We’re in bed. That’s where our wings were attached, you know, she’s saying. I think of angel wings plucked clean off by the hand of Christ. Under the sheets her bad ankle rests against mine and, to be honest, our legs are entwined and I’m reeling from the incredible way I played a nocturne during practice, the manner in which it came out of me but also the nocturne itself—the solemn perfection with which the notes arrived. She twitches slightly. The luminous throb of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka emerges from her stereo so softly we can hardly hear it. But when her cues come on she involuntarily gives a slight lift of one leg over another and her toes extend and she winces at the pain. The music has urged her to twitch. Like a rubber mallet tapping a knee. At dinner parties, sometimes even shopping, she’ll hear a cue and in response, purely involuntary, she’ll point a toe or swing a leg upward. I know the feeling. When I’m listening to a piece I’ve committed to memory my own fingers twitch, opening up the ghostly possibility of an unseen hand.

[Omitted from this section: At his friend Bernard’s suggestion he had read a story by Isaac Babel called “The Sin of Jesus,” in which a sluttish hotel servant is given an angel by God, an angel she immediately smothers. Also omitted is the fact that he didn’t know (really, he didn’t) that he was going to spurn her after this last fuck; he hadn’t the slightest idea that the chain of events would soon nullify his desire for Antoinette, which was based, in any case, mainly on rudimentary physical factors, which in themselves were coming out of his own good fortunes as a pianist. His career was ascendant while the affair was going. When his touch went, his desire went, too. ]

The light itself had a stony commitment to the land, spreading along the coastline as we arrived. Sylvia was out on the deck, leaning against the rail, letting the wind twist her hair. Great wondrous auburn hair flared by windblown sea spray. Her hips have grown, her legs lengthened, and she is no longer my little girl but something else, a woman at age sixteen leaning forward to examine the sea and approaching shoreline, a ballerina; she has studied ballet, learned its intricacies, graduated to dancing on pointe, and is in a small youth company in the city. I’ve tried to warn her away from the art form as a profession. But when I drop her off at the train in Tarrytown, I see in the way she hefts the bright blue tote bag, firmly up against her hip, that she’s preparing herself to haul her gear across the concourses of airports. She has that rugged lackadaisical motion of an artistic drifter. Our trip to Nova Scotia is a way to get away from all of that. I’ll have a long talk, maybe get her to see the light.