He says something, but it is lost in the sound of the door closing behind me, obscured by the ringing of some strange chime Franklin put there long ago to warn us that someone had arrived, in search of music.

10.

YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING how a woman gets to be forty in a city as big as Los Angeles without having any female friends. Well, I did have them. Or I had one. Her name was Leah.

We used to meet at John O'Groats, an Irish breakfast joint on Pico, every other Sat.u.r.day morning to catch up. Leah was a lawyer-turned-artist. She worked in family law. She dropped out and took up mixed media, which, as far as I could tell, was about putting unlikely stuff together until it looked good. She said that's what families were about, too. But with art, n.o.body gets hurt.

Leah made a name for herself by collecting bottle caps, flattening them with an iron, painting them, and then arranging them into abstract forms on a piece of plywood. There was a real rush for her work a few years back. Celebrities bought it. (That's how you know you've made it in L.A.) Leah would call me at all hours, saying, "Oh, my G.o.d, Tom Cruise was just here!" Or George Clooney or Jennifer Lopez or Susan Sarandon. Like most art waves in Los Angeles, it didn't last long.

We met at church, when I first moved here. A laid-back Episcopal church, which never bothered with follow-up. My faith started dwindling around the breakup of my marriage, and the church was so laid back they never sent anyone to check on me. This just didn't seem right to me. Though at the time, Leah said, "Pearl, be honest. If they sent someone, you'd throw a bucket of p.i.s.s in their face."

I would never have done that, but it sounded appealing.

I said, "Well, I'd like the option."

Leah laughed her raspy smoker's laugh and said, "That's why preachers stopped making house calls. Who wants to get p.i.s.sed on without a soul to show for it?"

Leah still went to church, even though she had been flailing as an artist. Or maybe because of it. She liked her faith. Whenever we talked, she'd say, "Don't you miss the wafer, Pearl? Don't you want to take Communion?"

"What for?"

"For protection," she said.

"Protection against what?"

"Well, I don't know. Life."

"I don't think it works that way. That's more like superst.i.tion."

"It's not a superst.i.tion. It's an image. An archetype. Jesus is your lawyer. Communion is your retainer."

"Please." I kind of believed it. But at the same time, as a musician, I thought I was way more up in G.o.d's grill than Leah. Although flattening out bottle caps might have had a spiritual component I hadn't yet understood. I have always believed in art, have devoted myself to it from an early age, because I decided it was important to make the world a more beautiful place. But the bottle caps sometimes looked to me like a nervous preoccupation, an attempt to ward something off. It scared me when I thought that music might have become that for me, too.

Leah and I had our bimonthly breakfast at John O'Groats shortly after my visit to the Edwardses'. I usually filled her in on all the happenings at my job. It took the place of her isolated life, experimenting in art while she whittled away at the same married man she'd been seeing for years. His name was Phillip. He was a literary agent. He was never going to leave his wife.

Leah was beautiful and still made every effort to keep herself that way. She wore whites and creams to show off her black hair and olive skin. She wore all kinds of rattling jewelry and she always smelled like something exotic. People stared at her.

Next to her, I felt dowdy but somehow proud of my earth tones and bare arms. As if I were a more serious person.

Leah always asked about my love life. Even back then, I made the mistake of telling her about Clive.

She was excited. She said, "Why shouldn't you sleep with a young guy? What's the harm in it?"

"He's young. And we work together."

"If you sleep with him, the other guy will come around in no time."

"You mean Franklin? I'm not sure I want him, either."

"Well, who do you want?"

"I don't know."

"Pearl, you haven't had s.e.x in ages. Have you? You're all alone in that c.r.a.ppy place and you're waiting for Mark to leave Stephanie."

"No, I'm not." But back then, I might have been.

"You need to start living."

"You're hanging around every night, waiting for a married man to call you."

"And how are we so different?"

"I'm not desperate."

"You're not?"

"Okay. I'm aware of my desperation."

"But you're in retreat."

"Not forever."

"Oh, really? How can you be sure?"

"Because I don't have a vibrator."

"How is this proof of anything?"

"When you get one, you're giving up."

"That's not true."

We had that argument often. I was right, though. I knew a lot of girls who had stopped looking after crossing that Rubicon.

"Is it really so much better," I asked her, "to sleep with a man who is emotionally connected to someone else?"

"He's only legally connected to her."

"Right. What planet are you on?"

"He's staying for the children."

"The children are in college."

This seemed to hurt her a little, but she was far too tough to admit it.

She sighed and said, "Oh, Pearl, I don't know. You're going home alone tonight, and so am I, but I have the chance of someone calling me in the morning. And he'll come over in the evening and we'll make love. And I won't be alone for those hours. Do you have anything like it?"

I didn't have anything like that. But I could pick up an instrument and play it and I wouldn't have to tell it anything in the morning.

Still, I missed lying next to someone in a bed. Kicking him when he got too close or snored. Forgetting he was there, then remembering. Looking dumbfounded at each other when the morning broke through the blind. Wondering who was going to shiver and say, "It's cold." Wondering who was going to make the coffee. Wondering who was going to say, "Coffee can wait."

I remember thinking all this. I remember the whole conversation because I could have left it there. I didn't have to say the thing I said next. I didn't have to set it all in motion.

I said, "Listen, I need some advice. I have a situation at work."

She laughed. "I told you. Sleep with the ba.s.s player."

"It's about this student I'm working with. She's kind of a foster kid. She's not in the system, but she's living with some relatives who inherited her."

"Uh-huh," she said. She didn't look up. She said this in a tone that asked me not to go further. She used to deal in custody cases, representing parents warring over their children, and sometimes representing the children who had been taken out of dysfunctional homes in order to be placed in less (though not always) dysfunctional situations. She understood about abuse and Social Services and when a layperson was required to step in. She understood, but she left it all behind to flatten bottle caps. She had told me before that it was the pain that turned her away. And I could see the pain rising to the surface again, like some recurring nightmare she couldn't fight off. As if it always hovered. I felt bad for bringing it up, but I had to.

I said, "Suppose I suspect some kind of abuse is going on."

"What kind?"

"I saw bruises. On her wrists. She said she was wrestling with her brothers. Her cousins. The boys she's living with."

"Right."

"But I think there's more."

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know. I just have a feeling that something very bad is happening."

"Feelings don't play out in court, Pearl."

"I went to the house. I met her foster father. He gave me a stomachache."

"How did he do that?"

I pushed my plate away and leaned forward. "I know about unhappy homes, Leah. I know them when I'm around them."

"Leave it alone," she said quietly.

"There's something going on. I can't say what, but I know it. She has suddenly lost interest in the music. She's really talented and she used to love it. Now she just phones it in. Isn't that indicative of something really bad?"

"Not necessarily. It could be indicative of anything. Hormones. Anything."

"So you're telling me to stand by and do nothing?"

"I haven't heard anything concrete. Believe me, Pearl, it's hard enough to prove these cases when you have hard evidence. I can't tell you the times I went to court with signed depositions from abused kids, only to have them recant on the stand. And even when I got some of these kids out of their homes, I just threw them into the frying pan. We all fall in love with the fairy-tale ending. The beauty of riding in and rescuing these children and delivering them to some better place. Sometimes there isn't a better place. And I came to the conclusion that maybe the stories we are born with are nothing more than that. Just our stories. Everybody has something to get through. Everybody has something to live down."

"I think that's harsh."

"You don't know harsh. You only imagine it. I've seen it. Trust me, you don't want to go there. Just teach them and send them home. Clock out, for G.o.d's sake."

"What kind of world is it when people just stop looking out for each other?"

"I don't know what kind of world it is. I just know it's the one we live in."

We were silent for a moment. We sipped our coffee and she avoided my eyes.

Finally she looked up. "Maybe this is about your own childhood and you need to go to therapy."

"It's not about my childhood. Though I don't deny I'm sensitive to her plight. It's how I'm able to recognize it."

"Then maybe it's about you having nothing else in your life."

"Oh. I see. So if I get a vibrator, I can learn to ignore pain?"

"If not ignore it, at least keep it at bay."

"Until what? I'm strong enough to confront it?"

"No. Until you're strong enough to realize that it is always going to exist. And these distractions-music, art, s.e.x, movie popcorn, alcohol, whatever you choose- serve as a vacation from it all. Not an escape. Just a stepping out."

I looked down and pinched my lips against the angry things I wanted to say.

"That's what church is, Pearl. If you went back you'd understand. It's just a stepping out of the world. For that one hour. If that's all you can afford, it's enough. But if you can't step out at all, the world gets to be too much."

"I barely live in it at all. Isn't that your argument? I'm not at the party?"

"You're in it," she said. "But you're only in it for the bad parts. Even your music makes you sad."

"No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it does. It reminds you of some lost career. It reminds you of Mark. It reminds you of your father. It never puts you in the moment or makes you look ahead."

"You don't know the first thing about my music."

"I know what you've told me."

I didn't feel like talking anymore. I felt defeated but not wrong. I felt overwhelmed by what she was saying to me. She didn't know my life at all, and I didn't know hers. She had walked from pain into art and had found some kind of relief. I had walked from pain into art and found more pain. This, she was saying, was how we differed. She was telling me to feel less. She was telling me to look away. But when we look away, there's no art. There is only distraction.

She said, "Look, if you are really concerned, I know someone in Social Services you can talk to. But it's a slippery slope, and you'd better think very hard about it before you get involved."

I didn't respond. We gathered our things and left.