“You’ve got to be kidding, Jim! You know perfectly well Beethoven would cringe at the very idea.” She laughs at him. “Each quartet is a whole experience, right? You’re cutting out all the other parts of them! Come on. Go put on one of them complete. Choose the one you like best.”

“Well, that’s not so easy,” Jim says as he goes to the old CD console. “It’s odd. Sullivan says in his book on Beethoven that opus 131 is by far the greatest of them, with its seven movements and the spacy opener and so on.”

“Why should that matter to you?”

“What Sullivan says? Well, I don’t know … I guess I get a lot of my ideas out of books. And Sullivan’s is one of the best biographies in the world.”

“And so you accepted his judgment.”

“That’s right. At first, anyway. But finally I admitted to myself that I prefer opus 132. Beethoven wrote it after recovering from a serious illness, and the slow movement is a thanksgiving.”

“Okay, but let’s hear the whole thing.”

Jim sticks in the CD of the LaSalle Quartet performance, and they listen to it as they finish dinner. “How you could pass on this part?” Hana says during the final movement.

“I don’t know.”

After dinner she wanders his ap and looks at things. She inspects the framed orange crate labels with her nose about an inch from their surfaces. “These are really nice.” In his bedroom she stops and laughs. “These maps! They’re great! Where did you get them?”

Jim explains, happy to talk about them. Hana admires the Thomas Brothers’ solution to the four-color map problem. Then she notices the video cameras in the corners where walls meet ceiling; she wrinkles her nose, shudders. Back into the living room, where she goes over the bookcase volume by volume, and they talk about the books, and all manner of things.

She notices the computer on Jim’s battered old sixth-grade desk, and the piles of printout beside it. “So is this the poetry, then? Do I get to read some?”

“Oh no, no,” Jim says, rushing to the desk as if to hide the stuff. “I mean, not yet, anyway. I haven’t got any of it in final form, and, well, you know.…”

Hana frowns, shrugs.

They sit on the bamboo-and-vinyl couch and talk about other matters. Then suddenly she’s standing and looking at the floor. “Time to go, I have to work tomorrow.” And she’s off. Jim walks her to her car.