The Museum of Modern Love(39)
Mostly Lydia was right. He didn’t like people. Hardly at all. He certainly didn’t like thinking about people. He didn’t want to know about starving people who lived on one corncob a day if they were lucky. He didn’t care about people who would be swallowed up by climate change. He didn’t care about the plastic takeout containers of his life that stretched out behind him in a great wake that probably reached from here to the moon by now. He didn’t even like living on this planet particularly. It seemed complex and often violent.
He hadn’t much liked growing up. He’d loved his mother but he hadn’t liked her. She had meditated. She had silent days. Days when he was not allowed to speak to her and she did not speak to him. They ate in silence, washed up in silence, went to bed in silence. The piano was the only thing allowed to disturb the house because Levin, his mother assured him, was destined for greatness. She was sure there was some sort of plan at work in the universe, a plan that would see the stars align, and her nights nursing to get him through school, and her weekend shifts at the aged-care facility, would no longer be necessary because Levin was going to be famous.
He hardly remembered his father. He remembered the night his mother had come into his room. He had been four. He remembered the light from the hallway and the weight of her pressing the sheets down on him and her voice in the dark whispering, ‘Your father is dead, Arky. He’s dead.’
Perhaps she said more. He didn’t remember. He only remembered that afterwards she had left the room and he had laid there in the darkness. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep breathing. Or if he was even allowed to breathe when his father was dead.
Levin had a dim memory of his father holding his hand as they walked down a flight of stairs. But perhaps he had made it up. When his mother died, it had simply consolidated his thinking. Bad things happened at any moment. It was an almost unbearable effort being human. Did it matter that he’d loved Lydia? Did it matter that he’d tried to be a good husband and father?
He had made some nice film scores. He had made some people happy with his music. Other than that, did it really matter how he lived his life? It was hard enough knowing which light bulb to buy. How to understand a software upgrade. How to read the baseball fixture. How to sort out a new phone. The list was endless. If the little things made no sense, what hope was there for big things like marriages?
He’d done his best. Clearly it hadn’t been enough. He felt immensely sad. He felt as if he’d missed something very important. Lydia had tried to get him to go to therapy. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to have some freedom around all your worry?’ she’d said. ‘And look what happened to you. It could really help.’
But he didn’t need help from a stranger. He didn’t want to be some clichéd New Yorker with therapy every Friday morning before the weekend came and everything went pear-shaped.
Pillow-Marina looked back at him. She said nothing. But she was there. That seemed to matter. Even in her pillow form, it felt good to know she was there. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, dropped his head as he’d seen them do at the museum.
He got up from the table, noting that he’d sat for almost half an hour, which surprised him because it had felt shorter. He made coffee. He thought about dinner with Alice and decided it seemed to require a follow-up. He didn’t know how to help. He’d never known how to help. It was his great flaw. His father had died and he didn’t know how to help. His mother died and maybe she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t needed to get out of the house that night. She’d liked her night-time drives. But he suspected she had driven away because she needed to be alone. He must have been hard to live with. There was no help for that. It was long ago. He didn’t know how to solve anything but music.
He sat in his studio, coffee cup in hand, and listened again to the melodies he was discovering for Kawa, and the one melody that might repeat throughout the film. The soundtrack had to evoke love and loss in a world cloaked in snow and he thought, I’m writing the music of this winter. The winter when everything went away.
Isoda had liked both theme track options he’d sent. The completion of the new scenes would determine which melody they finally chose. Or it might take longer to be sure. They had discussed the possibility of him going to Tokyo next month to Isoda’s studio. With the new scenes he’d have more than forty minutes of footage, but they weren’t consecutive scenes. It was hard to gauge precisely the emotional arc of the story. If he could see the work in progress—see the sketches taking form, see what Isoda was seeing—then he could be sure that the melody would draw the pictures together. If it did there was the score to write, an orchestra waiting for its parts and a studio to book. He’d need vocals and session musos.
He began considering which orchestra, the pros and cons of recording in New York or possibly Chicago. Maybe even Tokyo. This was what he loved, when the process began to escalate and the outcome began to appear.
Lydia had been the same about architecture. He had stood in her buildings and been in awe of her. Floors played music, ceilings rained and rooms were divided by live fish, butterflies, crickets. Holographic symbols were pinned to the night sky, a pedestrian bridge rolled up like a caterpillar, filaments of light made an ever-changing ceiling of rainbows, corridors rippled with laughter. In her buildings there was no separation between the interior and the exterior worlds. The private homes she designed had Japanese maples inside the front door, waterfalls on rooftops, fragrant vertical interior gardens and streams running through bathrooms.