American Realism

The dinner was to be at Galina’s apartment, in the East 70s. She had been watching a lot of Visconti and wanted to re-create the salons and dinners of The Innocent, Ludwig, and Death in Venice.

For approximately a decade, her husband, Igor, had been dying from a series of treatable cancers in nonessential tissues. “Dying is so boring after a while,” he said. In the spring, his doctors had told them that nothing more could be done and the time had come to transition to hospice care. Galina and Igor were astonished by the surprise they felt at being told that Igor’s dying had turned acute.

“It’s just been such a reversal,” Galina said to her friends. It was like Icelandic villages and their volcanoes: You somehow feel betrayed when the lava sweeps down the rock face and takes everything with it. Galina and Igor had then retreated into their favorite films and novels, which was what had made her throw the party that night. One final note of beauty.

Caspar arrived late—he’d had trouble getting across town. Protests cut a diagonal through the city, disrupting the trains and traffic. Even as he stepped into the lobby of Galina’s building, he could hear the beat of the choppers circling above, making a net of slashing light over the blocks between Park and Fifth. Galina met him just off the elevator and kissed his cheeks in greeting.

“You’re cold,” she said.

The apartment was warm with gold light and the murmur of conversation under music. Someone was playing Schubert on the piano.

“The weather finally changed,” he said. She squeezed his fingers. Galina had let her hair go gray during the pandemic, and he was not entirely sure it suited her. She had a round but not kind face with mischievous eyes. She wore a gold dress with a modest neck but a sharp slit.

“I’m glad you could come.”

In the living room, people sat in their evening finery on lovely antique chairs and velvet chaises. Galina left him at the doorway to join Igor, seated on a chaise at the front by the window. Caspar watched the back of his head, sallow under the chemo fuzz. Igor’s shoulders, once broad, were quite skinny now. His oxygen tank sat at his knees like an obedient mastiff.

The pianist was young and blond, which made Caspar realize that he hadn’t seen a blond adult man in a long time. He played the Schubert well, in a lovely though condescending way. He wasn’t really trying. Caspar stood at the back of the room and watched him lilt his way through the piece, going through the motions. This sarcastic attitude made the playing uglier as it went on, and in the end, Caspar retracted his previous judgment—it hadn’t been lovely at all. Everyone clapped. Over the heads of the crowd, Caspar’s eyes met the young man’s. Something poisonously sarcastic in his expression made Caspar want to leave.

“Well, look who’s finally here!”

It was Nina. She had just come from the bathroom.

“Traffic,” he said.

“Oh yes,” Nina replied, but did not elaborate. She knew about the protests, of course. Her husband was a senior attorney for the city.

“How is he?” Caspar asked.

Nina looked out over the room at the others gathered, who had turned at her greeting. She smiled at them and said to him, quietly, “Not here. Not now.”

She put her arm through Caspar’s and ushered him forward.

Nina and Caspar had both been Galina’s students as undergraduates. They had registered for a graduate course on Faulkner, been intimidated at first, then stayed because of Galina. Together, they made diagrams and charts to take apart The Sound and the Fury, and they ate lunches in Washington Square Park while committing lines of Faulkner’s prose to memory to recite for Galina’s lightning-round verbal interrogations. During that strangely warm fall, they became friends and, for just a couple of confused, painful weeks, nearly more than friends. But Caspar, no matter how hard he tried, was incurably gay, and Nina was, unfortunately, not willing to make herself a martyr.

It was for the best, Galina told them later. Because they might have married each other and ruined a lifelong friendship.

They stopped by the chaise so that Caspar could say hello. Igor’s eyes were cloudy, and his chest rattled with effortful breathing. The cannula pressed against Caspar’s cheek when he bent to kiss him.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“No one is ever late in New York,” Igor said. He tried to laugh, but his chest seized up and he had to cough violently into his handkerchief. Galina gave him a glass of water. When Igor recovered, a wild, dazed look in his eyes made Caspar feel cold, as if some winged thing were passing over his soul.

“You’ve just seen it, haven’t you?” Igor whispered. He gripped Caspar’s wrist.

“Seen what, Igor?”

“I know you have.”

“No, I haven’t seen anything. I promise.”

Igor stared at him as Galina tried to pry his grip loose.

“He gets like this in the evenings.” She leaned in to say something in Igor’s ear. His expression grew focused and then softened. When Igor released him, Caspar flexed his hand and looked around to find that people were trying politely not to stare in their direction. About 20 guests had arrived, too few to be truly anonymous.

Nina came to the front to help Galina with Igor, first getting him to stand and then escorting him out of the room. As they passed, people touched his shoulder and his back. They squeezed his arm and said quiet, comforting things. The three of them and the little tank on its cart reached the doorway and turned the corner.

Several guests approached Caspar—Simon and Richard, two of Galina’s former colleagues in the English department, and Elaine, a literary critic. Their smeary glasses turned their eyes large and owl-like as they blinked at him wordlessly, as though the mere act of looking were enough of a prompt.

“He didn’t say anything to me, not really,” Caspar said.

“It’s just very strange,” Richard said. “I’ve known him a long time. I never thought he’d go batty.”

“Has he been saying strange things to you?” Caspar asked.

“Yes,” Richard said, “though nothing very interesting. I was sitting with him the other day, had been for an hour or so, just reading to him—Galina was out, but reading calms him when she’s not around. And he just kept … asking for her. Even though he knew she was out for the day.”

“But maybe he didn’t know it,” Simon replied. “That’s how it is. They don’t know. They are prisoners of their present. They have no recourse to the past and therefore no recourse to knowledge.”

Elaine’s eyes widened, and she made a low hum of disagreement.

“Oh, don’t start,” Richard said.

Caspar laughed. Elaine’s area of expertise was modernism.

“I’m going to make my rounds,” Caspar said. As he left, Elaine was puffing up her chest.

After that Faulkner class, he had gone on to study mathematics and physics. Now he was an adjunct, trying to find a postdoc that might lead to a material change in his life. Nothing had been forthcoming.

Aside from various former students of Igor’s, no one looked familiar, including the pianist, who now lurked near the window, staring down onto the city. All that anyone else seemed to know was that he was a distant relative of Igor’s, from Prague, and that his name was Radek. He wore a casual suit, slightly boxy, in dark gray, with elegant shoes, and standing there at the window, he was clearly tall, which hadn’t been obvious when he was sitting.

“You are the relative,” Caspar said by way of hello. He offered Radek a glass of white wine. Radek refused but smiled.

“I am. He is my uncle’s uncle,” he said.

Radek had dull-blue eyes, thick brows, and a fullness to his face that might fall away in the coming years. He was younger than Caspar initially thought.

“Come to say hello, then?”

Radek laughed quietly. “Yes, something like that. It is actually very funny. Two weeks ago, I was walking into rehearsal, and I saw a poster for a talk. And it was strange, because the talk, the series, is named after Igor. And we have the same last name. So I thought, Oh, who is this? I looked it up, thinking, Is this someone from a long time ago? And I found out, no! It is Igor! I call my mom and I say, ‘Mom, Mom, I found this poster! With our name!’ Then she told me that, ‘Aha! That is your uncle’s uncle!’ ”

“This is your first time meeting them?”

“Yes,” Radek said. “It’s very funny.”

Then he grew more contemplative. “I suppose it’s not very funny. It’s very sad.”

“Yes,” Caspar said. “He’s a wonderful man.”

“Was he your teacher? So many of his students are here.”

“No,” Caspar said. “Galina was my teacher. But I have known them for a long time, ever since.”

Radek nodded. Then he took the wine from Caspar and gulped it down.

“They do seem really wonderful. They must have been great teachers for so many people to have come to say goodbye.”

Caspar nodded. It was getting sadder.

Outside, over the dark city, the choppers were spreading wide their net of light. Radek turned to watch.

“Why are they out there? Do you know? I tried to look it up.” Radek showed him the blank screen of his phone. “There was nothing on the transit apps.”

“Protests,” Caspar said.

“For what?” Radek frowned.

“You don’t remember? This summer, a boy was pushed onto the tracks by a woman. She said that he was attacking her. But it came out that she had just felt unsafe because he was standing near her and talking to himself. He was unhoused. And possibly off his medication. Anyway, they reviewed some footage and the city prosecutor declined to take up the case, and people were very upset.”

“Unhoused?”

“Homeless,” Caspar said.

“Ah.”

“He was 17, I think? He’d run away from a group home. Anyway, it was very sad.”

“She pushed him because she felt scared?”

“Yes,” Caspar said.

“And no charges?”

“No. And there was a shooting in Brooklyn,” Caspar said.

“God, this place.”

Caspar laughed. “Yeah, sometimes it really does seem like misfortune piles up here. But I’m not sure the ledger looks any better anywhere else.”

“No,” Radek said. “Probably not.”

Nina returned, looking tired and pale. Caspar introduced her to Radek.

“You’re the nephew,” she said. “Pleasure.”

Radek’s eyes glinted as he admired her. He did a silly little bow.

“Don’t be patronizing,” she said.

“How are they?” Caspar asked.

Nina sighed. “I need a cigarette. But they’re fine.”

“Should we go down?”

“Isn’t it cold?” she asked.

“Yes, but since when has that stopped us?”

Nina laughed.

“Mind if I tag along? I don’t know anyone else,” Radek said.

Caspar almost said that he didn’t know the two of them either, but Nina shrugged.

“Sure,” she said.

They put on their coats and took the elevator down. They stood under the green awning. Radek lit Nina’s cigarette first. Then Caspar lit Radek’s and Nina lit his, a funny game of formality. The chopper blades were audible, but moving into the distance. They could hear the barest whine of sirens and a dull roar from downtown. Nina gazed up the street into the wind, westward. The sharp chill brought tears to her eyes, but she would not look away.

“My husband,” she said to Radek, “is a prosecutor for the city. Right now, right this moment in fact, he is holed up in a building somewhere, under siege.”

“That’s a bit dramatic,” Caspar said. His fingers were getting numb already. It was mid-November.

“No,” she said, flicking ashes to the side. “Not at all. Those were Valeri’s words. Under siege, can’t make it tonight, eye-roll emoji.”

“Is he safe?” Radek asked. They both looked at him, his boyish exuberance. His flashing eyes. Nina took a long pull on her cigarette.

“Very,” Caspar said. “He’ll be fine.”

“This whole case is such a nightmare,” she said.

Caspar looked away. They had very nearly gotten into an argument several times because Nina believed the woman’s fear was sufficient cause to defend herself. Caspar did not agree, at least not entirely, that the woman was without blame or culpability. You couldn’t go around in the world weaponizing your fear against other people. Did others not also have an equal claim to safety? They couldn’t come to an agreement. Caspar didn’t want to say that Nina’s judgment was impaired by the fact that she was also a white woman. Nina obviously felt the same way about Caspar being Black.

“I feel for the girl,” she said.

Caspar suppressed his urge to respond. He walked to the other side of the awning and gazed eastward down the street.

“Still,” Radek said. “She did cause a boy to die.”

“Boy,” Nina said, but then, catching herself, “I’m just worried about my husband.”

“Understandable,” Radek said.

Caspar watched a Lyft pull to a stop and let passengers out across the street. Two drunk women, their voices high and brittle, laughed as they helped each other into the lobby of their building. The car pulled away. Caspar looked up at Galina’s building. The doorman stood at the ready to let them back inside. Nina and Radek were whispering about something. Nina had a bad habit of collecting strays. Caspar dropped his cigarette and put it out with his heel.

“Should we go back up?”

Radek was laughing, looking in Caspar’s direction. Nina smiled. “Of course, my love.” She took Caspar’s arm.

“Your coat will smell like smoke. Aren’t you supposed to be quitting?”

“I’ll just blame your bad influence,” she said. Radek lagged behind as they went inside. Nina glanced back at him and murmured, “What do you make of our new puppy?”

Caspar pressed the call button for the elevator. Radek stood awkwardly off to the side. He was good-looking, though Caspar couldn’t get rid of the impression from earlier, the sarcastic Schubert.

“I think he’s a child,” he said.

“That’s the problem with New York,” Nina pouted. “There are no men anymore.”

“Were there ever?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, loud enough for Radek to hear. “But now they’re all eunuchs.”

Back in the apartment, they hung their coats in the closet. Galina had returned from the bedroom and was standing just outside the kitchen. The other guests had gone to sit in the dining room. Nina made Radek pour her another glass of wine. Caspar joined Galina.

“Smoking? How bad,” she said. “Where is Nina?”

“With your nephew,” he said.

Galina turned her head just slightly so that she could take in the sight of Nina and Radek. Her expression conveyed something that Caspar could not read, but he assumed it was a form of displeasure.

“None of my business,” he said.

“Awful.” But Galina was now smiling with barely contained amusement.

“Shall we go in?” Galina asked. “Nina, you sit with me.”

“Of course,” Nina said. “I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

Radek sat on Caspar’s right. They were pretty far down the table from Galina. She and Nina were in close conversation. Galina had hired caterers for the evening, who were setting out the cold soup course.

Voices rose and fell. Ben the surgeon was talking to Ben the poet about something Caspar couldn’t quite make out. Someone said, “The pandemic has changed everything—what does and doesn’t make sense, on the money side. It’s all a mess.”

Caspar could tell that Radek was following bits and pieces of conversation but not really committing to anything in particular. He seemed content with just being at the table.

“Your Schubert earlier was good,” Caspar said.

“You thought so?”

“But it was not very nice.”

“So you could tell,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to play. I was asked last minute.”

“Yes, I thought it was sarcastic,” Caspar said. “A little mean-spirited.”

Radek nodded, though he did not look chastened. “Sometimes, I can’t help myself. I have a bad nature—I’m rather spiteful.”

“I can tell.”

“But is it so bad, to be spiteful?”

“Yes,” Caspar said, but then, thinking for a moment, “Maybe not. I don’t know. But tonight it seemed bad.”

“Why? I don’t know anyone here.”

“But the occasion,” he said. “You had to know that at least. And so, to choose to play a sarcastic Schubert?”

“Yes, but didn’t you see Igor’s face?”

“No, not at first,” Caspar said.

Radek leaned toward him. His breath was sweet from the wine, warm.

“He loved it,” Radek said. “I think it made him happy.”

Radek’s lips brushed Caspar’s neck, and there was a flash of damp heat.

“Well, you’re the one who had the view of his face—I defer to you,” Caspar said.

“But you didn’t care for it,” Radek said, and paused. “Don’t you think it’s rather sarcastic to ask someone to play Schubert for a dying man?”

Caspar laughed. “You’ve got me there.” They were quiet for a moment. Nina was watching them.

“What would you have played if you’d had your pick?” Caspar asked.

“For myself or for Igor?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Caspar said. “What would you have picked for yourself?”

“And just piano, or any music?”

“Let’s start with just piano.”

Radek folded his arms across his chest and hummed in thought.

“On a night like this,” he said, turning it over. The fish course had arrived, and Caspar picked at his dorado. A gorgeous, delicate seared white skin. A pale sauce.

“Brahms,” Radek said. “His three intermezzi, opus 117.”

“I don’t know them,” Caspar said.

“He told a friend as he was writing them that they were a lullaby for his grief,” Radek said. “I find them very beautiful. No one really thinks of them. They are overshadowed by opus 118. But Glenn Gould did a recording of opus 117 and it is my favorite of all of his work.”

“That’s nice,” Caspar said. “I’ll have to listen to it sometime.”

“But listen to the Gould version first. Before you listen to anyone else. His is the best. It’s melancholy, yes, maybe even sad sometimes, but I find it very beautiful and oddly hopeful. Like, Life, it goes on. He understands it the deepest. Everyone else just follows.”

“I will,” Caspar said.

Radek put his arm around Caspar’s shoulders and squeezed him. The suddenness of the contact, the immediacy, was startling, but also, it had been a long time since someone had truly hugged him.

“It’s a promise,” Radek said. “You have to email me or call me when you listen.” Radek’s eyes were very serious. Caspar nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

Two weeks later, Caspar was walking with Nina in Central Park. Igor had died at the house upstate, near Hudson. There had been no funeral. There had been no memorial. He would not have wanted them to stand around sniffling and crying over him, Galina said. Caspar agreed.

The wind was sharp and damp. It was a miserable day for a walk.

“How is Valeri?” he asked.

“Better,” she said.

“Good. I’m glad it worked out.”

“Me too,” she sighed. “It was so hard on him. Hard on all of us. Just a sad mistake.”

Caspar did not reply right away.

“I know you don’t agree,” she said. “But I really do feel sorry for her. And for the man who died, obviously.”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “We all feel sorry.”

“And poor Igor, too.”

They sat on a bench and watched children climb and play. They drank coffee from a cart and talked about what they had been doing for the past two weeks. Nina was in the midst of writing a very long article about a recently rediscovered Italian author whose work had Marxist undertones.

“She’s like an Italian Grace Paley,” she said. “But totally sick in the head. Like, deranged body horror. Headless dogs. It’s great.”

“I’ll look for it. Where will it be?”

“The London Review of Books, if I can meet my deadline,” she said. “What about you? What are you doing? Still wasting yourself on undergraduates?”

“I help run a lecture course for a couple of faculty, do some tutoring,” he said. “It’s a life.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“It’s not,” he said. “Don’t be elitist.”

“You should be at MIT,” she said.

“No, I shouldn’t. I probably should have just gone into industry.”

Nina looked horrified.

“You should write. You’re a beautiful writer.”

Caspar laughed. “No, that was always you.”

“You are. Galina always said so. Your writing is beautiful, sensitive. You are a prime noticer.”

“But all the rejection,” he said. “All the bad ideas before you get a good idea. I don’t have the courage.”

A group of screaming children threw themselves around in fits of delight and rage. A group of them ran from one end of the playground to another, and they went on that way, until the group grew long and stringy and folded back on itself. All the children, made chubby by their coats and jackets, their hats and scarves, the pitch of their glee rising and falling like a siren.

“Have you heard much from Galina?”

“She’s still upstate,” Nina said. “That’s all I know. You?”

“About the same.”

“I hope she’s okay.”

“Have you spoken to the nephew?” he asked.

Nina flushed and looked down.

“No,” she said. “Not a lot.”

“Which is it—no or not a lot?”

“Don’t be a morality cop,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“Why do I not feel like it’s nothing?”

Nina poured the rest of her coffee onto the brown, scraggly lawn. It steamed.

“I’ll take that as a sign to shut up,” he said.

“Next time, it’s your lap.”

They walked back to Columbus Circle. Everything was crusted in Christmas cheer, but neither of them felt very cheerful.

“You have a bad habit,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

She was going uptown. He was going downtown. They parted and took different trains.

On the platform, vendors were selling mango and churros and boxes of candy. A man was playing Celine Dion’s greatest power ballads on an electric violin. Caspar stood among the throng waiting for the first compartment on a downtown C. When the train arrived, he read while standing, letting an old woman take the seat he wanted. In between stations, when their train came close to another, he looked into the adjacent car and watched the people there as they, too, went length by length through the dark.

In February, Caspar was browsing cards at a downtown stationery store when he heard his name from an unfamiliar voice.

He looked up and there was Radek. They had not seen each other since Galina’s party. But as sometimes happened in the city, meeting just the one time charged both people with the potential of meeting again. They hugged, and Radek asked what had brought Caspar to this particular store.

“Oh, I live around here,” he said.

“No, you can’t.”

“Why can’t I?” he asked.

“Because I live around here.”

“Since when?”

“Since two years ago,” Radek said.

“I’ve never seen you!”

“You wouldn’t have known if you had seen me. You didn’t know me then.”

“I guess that’s true,” Caspar said.

“I bet I know who that’s for,” Radek said. He pointed to the card in Caspar’s hand, a delicately made watercolor on high-quality stock. Amid softly blooming whorls of earth-toned color was a gorgeous calligraphic rendering of Congratulations!

“I bet you do,” he said. Nina had told him three weeks ago about her pregnancy. Valeri was thrilled, but anxious. “You’ve got one too.”

Radek had picked out a bright-orange card with happy cats on it, painted in muted watercolor. His eyes darkened just a little.

They paid for their cards and stepped out into the cold. Radek asked if he wanted to go to a café. It turned out they had the same favorite spot, near the IFC theater.

“I was just here a couple days ago,” Caspar said. “I saw a documentary about Nan Goldin.”

“No,” Radek said. “Because I was here a couple nights ago seeing a documentary about Nan Goldin.”

They each took out the tickets they’d left in their coat pockets and discovered that they had indeed gone to the same showing.

“What did you think?” Radek asked.

“I found it very moving,” he said. “A little scattered, but very moving.”

Radek ordered an espresso. Caspar ordered a black coffee. The café was busy, so they squeezed in at the bar by the window, sitting on two rickety stools.

They talked about the documentary. Radek also found it moving. But less so than Caspar.

“It felt like two movies somehow brought together—it also seemed rather dubious on the start of the addiction,” Radek said.

“I suppose,” Caspar agreed. “But it’s slippery, with addiction. There’s no definitive hard start. It comes on slowly sometimes.”

“But there was a hard start. When that man beat her up and left her. She got deep into heroin. It feels very clear when there’s someone else to blame, but for her own accountability, I don’t know. And the activism stuff, forget it.”

“You didn’t like that part?”

“I thought it was so boring. So mushy. So good.”

“That’s true,” Caspar said. “That part had less scrutiny in it.”

“But I did like the part about New York. That era. That would be fun to do again.”

“That part really flattened me,” Caspar said. “They were so young and so free. They were broke, yeah, and struggling in a lot of ways, but they seemed so … I don’t know, it’s like they had a different kind of freedom than we have now. A freedom from language for that sort of stuff.”

“You mean being gay?”

“Yeah, or trans even. It’s like, they all had this space to just exist. I bet that was nice.” Radek hummed in agreement. Neither of them said anything for a few moments. Then he said, “I guess you know.”

“That could mean anything,” Caspar said. “What do I know?”

“About me and Nina,” he said. “After the party, we met a couple of times. But she told me I wasn’t serious.”

“That sounds like her,” Caspar said. Radek had begun turning his cup slowly, and it scraped the fake marble of the tabletop.

“It was dumb,” he said.

“Yes,” Caspar agreed.

Radek looked at him from the side, an appraising stare.

“You don’t think I’m bad? You won’t judge me?”

“No,” Caspar said. “I was in love with Nina once.”

Radek gaped at him. Caspar laughed.

“A long time ago—when we were almost young enough to do something stupid about it. But thankfully, Galina stopped us.”

“How did she stop you?”

“Well, she just let us see that making ourselves unhappy because we thought it would make the other person happier was actually a deeply stupid choice to make.”

“Is that why you’re so devoted to her?”

Were they devoted to Galina? Caspar wasn’t sure. He hadn’t spoken with her in months. This in itself was not unusual; they sometimes went a whole year without speaking. But yes, he would do almost anything for Galina.

“I suppose when someone prevents you from making the greatest mistake of your life, you feel a little loyalty to them.”

“Just a little? Americans are so brutal.”

“We keep score like no one else,” Caspar said.

Radek had stopped turning his cup. The crema had settled in the bottom amid the sooty remnants of the coffee.

“Still,” Caspar said. “She must have liked you if she invited you to her baby shower.”

Radek showed a confused expression until it clicked. “Oh, Nina. Yes.”

They were quiet a bit longer.

“And how are you keeping busy?” Caspar asked.

“I played a concert,” he said. “A very small one—in a friend’s father’s loft. Me and three others. There is so much money in this place.”

“What did you play?”

“I played some Philip Glass, actually. I’ve not played a lot of his work. But the show was meant to be a medley of contemporary masters. And I got Glass.”

“I love Glass,” Caspar said.

“Yeah, people do.” Radek’s eyes flashed.

“Don’t be condescending.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Radek said. “It was nice. People enjoyed it.”

Their time had come to an end. Caspar finished his coffee, and they went back out onto the sidewalk. They hugged goodbye, and as Radek was turning to leave, he stopped.

“Did you ever listen to that Brahms?”

Caspar paused a moment, searching his memory, and then, alighting upon the relevant facts, he said, “Ah. No, I never did.”

“Just as well. I realized I didn’t give you my number, so you couldn’t tell me what you thought.”

“Here, give me your phone,” Caspar said. He typed his name and number into Radek’s phone and then called himself. Then he saved Radek’s information. “Now we are in touch.”

Radek laughed.

They hugged again. Though they lived in the same neighborhood, they lived in opposite directions from the IFC, so they each set off into the cold wind.

When Caspar got home, he looked up the Glenn Gould album of the Brahms intermezzi. His music app was a mess of Fauré and Debussy from having let it run long into the night the previous evening, when he’d been grading. Not having enough pop divas of any era in his queue made him feel older than he was.

The Gould version of the intermezzi, particularly the three from opus 117, did have what Radek had described. A certain unpretentious lightness, a stirring belief— hope, even. When the melancholy came in the middle of the first intermezzo, it was as if someone had drawn a cool, dark shade across a sunny afternoon. The music changed after that, still progressing, but somehow inflected with a new sadness, so that in its steady forward motion, it became a perfect expression of seeking happiness in dire straits. Caspar could understand why a person would choose this for their last party. The second intermezzo had the underlying character of a waltz, both less wistful and more playful than the first. There were brassier accents as well, and the melody felt more intricate. Yet, here, too, was a theme of nostalgia and recollection, a long backward glance.

Caspar played the whole album as he reheated soup for dinner. When it ended, he started it over and sat on his sofa to listen again. Then he wrote Radek a long text message explaining his feelings about the music. But he deleted that. Instead he texted, Listened. Very good. Love the second one especially.

Radek texted back, Gould?

Yes, Caspar texted.

!!! he is the best!

I agree.

Next time, I will play it for you.

Here Caspar paused. The insinuation of a next time.

Caspar typed Like you did for Nina? But this seemed needlessly cruel. Instead he sent, Yeah, yeah, sure.

No, really, I will.

Ok.

I will. Come over right now. I will play.

Caspar did not know what to say. He felt bad that he had accidentally gotten them on this course of proving something. Or needing to prove something. Then it occurred to him that Radek was being sarcastic again, and that this needling, bratty behavior was somehow part of the charm that had gotten Nina to sleep with him.

No, next time is fine, Caspar texted.

Radek sent an annoyed emoji.

In the spring, Galina had another party. She was selling the apartment and wanted to have a salon to celebrate. Or to close an era. She was in a long black skirt and a gray cashmere sweater. Her face had become keen and smooth. Something had been blasted away from her.

She kissed Caspar in greeting and took his arm. The salon was in the afternoon this time. The room was flushed gold with sunlight. Radek and Nina were speaking near the window. Her belly was big now. She wore a gray jersey-knit dress. She looked radiant.

Elaine and Richard and Simon were there. The others were not. In honor of Nina’s pregnancy, they were all drinking cider and coffee, tea. There had been a warm soup course and a chicory and fennel salad. The food was good, tart, enlivening. Elaine and Simon were arguing about Woolf and Forster. Elaine thought Forster was a misogynist, and Simon thought Woolf was a homophobe.

Richard stood between them looking beleaguered.

Galina and Caspar sat on the chaise overlooking the city. Where she and Igor had sat many months ago.

“I have been thinking,” she said, “of what he said to you that night.”

Caspar had forgotten that moment, but it made itself available to him at this mention. Igor’s wide eyes. The desperation in his grip.

“What did you see?” she asked. A long segment of light fell over her lap. They were warm there, the sun striking their knees and thighs. The fabric of the chaise had slowly faded from this light. Every day, soaked in sunshine.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Except, that moment, when he choked. I thought I … It wasn’t sight. But I had this feeling of, I don’t know. Like something was going.”

Galina nodded.

“And I guess he saw me see that? I don’t know. It makes me sad that he got scared because I panicked when he choked.”

“His last weeks were very difficult,” she said. “We knew they would be, of course, but to live them? That was excruciating.”

Caspar didn’t know what to say. Instead, he put his arm around Galina and let her rest her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes.

Nina sat on the arm of the chaise. She smelled like Radek’s cologne. Radek sat at the piano. He and Caspar shared a look. Then Radek began to play the second intermezzo. The others joined them near the chaise, and Radek played on. Caspar’s chest felt tight. The last notes hung in the air, and then that was it. That was it.

Caspar and Radek took the train together. They sat on facing benches. Sometimes, people stood between them and they couldn’t see each other except when the train rocked and opened a space. Radek’s face did not change during the whole ride. He looked as peaceful as when he’d been playing the Brahms.

At their stop, they climbed the steps, Radek in front, Caspar behind, and when they emerged, there was a moment when they might have gone in either direction, apart or together. But Caspar did not feel equal to that. They went on standing near the top of the subway-station stairs, which was the worst place to stand. And after a few moments of getting annoyed looks, Radek nodded. Then he put his arm through Caspar’s and led him to the café, where they sat for an hour, not really speaking, not really doing anything, just passing the time together, until the light was gone, and they had to go home.

This story appears in the February 2025 print edition.