Voices began to rise, like the rumble of distant thunder, and it took five or six seconds to recognize whose they were. And then the rhythm of the whole thing intensified, as if the Luftwaffes strafing had just begun. Hearty shouting gave way to a familiar high-pitched, self-pitying shriek from the fashion model who lives on the other side of me with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. About the same time last week, she delivered a statement at a pitch so high and desperate, I suspected she was being leeched. "All I want is a relationship," she had wailed, at an operatic pace that must have taken thirty or forty seconds to deliver.
Her boyfriend's reply was so direct and sensible-though he was shouting at the top of his lungs-that I was tempted to applaud. "I'd rather eat glass than have a relationship with you."
It sounded as if they were heading toward some of those themes again today.
I poured another cup of coffee and tried to imagine what someone living next door to Will and me would have heard when we were at our worst. Nothing. Plenty of nothing. Silence, though not the silence of the monastery, not the silence Thomas Merton said can make you sense that God is right there, not only with you but in you. Not the silence of what Merton called "the quiet heart." There are no quiet hearts in states of stifled rage, in angry defeat or the black dog of depression.
I gazed at Lili in my lap and heard another species of silence: the work that no longer speaks to you. It feels like illness, like ague. I laid the manuscript aside and did something I hadn't done since before I left my husband: put on the CD of Lili's choral music and turned up the volume to drown out the lovers' quarrel next door. I skimmed the liner notes on Lili's life and tried to revive my obsession for this woman, who had died in 1918, but who, in my novel, went on to live a long, fabulous life. Not so long ago every carat of her being had moved and inspired me: her precocious talent, her lifelong illness, her valiant, premature, unkvetchy death. Though her sister Nadia is, to this day, exalted in letters, memoirs, and musical homages, Lili is barely remembered, except by a few oddballs and cultists to whom she is angelic. I had an idea to rescue her-and myself too-from obscurity. And I wanted to take a few liberties with her memory.
In my nervy invention of a life she might have lived, had she lived, she breaks with her sister and flees to America with the real-life avant-garde composer George Antheil. When he leaves her for a chorus girl, she heads for Hollywood to write movie scores for Sam Goldwyn. To sleep with John Barrymore. To eat burgers on the Fourth of July with Thomas Mann. Christopher Isherwood. David Hockney. Steven Spielberg. Her efforts to make peace with her sister are always rebuffed.
I wanted to ransack the archives. To dynamite our ideas of worship and devotion.
You have to understand: my marriage was unraveling when I conceived of the book. I was desperate to rewrite a real woman's life, not knowing until six months into it that I really wanted to rewrite my own. Where did that leave Lili now? Was my imagination large enough to hold her only as long as she could stand in for my own stifled yearnings?
Within seconds of that thought, two things occurred that startled me, the first more profoundly than the second. I heard her music with more insight and clarity than I ever had and found it truly awful-thin, screechy, derivative. Second, the doorbell rang.
"Who is it?" I called out and crossed the room. Jesús again, making me an offer I couldn't refuse? Daniel, nearly a day early?
"It's me, darling." That disqualified Daniel. I mean the "darling." The only term of endearment in his adult-to-adult vocabulary-uttered to me about once every six weeks-was Ducks. "It's Henderson."
I swung open the door and saw not Hendersons face but an immense basket of flowers, in which two birds of paradise poked up higher than the roses and delphiniums.
"The doorman didn't announce you. Did you bribe him?"
I was so used to his drop-in calls before memorial services that I was relieved to see he was wearing khaki shorts and a shiny red tank top that said Goldman Sachs Softball Team, which I knew to be a hand-me-down from the boyfriend of a boyfriend. Sweat cascaded down his neck despite the air-conditioning. "My sunglasses are melting," he announced, "and I saw a piece on the AP wire yesterday that said sunscreen doesn't work when the ozone layer looks like your mother's fishnet stockings. Have you been watching the Weather Channel?" He deposited the flower basket on my kitchen counter and tore off a long sheet of paper towel to wick the moisture that coated his exposed skin. He was a bit sunburned, a bit overweight, almost completely bald, an aging gay man with an acquired demeanor of unflappability that comes from having lost forty or fifty of his best friends and several layers of acquaintances. He and I had also met during my first week in New York, at the gay-lesbian-all-welcome AA meeting, and I could tell right away that Henderson had what they call in that circle "a lot of serenity." He, too, was much in the market for new friends.
"I haven't bought my TV yet," I said. "What's the forecast?"
"Misery everywhere but Swansea Island, where it's only seventy-eight degrees. You obviously didn't factor global warming into your decision to get divorced. Happy birthday, dear. I'm sorry I'm so late."
"Just a week. I thought you were still in Provincetown. These are beautiful, H., but you know you didn't have to."
"We all need flowers at forty-four, Sophy. It's the only thing we actually require this late in life. I've got to run home and pack for the Swiss fat farm, but I brought you a disk of my memoir, in case my building goes up in flames. I've got two chapters left, and if I weren't meeting Bianca at the fat farm, I'd bail. Not that I need to pack much to spend ten days drinking water on the side of a mountain. Where will you put the disk for safekeeping?"
The diskette was in a clear plastic bag, sandwich size, and I could see he'd written on the label MY FAVORITE THINGS, the title of his memoir and of his down-at-the-heels cable TV talk show. He aspired to be a gay Charlie Rose and hoped the memoir, to be published next year, would give him the boost he needed to get a better TV station, a better time slot.
"My favorite place," I said. "Inside a plastic container in the fridge, in case my building goes up in flames." Henderson always began his show with a witty monologue about his favorite things, which led to his introduction of his guest for that day. "Favorite Bach cantata? One hundred and five. Favorite wife of Pablo Picasso? Françoise Gilot. Favorite sexually explicit classic poem? Do you have to ask? Favorite Bible story for atheists? Abraham and Isaac. Favorite castrato? Farinelli. Favorite suicide note? Virginia Woolf's, natch. Favorite celebrity homemaker? Please. Welcome to the show, Martha. It's great to see you again."
"Do you have time for a cup of coffee?"
"A short one," Henderson said, "but don't make a fresh pot; give me what's left over with a splash of skim milk. How's Lili?"
"I think she's having a midlife crisis. Or maybe it's menopause."
"And how are you?"
"Somewhat the same." I stuck a mug of coffee in the microwave and told Henderson I'd Fed Exed my separation agreement to my lawyer the day before yesterday.
"How do you feel about it?"
"Sad. And Will's pissed off at me. He owes me a thousand dollars for medical reimbursements and wont send the money. Won't even answer my phone calls. I've left three or four messages."
"Still seeing the Bionic Man? Has he topped forty-three minutes yet?"
"I don't clock it every time. I've got two percent."
"Of his attention? That seems awfully low, even for a straight man in New York."
"Milk for the coffee. I've probably got ten percent of his attention. Guess what? I received a marriage proposal today."
"Not from him, I take it."
"A gay illegal alien."
"It could be worse. Though I'm not sure how."