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grinned to no one, without choice or pleasure.
    “Did you write today?”
    “Yeah. Just before I came.”
    “The Dutch stuff?”
    He nodded. By her face, he couldn’t tell if she believed he’d done anything but drink. Anyway, if she didn’t, she would never say so, even if nothing could help him more than to be called out. That would mean tension. Nothing was worth that.
    Larent set his bow down against the amplifier and started in on a delicate pizzicato line, his right hand snaking over the fingerboard as his left pinched the strings. For a moment it took Stagg away from her, put him in mind of Bartók’s strings. It was a mutual respite.
    He and Renna sat at the table. “Another sherry?” he asked without raising his eyes from the empty copita in front of her.
    “Sure, yes,” she said.
    He lifted his hand in the light of the hanging brass lamp, signaling for the waitress. “And the writer, how was he?” he asked.
    “He was good.”
    Stagg waited for more but she was absorbed with Larent’s hands now. “Very nice.” He felt his mouth tightening into a smile but conquered the urge.
    The waitress, dressed crisply in black, crossed into the yellow cone of light.
    “Another sherry for her,” he said, leaning close to her ear. “And I’ll have, what, an Ardbeg? If that’s something you’ve got.” She gave a sharp nod, all surface, and withdrew.
    The room clouded over in the harmonics Larent drew from his bass. The music’s complexion had changed. It seemed beyond comparison now. Perhaps that only underlined Stagg’s ignorance.
    As the piece wound down in intricate double-stopped glissandi, he took in Larent’s face: the long jaw, the very short, very brown hair, the eyes of the same color, and the delicately freighted expression—with what exactly Stagg couldn’t tell—on which applause, twice now, had no effect.
    Renna and Larent had been great friends in prep school, then something more afterward, though at a distance. He was in a conservatory in New Hampshire, and she was in grad school abroad.
    Now they were something less, though exactly what Stagg felt it hard to know, given how little she volunteered. The two kept up, that much was clear. There were his performances and her readings and panels. Renna’s silence about Larent annoyed Stagg, but prying was just the sort of indignity he wouldn’t bear. Perhaps she thought she was saving him from more mulling. Of course it could only have the opposite effect.
    Larent’s manner was a challenge. The literary set might be nauseating, yes, but it was possible to feel that way only because reading them—“marking the axes of their being,” another phrase he’d run into that Renna had seized on—was not very difficult. It was a nausea born mostly of boredom.
    Larent was different, opaque, and even that without making a show of it. Translucent. It wasn’t just that he was a musician, although that wasn’t irrelevant. Notes could give away less than words. It was that he didn’t flaunt who or what he knew, or what he was or thought he was, or what he thought you ought to think he was. Maybe he didn’t have strong ideas about any of this, though there was plenty to have ideas about. He was interesting. That was just a fact about him, like height or weight. Partly this was because he seemed less interested in himself than in whatever he found himself doing. If only Stagg’s own engagement with his work might be so natural.
    There was none of the theater, then, the performance of character, that could give away the shape of your soul—a shape, incidentally, almost always distinct from the one you were trying to project.
    In one sense you could say he was without charm, but in a way that had an abiding pull on Renna, it seemed, and, grudgingly, on Stagg too. It’s what set him apart from the people in her world. Charm, after all, was always a bit of a racket. And he wasn’t a racket, though he wasn’t exactly earnest in the ordinary sense of