He also noticed that time operated very differently with and without music. While listening to some music, time sped by much more quickly than usual; other music seemed to slow time down painfully, making twenty minutes seem longer than a poor fiscal quarter. Why? What caused this? Another mystery Kuperman couldn't pierce.

The larger meaning of music escaped him. Where, he wondered, was the payoff? What was the bottom line? Was there a meaning to it all that evaded him? One night, on the ride home after an all-Russian evening at Symphony Hall — Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev symphonies — he put the question to Judith. 

"I shouldn't worry overmuch about it, Milton," she said. "Music is directed to the emotions. If you like, you can try to put into thought what the great composers wanted to suggest emotionally. I suppose that's what the good music critics try to do, though not all that many succeed. But I gave up on that project long ago. I love music because it allows me to get out of myself into something larger, which I find it not easy to specify. I am content to listen as carefully as I can and let the music come to me, if you know what I mean?"

Kuperman, in fact, didn't know what she meant — hadn't, really, a clue. But he decided not to press the point, lest he look as boorish as he felt. 

Kuperman and Judith Neeley had been going to concerts together for roughly four months. All this while his own movements with this woman were, you might say, strictly adagio. He did not call her every day; some days he wanted to, just to check in, but decided doing so would be pushing things. Sex wasn't anywhere near up for negotiation, though Kuperman, obviously no longer a boy, wouldn't have minded if it were. 

Judith had invited him to a Passover seder at her daughter's, the one who lived in Glencoe. Judith's other daughter and her son and their families — seven grandchildren in all — were there. Kuperman sensed he was on display, being considered for his worthiness as a companion for their mother and grandmother. He also sensed that he was failing the test. The conversation wasn't on any of his topics. Judith's family talked about recent plays, and books, and colleges, lots about colleges, since one of her grandchildren, a boy with bad skin and braces named Dylan Schwartz, was applying to colleges in the fall. (Kuperman could have gone to college on the GI Bill after the war, but was too eager to get back into the stream of life, to start making some money, once he was discharged in '45.) Kuperman decided to keep his own counsel among Judith's family, to say little and hope that his silence would pass itself off for the wisdom of the aged. More likely, he felt, they found him a schlepper.