They had queued up her entrance—“L, you know you got the lyrics”—the way Pushkin queued up Tatiana’s letter, with the same pride and confidence. I recognized, in their solicitude, something that I had felt in emails with Ivan: the way he had made me feel my own competence, even saying once about the way that I wrote that I “had a style.” I felt that he was right, I did have a style,
