For me, the assignment was like nothing I’d done before. Clusters of notes that may sound fine on a piano can seem muddy, grating, even comic if directly assigned to a group of wind instruments. Yet Gail had made it a point of personal pride that not one note of her piano composition was to be changed, and I respected that. So it was up to me to find the combinations of instruments that would sound best playing the piano voicings she’d obliged me to commit to. Certain melodic passages had leaps in them that no one wind instrument could ever make, and so, right from the start, certain choices were simply not available to me. Much as I might want a trumpet to take an entire phrase, at some point I would have to give his part over to a trombone or baritone sax, only to switch it again to alto sax or clarinet. But this only served to dramatize the departure from the norm that Gail’s Swing represented.

We worked quietly. She was finished with her task in less than two hours. She stepped behind me and watched as I filled in notes and rests and dynamic markings like a lightning sketch artist at a sidewalk café.

“Wow, Ray, look how fast you work.” She peered at the landscape of pencil lines. “Isn’t there a chance you’ll get some of my notes wrong?”

“That’s why you’re going to be proofreading very carefully. As I finish each page of score, you’re going to be responsible for checking my orchestration with your piano composition to see that I got it right.” I set down my pencil. “I’m sure you envisioned me doing this like a medieval monk inscribing illuminations of a holy text. But I think you’ll find very few mistakes.” I rolled my shoulders, which were stiff from writing, and went back to my inscribing.

Standing behind me, she put her hands on my shoulders and began to knead them.

It was the smallest, most harmless and innocent thing to do, undoubtedly prompted by a momentary rush of gratitude for the effort I was making on behalf of her work.

Only it wouldn’t be enough that my intentions were noble if I allowed hers to be anything but the same. I couldn’t let her unknowingly do, say, or feel anything that would cause her revulsion or self-recrimination were she ever to learn what our relationship might be.

“Uh, thanks, Gail,” I said, squirming out of her grasp, “but doing that actually interferes with my concentration. It makes it harder to write. Please, um, don’t do that.”

“Oh. Oh, okay,” she said, a bit taken aback, and returned to her chair.

I continued to write, more briskly than ever. She shifted in her seat.

“So is there anything you want me to do now?” she asked at last.