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I fell in love with his hands first. They were slender, long-fingered, supple – musician's hands. He played trombone. In the final movement of the Shostakovich Fifth, the trombones peel the paint off the walls with D major blasts. The first time I watched him pick up his horn and hit those octaves, I thought my heart would stop.

We met in summer – a very dangerous season according to Byron, a man reputedly “mad, bad and dangerous to know” but painfully versed in affairs of the heart. The bolt that struck me that night in the concert hall was as sudden and blinding as summer lightning, but I was a grateful target. The cosmos had sent out a signal. My fate was to be with a man who had the brooding good looks of Daniel Day-Lewis and the ability to blow notes that shimmered in the air surrounded by silence until they floated back into the score. After the concert, the second trombonist and I were introduced, and I discovered that he was not only talented, he was brilliant. That my loins twitched for him was no mystery; that his loins responded was a puzzle.

I was smart and pretty, but I didn't know anything. A virgin ripe for the plucking, a tabula rasa panting to be written on, I was hungry to learn. As it turned out, he had his own hunger. He yearned for a girl like me, a girl whose gaze said, “I want what you know.” We fell into each other's minds. We were both very young.

He brought me books: novels by Proust, Musil, Mann, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nabokov. I devoured them; afterwards, we would sit on the small hot square of grass outside my flat and talk. We were happy. I loved the way the sun touched his dark hair as he explained what I had read; he loved the way I pronounced the title of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. We read Shaw and O'Neill and Chekhov and Ibsen. Neither of us cared much for A Doll's House. We never quarrelled. There was no reason to. We agreed on everything. Besides, he had the keys to the kingdom, and I wanted in.

We listened to music. Because I knew nothing, we started with Bach and worked our way through the centuries. He explained the structure of the fugue; Brahms's reverence for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; and the evolution of Schoenberg's relationship with Mahler. There was nothing he didn't know. One steamy weekend, we listened to the entire Ring of the Nibelung (his choice); the next weekend, he rewarded me with Puccini. The Ravel string Quartet in F became our song. Every night, when we had finished analyzing music, we would collapse on the bed in my room on Charles Street and lie there, hands touching, not speaking, enveloped by beauty.

We both had summer jobs that we dismissed as soul-destroying. Our employers paid us far too much for far too little, but we weren't grateful. We resented every moment away from one another. We were two against the world. Needing no one else, we shed old friends. We were growing so fast, there was no room in our lives for other people. We transcended D.H. Lawrence's idea of twin stars and became one – delighting at the fact that we simultaneously bought copies of Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving and wrote the identical inscription on the title page: “One foot away from you my loneliness begins.” We read The Art of Loving aloud to one another. Somehow we must have missed Fromm's warning about how easy it is to mistake egoism à deux for love.

When the ending came, it was as sudden as it was inevitable. We were lying on his bed, listening to Strauss's Don Juan and reading Byron. When my lover read the lines “Man's love is of man's life a thing apart/'Tis woman's whole existence,” he looked at me expectantly. I lowered my eyes and smiled in a way that I hoped was enigmatic, but wasn't. He knew me too well. He took my hand. “You don't agree,” he said. “No,” I said. “I don't.”

And that was it. The music ended. He closed the book, and the mystical union was over. Shaken, scared but somehow exhilarated, we were once again separate beings. What was ahead was painful for us both. For a green and golden time, we had shared Eden, but like Eve I had wanted more, and that meant we'd both been turfed out.

Life without one another wasn't easy, but we went our separate ways and finally we learned to revel in our aloneness. We made friends and enemies; we succeeded and failed; we had relationships, and when the right partner came along we were ready – in part because of what we had meant to one another.

Later, when I read Carl Jung, I understood why the lightning bolt found us both that sultry night in the concert hall. When we met, my first love and I were deeply involved in the process of becoming ourselves. We were still forming – still searching for the answer to the question: Who am I? At some

level beyond the rational,

we both recognized that embracing the other would bring us closer to finding that answer. For a while, we completed one another, but the price of staying together was too high.

As a mathematician, he knew that coming close to finding an answer isn't good enough. As a devotee of old movies, I recognized the truth in Annie Oakley's tart assessment of an opponent's performance: “Close, Colonel, but no cigar.”

One way or another, we move along. Last February, my husband and I had breakfast in the dining room of Vancouver's Sylvia Hotel with my long-ago love and his wife. We chose wisely. Breakfast is a safe meal to deal with emotions that, against all odds, might still be smouldering, and the Sylvia is a hotel that quiets rather than fuels passions. The four of us chatted amiably about nothing at all and then my love slid his menu to me, and I saw his hands. We had all changed in so many ways, but his hands – slender, long-fingered, supple, musician's hands – were still the same. When I saw them, I wanted to ask him how much he remembered of that summer. I wanted to ask if, when he picked up his horn and hit those D major blasts in the final movement of the Shostakovich Fifth, his loins twitched for me. But I didn't. The timing was all wrong.

Arthur Ellis Award-winning author Gail Bowen's eleventh Joanne Kilbourn novel, The Brutal Heart, will be published by McClelland & Stewart next month.