“Here, lemme show you.”

She clicked around on the computer until some ancient-looking software filled it. She pressed the space bar and the projector screen lit up with a rapid montage of images andsnippets of video, none longer than a few seconds. Videos of Erin moving a hand over her bare breasts, archival footage of dynamite exploding on a black-and-white hill, videos of places in town that I recognized.

“It’s a piece for piano and video track,” she said, leaning over the computer screen, dragging and dropping things. “I’m still figuring out the relationship between sound and image I want to have.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Huh,” she mimicked me in a high-pitched girly voice, not looking up.

I sat in the broken chair a few feet behind her, in front of the overflowing closet. She looped through parts of the video. I couldn’t say anything intelligent about what she was doing, as always, and I didn’t want to ask her questions.

“Should I go?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

She swiveled around in her seat. “What’s with you?”

“If you’re busy, I can leave,” I said.

I had a habit of averting my eyes in front of Erin’s gaze. Looking at her straight in the face took a little bit of effort, even when we were making love. Those blue eyes, like nets of bright color spreading outward from her pupils.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I’ll be done in, like, an hour. We can get dinner afterward maybe.”

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I said.

She turned around again, then stood up, which I hadn’t expected.

“What do you mean?”

I stood up too. She closed the distance between us and reached a hand toward my face. I didn’t stop her. She brushed some of my hair out of my eyes. It was always her prelude to a kiss.

I responded a little bit, tilting my head up. Then I took a step back.