Page 137 of Full Contact

Trier: Then she’s in no hurry to bring it.

I laughed out loud at my desk. Leah looked in from the hallway, saw my phone, and kept walking.

I pictured Trier on the couch, just before getting ready for the game, with the recording playing from his phone. Peaches would be sprawled on his legs.

On Friday, I picked him up at six thirty. He wore a dark overcoat over a charcoal suit, the jacket cut close through the shoulders, with a tie I hadn’t seen before. It was dark blue with small white dots.

He folded himself into the front seat and caught me looking. “What?”

“I’m admiring the tie.”

“Anna picked it. She took a gray one out of my hands, saying it was the symphony, not a funeral.”

“She’s right.”

“Can I hear Mars again?” Trier asked.

I found it on my phone and played it through the car speakers. The snare came in low and insistent, then the strings, tapping out the rhythm with the wooden backs of their bows.

Trier watched the traffic and didn’t say anything. The music built slowly. At the light on Clark, he started tapping his fingers against his knee. He got four beats in and stopped. Then he tried again, slower, mouthing the count.

“There’s one too many,” he said. “Every time. Right when you think it’s going to land, there’s one more.”

“That’s it.”

“It’s like skating behind a guy who keeps taking an extra stride before the turn. You keep waiting for the turn.”

“Does he ever turn?”

“Not in this.” He listened a while longer. “I like it. I didn’t think I would.”

The hall smelled the way it always did in winter: wool coats and the lemony polish they used on the wooden rails. Trier walked down to our row and stopped beside our seats with his program still closed in his hand. He looked up at the balconies rising toward the ceiling, then down at the stage itself.

We’d checked our coats on the way in. When Trier sat, he opened the program and read the notes with his reading glasses on.

“He finished Mars in the summer of 1914,” Trier said. “Before the war started.”

“That’s what they say. Some people argue about the dates.”

“Either way, he wrote it before anyone knew what was coming.” He turned the page. “And these aren’t in order. Mercury’s closest to the sun, and he put it third.”

“It’s astrology, not astronomy. Each planet is a temperament.”

“So Mars isn’t the planet. It’s the mood.” He went back to the first page and read it again.

I’d heard the piece many times. I kept catching myself watching Trier instead of the orchestra. He didn’t follow the conductor much. Instead, he watched the percussion section at the back of the stage. Near the end of Mars, when the entire brass section came in at full force, he flattened his hand on his thigh.

During Neptune, when the women’s voices began from somewhere offstage, he looked up at the balconies, trying to find them. In the dark, he put his hand over mine on the armrest, lacing his fingers through mine.

After the concert, the wind off Lake Michigan swept down Michigan Avenue and found the gap at my collar. Trier turned his up, and we walked toward the garage with the rest of the crowd.

“Which planet do you think is the most like you?” he asked.

“Saturn.”

“That’s the one I’d have guessed,” he said.

“Because it’s the Bringer of Old Age? I’m only forty-one.”