[Omitted here is the perplexity he felt over his split feelings, the dualism he felt taking Sylvia shopping on Fifth, slipping her little hand into his glove so he could warm it up; hiking across the park, slapping snow in each other’s faces. He loved fresh snow on Central Park but despised the way, a few short hours into the morning, the snow was defiled by ski tracks, sled marks, people jogging, the frenetic urgency with which New Yorkers threw themselves into exercise. ]

Eventually I gave up trying to get rid of the weight in my fingers.

[Omitted in this section: A few days after returning from Russia, in a practice room at Carnegie Hall, he’d sat plucking the keys, listening to the deadened sound of notes absorbed by the acoustic tiles; he ran through the nocturnes; he’d played flawlessly, relaxing the tops of his hands, rolling across the notes (as his first teacher used to describe it, creating a fluid movement into the notes, through them, a rolling motion), pointing each one but not too carefully. You don’t want to make the listener aware of the notes, one of his teachers used to say. You want to seduce the listener into thinking he’s actually hearing notes, when in truth he’s hearing Chopin, only Chopin. The old battered practice piano—soft from years of pounding—produced a dog-eared tone, slightly yellow. He finished, exhausted, and rested his brow against the board; then he got up, stretched out his legs, and opened the door. It was like unsealing a vault, allowing wonderful sound to flow out and escape into the stale hallway. From down the hall came the sandy shuffle of ballet slippers across floorboards. (This was a sound he loved from early memories of music school and summer music camp in the Midwest.) Antoinette appeared a moment later, standing for a second in the doorway, holding her coat tight at the collar, shivering. Her face was narrow but thoughtful and led up to blond hair so fine it eluded control; it sprang from clips, slid out from the tightest band, flew from any hat. He saw that her eyes had given over to some fear. Her stare had a subdued gloss. She blinked rapidly. Her ankle was bad. She’d fallen during a leap—something called a grand Jeté—arriving back to the stage slightly off balance, misaligning her foot so it received the brunt of the force. An understudy had taken her place. She was alone with her injury. None of the company had visited her dressing room. They feared being jinxed. Ice was applied in bright blue packs. An X-ray revealed a stress fracture, but there was something more. A tendon was pulled. I’m fucked, she said, because Francisco has decided to sideline me. Bending down, she rubbed her ankle softly and then, forming a ring with both hands, twisted her hands as if trying to remove a lid from a jar. The doctor had given her an injection of cortisone. She stood back up, put her heels together, gathered her hands, raised them above her head, opened them apart, formed an arch, and lifted up onto the tops of her flattened toes. He felt completely the beauty and sickness of this abnormal position; even after years of watching ballerinas find this position, it still hurt to see; it was odd. Against the nature of feet and bones and even the heart itself. ]