all she’d left behind were her plangent songs that tell me so little and her unfinished memoirs that reveal little more

Over the next few weeks, Waits practiced piano at Grove Street so often that X gave him a key. In a diary, X wrote that she knew she could respect him because unlike so many other musicians, he understood that “the importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It’s nothing but a noose.”† The admiration was mutual; Waits soon invited her to Electric Lady Studios, where he’d been gifted some time that winter. (“She was like a broken toy that works better than before it was broken,”‡‡ Waits told Mr. Smith.) Of course, no one at Electric Lady had ever heard of any “Bee Converse,” but there was no need to ask for her qualifications or which records she’d worked on. Arriving with Waits was credential enough.