But there was, even with his radio playing nonstop, only so much he could make in a day. He had worked on orchestrations on both legs of his flight (from takeoff to landing), stolen a few hours in between lunch and dinner, stolen a few more before bed. He was exhausted. Not tired, nowhere near ready for sleep, but exhausted all the same. It was eleven o’clock. Max retired with Evelyn, thinking he might stumble upon the melody he needed for act three, a phrase mined from act one, but timeworn, changed, the sound whereby Lily returned to the Ramsays’ summer home, set her easel down on the grass, and made ready to finish the painting she’d started ten years before.
Max captured something close to it on a scrap of paper and, alone in his room, played it on the rollaway keyboard connected to his computer. It was rough as a block of clay hauled up from the earth; he was happy to have it, but lacked the energy to trim it or shape it or make it flow like the rhythm of Lily’s brush as it danced across the canvas with its flashes of blue and green. He played the notes again but preferred to write on paper, the intimacy of penciling the notes on neatly inked staffs, and turned now to the tidy sheaf of 213 pages that comprised his almost finished opera. He leafed through act two, the section called “Time Passes,” and reviewed the closing bars. It really was sturdy. It really would stand. It played in his head, a cord of intertwined themes that unraveled and, one by one, like the characters themselves, died out. Silence encroached upon the music, washed over it like waves swallowing an island, until silence was all there was.
A knock at the door. Max was cross but also, somewhere beneath the irritation, relieved.
Claudia stood at the threshold. Benji would have twisted the knob and barged in like a golden retriever, but not Claudia. She waited in the hallway, patient, uncertain, softly saying his name.
He slid the papers aside and answered the door.
She smiled tentatively, looking lovely changed into the drapey cotton clothes she slept in; her long brown hair fell lightly over her shoulders, her face scrubbed pink. “Care for a nightcap? Well, I’m having a nightcap. Benji’s having tea.”
He turned back into the room and picked up his score to show her.
“Is this it?” she said, placing a reverent hand on it.
“This is it.”
“And you’re almost done?”
“I’m working on the transitions between acts.”
“We should leave you alone then.”
“No.” He grabbed her sleeve as she turned to leave and asked her to sit down. “I could use a break.”
Claudia took a seat on the couch, considering the hieroglyphics on the pages Max had left with her. “I always wished I’d learned how to read music.”
“It’s not too late. I could teach you.”
“You have better things to do. Like working on your transitions.” She looked around the room, the ghost of her father battering away at his Olivetti, ransacking his bookshelves for the one and only epigraph that made sense.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked.
Claudia shook her head. “A little sad. My dad’s study.”
“It brings me luck to work in here.” Max collected the sheets from her and, adding them to his half of the score, tapped the edges into one neat sheaf, which he carefully laid on Henry’s desk. “He wrote eight books in here. At this desk. I figure if I can pick up a little of that magic.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that.” A look of sorrow landed on her face, which she quickly shooed away, half amused, as if to say it didn’t matter now what Henry heard. “He always said writing was work. Not magic. He hated when other writers said they were channeling voices from another realm. He said writing had more in common with ditch digging than sitting around like a clairvoyant waiting for Aunt Gladys to tell you a story. You show up every day and you work.”
“He’s right. But there’s always a little magic, I think.”
“And it’s not eight books. It’s nine.”
“Nuisance, Open Ground, The Skirmishes, Nostomania—that’s my favorite.” Max ticked off the titles he’d read since last September on his fingers. Five. Six. Seven. “I’m forgetting the essays.”
“Imponderable Needs.”
“Right. Eight.”
“See that safe right behind you? That’s nine.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. No one’s read it. Except my uncle Roger, and he has reservations about publishing it.”
“Why? Isn’t it any good?”
“Roger says it’s his best. But he thinks publishing it could be — messy.”
“What does that mean?”
Claudia shrugged. “He won’t say.”
“And you haven’t read it?”
“Nope.”
Max turned to look at the safe. “He keeps it in there?”
“He’s never written on a computer.”
“I get that,” Max said.
“I don’t,” Claudia answered. “It’s dumb.”
They went downstairs, and two hours later, after three neat pours of bourbon (after which, Claudia, with an uneasy sense of parental duty, cut him off), he returned. The room, with all its lamps burning, seemed violently lit. He turned off all but the task lamp on Henry’s desk. It threw barely enough light to see by, but Max wasn’t deterred from taking a slow, bobbing stroll around the room. Swaying lightly, he studied the spines of Henry’s books, pulled one volume and then another from the tightly packed shelves. His fingers found the collection of Henry’s awards, feeling them like a blind man, trailing over the smooth etched crystal, the cool etched bronze. He examined the trinkets that had little value, he supposed, to anyone but Henry — and now that Henry had forgotten them? What was the worth of this toy soldier? Of that heavy brass urn and whatever was inside it? Sooner or later it would all be swept away. Everything, everything goes. Finally, he came to sit at Henry’s tank of a desk, a large gray metal antique with silver-handled drawers buffed by a thousand openings. Max peeked into these, disappointed to find a pack of unopened cigarettes and a box of large wooden matches, dusty manila folders stuffed with ancient contracts, a faded photo of Benji and Claudia, thrilled and frightened, being locked in the shiny red seat of a Ferris wheel.
He spun round in the chair. He spun round and round like a game show wheel, not knowing where he’d land. As the room slowed, the objects in it separated from the smear that speed and drink had made of them. Here was the desk lamp. The couch. The fancy flat-screen computer shagged like a bulletin board with taped notes and newspaper clippings. The score. The safe sitting atop a waist-high bookcase. When he stopped, his eyes were level with the squat cube of black metal with a combination lock fitted into its hefty handle. He rapped his knuckles on the top, waiting, as if something inside might rap back, then tested the door. It swung open heavily on its hinges. Max looked around like an amateur thief who expects the hand of the law to clamp down on him. He angled the desk lamp so he could see the fat stack of typed pages tied with a length of butcher’s twine inside. The last book. The messy one. The only copy of whatever it was in the world. With care, Max removed the bundle and placed it on the desk. He slipped the knot from the string and, boosted by a vaguely stimulating sense of criminality, started to read.
The title page: EVERY WAND’RING BARK.
Max wasn’t 100 percent sure he liked that, but he turned the page and read what followed: I am minutes away from meeting the woman I think I’ll be with for the rest of my life and years and years away from the one who will make the rest of my life livable.
In the morning, he woke to an old analog clock whose face glowed green. He sat humped in the chair. Stiff neck. Sore back. Head throbbing from three belts of Blanton’s. The pages of Henry’s book lay in a chaotic nest around his feet. What had he read? The realization hurt his head as much as the bourbon. He gathered the papers on the floor, determined to return them to the right order later, and stuffed the rumpled pile back into the safe, afraid he’d be caught and made to lock it away before he could return to it.