[Omitted from this section: a huge slice of narrative time. He has left out just about everything. Years have passed. Deep struggles with himself, Margaret, art. He has resigned himself to teaching. Giving it his all. The day-in, day-out trials of fatherhood. ]

A couple of weeks after the fiasco at the Alice Tully Hall recital I was in the studio trying to record Bach’s French Suite (BMV 772), still pretty certain that the heavy-finger event during the concert was a fluke, jangled nerves, a momentary loss of resolve. Manager Man, as I call him, stood in the control room with the score in his hands, tracing a finger along the notes. At the Andante part—simple fugue motion from side to side, a rocking (when played correctly) between the two voices, not all that hard on the technical front but demanding exactness on the interplay of voices—in that softness I faltered and landed too hard on an E-flat, counteracting with a contrary voicing. Manager Man stared pensively through the plastic window; he had one of those piratic faces—augmented by his thick beard—with the expression of a man demanding a bounty. Let’s call it a day, he crackled over the microphone. We’ll do another take tomorrow, fresh in the morning. The next day New York was draped in a wintery mess. Snow fell down in clumps and melted into the sidewalks. The studio was near the Port Authority, along Forty-second Street, and from the sidewalk you could watch as buses arrived from the suburbs, emerged out of the Lincoln Tunnel, heaved up the looping concrete entrance ramps. This was a preposterously ugly and noisy neighborhood, especially when compared to the padded silence of the studio. For a long time I stood watching the action, unable to go inside. I could see it all. My recording career would draw to a silent close. My face—strangely round and young, an old publicity photo—would appear one last time on the cover of Gramophone; a ghostly CD would be released with embarrassing fanfare, bringing together scavenged pieces recorded in the previous years when precision and élan arrived from my fingertips. Publicly, I’d remain silent about my inability to finish the French Suites. But of course rumors would seep out: his abilities are gone; he’s fucked up; he’s taking drugs; he was having an affair with that what’s-her-name, that anorexic ballerina junkie, and it did something to him; he has a weird stage fright thing going. In order to counter these rumors I’d say things I believed to be true: that the recording process itself was suspect; that notes should not be held hostage to material surfaces: the ferrous oxide of tape or the vestige of bits and bytes. Nothing deserves to be locked into the singular silence of repetitive play. I’d make the grand claim (because that is what failing artists are best at, being grand) that notes should be held in the lingering solitude of notations on the staff, not released into the air, where they only dissolve and become nothing.