The conversation had to move elsewhere. At the moment, I had no idea what if anything I could ever do about Gail, or if I would even get to see her again once our work was completed. I knew I delighted being in her company, and felt as if I’d received the miraculous chance to be graced by a glimmer of what Linney might have been in my life. But what I wanted or needed meant nothing. I had to steer Gail away from caring about me as anything other than an ally. One good way to do that would be to make sure both of us were working studiously, soberly, and industriously on Swing. “Gail, we can talk about all this some other time. Right now we have a ton of work ahead of us, and that’s what we have to focus on.”

She said I was the boss, and I told her that, yes, I would have to be while I was creating the orchestration. Rolling out an eight-bar sheaf of blank orchestral manuscript on the drafting table, I said, “Look, you’ll save me ten minutes an hour if you label all the lines for me. The first staff is for bar numbers, each number in a circle. Staves two through five are the four trumpets; leave staff six blank; then four trombones; staff eleven blank; five reeds. That takes care of all your horns. Staff seventeen blank; eighteen through twenty-two are rhythm. . . you get the idea, right?”

She smiled. “Got it.”

“Now for the clefs and keys. You’ve chosen to write this chart in the key of D, even though it’s so atonal I suppose it could be in no key at all. Why D?”

She sat on the chair by the card table and scrunched her shoulders together. “Looks nice on the page. Two sharps. Sounded right. Swing Around the Sun in D Major.”

I winced. “Putting the tenor sax and trumpet in four sharps, and the alto and baritone sax in five? In your future writing, keep in mind that jazz musicians just love composers who write in flat keys.”

“Sorry.”

“Just a tip. Well, no matter what the key, we’re going to write a transposed score, not a concert score.”

“Where all the instruments are notated in their own keys, right? The same as their individual parts?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it saves the copyist time and saves us money. It also forces you to think of where the notes lie not on the piano, but on the instruments themselves.”

“Then that’s what we should do,” said Gail, and she began the thankless job of preparing each big sheet of score paper for my contribution as orchestrator, which was ludicrous, as she was the composer. It was something like hiring young Mozart to tune the harpsichord for the premiere of his first sonata.