The way you know true things in your very follicles, in the basis of your next breath, from the scrotum to the inner ears and back down the IRT express of your nervous system which IS a form of transportation—we all gained what we had earlier suspected: how gifted Robert was, how right our Angie Alabama had just been. What had first seemed an exercise for friends became, with one dynamic change, a composition fit for groups of strangers. It started as gifted kid stuff then got pushed, by certainty, reiteration, playful community, to a fast hothouse maturity.

And without writing one extra note! By simply knowing the material so thoroughly, by trusting its seaworthiness to withstand this second voyage out.

I felt then—as the voices of the street built, as another pink-gold rocket feathered past, as Robert reached the arc of the gentle music’s soaring—something lock into place. It registered bodily as a single isolated hiccup. Angie, head in my lap, looked up at me then. As if responding to a question with a question, which was actually an answer, at the very moment Robert finished, just before we’d pitch upright and applaud our winged one, she whispered a word straight up into my face: “Happy?”

I could only nod, once, down.

Finally, secure, surrounded, I was, that. I had felt—as completely as a work of art is art, with the brevity of a single potent wing-beat—the H- word.

We would soon stumble downstairs, kicking through party streamers and burned rocket husks, we’d head toward Ossorio’s caffeine and, after vowing to visit each other’s hometowns for official tours of our squandered early years, in linked inches of a single golden line from her felt pen, we finally believed ourselves worthy, this night of the angels, to give Eternity itself our single autograph!

Robert’s angel triptych, written as a lark—got included in a concert that was called “Ten Composers Under Thirty-Five: A New Romanticism Afoot?” (At Ossorio’s, this gave rise to foot fetish jokes.) Angie was picked for some decent juried three-person show in Houston and they actually sent her a plane ticket to the opening. Her first free fare. She brought it to our table to show us. “Round trip?” I asked, checking for her. We still didn’t trust the few good things that fell our way from strangers. Marco, who’d never mentioned knowing Russian, was now translating uncollected Isaac Babel stories into English. He explained the difficulties and read aloud a story so good I vowed to quit. “But,” he told me, “you are something Babel was not, ever.”

“Thanks, Marco … what?”

“Isaac Babel wasn’t born in Falls, North Carolina. Think of the material he missed.”

“Great. What a vote of confidence. I wasn’t born in revolutionary seaside Odessa, either, ditz.”

Gideon sold his blue-gold nocturne to a famous genius poet whose dad had founded the world’s biggest brokerage firm. And I, after waiting forever, heard from a magazine that mailed a check and the exact date I should look for my first published short story.