were they so interested in me? I was just a secretary. True, in other arenas of my life, I could conduct myself with confidence
and grace, but back in those early days, interacting with members of the faculty made me shy. After all, these people had
doctorates from grand universities—while I had only a high school diploma. Later, I would cease to be so easily impressed—I
would learn that Ph.D.’ from Harvard could be blithering idiots, just as secretaries could be geniuses—but back then I was
still naive. And so as I opened the door to my apartment, I found myself not only reviewing the events of the evening, but
wondering whether behind the kindness the Wrights had shown me there might not lie some nefarious motive; might I perhaps
have been the subject of some psychological experiment, my every action and reaction recorded, analyzed, assessed? Hidden
cameras, Dictaphones in the potted plants, Glenn and Phil taking notes: Lying in bed that night, I let paranoia get the better
of me. Probably the Wrights simply liked me, I reminded myself. Or felt sorry for me. I would have to get to know them better
before I could say for certain.
Monday I was back at the office. I worried that Ernest might make some reference to our clinch in the kitchen, but he acted
as if nothing had happened. “So I’ll be seeing you on Saturday mornings from now on?” he asked.
“If you’re home,” I said.
He was home. While Nancy and I played, he puttered around in the study, ostensibly fixing the stereo and alerting us every
time one of us hit a wrong note, which was often. This time Nancy was less patient. As I would soon learn, the role into which
she had conscripted me was one for which several professors’ wives had already auditioned and been turned down. Why I succeeded
where they failed I still don’t know. Perhaps I simply buckled under more willingly to her domination; or perhaps she really
did love me in a way she loved few others. Certainly in those early days of our friendship it seemed that her wish was to
nurture and cultivate me, to bring me along in the world as if I were another daughter of that house. Nor can it be denied
that each week she treated me more like Daphne. “Careful, Denny!” she’d shout, if I accidentally turned two pages at once;
or if I had trouble with octaves—"It’ so simple, just look!” she’d say, and grab hold of my hands, smashing them into position
against the keys. “I see now,” I’d say, and we’d try again, and again I’d fall apart.
“You’re just not concentrating. I never had these problems with Anne. We played so perfectly together, the harmonies—they
were almost magical.”
“You must miss her.”
“We were the same size, we could wear the same clothes.”
“What did you talk about while you played?”
“Husbands. Things.”
There was no way I could have gotten into Nancy’ clothes. Nor could I talk with her about husbands, as I had none.
As the weeks passed, more and more Anne became the principal topic of our conversations: Anne and, more specifically, my failure
to live up to Anne in almost every regard. In Bradford, she and Nancy had played five days a week—Mozart, some Brahms waltzes,
a stab at Schubert’ “Grand Duo.” Because I worked, I could only manage Saturday mornings—a source of some annoyance to Nancy,
though clearly not enough to induce her to go off in search of a partner with more time on her hands. Soon I began to catch
on that my function was not, in fact, to improve. My function was to exalt, by my very incompetence, the true friend, Anne,
swindled away by distance and Ernest’ ambitions. The race was fixed. By losing, I fulfilled my part of the bargain, and received
as payoff a sense of inclusion that I pocketed as greedily as any bought jockey does the profits of his corruption.
Sometimes things got contentious between us. Nancy would ask me to help her load the dishwasher