Gail walked me up three steps to a slightly elevated extension of the house and indicated a doorway on her left. “My garret away from my garret,” she said. “Where I sleep when I stay here on the weekends.” I entered a room painted a blanched yellow, the same color as the promised piano, a console model, the kind you knew from kindergarten. Adjacent to the keyboard was a drafting table with blank manuscript paper and a coffee can filled with twenty or thirty lethally sharpened pencils. A small bed looked the right size for Gail. I could picture her napping there. Several orange crates were lined up against the opposite wall.

“You better sit down,” Gail said. “It’s not that short a piece, and I intend to play it through twice for you. I want you to like it, and with music, familiarity breeds content.”

There was no chair in the room, other than the piano stool. “You want me to sit on the floor?” I asked.

“No, just sit on my bed, Ray, but take off your shoes first.”

I did so and sat myself at the foot of the bed, leaning forward attentively.

She protested, “No, you’re too close, it’s making me nervous. Stretch out.”

I dutifully wadded a few thin pillows behind the small of my back and lay there like a pasha on a divan, propped up on my right elbow.

She turned to face me, mock formal, posing with her right hand upon the cabinet of the piano. “It gives me now great pleasure, mingled with terror, to perform for your express enjoyment the original composition Swing Around the Sun, Opus Thirty-seven in D Major, composed by G. Prentice, circa 1940.”

I wondered if she’d really kept track of how many works she’d composed to arrive at Opus 37 and when she had started counting.

She dropped her tongue-in-cheek grand manner and added, “Hey, listen, Ray, all I ask is that if you really don’t like it and think it’s not for you, that you’ll lie to me, tell me it’s great, and do the arrangement anyway. Is that too much too ask?”

“Sounds eminently fair to me,” I replied. Who was I fooling? An albacore tuna in a net had more freedom of choice than I had at this point.

She walked over to the side of the bed. “Could we shake on it, Ray?” she asked. “It’ll be a lot less harrowing for me to play this for you if you tell me in advance that you’ll do it, no matter what you think. I mean, it did win the competition, so somebody thought it was good, right?”

“I’ll do the best I can for you.”

She reached out her hand. “So when you give me your critique, you’ll be gentle?”