The Museum of Modern Love (2 page)

And so we come to Arky Levin. He would like to think he stands apart from the riffraff of humanity, isolated by his fine musical mind. He believed, until recently, that he was anaesthetised to commonplace suffering by years of eating well, drinking good wine, watching good movies, having good doctors, being loved by a good woman, having the luck of good genetics, and generally living a benign and blameless life.

It is 1 April, but Levin, in his apartment on Washington Square, is oblivious to the date and its humorous connotations. If someone played a practical joke on him this morning, he would be confused—possibly for hours. The morning sun is spilling into the penthouse. Rigby, a grey rug of cat, lies sprawled on her back on the sofa with her paws stretched high above her head. In contrast, Levin is curled forward over a Model B Steinway, his fingers resting silently on the keyboard. He is so still he might be a puppet awaiting the first twitch of the string above. In fact, he is waiting for an idea. That is usually where I come in, but Levin has not been himself for many months. To write music he must hurdle over a morass of broken dreams. Every time he goes to leap, he comes up short.

Levin and I have known each other a very long time, and when he is like this he can be unreachable, so caught on the wheel of memory he forgets he has choices. What is he remembering now? Ah yes, the film dinner from the night before.

He had expected questions. It was why he'd avoided everyone, hadn't attended a function since December. It was still too raw. Too impossible. For the same reason he'd ignored emails, avoided phone calls and finally unplugged the answering machine in February after one particularly upsetting message.

And then last night, in a living nightmare, three of them had got him at one end of the room and harangued him, berated him. Outrageous claims of abandonment and lack of responsibility.

‘You don't seem to realise I had no choice in this,' he had told them.

‘You're her husband. If it was the other way around . . .'

‘Her instructions are perfectly clear. This is what she wants. Do I have to send you a copy of the letter?'

‘But, Arky, you've abandoned her.'

‘No, I haven't. If anyone has been abandoned . . .'

‘Please tell me you are not suggesting, Arky, that you have the raw deal here?'

‘You can't just leave her there.'

‘Well, what exactly did you have in mind?' he had asked. ‘That I bring her home?'

‘Yes, for God's sake. Yes.'

They had all seemed stunned at his reluctance.

‘But she doesn't want that.'

‘Of course she does. You're being unbelievably blind if you think anything else.'

He had excused himself, walked the twenty blocks in a rage, aware also that he was weeping and grateful for the handkerchief he never went anywhere without. The bitter taste of helplessness
lingered on his tongue. He scratched at the rough patch on his hand that might be cancer. He thought of the night sweats too. Waking drenched at 3 am. Having to change his soaked pyjamas and slide over to the other, empty side of the bed where the sheets were dry. He wondered if it was his heart. If he died in the apartment it could be days before anybody noticed. Except Rigby, who would possibly settle on his corpse until she realised he was not getting up to feed her. It would be Yolanda, their housekeeper, who would find him. Yolanda had been in their life for years. Ever since they were married. Lydia had thought it as normal to employ a maid as keeping milk in the fridge. She had stayed on, Yolanda, through the move to Washington Square. Levin never liked to be home when Yolanda came. Lydia was good at small talk with shop people and teachers and tradespeople. Levin was not.

Levin thought that if he died, the trees on the deck in their tall glazed pots would almost certainly die too for lack of water. He got up and made another pot of coffee, sliced an onion bagel and lowered one round into the toaster. Within minutes it was smoking and blackened. With the second half he assumed complete vigilance, spearing the thing with a knife when he sensed it was ready, hoisting it up and reinserting it in a slightly different position. Why had Lydia bought this particular toaster and not a version that didn't destroy his breakfast every morning? How was it possible they could invent drones to kill a single man somewhere in Pakistan, but not perfect the toaster?

Leaving his plate and cup in the sink, Levin washed his hands and dried them carefully before returning to the piano. On the music ledge was an illustration of a Japanese woman with long blue-black hair and vivid green eyes. He wanted to write something spellbinding for her. A flute would be good, he had decided a few days before. But everything he came up with
reminded him of
The Mission
. He felt like a beginner again, searching through old melodies, attempting transitions that didn't work, harmonies that tempted and then became elusive.

And so for the next few hours Levin immersed himself in the process, moving from the Steinway in the living room where so many of his ideas began, to his studio in the western end of the apartment with its Kurzweil keyboard, Bose speakers and two iMacs giving him every variation of instrument at his fingertips. He took the ink drawing with him and put it back on the corkboard where storyboard sequences in the same distinctive style were pinned. There were also more illustrations of the same Japanese woman. In one she was bending over a pool of water, her dress the green and shimmer of fish scales. In another she was reaching out to touch the nose of a huge white bear. And in another she was walking with a child along a snow-laden path, red leaves the only touch of colour.

Levin switched from flute to violin on the keyboard, hearing the same transitions from C to F to A minor. But violin wasn't right. It was too civilised for forest and river. I suggested the viola, but he dismissed me, thinking it too melancholy. But wasn't melancholy what he was looking for?

I had encouraged him to take this film score because solitude may be a form of contentment when you live in a fairy story, but not when you are an artist in New York who believes your best years are still ahead of you. Artists are stubborn. They have to be. Even when nothing is happening, the only way through is to work and work.

I drew Levin's attention to the day outside. He went to the window and saw sunlight dazzling the fountain in Washington Square. Purple tulips were blooming on the walkways. He looked again at the audio file on his screen. I reminded him of the previous evening, before the women had pinned him against the
table. He had sat with his old mentor, Eliot, who had told him of the Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA. It was not the Burton I wanted him to see, but it was a way of getting him there. For all he wasn't listening to my musical suggestions, he was amenable to an interruption.

‘You will have to wait,' he said to the Japanese woman, but he might as well have been talking to me. In his bedroom he chose a favourite blue Ben Sherman jacket and his dark grey Timberland sneakers.

He took the E train and got off at Fifth Avenue, crossed the street and walked into the Museum of Modern Art. With the membership Lydia bought them each year, he skipped the lengthy queue for tickets. The narrow corridor to the Burton exhibition was jammed with people. Instantly he was surrounded by the warmth of bodies, the gabble of voices. Within a few minutes the illustrations of stitched blue women, their wide-eyed panic and long-limbed emptiness, mingled with the odour and proximity of warm bodies, began to make Levin nauseous. He saw with relief an exit sign. Pushing open the door, he found himself in an empty corridor. He stopped, leaned against the wall and breathed.

He intended, at that moment, to go downstairs and sit in the sculpture garden to enjoy the sunshine. Then the murmur from the atrium drew him in.

IN THE ATRIUM OF MOMA,
visitors were observing a woman in a long red dress sitting at a table. It was a blond wood table with blond wood chairs, as if it had come from IKEA. Opposite the woman in the red dress, a younger woman sat wearing a lightweight beige coat. The two women were gazing into each other's eyes.

Levin noticed white tape on the floor marking out a square. People rimmed this square. Some were standing, others were sitting cross-legged, and all of them were watching the two women at its centre.

Levin heard a small girl ask, ‘Mom, is that lady plastic?'

‘No, of course she's not,' the mother replied in a hushed voice.

‘What is she, then?' the girl asked. ‘Mom? Mom?'

The mother had no answer and her gaze did not leave the spectacle in front of her.

Levin could see the child's point. The woman in the red dress was like plastic. Her skin looked as if the floodlights had bleached her to alabaster.

Suddenly, without any cue, the young woman got up and left the table. The woman in the long dress closed her eyes and bowed her head, but remained seated. After some moments a
man sat down in the empty chair. The woman now raised her head and opened her eyes to look directly at him.

The man had a crumpled face with untidy grey hair and a short hooked nose. He looked small opposite the woman. The two of them gazed into each other's eyes. More than gazing, Levin thought. Staring. The woman did not smile. She hardly even blinked. She was entirely still.

The man rearranged his feet and his hands twitched on his lap. But his head and eyes were very still as he looked back at the woman. He sat like that for maybe twenty minutes. Levin found himself absorbed by this spectacle, unwilling to leave. When the man finally left the chair, Levin watched him walk to the back of the atrium and lean his forehead against the wall. Levin wanted to go ask the man what had happened as he sat. How had it felt? But to do so, he realised, would be like asking a stranger what he prayed for.

By then another woman—middle-aged, broad-faced, tortoiseshell glasses—was sitting. Levin moved towards the black lettering on the wall that read:
The Artist is Present—Marina Abramović.
The text beneath was obscured by the crowd entering and exiting the room.

A professional photographer appeared to be documenting everyone who came and went from the table through a long lens mounted on a tripod. Levin nodded to him and the young man smiled briefly. He wore black pants and a black turtleneck, a three-day growth on his perfect jawline. When you lived in the Village you could be forgiven for thinking that cantilevered cheekbones and sculptured bodies were taking over the world.

The middle-aged woman sitting opposite the person Levin assumed was Marina Abramović had never been beautiful. She left after only a few minutes and the crowd took the opportunity
to dissipate. Levin heard comments as people made their way to the stairs.

‘Is that all that happens? Does she just sit?'

‘Don't you want to see the Picassos?'

‘Do you think there's any chance we'll get a table? My feet are killing me.'

‘Do you really want to try to get to M&M's World today?'

‘Have you seen the Tim Burton? It's so crowded.'

‘Is there a restroom on this floor?'

‘What time was she meant to be here?'

Levin returned to the side of the square where he could see both people in profile once more. He sat down on the floor. A young man now sat opposite the woman. He was strikingly handsome with luminous eyes, a wide mouth and shoulder-length curls, the face of an angel sent to visit dying children. Levin was interested to see if the woman would respond to this aesthetic but she didn't, as far as he could see. She maintained the exact same gaze she'd been giving everyone else. She gazed gently and intently. Her body didn't move. She sat very straight with her hands in her lap. From time to time her eyelids blinked but nothing else.

A hush descended on the atrium. It became evident that the young man was weeping. It wasn't a dramatic gesture. Tears were running down his face while his glistening angel eyes continued to gaze at the woman. After some time, the woman began to weep in the same silent passive way. The weeping went on as if they could both see they must settle for losing something. Levin looked about and realised the atrium had quietly filled again and everyone was staring at the two people.

Levin thought there ought to be music. The woman in red was surrounded by the crowd and she was alone. It was utterly public but intensely private. A woman beside Levin pulled out
her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Catching his glance, she smiled self-consciously. Along the row of faces watching the performance, Levin saw that many eyes were wet with tears.

Time went by and the man at the table was no longer weeping. He was leaning in towards the woman. Everything between the man and the woman became microscopic. Levin felt that something was lifting right out of the man and creeping away. He didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was unfolding. The woman seemed to become enormous, as if she stretched out and touched the walls and stood as tall as all six floors of the atrium. Levin closed his eyes and breathed. His heart was racing. When he opened them again, she was once more a woman in a red dress, the right size, no longer young but full of virility and elegance. Something about her was as alluring as polished wood or light catching a sleeve of antique silk.