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“How was the opera?” the man asks me. I begin to tell him about that night’s performance of Ariadne auf Naxos, and we chat quite naturally all the way to the Yellow House, as though we know each other. He seems to know me, anyway. I tip the driver well. The man hops out of the car and sprints to the back door as though he’s done it a zillion times. I follow slowly, my heart pounding.

By the time I get into the house he’s already upstairs, whistling merrily, pacing around in what is evidently his bedroom. I pour two whiskies and sit on the Chesterfield, drinking and waiting.

When he comes downstairs he’s wearing gray slacks, a white shirt with the cuffs undone and the collar open, no shoes and the wedding ring. He’s freshly shaved, and I can smell Old Spice when he leans over and kisses me. The kiss says, Of course. This is your real life, this is what we do here, you can discard everything else now.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Who are you?” I reply.

“Ohhhh . . .” He plops down next to me. The Chesterfield is lower than it looks, one is always falling the last six inches into it. “Really? This is it?” He laughs. “What a bizarre way to meet a girl. Wow.” His grins fades when he sees I’m not joining in. “Sorry! Right. Alba, I’m Oliver. Oliver Thornton-Yang.” He watches my face, as though I might recognize his name. It doesn’t trigger anything, but it does fit the monogram on the cuff links. That’s something, I guess. I hand him his drink. He looks at it with raised eyebrows, but accepts it with thanks and sips at it.

“What?” I say.

“I don’t like ice in my Scotch,” he says.

“Okay. Now I know that and your name. Tell me more.”

“This is so strange. You look just like yourself, but you’re different.” Oliver looks at me, trying to discern how to bind us, how to begin. He hops up and retrieves his cigarettes from the mantelpiece. Then he checks himself. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Do I usually mind?”

“No, you usually don’t mind. Sometimes you smoke, too.”

“Then give me one now.”

He lights one for each of us, hands one to me. His gesture is careful, intimate.

“Tell me a story,” I say.

“A story about us.”

“Yes.”

Oliver smokes and thinks about it. “Shall I tell you how we met? How I met you, that is? It’s quite far in your future.”

“Yes, that’s fine.”

He leans back and looks at me, smiles. His teeth are long and awkward, but his smile is sweet. “I was sixteen. It was October 12, 2044. We met in my present. You were seventy-three years old.”

He waits for me to say something. “That’s . . . disturbing,” I tell him.

“It wasn’t then. I didn’t know who you were, who you would be, to me, so you were just a very glamorous and intimidating lady. But you knew me.”

“Where did we meet?”

“At a piano competition. You weren’t a judge, you were sitting behind the judges. When I walked onstage someone said my name and you stood up, and that made me notice you. Then you sat down again. We looked at each other, there was a sort of jolt in that look, I didn’t understand it.

“The piece I had prepared was Chopin’s Opus 25 No. 12, the Ocean étude. I tended to be a very technical player, back then, and the piece should be imbued with intense emotion that pushes and pulls—and that day, for the first time, I managed to get a little of that into my playing. Nuance, contradiction, heartache. Sex. Love. It was a shadow of future emotion, as though everything you knew about me pressed itself against me and through me into the piano. It was weird.”

“What happened then? Did you win the competition?”

“No, not even close.” Oliver laughs. “It was kind of a mess, actually, my playing that day. It was like I’d been possessed by the player I was going to become, but I didn’t know quite what to do with that. I played as though I had just had emotion installed in my brain and hadn’t ever seen it before. Before that day I’d thought that playing was about doing everything correctly, that there was some ideal way to render each piece of music. That day I began to understand that music can inhabit you, can move through you in ways you can’t dictate, that the point of all that practicing is to stop thinking consciously, to open up to the thing inside the music. To let go. I experienced an intimation of that.”

“Mmm. Yes.” We sit quietly for a moment. Finally I say, “Did I speak to you?”

“Yes, you did.”

“What did I say?”