And the flood of relief that fills him has other components in it he can’t tag so readily; it’s the kind of pleasure he gets when Tash or Abe give him a call to arrange something, the sense that one of his good friends reciprocates his regard, and will actually take the trouble to initiate a get-together, something that is usually left for Jim to do.

So he goes out and buys spaghetti and the materials for the sauce and a salad. A bottle of Chianti. Back home for some hapless, hopeless attempts to clean the place, or at least order it a little.

Hana shows up around seven.

“I’m really glad you called,” Jim says, stirring the spaghetti sauce vigorously.

“Well, it’s been a while.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring past him at the floor, throwing her sentences out casually. Attack of shyness, it seems. Her black hair as tangled as ever.

“I—I think I’m losing it, somehow,” Jim says, surprising them both. “This trip, it just reinforced everything I was feeling before!” And it all spills out of him in a rush, Hana glancing up now and then as he rattles on about Cairo and Crete and California. He mixes his account of them so that it must be impossible for her to figure out which place he’s talking about, but she doesn’t interrupt until a desperate edge tears his voice. Then she stands, briefly, puts a hand to his arm. This is so unlike her that Jim is struck dumb.

“I know what you mean,” she says. “But look. Your dinner’s almost ready, and you shouldn’t eat when you’re upset.”

“I’d starve if I didn’t.”

But he pours the spaghetti into the colander with a wry grin, feeling a bit more relaxed already. There’s something new floating in the steam between them, and he likes it. As they sit down to eat he goes and puts on one of his amalgamations of classical music, and they eat.

“What’s the music?” Hana asks after a while.

“I’ve taken all the slow movements from Beethoven’s five late string quartets, and also the slow movement from the Hammerklavier Sonata as the centerpiece. It has a very serene effect—”

“Wait a minute. You mean all these movements come from different quartets?”

“Yeah, but they’re unified by a similar style and—”

She is laughing fit to burst. “What a terrible idea! Ha, ha, ha, ha!… Why did you do that?”

“Well.” Jim thinks. “I found when I put on the late quartets I was usually doing it to hear the slow movements. It’s for a mood I have that I like to, I don’t know. Soundtrack, or reinforce, or transform into something higher.”