The Museum of Modern Love(33)

He didn’t miss hearing her discuss the education crisis in schools, or what Obama should be doing in his first term while he had the balance of power in the Senate, or how furious she was at him winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that it was the worst decision since Kissinger won it. And how this winter was going to be the coldest ever recorded, which would cause all sorts of havoc for the agricultural sector, and that sea ice was melting at an unprecedented rate. He didn’t want to know that everything was going haywire. Hadn’t he earned the right to enjoy air-conditioning? He liked well-lit rooms and air travel. He felt helpless to solve any of the things that were going wrong in the world. He was just one person, a musician, a composer. He entertained people. It wasn’t really his problem. He sorted the trash.

He was surprised to find he was missing Alice. He missed her more now than during the year she’d spent in France. Her absence then, he seemed to remember, had been something of a relief. He had liked having Lydia to himself again. They had discovered a rhythm of work and movies, meals and walks, bike rides and cafes that had been easy, as if this was the real reward of staying together for twenty years.

When Alice had returned from France, she’d moved in with friends. Her bed, her desk, posters, books, clothes, jewellery, all the paraphernalia that had saturated her room through her school years had gone.

She’d never visited the new apartment. He’d never asked her to. She’d never suggested it. When they met, it was in cafes or restaurants. Her university fees and monthly allowance were paid from an account Lydia had set up. He didn’t really serve a purpose. He saw this more acutely now that Lydia wasn’t here to make family dinners or organise for the three of them to go to the theatre or concerts together.

Lydia’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe. Her jars and bottles were in the bathroom. And there was the piano that had been delivered on the morning of his birthday on 21 January. It had come in via the balcony by crane. Lydia had arranged permits, a road closure, all back in November, without breathing a word of it to him.

It drew a crowd on the icy street as the wooden box was hoisted five floors and swung in. He loved the piano. After the Steinway people had left, he’d sat down that first day and played for hours. But as the day had stretched out there was no other acknowledgement. No one had dropped by because there was no Lydia to organise friends. There was no Alice because he was still angry over the legal situation and didn’t want to turn on his phone. So he never knew if she’d remembered his birthday or not, or might have wanted to catch up. If she’d really wanted to, she had his address. But there was no card. No message at the front desk.

They should never have moved to this new apartment. He was surprised he hadn’t thought of it before. It was April and he was still living here alone and and Lydia was not coming home. He suddenly knew that with a terrible cold certainty. He would call their realtor and tell her he wanted to sell it. He’d find somewhere else. Maybe back on the Upper West Side. Somewhere that would fit the piano but not remind him every moment of the day that Lydia wasn’t here.

He got up from the table and went to the storage cupboard and pulled out the last of the moving boxes flat-packed against the wall. He began assembling them, walking to the kitchen for scissors, rummaging through several drawers in the hope of finding packing tape. But he couldn’t find it. It was only then that he realised he had left the table. He had left the chair and Marina with her pillow face and dark cashmere hair. He looked at the clock. He had lasted almost twenty-six minutes.

She overrides herself, he thought. Marina must have urges all day to get up, to walk about, to go do something else. But she doesn’t.

Unbidden, a conversation with Alice came back to him. She was twelve or thirteen, putting on her boots in the ski room of their old house in Aspen.

‘Dad,’ she said, ‘I have been thinking that humans need fear.’

‘Why is that?’ he had asked her.

‘Well,’ she said, with the kind of matter-of-factness she employed to inform him of her choice of breakfast cereal, ‘fear leads to doubt. Doubt leads to reason. Reason leads to choice. Choice leads to life. Without fear you don’t have doubt. Without doubt you don’t have reason. Without reason you don’t have choice. Without choice, you don’t have life.’

But did choice always lead to life? Small deaths happened every day. He had seen that. There was the death of turning twenty-one and never again being able to claim youth as an excuse. The death of idealism when the first girl you loved left you and so did the second and the third. The death of having the audience respond only kindly, not warmly, not ecstatically to his work. The death of losing awards, or not even being nominated. The death of jobs going to other composers with less experience or talent. The death of energy as forty-five came around and he realised he just didn’t want to work the hours he once had. His face, which he’d always quite liked, had done double time in the last few years. The once ginger-blond hair was now silver and receding. The skin had grown loose at the base of his neck. In a human life, time was relentless.

He must call Alice. He went to the bedroom, retrieved his mobile and switched it on. She answered after two rings.

‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Nice to hear from you.’

He suspected sarcasm, which was unlike Alice. He decided to overlook it. ‘Can I take you to dinner?’

‘Um, is everything okay?’