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without looking around from the corner she faces, asks why the viola players were found standing outside the party. She spins around to deliver the punch line before Suzanne can. Instead she freezes and says, “You’re wearing black. What the hell is going on?”
    Daniel meets Suzanne’s eyes. “You look beautiful in black.”
    “We’re almost late,” Anthony says, closing the door. “Two minutes.”
    Handsome but effete, with a flourish of freckles high on his cheeks and forehead, Anthony is, as ever, well-dressed above the ugly tasseled loafers he was partial to even as a student. His pants hike as he sits, exposing two inches of extravagantly thin sock—an effect Suzanne suspects is planned.
    Suzanne takes her seat. Now there is nothing but the familiar smell of wood and rosin, the sound of string being slackened and tightened, the asymmetrical weight of the bow in her right hand, the familiar plate of the chin rest, still cool under her jaw.
    Playing chamber music involves an intimacy between people that is no weaker than the closeness of love or sex. To play with others is to be bound by and respond to their rhythms and desires without sacrificing your own. Like sex, great music can be made with someone you know well or not at all—and with someone you loathe so long as there is passion in your hatred. Yet, unlike sex, great music can be made even with someone you merely dislike. This explains why Petra, Daniel, and Suzanne play well with Anthony, even when they find his arrangements too facile. There is some other, unnamable sensibility they share.
    Having married a domineering woman from a rich family whose wealth has been diluted but not drained by generational expansion, Anthony thinks always of the books and of appearances. He is a man who subtracts tax and wine before figuring a tip, who divides a four-way bill not into quarters but by calculating the exact cost of each person’s meal. The sole time Suzanne saw him pick up a whole check—at a luncheon with his father-in-law and a potential donor—he figured the tip in odd cents to make the total charge an even number, leaving the poor server to count out from the till her too-few dollars and sixty-seven cents. “Makes the ledger much cleaner,” he announced as he produced the loops of his elaborate signature.
    “Cherubini,” Petra whispered, not softly, making Suzanne smile though she tried not to.
    Maria Luigi Cherubini . As directeur du conservatoire he was dictatorial, demanding separate entrances for men and women and once chasing Berlioz around the library tables for using the wrong one. Cherubini . Timid in his harmonies, known to history as a textbook composer of white-key music of no great significance, now a man seen but not heard: the Louvre’s millions of visitors see his face, as painted by Ingres, but few hear his music. Yet in his day he was considered by Beethoven to be one of the immortals. He was admired by musicians for his technique and was financially successful during a time when the Parisian scene was all about money.
    Cherubini . A way for the quartet to think about Anthony, who plays his violin with a rare and sturdy clarity and is capable of originality of interpretation—particularly of Debussy—that baffles those who know him away from his instrument. His tastes, when he steps away from questions of money, when he considers the Princeton quartet’s critical as well as monetary success, are fine if a bit cold. His choices for the quartet have been mostly wise, including bringing in Andres Flanders to perform Bocherinni’s fifth guitar quintet as part of last year’s February program. He’s also made a name as a reviewer, his exertions toward fairness giving decency to his fastidious judgments. Ben should hate him, yet does not, which Suzanne supposes suggests something good about them both. And because Anthony functions by reason and not by feeling, he is easy enough to work with. He holds no grudges. Suzanne arrives