The Nix(208)

Turns out she’s in a rehearsal that lets out soon and would he like to meet for lunch? She suggests the Morgan Library. It’s close to her, in midtown. There’s a restaurant inside. She’d like to show him something.

Which is how he finds himself on Madison Avenue in front of a palatial stone mansion, the former home of J. P. Morgan, American titan of banking and industry. Inside, the place seems designed to make visitors feel small—in stature, intellect, and pocketbook. Rooms with thirty-foot ceilings elaborately muraled with images inspired by Raphael’s at the Vatican, the saints replaced here by more secular heroes: Galileo, for example, and Christopher Columbus. All surfaces are either marble or gold. Three stories of shelving for the many thousands of antique books—first editions of Dickens, Austen, Blake, Whitman—visible behind the copper lattice that protects them from being touched. A Shakespeare first folio. A Gutenberg Bible. Thoreau’s journals. Mozart’s handwritten Haffner Symphony. The only surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost. Letters written by Einstein, Keats, Napoléon, Newton. A fireplace about the size of most New York City kitchens, above which hangs a tapestry titled, appropriately, The Triumph of Avarice.

The space feels designed to intimidate and diminish. It makes Samuel think that the folks protesting the superrich at Zuccotti Park are about a hundred years too late.

He’s staring at a life cast of George Washington’s actual face when Bethany finds him.

“Samuel?” she says, and he spins around.

How much do people change in just a few years? Samuel’s first impression—and this is the best way he could explain it—is that she looks more real. She is no longer glowing with his fantasies about her. She looks like herself, in other words, like a normal person. Maybe she hasn’t changed at all, but the context has. She still has the same green eyes, the same pale skin, the same perfectly erect posture that has always made Samuel feel a little slumpy. But there is something different about her, the way her face has creased about the eyes and mouth that does not suggest time or age but rather emotion, experience, heartache, wisdom. It’s one of those things he recognizes in a blink but could not point out specifically.

“Bethany,” he says, and they hug, stiffly, almost ceremonially, like how you might hug someone you used to work with.

“It’s good to see you,” she says.

“You too.”

And because she probably doesn’t know what to say next, she looks around the room and says, “Quite a place, isn’t it?”

“Quite a place. Quite a collection.”

“Very pretty.”

“Beautiful.”

They spend a useless moment staring at the room, looking at everything but each other. Panic surges up in Samuel—have they already run out of things to say? But then Bethany breaks the silence: “I’ve always wondered how much joy all this stuff really brought him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He has the big names—Mozart, Milton, Keats. But there’s no evidence of real fire. It’s always struck me as an investor’s collection. He’s building a diverse portfolio. It doesn’t say love.”

“Maybe there were a few pieces he loved. He hid them from everyone else. They were only his.”

“Maybe. Or maybe that’s even sadder, that he couldn’t share them.”

“You wanted to show me something?”

“This way.”

She leads him to a corner where, displayed under glass, are several handwritten musical scores. Bethany points to one: the Violin Concerto no. 1, by Max Bruch, written in 1866.

“The first concert you heard me play, I played this,” Bethany says. “Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

The yellowed manuscript pages look like chaos to Samuel, and not because he doesn’t read music. Words have been written and then scribbled over, notes have been erased or x-ed out, there seems to be a first layer of pencil under the ink, and stains on the pages from what might be coffee or paint. The composer had written allegro molto at the top, but then crossed out molto and replaced it with moderato. The title of the first movement, Vorspiel, is followed by a lengthy subtitle that extends more than half the page and is completely obscured by squiggles and lines and doodles.

“That’s my part,” Bethany says, pointing at a clump of notes that seem barely contained by the five-line staff underneath. How this mess could turn into the music Samuel heard that night seems like a miracle.

“Did you know he was never paid for this?” Samuel says. “He sold the score to a couple of Americans, but they never paid him. He died poor, I think.”

“How do you know that?”

“Something my mother told me. At your concert, actually.”

“You remember that?”

“Very well.”

Bethany nods. She doesn’t press.

“So,” she says, “what’s new with you?”

“I’m about to be fired,” he says. “What’s new with you?”

“Divorced,” she says, and they both smile at this. And the smile grows into a laugh. And the laughing seems to melt something between them, a formality, a guardedness. They are together with their disasters, it turns out, and over lunch at the museum’s restaurant she tells him about her four-year marriage to Peter Atchison, how by year two she’d begun saying yes to every international gig offered to her so she wouldn’t be in the same country as Peter and therefore did not have to acknowledge what had been plain to her from the beginning: that she was very fond of him but did not love him, or if she did love him she did not love him in that particular way that sustains the years. They were good to each other, but they were never passionate. In their final year of marriage she was finishing a monthlong tour of China and dreaded going home.