Entered the concertmeister and took his place. A man with a pickled face and a nut-brown oboe sounded his nasaline keynote. The other players took up the note, converged upon consonance, groped closer and closer until the entire Denver Symphony Orchestra was braying forth one sustained and mighty A. (Often the highlight of an entire concert.) Satisfied, the first violinist nodded his sleek rodentine Central European head. The musicians fell into silence.

Pause.

Then applause, beginning with a tentative few, catching on with more, bursting out from the entire hall as the members of the orchestra rose to their feet and the conductor marched onstage. Smiling, the maestro—a brusque fellow named Fritz—bowed once to the audience, turned briskly to his reseated orchestra, faced the music, uplifted his baton…

Now what?

Two hours of bliss, by the clock. An eternal moment, in Henry’s soul.

The question of temporal sequence hardly entered into the matter. With Henry H. Lightcap the dance of love began as a mad impulse followed, in due course, by leisurely regret. Events in between proceeded by quantum jumps, often without traversing the intervening space, sometimes jogging through time in reverse. Each particle indeterminate and unpredictable but the aggregate bound tighter than a bull’s asshole in flytime to the iron laws of probability. As Henry would have phrased it, composing his footnote to Plato.

He found the reception, smuggling himself in when challenged by affecting a Continental accent. Smiling, shrugging, spreading his hands—“Mein Hinklish”—an apologetic grimace—“iss how you say?”—tapping his skull, “Not zee best he could be, eh? Je ne c’est pas, non?” He drew a faded card from his jacket pocket, allowing the usher a brief glimpse: “H. Holyoak Lightcap, MA; Special Project Consultant.”

Working his way politely but firmly through the jostling mass of bald heads, black coats, lacquered hairdos and velvet gowns, heestabfished himself at the vantage point of the punch bowl. He sloshed a champagne glass through the punch, avoiding the fruit, and looked about. Over a bobbing bubbling cumulus of svelte heads he looked for the golden radiant one he sought. And found her, after a moment, trapped within a tight circle of all-male music lovers. Lecherous swine. Henry dipped a second glass into the bowl—the server busy with a queue on the other side of the table—and forged a path through the murmuring mob toward Claire. Light was her name, bright star of his soul. The cuffs of his shirt were wet but little he cared about that. Little he knew.

She smiled at his earnest approach, his uncombed head and padded shoulders rising above the crowd, his unsteady hands holding aloft two glasses of punch. He held one toward her, providing her with a pretext for escaping her admirers. My God she’s beautiful, thought Henry. The thought left him speechless. Him, Lightcap, speechless.

“Well here you are,” she said. He nodded; they touched glasses. “Where’s your Smokey Bear suit?” He grinned and nodded, unable to take his eyes from her face, hair, the bare neck and shoulders. Take your eyes off my face for godsake, he imagined her, thinking, unable for the moment to imagine what else he could do. “I was hoping you’d be wearing the big hat,” she went on.