The Museum of Modern Love (16 page)

They should never have moved to this new apartment. He was surprised he hadn't thought of it before. It was April and he was still living here alone and and Lydia was not coming home. He suddenly knew that with a terrible cold certainty. He would call their realtor and tell her he wanted to sell it. He'd find somewhere else. Maybe back on the Upper West Side. Somewhere that would fit the piano but not remind him every moment of the day that Lydia wasn't here.

He got up from the table and went to the storage cupboard and pulled out the last of the moving boxes flat-packed against the wall. He began assembling them, walking to the kitchen for scissors, rummaging through several drawers in the hope of finding packing tape. But he couldn't find it. It was only then that he realised he had left the table. He had left the chair and Marina with her pillow face and dark cashmere hair. He looked at the clock. He had lasted almost twenty-six minutes.

She overrides herself, he thought. Marina must have urges all day to get up, to walk about, to go do something else. But she doesn't.

Unbidden, a conversation with Alice came back to him. She was twelve or thirteen, putting on her boots in the ski room of their old house in Aspen.

‘Dad,' she said, ‘I have been thinking that humans need fear.'

‘Why is that?' he had asked her.

‘Well,' she said, with the kind of matter-of-factness she employed to inform him of her choice of breakfast cereal, ‘fear leads to doubt. Doubt leads to reason. Reason leads to choice. Choice leads to life. Without fear you don't have doubt. Without doubt you don't have reason. Without reason you don't have choice. Without choice, you don't have life.'

But did choice always lead to life? Small deaths happened every day. He had seen that. There was the death of turning
twenty-one and never again being able to claim youth as an excuse. The death of idealism when the first girl you loved left you and so did the second and the third. The death of having the audience respond only kindly, not warmly, not ecstatically to his work. The death of losing awards, or not even being nominated. The death of jobs going to other composers with less experience or talent. The death of energy as forty-five came around and he realised he just didn't want to work the hours he once had. His face, which he'd always quite liked, had done double time in the last few years. The once ginger-blond hair was now silver and receding. The skin had grown loose at the base of his neck. In a human life, time was relentless.

He must call Alice. He went to the bedroom, retrieved his mobile and switched it on. She answered after two rings.

‘Dad,' she said. ‘Nice to hear from you.'

He suspected sarcasm, which was unlike Alice. He decided to overlook it. ‘Can I take you to dinner?'

‘Um, is everything okay?'

‘Sure. Yes. Fine.'

‘I'm kind of busy.'

‘Gramercy Tavern? There's something I need to discuss with you.'

‘Dad, there's nothing to—'

‘Please, Alice. I really need to see you.'

She sighed. ‘Oh, so you call after all this time, after all my messages, and you need to see me?'

‘Just a father wanting to have dinner with his daughter.'

There was another sigh.

‘Maybe Sunday.'

‘Seven o'clock?'

‘I guess so.'

‘See you then,' said Levin, and then, though she was gone, he said, ‘Thank you.'

He pushed the boxes flat again and put them back in the closet. At any moment Yolanda would arrive. It suddenly occurred to Levin that he didn't know how Yolanda was paid. How was she reimbursed for the food she bought each week? Ever since Lydia had left, she'd kept everything as he liked it. Organic Valley low-fat milk, Porto Rico's French Brazilian Santos coffee. Amy's sourdough. Ben & Jerry's. And meals. Macaroni cheese, fajitas, roast pork with scalloped potatoes, seafood pie, lasagne. The cupboards were kept stocked with pasta and sauces. There were several cheeses in the fridge, cold cuts, relish. He prickled at the idea of her doing all this while he had neglected her wages. Not reimbursed her. It could well be a small fortune by now.

He penned a note.
Hi Yolanda, do I owe you anything for these past few months? Please advise.
He propped it against a cup on the kitchen bench. Then he added,
I'm so sorry if I've neglected this.
Another thing he had to take care of in Lydia's absence. And the tax. There had been an email from their accountant. But Lydia did all that stuff. Couldn't the accountants just do it for him?

He went out, walked down the street to Francois, and ate a rocket salad, a piece of seared salmon, fries. He listened through lunch to Zoë Keating's album under headphones. It sounded as if she was playing her cello beside a lacquered screen of mother-of-pearl birds and snow-capped mountains. He could feel the wind off a long narrow lake. As she played a whole landscape came to life.

He arrived at MoMA just after 1.30. He thought that maybe if dinner went well, he and Alice might go together to see the retrospective on the sixth floor. He thought she might enjoy it. They could rebuild a little. It had been a very tough few months.
It must be tough for her, seeing her mother like that. Did she go often to see Lydia? He guessed she did. He felt a stab of jealousy.

He looked about for Jane then remembered that she had gone back to Georgia. Suddenly, he missed her.

PEOPLE FLOCK TO RETROSPECTIVES—VAN GOGH
at the National Gallery in London, Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. They flock to see the
Mona Lisa
, the statue of
David
. They flock to Art Basel and the Venice Biennale. But when did a city last cast its collective attention on a single work of one artist? In 1969 Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Sydney coastline. In 2005 they made seven thousand five hundred and three gates of saffron fabric in Central Park and more people walked among them than entered all of New York's galleries in that single year.

Now, every day the crowds are increasing. The queue to sit with Marina Abramović begins to form at 7 am on the pavement outside MoMA. Since the show began on 9 March, more than three hundred and fifty thousand people have come to see this one work of art.

The artist is at her table. The man with the angel eyes is opposite her again. They have been sitting together, unmoving, eyes connecting, for almost half an hour. Marina can see a room with a floor of confetti made from notes and letters, receipts, journals, manuscripts, books—every shred of documentation she has amassed (and believe me there is an amassment—she
throws nothing away, not even a receipt from the dentist). It is the room she imagines her dead body being laid in.

Seated at the side of the performance is Arky Levin in dark jeans and a blue patterned shirt. Further along is Brittika from Amsterdam, with her silken pink hair and trademark make-up. There are other students with hoodies and laptops, who will trade on this show for months if they manage to write something useful about it. There are the very famous, who are increasing in numbers at
The Artist is Present
. They are given preference at the head of the queue. Of course.

There are visitors from Brooklyn, Bombay, Berlin and Baghdad. Well, perhaps not Baghdad, because that is a war zone of broken buildings, dust, heat and not a bird to be heard. I have seen death scoop up tens of thousands of civilians in that war. The same civilians who once admired Van Gogh's sunflowers, or Monet's lilies. Perhaps they read the poems of Nazik Al-Malaika
,
Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Christina Rossetti. Perhaps they liked the music of Leonard Cohen and Kadim Al-Sahir. Or the writing of Mahmoud Saeed, Ernest Hemingway, Betool Khedairi, Toni Morrison. War seeks to eliminate commonality.

This is not a war zone. This is commonality. Marina's friends come too. What do they make of this? And what of those who don't come? Who can't quite bear to see her in such pain? For they know her well enough to know the pain she is in. Can see it in the tremor of her eyelid, the tension in her fingers, the pallor of her skin, the glaze across her lucent brown irises.

Francesca Lang is the wife of Marina's long-time agent, Dieter Lang. For the one artist who makes an agent rich, there are many who never will. Agents are like cats. Rarely do they get lucky and catch a bird, but it does not stop them being fascinated by
flight. Marina has not made Dieter rich. He never thought she would. But he thought what she did was important.

‘I've said it before,' said Francesca to her husband. ‘Marina was Cleopatra in a past life. Or Hippolyta. Or Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. A painter would make sense.'

Dieter Lang sighed.

‘You must stop going,' she said to him. ‘It doesn't help her and it certainly doesn't help you.'

‘But I need to see that she's okay. I mean, we know she's not. We know it's hell.'

‘She will be fine. If there's one thing I am sure of, it's that.' She knew Marina's legs were swelling. Her ribs were sinking into her organs. But Marina would be fine. If Francesca wasn't so entirely certain of Marina's ability to succeed she might, over the years, have been more uncertain of her marriage. But there had never been any cause to be, as Francesca had surmised from the start. Marina was never going to fail. Dieter had made the right decision.

Francesca understood that Marina's success required Dieter to be adviser, business liaison, friend, agent, counsel and accomplice in all things that promoted the artistic ambitions of Marina. This was not a malicious observation. It was simply true. Despite it being 2010, Francesca was surprised how often she had to defend the desire for success in a woman. If anything, it ought to be encouraged, Francesca thought. How tired she was, after all they had fought for, to find the ambitious woman still painted as the femme fatale, lacking in empathy, selfish, threatening—no matter how much she gave of herself to the world. It was ridiculous but it was still there.

Francesca had known Marina for several years before she had introduced her to Dieter. It had been Francesca who arranged
the lunch where at last Dieter and Marina agreed on a working relationship. Of course it had to be. Why ever not? Dieter was the perfect agent for Marina. They both had the same ambitions, the same hunger for New York.

People asked Francesca how she felt about Marina. Wasn't Marina tough? Ruthless?
Yes
, Francesca would say,
and no. Marina's the warmest person I have ever met.
Women's groups tried to claim Marina as a feminist but Marina denied it. She said she had made no overtly feminist pieces, though Francesca would dispute that. Surely
Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful
said a great deal about women and art.

The thing people seemed to overlook was that Marina had watched Yugoslavia turn into a religious bloodbath under Milosevic. Orthodox Christians, their crosses around their necks, killing Muslims and Catholics and atheists. Dead Bosnians and Croatians and Albanians on TV every night. Tortured women and girls. Rapes. Sex slaves. Mass graves. Marina knew what it did to people. She had lived with parents who each kept a loaded pistol beside the bed.

Marina had requested but been refused (once they understood what show she intended to stage) the Yugoslavian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Dieter had found her an airless basement ripe with summer heat and there she scrubbed cow bones fresh from the abattoir. Mounted on the walls of the cellar were photographs of her parents—Vojo and Danica—their images reflected in large copper water bowls. On one wall was a film of Marina dressed in a white lab coat, explaining about the wolf rat who eats all the other rats.

As visitors descended the stairs to the cellar, they were met by the sweet putrid smell of rotting meat. There was the artist in a bloodied white shift atop the pile of rotting bones, scrubbing away the blood and gore. This was a citizen's response and
a daughter's response. An artist's response. It was her own form of outrage and lament and possibly farewell to a country she had loved.

‘I am only interested in art which can change the ideology of society,' Marina said at the ceremony to award her the Golden Lion.

Francesca understood some of that. She was German. It was enough simply to say that. She was German, and nothing could take away the things that statement had come to mean since Hitler. Francesca recalled the writer she'd seen interviewed on
Oprah
. Oprah had asked him what race he was. The young man had responded: ‘The human race.'

Marina did not actively befriend politicians, nor did she seek out the allegiance of billionaires. If such people came into her life, they interested her only if she felt a connection. She did not force anything to be something it was not. If she had ever been Hippolyta of the Amazons, or Freyja the Norse goddess, then in this life Marina had subdued her warring instincts. But not her wanting ones. She wanted fame. And she had sought it through long hard labour, by endurance and pain and heartbreak and love, over decades in which the only thing that kept her going was her commitment to herself not to let this life go unrecorded.