The Reflection Read Online Free PDF Page B

I realized, but when the patient is pulling out of it. Throughout the night, I’d feverishly written up the case history and my conclusions. Journal after journal had turned the paper down, always finding it “interesting,” but lacking the necessary “clinical rigor.” Eventually, a small journal published by some Midwestern university had accepted the piece.
    It was getting late when I finally returned home, but I wasn’t tired. I felt dizzily on the verge of something, but I didn’t know what. An odor of cigarettes was in the sitting room, although I rarely smoked at home, and hadn’t for weeks. I picked up a coin from the table, flicked it into the air, caught it, then put it down again. Heads or tails? Abby and I had often played this game to decide what to what to do with our evenings. For the second night running, I poured myself a large whiskey, downed it, then poured myself another. By nature, I was an abstemious type—I’d drunk more in the past couple of days than I normally would in a month.
    I eyed the gramophone in the corner of the room. Besideit, the dozen or so records I owned. All Beethoven. All piano sonatas and string quartets. It was this music, more than anything else, which filled the emotional space that had long ago opened up within me. I took a record out of its sleeve, dropped the needle onto it. The grooves were worn down through overplaying now, although to my ears the accentuated crackles only added further meaning, overlaying the music with intimations of its own obsolescence. It sometimes felt as though the whole of a life had been lived within those tolling tones of the slow movement of the “Appassionata.” Other music imposed a mood, but this soaked up one’s own mood, reached to the essence of it, and ultimately to the end of it.

4
    Again I lay in bed longer than usual. Feeling at a loose end, I flicked through my address book. D’Angelo’s home number was there, although I couldn’t recall his giving it to me. Even as I was dialing it I was wondering why—as though I were observing myself from a distance, with no access to my own motives. But once his wife had handed him the phone, I bluntly cut through the first few awkward exchanges.
    “Something I didn’t tell you the other day. If I seemed in a peculiar mood, it was because I’d had a bit of a shock. Remember my ex-wife?”
    “Yeah. Abby, is it?”
    “She died a few days ago. Cancer. I’d only just found out that afternoon.”
    “Ah. I’m sorry to hear that.”
    I could hear the slight hesitation. She wasn’t my wife any more, after all, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether condolences were due.
    “It threw me, that’s all. I’d had a few drinks. I’m concernedbecause I really shouldn’t have gone to see Esterhazy. Wasn’t in a fit state to give an opinion.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “I mean it, George.”
    “Listen. You sound like someone who could do with some company. It’s going to be a fine day. Me and Maureen, we’re going to set up the grill in the yard, cook some steak. Why don’t you come over? We’re in Howard Beach, not so far. Get the train from Penn Station. When you get in, call me and I’ll pick you up.”
    A couple of hours later I was in D’Angelo’s car. We were pulling into the drive of a neat, clapboard bungalow on a long, wide avenue of more-or-less identical clapboard bungalows. It had been so long since I’d been out of Manhattan that the quiet suburban streets felt like a foreign country. I hadn’t been angling for an invitation, not consciously anyway, but had nonetheless jumped at D’Angelo’s offer. After the past couple of days, I was surely in need of a perspective other than my own. And this felt like the kind of thing that people should be doing on a weekend. A family man invites an old friend over for a barbecue. What could be more normal than that? But on the train down, it started to seem less clear-cut. I wasn’t really a friend of