Next, I stood beside the fourposter and read my new story aloud. I tried to impersonate the chief angel supervising freshmen orientation for a new crop of winged ones. The tale met with a certain admiration—both for its proposed order of angel hierarchy, and the leisurely, conversational, getting-to-know-you quality of my intended paradise. There was applause, it held. I flopped down on a bolster at the head of Robert’s bed. I felt surrounded by a second, purer, kind of humid air.

These were the only people in the world I wanted to please and, having done that, I could now relax, for maybe another six weeks.

Both Angie and Gideon had hung paintings in Robert’s short hallway and, bringing over the one good floorlamp, we now admired them. Gideon was teased for not bothering to attempt a new one; but he still didn’t seem to know he ought to find such charges troubling. Angie’s painting showed a manhole cover that soon became the shieldlike pattern from a tortoise’s shell. A convincing oval fluorescent tube had been painted all around it (painted factually as if by a medical illustrator). She had given the turtle shell its own industrial-strength halo. I remembered telling her about a snapping turtle I’d seen murdered. Had Angie awarded the dead creature a miner’s carbide headlamp? You were, as ever, left with questions. But new ones.

Robert had greeted us at the door and, on turning, casually showed the homemade wings. He said he’d considered throwing out early drafts of the piece we would soon hear, plus his sketches for the Ocean Liner symphony. Instead he’d scissored those pages into feather shapes. Then he stapled hundreds of these, overlapping, to twin pieces of long cardboard cut in curves. The striped paper and its speckled notes looked, at a distance, strangely like the markings of some white seabird. Given the heat, Robert wore only jeans, a white scoop-necked T-shirt, wings. He had fastened the left span around one shoulder with some twine; the other stayed attached via a web khaki belt. These Xed like bandoliers across his back, as he settled before his peeling veneer piano.

He slowly lit a dozen candles and now asked Marco to kill the lamp as our composer faced his new score. Robert played the two-part tonepoem, played well if with some church training evident in a steady underpulse and maybe overmuch pedal. The first half he presented was an exquisite melting thing, rendered more exciting by the shrieks of our neighbor kids, the jets of water heard striking asphalt. Pink molten spray from a Roman candle lit the fire escape across the street then cooled to darkness.

The starting half of Robert’s poem was lyrical, a sort of waking up in Paradise look-see. It had long runs and the Fauré Requiem’s airy sweetness. The second half reprised the first but in a manner somewhat hellishly lumbering, overdetermined. Though it possessed a thorny integrity, when the second ended, when Robert turned around, wings shifting away from our applause, he sensed that something had been lacking. The two halves did not adhere. We’d all heard this.