Nuno R.F.C.R

There is such a thing as "fashionably late".

Thank you, to everyone, for coming all the way to the end with me. You boarded a plane you didn't have to, to an island you'd never see again, and you stayed, through the gold and the rot under it. You held the secret the whole time, the way the best listeners do. I wrote this book the way Julian writes his music, going back into rooms I'd rather have left shut, scoring the doors I couldn't open. It asks an ugly question, the one the gilded houses of the world are built to keep us from asking: what is a beautiful thing actually made of, underneath the plating? But it answers with a gentler one. That some things are solid all the way through. That love, when it's the real material and not the leaf laid over something lesser, survives. That people break, and that breaking is not the end of the sentence, only a rest in it, and a rest, as someone in these pages said, is the most active silence there is. If you take one thing out of these stories and into your own life, let it be the thing I believe most stubbornly of all: that the human spirit is more resilient than the worst that is done to it. And now I get to tell you a small, glad secret of my own: I'm already at work on the next project. It will be a lighter thing than this (Lord knows I need it), more morning than midnight, more laughter than ache, but it will still be a love story, because I don't seem to know how to write anything else, and it'll still be built on the one foundation all my stories are built on: the astonishing, comic, unkillable resilience of the human heart. Same faith. Sunnier weather. So this isn't goodbye. It's just until the next "island". Thank you for reading. Thank you for hearing it. With love and gratitude, Nuno R.F.C.R.

Berlin went on glittering below the window, indifferent and enormous, and neither of them had moved in ten minutes. “You’re crushing me,” Mark said, into the pillow. “I know.” “You’re aware of it.” “I’m doing it on purpose.” Julian had his full weight settled along Mark’s back, chin hooked over his shoulder, both of them still damp, still catching the last of their breath, the sheets a ruin around their ankles in the way of sheets that have given up all ambition for the night

The plant on the windowsill was dying again. Julian was standing over it when Dr. Reyes came in, two minutes late, carrying her tea, and he didn’t turn around. “You’re killing this thing,” he said. “This is the third one. You have a degree in keeping human beings alive and you can’t keep a pothos alive, and they are famously the plant you can’t kill. People kill them on purpose and fail.” “That plant and I have an understanding.” She set the tea down on the side table by the green chai

I'm happy to engage. As long as the comments are constructive in their nature.

My dear Peter, Your premise is that Julian would never give an interview, and would never explain this piece. I agree with both. My defense of the scene is that he does neither. Run the inventory of what Feld actually leaves with. The trust, the foundation, the divorce, the allegations: every one of these is public record, and the scene is careful to show Feld arriving with them, not extracting them. The scene even states its own result: Feld has gotten as close to the center as he will ever get, and the center stays exactly where it is. A man who leaves a conversation with nothing he didn't fly in with has not been given an interview. He has been given courtesy, which is a different thing, and which is the point. On the piece: Julian never names it, never describes a bar of it, never says what it contains. He confirms only that it exists and where to sit when it premieres. And here I'd gently point you back to the master class two chapters earlier, because the Feld scene is its deliberate twin: you hold the secret, you let it leak, and you never, ever say what it was. Julian does with the journalist precisely what he teaches Sofia to do at the keyboard. "Come to Berlin" is not an explanation, it's the refusal achieving its final form. For ten years his "no" had nothing behind it but a wall. Now that the piece is finished, the "no" has an address. He hasn't broken his silence. He's made it permanent, by giving every future journalist the same answer in advance. As to why this journalist earns the ten minutes: he didn't record, he refused the cheap version twice, and he declined, unprompted, to ask about Catherine. Julian's grace is responsive, and it's the character note the whole present timeline turns on: he kept his compassion. A slammed door would have been easier to write, and less true of him. Which brings me to the gentlest version of my pushback. The scene is constructed like the music it circles: a surface that performs openness over a core that yields nothing. Feld walks away feeling he was given something. He wasn't. If the scene left you with the same feeling, that Julian "gave", then in one sense it worked on you exactly as it worked on him, which I'll admit gives me a certain wicked satisfaction. Thank you again for reading this closely, and for caring this much about who Julian is. He'd approve of the defense. He'd also, I suspect, decline to comment...

He’s running. He’s running before he has decided to run, the body makes the decision and informs the mind afterward, and the marble steps are coming up at him too fast and he is taking them three at a time, four, his bare feet slapping the cold stone, and behind him the house has opened its mouth to scream his name. “JULIAN…!” His mother’s voice. It comes down the great glass stairwell after him, ragged, cracked all the way open, nothing left in it of the calm she has carried his

“No. Stop. Stop… please.” Julian lifted one hand off the lid of the piano and the student at the keyboard lifted her hands from the keys. “It’s beautiful. That’s the problem. You’re playing it like it’s beautiful.” A ripple of something, not quite laughter, moved through the dozen students arranged on the chairs and the window ledges of the rehearsal room. They knew this mood. They came to his master class on Thursdays for this mood specifically, the way you come back to a particular weathe

I don't think that's how life works.

Afterward there was only the heat, and the heat had gone stale. That was the thing about the steam room when it was over, the same heat that had rolled out at Mark in the doorway hours ago, wet and gold and total, didn’t dissipate when the thing it had witnessed was done. It simply soured, hung there, thickened, the gold gone grey at the edges where the first dishwater light of the coming day was finding its way through the high fogged glass. The cigar was a cold stub on the tiled bench. Th

Julian is the quintessential golden boy. That's his whole condition in the early chapters, the deep-water sleeper who hands himself to unconsciousness "certain the world would still be there, arranged and safe and golden, when he came back." His goodness is real, but it's the goodness of someone who has never been made to pay for anything, never had to see the machinery under the gilding because the gilding was built for him. The "tragedy" the story is building toward is that the same dramatic irony that devastates the reader will, eventually, devastate Julian, and force him to grow out of the "golden cage" he was brought up in. This particular tale isn't only a love story and a tragedy. It's a bildungsroman wearing the costume of a romance...

There is a photograph, though no one knows where it is now, of the Ellisons at the height of them. It was taken at the house on Long Island in a summer Mark could not have been more than eight, and in it his father stands at the center of a long marble terrace with a glass in one hand and the other thrown wide, mid-gesture, mid-story, his head tipped back in a laugh that was less a response to anything funny than a thing he produced, generously, the way a fountain produces water, for the pl

I've always loved this quote. "All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale."

The bass came through the wall before anything else did. Through the tile and the partition and the door of the stall, a low four-count thud that he felt in the soles of his feet and the water of his body more than he heard, and Mark stood and finished and zipped and stood a moment longer in the small graffitied dark of the stall with his hand flat against the partition, feeling the music arrive through it. Then he flushed and slid the latch and came out. The men’s room was low-lit and

The music had ended a long time ago. Julian didn't know when. There had been a moment, somewhere in the dissolved middle of the night, when he had been aware of the playlist still going, the delicate fingerstyle guitar turning over and over in the corner of the room like a small machine that loved them, and then there had been a longer stretch in which he was aware of nothing but Mark, and when he surfaced from that stretch the music was gone and had been gone, he understood, for some time.