In that moment of nausea and disorientation, he recalled Marya’s description of how it felt to play the piano at the Blue Tattoo. She said, “I play and we sing until the room spins. It feels lovely to be at the center of that merry little circle.” “But, my dear,” he replied, mistaking this as an appropriate time for a lecture on geometry, “the center of a circle is an infinitesimally small point. It hardly exists at all.” “Suits me. I’d rather be a nothing at the center of everything than a puffed-up somebody at the edge of it all.”
