Paying Attention to Peacock Blue

“I live to dream,” begins the first sentence of an unpublished novel that I wrote years ago. The novel is about a young woman who lives in New York and seeks in sleep a vibrancy she cannot find in life. Her name is Beth, a single syllable that disappears into itself as soon as it is uttered. She sleepwalks through her days, working as some assistant in publishing, though the details of what she actually does are vague. On page 88, she gives up her job—where she finds the funds to do so is not explained--and travels to Paris, where she meets, at the base of the Winged Victory in the Louvre, an older professor, on sabbatical from an American university. He is headed for the Greek island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea, and persuades her to join him. Not long after they have settled into his cliffside rooms with spectacular views of the active volcano, Beth discovers that he is suffering from a fatal disease.

The story, only loosely autobiographical, was my fictional attempt to prepare for the overwhelming likelihood that my beloved, much older husband would predecease me. When several agents and publishers rejected it, claiming that the character and her dilemmas were not fleshed out sufficiently, I put the novel aside, saving all the rejection letters.

The novel and its narrator were drifting, pollen-like, through my consciousness recently on a warm, May evening in New York. My friend, Christine, and I were walking around the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York. We were headed to a bookstore off Broadway to hear a friend read from his new book of short stories, and had arrived early to inspect the peacocks--one of which was rumored to be all white--in the Cathedral Garden of St. John the Divine.

The peacock-peeping was orchestrated entirely by Christine, who is forever questing after exotic phenomena, especially anything ecclesiastical. When we traveled to north Wales together seven years ago, staying with our mutual friend, Lilla, in the Vale of Clywd, just down the road from where Gerald Manley Hopkins had written, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” we spent many an afternoon tracking down holy wells, tramping through muddy paths in a sea of farmers’s rain-soaked fields, our boots growing brown with sheep dung.

The holy wells were invariably disappointing, small, rock-strewn dips and indentations with only the faintest trickling of actual water. Unlike Christine, I lacked the imagination to time-travel back to the Middle Ages, when life was simpler and earthly quirks more miraculous. My reaction to these vulva-like holes in the ground was that of a bored teenager’s, as in, “So? Are we done?”

I kept my reservations to myself, trudging gamely along and focusing on the afternoon treat we had promised ourselves: the cream tea at the village pub in Tremerchion. Christine was following her bliss, clicking away at her digital camera, and explaining that there were more holy wells in Wales than in any other part of Great Britain.

But this May evening as we were searching for the white peacock, I somehow had the feeling—maybe it was simply because we had scored a parking spot on Broadway—that some epiphany was already winging its way toward us.

Something was stirring at the Cathedral: a whole block of parking spots were sealed off with sawhorses, and everywhere there were fleets of limos and cells of workers dressed in black-and-white catering uniforms. Whatever it was—a concert, a benefit, a surprise visit from the Dalai Lama--we had the sensation, which comes often in New York in the cocktail hours before dusk, that we were at the epicenter of everything magical.

We turned off Amsterdam Avenue and pressed deeper into the garden, putting the secular world behind us, and giving ourselves up to the rhododendrons, irises and bleeding hearts. But where were the peacocks? Surely on a summer night like this, they wouldn’t be sequestered in their cages in one of the Cathedral’s garages, where they waited out the cold, New York winters.

Then Christine grabbed my arm and said, “Look!” And there on the terrace of one of the faux-medieval stone buildings that belonged to the Cathedral School, we spied it: a peacock with its train fanned out in full, as still as if it were posing for its portrait. We crept closer, our footsteps mincing, our voices whispering. But the creature paid no attention to us; he didn’t so much as flutter one of his many-eyed feathers.

I don’t know how long we stood there: two, five, ten minutes, but it felt longer, the way time stretches out and becomes eternal when one is fully in the moment. “I have never been this close to a peacock,” I whispered.

“Me neither,” Christine whispered.

“Look at all those eyes on its feathers.”

“I read somewhere that the more eyespots on its train, the more attractive he is to the female,” she said.

“Well, this guy is definitely the Johnny Depp of peacocks.”

“Look at the tiny crown on its head,” she said. “Look at the iridescent blue of its neck.”

“Peacock blue. Now I finally get what that means.”

Then, as if sensing that it was the object of our awe, the bird did a full 360-degree turn, showing us its fluffy, ivory-colored backside (imagine the end of a very elegant dust-mop).

“Look,” I said, “it’s shaking its booty.”

“There must be a peahen nearby,” she said.

We checked the time on our cell phones and realized that we’d have to hurry if we were going to get to the reading by seven. We passed one of the young caterers, half-hidden by a flowering cherry tree, and taking a cigarette break. We asked her what was going on at the Cathedral that night and she said it was a benefit for St. Luke’s Hospital. Then Christine asked about the white peacock. Had anything happened to it? Oh no, it’s around, the young woman said, already bored with our questions and releasing a scarf of smoke.

We thanked her and hurried away, and then we saw the creature strolling slowly along the stone paths among the hostas and ferns, carrying the tail of its ivory train behind it, a sort of avian version of Pippa Middleton at the recent royal wedding. But extraordinary as the bird was—I had seen only three or four peacocks in my life, and none had been white—it couldn’t compare to the one in full-dress regalia on the terrace.

Or maybe it was simply that all our attention had been concentrated to a fine point, captured in one of those multitudinous eyes on the creature’s train. Perhaps we were worn out with seeing, the way one feels after spending an afternoon looking at masterworks in a museum.

At the reading, my mind kept wandering to my novel, resting in a white typewriter-paper box among the manila envelopes of sympathy cards I had kept after my first husband’s death, one of which had been written by the man who was now giving the reading. (“It’s impossible to imagine,” he had written, “that so much life force is no longer in the world.”) And then it suddenly occurred to me what the novel’s failings were: its narrator had not been paying close enough attention to her life, and because of this it was hard for a reader to pay attention to her, to care about her.

It wasn’t Beth’s fault; it took effort, focus and energy to pay attention. Perhaps, if “absolute attention is prayer,” as Simone Weil once observed, it even took a measure of religious faith. In any case, the work of paying attention was harder if you suffered from depression, as my narrator surely did, as I had when I had written the novel, though I had not been able to own the experience.

At fifty-six, going on fifty-seven, was it too late to start paying attention? Perhaps, but then I remembered that old African fable about the best time to plant a tree: “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago,” the fable goes, “The next best time is now.”