The Museum of Modern Love (22 page)

When Marina was still living at home at age twenty-eight, she wanted to do a show where she would walk on stage dressed
the way her mother would have liked her to. In a nice skirt and blouse, or a dress and gloves, with hair and make-up done. Marina would stand and look at the public and then put one bullet in the chamber of the gun. She would spin the cylinder, put the gun to her temple, and shoot. If she didn't die, then she would dress in the clothes
she
wanted to wear, looking how
she
wanted to look, and leave.

She had also wanted to make a room where, when people entered, they would undress and all their clothes would be washed, dried and ironed then returned. The naked visitors would then dress in their clean clothes and exit the room. Laundromat as performance art. The university had refused to permit it.

Brittika thought of the little Citroën van parked at the entrance to the retrospective upstairs. Marina and Ulay had driven all over Europe in it, with their dog Alba. It no longer held the narrow mattress they had slept on for five years, the cooking equipment, the books that came and went as they travelled, the retsina bottles, Marina's latest knitting project. Alba was long dead. Gone too were the pale headlights pinning the road to their van, the goats that gave them milk in the morning, the walks on cliff tops, through forests and across town squares listening to conversations. Watching games of backgammon and boules. Making plans for this show and that. Gone was that relationship.

Brittika wondered if she would ever meet someone who made her feel the way Marina and Ulay had once felt about each other. She couldn't imagine living and working with someone. To let them hold a bow and arrow to your heart like Marina had in
Rest Energy
. Or take your breath, like in
Breathing In/Breathing Out
, until you were almost poisoned by the other person's carbon dioxide. Or to bind your hair together. That one made her particularly claustrophobic and she grimaced.

She hoped Marco hadn't caught that. She realised her heart had settled and the quiver down her spine was less insistent. She refocused on Marina's eyes and tried to be open.

I don't want to love like you've loved, she thought as she looked at Marina. Brittika knew she became way too intense with guys. Her last relationship had ended badly. She had basically stalked him. It embarrassed her to think back on it. She hoped Marco hadn't taken her photograph just then either.

She saw that Marina's gaze was lingering in the space just before Brittika's face as if there was another world right in front of her that Brittika couldn't see. What was Marina seeing?

Art did not stop, that's what Marina had said. Art did not get to five o'clock and say, “That's it, the day is done, go think about TV or making dinner.” It wasn't like that. It was there all the time: when you were chopping vegetables, talking with a friend, reading a newspaper, listening to music, having a party. It was always there offering suggestions, wanting you to go write or draw, sing or play. Wanting you to imagine big things, to connect with an audience, to use energy, to find energy. It wasn't ready when you were, it didn't come when you wanted it or leave when you were done. It took its time. It was often late, or slow, or not what you had in mind.

Brittika thought about how when she arrived home late her mother had always thought to put food aside for her. How she always left the lamp on in the hallway. Put fresh linen on her bed. As if her mother wanted Brittika to be sure that she was loved. That was the problem of adoption. You weren't. Not first off. Not enough to keep. Her birth mother had been a woman in China who had probably already given birth to one child. Or who had wanted a son, and so had given Brittika up in the hope that next time . . .

But she had been adopted and knew nothing other than her parents who had done so much for her. She was trying to do everything she could to make them know she appreciated them. But it wasn't easy to do that. She had urges to do things that she didn't understand. Without a sense of history, she didn't know why she'd had such an interest in sex from such a young age. It had already got her into trouble.

She wasn't sure she was essentially a good person. She thought when she could afford it, it would be good for her to live alone because the idea of it frightened her. She imagined a cottage by the sand dunes on the little island of Terschelling in the North Sea. Maybe she'd try to go there to finish the last draft of her PhD.

Brittika had a theory that Abramović didn't like being alone. Sitting at this table was part of that fear. Marina had been a solitary child, living with her grandmother for the first six years of her life, and seeing her father and mother only on Sundays. She had returned home to live with her parents when her brother was born. Not long after, she was hospitalised for a year with a blood condition. Her mother never came to visit.

Nobody might have come to
The Artist is Present
. The show could have opened and, after a few days, once the Abramović fans had come and gone, it might have wilted and died. People might have stood on the sidelines, frowned, scoffed and dismissed it. That was always the risk. The work might not have connected with anyone. Marina Abramović might have come all this way, from Belgrade to New York via forty years of art, to be alone at this table for three long months.

And then, for a long time, Brittika simply sat, and there was a luminescence that descended as if the skylight six floors above them was sending a cone of sunlight down into the atrium.
Marina's face looked as if it was made of stone as ancient as the face of the Sphinx, but now it was a man's face, and now an opal.

At some point Brittika saw a small square package in the air between Marina and herself. The package floated towards her and she could see it was gently vibrating. Without moving, somehow Brittika was able to reach out and take the package between her fingers. It smelled of wool wash. She thought of her mother in a pool of lamplight practising her calligraphy. She saw her father hanging out washing. She felt the smallness of herself. She thought of how she would lie awake and talk to Jesus as a child and several times she was sure Jesus had talked back.

She unwrapped the gold leaf around the package and within it she saw her soul. It was dark and eternal like starlight but shaped like a small mochi ball. She slipped it into her mouth and swallowed it.

When she finally stood and left the chair, the room had become a place of strangers. She had forgotten what language she was meant to speak. She went out into the street.

Later, lying on the grass in Central Park and staring at clouds, she felt as if parts of herself had flown away, or come home.

‘HEALAYAS? IT'S ARKY.'

‘Arky? Hi! Are you okay?'

Her voice was the same as ever. Suddenly Levin didn't know what he'd been afraid of, or why he hadn't called her months ago.

‘I saw you sat with Marina Abramović,' he said.

‘Yes, I have—twice now.'

‘Could we talk about it?'

‘
Bien sûr
. Will you come over?'

‘Umm . . .'

‘I could make something.'

‘Really? Thank you. I'd like that. Okay. What time?'

‘Anytime. Tonight? Just come over. I've really missed you.'

‘I thought you might like to do the vocals. On the new soundtrack I'm working on.'

‘Let's talk about it.'

‘I'll bring a few tracks.'

‘Okay. So does seven work?'

He looked at his watch, calculated the trip and his need to shower and shave. ‘Sure.'

‘
À bientôt
,' she said.

Healayas lived on Sixth Avenue, a few blocks north of the park. New apartments were multiplying inside old civic buildings. Cafes were replacing locksmiths. A new movie theatre had opened. But Harlem had been making itself over for millions of years. Before white and black, there were Indians, and before Indians there had been mastodons and bison. Before that there had been dinosaurs and glaciers and before that a great inland sea just waiting for the Appalachian Mountains to rise up out of the ocean and make Manhattan Island.

Levin took the A train express to 125th and then walked. He'd finally unpacked his old vinyls and had come across some Morrissey, Nick Drake's
Pink Moon
and several Leonard Cohen albums that Tom had given him years back. It had felt good to play music loud with the doors open onto the balcony and let the sound ripple out over the treetops on Washington Square.

Healayas's apartment was at the top of a brownstone fenced with polished steel, interrupted only by a gate with a video keypad and a slot for mail. The owner had gutted the first two floors but Healayas's apartment on the top floor remained unrenovated. Levin pressed the intercom. Healayas buzzed him in and he walked down the laneway and climbed the side stairs.

The door was open to the warm evening. She came towards him, embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘It's good to see you, Arky. You don't have to be quite so good at avoiding everyone, you know. We all miss you. I'm making gazpacho. I thought in this heat gazpacho followed by pasta with garlic prawns.'

She moved about the kitchen in cut-off blue jeans, a small red t-shirt, coloured leather ties on her wrists, her hair pinned back and falling between her shoulder blades in black ringlets. She was chopping garlic, parsley, grating lemon rind, tossing them together in a bowl, slicing bread.

Tom had met Healayas at a party in Aspen at Hunter S. Thompson's place. Healayas was years younger, but that hadn't stopped Tom. She had also had been with someone else at the time, but at the end of the holiday, she and Tom went back to Los Angeles together.

They had been a vivid couple. He knew Tom had asked her to marry him, and Healayas had not given him an answer. Once Tom had said to him that Healayas was Teflon. Everywhere they went, men slid off her. Did he mind? No, he said to Levin. He had to keep reassuring her that
he
wasn't going anywhere. But he did. He used to say Leonard Cohen must have been thinking of her when he wrote:

Levin had played that song again just this afternoon and heard other lyrics that had stuck on repeat in his mind.

On the table was fresh ciabatta, a dish of olive oil and another of dukkah. Healayas opened the bottle of wine he had brought. Plucking two glasses from a shelf, she poured for them and sat, looking at Levin across the wooden counter-top.

‘So, tell me, what's new, Arky?'

‘I've been working on a soundtrack. It's a feature length animation. A company called Izumi that's partnered with Warner. Japanese director.'

‘An animation? Is that a first for you?'

‘It is,' said Levin. ‘But I like it.'

‘So how does it work with the Japanese director? You go there? He comes here?'

‘We Skype. But I may go there soon. We may even do the final soundtrack in Tokyo.'

‘You want to play me something?'

‘Later. I've got some lyrics I'd love your thoughts on.'

He explained the script Seiji Isoda had adapted about a woman who was a fish by night and how she falls in love with a man who is also a bear and the King of Winter.

‘What is the problem? What makes the tension?' Healayas asked.

‘They have a child, and the child has to choose whether to be a bear like her father, which means leaving, or stay and be a fish like her mother.'

‘To become your mother or your father, that is the eternal question,' said Healayas. She stared out over the low rooftops of South Harlem. The heat hung damp in the air. A thunderstorm was brewing.