“The Grand Was Leo.”

(Post #3: Chapters 20-37; pp. 87-170)

Bea’s time in Los Angeles marks a few discoveries. First, she visits Margaret, Marvin’s Brahmin wife, whom she’d met only once before, more than a decade ago. She visits her at a “spa” where Margaret is resting and recovering from an illness. The meeting is strange. The women do not know each other, although Margaret does not appear alarmed by Bea’s unannounced visit. Margaret is upfront regarding her hatred for her husband, and she blames him entirely for Julian’s estrangement and self-exile to Paris. Margaret denies that she is ill and claims that she wanted to go to go to spa to get away from Marvin. When Bea informs her that Julian is married and that Iris also has run off to Paris, Margaret thinks Bea is lying. The fact that Margaret, indeed, suffers from some type of psychological disturbance becomes obvious to Bea when Margaret shows her artwork, a painting to which Margaret added a smudge of her own excrement.

Interestingly, Bea doesn’t let Marvin know that she’s come to Los Angeles, but she does drive up to see the outside his grand home on the morning of her return flight home. As she sits in her car she sees Marvin and a young woman leave the house together to go for a swim. Apparently Marvin’s life is not all work, but he also finds time for some extramarital activities.

Perhaps the primary reason for Bea’s trip to Los Angeles is to confront her ex-husband, Leo, although it’s not clear that Bea herself recognizes this intention. She calls Leo beforehand to say that she is in town and wants to come see him. Leo is living a very comfortable life as a music composer for films. But of course, being Leo, he is dissatisfied with the course his career has taken because he feels that he doesn’t have license to create the type of work that he wants. His boss directs, “Stick to the action, don’t give me any fancy art music, you follow me?” Since Bea, Leo has had two other failed marriages, and a daughter with each, neither of whom live with him.

During their visit Margaret told Bea that Marvin had gone to Leo asking for a job in films for Julian. Leo assumes that this is the purpose for Bea’s visit now—that Marvin or Julian recruited her to make the case for Julian. But Bea has an entirely different reason for her visit—she is finally having her reckoning with Leo regarding how their relationship ended. For Bea the separation was inconclusive because Leo did not take the grand piano, the looming, overbearing symbol of their unequal union in which Bea always “gave” but never “took.” The piano has kept Leo in her daily life, front of mind, all these years.

She tells him, “…you made me think of you. You made me. Because you left it, you never came back for it.”

Of course, Leo now has another piano, a priceless grand from Vienna on which Mahler composed his Symphony Number Six. Bea goes up to the piano, lifts the lid, and crashes her fist onto the keys.

Later, when Bea returns home to New York, she sells Leo’s grand piano, inspired by the transformations and audacious rebellion of Julian and Iris. But even after the piano is gone, there remains a dark shadow on the carpet where the piano had stood shielding the sunlight that had turned the rest of the carpet beige, “the grand’s bleeding silhouette persisted.” A few days later Bea hires some men to rip up the carpet and restore the wooden floors beneath. It’s Bea’s own personal rebellion. She acknowledges that the situation with Julian and Iris is part of her now, that she remains involved in it for her own sake, not Marvin’s.