* * *
There came a night when we arrived at our mother’s apartment for one of our occasional dinners and found it empty of papers. Her book had been done for over a year, but she’d awaited its publication surrounded by the fluffy detritus of its creation, like a gerbil or some other nest-building creature.
Are you moving? we asked.
I have a new office at the university. They’ve given me a tenure-track position on the basis of… this!
From the windowsill, where the unused bird feeder still rested, she took two slim hardcover volumes and handed one to each of us. Patterns of Affinity, by Miranda Kline. There was no image on the cover, just a quiet geometric pattern. We were mesmerized.
Miranda.
That is my name.
But everyone calls you Mindy.
You don’t use a nickname on a book.
Kline?
I’ve kept that name. As you know.
But on a book?
I don’t want a different name from yours. Even on a book.
Our mother had become the author Miranda Kline. We carefully brought the two books home—or to the wing of our father’s house he’d ceded to us. When we showed him the books, he instantly partook of our reverence.
She did it, he said. He opened a bottle of champagne and poured each of us a glass at the wax-spattered table where we now presided, among friends and boyfriends, as often as he did. To your mother, he said. A remarkable woman. She said she would do it, and by God, she did it.
We toasted Miranda Kline and drank. She’d done it. But none of us had the slightest notion of what she’d done.
We placed the books proudly on a shelf without opening them.
4
Four years after Patterns of Affinity was published, in the summer of 1999, our father’s friend and protégé Bennie Salazar came to visit from New York with one of his bands, the Conduits. We were out of college by then, working full-time for our father. At the office, Bennie wanted to play us a song we didn’t have on CD. We asked one of our summer interns, Keisha, to drive to Tower Records and buy it.
You don’t have to do that, Keisha said. She logged in to Napster and played us the song.
Do that again, our father said.
Keisha used Napster to play several more songs, some of whose copyrights we owned. Thanks, doll, our father said, apparently having grown bored with the lesson. That was very instructive.
Later, after Bennie and the Conduits had dinner at our house, our father asked the two of us to take a walk on the beach. That usually meant he’d had an idea.
Our beach could look many ways at night; sometimes the water was bright and the sand dark, other times the reverse. That night, the sand had a lunar fluorescence, making inky shadows around our bare feet.
Without preamble, our father said, In five years, not a single person is going to pay for music. He was peering toward a horizon impossible to make out in the hazy dark. I’m watching a tidal wave, he said. The complete annihilation of my business.
You’re overreacting, Daddy.
If you think so, you’ve learned less than I thought.
We fell into chastened silence. We were learning something right then: People project their internal states onto the landscape. Our father was sixty-five. He’d been through a lot. He still had plenty of vitality, but not enough to reinvent his business. All he could see was an end.
And us? We were twenty-three and twenty-four, still near enough to college that functioning as adults felt like pulling something off. We saw the same facts our father did, but differently, through the bottom of a glass—that image came to both of us, we discovered later. People were letting the Internet go inside their computers and play their music, so that they, too, could play songs they didn’t own without having to buy them. The idea made us squeamish; it was like letting a stranger rummage through your house—or your brain! Once the Internet was inside your computer rifling through your music, what else might it decide to look at?