The Museum of Modern Love(57)
Then Levin got a scholarship to Juilliard. He met Tom Washington at a student event. Tom was an actor at the Lee Strasberg school but he wanted to be a director and he was looking for someone to compose the music. Neither of the first two short films they did together amounted to much. Back then Tom wasn’t a particularly good writer, and they did all the special effects themselves. But Tom had the same passion for film that Levin had for music. The third film was an eighteen-minute dark comedy featuring a mute girl who tried to get her boyfriend out of prison. It got picked up on the awards circuit. It was In Competition at Cannes and won in Toronto. People praised the soundtrack. An agent in LA wanted to represent him. Tom was offered a feature and he insisted that Levin was signed for the soundtrack. The budget was more than either of them had ever imagined. And that first feature won Sundance. It won Berlin. The soundtrack was nominated for an Oscar and Tom’s script was nominated for best original screenplay. The lead was nominated for best actor. They didn’t win that year, but Tom was the latest wonder kid and the budgets got bigger fast.
Levin met Lydia one day at a recording studio he and Tom were using. She was looking it over for her father as a possible investment. He had been sitting in a back room taking a moment out while Tom was on a call. Lydia said she needed to sit down somewhere quiet because she was feeling dizzy, and was it okay if she just hid away in here a few moments because bathrooms made her feel worse.
She was a second-year architecture student at NYU. He asked if he could call her, make sure she got home alright, and she gave him her number. When he called and said they should have coffee, she agreed. He delivered flowers to her via the concierge in her building, who was Brazilian and liked being part of this little romance. He rang and played piano until she was asleep. She said, ‘You’re too sweet for me. You don’t know how complicated this can be.’
A marriage was a series of days, Levin thought. He thought of Lydia in the morning. First the underpants then the bra. Rarely the other way around. Standing in the early light, slipping off the long t-shirt she wore to bed. For years she had always done her bra up from the front and then swivelled it about to cup her breasts. Later, he realised she had stopped doing this and was doing it the way women did it in movies: scooping her breasts into the fabric then reaching behind, duck-winged, and snipping closed the clasps. Bras came in so many fabrics—opaque and transparent, embroidered, spotted, striped, delicate, moulded, lace, satin, black, cream, red and orange. Day after day she poured her perfect handfuls of breasts into sculptured fabric. He would have done anything to hold her breasts for a day.
He thought of how rarely he had touched her at such moments, as she dressed and undressed. She had seemed unreachable, distant, something to be observed tacitly, a glimpse of long thigh and buttocks.
The music he heard at such times was Brian Eno’s flashes of sound, light touching here and there, the morning’s texture having the weight of feathers or the static of nylon. Lydia was not by nature a moody person. Quite the opposite. She had an eternal sort of optimism that he had liked. Needed. It was he who brought the static.
‘I have this blood condition,’ Lydia said the very first day they met, by way of explanation for her dizziness and the red spots he noticed on her arms. Already, there in that little room, Levin knew he wanted to marry her.
When he first proposed, she said, ‘I don’t think I should get married. This thing I have, it’s hereditary. My mother died from it. You have to know that it could make things very difficult. I’m not sure I want to put you through that. Losing my mother, it’s wrecked my father. And the doctors all say it’s too dangerous for me to have children. If I ever need an operation . . . well, it’s nasty.’
‘I’ll look after you,’ he said.
They were married, and one year later Lydia was unexpectedly and worryingly pregnant. It was a huge risk, but she wouldn’t consider an abortion.
‘It’s meant to be, it must be,’ she said.
So Alice, who was meant to be, was born. The easiest birth in the world.
Levin’s grandparents died in the same year, one following the other only days apart, as if they were the head and tail of a kite that had found its way free. In the weeks that followed he had played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 so often that for years it was the one thing that would always put Alice to sleep.
Being here sounds like this, Levin thought, as the sky darkened, turning the Hudson to pewter. The rumbling of traffic, the lift of wind, the passing of joggers, the parents with strollers, the rollerskaters, the lovers, the great river moving past, taking itself out to sea. Behind him the city bloomed with night lights. Life was the Leonard Cohen songbook, he decided. Bittersweet love, a little sex and a moment of God. Then life moved on. You got over the love, sex came and went, and you forgot about God.
Perhaps ignoring things was an underestimated art. A critical survival skill even. Ignoring the bullet wound so you could get to the hospital. Ignoring the phone call so you could avoid the news. Ignoring the memories so you didn’t hurt.
He suspected that instead of the Stop sign that seemed to have haunted his life since Christmas, somewhere there was a Go sign, or a Turn Left sign. If only he could glimpse it out of the corner of his eye, he’d follow it. If only a white rabbit would appear, he’d run after it. If only Lydia would come home and be Lydia again, he’d know what to do.