His right hand on the bench, his left atop his instrument, he said, “Tell me true, I can take it.” His face took on a beseeching softness. He was a spectacle that night, brown from sailing and from baking on his roof, with the Swedish carpenter shoulders, and a glimpse of his chest’s tattoo, plus the wings’ guy-wires.

I can still see his paper feathers moving in a mild breeze while some cherry bomb echoed along our street. A great Mediterranean cry rose up.

“Number one,” Angie spoke first and we, having sensed a weakness in Robert’s composition, felt relieved not to address it ourselves. “One: Never take the wings off. You’ve hit on a fashion accessory I didn’t know was missing from the world till tonight. Number two: Mother will now tell you how to fix your tonepoem. Simple. This is what only a good painter can tell a fairly good composer. And you are good. You’re just not grown. Listen …”

Robert’s face bent itself into a paroxysm of penitence, it looked erotic, in extremis. It admitted, “I screwed up, I made something very bad for my pals and now I’ve slaughtered all their future respect for me forever.” And yet such hope still lived in the gaze he offered her (“Maybe I can fix it in a year? Maybe they’ll forgive me when I do?”).

“It’s not a diptych you’ve written. More a triptych. You probably got too literal about your own two wings, you narcissist. Try this, why dontcha? Play the sweet one first, play the sour cubistic thing second, and then, verbatim, end with the sweet one again, no changes, no pushing up the emphasis, not even a bit, though you’ll want to, Love Machine. Repeat it exactly as you did it first. Thing’ll come out completely different. It’ll truly seem paradise the second time. Because, by then, it will all sound completely earned.”

We sat in candlelight, we stared at each other, we did not risk a single smile about our own good fortune. We were lucky, we knew it, we were not scrambling in the Hamptons and, better, didn’t want to be. We were honestly entertaining each other and therefore learning. Could we make each other briefly content? Could we make this evening, through our own heavenly descriptions, indescribable? Yes, we probably could.

The hardest thing to do is tell the truth and have your listeners love hearing something that difficult to bear: You’re not perfect; you’re a player but you still need work.

I remember feeling my usual sinus burning. I remember hoping Robert would say nothing now. No word, please. He did not. Guessing we all had time for this, he simply turned back to his piano. To play. Robert breathed once. Then—paper wings suspended between shoulder blades as easy as male genitals between thighs hang, solemn, replete, concentrated—our wizard, as instructed, began again.