“Is that a euphemism?”

“No!” I laughed, then forced myself serious, thinking about how Dad was out to dinner with Nora and Bill tonight, wouldn’t be back for hours and . . . no. Serious. “You cannot compose on that thing anymore. Pianos only from here on out.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

•   •   •

I dragged an armchair from the sitting area to avoid using Mom’s piano bench. Then I leaned against my knees and listened while Oscar worked through a new motif in fits and pauses and bursts. His mind was a remote satellite. I couldn’t begin to understand how these thoughts were forming, these notes coming to life. But as the piece took form, his gibberish about dichotomies started to make sense—and so did what I’d noticed up in Washington Heights.

This new section was a nod to the mass we’d heard sung at the Cloisters, pure and sacred, interlaced with a higher, more contemporary melody. It took me a second to identify the syncopation as a bachata swing—Dominican-flavored, that music I’d heard pumping out of an apartment building. I watched Oscar, wondering whether he’d wandered back without me during those lost days, listening for the sound of the neighborhood. He must have. And here it was, dancing with something ancient—before drowning it out with an almost triumphant cadence at the end.

Almost. My muscles felt antsy, like I was kicking rocks off the edge of a cliff.

“It peters out there, doesn’t it?” I heard myself murmuring. “You resolve it so quickly, it doesn’t feel like there’s anywhere for it to go and you’re . . . how many bars in?”

“Forty.” He scratched his hair. “I’m not sure where I want it to go.”

I tried to think like Dad. “What are you trying to say?”

He leaned against the piano, head slumped. “Something . . . about high art vs. quote-unquote low art, music, pop culture, culture in general. This life, real life. You have the Cloisters, this oasis, but is it an oasis? Is it better than everything surrounding it? Who decides that? So I start out . . .”

He played the contrapuntal section, an analog to early music.

“And then it starts to get heckled . . .” The Latin melody came in. “But in the end, the bachata . . . it’s joyous, right? It’s now, it’s the pulse of that neighborhood, it should win.”

“What about other pop forms? To keep developing it. Hip-hop!”

His eyes went wide—and my own scrunched tightly shut.

When I opened them, he was shaking his head slowly with a disappointed smile. “Ruby Chertok . . .”

My cheeks were flaming. “I know you don’t listen to hip-hop. I don’t listen to it either. I don’t know why I—”

“You don’t know why.”

“I . . . am shutting up now.”

He grinned. “No, I’m gonna let you sit in this a minute longer.”

“EDM maybe? Klezmer? Polka? I am an idiot.”