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Grundy’s wife was asking, and he turned his face to hear, regretting, for a moment, that he heard her, usually, only with his ears and not his consciousness. He had known her for ten years now, she had been the vocalist with a combo he’d played string bass in and it was he who had introduced her to Van Grundy. A pretty woman with short, singed-blond hair and an affectation of toughness. “Rivas?” he asked.
    â€œRivas, Maruja Rivas. The album we lent you. Last time you were here.” The smoke hissed out from between her lips, aimed into her empty coffee cup. “Don’t tell me she didn’t mean anything to you.”
    â€œDid you play the record?” Van Grundy asked.
    â€œI can’t remember borrowing it,” he said.

    Â 
    THE LAST STUDENT was gone. He had come home from the Van Grundys’ to find the first student waiting on the apartment steps, and he had put aside the record on a pile of sheet music and there she had waited in the silence of the confident artist. He had noticed that proud patience of hers when, in the streetlight that shone into his car parked before the Van Grundys’ gate, he had looked for the album and found it on the floor, under the seat, where David had slipped it so he could sit down. After she had waited for so many days, she had waited again until the last student was gone, and when he picked up the album cover, the racy cover with orange letters on purple background and the woman in the simple black dress, there was that unsmiling serenity again.
    He turned his back to the record going around, half-sitting on the cabinet, chin dipping into his fingers, elbow propped in his stomach. He cautioned himself to listen with his own ear, not Van Grundy’s, but with the first emerging of the guitar from the orchestra, the first attack on the strings, he found himself deprived of caution. His head remained bowed through all the first movement, and at the start of the second he began to weep. The music was a gathering of all the desires of his life for all the beautiful things of the earth, the music was his own desire to possess that same fire, to play so well that all the doors of the world would spring open for him. Wiping his nose with his shirtsleeve, he sat down on the sofa.
    With the cover in his hands he watched her as she played, though he knew that the photo was taken while her hands were still, the left-hand fingers spread in a chord, he watched her, the pale face and arms against a Spanish wall of huge blocks of stone and a gate of wrought-iron whorls. Her hair was olive-black, smoothed
back from the brow, the face delicately angular, the black eyebrows painted on, the nose short, straight, high-bridged, and the lips thin and soft and attuned to the fingers that plucked the strings. He knew the sensation in the lips, the mouth wanting to move over the music as if it were palpable. Concierto de Aranjuez, and the fine print on the back of the cover told him that Aranjuez had been the ancient residence of the Spanish kings. “I believed myself in some enchanted palace. The morning was fresh, birds singing on all sides, the water murmuring sweetly, the espaliers loaded with delectable fruit.” Why did they quote some Frenchwoman back in 1679? He knew the place without any help. The memory of another Aranjuez came to him, the party he’d played for last summer down the Peninsula, the sun hot on the pears and the plums even at six in the evening, and the shade waiting along with everything else for the cooling night. He had played all night under the paper lanterns of the brick patio, and tiny bells were tied to the trees and tinkled in the night’s warm winds, and, early in the morning when all the guests were gone, that party-thrower, that divorcée with a dress the color of her tan, had told him her checkbook was in her purse and her purse in her bedroom, and he had awakened at noon in a sweat from the heat of the day and the