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Step away from the piano when the group takes a break.

You’re not one of the strings. You can leave your instrument behind. Push the bench back in. Forget all the times your hands have felt empty.

“It’s a Yamaha Grand,” the receptionist said after Trevor told you it was your responsibility to call and find out. “The firm bought it new when they moved into these offices in ’95.” Then, her voice throaty from cigarettes, “Is that a good year?” The question forced, you assume, because you held silence in your mouth in the way Trevor always has called heavy. Spiteful.

You said, “Yes, that sounds fine.”

And that’s how you end up leaving this room, an hour and a half into the party. Not seeking the approval of Trevor—or anyone else who takes in your retreat by noting the back of your black velvet dress, the weight of your hair pulled full off the nape of your neck. A cascade of curls, dark.

You will not turn your head to look back.

And of course you remember how one returns.

Trevor always has underrated your self-sufficiency. Right after your first time together, always the best moment for confessions, he described you as one who generally appeared lost. “You seem to float, you know.” He’d pressed his forehead down on yours, pushing your head into that pillow.

But then he thinks too much of your privileged past, forgetting that even the wealthy and protected are not born possessed of achievement. As a child, you told Trevor tonight, while you both were dressing for this job, you were driven repeatedly to consider dangerous stretching exercises. You had read, God knows where, about a device that ruined Schumann’s hands. “So when I couldn’t make the reaches in the Etude,” you studied your fingers, pale and thin, while Trevor turned off his cell phone, “I kept going out to the garage to where my dad kept these large clamps.” You laughed. “You know. Just wondering.”

Does such a child grow into a woman who needs “someone to look after her”?

You’ve never floated, you should have said that night—the first one, tonight, at any point in the past two years. You make decisions. As in now, when you lift your forehead off that cool marble counter and leave the bathroom—all found finally after you left the others and turned time and again through those halls.

You choose not to return. You turn right: the start of a path you will trace to its end.

And though the corridors circle back in on each other, a door will stand open. As will others—you are surprised by how many. But in this room, a light on too.

“Where did you get that?” you ask, when the man who owns the office returns. Then gesture with your head at the clipping.

He’ll see what you mean—not the cabinet. The newspaper article with the movie star photograph: Jodie Foster, her eyes lifted up. She looks like a modern-day saint. He does not ask why you are there.

His reply, stammered out, will fall short.

Silent again? Trevor might have asked you, the clipped edge of his accent on the phone. You would have done better each time if he’d just left and not checked in on his drive home. Instead he always called, more than two years of transmissions you never knew how to handle.

Once you asked him if he thought his daughters would be asleep by the time he made it home. “Yes. And Carol too.” Trevor hung up then as if he had summoned his wife with her name.

This man with the office will try harder.

He’ll specify. He’ll name the newspaper. And as he stands there, his tie slightly loose under his collar, you’ll smile and turn benevolent.

“Perhaps what I should ask,” your head now swiveled fully toward him, “is why.”

Significant portions of the movie, he tells you, were shot in Washington, D.C. This you already knew.

“I was in this movie myself,” you say. “Almost in this movie.” Because you are trying. You’ve been aiming for new standards of truth.

They ran cables throughout the whole of this building, you learn. Shut the place down for two days, on the weekend. All for a conference room, he nods at the clipping. The largest, he explains, in the city.

Imagine! You both laugh. It was the weekend, but still—. To shut a law firm down for even a single day.

Only one partner, he tells you, gained special permission to attend the filming. Two hours access. Negotiations pursued—. God knows how and when.

That partner brought his son with him, a ten-year-old child, and they stood to the side together while Jodie Foster worked through one take after another.

You wonder how the moment changed that child’s life.

Genius transmits, a gift from one generation to the next. You have believed this ever since your piano teacher took you backstage to meet the great Madam Rostowski after her 1980 concert in Albany. Two years later, the local paper sent a reporter to interview you—“Home Schooling Gives Local Girl More Time to Practice.” And you explained how Madam had given you her own personal score for the Chopin Etude—Opus 10, Number 1. Then, as serious as you were beautiful—even at twelve—you told the reporter, “This is what changed my life.” Because you had insisted on greater seclusion after Madam—reminding your parents that your school, all eight grades, only had twenty-six students; counting, each day, the time you’d wasted there on your own. Until you’d won the argument, and they’d pulled you out.

The picture for the story—taken in your bedroom of all places, because the light had been wrong by the piano—showed you pointing at one of Madam’s annotations on the first page. All that came through in the photograph was a blank white sheet. For years, this meant you knew that this transmission was for your eyes only.

God help that ten-year-old boy figure out what he was supposed to take from watching the filming of a single scene.

The firm’s lobby also shows up in the movie.

It was nothing, the man says, when you shake your head. You can’t remember. I heard it took no time to film. You know, he adds as if discovering something, they probably caught it after the real work was over.

“I can see you know all about real work,” you say. His clothes signal labor, not leisure.

But then who doesn’t. Know about work, that is. Even if velvet is your uniform—. Velvet, after all, is what Jodie Foster wore for the hours it took to film what you now call “Trevor’s scene.”

Burgundy velvet cut into a long coat, with chiffon and satin below. She had shed her drab scientist khakis for party clothes. So when Matthew McConaughey sees her, they hardly pause before exchanging public for private, a crowded reception hall for an empty balcony.

Trevor’s moment comes just as Ms. Foster walks in. He’s part of the aural cue that signals “new scene” and “party” but “dignified.” Being as it is a movie about the search for alien life, Trevor also signifies “human” and “evolved” and “culture.” He plays violin, striking the high note just as the camera catches his chamber group, the lens panning by their chairs to the portion of the room where the piano was to have stood.

“Did you see her?” you asked when Trevor finally showed up that night at the hotel, knocking at the door after he called you from the lobby.

“Who?” he wanted to know, because that pronoun was fraught with danger.

“Jodie Foster.” You pulled him over to the bed because this was only your second time together, and you didn’t yet know how much he hated that. As he removed his tuxedo—Trevor never shed clothes—he held his eyes straight on your face.

“Well, yes.” His eyebrows signaled confusion. “We all did. Of course.”

“And?” He was late. Much later than you had guessed he would be.

“And,” he said, stopping but not looking you in the eye. “I really don’t think you missed that much.”

Two years later, just over a month ago, you found him rewinding the tape when he didn’t know you were in the room. Only then did you realize, as he caught himself, time and again, his features sharply beautiful even in the soft distance, how he had betrayed you.

“There never was a part for the piano, was there?” You’d stood for five minutes behind him.

“Of course there was a part.” He’d just entered counseling with his wife and already was alternating between inward melancholy and wounded interactions. “You saw the call.” He stopped the tape.

And of course you remember. Of course. He’d asked you into his office, looking then as he would in the movie. Different clothes, different position, no violin beneath his chin. But beautiful in the distance, the soft focus of his features as—Yes, Professor?—you’d stepped into the room. When he’d handed you a sheet of paper with the notice, your eyes had locked with his. And you’d trusted him, believed in some higher power for one full month until right after he’d pressed your head into that pillow. He was running his hand along your hipbone that afternoon, saying how much he loved that part—the flesh and the bone and the two together even more. And then he told you that someone—thinking about the size of the piano, the number of partygoers now slated for the scene—had taken away your part.

That part, your part. “What part has been taken away?” you laughed.

“Just strings,” he said. “They just want strings for the movie.”

“And a different song?” you asked.

“Of course. Yes,” he said. “We started rehearsals yesterday.”

Still, he said. There was a hotel nearby, and people expected him to be in D.C. If you would just wait.

“And you don’t care about that stuff,” he dismissed the movie with a wave of his hand. “Pop culture.” He pulled the sheet up, almost covering your head.

The man with the office holds out his hand. “I could show you the room.” He swings the other side of his body toward the desk, as if on a pivot, setting down the stack of papers he cradles in his right arm. “It would be hard—. I don’t think you could find it on your own.”

He leads you through the intricate tangle of corridors, his gait slightly ahead as he pulls you, his palm curled around your three middle fingers.

“The table is large,” he says. “So large,” he says, “and so—polished,” the acoustics in the gray halls send his voice back to you, “that when Jodie Foster walked into the room, she reached her hand out and—. The partner—the one who took his son—told us all.” You imagine white paper notices handed out to the entire firm. “That she kept moving her hand over its surface as if—.” You lose his voice for a moment when you find, with a jump, the music filtering now through the hallways. Strings only. Somewhere in the building, Trevor strikes a high note in his tux.

As the man moves to turn on the conference room light, you put your hand up to his and say, “Stop.” The Twelfth Street lights shining in through the windows catch the table, an enormous and glossy arc.

Earlier today, Trevor had sent you to the shower by yourself. He needed to make business calls, and you always took more time than he did to prepare for these jobs. When you’d turned the water off, his voice, though hushed, had pressed through. “Do you know anyone? Maybe a lawyer—or someone of means. Someone who could—. Well, she needs someone to look after her.”

Lead this man now in the dark toward the table’s surface. Watch the streetlights trace his form, a ghostly electric outline. Tell him—he will hear what you mean, this is how it begins, and you should smile, beautiful, can’t you smile just a little for the camera?: you really are alone.