He read her listening journal slowly, a few entries at a time, in the evenings when he was not writing. He treated it with the care of something precious and irreplaceable, which it was.
It began six years ago, in Chicago, in her first week there after leaving Paris. The first entry read: 'Mahler 9. Third movement. The apartment on Wicker Park smells of the previous tenant's cigarettes and I cannot open the window far enough. The music is about knowing something is ending and choosing to face it rather than look away. I needed to hear that today. I'm not sure why I'm here.'
He read it and sat with it for a while. She had been thirty, newly arrived in Chicago, recently gone from Paris, not sure why she was where she was. She had put Mahler on and faced the ending and had been, apparently, sustained by it.
The journal moved through the six Chicago years with the documentary clarity of someone who had learned to pay close attention to her own inner life without sentimentality. There were entries about compositions she was working on, about the music she turned to in different states: Satie when she was tired, Beethoven when she was angry, Bach when she needed to think clearly. There were entries about Daniel — not many, and not detailed, but enough to understand the shape of it: two people who had been good together for a period and had then, honestly, outgrown each other.
There was an entry from the week she had been offered the Carver position. It read: 'Possibility of a year in Virginia. Don't know if I want to leave Chicago. Don't know if I want to stay. Playing Pärt this morning and thinking about tintinnabuli — the principle that the melody and the harmony are always there together, from the beginning, you just have to listen for both. Maybe that's the decision. Not one or the other. Both.'
He turned the page and found an entry dated two weeks after her arrival at Carver: 'Faculty lounge. Met a literature professor named Voss. Talked for two hours without noticing the time. He is — attentive. In the way that musicians are attentive. He hears the thing underneath the thing. This is rarer than it should be.'
He read this sentence four times.
Then he called Tom and told him about it.
'So she noticed immediately,' Tom said.
'Apparently.'
'As did you.'
'As did I.'
'Good,' said Tom, with the satisfaction of a man whose analysis has been confirmed. 'Now stop being surprised and go write your novel.'