Cadenza

“You’re blushing,” he said.

“No, I’m not.”

He gave an amused, disbelieving glance from across the table. “Are you sure?”

I thought for a few seconds and then gave in. “I guess I am, aren’t I?”

I was young enough to hate being read so easily, especially during an awkward silence with someone who was close to twice my age, but I was sufficiently grown-up to welcome having a blush say something I was reluctant to disclose. Then I looked at him.

“You’re blushing too,” I said.

“I know.”

This was about two hours later.

I’d met him during intermission at a chamber music concert at the Church of Sainte U. on the Right Bank. It was an early-November Sunday, not chilly, but not warm, just your basic overcast autumnal evening that starts too early and presages the long winter months to come. Many in the audience were already seated inside the church and were wearing gloves; others hadn’t removed their coats. Yet despite the chill there was something snug in the air, as people quietly made their way down the pews, clearly in anticipation of the music. It was my first time inside this church and I had chosen a seat in the very back, in case the playing wasn’t to my liking and I wanted to leave without disturbing anyone.

I was curious to hear what might be the very last performance of the Florian Quartet. The youngest member must have been in his late seventies. They played regularly in that church, but I had never heard them live before and knew them only from their rare, out-of-print recorded music and a few performances on the Web. They had just finished playing a Haydn quartet and after intermission were going to play Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor. Unlike the others in church—and there were no more than forty or so in attendance that Sunday—I was a latecomer and had bought my ticket from one of the nuns seated at a small table by the entrance. Almost everyone else had gotten theirs by mail and entered the church holding large vouchers, which they’d been asked to keep unfolded while a hunched, elderly nun dutifully copied everyone’s full name with an old green fountain pen. She was at least eighty years old and must have been doing this for ages, probably with the same pen and in the same tremulous, archaic script. The small bar code numbers on the vouchers probably reflected the younger image that the church wanted to project to new parishioners, but the old nun was having a hard time recopying them before stamping each voucher. No one said anything about her slow pace but there were a few indulgent smiles exchanged among those who hadn’t had their vouchers validated.

During the intermission, I was waiting in line by the entrance for mulled cider, which the same nun was now scrupulously dispensing into plastic cups with a ladle she was barely able to lift when it was full. Everyone donated much more than the €1 written on a paper sign on the bulletin board next to the large vat of hot cider. I was never a fan of mulled cider, but everyone else seemed to be, so I stood there and when my turn came, I put five euros into her bowl, for which she thanked me profusely. The old nun was sharp. She could tell it was my first time in her church and asked if I’d enjoyed the Haydn. I uttered an enthusiastic yes.

He had been standing in front of me in line, and after I paid for my cider, he simply turned around and asked, “Why is someone so young interested in the Florian Quartet? They are so old.” Then, perhaps realizing that the question had dropped from nowhere, he added, “The second violin—must be in his eighties. The others are hardly any younger.”

He was tall, slim, elegantly put together, with a gray mane of hair that fringed the collar of his blue blazer.

“I’ve been interested in the cellist and I figured that as it’s rumored they’re traveling later this year before possibly disbanding, our paths might never cross again. So here I am.”

“Doesn’t someone your age have better things to do?”

“Someone my age?” I asked, surprise and stung irony in my tone.

A moment of silence hung awkwardly between us. He shrugged his shoulders, probably his way of apologizing without saying anything, and seemed about to turn and walk to the area by the two portals where people were smoking, others chatting and stretching their legs. “Feet always get cold inside a church,” he said as he turned around and headed to the door. It was a closing, throwaway sentence.

Then realizing I might have snubbed him with my tone, I asked, “Are you a fan of the Florian?”

“Not really. I’m not even a fan of chamber music. But I know quite a bit about them because my father loved classical music and subsidized their concerts in this church, and I’ve been doing the same now, though frankly I prefer jazz. But I come here because I used to tag along with him on Sunday evenings when I was young, and I still come every few weeks or so to sit and listen, and perhaps to imagine I’m with my father for a while—but I’m sure all this must seem a rather silly reason to sit and listen to their playing.”

What instrument had his father played, I asked.

The piano.

“My father never played at home. But on weekends, when we’d stay in the country, he’d go to the other end of the house late at night and from my bedroom upstairs, I’d hear the piano as though it were being played by a furtive waif who’d stop the moment he heard footsteps creaking on the floorboards. He never spoke about his playing, nor did my mother ever bring it up, and the best I learned to do in the morning was to say I’d dreamed the piano was playing itself again. I think he wished he’d continued as a professional pianist, just as I’m sure he wished I’d grow to love classical music. He was the type who seldom forced his views on others, much less spoke to total strangers—totally unlike his son, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” At which he chuckled. “He was too tactful to ask me to join him on Sundays for these concerts, and was probably resigned to going alone. But my mother didn’t want him out by himself at night, so she’d ask me to come with him. Eventually it became a habit. After the concert he’d buy me a pastry. We’d sit together at a place nearby, and, when I was a bit older, we’d head out afterward and have dinner. But he never spoke about his time as a pianist, and besides, my mind was altogether elsewhere in those years. Sunday evenings were always reserved for last-minute homework, so coming here with him meant I’d have to stay up doing work I could have finished much earlier. But I was glad to be with him, more than I liked the music, and as you see, I’m still bound by routine. I’ve spoken too much, haven’t I.”

“Do you play?” I asked, to let him know that I didn’t mind his talking.

“Not really. I followed in my father’s footsteps. He was a lawyer, his father was a lawyer, I became a lawyer. Neither my father nor I wanted to be lawyers, and yet … Life!” He smiled wistfully. It was the second time that he’d smiled and then shrugged his shoulders. His was a broad, endearing, and sudden smile that caught you off guard, but given the irony underscoring the word life, there was little mirth in it. “And which instrument do you play?” he asked, suddenly turning to me. I didn’t want our conversation to end and was surprised to sense he didn’t want it to either.

“Piano,” I answered.

“Vocation or avocation?”

“Vocation. I hope.”

He seemed to think for a while.

“Don’t give up, young man, don’t.”

So saying he put a wise, gently patronizing arm around my shoulder. I don’t know why, but I reached for the hand that had rested on my shoulder and touched it. It had happened so seamlessly that I looked at him and we both smiled, which allowed his hand, which would most likely have left the spot, to stay just a moment longer. He turned but then looked at me once more, and I felt a sudden urge to hurl myself against him and put my arms around his upper waist right under his jacket. He must have felt something along those lines as well, because in the awkward silence that followed what he’d just said, he kept staring and I was staring back, totally undaunted, until it hit me that perhaps I had read all the signals wrong and I began to want to look away. I liked that his eyes lingered on me still, it made me feel handsome and desirable, something soft, caressing that I wanted to hold in place and didn’t want to escape from except by burrowing into his chest. I liked the promise, in his gaze, of something totally kind and guileless.

But then, perhaps to give a hasty justification to our smiles, he said, “You come here for the music and I come for my father. He died almost thirty years ago, yet nothing changes here.” He chuckled. “Same cider, same odors, same old nuns, same stifling November evenings. Do you like November?”

“Sometimes, but not always.”

“Me neither. I don’t even like church, though perhaps I like to come here on evenings like this … and, well, me voici, here I am.” I could sense he was running out of things to say and was fumbling to keep our conversation going. Then silence. Again the warm, fetching smile, a blend of wisdom, irony, and just a dab of sadness to remind me that there was nothing light about this gentle, possibly unhappy man.

When we saw the quartet shuffle back to their places and that it was time for the Beethoven, he asked where I was sitting. I didn’t understand why he was asking, but I pointed to the corner seat in one of the last pews where I’d left my backpack and jacket.

“Chosen wisely.” He understood why. “But don’t slip away,” he added. I thought he was asking me to give the quartet another chance before opting for a hasty exit but I had already changed my mind after the Haydn and had no intention of leaving before the end of the concert. But then to clear the air I asked point-blank: “Do you want me to wait for you?” The inflection in my voice could have been all wrong. I sounded as though I were asking an older person if he’d need someone to hold the door for him while he struggled with his walker. So I repeated: “I’ll wait for you outside.”

He didn’t say anything; he simply nodded. But his wasn’t a nod of affirmation, meaning yes; it was the pensive, distracted, wistful nod of someone who normally chooses not to believe a word he’s heard.

“Yes, why not, wait for me,” he finally said. “And my name is Michel.” I told him my name. We shook hands.

I was sure he was going to leave at the end of the first movement, but half an hour later we met on the steps of the church, just as we’d promised, except that I had a feeling he’d forgotten about our meeting. He was speaking with a couple, and all three seemed about to head out somewhere. But as soon as he saw me, he turned around, then hastily finished talking to them as they shook hands goodbye. He apologized for not introducing me. I was busy wrapping my scarf around my neck, which was my way of deflecting his apology. I caught myself trying to seem surprised he had waited or that he remembered we’d promised to meet. Or had he perhaps waited simply to say goodbye once more before we went our separate ways?

Instead, he suggested we go for a little something at a small bistro not too far across the bridge. I told him I had locked my folding bike nearby. Did he mind if I unlocked it and walked with it? Not at all. It was around ten on a Sunday evening, and the streets were largely empty. “And you are my guest,” he added, to reassure me that money should not be a concern. I accepted. I liked the walk, especially as it had rained during the concert and the cobblestones glinted under the streetlights. “Just like a Brassaï photo,” I said. “Yes, isn’t it,” he added. “And what do you do besides play the piano?”

I noticed that he tended to start some sentences with the word and, perhaps to smooth out the jolting or missing transition between unrelated subjects, especially when broaching something slightly more probing, more personal. I told him I taught at the conservatory. Did I like teaching? Very much. Then I said that once a week I also played gratis and for the fun of it at a piano bar in a luxury hotel. He didn’t ask the name of the hotel. Tactful, I thought, or just his way of showing he wasn’t the sort who prods or cares.

When we arrived at the bridge, we spotted two Brazilian performers, a man and a woman, singing to a large group who’d gathered around them. The man’s voice was high, the woman’s raucous. Together they sang beautifully. I stopped walking the bike and stood a moment, one hand holding the handlebar. He stood there as well, holding the other end of the handlebar, as if he were helping me steady the bike. I could tell he felt slightly awkward. When the young singers ended their song, everyone on the bridge clapped and cheered, while the two singers immediately launched into another duet. I wanted to hear part of the second song and wasn’t budging, but soon after they had begun singing we decided to walk away and, once on the opposite bank, heard the crowd clapping when the singers were done. He saw me turn around, then turned himself to watch the male singer put down his guitar, while she began sauntering through the crowd, cap in hand. Did I recognize the song, he asked. Yes, I said. Did he? “Maybe, I think so.” But I could tell he had no idea, just as he seemed out of his element listening to Brazilian music played on a bridge, of all places.

“It’s about a man who comes back home from work and asks his beloved to get dressed and come outside and dance with him. There is such an eruption of joy on their street that eventually the whole city bursts with joy.”

“Nice song,” he said. I wanted him to feel less ill at ease and for a few seconds clasped his shoulder.

But he was totally at home once he opened the door to his bistro. The place was indeed small, just as he had said, but it also looked very exclusive. I should have known. His navy Forestière jacket, the large, flowing printed scarf, and the Corthay shoes were dead giveaways. Our little snack turned out to be a three-course dinner. He ordered a single malt, Caol Ila was his favorite, he said. He asked if I wanted one. I said yes but had no idea what a single malt was. I could tell he’d seen through this, perhaps had seen it many times. I liked his manner, but it left me feeling uneasy. He explained the menu. “Not too many meats here,” he said. “But their wine cellar is good, and I like how they cook vegetables. Fish is also very good.” He shut the menu no sooner than he’d opened it. “I always order the same thing, so I don’t even bother to look.” He waited for me to decide what I wanted. I couldn’t decide. Then I did something that came to me totally impulsively. “Order for me,” I said. I loved the idea, and it seemed he loved it too. “Easily done. I’ll order what I always have for you too.”

He called the waiter and ordered. Then after sipping from his whiskey, he said that his father, who had introduced him to this restaurant, was also in the habit of ordering the same thing all the time. “He was diabetic,” he explained, “so I learned to avoid what diabetics shouldn’t eat. No sugars, no rice, no pasta, no bread, and seldom any butter.” As he said that, he was buttering and then sprinkling salt on the end of his small pain Poilâne roll, snickering as he brought it to his mouth. “I don’t always walk in my father’s footsteps, but his shadow is difficult to avoid. I am full of contradictions.”

There was a pause. He went on about his father’s regimen, but I wanted to hear more about his contradictions, which interested me and which might have told me more about who this man was and how he saw himself. He seemed to waver between opening up or going on about food and dieting. There was even a moment of slight tension, as though we both sensed we were just making conversation and could easily get trapped in small talk. To get past the awkwardness, I told him about my two great-uncles, whom I’d never met but who had the reputation of being very savvy bakers and who had opened three bakeries in Milan only to be rounded up as socialists during the war. “They ended up in Birkenau. My mother frequently spoke about her uncles when I was growing up. They too, as in your father’s case, cast long shadows on my mother’s family.”

“What kind of shadows?” he asked, not quite getting my point.

“She bakes wonderful cakes.”

He gave a hearty laugh. I was glad he got the joke. “But I know: some shadows never go away,” I added.

“You’re right. My father’s shadow never left me. He died two years after I inherited his law practice. I was your age at the time.”

But then he stopped short again and thought a while, as though he had seized an unforeseen link between what he’d just said and what, without my knowing, must have been pressing on his mind. “And you know that I’m almost twice your age.”

This was when I blushed. It was a tense and awkward moment, partly because he had broached a subject that felt totally premature and too close to what we were cautiously sidestepping, crossing t’s that weren’t even written out yet and should have remained silent, at least for a while longer. But his statement also left me feeling at a loss for what to say, and, as I rummaged for just the right words, the blush must have signaled my discomfort. Perhaps it was his way of bringing the subject out into the open and making me say something to allay his own anxieties. I struggled to banish our silence but couldn’t. Finally, “You don’t show your age at all,” I said, my attempt at an evasive response.

“That is not what I meant” was his quick comeback.

“I know what you meant.” And to show there was no misunderstanding between us: “I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, would I?” Was I blushing again? I hoped not. The silence that suddenly hovered between us did not displease him, and he nodded again, that same wistful and reflective nod, followed by a very mild shaking of the head, not of negation but of something bordering on disbelief and speechless wonderment at the way life simply plays along sometimes. “I didn’t mean to make things awkward for you.”

He was apologizing.

Or maybe not.

It was my turn to shake my head.

“No awkwardness at all,” I said. Then, after a short pause, “And now you’re the one blushing.”

He pursed his lips. I reached for his hand across the table and held it for a moment in a friendly gesture, hoping he wouldn’t feel uneasy. He didn’t withdraw it.

“You don’t believe in fate, do you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

It was the kind of talk that was not as oblique as I would have wished. I could sense where he was headed, and I didn’t mind the candor; but I didn’t need the matter discussed too broadly either. Perhaps he belonged to a generation that sought out what was a tad difficult to discuss, I to one where what’s obvious enough is left unstated. I was used to the totally direct approach that requires no words whatsoever, or just a glance or a hasty text. But shrouded, lingering speech left me unmoored.

“So if it wasn’t fate, what brought you to the concert tonight?”

He gave my question some thought, then, looking down and away from me, started drawing ridges on the tablecloth with the fork he hadn’t yet used. They looked like light furrows that made sudden squiggly turns around his bread plate. He was so taken by what had crossed his mind that I was sure he was no longer focusing on my question, which I welcomed, since on second thought I hoped he’d let go of our gingerly back-and-forth. But then he looked up at me and said that the answer to my question couldn’t be simpler.

“What is it?” I asked, knowing he’d say something about his father.

Instead he said, “You.”

“Me?”

He nodded. “Yes, you.”

“But you didn’t know you’d meet me.”

“A meaningless detail. Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.”

I took this in. “Too, too deep for me.” There was another moment of silence between us.

“You see, my father believed in fate,” he went on.

What a generous soul, I thought. He had sensed I wanted to skirt the subject and had deftly brought the conversation back to his father. But I wasn’t really listening—he could tell I wasn’t. Then he stopped. He was probably still debating how to broach the unspoken between us, which explains why he cast a lingering glance at me, then looked away. What totally surprised me, though, was what he said next as we stood up from our table and were about to leave. “Will I see you again? I would like to.”

His question startled me. I muttered a feeble but all too hasty “Yes, of course.” My reply came so quickly that it must have sounded totally disingenuous. I had expected something far bolder than a goodbye from him.

“But only if you want to,” he added.

I stared at him. “You know I’d like to.” And this wasn’t the single malt or the wine speaking.

He nodded his signature nod. He was not convinced. But not displeased.

“Same church, same time next Sunday, then.”

I did not venture to add anything more. So tonight was not in the cards, I thought.

We were the very last to leave the restaurant. It was clear from the way the waiters were hovering that they were eager to close down the moment we stepped outside.

On the sidewalk, we instinctively embraced. But it was a makeshift, clumsy hug that was more like a holding back than the prolonged cuddle I had hoped to find in his arms earlier on when we’d met during intermission. He was already softening his hold. Once again I felt an impulse to throw myself against him and put my arms around him and, though I held back, in the flurry of the moment, I ended up kissing him not on the cheek, but without meaning to, under both his ears. Definitely the single malt and the wine this time. I am sure he must have noticed. But I liked what I’d done. Then I thought twice about it. This was awkward, I thought. More awkward yet when I spotted the three waiters staring out the window from behind the parted muslin sheers. They knew him well and must have witnessed similar scenes many times before.

He walked me to where I’d locked my bicycle, watched me unlock it, started a bit of small talk about the diminutive size of the bike, even said he’d thought of purchasing one just like it. But then, before withdrawing, he placed a lingering palm on my cheek—a gesture that completely threw me off and left me feeling shaken and overcome with emotion. It had caught me by surprise. I wanted us to kiss. Just kiss me, will you, if only to help me get over being so visibly flustered.

I watched him pivot and walk away.

You don’t do that and walk away, I thought, and so stiffly too. I wanted him to bring his other palm to my cheek and hold my face, hold my face and let me be the younger of the two, and then kiss me deep in the mouth. It felt as though we’d just been in bed together and he’d stopped talking to me and then simply vanished.

The feeling stayed with me all night, and I kept waking in fits and starts. The night was still young and we could easily have gone elsewhere for another drink. I could have rushed after him and asked to offer him something at a café nearby—just to be together and not say goodbye so soon. Yet something held me back and eventually another voice in me reminded me that I was not exactly displeased by how the evening had turned out on the end of a long, dull Sunday when nothing remotely like this was planned. Perhaps he’d seen that sometimes it’s best to stop things when they’re perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.

I walked my bike on this lovely November night: the deserted glinting cobblestones, the Brassaï effect we’d discussed, my clumsy kiss under his ears, and the matter about being almost half his age, all these buoyed my spirit and made me feel quite happy. Perhaps he’d understood things better than I ever could; and if he understood, then he knew something I was barely beginning to realize myself: that perhaps I wasn’t ready, any more than he was, not tonight, not tomorrow night, not even next week, which was when it finally dawned on me that he might not attend next Sunday’s concert, not because he didn’t want to but because he already sensed that, at the last minute next Sunday evening, I’d be the one who’d find a reason not to show up.

Two evenings later, I was just finishing a master class devoted to the last movement of Beethoven’s D Minor sonata when suddenly, at the door, there he was, standing with his hands in the pockets of his blue blazer, looking a touch gawky for such an elegant man, and yet not in the slightest bit uncomfortable. He held the door for the six or seven who were starting to leave the hall, and seeing they were filing out without holding the door or thanking him, he smiled broadly at them, finally thanking them for the tip. I must have been beaming. What a lovely way to surprise someone.

“You’re not displeased then?”

I shook my head. Like you needed to ask.

“What were you planning after class?”

“I usually have coffee or a juice somewhere.”

“Mind if I join?”

“Mind if I join?” I mimicked.

I took him to my favorite café where I go after teaching and where sometimes a colleague or a student joins me as we sit and watch people race along the sidewalks at this time of day—people on last-minute errands, others looking to put off heading home and shutting their door to the world, and then some just rushing from one corner of their lives to another. The tables around us were all filled with people, and for some reason that I’ve never been able to define, I like when everyone seems bunched together, almost elbow to elbow with strangers. “Are you really not displeased I came then?” he asked again. I smiled and shook my head. I told him I was still not recovered from the surprise.

“Good surprise, then?”

“Very good surprise.”

“If I didn’t find you at the conservatory,” he said, “I was going to try every luxury hotel with a piano bar. Very simple.”

“It would have taken you a long time.”

“I gave myself forty days and forty nights, and then I would have tried the conservatory. Instead I tried the conservatory first.”

“But weren’t we planning on meeting this coming Sunday?”

“I wasn’t too sure.”

That I didn’t object or say anything to gainsay his assumption must have confirmed his suspicion. Indeed, our silence regarding next Sunday’s concert made us smile uneasily. “I have wonderful memories of last Sunday,” I ended up saying. “So do I,” he replied.

“Who was the lovely pianist with whom you were playing?” he asked.

“She’s a very talented third-year student from Thailand, very, very gifted.”

“The way you looked at each other while playing clearly suggests there is more than just teacher-pupil affinity between you.”

“Yes, she came all the way here to study with me.” I could tell where he was leading and shook my head with mock reproof at the insinuation.

“And may I ask what you’re doing later?”

Bold, I thought.

“You mean tonight? Nothing.”

“Doesn’t someone like you have a friend, a partner, someone special?”

“Someone like me?” Were we really going to repeat last Sunday’s conversation?

“I meant young, sparkling, clearly fascinating, to say nothing of very handsome.”

“There is no one,” I said, then looked away.

Was I really trying to cut him off? Or was I enjoying this without wanting to show it?

“You don’t take compliments well, do you?”

I looked at him and shook my head again, but without humor this time.

“So no one, no one?” he finally asked.

“Nobody.”

“Not even the occasional…?”

“I don’t do the occasional.”

“Never?” he asked, almost baffled.

“Never.”

But I could hear my tone stiffen. He was trying to be playful, prodding, borderline flirtatious, and here I was coming off as mirthless, dour, and, worst of all, self-righteous.

“But there must have been someone special?”

“There was.”

“Why did it end?”

“We were friends, then we were lovers, then she split. But we stayed friends.”

“Was there ever a he in your life?”

“Yes.”

“How did it end?”

“He got married.”

“Ah, the marriage canard!”

“I thought so too at the time. But they’ve been together for years now. They were together before he started with me.”

At first, he didn’t say anything but he seemed to question the whole setup. “Did the two of you remain friends?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted him to ask, yet I loved being asked.

“We haven’t spoken in ages, and I don’t know that we’re friends, though I’m sure we will always be. He’s always read me extremely well, and I have a feeling that he suspects that if I never write it’s not because I don’t care but because a part of me still does and always will, just as I know he still cares, which is why he too never writes. And knowing this is good enough for me.”

“Even though he’s the one who got married?”

“Even though he’s the one who got married,” I echoed. “And besides,” I added, as though it dispelled any ambiguity, “he teaches in the US, and I’m here in Paris—kind of settles it, doesn’t it? Unseen but always there.”

“Doesn’t settle it at all. Why haven’t you gone after him, even if he is married? Why give up so easily?”

The near-critical tone in his voice was hard to miss. Why was he reproaching me? Was he not interested then?

“Besides, how long ago was it?” he asked.

I knew my answer would leave him totally stumped. “Fifteen years.”

Suddenly, he stopped asking and went silent. As I expected, he had not figured that so many years could go by and leave me still attached to someone who had become an invisible presence.

“It belongs to the past,” I said, trying to make amends.

“Nothing belongs to the past.” But then he right away asked: “You still think of him, don’t you?”

I nodded because I did not want to say yes.

“Do you miss him?”

“When I am alone—sometimes, yes. But it doesn’t intrude, doesn’t make me sad. I can go entire weeks without thinking of him. Sometimes I want to tell him things, but then I put it off, and even telling myself that I’m putting it off gives me some pleasure, though we may never speak. He taught me everything. My father said there were no taboos in bed; my lover helped me cast them off. He was my first.”

Michel shook his head with a confiding smile that reassured me. “How many after him?” he asked.

“Not many. All short-lived. Men and women.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because I never really let go or lose myself with others. After an instant of passion, I always fall back to being the autonomous me.”

He took a last sip of his coffee.

“At some point in your life you will need to call him. The moment will come. It always does. But perhaps I shouldn’t be saying all this.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, you know why.”

I liked what he’d just said, but it left us both silent. “The autonomous you, then,” he finally said, obviously eliding what had just transpired between us that very second. “Difficult, aren’t you?”

“My father used to say so as well, because I could never decide on anything, what to do in life, where to live, what to study, whom to love. Stick to music, he said. Sooner or later, the rest would come. He started his career at the age of thirty-two—so I still have some time, though not much, if I’m to time myself to his clock. We’ve been exceptionally close, ever since I was a baby. He was a philologist and writing his dissertation at home while my mother was a therapist in a hospital, so he was the one in charge of diapers and all the rest. We had help but I was always with him. He’s the one who taught me to love music—ironically, the very same piece I was teaching when you walked in this afternoon. When I teach it I still hear his voice.”

“My father too taught me music. I was just a bad student.”

I liked this sudden convergence of coincidences though I was reluctant to make too much of it either. He kept staring at me without saying anything. But then he said something that caught me off guard once again: “You are so handsome.” It had come totally unprompted, so that rather than react to his words, I tried to change the subject, except that in doing so I heard myself mutter something more unprompted yet. “You make me nervous.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t really know what you’re after, or where you’d want me to stop and not go further.”

“Should be very clear by now. If anything I’m the one who should be nervous.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m probably just a whim for you, or maybe a few rungs higher than an occasional.”

I scoffed at this.

“And by the way”—I hesitated before saying it but felt impelled to say it—“I’m not very good at beginnings.”

He chuckled. “Was this thrown in for my benefit?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, but to come back to what I was saying: You are unbelievably handsome. And the problem is either that you know it and are aware of its power over others or that you need to pretend not to—which makes you not just difficult to decipher but, for someone like me, dangerous.”

All I did was nod listlessly. I didn’t want him to feel that what he’d just told me was misplaced. So I stared at him, smiled, and in another setting would have touched his eyelids before kissing them both.

As it got darker, the lights of our café and of the adjoining one were lit. They cast a luminous, unsteady glow on his features, and for the first time, I was aware of his lips, his forehead, and his eyes. He’s the handsome one, I thought. I should have said so, and the moment was ripe for it. But I kept quiet. I did not want to echo his own words; it would have sounded like a strained and contrived attempt to establish parity between us. But I did love his eyes. And he was still staring at me.

“You remind me of my son,” he finally said.

“Do we look alike?”

“No, but you’re the same age. He too loves classical music. So I used to take him to the Sunday-evening concerts, the way my father had so often done with me.”

“Do you still go together?”

“No. He lives in Sweden, mostly.”

“But the two of you are close?”

“I wish. My divorce with his mother ruined things between us, though I’m sure she did nothing to hurt our relationship. But he knew about me of course and, I suppose, never forgave me. Or he used it as an excuse to turn against me, which he’d been wanting to do since his early twenties, God knows why.”

“How did they find out?”

“She did first. One early evening she walked in and found me listening to slow jazz and nursing a drink. I was alone and just by watching me and the look on my face she knew right away that I was in love. Classic feminine intuition! She put down her handbag by the coffee table, sat next to me on the sofa, and even reached out and had a sip of my drink: ‘Is she someone I know?’ she asked after a long, long silence. I knew exactly what she meant and there was no point denying it. ‘It’s not a she,’ I replied. ‘Ah,’ she said. I still remember the last remnants of sunlight on the carpet and against the furniture, the smoky smell of my whiskey, and the cat lying next to me. Sunlight, when I see it in my living room, still reminds me of that conversation. ‘So it’s worse than I thought,’ she said. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because against a woman I still stand a chance, but against who you are, there’s nothing I can do. I cannot change you.’ Thus ended almost twenty years of marriage. My son was bound to find out soon enough, and he did.”

“How?”

“I told him. I was under the illusion that he’d understand. He didn’t.”

“I’m sorry” was all I could say.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t regret the turn in my life. But I do regret losing him. He never calls when he is in Paris, seldom even writes, and doesn’t pick up when I call.”

He looked at his watch. Was it time to go already?

“So it’s not a mistake that I tracked you down?” he asked for the third time, perhaps because he loved hearing me say that it absolutely wasn’t, which I enjoyed telling him.

“Not a mistake.”

“And you weren’t upset with me about the other evening?” he asked.

I knew exactly what he was referring to.

“Maybe I was—a bit.”

He smiled. I could tell he was eager to leave the café, so I moved closer to him, my shoulder touching his. Which was when he put his arm around me and drew me to him, almost urging me to rest my head on his shoulder. I didn’t know whether this was meant to reassure me or simply humor a young man who had opened up and spoken some touching words to an older man. Perhaps it was the prelude to a goodbye hug. So, fearing the unavoidable leave-taking, I blurted out, “I’m not doing anything tonight.”

“Yes, I know. You told me.”

But he must have sensed that I was nervous or that his tone was off.

“You are an amazing and—” He didn’t finish his sentence.

He was about to pay but I stopped his hand. Then as I held it I stared at it.

“What are you doing?” he asked almost reproachfully.

“Paying.”

“No, you were staring at my hand.”

“I wasn’t,” I protested. But I had stared at his hand.

“It’s called age,” he said. Then a moment later: “Haven’t changed your mind, have you?” He bit his lower lip but then right away released it. He was waiting for my answer.

And then because there was nothing I could think of saying to him but still felt the need to say something, anything, “Let’s not say goodbye, not just yet.” But I realized that this could easily be viewed as a request to extend our time together by a short while in the café, so I decided to opt for something bolder. “Don’t let me go home tonight, Michel,” I said. I know I blushed saying this, and was already scrambling for ways to apologize and take back my words when he came to my rescue.

“I was struggling to ask the very same thing but, once again, you beat me to it. The truth is,” he went on, “I don’t do this frequently. Actually, I haven’t done this in a long time.”

“This?” I said, with a slight jeer in my voice.

“This.”

We left shortly after. We must have walked with my bike a good twenty or thirty minutes to his home. He offered to hail a taxi. I said no, that I preferred to walk; besides, the bike was not the easiest thing to fold, and taxi drivers always complained. “I love your bike. I love that you have such a bike.” Then, catching himself: “I’m speaking nonsense, aren’t I?” We were walking side by side with hardly a foot’s distance between us and our hands kept grazing. Then I reached for his and held it for a few moments. This would break the ice, I thought. But he kept quiet. A few more paces on the cobbled street, and I let go of his hand.

“I do love this,” I said.

“This?” he teased. “Meaning the Brassaï effect?” he asked.

“No, me and you. It’s what we should have done two nights ago.”

He looked down at the sidewalk, smiling. Was I perhaps rushing things? I liked how our walk tonight was a repeat of the other evening. The crowd and the singing on the bridge, the glinting slate cobbles, the bike with its strapped bag I would eventually lock to a pole, and his passing comment about wishing to buy one just like it.

What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines, and when we feared we weren’t or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did, which was why I was so diffident with him and mistrusted every impulse in myself and couldn’t have been happier when I saw how easily we’d shed some of our screens. How wonderful to have finally said exactly what was on my mind ever since Sunday: Don’t let me go home tonight. How wonderful that he’d seen through my blushing on Sunday night and made me want to admit I’d blushed, only then to concede that he himself had blushed as well. Could two people who’d basically spent less than four hours together still have so few secrets from each other? I wondered what the guilty secret was that I held in my vault of craven falsehoods.

“I lied about the occasionals,” I said.

“I figured as much,” he replied, almost discounting the struggle behind my avowal.

When we finally stepped into one of those tight, small Parisian elevators with no space between us, “Now will you hold me?” I asked. He shut the slim elevator doors and pressed the button to his floor. I heard the loud clank of the engine and the strain as the elevator began its ascent, when suddenly he didn’t just hold me but cupped my face in both his hands and kissed me deep on the mouth. I shut my eyes and kissed him back. I’d been waiting for this for such a long time. All I remember hearing was the sound of the very old elevator grinding and staggering its way up to his floor as I kept hoping the sound would never end and the elevator never stop.

Then, once he closed the door of his apartment, it was my turn to kiss him, just as he had kissed me. I knew he was taller, and I sensed he was stronger. I just wanted him to know that I was holding nothing back and wasn’t going to.

“Perhaps what we need is a good drink,” he said. “I have some wonderful single malts. It is single malts you like, correct?”

The question about drinks caught me totally off guard, especially as I was just about to drop my backpack and remove my coat and sweater and ask him to hold me again. My heart was racing, yet suddenly I felt awkward, even if none of this was unfamiliar to me. I kept wanting him to stop moving around so much. But I said nothing and took my time removing my backpack and placing it on an armchair.

“Do you want to remove your coat?” he asked.

“In a while,” I said.

“I like your backpack,” he said, turning around.

“It was a gift. A friend”—and because there was hesitation on his face—“just a friend.”

He pointed to the sofa for me to sit and said he was bringing in the glasses. So I sat down. I don’t know why but I suddenly felt cold, so I stood up again while he was in the foyer and leaned against the radiator. Feeling the warmth inadequate, I placed my arms against it as well.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes, just cold,” I said. I was almost not going to tell him that I was suddenly close to freezing.

“I’ll shut the window, then.” And he did.

Did I want ice in my whiskey?

I shook my head.

But I didn’t move away from the radiator and continued to keep both hands and the front of my body glued to it. He put down the glasses on the coffee table, approached me from behind and began massaging my shoulders. I loved the way he kneaded my neck and shoulder blades.

“Better?” he asked.

“More,” I said. Then without knowing why: “I told you I get nervous.”

“Because of me?”

I hunched my shoulders, knowing he’d understand I meant I don’t know, maybe it’s not you, or the evening, who knows, just don’t stop.

He had strong hands—and he knew, just as I wanted him to know—that I was yielding bit by bit each time he pressed the area right under my skull and sent the most stirring shudder all the way down my spine. When he was done, he put his arms around me and pressed his chest to my back, both his hands clasping my stomach. I wouldn’t have minded had he gone lower, but he didn’t, though I knew it had crossed his mind, because I sensed a millisecond of hesitation. Gently, he drew me to the sofa.

But then he started with the whiskey, poured some into both our glasses, suddenly remembered something and rushed to the kitchen, coming back with two bowls, one with nuts, the other with mini salted biscuits. He sat down at the other end of the sofa, we clinked our glasses, uttered a toast, and took our first sip. He wanted to know what I thought. I didn’t know what I thought. So I said I was still quite new to single malts but that I liked them. He offered the bowl of nuts, watched me take some, then placed it back on the coffee table without helping himself to any. I took a second sip and told him that I was still cold. “Could I have a cup of tea instead?” What kind of tea did I want, he had so many, he said. Any tea, I replied, just something hot. On his way to the kitchen he touched my cheek and the side of my neck. It reminded me of my mother when I wasn’t feeling well and she’d check to see if I had a fever. But his was not a fever touch, and I smiled. Within minutes, immediately following the beep of the microwave oven, he was back and I was cupping a warm mug in both hands. “So much better,” I said, almost laughing at how happy the tea made me feel.

Once again he stood up, and put on some music.

I listened for a moment. “Brazilian?”

“Correct.” He seemed very pleased with himself. He had bought the CD the day before, he said.

By my smile, he knew I’d inferred the reason for the purchase.

Did I understand Portuguese, he asked.

Some, did he?

Not a word.

It made us laugh. We were both nervous.

We talked mostly about old partners. His had been an architect who eventually moved to Montreal years ago. “Yours?” he asked. “And I don’t mean the marriage canard.” So he did remember the man who’d got away and thrown my life off course. I told him that my longest relationship was with a kid I’d known in elementary school whom I met almost fifteen years later in a gay bar on the seedy outskirts of Rome. What astounded me was that he confessed to having a crush on me when we were eight. I told him I’d been totally fascinated by him when I was nine. Why hadn’t he said anything? Why hadn’t I? Why hadn’t either of us known about ourselves? All we wanted to do was make up for lost time. I think we could not believe how lucky we were to have reconnected.

“How long were you together?”

“Less than two years.”

“Why did you separate?”

“I used to think it was good old ordinary domesticity that killed what we had. But it was more than that. He wanted to adopt a child, he even wanted me to father the child. What he wanted was a family.”

“And you didn’t?”

“I don’t know that I didn’t. I just knew that I wasn’t ready, I was entirely devoted to music and still am. The real truth is, I couldn’t wait to live alone again.”

He gave me a quizzical look: “Is this by any chance meant as a warning to me?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” I smiled to cover up my embarrassment. His question was totally premature. But then, in his place, I would have asked the same thing.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything, but I’m looking at all this from the other end. Age. I’m sure it’s crossed your mind more than once.”

“Age is no problem.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I told you so on Sunday. How quickly we forget.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You’re losing your memory.”

“I was flustered.”

“And I wasn’t?”

“I’ve thought of you ever since we said good night outside the brasserie. I went to bed thinking of you, woke up thinking of you, and was in a trance all of Monday, basically kicking myself. I can’t even bring myself to believe you’re sitting under my roof.”

He stopped speaking, looked at me, and just said, “And I want to kiss you.”

I was more surprised this time than when we kissed on stepping into the elevator. It made me feel we had never kissed before and that the shadow of uneasiness while walking home with him without being able to hold hands had not been dispelled. He put down his glass, moved over to me, and kissed me lightly on the lips, almost diffidently, while, like the obliging soundtrack to our earlier kiss, I kept hearing behind the faint Brazilian singer playing in our room the sound of the elevator coming down to remind me that kissing to the sound of an old elevator going up and down the stairwell was like kissing under the patter of falling rain on a rooftop in the country, and that I liked the sound and didn’t want it to end because I felt snug, protected, and safe under its spell, because, without intruding on us, it gave a voice to the world outside his living room and reminded me that all this was not just happening in my mind. What he was really asking perhaps was for us to take our time and not hurry, and, if need be, backtrack if things went faster than either of us wanted. This I had never done before. Then he kissed me a second time, also lightly.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Much. Just hold me again, please.” I wanted to be held and to wrap my arms around him. I liked the texture of his sweater on my face, the smell of wool, and, behind the wool around his underarms, a faint scent that could only have been his body’s.

So I whispered the words of the song in Portuguese:

De que serve ter o mapa se o fim está traçado

De que serve a terra à vista se o barco está parado

De que serve ter a chave se a porta está aberta

“Translate,” he said.

What good is the map if the end’s already known?

What good is landfall if the boat stalls?

What good is a key if the door’s wide open?

He loved this, he said, and asked me to repeat the words, which I did.

Soon, he said, “Let’s lie down.” He showed me to the bedroom. I was about to unbutton my shirt, but “Don’t,” he said, “let me do it.” I wanted to be naked before him but didn’t know how to say this. So I let him unbutton my shirt without touching any of his clothing. He didn’t seem to mind. “It’s because”—and he hesitated—“I want this to be very special,” he said.

And as we lay down, we embraced and sought each other’s mouths. But I could sense we were still unsteady and off-balance. Something was missing. It was not passion we lacked; it was conviction. Had we, perhaps, slowed things down to a halt? Had I failed him? Were we changing our minds? He must have felt it as well; it’s something no one can conceal or fail to pick up. He stared at me and all he said was, “Will you let me make you happy, just let me, I so want to.”

“Do anything you want. You make me happy as it is.”

Hearing this he could not wait and kissed me again and began to finish unbuttoning my shirt. “Mind if I take your shirt off?” What a question, I thought as I nodded. Then, as he helped me: “I love your skin, I love your chest, your shoulders, your smell. Are you still cold?” he asked, all the while gently caressing my chest.

“No,” I said, “not any longer.”

Then, once again he surprised me: “I’d love us to take a hot shower.”

I must have looked at him with totally baffled eyes. “Why not, if you want to.”

We stood up, and stepped into his bathroom. It was larger than my entire living room.

I couldn’t believe the number of bottles lining the floor of his large, enclosed glass shower. “Two for you, two for me,” he said, producing four folded navy towels. In an effort to bring some humor to the situation as we were getting undressed and already touching, I asked if they served breakfast here in the morning. “And how,” he replied. “A complimentary breakfast is included for all hotel guests.” We were naked and hard when we kissed again.

“Shut your eyes and trust me,” he said. “I want to make you happy.” I didn’t know what he was up to but I did as he asked. I heard him grab a cloth, and I immediately recognized the scent of the shower gel, because it smelled of chamomile, which reminded me of my parents’ home and, despite the weather outside tonight, it took me right back to our summers in Italy, which made me feel at home in this home that wasn’t my home. He began to rub my body, and I let myself go with the feeling. “Don’t open your eyes,” he cautioned as he palmed my face gently with soap and then asked if he could shampoo my hair, to which I said of course he could, and while the shampoo sat on my hair after he’d rubbed it in, I heard him wash himself, only then to feel his fingers rubbing and prodding my skull time and time again. “Don’t cheat and look,” he said, and I could tell from his voice that he was smiling, almost laughing at what the two of us were doing in the shower.

After the shower, and while my eyes were still shut, he opened the glass door and helped me step out slowly, then insisted on drying my body, my hair, my back, and underarms, and then walked me to the bedroom and asked me to lie on his bed. I loved knowing I was naked and being stared at, loved being coddled this way, loved when he started rubbing a lotion on me that felt wonderful each time he poured more of it on his palm and touched me everywhere. I felt like a toddler being washed and dried by his parent, which also took me back to my very earliest childhood when my father would shower with me in his arms. I must have been one or so—why was all this coming to me now, and why did it suddenly release me from a box whose lid had been depriving me of air and of light and sound and of the scent of flowers and herbs in the summertime? Why was I being pulled out of myself as though I’d been a prisoner whose jailer happened to be none other than myself and me alone? And what was this product that I’d never felt on my skin before? What did I want from this man and what was I going to give him in return? Was he doing all this because I’d told him I was nervous, because I’d warned him I found beginnings difficult? I let him do as he pleased, because I liked it so much and felt so desirable that I desired him even more in return, more than I’d done the moment I’d seen him in church and held back from embracing his chest. I thought I knew what he was about to do, but what he did next, once again, came as a complete surprise, so that when he finally asked me to open my eyes and look straight into his, I was entirely all his and when he kissed me again and again I didn’t need to say or think of anything, I didn’t need to do a thing except give myself over to someone who seemed to know me, and know my body and what it craved far better than I did, because he must have known it the moment he’d spoken to me in church and I’d touched his hand, known when he’d asked me to wait for him outside the church and then invited me to dinner, known when he stopped short of where we might have been headed that night and abruptly said good night, known everything about me when he saw me blush so easily and then pushed the matter just a tad farther to see how I’d react, known that I’d lost my soul for so long and was now finding I’d owned it all along but didn’t know where to look for it or how to find it without him—Lost my soul, lost my soul, I wanted to say, and then heard myself mutter the words, Lost my soul, all these years. “Don’t,” he said, as though fearing I was on the point of tears. “Just say I’m not hurting you,” he said. I nodded. “No, say, ‘You’re not hurting me,’ say it because you mean it.” “You’re not hurting me,” I said. “Say it again, say it many times.” And I said, “You’re not hurting me,” because I meant it, “you’re not hurting me, you’re not hurting me, you’re not, you’re not,” and then realized that even as I spoke these words more times than he had asked, that what he’d also done was help me leave behind—everything I had brought with me that night, my thoughts, my music, my dreams, my name, my loves, my scruples, my bike, everything else was dumped on my jacket and my backpack in the living room or stuffed into the bag that was strapped to my bike that was locked to a signpost that was all the way downstairs before we’d taken the elevator, which once again, now when we were making love, gave out its telltale squeal, because who knows which tenant in the building had pressed a button to call the elevator downstairs and would soon step inside, click shut the slim doors behind him, and ride his wobbly way up to who knows which floor, and I didn’t care what floor that was, because if I thought these muddled thoughts it was because I was trying and failing each time to think that I wasn’t losing my grip when I knew damn well that I was just desperately holding on to mere slivers of reality and feeling them slip from me, and feeling ecstatic each time they did, because I loved that he was seeing this happen to me, and I wanted him to see this on my face even while he was doing the most generous thing in the world, which was to wait and still wait while I kept repeating he wasn’t hurting me, wasn’t hurting me, just as he’d asked me to, until I caught myself begging him not to wait, because this was the polite thing to ask, hoping he’d decide for me as well, because by now his body knew mine better than it knew itself.

There’d been only a very short awkward hiccup in what had been a moment of perfect intimacy between two men who until then hadn’t seen each other naked. It had happened in the shower when he was holding my penis and my eyes were shut because of the soap. “I don’t know how to ask this,” he had said, “but—” And then he hesitated again.

“Yes?” He was making me nervous now and I couldn’t even open my eyes.

“Are you Jewish?” he finally asked.

“Seriously?” I replied, almost laughing. “Can’t you tell?”

“I was trying to base my guess on other facts besides the obvious.”

“The obvious says it pretty loudly. How many Jews or Muslims have you seen naked?”

“None,” he replied. “You are my very first.”

His sudden candor aroused me even more, which was why I pressed his body against mine.

“Fabiola,” he explained right after we were jolted from sleep by the sound of the service door banging. “She always lets the wind slam it shut.” When I looked at my watch it was already past eight a.m. and I had to teach at eleven. But I felt very lazy. He, however, had already released me from his embrace and was sitting up, while his feet, I thought, kept searching for his slippers.

“Come back to bed,” I said.

“What, more?” he asked, feigning shock. I had loved being held in his arms with my back turned to him and his breath on my neck. I wasn’t holding back.

There had been a moment of hesitation just after we’d made love that night when I felt it was time to get dressed to leave. “You’re not getting out of bed, are you?” he had asked.

“Bathroom,” I said.

I was lying.

“Not leaving though.”

“Not leaving.” But I was lying here as well.

I had meant to leave, even if I’d be doing it out of habit. I was going to explain that I always leave after sex, either because I want to or because I sense my host can’t wait to see me gone, because I myself almost always want to see occasionals out the door afterward. Hurry up with the socks, stuff them in your pockets if you have to, just go. I’d even mastered the art of the civil if totally perfunctory way of delaying my hasty exit, the way a host may sometimes feign reluctance to see you turn down a glass of water or a bite of something while you’re racing out from his world, from his things, from the smell of his hair, his sheets, his towels. Here the matter was slightly odd, and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really want to get out of bed but didn’t know how to read, much less trust the look of surprise on his face. And yet, as I’d noticed from the time we were walking to his apartment and relishing how our hands kept nearing yet missing each other, this hadn’t exactly been slam-dunk sex either.

After we made love that night he said we should head out to grab a bite to eat. “I’m starving.” “Me too,” I echoed. “But we should hurry.” Neither of us had realized that it was past midnight. “Do we look like we’ve been fucking?” “Yes,” I said. “Maybe people will know.” “I want them to know.” “So do I.”

We had dinner in a small but noisy place that tended to stay open late. The waiters knew him there, and some of the regulars knew him as well. It gave the two of us a shared thrill to sense they suspected what we’d been up to not fifteen minutes earlier.

“I want one more hug,” I said that morning.

“Just a hug?”

Before I knew it, I had my legs wrapped tight around his waist.

“And so may I ask you something?” he said, his face no more than an inch away from mine, with one palm on my forehead brushing my hair away from my eyes.

I had no idea what he had in mind—perhaps, I figured, something to do with our bodies or something a touch awkward, about performance, or would it be about protection?

“Are you busy this evening?”

The question almost made me laugh. “Totally free,” I said.

“Then how about our little bistro?”

“What time?”

“Nine?”

I nodded.

I had forgotten the precise address of the place. He named the street. Then, while trying not to sound too self-important, he said they sometimes kept a free table for him there. “I frequently bring clients there for lunch or dinner.”

“And others?”

He smiled.

“If you only knew.”

The maid must have been told he had a guest—probably while I was in the shower—because when he showed me to the dining room, breakfast was served for two. Coffee and a host of wonderful things, breads, cheeses, and jams that seemed homemade. He said he liked quince jam and fig jam. Most people liked berries and marmalades. “But suit yourself.”

He had to rush to his office. “Nine then?”

We left together. I told him I was going to ride home to change and then head to the conservatory, after which I had a lunch scheduled with a colleague. I don’t know why I provided so much information about my day. He listened, he watched me unlock the bike, admired its frame again, told me to fold it and bring it inside the next time, then he stood there, and, unlike the first time, watched as I rode away.

But it was still too early in the day. So I rode down one street and then another, crossed the bridge, not caring where I was headed, eager to find a bakery where I might stop, sit, have another cup of coffee and think of him, I didn’t want the events of the morning to brush away the feeling or the memory of last night, of how we kissed savagely in the end while all I liked hearing was the silence and the comforting wheezing of the old elevator going up and down reminding me each time that we were no longer the last who’d used it.

Usually, I forget, or try to put away what happened at night, which isn’t difficult since things seldom last more than an hour or two. Sometimes it’s as though it hadn’t occurred at all, and I’m happy not to remember.

Sitting down on this very clear morning, I liked watching all these people headed to work while feeling I was on an extended Christmas Day. The sex had had nothing unusual about it, but I liked how he had paid attention to everything, from the moment he handed me the towels to the way he cared for my body, my pleasure, mindful of everything, and always so tactful and kind, with something verging on deference for the young body that was half his age. Even the way he’d kept rubbing and caressing my hand and then my wrist, asking for trust and little else when my eyes were shut, just rubbing my wrists, which he held down gently on the bed, the kindest gesture known to man. Why had no one ever held my wrists that way and brought me so much joy with such minute and seemingly insignificant caresses? If he forgot, I would ask him to rub my wrists just as he’d done before.

I put down the paper and without thinking had raised the collar of my fleece jacket and felt it rub my face. It reminded me of his unshaven cheek this morning, when we’d made love again. I wanted my coat to smell of him. What aftershave did he wear? It was so faint, but I wanted to know. I would learn to rub his cheek with mine tomorrow morning.

And then I thought of my father who said he’d be in Paris for Christmas in a few weeks. I wondered if Michel and I would still be together by then. I wanted my father to meet him and wondered what he’d think of him. He and Miranda had promised to bring along the boy this time—it was time I saw my younger brother again, he said. I would take them to my café here, and if Michel were still a presence in my life, Miranda and I would simply sit back and watch both men figure out who was the younger of the two.

I spent the rest of the day in a mild daze. Three students plus a lecture prepared fifteen minutes before class. At lunch all I kept thinking of was dinner that night, the single malts, the nuts and salted biscuits, and the moment when he’d once again offer two towels for me and two for him. Would he be as hospitable tonight or would he have changed into someone I didn’t know? I hoped my best shirt was well pressed, and, when I checked, I found it was. I had a mind to put on a tie but decided against it. I combed my hair but I couldn’t wait for him to brush my forehead with his hand. Then on my way out, I ran to my local cobbler to have my shoes shined.

I think I’m happy. That’s what I was going to say to him. I think I’m happy. I knew I should avoid saying this on our third evening, but I didn’t care. I wanted to say it.

When I arrived at the restaurant that night I didn’t find him and realized to my extreme embarrassment that I didn’t know his surname. It left me feeling completely flustered. I would never dare say that I had come to meet Michel or Monsieur Michel. But before I had a chance to utter something that was bound to mortify me, one of the waiters recognized me and right away took me to what had been our table three nights earlier. It occurred to me that, despite Michel’s denial, I was not the first young man to have walked into the brasserie looking slightly awkward and whom the help had been trained to spot as yet another of his guests. I was a touch miffed, but decided not to nurse a grudge or let the feeling fester. Perhaps I was making it all up. And maybe I was, because when I was shown to his table not five steps away from the door, there he was, already seated, nursing an aperitif. In my confused state I’d failed to notice he’d been staring at me all along.

We hugged. And then, unable to control myself, I told him, “I’ve spent the most wonderful day of the year.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I still haven’t figured out why,” I said, “but it may have something to do with last night.”

“Last night and this morning for me.” He smiled. I liked that he wasn’t reluctant to show he had appreciated our hasty little morning sequel. I liked his mood, his smile, liked everything. A moment of silence and I couldn’t hold back: “You’re wonderful, I’ve been meaning to tell you, you’re just wonderful!”

As soon as I unfolded my napkin, it hit me. I had lost my appetite. “I’m not at all hungry,” I said.

“Now you’re the one who is wonderful.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m not hungry either but I wasn’t going to say it. Let’s just go home. Maybe a snack. A single malt?”

“A single malt. With nuts and salted things?”

“Definitely nuts and salted things.”

He turned to the headwaiter: “Apologies to the chef, but we’ve changed our mind. À demain.”

When we reached his home, we ditched the idea of a drink or a snack. We took off our clothes, left them on the floor, skipped the shower, and went straight to bed.

Thursday that week we met again at nine at the same restaurant.

Friday for lunch.

And then for dinner as well.

After breakfast that Saturday, he said he was going to drive to the country and that I was welcome to join him—if I was free, he added with that guarded and typically unassuming, ironic lilt in his voice meant to show he was perfectly prepared to accept I had a life outside of our meetings and that he was never going to ask why, where, when, or with whom. But having spoken, he probably felt he might as well go all the way: “We could come back on Sunday evening just in time for our one-week anniversary concert.” I couldn’t tell what was making him slightly uneasy, the invitation to spend the weekend with him or the open admission that the two of us already had an anniversary to celebrate. To tidy things with his usual reserve he quickly added that, if I wished to join him, he could drop me at my flat, wait in the car while I packed a few warm things—it gets cold at night—and we’d be off.

“Where to?” I asked, which was my hasty way of saying, Of course I’ll come.

“I have a home about an hour away from the city.”

I joked and said I felt like Cinderella.

“How so?”

“When does the clock strike midnight? When does the honeymoon end?” I asked.

“It ends when it ends.”

“Is there an expiration date?”

“The manufacturers haven’t determined an expiration yet. So we’re on our own. And besides, this is different,” he said.

“Don’t you say this to everyone?”

“I do. And I have. But you and I have something very special, and for me totally unusual. If you’ll let me, I hope to prove it to you this weekend.”

“A likely story,” I said. We both laughed.

“The irony is that I may even succeed in proving it—and then where will we be?” He looked at me. “And that—if you care to know—is the part that scares me more than a little.”

I could have asked him to elaborate, but, once again, felt that this could lead into territory neither of us wished to enter.

The home, when we finally reached it more than an hour later, wasn’t Brideshead but it wasn’t Howards End either. “I grew up here,” he said. “It’s big, it’s old, and it’s always, always cold. Even the bikes are old and rickety, nothing like yours. There’s a lake down beyond the wood and I like it there. It’s where I recharge. I’ll show you around later. Plus there’s an old Steinway.”

“Great. But is it tuned?”

He looked slightly embarrassed. “I had it tuned.”

“When, though?”

“Yesterday.”

“For no reason, I suppose.”

“For no reason.”

We both smiled. It was moments of sudden and radiant intimacy like these that made me want to shout, It’s been years since I’ve been like this with anyone.

I put my arm around his shoulder. “So you knew I’d come.”

“Not knew. Hoped.”

He showed me around the house, then walked me to the large parlor.

We didn’t exactly step inside but stood at the doorway like two characters looking on as Velázquez paints his two monarchs. The ageless wooden floor around the large Persian rugs was gleaming gold and was clearly the beneficiary of years of buffing. One could smell the wax polish. “I’ll always remember,” said Michel, “how it used to get so lonely in the fall at the start of each school year when we’d come to spend weekends here. Those days felt like never-ending rainy Sundays that start at nine in the morning and never let up until winter comes and we’d be driving back to Paris by four feeling sapped and silent in the car. My parents hated each other but never said it. The only thing that stirred any joy—and it was more relief than joy—was Sunday evening when we’d unlock the door to our flat in town, turn on one light after the other, until life seemed to pick up its pace with the promise of a concert, which was when my whole world rose from its induced stupor called schoolwork, called dinner, called Mother, called silence and loneliness, and, worst of all, perpetual boyhood. I wouldn’t wish my childhood or adolescence in this house on anyone. Life was like a waiting room at a doctor’s office and my turn never came.”

He saw me smile. “All I ever did here was homework and masturbate. I think there isn’t a room in this whole mansion where I didn’t do homework.”

“And masturbate.”

It made us both laugh.

We were having a simple, almost frugal lunch in the dining room. From what I inferred, he normally drove here late on Saturday mornings and would leave by Sunday afternoon. “Habit,” he explained.

The L-shaped house was large, and its façade was late-eighteenth-century Palladian: very plain and unassuming, almost bland in its predictable symmetries, which probably explained its restrained yet welcoming grace. And then came the mysterious right-angle wing, which created an intimate space that yielded a well-tended, semi-enclosed Italian garden. The mansard roof with its dormer windows immediately made me think of a cold room up there where the lonely boy who would one day become my lover sat at his desk and dutifully did his homework while nursing all manner of lurid thoughts. I felt for the boy. His mother always made him bring his homework along; so there was little else to do here, much less to enjoy, he said.

I asked him about his school days. He’d attended the Lycée J. “I hated it,” he said, “but my father would sometimes drop by and arrange to take me out for a few hours. It was to be our secret. He too had studied there, so walking with him around the neighborhood on a weekday and going in and out of stores was like sliding into a buoyant, grown-up world I was not entitled to, while I’m sure that slipping into my little world was his way of reliving his years as a lycéen, only to thank his lucky stars for keeping them forever locked behind him. He wouldn’t be surprised, he said, if I hated school. When one afternoon I showed him into my empty classroom, he was baffled to see that not a thing had changed since the days before the war. The overpowering smell of the old wooden desks still lingered in the room, he said, and that dusky slant of failing afternoon light that could smother every indecent thought in a boy’s mind still swept over the dust on the dark brown furniture in my dark brown smelly classroom of Lycée J.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Miss him? Not really. Maybe because, unlike my mother, who died eight years ago, he never really died for me. He’s just absent. Sometimes it’s almost as though he might change his mind and slip in through a back door somewhere. Which is why I’ve never really mourned him. He’s still around—just elsewhere.” He thought for a moment.

“I’ve kept most of his things, his neckties especially, his rifles, golf clubs, even his old wooden tennis rackets. I used to think I was keeping them as mementos, the way I’d sealed two of his sweaters in plastic bags so that they might retain his scent. It’s not death I refuse, but extinction. I’ll never use his warped wooden racket, still strung with old catgut. The main reason I lament not being closer to my son now that he has children is not because I know I would have made an excellent grandfather, but because I wish he had met my father, and loved him as I did, so that now my son and I could sit together on November days like here today and remember him. There is no one to remember my father with.”

“Could this be my role?” I asked completely naively.

He did not respond.

“But I should tell you that if there is one thing I regret now almost thirty years later it’s that he never met you. Today this weighs on me, as if a link is missing in my life, I don’t know why. Perhaps this is why I wanted to bring you here this weekend.”

I was going to ask whether it wasn’t perhaps too soon to meet his parents—and the thought brought a smile to my face—but I decided not to say anything, not because my ironic comment wouldn’t sit well at that moment, but because a voice told me that it wasn’t too soon, indeed it was about time I met or, rather, heard about his parents.

“You’re scaring me a bit,” I said, “because it means that I’ll never pass muster unless your father approves, and since he’ll never know me, you’ll never approve?”

“Wrong. I know he’d approve. That’s not it. I think it would have made him happy to know I’ve been happy this whole week.” He stopped a moment. “Or is this too much pressure for those of your generation?”

I shook my head and smiled, meaning You’re so off the mark about me and my generation!

“I’ve been blabbering on so much about my father that I’m sure you must think I have a father fixation. I hardly think of him. But I do dream of him. They are usually very sweet and soothing dreams. So here’s a funny thing: he even knows about you. It was he who in a dream steered me away from visiting piano bars to go directly to the conservatory instead. Clearly my subconscious speaks through him.”

“Would you have sought me out anyway?”

“Probably not.”

“What a waste that would have been.”

“Would you have come to this Sunday’s concert?”

“You already asked me this.”

“But you never answered.”

“I know.”

He nodded, meaning My point exactly.

After lunch he asked if I wanted to try the piano. I sat down, played a few quick chords to test it, assumed a very grave air, and then started to play “Chopsticks.” He laughed. Before I knew what possessed me, I started to improvise on “Chopsticks” until I stopped and played a chaconne composed recently in the old style. I played it beautifully because I was playing it for him, because it suited autumn, because it spoke to the old house, to the boy in him still, and to the years between us I was hoping to erase.

When I stopped I asked him to tell me exactly what he had been doing when he was my age.

“Probably working in my father’s law firm, being completely miserable, because I hated it, but also because there was no one, just no one special in my life except for the … occasionals.”

Then, from nowhere, he asked when was the last time I’d had sex.

“Promise not to laugh?”

“No.”

“Last November.”

“But that’s a year ago.”

“And even then…”

But I didn’t finish the sentence.

“Well, the last time I brought someone to this house I was probably your age and he spent one night here and I never saw him again.” He stopped short of finishing what he was about to say. He must have immediately figured what had just crossed my mind: that when he invited his lover here I wasn’t born yet. Then, to change the subject, he added, “I’m sure my father would have loved the piece you played.”

“Why did your father stop playing?”

“I’ll never know. He played for me only once. I must have been fifteen or sixteen. He told me it was a very difficult piece. By then he had given up entirely on my musical aptitude. He sat at this very piano one day when Mother was away in Paris and there it was: a short piece played, in my opinion, magnificently, La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell by Liszt. I knew right away, without a doubt, that my father was indeed a great pianist. I had seen many pictures of him in tails sitting at a piano or standing after bowing to an audience. But I had never really come face-to-face with his life as a pianist. It was a closed door. The question I’ll never be able to answer is why he stopped playing, or why he never discussed it. Even when I told him once that I thought I’d heard him playing at night and that the music had drifted to my bedroom from a distant wing of the house, he denied it. ‘It must have been a record,’ he said. After he was done playing the Liszt that one time he simply asked, ‘Did you like it?’ I didn’t know what to say. All I muttered was, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ He never expected me to say such a thing. He nodded a few times, but I could tell he was moved. Then he closed the piano, and never played for me again.”

“Puzzling.”

“But he wasn’t a closed man at all. He liked to talk about women, especially when I was in my mid-to-late teens after one of those concerts in the church. He would speak about music but then sometimes he’d drift and end up talking about love, about the women he’d known in his younger days, and he’d speak about this intangible thing called pleasure, which no one ever really knows how to talk about, and which explains why I learned more about both pleasure and desire from him while we were walking back home from a concert than from those who were meant to help me discover what they were. He was a man who cultivated pleasure, though I doubt it was with my mother. He said so himself one day when he told me that it was far better to pay for a good half hour with a woman you might never see again than to spend time with one who leaves you more lonely after you’ve had a few minutes flouncing between her legs. He spoke that way. He was funny.

“One day after our Sunday concert he said that if I wanted he knew of a place where a woman could easily teach me what adults did together. I was curious and scared, but he told me where, whom to ask for, and gave me money for good measure.

“A week later we were back to our Sunday evenings together and laughing on the way. ‘So it happened?’ was all he asked. ‘It happened,’ I replied. It brought us closer still. A few weeks later I found a different kind of pleasure that he most likely knew nothing about. In retrospect, I regret never having told him about it. But in those days…”

He did not finish his sentence.

Did I want to go for a stroll, he asked.

I said yes.

Michel said he used to have a dog, and they would go for long walks together, returning after dark. But since the dog had died he’d never wanted another. “He suffered a lot before dying, so I put him to sleep, but I won’t ever go through such a loss again.”

I did not ask. But that I didn’t ask must surely have warned him I’d pondered the question.

Soon we approached the wood. He said he would show me the lake. “It reminds me of Corot. It’s always early evening and perpetually sunless here. Corot always has a dab of red on the boatman’s bonnet in his paintings—like a sprig of mirth on gloomy November fields where there’s never any snow. Reminds me of my mother—always on the verge of tears but never a sob. This landscape makes me happy, perhaps because I can feel it’s gloomier than I am.” When we reached the lake: “Is this where you recharge?” I asked.

“The very place!” He knew I was ribbing him.

We were going to sit on the grass, but it was damp, so we loitered by the shore a bit, then turned back.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but there is a reason why I asked you here.”

“You mean it has nothing to do with my looks or my youth or the sheer brilliance of my intellect, to say nothing of my ripped body?”

He embraced me and kissed me longingly on the mouth.

“It definitely has to do with you—but I promise that what’s in store will surprise you.”

It was starting to get cloudy. “It really is Corot country, isn’t it—mournful as ever. But it puts me in a good mood. Or maybe that’s because you’re here,” he said.

“Clearly because I’m here.” He knew I was ribbing him again. “Or maybe because I’m happy too.”

“Are you really?”

“I’m trying to hide it, can’t you tell?”

He put his arm around me, then kissed me on the cheek.

“Perhaps we should head back. A little Calvados wouldn’t hurt.”

On the way back, he said it was my turn to talk about my family. He was probably trying to show he wasn’t going to do all the talking about parents and was giving me equal time to talk about mine. But there was so little to say, I said. Both my parents were amateur musicians, so I was the culmination of their dreams. My father, a university professor, was my first piano teacher but soon realized, when I was eight or so, that my capacities surpassed his. The three of us were exceptionally close. They never disagreed with me, and I could do no wrong in their eyes. I was a quiet child and by the time I was eighteen or so it was clear that my inclinations ran in all ways. I said nothing at first, but I am forever grateful that my father made it easy for us to speak about matters most parents are reluctant to even hint at. After I went to college, they separated. I think that unbeknownst to them, I was the bond that held them together, whereas they’d always had different interests, led different lives, and had very different friends. Then one day my mother ran into someone she’d known years before my father and decided to move to Milan with him. My father had altogether given up on meeting a partner but a few years later he met someone, on a train of all places, and they now have a child whose godfather and half brother I am. All told, everyone is quite happy.

“Do they know about me?” he asked.

“They do. I told him on Thursday when he called. Miranda also knows.”

“Do they know I’m much older than you?”

“They do. My father, incidentally, is twice her age.”

He paused a moment and was silent.

“Why did you tell them about me?”

“Because it matters, that’s why. And don’t ask me if it does.”

We stopped walking. He scraped his shoes against a fallen branch, tore a shoot and cleaned the rest of his shoe with it, then looked at me.

“You could just be the dearest person I’ve ever known. Which also means you could hurt me, devastate me actually. Do people speak like this in your generation?”

“Enough with my generation! And stop saying things like this. This kind of talk upsets me.”

“I won’t say another word then. Do people you know ever use the big word?”

I could feel it coming. “Please hold me, just hold me.”

He put his arms around me and held me tightly.

We resumed walking in silence, arm in arm, until it was my turn to scrape my shoe. “Corot country!” I cursed. It made the two of us laugh.

Back in the house: “I want to show you the kitchen. It hasn’t changed in eons.” We walked into a large kitchen that was clearly never meant to be a place where the owners might sit to have coffee or eggs. Pots and pans of all makes were hanging on the walls, but not in that faux, fashionably cluttered, chic French-country style found in magazines and home decor catalogues. It was ancient and dysfunctional in parts, and no one was going to hide it. As I surveyed the room I thought that it probably had electric wiring and gas and water pipes going back many decades, if not generations, that needed to be torn out and replaced.

We left the kitchen and headed to the parlor where he opened a tiny antique wooden cabinet, found a bottle, and took out two snifters, which he held in one hand with his fingers thrust between their stems. I liked how he did this.

“I’m going to show you something I believe no one has ever seen. It came into my father’s hands not long after the Germans left our house. When I was in my very late twenties, and a few days before my father fell into a coma—he knew his time had come, and no one was stupid enough to try to tell him otherwise—he asked me, when we were alone together, to unlock this tiny cabinet and to take out a large leather envelope.

“My father said he was younger than I was at the time when what was in the envelope came into his possession.”

“What’s in it?” I asked, holding the envelope.

“Open it.”

I expected some sort of deed, will, or certificate, or a compromising set of photos. Instead, when I opened the leather folio I found a musical score on eight double-sided sheets of onion paper. The staffs were drawn by the unsteady hand of someone who obviously didn’t own a ruler. On the front was written: From Léon to Adrien, January 18, 1944.

“Adrien, my father, never explained. All he said was, ‘Do not destroy it, do not give it away to some archive or library, just pass it on to someone who’ll know exactly what to do with it.’ It broke my heart because from the look on his face as he spoke these words I could tell he knew there was no one else in his life or in my life to give this to. I also think he knew, just knew—about me, that is. And the strange thing, as he looked at me with that deep, searching stare of those who know they are about to die, was that everything between us, every moment of love, every disappointment, every misunderstanding, every coded glance had all but dissolved. ‘Find someone,’ he said.

“Of course as soon as I looked at the score I was completely at a loss. Beyond the few years I’d spent playing the piano, I knew nothing about classical music, and he, on his part, never pushed me. So I never bothered with this score.

“But there was another reason why I was truly perplexed when I took a look at it. I was born twenty years after the date on the score and yet here was someone I’d never met, much less heard of, who bore my middle name, Léon. I asked my father who this man was, but he gave me a blank look, made a dismissive gesture with his hand, then said it would take too long, adding he was tired and that he preferred not to say, not to think. ‘You’re making me remember, and I don’t want to remember,’ he said. I didn’t know whether it was the morphine clouding his mind or whether he was resorting to his go-to phrase—I’d rather not say—when trying to avoid a delicate subject, especially when he wanted you to know that if he uttered another word it would open up Pandora’s box. Had I kept asking, I would have received that curt, impassive hand motion of his again, which is how he dealt with beggars he had no patience with. I’d planned to ask him again anyway, but the score slipped from my mind and I needed to care for him, as his condition kept worsening. In retrospect now, I almost think that what had kept him alive during his sickness was the need to find the chance to hand me the score without my mother’s knowledge. Months after he died, I asked around and learned that not a soul on my mother’s or my father’s side of the family was called Léon. Finally, I asked my mother, ‘Who was Léon?’ She looked at me with a bewildered and amused look on her face: ‘You, of course.’ Had there ever been another Léon, I asked. No one. Léon had been my father’s idea. They had argued about names. She wanted Michel, after my father’s grandfather who had bequeathed us his property. My father insisted on Léon. She won, of course. Léon as a second name was a concession. No one ever called me that.

“Only then did it dawn on me that my mother couldn’t have known anything about the existence of Léon or of the score. Had she even seen the score, she would have asked who Léon was and wouldn’t have let go of the matter until she’d gotten to the bottom of it. That’s the way Mother was—intrusive and implacable once she set her mind on something. She insisted I become a lawyer—and there was no gainsaying her.

“As it turned out and after I’d made some inquiries among the staff following the death of my father, one of the older servants did recall a certain Léon. Léon le juif, Léon the Jew, they called him in the household, starting from my grandfather, who hated Jews, down to the cook and the chambermaids. ‘But,’ in the words of the same old cook, ‘that was a very long time ago, before your parents even knew each other.’ I could tell it was going to be like pulling teeth to get more out of our cook, so I let the matter slide, figuring I’d ask him at some other time and not give him the impression I was grilling him for answers. I asked him about the Germans who occupied our home, knowing that speaking about those days might lead us back to Léon, but all he said was that the Germans were de vrais gentlemen who tipped well and treated my family with exceptional respect, not like that old Jew, he said, recalling I had asked about Léon. He was the last in our family to have known Léon, but after my father died he retired and moved back to the north, where he too disappeared. So the trail went cold.

“When my mother died, I decided to sort through the family papers—but I found nothing about the Jew. The one thing I failed to grasp was why my father had kept the score under lock and key and why I had ended up with Léon’s name. What had happened to my namesake? I had hoped to find a diary or a school record of my father’s early years. But my father had never kept a diary. I did find diplomas and certificates and numberless musical scores among his papers, some on paper so brittle and with such high acidic content that they crumbled as soon as you touched them. Strange to say, though, I never once saw him leaf through those scores. Occasionally, when he’d overhear pianists on the radio he would criticize their playing, always saying, ‘He might as well be typing on a Remington.’ Or about another world-famous pianist, ‘A great pianist but an appalling musician.’

“I have no sense of how turning to law changed him or, for that matter, why he abandoned his career as a musician. Or, to put it more bluntly, I never got to know who was the man behind the man I thought my father was. I knew the lawyer only but had never even seen or met or lived with the pianist. And it kills me still today not to have known and spoken to the pianist. The person I knew was his second self. I suspect we have first selves and second selves and perhaps third, fourth, and fifth selves and many more in between.”

“Whom am I speaking to now,” I asked, seizing his drift, “second, third, or first self?”

“Second. I think. Age, my friend. But a part of me would die to have you speak to my younger self, to have had you here in this house when I was your age. The irony is that with you I feel your age, not mine. I am sure there’ll be a price to pay for this.”

“You’re such a pessimist.”

“Maybe. But my younger self bungled and sped through so many things. An older self is more frugal, more cautious, and therefore more reluctant—or more desperate—to rush into things he already fears he might never find again.”

“But you have me here and now.”

“Yes, but for how long?”

I did not answer. I was trying to avoid touching on the future, but as a result must have sounded more fatuous than he would have wished.

“This, today, like yesterday,” he said, “like Thursday, like Wednesday, has been a gift. I could so easily never have found you, or never run into you again.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled.

With that he poured each of us a second glass of Calvados. “I hope you like this.”

I nodded, as I’d done the first time with single malts.

“Fate, if it exists at all,” he said, “has strange ways of teasing us with patterns that may not be patterns at all but that hint at a vestigial meaning still being worked out. My father, your father, the piano, always the piano, and then you, like my son, but not like my son, and this Jewish thread running through both our lives, all of it reminds me that our lives are nothing more than excavation digs that are always tiers deeper that we thought. Or maybe it’s nothing, just nothing.

“In any case, I’ll leave you with the score. I’m going to see what they’re preparing for dinner tonight. Meanwhile, let me know what you think. Remember, you are one of the very, very few who have ever seen it.”

He shut the door very quietly, as if to show that what I was about to do required great concentration and that the last thing he wanted was to disturb me.

I liked being alone in this room. It felt intimate, despite its large size. I even liked the smell of the old, thick curtains behind me, liked the aged mahogany paneling on the wall and the dark red rug, even liked my sunken, flaking old leather armchair, and the excellent Calvados. Everything felt aged, passed on, and set in place centuries ago for centuries to come. Wars and revolutions could not undo this because stubborn legacy and longevity seemed permanently inscribed everywhere in this mansion, down to the delicate snifter I was holding in my hand. Michel had grown up here, been sheltered here, been stifled here. I wondered if he had used this very armchair while scanning for erotic images in magazines as a teenager.

What did he expect me to do with the score—tell him it was good or bad, say the Jew was a genius? Or maybe an idiot? Or was he looking for the man his father was before becoming a father and hoping I’d help dig him out from this rubble of musical notations?

I began leafing through the score, and the more I stared at its second page the more I began to question why the staff lines were drawn in so unsteady a hand. There was only one explanation for this: there was no staved stationery available when this was written. Besides, Léon must have assumed that Adrien would immediately recognize the notes, or at least know what to do with them.

But then I began to notice something else. The score had no perceptible beginning, which meant either that the score was incomplete or that it was composed at the very peak of the modernist era. And yet, how unoriginal was that, I thought, irony bringing a smirk to my face. I looked at the last page of the score, not expecting to find a clear ending to the piece either, and indeed there was nothing but a long trill leading absolutely nowhere. How predictable, I thought, and how dull! The no-ending ending—modernism at its foulest!

Part of me didn’t have the heart to tell Michel any of this. I didn’t want to tell him that the score so faithfully coddled by his father and for so long was worth less than the Cartier leather folder where it had slumbered in a locked cabinet. Better to have left it sleeping.

Then as I kept leafing through the first three pages, I became aware of something that truly made my heart sink. I’d seen these notes before. Dear God, I’d even played them five years earlier in Naples! But not quite in this order. It took no time to recognize the notes. The poor fellow had been copying Mozart. How banal! And then, worse yet—I couldn’t believe it—a few bars later and not so subtly, I thought I recognized wisps of something everyone knew: the recognizable lilting rondo lifted from Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. Our dear Léon was stealing left and right.

I looked at the pale sepia ink. Either the ink had faded over the years or the writer was using diluted ink. It looked so desperately and hastily scribbled down, that I imagined Léon mailing it from the Gare du Nord just as the train was inching its way out to who knows where he was headed in 1944. Did its owner have a sense of humor, I thought, as he pilfered notes left and right? Was he intelligent, or a fool? Could one tell anything by the handwriting? And how old could Léon have been? A young prankster in his mid-twenties like Michel at the time, or was he even younger?

As I was trying to guess who or what Léon was, it suddenly hit me that there was a reason why I recognized the first series of notes. They were composed, or partially composed, by Mozart. But this was no sonata, no prelude, no fantasy, or fugue. This was a cadenza to Mozart’s D Minor piano concerto, which was why I had recognized the theme. But he was not copying Mozart; he was quoting from Beethoven’s own cadenza to Mozart’s concerto, which had also inspired Léon to echo a few bars from the Waldstein Sonata. Léon was having fun. All he’d done was to compose the parts that the pianist Adrien was probably meant to improvise at the end of the first movement, that glorious moment when the orchestra stops and lets the pianist play at will, which is where imagination, boldness, love, freedom, prowess, talent, and a profound understanding of what lies at the very heart of Mozart’s concerto can finally shout their love of music and invention in a cadenza.

The composer of the cadenza had divined what Mozart hadn’t finished composing and what Mozart had left open-ended for others to finish for him, even if they composed it in an entirely different age when music had altogether changed. What one needed to enter into the mystery of Mozart’s composition was not to wear Mozart’s shoes or walk in his gait or echo his idiom, his voice, his pulse, his style even; what one needed was to reinvent him in ways he himself would never have imagined, to build where Mozart had stopped building, but to build what Mozart would still recognize as irreducibly his and only his.

When Michel returned I couldn’t wait to tell him about the score. “This is not a sonata, it’s a cadenza—” I began.

“Chicken or beef?” he interrupted. Our supper and well-being tonight trumped everything else.

I loved it when he did this. “Are we on an airplane?” I asked.

“We might serve vegan food as well,” he continued, parodying an Air France stewardess. “And I have a fabulous red.” He stopped a moment. “You were saying?”

“Not a sonata but a cadenza.”

“A cadenza. Of course! I suspected it all along.” He halted a second. “And what’s a cadenza?”

I laughed.

“It’s a brief one-to-two-minute moment in a piano concerto when the soloist improvises upon a theme already explored in the concerto itself. Usually, the signal for the orchestra to come clamoring back in and close the movement is a trill played by the pianist at the very end of his cadenza. I couldn’t figure out what the trill was when I first saw it but now it makes perfect sense. This cadenza, however, goes on and on, I don’t know for how long yet, but it’s obviously more than five to six minutes long.”

“So this was my father’s big secret? Six minutes of music, and that’s it?”

“I suppose.”

“Doesn’t add up, does it?”

“I’m not sure yet. I have to study this. Léon keeps echoing the Waldstein.”

“The Waldstein.” He repeated the word with a broad smile. It took me a moment and then, once again, I understood why he was smiling.

“Don’t tell me you’re twice my age and you’ve never heard the Waldstein Sonata.”

“I know it inside out.” Again the smile.

“You’re fibbing. I know it. I can tell.”

“Of course I’m fibbing.”

I stood up, went to the piano, and started playing the opening bars of the Waldstein.

“The Waldstein, of course,” he said.

Was he still joking?

“Actually I’ve heard it many times.”

I stopped playing and then moved to the rondo. He said he knew it too. “Then sing it,” I said.

“I’ll do no such thing.”

“Sing it with me,” I said.

“No.”

I started singing the rondo and, after a bit of coaxing by staring at him from the piano, began hearing his tentative attempts at song. I played more slowly, and then asked him to sing louder, till in the end we were singing in unison. He placed both hands on my shoulders, I thought it was a signal to stop, but then he said, “Don’t stop,” so I continued playing and singing. “What a voice you have,” he said. “If I could, I would kiss your voice.” “Keep singing,” I said. So he kept singing. When I turned around at the end of our crooning, I noticed he had tears in his eyes. “Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know why. Maybe because I never ever sing. Or maybe it’s just this: being with you. I want to sing.” “Don’t you sing in the shower sometimes?” “Not in ages.” I got up and, with my left thumb, wiped the tears from both his eyes. “I like that we sang,” I said. “I do too,” he said. “Did it make you sad?” “Not at all. I was just moved, as though you’d pushed me out of myself. I like it when you do that: push me out of myself. Plus I’m so shy that I tear up as easily as some people blush.”

“You, shy? I don’t think you’re shy at all.”

“You wouldn’t believe how shy.”

“You spoke to me out of nowhere, picked me up actually, and in a church of all places, and then you took me out to dinner. Shy people don’t do any of this.”

“The reason it happened that way is because I wasn’t planning any of it, wasn’t even thinking. It all came so easily, maybe because you helped. Of course I wanted to ask you to come home with me that same night, but I didn’t dare.”

“So you left me stranded all alone with my backpack, my bicycle, and my helmet. Thanks!”

“You didn’t mind.”

“I did mind. I was hurt.”

“And yet now you’re here with me in this room.” He paused a moment. “Is this too much for you?”

“My generation again?”

We laughed.

Getting back to Léon, I took up the score.

“Let me explain to you how a cadenza works.”

I riffled through his record collection—all jazz—but finally landed on a Mozart concerto. Then I located a very complex and expensive-looking music system sitting on an eighteenth-century coffee table. As I fiddled to see how it worked, I avoided looking at him so as not to give what I was about to ask any importance. “Who told you to buy this?” I asked.

“Nobody told me. I told myself. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

He knew I liked his answer. “And I know how to work it myself. All you had to do was ask me.”

It took a few moments, and we began listening to Mozart’s piano concerto. I let him hear a bit of the first movement then lifted the stylus and moved it forward to the part where I suspected the cadenza started. This cadenza was composed by Mozart himself. We listened to the cadenza until I pointed out the trill that signaled the return of the full orchestra.

“That was Murray Perahia playing. Very elegant, very clear, simply superb. The key to his cadenza is these few notes taken from the main theme. I’ll sing them for you and then you will too.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Don’t be a baby.”

“No way!”

I played the notes first, then began singing as I was playing them and continued playing, to show off a bit. “Your turn now,” I said while playing the notes again, and then turned my head toward him to signal it was his turn. He hesitated at first but then did as asked and began humming the notes. “You have a good voice,” I finally said. Then, because I felt inspired, I played the notes once more and told him to sing them again, saying, “It would make me happy.”

And he did sing again, until we sang together. “Next week I will start taking piano lessons,” he said. “I want the piano to be part of my life again. Maybe I want to learn composition too.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was humoring me.

“Would you let me be your teacher?” I asked.

“Of course I would. What a stupid question. The question is…”

“Oh, shush!”

Then I told him to sit while I played Beethoven’s and then Brahms’s cadenzas to Mozart’s D Minor concerto. “Luminous,” I said, as I began playing, feeling that I was playing the two perfectly.

“There are many others. One was even composed by Mozart’s own son,” I said.

I played. He listened.

And then, because I felt inspired, I played him my own improvised version on the spot. “This can go on forever, if you wish.”

“I so wish I could do this.”

“And you will. I’d be better at the piano if I’d practiced earlier this morning, but someone had other plans for the day.”

“You didn’t have to agree.”

“I wanted to.”

Then, out of the blue: “Could you play the notes you played for your student from Thailand?”

“You mean this?” I said, knowing exactly what he was referring to.

“What’s interesting here is that after our friend Léon’s cadenza quotes a few bars from the Waldstein Sonata, something far crazier happens.”

“What?” he asked, almost overwhelmed by too many musical facts for one day.

I looked at the score and then once again, just to make certain that I wasn’t making any of it up. “It seems to me, and I’m not sure yet, that at some point after quoting the Waldstein Léon dithers awhile until he slips from the Beethoven to something that very possibly inspired another piece by Beethoven, something called Kol Nidre.”

“Of course,” he said. He was close to laughing.

“Kol Nidre is a Jewish prayer. You see, the Jewish theme is very veiled but it’s smuggled in there … and my hunch is that unless someone were musically trained, only a Jew who reads music would recognize that the centerpiece of this cadenza is not the Beethoven but Kol Nidre. Those few measures are repeated seven times, so Léon knew exactly what he was doing. Then, of course, he goes back to the Waldstein, and to the trill that announces the return of the full orchestra.”

To let him know what I had in mind I played the cadenza and then Kol Nidre bit by bit for him.

“What is Kol Nidre?”

“It’s an Aramaic prayer at the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and represents the recantation of all vows, all oaths, all curses, all obligations made to God. But the melody has charmed composers. My hunch is that Léon knew that your father would recognize it. It was like a coded message between them.”

“But I know this tune,” he suddenly said.

“Where did you hear it?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. But I know it, maybe from way, way back.”

Michel thought for a moment, then, as though rousing himself, said, “I think we should sit down for dinner.”

But I needed to get the matter off my chest.

“There are two ways in which your father could have known this tune. Either Léon hummed or played it for him—why, I have no idea, unless it was to prove that Jewish liturgy had beautiful music—or your father attended a Yom Kippur service, which might suggest a closer bond between the two. The service on that day is not an occasion for tourists to come and watch how Jews celebrate the Day of Atonement.”

Michel thought for a moment, then said, “If you invited me, I’d come.” I took his hand, held it, kissed it.

During dinner we discussed what we considered might have been the reason for the secret cadenza. An inside joke? A distillation of a work in progress? A challenge to the pianist? Maybe a gesture from one to the other, a salutation, in memory of a friendship that might have lapsed, who knows. “So many things I haven’t had time to examine yet,” I said. “Unless the cadenza was thought up in dire circumstances and was a Jewish salvo composed from hell itself.”

“Are we reading too much into this?”

“Maybe.”

“We have an amazing butcher in town, so the filet is simply excellent. And our cook loves vegetables, asparagus if she can still find it, which she cooks magnificently despite her allergies. I love Indian rice, so smell this,” he said, delicately fanning the air over the rice in my direction. He knew he was teasing me.

But then I said there was something missing.

“Léon is Jewish, is hated by your grandparents, is most likely considered a bad influence on your father’s career, and the servants think he’s beneath them. France is already occupied and soon the Germans will be living under this very roof, if they aren’t already eating at this very table, which you told me they did. Léon cannot be in the same house, unless he is hiding in the attic, which no one here would have tolerated. So how does the score fall into your father’s hands?”

I had brought it with me to the dining table.

“Try this wine. We have three bottles left. We’ve let it breathe in the kitchen.”

“Can you just focus, please?”

“Yes, of course. What do you think of the wine?”

“It’s stunning. But why are you constantly interrupting?”

“Because I love seeing you focusing like this and I love it when you get so serious. I still can’t believe you’re staying with me. I can’t wait to have you in my bed—can’t wait.”

I sipped some more wine, then he replenished my glass.

As I was cutting the meat, I couldn’t help adding: “We still need to figure out how the score ended up here. Who brought it? And when? For a Jew to come here to deliver a score in 1944 seems absurd. In fact, how it got here might say everything about this score. It might even say more than the music itself.”

“This makes no sense. It’s like suggesting that the way a famous poem got to the printer’s is more important than the poem itself!”

“In this case, it may be just so.”

Michel looked at me with bewilderment, as though he had never thought of things in this twisted manner.

“Was it delivered by mail,” I asked, “by hand, or did Adrien pick it up himself? Was a third party involved? A friend, or a nurse in a hospital, or someone from the camps? This is 1944 and the Germans are still occupying France. So he could have fled or been captured. If he was in the camps, which camp was it? Was he in hiding? Did he survive?”

I thought about it some more.

“There are two things that might tell us a lot. And we’re missing both. Why did the composer draw the staves himself? And why are the notes so crammed together like this?”

“Why would this be important?”

“Because my hunch is that perhaps these notes were not jotted down hastily at all.” I riffled once again through the pages. “Notice, there’s not a single scratch mark, nothing was crossed out where the composer might have changed his mind while composing. These notes were being transcribed, and in a place where score paper was impossible to come by, where it was even difficult to find ordinary paper. The notes are so terribly crammed—as though he were afraid he would run out of paper.”

I raised the first sheet toward the candle standing in the middle of the dining table.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for a watermark. A watermark might tell us a lot: where was the paper manufactured, in which part of France. Or elsewhere, if you follow my drift.”

Michel looked at me. “I follow your drift.”

Unfortunately there was no watermark on the paper. “All I can deduce is that it was cheap onion paper. So, the composer of the cadenza already knows these themes and transfers the notes in this compressed form. He wants your father to have this cadenza. This is all we know.”

“No, we know something more. My father gives up playing altogether and begins to study law. The world of music is entirely shut to him. I cannot believe that this has nothing to do with Léon. Because one thing we do know. He kept this cadenza as though it were the most precious thing in his life. But then why keep it if he was never going to play it, why lock it up all those years in this cabinet—unless he promised to play it only in Léon’s presence? Or unless he kept it so that someone else should materialize and play it? Someone like you, Elio!”

This flattered me but I did not want to appear to have seized what he was implying.

“Do you think he meant to return it to Léon or to someone dear to Léon? Or did he simply not know what to do with it and didn’t have the heart to be rid of it—the way you continue to keep your father’s tennis rackets?”

“Perhaps the most important thing is to determine who Léon was.”

After dinner, using his computer I typed in Adrien’s full name and within seconds saw the years when he attended the conservatory. Even his picture appeared. “Dapper and natty,” I said, “and handsome.” I searched for the names of teachers before, during, and after those years. The records were desultory and scattered, but in not one was there a person called Léon. I looked for Jewish-, German-, or Slavic-sounding surnames or any with L as a first initial. Nothing there either. I looked for students with the name Léon. Nothing. Either he had another name or his name was removed from the school records. Or he’d never been at the conservatory. “There is no Léon,” I finally said.

“So here ends our bit of detective work.”

By then, we were sitting very close together on the sofa, the light was dim, and we were drinking more Calvados.

“Perhaps your father studied with Alfred Cortot. But I doubt that Léon did.”

“Why, do you think?”

“Cortot was anti-Semitic and became even more so under the occupation. I believe the violinist Thibaud, whom Cortot knew well, played for the Führer.”

“Terrible times.”

“Any more thoughts on the matter?” he asked.

“Why do you ask?”

He shook his head ever so mildly. “No reason. I just love being like this with you. Talking the way we do, at night, in this room, sitting on this sofa, glued together while you’re fiddling with the computer, and outside all over, it’s just November. I love that you’ve taken such an interest.”

“I love it too, very much.”

“And yet you don’t believe in fate.”

“I told you, I don’t think in those terms.”

“Then maybe when you get to be my age and the dearth of things life has to offer becomes more evident by the day, maybe then you can start noticing those tiny accidents that turn out to be miracles and that can redefine our lives and cast an incandescent luster over things that, in the great scheme of things, could easily be meaningless. But this is not meaningless.”

“This here tonight is wonderful.”

“Yes, it is wonderful.” But he said it with a tone of nostalgic resignation verging on melancholy, as though I were a dish he was watching being taken away before he’d had his fill. Is this what happens when one is close to twice someone’s age: one starts losing people long before they’ve started looking elsewhere?

We sat this way without saying anything. I gave him what I thought was a hug, but what he returned was a real, sad, famished hug filled with sensual despair.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, still reluctant to hear what I already suspected was going to be his answer.

“Not a thing. But then this is what’s so scary—if you see my drift—precisely because there’s nothing wrong.”

“Give me more Calvados.”

He was happy to oblige. He stood up, walked over to the small cabinet behind one of the speakers, and took out another bottle. “Much better quality.”

He knew I had changed the subject. I was hoping that something would lift this sudden cloud between us, but nothing came, and neither he nor I attempted to dispel it, perhaps because neither was quite sure what lurked behind it. So he enlightened me about the Calvados, and its history, and I listened, and read the tiny hand scrawl on the bottle’s label giving a history of the house that produced it. Which was when he had a stroke of genius, and used an expression that had become a catchphrase between the two of us: “I want to make you happy.” I knew exactly what he meant. “So, keep reading the label, I don’t want you distracted. I don’t even want you looking.”

He picked up the glass of Calvados and sipped from it. Then I felt it, felt his mouth, felt the slight tingling. “I love what you’re doing,” I finally said, shutting my eyes, trying to put the bottle down somewhere until I decided to place it on the carpet, at the foot of the sofa.

I remembered the housemaid.

“Gone already. Didn’t you hear her car?”

We spent Sunday in the house. As Michel remembered, it always seemed to rain on Sundays, and the wood, where we’d planned to take a long walk, was growing darker and bleaker by the hour. Late that morning I practiced for a couple of hours while he leafed through some papers from his office. But ours was mostly perfunctory activity, and in the end we were both relieved when the other tactfully suggested that perhaps it might be good to head back to Paris before traffic got heavy with Parisians returning late from the weekend. As we neared the city, there was a slightly awkward moment when it became clear he was planning to drop me at my address first—and that he was doing so either because he didn’t want me to feel pressured to head straight to his home or because he suspected I had other plans before our evening concert. Or, I thought, he needed some time alone. After all, he had a habit of coming back to Paris on Sundays, and who knows, perhaps this was what he’d done for years and didn’t want it changed. When he double-parked in front of the entrance to my building, he didn’t turn off the engine. I was meant to step out, which I did. “See you in a bit,” I said, to which he gave that silent, wistful nod of his. And then I simply found the courage. “I don’t need to go home. I don’t want to go home.” “Get back in,” he said. “I adore you, Elio, I adore you.” We went straight to his home. We made love, even dozed a bit, then quickly rushed to the concert, followed by the intermission cider, and then the three-course meal during which he held my hand. “Tomorrow is Monday,” he said. “Last week’s Monday was agony.” Why, I asked. But I knew the answer. “Because I felt I’d lost you—and for what reason? Because I was scared you’d say no and was trying not to seem depraved.”

He looked at me for a while. “Do you have to go home tonight?”

“Do you want me to?”

“We’ll pretend we met tonight and that instead of walking away with your bike, you said, ‘I want to sleep with you, Michel.’ Would you have said it?”

“I was on the verge of saying it. But no! You, sir, had to walk away!”

Monday morning I decided to take a taxi and went straight home to change. The place looked slightly unfamiliar, as though I hadn’t been there for weeks, months. The last time I’d seen morning there was on Saturday when I’d dashed upstairs, picked up a few things to wear, and rushed down to where he was waiting in his car. That afternoon, after teaching, I headed straight to the conservatory office to find whatever I could about Léon.

When I saw Michel at our usual bistro that night I told him that the trail had gone cold. Not a trace of Léon anywhere. He was more disappointed than I’d expected, which was why I had another idea on Tuesday. I tried two music schools and searched their yearly records. But once again, nothing.

We both made the reasonable assumption that either Léon had studied abroad or that, like well-off Jews in the early years of the century, he had studied with a private tutor.

Two more days went by this way. I had run out of clues.

On Friday, however, I finally discovered Léon’s identity in the records of the lycée where both Michel and his father had been enrolled and where the secretary had searched through the records in my presence after I’d claimed to be Michel’s nephew. In the car to the country that day, I couldn’t hold back and broke the news to him. “I was even able to obtain his old address. The family name is Deschamps. The only problem is that Deschamps is not exactly a Jewish name.”

“Could be an acquired or changed name. Think of Feldmann, Feldenstein, Feldenblum, or just Feld.”

“Could be. But there are many Léon Deschampses on the Web, assuming they are all alive, or still live in France. The search could take months.”

He looked perplexed. What I couldn’t help thinking was why he hadn’t made the school connection himself. Finally, I asked him why after all those years he was still searching for Léon.

“It may tell me something about my father that I never knew. I’m also curious to know when and how Léon disappeared.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just a way of reaching my father, to know what made him stop doing what he loved most, and to understand his friendship or love for Léon, if love and friendship it was. It’s the one thing my father never mentioned and yet by the time I was eighteen he could easily have opened up to me. Or perhaps I was not unlike my own son and was trying to put some distance between us. Or maybe it’s my way of atoning for not making time to know the man who’d stopped playing music. But how many of us ever make time to know who our parents really were? How many sunken layers deep are those we thought we knew simply because we loved them?”

“In any event,” I said, interrupting him, “I’ve even found Léon’s picture in the yearly class photo. Here, take a look.” I produced the photo I’d had copied that same day in the school office. “He is very handsome. And looks very Catholic, very conservative.”

“Indeed. Very handsome,” said Michel.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“Of course I’m thinking what you’re thinking. It’s what we’ve been thinking all along, isn’t it?”

When we arrived, the first thing he did after depositing his bag and greeting the cook was to head directly to the living room, open a slim drawer in a little table by the French windows, and produce a large envelope. “Take a look,” he said.

It was a blown-up old class photograph, taken a year or two before the one I’d had reproduced. He pointed at Adrien with his pinkie; he looked younger in this picture. We were both looking for Léon.

“Find him?” he asked. I shook my head. But then there he was, standing right next to Adrien. The resemblance between the face in my photograph and in the old class photograph was stunning. “So you knew all along!” I said.

He nodded with a guiltily amused smile. “I knew about the picture. But I needed someone else to confirm it.”

I thought about this for a while.

“Is that why you brought me here last week?”

“I knew you were going to ask this. The answer is no. There was another reason, and I’m sure you’ve guessed it. I want to give you the score. By giving it to you, and to no one else, I am fulfilling my father’s last wish. All I ask is that you play it at a concert.”

A heavy silence fell between us. I wanted to protest and say what people say when they’re given an expensive gift: I can’t accept it—which also means I am not worthy of your gift. But I knew this would offend him.

“I still think our discovery is too neat, too easy,” I said. “Part of me doesn’t trust it. Let’s not rush to conclusions yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t think of a single reason why a well-to-do young Catholic man from the Lycée J. whose parents probably subscribed to the Action Française would want to touch Kol Nidre.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That our Léon may not be Léon Deschamps.”

In my attempt not to leave any stones unturned, I spent the whole of the following week looking for clues.

There were more dead ends, and another false start, but then, that Saturday afternoon in his country house, it suddenly hit me.

“Something kept gnawing at me. First that your father continued to go to the Sainte U. concerts on Sundays. Might the church have been tied in some mysterious way to Léon? Perhaps the church itself also had something to do with the Florian Quartet. I knew that the Florian had been playing for years at that same church and you yourself told me that your father had subsidized their concerts. So I looked them up online and eventually found out, as I suspected, that there were not one or two, but three incarnations of the Florian. The Florian started in the mid-1920s, not as a quartet but as a trio: violin, cello, and piano. And now comes the part that shows I’m a true genius. The pianist of the trio was not Léon Deschamps, as the two of us thought, but someone who had been with the trio for ten years, who played the piano but also the violin. His name was Ariel Waldstein. So I looked up Ariel Waldstein and sure enough he was a Jewish pianist who didn’t just die in the camps but was beaten to death there because he owned an Amati violin and refused to part with it. He was sixty-two years old.”

“But the name Ariel is not Léon,” said Michel.

“I put the puzzle together early this morning—how, I’ve no idea. In Hebrew Ariel means ‘lion of God’: in short, Léon. Many Jews have a Jewish and a Latin name. In the twenties the violinist is listed as Ariel; in the early thirties he becomes Léon, probably because of rising anti-Semitism. The easiest way to find out more about him is to inquire at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.”

I felt I needed to add something else here, as though all this digging and excavating into the life of Ariel Waldstein were also bringing to light a subject that might seem totally incidental but that I knew was subliminally related if only because it involved the passage of time and the rediscovery of a beloved person. I could almost sense where this could head and was already reluctant to fathom any deeper for fear that Michel’s thoughts were already inclined that way. He didn’t bring it up, I didn’t either. But I was sure it had crossed his mind.

We showered together that Sunday morning, then went out for a short walk, using the back door, which I hadn’t seen before. Everyone in the village seemed to know Monsieur Michel and greetings flew back and forth across the way. He led me to a café on the corner of a street that looked as though it had nothing to recommend it, but the moment we stepped inside, I immediately felt warm and sheltered. It was filled with people who had parked their cars or vans to have something hot to drink before getting back on the road. We ordered two cups of coffee and two croissants. Three girls in their late twenties were sitting next to us, basically grumbling about the men in their lives. I liked it when Michel, who was eavesdropping, smiled and then winked at me. “Men are terrible,” he said to one of the girls. “Horrible. How you men can face yourselves every morning is beyond me.” “It’s not easy, but we try,” said Michel. There was laughter. The waiter, who overheard, said that women were better than men and that his wife was the most perfect person in the world. “Why?” asked one of the girls who kept going through the motions of lighting a cigarette only to put off doing so. “Why? Because she made me a better person. And let me tell you, with me this was something only a saint could accomplish.” “So she is a saint then.” “Let’s not exaggerate. Who wants a saint in bed.” Everyone was laughing.

After coffee Michel extended his legs all the way under the table and seemed majestically satisfied with breakfast. “Another?” he asked. I nodded yes. Michel ordered two more coffees. We didn’t speak. “Three weeks,” he finally said, perhaps to fill the silence. I echoed his words. Then, from nowhere, he reached out and held my hand. I left it in his, feeling awkward because the place was filled with people who were standing at the bar. He must have sensed my unease, and let go. “Tonight they’re playing Beethoven again.” He was saying it as though tacitly trying to coax me into going.

“I thought we had a date.”

“Well, I didn’t want to presume,” he said.

“Stop!”

“I can’t help it.”

“But why?”

“Because the young teenager still lingers inside me, and occasionally utters a few words, then ducks and goes into hiding. Because he’s afraid of asking, because he thinks you’ll laugh that he asked, because even trusting is difficult. I’m shy, I’m scared, and I’m old.”

“Don’t think this way. We’ve almost solved a mystery today. What we need to do is ask the cellist tonight if he remembers Ariel. He may not, but all the same, we’ll ask.”

“Will it bring my father back?”

“No, but it might make him happy, which will make you happy.”

He considered my words for a moment, then shook his head as he’d done before, to signify resigned and quiet comprehension. Then, as though he’d jumped across all the unstated subjects between us: “Can you promise that you’ll play the cadenza—one day soon, I hope?”

“I’ll play it late this coming spring when I tour the States, and in the fall when I’m back in Paris. I promise.”

I saw him hesitate and I realized why. Now was the time to tell him.

“In America, I’m planning to drop in on someone I haven’t seen in ages.”

I watched him ponder the matter.

“So you’re traveling solo then?”

I nodded.

Again I watched him weigh my words.

“The marriage canard?” he finally asked.

I nodded. I loved that he was able to read me so well, yet I feared what he was reading. “Being with you reminds me of him,” I said. “If I meet him, the first thing I’ll want to do is tell him about you.”

“What, that I fall short of such a high standard?”

“No, because you and he are the standard. Now that I think of it, there’s only been the two of you. All the others were occasionals. You have given me days that justify the years I’ve been without him.”

I looked at him, and this time it was I who reached out and held his hand.

“Walk?” I said.

“Walk.”

We stood up and he suggested we go back through the wood to reach the lake.

“What I think we should do is find out who Ariel Waldstein was. Perhaps there is someone who might know more about him.”

“Perhaps. But he was sixty-two when he died, which puts a living relative at a very, very advanced age.”

“So Ariel was probably twice your father’s age at the time.”

He suddenly looked at me and smiled.

“You’re a snake!”

“I wonder about the two of them. Maybe this is what feeds our search in the end.”

“Us, you mean?”

“Maybe. If the church has records, we’ll know. We can even try to find Ariel’s address, maybe in an old telephone book. And if we do find the building, what we should do is commission a Stolperstein in his name.”

“But what if there are no descendants, what if the line stopped with him, what if there isn’t a trace of him and there is not a thing more to learn?”

“Then we’ll have done a good deed. The stone will be in memory of all those who perished and couldn’t even smuggle a word of warning or of love or even their name before the gas chamber. Except for a score with a Hebrew prayer. Did anyone in your family die in the Shoah?”

“You know about my great-uncles. I also think my great-grandmother died in Auschwitz. But I’m not sure. You die and then no one speaks of you, and before you know it, no one asks, no one tells, no one even knows or wants to know. You’re extinct, you never lived, never loved. Time never casts shadows and memory doesn’t drop ashes.”

I thought of Ariel. The score was his love letter to a young pianist, his secret missive. Play it for me. Say Kaddish for me. Remember the tune? It’s hidden in there, under the Beethoven, next to the Mozart, find me. Who knows under what dreadful, unthinkable conditions Léon the Jew penned his cadenza to say, I am thinking of you. I love you, play.

And I thought of old Ariel the Jew who’d visit Adrien’s home even though he knew he was unwelcome, Ariel seeking refuge but being turned out or, worse yet, denounced either by the father or by the mother or by the servants, probably with the blessing of the parents. I thought of Ariel attempting to flee to Portugal, or England, or far worse, Ariel arrested by the French Milice during one of those terrifying raids when Jews young and old were torn from their homes in the middle of the night and forced into packed trucks. Then Ariel penned up somewhere, Ariel in the cattle cars, and finally Ariel being beaten to death because he wouldn’t part with his violin, which is likely now sitting in a German home with a family who might not even know the instrument was looted after its owner perished in a camp. Was Michel’s father perhaps atoning for not having helped to save Ariel? Since I couldn’t give you and your loved ones shelter, I’ll never play again. Or: After what they’ve done to you, music is dead to me. I could just hear the older man imploring: But you must play. For the love of me, never stop, play this then.

And once again I thought of my life. Was there anyone who would send me a cadenza one day and say, I am gone, but please find me, play for me?

“What is the name of the Jewish prayer?”

“Kol Nidre.”

“Is it recited for the dead?”

“No, that prayer is called the Kaddish.”

“Do you know it?”

“Every Jewish boy learns it. We’re taught to rehearse for the death of loved ones before we know what death even is. The irony is that the Kaddish is the only prayer one cannot use on oneself.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you can’t recite it and be dead at the same time.”

“You people!”

We laughed. Then I thought for a moment. “You know, there is more than a strong possibility that this whole Léon-Ariel thing is nothing more than fiction.”

“Yes, but it is ours. I know exactly what we’ll do tonight. We’ll return to the city, I will be like my father, and you’ll be the young man I was in those years, or you’ll be my son whom I never see, and we’ll sit together and listen to the Florian Quartet, perhaps the way my father did, when he was your age and I was Léon’s. You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn’t deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we loved and who loves us enough. In my case, I’d like to think it will be you, even if we’re no longer together. It’s like already knowing who will be the one who’ll shut my eyes. I want it to be you, Elio.”

For a moment, and just as I was listening to Michel speak, it occurred to me that there was only one person on this planet that I’d like to have my eyes shut by. And he, I hoped, without saying a word to me for years, would cross the globe to place his palm upon my eyes, as I would place mine on his.

“So,” said Michel, “we’ll meet the oldest member of the quartet, the one you were keen on hearing three weeks ago, and we’ll ask if he remembers. But before that, during the break, we’ll buy hot cider from the decrepit old nun, maybe pretend again that we don’t know each other, promise to meet after the concert, knowing that afterward we’ll head out for a little snack.”

“God, I did tell you how much I wanted you to hold me and ask me to come home with you that night? I was almost on the point of saying something but then I held back.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t in the cards that night.” He smiled.

“Perhaps not.”

He looked at me while wrapping his scarf around his neck. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“A bit,” I said. I could tell he was feeling apprehensive about me but didn’t want to show it. “Want to go back home instead?”

I shook my head. “I get cold when I’m nervous.”

“Why are you nervous?”

“I don’t want this to end.”

“Why should it?”

“No reason.”

“You are the one card I was almost cheated of in this lifetime. Tonight it will be three weeks, and it could so easily not have happened at all. I need—” But then he stopped.

“You need?”

“I need another week, another month, another season, meaning another lifetime. Give me winter. Come spring, you’ll fly away on tour. Beneath all the layers we uncovered today, I know there is one person for you, and I don’t believe it’s me.”

I did not say anything. He smiled wistfully.

“The marriage canard perhaps.” Then he balked for a moment, and I heard his voice tighten. “The one thing I want in this life is for you to find happiness. The rest…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. He shook his head to mean that the rest didn’t matter.

Neither of us had anything to add. I held him and he held me, and we were still holding each other when he spotted a skein of geese flying overhead. “Look!” he said. I did not release my hold.

“November,” I said.

“Yes. Not winter, not fall. I’ve always liked November in Corot country.”