[Omitted from this section: He disagreed with his father. Of course there in the hospital room he wasn’t about to argue. To linger over one or two composers for an entire career seemed like an exercise bordering on cultist adoration, maybe religion; he was no monk. Later that night his father died. Nothing dramatic. Then days of arrangements—the funeral parlor, the minister, and then the funeral, attended by a few retired members of the Cleveland Philharmonic. When he got back to New York he met up with Antoinette right away, at a place on Madison near her building. When someone tells you something just before he dies, he said, it kind of sticks to you like a residue—is that the word?—and you can’t, at least I can’t, just shrug it off. And she turned to look up at him, over her spoon, with wide gray eyes, considering what he’d just said; but her eyes were off slightly, drifting away when she tried to focus. Before lunch she’d gone into the bathroom and snorted something (cocaine? heroin?) from a square of brown wrapping paper. He was a beautiful man with great talents and fine clothing. He was a man who would take her away to some domestic place, she thought. He, in turn, felt the deep shame that came from laying out the particulars of his private life to a woman who was, clearly, under the influence of medication. (At that point he was only partly aware of her addictions and thought it was something she was taking for pain in her ankle.) In the end he’d leave the restaurant and go out into one of those astonishingly clear days, bright cold weather, just before Christmas when the whole metropolis, at least the Upper East Side, seemed to establish itself as a center for high-class gift giving. In a few weeks, up in those apartments overlooking Central Park, women would unwrap mink stoles from great long boxes; men would be led blindfolded to the bowels of parking garages to see, unveiled from beneath clean canvas tarps, their new sedans. ]