Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-One: The Year Turns Again

The seventh year ended the way the sixth had ended — the three of them at midnight in the apartment, the wine, Catherine at the piano, the city at its celebratory distance.

And the same, and different.

The same: the kitchen table, the wine, the midnight. The December that had been the prepared room, the December of the library and the Farrow house visits and Catherine's call. The Bösendorfer opened. The chalk plant on the sill.

Different: the quality of the sitting. Seven years of practice between the first New Year's Eve — the tentative December, the managed exterior still finding its register — and this one. Seven years of the texture, the deepening.

Daniel sat at the kitchen table and watched Catherine at the piano and Adrian beside him and thought about the texture of seven years.

He thought about the texture not as duration — not as seven calendar years, the dates known, the arithmetic simple. As a quality. The quality of the interior after seven years of open practice. The quality of the known after seven years of the daily accumulating. The quality of the received after seven years of giving and being given to.

He thought: the texture is richer.

Not better in a comparative sense — not the seventh year better than the sixth or the fifth. The seventh richer in the way of a deep thing that has been further deepened, the interior made more interior, the attending more fully the prior condition than it had been in any previous year.

He thought about the Farrow house. The demolition scheduled for January — the first working week, the container coming down, the ground returned to itself. And then the construction, the building rising on the slope in the correct dialogue with the gradient, the rooms stepping down, the weight-bearing room at the hinge, the east bedroom above with its single window.

He thought about January.

He thought: January will be the eighth year's first month. The eighth year.

He thought about eight years at the bus stop. He thought about eight Octobers. He thought about the texture of eight years lived differently from the years before them.

He thought: I cannot see what the eighth year holds. I know only what the seventh year taught.

He thought about what the seventh year had taught.

He thought: the quality is the presence. Not the memory — the ongoing thing. The father in the field and the question and the chain and the quality present in all the rooms. The attending is the ongoing presence of all the people who had practiced it before you, their quality in your practice, their practice in the quality you give.

He thought: I am the quality of everyone who attended to me. Catherine and Adrian and Owen and Miriam and Sara and Ellie and R. Okafor and Clara Okafor and the journalist who sat in the bones room for forty minutes. All of them present the quality I now carry.

He thought: and I am present in the quality of everyone I have attended to. The library users and the Farrows and Miriam Chen and Sara's students and Ellie's future buildings and the nine-year-old who will one day stand in the Farrow house on the south-facing slope and feel the December sun at its best angle without knowing why.

He thought: the quality is the ongoing presence.

He thought: this is what the seventh year taught.

He opened his phone.

He opened the library notes.

He wrote: The year's last minutes. The seventh year ending.

What the seventh year taught:

The quality is the ongoing presence. Not the memory — the quality. The father in the field is present in the library reading room. The twenty-nine-year-old is present in the eight bars of the third composition. The Morrow Street container is present in Sara's column and Ellie's section and the Farrow house on its slope.

The quality passes through the form and survives the form. When the building is gone the quality has been given to the people who stood in it. When the person is gone the quality has been given to the people who attended to them.

Attending is the way the quality stays.

Ellie said: the building is the way the attending stays. After the person is gone.

I think she is right. I think all the honest forms are the way the attending stays. The building and the music and the section drawing and the mathematics and the furniture with its honest joint and the letter written to strangers and the library and the Farrow house and the notes written in the early morning and the notes sent to the self that includes the other.

The attending stays in all its honest forms.

January: the container comes down. The ground returns to itself. The eighth year begins.

He sent it to himself. He sent it to Adrian.

Catherine finished the piece she was playing — not the Schubert this time, not the husband's piece. Something else, something Daniel didn't know, something that had the quality of a piece she was still developing the relationship with, the piano and the piece and the north-light apartment and the December midnight all learning each other.

She lifted her hands.

"Happy new year," she said, thirty seconds past midnight.

"Happy new year," Adrian said.

Daniel looked at them — the mathematician and the structural engineer, the mother and the person beside him, the people who had arrived in his life through the practice and had stayed because the practice had been genuine on both sides.

"Happy new year," he said.

The city outside had reached its midnight crescendo and was beginning the slow settling back. The apartment in its warmth — the chalk plant and the scarf and the north wall shelf and the Bösendorfer and the two desks and all the accumulated years of the choosing.

He thought about the choice.

He thought: the eighth year will require the same choosing as every year. The daily practice, the full allocation, the interior given its correct location, the bones shown when they are worth showing.

He thought: the choosing does not become easier. The practice becomes more practiced.

He thought: that is the correct distinction.

Catherine played one more thing — a phrase, a few bars, something between the ending of the old and the beginning of the new. Not a transition — the attending itself, the practice continuing across the boundary of the year.

The note held.

The room held it.

The seventh year is over.

The eighth began.

End of Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-One