The Museum of Modern Love(2)

He had expected questions. It was why he’d avoided everyone, hadn’t attended a function since December. It was still too raw. Too impossible. For the same reason he’d ignored emails, avoided phone calls and finally unplugged the answering machine in February after one particularly upsetting message.

And then last night, in a living nightmare, three of them had got him at one end of the room and harangued him, berated him. Outrageous claims of abandonment and lack of responsibility.

‘You don’t seem to realise I had no choice in this,’ he had told them.

‘You’re her husband. If it was the other way around . . .’

‘Her instructions are perfectly clear. This is what she wants. Do I have to send you a copy of the letter?’

‘But, Arky, you’ve abandoned her.’

‘No, I haven’t. If anyone has been abandoned . . .’

‘Please tell me you are not suggesting, Arky, that you have the raw deal here?’

‘You can’t just leave her there.’

‘Well, what exactly did you have in mind?’ he had asked. ‘That I bring her home?’

‘Yes, for God’s sake. Yes.’

They had all seemed stunned at his reluctance.

‘But she doesn’t want that.’

‘Of course she does. You’re being unbelievably blind if you think anything else.’

He had excused himself, walked the twenty blocks in a rage, aware also that he was weeping and grateful for the handkerchief he never went anywhere without. The bitter taste of helplessness lingered on his tongue. He scratched at the rough patch on his hand that might be cancer. He thought of the night sweats too. Waking drenched at 3 am. Having to change his soaked pyjamas and slide over to the other, empty side of the bed where the sheets were dry. He wondered if it was his heart. If he died in the apartment it could be days before anybody noticed. Except Rigby, who would possibly settle on his corpse until she realised he was not getting up to feed her. It would be Yolanda, their housekeeper, who would find him. Yolanda had been in their life for years. Ever since they were married. Lydia had thought it as normal to employ a maid as keeping milk in the fridge. She had stayed on, Yolanda, through the move to Washington Square. Levin never liked to be home when Yolanda came. Lydia was good at small talk with shop people and teachers and tradespeople. Levin was not.

Levin thought that if he died, the trees on the deck in their tall glazed pots would almost certainly die too for lack of water. He got up and made another pot of coffee, sliced an onion bagel and lowered one round into the toaster. Within minutes it was smoking and blackened. With the second half he assumed complete vigilance, spearing the thing with a knife when he sensed it was ready, hoisting it up and reinserting it in a slightly different position. Why had Lydia bought this particular toaster and not a version that didn’t destroy his breakfast every morning? How was it possible they could invent drones to kill a single man somewhere in Pakistan, but not perfect the toaster?

Leaving his plate and cup in the sink, Levin washed his hands and dried them carefully before returning to the piano. On the music ledge was an illustration of a Japanese woman with long blue-black hair and vivid green eyes. He wanted to write something spellbinding for her. A flute would be good, he had decided a few days before. But everything he came up with reminded him of The Mission. He felt like a beginner again, searching through old melodies, attempting transitions that didn’t work, harmonies that tempted and then became elusive.

And so for the next few hours Levin immersed himself in the process, moving from the Steinway in the living room where so many of his ideas began, to his studio in the western end of the apartment with its Kurzweil keyboard, Bose speakers and two iMacs giving him every variation of instrument at his fingertips. He took the ink drawing with him and put it back on the corkboard where storyboard sequences in the same distinctive style were pinned. There were also more illustrations of the same Japanese woman. In one she was bending over a pool of water, her dress the green and shimmer of fish scales. In another she was reaching out to touch the nose of a huge white bear. And in another she was walking with a child along a snow-laden path, red leaves the only touch of colour.

Levin switched from flute to violin on the keyboard, hearing the same transitions from C to F to A minor. But violin wasn’t right. It was too civilised for forest and river. I suggested the viola, but he dismissed me, thinking it too melancholy. But wasn’t melancholy what he was looking for?

I had encouraged him to take this film score because solitude may be a form of contentment when you live in a fairy story, but not when you are an artist in New York who believes your best years are still ahead of you. Artists are stubborn. They have to be. Even when nothing is happening, the only way through is to work and work.

I drew Levin’s attention to the day outside. He went to the window and saw sunlight dazzling the fountain in Washington Square. Purple tulips were blooming on the walkways. He looked again at the audio file on his screen. I reminded him of the previous evening, before the women had pinned him against the table. He had sat with his old mentor, Eliot, who had told him of the Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA. It was not the Burton I wanted him to see, but it was a way of getting him there. For all he wasn’t listening to my musical suggestions, he was amenable to an interruption.

‘You will have to wait,’ he said to the Japanese woman, but he might as well have been talking to me. In his bedroom he chose a favourite blue Ben Sherman jacket and his dark grey Timberland sneakers.