The Museum of Modern Love (17 page)

‘Didn't you have an Anne Boleyn theory?' Dieter asked her as he poured Grey Goose for them both, adding fresh lime and a splash of tonic. He was off the phone at last. An evening when they could eat dinner on the couch together and watch a DVD.

‘Oh, yes,' said Francesca, remembering that she had once suspected Marina was the reincarnated second wife of Henry the Eighth. ‘I'd forgotten that one. But it does make sense.'

‘If I had been Anne Boleyn in a past life, then I'm not sure I'd be worried about death; I think I'd be worried about love,' said Dieter, chewing on a piece of celery. ‘I think I'd worry about
the cost . . .
wild for to hold, though I seem tame
, to condense Thomas Wyatt.'

Francesca took the glass he offered her. ‘To our Marina.'

And they both drank.

For twenty years Francesca had watched people subsumed by Marina's greater force. They bathed in her radiance, her easy humour, her hospitality and magnetism.

‘It will be the making of her. You know that,' Dieter said.

‘I see it happening right in front of us,' Francesca agreed. ‘And you were pivotal. It was refining it, pushing her to make it simpler—it worked. It's so utterly simple. The staircase, the theatre of those early ideas, it wouldn't have been nearly so powerful. This is perfect. All that's left is energy. It's not really remarkable to think that people are being drawn to it. Or that those who sit are being profoundly affected.'

‘I have asked Colm to write something about his sitting.'

‘Good,' said Francesca.

Francesca liked writers. She liked to feed them. She liked to feed anyone creative. She should have given the wall inside their door over to signatures and by now it would have been filled with people who had eaten at their table.

‘Antony Gormley is getting the usual attention,' Dieter said.

‘Ah, yes,' said Francesca. ‘I listened to the podcast.'

‘And?'

‘Oh, Arnold was saying the standard things about Gormley's use of space and referencing the Mersey and London, and then Healayas Breen said this interesting thing. She said historically the artist's role had been to stimulate us and arrest our visual senses with colour, texture, content—but that now YouTube gave us all that. So Gormley's statues looking down on the city and Abramović at MoMA were two new considerations for what art
might be into the future. Perhaps art was evolving into something to remind us of the power of reflection, even stillness.'

When Marina had done
The House with the Ocean View
in 2002, Dieter hadn't been sure he could bear it. They had constructed three open rooms on the wall. The rooms were interlinked and a ladder rested against each room, but the steps were made of razor-sharp knife blades, making it impossible to ascend or descend. For twelve days Marina had lived up there in those three open rooms. One held a bed, one a shower and toilet, and the third a table and chair. For twelve days Marina had no food, nothing but water to drink and a metronome to keep her company.

Dieter had left the gallery each night and locked the doors, knowing Marina was still in there. If there was a fire, he had locked her in and she had no way out other than down those ladders of knives. In the morning, when he and the staff arrived, she would be there going through her rituals. She wouldn't have it any other way.

Each day she took three showers. Every day she changed the tunic and pants she wore for another of identical shape but a new colour. Sometimes she began a Serbian song and, as much as possible, she maintained eye contact with the people in the gallery.
Establishing an energy dialogue
, Marina had called it.

Some people came every day and sat for hours on the floor. Someone offered her an apple, placing it up on the platform. It stayed there until one of the staff removed it. When Francesca had visited
The House with the Ocean View
, the gallery had felt like a church. And now the atrium at MoMA did too.

‘Is she reading any of the reviews?' she asked Dieter.

Dieter shook his head. ‘I tell myself that if I sit with her for a few minutes, that's a few minutes in which nothing is wanted of her,' he said.

Francesca held his hand. ‘On the last day she'll stand up and it will be over. She'll bathe in all the acknowledgement that will come to her and forget what it has cost her. The cost to her organs, her kidneys. Her mind. The hunger. When it's a complete success—and it will be—she will forget it all. You know her. She will be in diva mode, glorious, radiant, and it will all be in the past. And then she'll crash.'

When Francesca had met Dieter, he had been getting over a traumatic break-up.

‘You rescued me,' he liked to tell her in those early years. Abducted his heart and never returned it. She knew he loved Marina. They both loved Marina. He must love Marina. But his heart was hers.

‘You have to remember that,' Francesca continued. ‘To make sure her house is ready for her. It has to be stocked. Ready for her to have complete rest. In the end, this may take something from her that she can't replace, but if it wasn't so fraught with danger, and so hard, she would never choose it.'

Dieter's eyes filled with tears. They sat there, side by side on the couch. Thirty-four years they had been married. Thirty-four years, four children, five grandchildren, Berlin to New York, and how did they stay this way, where she knew him so intimately that nothing was new, and yet he was still a mystery to himself?

And the reverse was true, Francesca thought. Perhaps that was the way of long marriage. As they got older, they could never lose track of themselves. They had the other to remind them.

WHEN LEVIN ARRIVED TO MEET
Alice for their Sunday night meal, she was listening to something and reading what appeared to be a large illustrated medical textbook. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He placed the earbud she handed him in his left ear.

‘Evanescence,' said Alice. ‘
Fallen
. 2003. Hi.'

Levin nodded, listening to a wash of surging guitars and soaring vocals.

‘They're making another album right now,' she added, closing the book slowly as if it was hard to take her eyes from the page.

‘What else are you listening to?'

‘Hmmm . . .
Horehound
.' She met his eyes with her own green ones. ‘So what's up?'

‘It's a very strange time.'

‘And that's what you wanted to discuss?'

‘No. I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you if you're alright.'

‘If I'm alright? Are you serious?'

‘Yes, I am.'

Alice wanted to hurt him then. It had taken him all this time to think that maybe she wasn't okay. But it was hard to be unkind to him. It was like kicking a puppy and she hated that
too, that her father was like that. There were shadows under his eyes. He looked thinner. She would not feel sorry for him.

She said, ‘I cut up a cadaver last week. Well, not all of it. Some of it. The thigh, the gluteus maximus, the little sinews around the hip joint.'

He looked at her fine white fingers and imagined them unfurling nerves and arteries, her clinical eye observing the simple complexity of that weight-bearing joint.

‘I think its normal,' she went on, ‘to feel a little unhinged when you have to deal with a cadaver for the first time. They told us that, and I'm sure they are watching for it too. I think if you enjoy it, they'd be worried.'

‘I guess they don't want sociopaths qualifying with degrees in medicine,' said Levin, thinking of
Dexter
, and how sociopaths, even serial killers, had become the subject of Oscar-winning movies and prime-time viewing on television.

‘I'm sure a few have,' Alice said. It was hard to say which of her fellow students would become the sociopath, or the murderer. Certainly several would become drug addicts. Some probably already were. It was the law of averages, after all. All of medicine was based on it at some level. How many people you had to immunise before the population was safe. How many would die of cancer and how many from heart disease. How many would have a child with a birth defect. How many would contract late-onset diabetes.

Alice was wearing a red floral dress and a white cardigan embroidered with blue and green butterflies. She had a thing for old-fashioned dresses and mismatching patterns. Levin could never see her without thinking of Björk. But where Björk had a bone wildness in her face, Alice had the sheen of Ingrid Bergman, with those big eyes and big smile in a cream and pink complexion. He'd worried through her teenage years that one day
she'd realise that she wasn't a stick-thin girl in the latest tiny jeans. He worried that she'd get anorexic or bulimic or depressed. But Alice never did. She discovered retro clothes, put them together in a peculiarly individual style, and found friends wherever she went. She had been in and out of love half a dozen times with boys who had made his palms sweat, but nothing and nobody had yet dimmed her kindness, or the light in her eyes—except perhaps him. And this troubled him.

He hadn't considered Alice when he'd complied with Lydia's wishes. He hadn't thought he needed to. She had her own life. Her own apartment. He had thought, perhaps wrongly, that his job as a father was done. He knew he had tried to be a good father.

After Alice was born, they had decided it was too great a risk to Lydia to have another baby. So Alice was it. Levin had been relieved. It had been a shock how much noise babies made. It had upended his life. Alice the baby, named after Lydia's mother, had become the central drawcard for Lydia's attention. Alice the five-year-old had diaries scheduled around her. Alice the teenager became a vegetarian and suddenly he was eating tofu. Alice determined Lydia's life. The lateness of the hour she got to bed, the washing that needed doing, the movies they watched, the places they holidayed. Alice toyed with the idea of architecture and worked for a couple of years in Lydia's firm after senior year, before going to France. Then she applied to medical school at NYU and was accepted. And here she was, and Levin didn't know how he had got so much older that his daughter was this woman.

Alice ordered the duck ravioli (vegetarianism having gone the way of the Goth phase that happened about the same time) and Levin the grilled pork chop. After the wine arrived, and the food soon after, she said, as if complying with a social expectation, ‘So, what have you been doing?'

He told her about the performance at MoMA.

‘Oh, Marina Abramović,' Alice said. ‘I really want to see it. Is it good? What's she like?'

‘Very still.'

‘Did you see the naked people upstairs?'

‘No, I haven't seen that yet.'

‘It's been all over the news!' She laughed. ‘How long does she have to sit there for?'

‘Until the end of May,' he said.

‘Wow. Really? Did you sit with her?'

‘Oh no. No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Well, there's a queue, for one thing. There are usually at least twenty people waiting to sit by first thing in the morning and the queue just grows after that. Some people sit for hours and the rest of them all wait for nothing . . .'

‘And she never gets up? She just sits there?'

He nodded.

‘But what do people do?'

‘We watch her. It's very strange.' He shrugged.

There was a silence and then he thought to say, ‘So, how goes the world of medicine?'

‘It's big. My brain has to keep taking in all this information and trying to organise it. But the prac work is great. It's amazing to actually work with a real body and see all this incredible construction of muscles and ligaments, bones and blood vessels.'

‘Do the cadavers you work on have names still? Are they John or Nancy?'

‘No, they have codes.'

‘Is it yours then, for the duration—the body?' he asked.

‘Yes, but we share them. There are two of us working on ours. And the third-year students have already removed the face and
explored the head. At first we had one that didn't have much muscle so we got another one. Most of them die quite old so there's not much muscle left.'

‘Of natural circumstances?' he asked with a smile.

‘I think they have to die a certain way for them to be suitable,' she said, frowning slightly. Clearly this wasn't an area where jokes were made.

‘Is it possible to go all day without urinating?' he asked.

‘If you don't drink,' she said, ‘but I think it would be hard. You mean Marina Abramović, right? We've been talking about it at school. I mean, she's got to be getting dehydrated. Unless she drinks all night, but she couldn't stay awake all day if she did that. We're all betting she has a catheter. Has she done something like this before?'

‘I don't really know very much about her,' he said. ‘Do you want to go together one day?'