You hear about this stuff: a pianist from Mexico—most talented guy in the whole country, a big national figure, an asset to his country, a cultural ambassador by virtue of his abilities—who just folded up halfway through a sonata (take your pick: Beethoven, Brahms, whatever), stopped playing, slammed down the cover, stomped off the stage, and never ever again touched a keyboard of any kind. A young opera star from Verona who damaged her vocal cords in a screaming match with her husband and never sang again. The year of my first European tour we were in Italy for a break, running along the beach, tossing a Frisbee, working up a nice rhythm—husband to wife, wife to husband, the passing of the disk—and I was going to try one fancy catch even though we were going for a record number of passes, counting each one, and I was trying to catch it backhanded, racing to the side to meet Margaret’s smooth, flat toss heading directly toward my outstretched arm, my hand, my fingers—clawed open in anticipation—a bit tight because I’d been working all morning, trying to meet the technical demands of a Liszt piece. (For his part, Liszt was swallowed up by his virtuosity.) But then my foot hit a rock—the only rock on the whole half-mile stretch of beachfront—and I found myself balled up, fetal, with a toenail snapped down the middle and a broken toe. With my weight on Margaret’s shoulders, we followed the goat path up to the apartment. The next morning, if I remember correctly, and I think I do, I kept my sore foot off and played everything sans pedale, pecking through Chopin’s Sonata in B Minor, pounding the Scherzo—which as you probably know means joke in Italian—feeling suddenly light, airy, and purged of all deficiencies. Without the pedal the famous bass line was submerged, and the piece was restored to a flat empty world that Chopin never wanted; a stripped, destroyed, bare-boned perfection. I’d meet Antoinette at a reception a few weeks later—along with the other well-wishers—handing me, as so many did at that time, a large bundle of roses, still dripping, wet, and fresh.

About a year after my fingers got heavy, we rented an estate up the Hudson, a place to recuperate, to gather new energies, to mend. At Juilliard I was teaching technique, placing my fingers on top of fingers, putting students through the rigors of my methods: one of the last of the believers in tapping exercises, one magazine called me. The same method gave Glenn Gould his fine, pointed sound. The fingers of one hand were placed over those of the other, forcing the fingers to become acquainted with the notes, to learn them physically. At the house I set up a Steinway beneath the windows of the solarium. I’m going to torture the fucking thing the way it tortures me, I used to say to Margaret. In a few weeks the instrument began to produce a tinny, off-tune bar-piano sound, as if waxed paper were lodged under the hammers. I couldn’t play without thinking of dusty Wild West towns, of those parlor uprights abandoned to the husk-dry afternoons of the Central Plains.