[Omitted from this part: the fact that his manager, Bob Falco, had an addiction to painkillers; that Bob had once propositioned Antoinette, stating that he was in love with her, saying it frankly, without mincing words, with devout clarity: I love you. I can’t help myself. I love you more than life. There had been between them a zesty kind of erotic charge that couldn’t be denied; they were standing beneath the artificial stars of Grand Central Station. No, no, you don’t, she said, turning, fleeing across the wide concourse, merging into the swish footfalls, swinging valises, clutched pocketbooks. ]

A serrated kitchen bread knife, nothing special, at least when she was holding it between her fingers and slicing a loaf of baguette from Zabar’s. The view from the window behind her, over the sink, opened across a barren, wintry Central Park. Gazing out on a clear day, I could just about see Antoinette’s apartment on the other side, the window glass winking knowingly in the sunlight. Margaret was holding the knife and slicing down into the bread while I was talking about my preparatory schedule for the Alice Tully Hall concert. (Margaret advised me on how to schedule practice.) In a few days my concert career would be over. Between us was that steady but settled electric current produced by two adults trying to act normal for the sake of a child; we’d been at it for a week now, and something was cracking.

I found the note, she said softly. I found the note.

You what?

I found this.

Antoinette had that careful prep school script with elaborate, ornate swirls, the kind I associate with the education she received at whatever finishing school she went to in the Swiss Alps. I’d kept this one because in it she had reached a kind of passionate, sexy, poetic groove, an irresistible schoolgirl wildness. That’s how I’d explain it to my friend Bernard, the principal cello for the Philharmonic, who in turn would tell me about the Hebrew word pag’a, which means (I think) two material bodies, as in the blade/flesh, meeting, deeply. I stood in the kitchen doorway while she cut down into the bread, that kind with the wonderfully ungiving crust that made chewing seem like good, intense work. She cut through the bread and deep between her index finger and thumb, the web of skin there. Then she rocked back on her heels and put her hand up into the air and let the blood drip down around her arm. Behind us, at the dining room table, Sylvia was singing to herself, drawing something, unaware. The meeting of two material bodies or agencies, Bernard was saying. We were drinking martinis at the Harvard Club on a rainy afternoon.

One can’t help but think of Goliath’s huge sword, of pocketknives, of razor blades—I think there’s always a certain preordained aspect to getting cut by a blade, either accidentally or on purpose, as if that blade, and that blade alone, were meant to meet your skin, he said. But then again I might be talking out of my ass, he added.