The Museum of Modern Love (18 page)

‘And see the nudes upstairs?' She smiled.

‘If I must.'

‘I'll think about it. I'm so busy.'

‘Okay,' he said.

‘I saw Healayas the other day,' Alice told him, scraping the last of the chocolate cake and ice cream off the plate. ‘Have you seen her? Are you guys doing the club again through summer?'

‘No. I haven't seen any of them since . . .' Levin trailed off. ‘It's probably too late.'

‘You should. It's such a good gig.'

‘Would you come play with us some time?'

‘Hmmm . . .' She looked away.

‘This is what Mom wanted, Alice,' he said. ‘As the person with power of attorney, you know that better than anyone.'

‘Yes,' she said, turning to him again. ‘But how would any of us know that's what she wants?'

‘Well, she put it in writing—she made it legal.'

‘That was when she was well. That was before she stopped being able to change her mind.'

‘Do you think she wants to change her mind?'

‘I don't know,' Alice said and tears filled her eyes.

‘What would you have me do?' he asked, finishing his espresso.

Alice said, ‘I just feel like she's so alone out there and I can't visit every weekend.'

Across the room a baby had started crying. The noise penetrated Levin's ear with a particular ferocity.

‘Shall we go?' he asked.

On the sidewalk she kissed his cheek and said, ‘You know, Dad, I'm not really okay about any of this. I just have to keep trusting it will all work out.'

‘Okay,' he said.

‘So, thanks for dinner.'

She walked away and he wanted to cry then. It wasn't okay with him either and he didn't trust it would work out. He wanted it to be like it was. He wanted Lydia to come home and see the way he'd arranged everything. He wanted her there in the morning drying her hair on a towel. He wanted her voice on the other end of the phone talking about what they would have for dinner. Maybe if the
Kawa
score earned him nominations . . . maybe if his new album took off . . . He needed some sort of sign. But without stars, or God, there was nothing to wish upon and nowhere to ask for help.

THE NEXT MORNING, HE TOOK
an early Skype call from the film director, Seiji Isoda, in Tokyo. Then he carefully arranged the three pillows on the chair again, red, red and red, then the round white pillow and the long black cashmere scarf for Abramović's hair.

‘Good morning,' he said. I'm frightened of a pillow, he thought. But why was he frightened? Was he always frightened? Yes, he thought with startling clarity. I am always frightened. He wanted to forget that thought right away.

He wasn't a bigger man. He knew that. He was an average man, and something was wrong with him. Where was the feeling that everything was alright? Surely by fifty you were meant to have that locked in?

Who was he, when all was said and done? Who did people see when they saw him? People said he had nice eyes. Would Marina think he had nice eyes? He wasn't impressively tall. He wasn't impressively handsome. Lydia used to remind him to smile. ‘You know, you even frown in your sleep,' she said. ‘And I whisper to you that I love you, and sometimes your frown goes away.'

She had been certainty. When everything fell apart, she would be there. It was partly why he always felt so angry when she got
sick. He didn't like that the whole world wobbled when that happened, and he felt small. Small and alone. And now everyone knew. They knew that somehow he had failed Lydia. When she might have needed him the way couples seemed to do when life got tough, she had shunted him to the side.

He continued to gaze at the pillow face and imagined the dark eyes of Marina Abramović looking back at him. Today he felt more comfortable on the chair. There was a blade of sunshine coming in across the floor and illuminating the edge of the Danish dining table. He liked nice things. He liked the things they had bought that would always have style.

Mostly Lydia was right. He didn't like people. Hardly at all. He certainly didn't like thinking about people. He didn't want to know about starving people who lived on one corncob a day if they were lucky. He didn't care about people who would be swallowed up by climate change. He didn't care about the plastic takeout containers of his life that stretched out behind him in a great wake that probably reached from here to the moon by now. He didn't even like living on this planet particularly. It seemed complex and often violent.

He hadn't much liked growing up. He'd loved his mother but he hadn't liked her. She had meditated. She had silent days. Days when he was not allowed to speak to her and she did not speak to him. They ate in silence, washed up in silence, went to bed in silence. The piano was the only thing allowed to disturb the house because Levin, his mother assured him, was destined for greatness. She was sure there was some sort of plan at work in the universe, a plan that would see the stars align, and her nights nursing to get him through school, and her weekend shifts at the aged-care facility, would no longer be necessary because Levin was going to be famous.

He hardly remembered his father. He remembered the night his mother had come into his room. He had been four. He remembered the light from the hallway and the weight of her pressing the sheets down on him and her voice in the dark whispering, ‘Your father is dead, Arky. He's dead.'

Perhaps she said more. He didn't remember. He only remembered that afterwards she had left the room and he had laid there in the darkness. He wasn't sure he was going to be able to keep breathing. Or if he was even allowed to breathe when his father was dead.

Levin had a dim memory of his father holding his hand as they walked down a flight of stairs. But perhaps he had made it up. When his mother died, it had simply consolidated his thinking. Bad things happened at any moment. It was an almost unbearable effort being human. Did it matter that he'd loved Lydia? Did it matter that he'd tried to be a good husband and father?

He had made some nice film scores. He had made some people happy with his music. Other than that, did it really matter how he lived his life? It was hard enough knowing which light bulb to buy. How to understand a software upgrade. How to read the baseball fixture. How to sort out a new phone. The list was endless. If the little things made no sense, what hope was there for big things like marriages?

He'd done his best. Clearly it hadn't been enough. He felt immensely sad. He felt as if he'd missed something very important. Lydia had tried to get him to go to therapy. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to have some freedom around all your worry?' she'd said. ‘And look what happened to you. It could really help.'

But he didn't need help from a stranger. He didn't want to be some clichéd New Yorker with therapy every Friday morning before the weekend came and everything went pear-shaped.

Pillow-Marina looked back at him. She said nothing. But she was there. That seemed to matter. Even in her pillow form, it felt good to know she was there. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, dropped his head as he'd seen them do at the museum.

He got up from the table, noting that he'd sat for almost half an hour, which surprised him because it had felt shorter. He made coffee. He thought about dinner with Alice and decided it seemed to require a follow-up. He didn't know how to help. He'd never known how to help. It was his great flaw. His father had died and he didn't know how to help. His mother died and maybe she wouldn't have if she hadn't needed to get out of the house that night. She'd liked her night-time drives. But he suspected she had driven away because she needed to be alone. He must have been hard to live with. There was no help for that. It was long ago. He didn't know how to solve anything but music.

He sat in his studio, coffee cup in hand, and listened again to the melodies he was discovering for
Kawa
, and the one melody that might repeat throughout the film. The soundtrack had to evoke love and loss in a world cloaked in snow and he thought, I'm writing the music of this winter. The winter when everything went away.

Isoda had liked both theme track options he'd sent. The completion of the new scenes would determine which melody they finally chose. Or it might take longer to be sure. They had discussed the possibility of him going to Tokyo next month to Isoda's studio. With the new scenes he'd have more than forty minutes of footage, but they weren't consecutive scenes. It was hard to gauge precisely the emotional arc of the story. If he could see the work in progress—see the sketches taking form, see what Isoda was seeing—then he could be sure that the melody would draw the pictures together. If it did there was the score to write,
an orchestra waiting for its parts and a studio to book. He'd need vocals and session musos.

He began considering which orchestra, the pros and cons of recording in New York or possibly Chicago. Maybe even Tokyo. This was what he loved, when the process began to escalate and the outcome began to appear.

Lydia had been the same about architecture. He had stood in her buildings and been in awe of her. Floors played music, ceilings rained and rooms were divided by live fish, butterflies, crickets. Holographic symbols were pinned to the night sky, a pedestrian bridge rolled up like a caterpillar, filaments of light made an ever-changing ceiling of rainbows, corridors rippled with laughter. In her buildings there was no separation between the interior and the exterior worlds. The private homes she designed had Japanese maples inside the front door, waterfalls on rooftops, fragrant vertical interior gardens and streams running through bathrooms.

By her mid-thirties she was so in demand that she could choose one or two commercial projects and a house or two to do each year. She liked to be there when Alice came home from school. She had a waiting list two years ahead. Invitations to travel and speak piled up on her desk. Awards and citations cluttered her shelves. Some days Levin wondered how to reach out and touch her. She seemed to belong to other people. Was he even visible when she had flown in from Shanghai or Madrid? She kissed him, hugged him, was gone into the bathroom, dressing, asking him how he was, how Alice was, and all the time she was watching the clock, considering how long his answer was taking in relation to the traffic that would catch them at 51st on their way downtown to see the Philharmonic and the things she had yet to prepare for the next day.

When they made love it felt like the only time he could really hold her. When she woke in the night, she would reach out
and curl herself around him, and he felt as if he was the luckiest man in the world. When he woke she was often gone to her desk. In her pale blue hooded dressing-gown she had the look of a nun at prayer.

Washington Square had been her dream. He didn't know why she wanted to live on Washington Square. She just liked it. Of course it had to be the right building, have the right bones. So they had thrown themselves into the New York real estate Olympics. For every co-op they had to provide his work history, her work history, their financials for the last five years, everything that captured them on paper: references, qualifications, memberships. Their personal details laid bare for strangers to assess, compare and pass judgement.

‘There are new apartments on the river over in the Meatpacking District,' Anastasia, the Russian realtor, advised them. ‘They're very sizeable. Views over the Hudson. Near the High Line. They're also in your price range.'

‘Lydia wants Washington Square,' Levin said.

‘Okay,' Anastasia said, picking up the red leather folder. ‘Some very nice places on offer just now, plenty of movement and good prices.'

Several times they missed out. And then this apartment had come up.

Lydia saw the possibilities the balcony and the southern light afforded them. They had talked of ideas to reconfigure it at some point in the future. She had gone back and forth across town. Produced endless paperwork for him to sign and complete. And then they got the call. It was theirs.

Lydia had been looking drawn as fall faded and winter wrapped the city. She'd been back and forth to London all year, working on an interactive installation for children commissioned after the launch of her Rain Room in Cairo. Because no English child needed an education in varieties of rain, it was to be a horizontal and vertical flower and fruit garden within a vast bee house. She called it the Pollen Project. It was meant to be ready for the London Olympics in 2012.