It is easy to tell a story about deindustrialization — as most of our politicians of both parties have for the past generation — that presents it as another episode in a perennial sequence of economic development. The old is traded out for the new once again. Those who can’t keep pace by acquiring new skills or transplanting themselves to a new place get abandoned — a tragedy, to be sure. But this is how capitalism works and its casualties are worth it. In more recent discontented times, a rival narrative responds that this was not a necessary outcome but a globalist conspiracy, resulting not from any inner logic of capital but from the corrupt decisions of politicians and financiers; if not for them, everything might have stayed the same. In the course of Vance’s brief public life, he has swung from the first of these positions (the neoliberal) to the second (the populist-conspiracist).

Seemingly opposed to each other, both accounts share a disinclination to assign, or even imagine, any active role for the working-class people who bear the consequences of abandonment. Either they are self-sabotaging social detritus or passive victims of the elite. What they are not, in any way, is capable of making sense of their historical situation and exerting agency upon it — a concept unintelligible to Vance, who in his conversion narrative describes the “economic left” as a coldly compassionate Mandarinate:

[...] Vance is committed psychically to not seeing the third possible position in relation to the cruel power of capital: the inner logic of capital is implacable and punishing, but it can be made sense of and resisted if its agents are specified and comprehended as bearers of larger structures rather than malevolent shadow creatures. Such an act of comprehension is possible because capitalism forces proletarians to depend upon each other and therefore develop capacities beyond and against the violence of capital — capacities for solidarity, courage, and understanding. These are the working-class virtues. They have been modeled for Vance more than once, but he always mistakes and eventually reviles them.

“He’s been a Mason ever since he was a young man. It’s very important to him.”

“How does the barometer work?” he asked, since they were standing next to it.

“It measures the air pressure, doesn’t it? If it’s high, that’s a nice day.”

“But it says ‘Change.’ How does it know there’s going to be change?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure. Now, I’m not going to tell Mr. Knowlton.”

It was shaming that she thought Jacob had been interested in the devices only as toys. He knew she had the right to reproach him, but it felt like she was mistaking him for someone ordinary.

Again: as my wife’s set began, my skin contracted, I became a rock, tingling underneath, and my head started to race. Was this because of that amygdala, which was triggering all sorts of common sensations that can only be caught in clichés? No. I heard VanWyck’s fingers on the guitar opening up the other, true dimension in which I live, and her voice wiping out all that happened in superficial life. “Talk to me darling,” she sang, “I am all ears.” Even when I hear her for the hundredth time, it is as if I am waking up from a long sleep. “We’re all alone here,” she sang, “I could make use / Of a story.” This is all that matters, this level of feeling and beauty. And always the accompanying feeling: I wanna do something. My life should be: this! Energy bursting.

In 1963, Roland Barthes wrote that a good work of art “is never entirely non-signifying (mysterious or ‘inspired’) and never entirely clear.” The work has a suspended meaning: “It offers itself to the reader as an avowed signifying system yet withholds itself from him as a signified object.”

At the Alma Löv Museum, thousands of meanings dizzied through me: suspended, inspired, mysterious, signifying, “never entirely non-signifying” — the whole Barthesian specter raving in my body. At every performance new interpretations manifest. I wanted to never stop feeling this way.

On the way out he manages not to shake her hand, merely says: Well, be seeing you.

They walk out onto the street together, then he nods to her, turns, and walks off. She walks off the other way, but only as far as the lights. Where she stops. She knows his surname. It won’t be hard to find his address. Drop a note in his mailbox or wait outside his door. The streetcar jingles its bell, cars splash through puddles, the lights change for pedestrians, change back. She feels pain to the tips of her fingers. She’s still standing there, change, change back. She hears the hissing of wet tires on asphalt. She doesn’t want to go anywhere without him. Be seeing you, he said. Be seeing you. Didn’t even take her hand. Could she have been so utterly mistaken? But just then he says, behind her: Or shall we spend the evening together after all? His wife and son were in the country, with friends.

After that he plays the Impromptu in A-flat Major by Schubert, and Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy, the Partita in E Minor, and the third movement of Mozart’s B-flat Piano Concerto. Sometimes he nods his head in time, sometimes he says: Isn’t that extraordinary? Sometimes it’s she who says: This is beautiful. Sometimes she asks: Who is playing now? And he answers: Artur Rubinstein, Glenn Gould, Clara Haskil, as the case might be. Between the Bach and the Mozart, she had to go out to pee and in the bathroom, she saw his son’s cord jeans hanging up to dry. In front of the mirror is the little bottle with the perfume that makes the apartment smell so nice, Chanel No. 5. And three toothbrushes in one mug. And the wife’s nightie dropped on a stool and — why not — left there. Come, darling May, and put the buds back on the trees, the piano wishes at the end, but it’s July now, the summer evening outside has turned into a summer night, the bottle of wine is empty. Do you feel hungry? Sure. Then let’s go eat. Sure.

And now all the crypts are become transparent, and he and she are standing directly in the graveyard, and the island of the living is no bigger than the tiny patch of ground under their feet. While she takes off his glasses and lays them aside, and he for the first time enfolds her in his arms, humankind begs for peace and everlasting light. She takes his face in both hands and kisses him very gently. Then a lone young voice sounds and praises God, because if she praises Him, He will perhaps spare her. The way her bare shoulder feels in his cupping hand during the prayer, the one curve under the other, is something he won’t forget as long as he lives. To thee comes all flesh, yes, that’s how it is, he thinks, and then he stops thinking. The kisses, the choir, her hair, the moment just before the end of the Introit, the insistent and repeated demands of the living on behalf of their dead: Lead them to everlasting light! that echo away in the empty church. Human beings have to come up with the reply themselves, they are in darkness, their wish has no authority. He is breathing hard, and she too, with her head against him, is breathing hard.

We will only see each other occasionally, he says, but each time will be like our first time — a celebration. She listens to him attentively and nods. I can only be a luxury for you, because I am a married man. I know, she says. Perhaps that won’t be enough for you, he says. I understand that. She looks him straight in the face, there is a ring of yellow around her pupils, he now sees. I’m not just married, I’m also in a relationship with a woman who works in radio. If you had a thousand women, she says, all that matters is the time that we get to spend together. How can he ever refuse her anything, if she doesn’t demand anything? The black velvet ribbon moves him, it makes her look like a schoolgirl. If he doesn’t manage to say quickly what he needs to say, it’ll be too late. And you can’t expect any sort of public acknowledgment — I know, and you know, and that will have to do. That’s fine, she says, and smiles. Where terms and conditions are set, there is a future. All yesterday and today she was afraid he would just toss her out.

We can be as long as you want us to be, he says.

She nods. So long as she can see him. As long and as often as possible. She doesn’t mind about anything else.

From now on, he thinks, the responsibility for their existence is entirely hers. He has to protect himself from himself. Maybe she’s a monster?

She thinks, he wants to prepare me for difficult times ahead. He wants to protect me. Protect me from myself, and so he gives me the power of decision over us.

He thinks, as long as she wants us, it won’t be wrong.

She thinks, if he leaves everything to me, then he’ll see what love means.

He thinks, she won’t understand what she’s agreed to until much later.

And she, he’s putting himself in my hands.

All these things are thought on this evening, and all together they make up a many-faceted truth.

One day, he says, one day you will marry a young man — and I’ll give you a bunch of roses for the wedding. He sees her smile and shake her head, just as he expected. He was saying it more to himself than to her. He mustn’t forget that one day he will have to hand her on. He mustn’t forget that he knows this better than she does, she who smiles to hear such a thing. But if he wants to survive the crash, then the certain prospect of it must be kept at the forefront of his mind the whole time that he spends with her, be it short or long. This jagged thought must obtrude through all other thoughts of happiness, love, and desire, through all their shared experiences and any memories they may have, and he must endure it, if the crash, as and when it happens, isn’t to destroy him. Is that right, destroy him? The waiter clears away their plates. The pianist strikes up, the shift begins at six, a Mozart medley. His wife, when he was here with her not long ago, claimed the piano player looked like Heiner Müller. And she’s right, the piano player really does look like his fellow writer Heiner Müller. Probably it was the steel-rimmed spectacles. In May, not so long ago, Hans actually wrote his wife a love letter.