I was so glad I’d already presented my piece. Imagine following his Paradise Lost Then Corrected! Angie was the only other person on this bed. As I sat upright against its headboard, she wiggled over and—just as Robert hit the first complex chord—rested her head in my lap. He seemed to play with more rolling conviction now, as if her suggestion had given him a confidence. He settled into the work as if he had not written but memorized it, and from some source superior, foregone.

Now his playing bypassed that earlier determination. Instead, it unfurled; it oared, it wingbeat forward. And this new ease let us look around. This ease let us absorb our own scene as if looking back and down on it.

The windows stood ajar, supported by sawed-off broomsticks (or, no, what were those? plumber’s friends?). Pigeons, made nervous by pyrotechnics, sometimes came to rest on the ledge and then swerved off, returning. Across the street, our pizzeria’s usual neon burned, hissing; it spread fitful pink, then a humming blue across the facade opposite. Robert’s crystals, intensifying colors, seemed the dripping faucets of some distillery where light is manufactured.

Tonight, rendered intimate by his music and our after-hour whorehouse familiarity, the street itself seemed so narrow you could reach its far side just by leaning off our fire escape; you could water those leggy zinnia in the windowbox opposite.

Seated at the piano, one half-dressed boy wore formal wings. Candlelight played over the planes of his dark back. Light made much of his ringlets. Light picked out separate feathers, first drafts of the very music his long hands now played.

Roman candles’ phosphorous tints fired by at crazy angles. They seemed—in their rocking surge—short-lived, half-sexual, pagan in spectacle—Roman.

As our Robert ended the opening section and bolted into second’s gangly turns, I felt Angie tuck into herself and enjoy his every awkward complication, knowing now that an emotional competition waited dead ahead, and all at her suggestion.

I fought not to stroke her dye-burned hair, not to whisper something childlike. A smell lifted from her like heated milk scented slightly by the saucepan’s steel, a scent childlike in its blank trust. I felt honored by the weight of her good head. I judged it weighed just eight to ten pounds. What a miracle, a mind this fine should be so light!

I looked over at Marco. He often preferred to stand when others felt compelled to sit; he leaned back upright against a wall near the broom closet, arms crossed, head swinging a bit, filthy glasses glinting, locked in thoughts of usual purity.

Gideon sat slung across a kitchen chair, facing Robert but with both black eyes fixed instead on the tip of his own new and pointy right shoe. He seemed to be judging Robert’s sound against the visual evidence of the costly shoe itself. Robert paused, just the correct length of time and commenced, repeating the first.