They assured him that he wouldn’t die, but neither George nor Rebecca could look him in the eye when they said it. They had both noticed how pale and unwell he already seemed, and they knew that he noticed their discomfort, because he changed the subject gracefully a moment later. The evening was long and strained and sad. They all tried to enjoy their white clam pizza, and Rebecca labored with an almost frantic cheer to introduce things to talk about—politics, gossip, the movies, the wonderful performance a few days before by their mutual friend Denise the mezzo-soprano as Dorabella in an otherwise ragged Opera Studio production of Così fan tutte—anything but what they were all thinking about.

For most of that February, George experimented secretly with a dark piano sonata based on the polypeptides of lymphosarcoma, though he was meant to be working on a lucrative commission that didn’t interest him very much, a jazzy theme for a Japanese car commercial starring Tom Selleck. The work on the sonata drove him into a chronic unpleasant mood, and both he and Rebecca were plagued by nasty sinus headaches that wouldn’t quit. Rebecca’s headache was so severe and unrelenting that she missed entire days of work, which was terrible because at that point she had just started her new job in clinical genetics at the Yale School of Medicine.

They canceled a long-planned five-year anniversary weekend on St. Lucia, though it would have done them a lot of good. They fought horribly for the first time, over inconsequential things, the details of which they could hardly recall a day later, though the bitter mood lingered on and on like a bad smell. Their sex grew infrequent and angry. In March they came close to breaking up, and they might have done so if it wasn’t for George’s attachment to Rebecca’s grandmother. Sitting with her one dark afternoon, he grew ashamed, imagining her response if he actually put in motion the destruction of the connection to Rebecca he thought, until that moment, he had wanted. Stark grew sicker; no treatment worked. It was painful to see him, painful to avoid seeing him. Rebecca knew that visits to Stark, now in a hospice outside New Haven, were the only reason George came up from New York at all.

Finally, in April, when Rebecca, ordinarily a very principled respecter of privacy, felt an uncharacteristic urge to snoop around George’s desk one unhappy gray New York morning while he was in the shower, her first glimpse of the hieroglyphics headed “Lymphosarcoma polypeptides”—scribbled all over with musical notations in George’s familiar emphatic scrawl—was all she needed to understand with sudden clarity what George was working on, day in and day out. She made him stop, and she made him put it away unfinished, every scrap of paper with notes for any of it, in any form, and he agreed, reluctantly, recognizing her wisdom through his fury at her prying.

When their headaches vanished and the air in their rooms seemed to brighten by the day, they both recognized the dangerous and powerful possibilities for his gift. “That was such a close call! Now I want you to burn those folders. Every bar of that music. Every note. Seriously. You must use your power only for good from now on,” Rebecca admonished.