He was, this cold and rainy December morning, not thinking at all about the Huntington’s piece as he moved it aside while rifling an old file of idea pages, charts, jots, scratches, sketches, and completed compositions in search of the musical manuscript that contained all the notations for a sophomoric effort he had indulged in when he was, in fact, a sophomore in college. The project had been grandiose. It consisted of a series of crystal bowls sunk strategically into the sand along a calculated tide line on the beach at Hammonasset State Park, where he had gone for the day with an oboe player named Beth Gould, who drove her mother’s old Volvo station wagon. Because of her wheels, George had been much nicer to her than he might have been otherwise, though she imagined their bond to be musical. (She never understood that any number of brief romances with various art students who worked in larger formats had been sparked by their attraction to her cargo capacity.) The bowls were of varying sizes so each would resonate and chime in different tones as the incoming tide filled them and jostled the marbles in the bottom of each one. He had found the bowls—mismatched finger bowls, somebody’s forgotten heirlooms from another time—in a junk shop on Whalley Avenue. Where were those bowls now? Oh yes, he had given them to Beth Gould, wherever she was now; hers was not the household name in oboe virtuosity she had been so convinced was her destiny.

They had both gotten sunburned that day. They stopped for dinner at the Clam Castle on the way back to New Haven, and Beth had been sick in the parking lot afterward, and George never knew if it was from the fried clams or too much sun. (In fact, it was the combined effects of both those things, plus her dawning realization that George Botkin had no interest whatsoever in her thoughts about music or anything else.) They had spent hours on the beach that day. He had recorded the tones of the bowls filling, using a cassette player that was never the same after that because of the sand that got into the works, and he had then written the piece, scoring it for a jazzy vibes duet, transposing themes and certain melodic elements from that recording, embellishing along the way. Although High Tide/New Moon had a certain bravado and charm, it was a juvenile and self-indulgent effort, the kind of music that is far too pleased with itself conceptually.

He was looking for it because there was one simple little sequence that had stayed with him over the years, the one progression in the entire piece that he thought might have value and originality. Had he remembered it correctly? As George dug through the old sheets, setting aside all the Huntington’s folders that had been on top of this pile, Joe Green chirruped on the sill where he sat on high alert, tail flashing. The three cats who lived in the top-floor apartment in the nice red brick co-op on the other side of Tenth Street were in view, sitting upright between pots of flowering geraniums in matching poses on their windowsill, the muted glow of lights in the apartment behind them making them into silhouettes.