The Museum of Modern Love (29 page)

For a moment her dark eyes observed him as if he was a fresh canvas, then she blinked and her gaze settled. It felt like a spotlight had hit him.
Life specimen Arnold Keeble.
At first it was just the hard chair, the intense white of her dress, her face that seemed to emanate light as if Rembrandt had painted her. But then he felt the lens of her mind asking him a question. He was imagining it. It was part of this game of sitting. This game of mirrors. Still, it niggled at him. She was mute, and yet everything about her was loud. What did she want from him? The scale of
the square had expanded so the noise of the crowd felt far away, almost as if he and Marina were underwater.

He thought of his wife, Beatrice, and the coldness that had grown between them since he'd refused to have children. They had agreed, before he married her, there would be no children. It was typical of women to change their minds. But he wouldn't. There had been scenes. She had tried all sorts of tricks. He'd rather admired her determination to bring a little Keeble into the world. But not enough to allow it to happen. He had taken himself off for a vasectomy and told her about it afterwards. He had wondered if she might leave him, but had guessed she wouldn't. He'd guessed right. She preferred him to see her suffering. The clothes she needed to buy, the jewellery, the vacations he owed her now that she would never have a baby.

It wasn't the childlessness that he questioned—even Marina had chosen that. It was significance. What had significance? When he woke in the night, he didn't want to reach for Beatrice. Of late, he wanted to reach for Healayas Breen. That had disconcerted him.

He didn't like this train of thought. He wanted to think that Healayas was just another affair. No different to discovering a new vineyard or vintage. A new artist. A new motorbike. Their relationship didn't matter. It was art direction. He had an exquisite mistress. He had curated his life to be a gallery of careful perfection.

He felt a tear run down his cheek. He blinked and felt confused. Had he been sad? Then he dropped his head, stood up and, putting two hands to his face, rubbed his eyes and cheeks as he returned to where James Franco was standing with the security guard.

When Keeble checked the Flickr feed the next night, he saw he had sat for eight minutes. The photograph captured the moment
when that single tear had reached the light on his cheekbone. He would have to answer for it. Had he been moved by the performance? Yes, he could say. I found it moving but also impenetrable. Beatrice would surmise that he had regrets, when she saw the picture. But he didn't. Regrets would involve thinking about the past. A decade of therapy had taught him that thinking about the past was an expensive hobby.

What exactly had he been thinking? He regarded the photograph, the thick wave of hair, the fine block of nose, the way he held his chin, the uncertainty in his eyes. That was the bit he didn't recognise. He had liked to think he was never going to get past being a self-indulgent prick, because that was how he'd got to where he was. No one, not a child, not the many pleasures of Healayas Breen, not eight minutes with Marina Abramović, not even Beatrice leaving him, was going to change that.

In the hallway of his apartment he stopped and sat down on a bench. Here he could look out over the bonsai garden and, beyond it, the Hudson. He sat for some time until he nodded, as if agreeing with something unsaid, then turned and went into the bedroom.

LIKE ALL ADULT HUMANS, MARINA
Abramović's body was made of some forty-three kilograms of oxygen, most in dilution as water. She also had the regular allowance of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and a kilo or so of calcium in her bones. After the main elements, things in the human body get a little smaller. Around seven hundred and fifty milligrams of phosphorous, one hundred and forty grams of potassium, ninety-five grams of chlorine, a little magnesium, a little less zinc. There was also silver, gold, lead, copper, tellurium, zirconium, lithium, mercury and manganese. Even a milligram or so of uranium. The human body is an incantation of earth, air and water.

Through the tinted windows of the car, she watches New York go about its 9 am business. Two girls in high heels are each carrying a large flowering pot plant like something from a French movie. Three men in skinny jeans and dark glasses are looking like an advertisement for
Vanity Fair.
For a moment I hear her consider that the real is literally unbearable. Traffic lights and crowds. Scaffolding where this building and that is being restored, repainted. New apartments advertised on giant billboards. New fragrances and movies and television shows. New everything every moment
of the day. American luxury, so tantalising, so tempting and so treacherous.

Marina loves luxury as much as anyone. She loves fabrics and food. Simple is the hardest thing to achieve. She thinks of Klaus Biesenbach, who invited her to create this show at MoMA. Marina and Klaus were lovers years ago. He still loves her and she him, the way some people manage to do love in all its forms. He is one of the great curators. He has made this possible. You might imagine he has a house filled with art but he doesn't. He lives in the simplest apartment in the world. An ultimate Manhattan view with blank walls and not a painting or sculpture anywhere. Why would he need them when he spends every day in one of the most wonderful galleries in the world? Why indeed.

When Marina was sixteen, Danica employed an art tutor. He was very short, in a red coat, with a dark beard. He was the latest in a long line of people employed to make the young Marina into something Danica could be proud of. First it was a pianist, then a linguist. Later an historian, and then, as a last resort, an artist. Perhaps the little man understood this about a certain type of mother. So once the door was closed, and he was alone with the young Marina, he did not bring out paper and pencils. He unrolled a small canvas that he pinned to the floor. Then he squeezed red, yellow and blue paint onto the canvas. He scraped the colours this way and that, until it was all a brown smear. From a glass jar he took grit and gravel and poured this onto the painting, again scraping and smearing. He took a small pair of scissors and clipped his nails, the hair on his head, and all of this went onto the canvas too.

‘You want to be an artist,' he said, ‘then it takes everything. Everything. You do the other. You get a job. You become a wife. A mother. You contribute to the machine. The machine is always
seeking volunteers. But art is not a machine. It does not ask. You ask of it, in your unworthy way, if you might add a little thread. If you ever do add a thread, then that is something to be marvelled at. I will never do that. I'm old enough to know that now. But you are still young enough. You have time to find it. Find what it is that lives inside you, and only you.'

With this, he poured turpentine onto the painting. Striking a match, he picked up the painting and set it alight. It dripped and flared, and only when the flames licked his fingertips, did he let it float to the ground. It sputtered and smoked and the fire died.

He said, ‘Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.'

With that he gathered up his satchel and bowed his head briefly to her before closing the door behind him. Marina tacked the remnant of canvas onto the wall. It was as if she had been given the skin of a dragon. She pressed the charred flakes on the floor into her skin, where they left a dark powdery smear.

She watched the dragon skin through the autumn that followed, and the winter, and the spring and summer beyond. She observed as it aged and decayed. Art, she thought, could be something unimaginable.

She painted car crashes, portraits and clouds, but they did not convey the unimaginable. She discovered Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein and Zen Buddhism. Klein declared his paintings were the ashes of his art and she wondered if the little man had paid him a visit too. She read Helena Blavatsky, who said there was no religion higher than truth. But was there an art higher than truth? What was the most truthful art? She wanted to know what came before art, what was underneath art. She wanted to understand infinity.

She longed to harness the subtle bodies Blavatsky described. But it was hard to know how to leave her body. It seemed that other people visited more often than she left. There was a self that watched her parents fighting from a vantage point above the kitchen sink. There was a woman who appeared in the darkness and sang her back to sleep after her mother had forced her awake yet again, haranguing the young Marina to smooth the sheets and blankets on the bed, insisting that even in sleep Marina must have a soldier's eye for order and be ready for anything. There was an old woman in a white dress who sat beside the bed when the migraines came with every period, and put her cool hand upon the teenage Marina's brow.

The car pulls in to the kerb and Marina's assistant Davide comes around to open the door for her. She is unbelievably tired. She has lost more than seven kilos. Sixty-eight days are behind her and seven ahead. Klaus is there to welcome her.

‘I would like to lie on grass,' she says to Davide in the green room. ‘Tonight, once we are finished.'

He nods and smiles.

‘I want to lie and watch leaves.'

‘Then it shall be so.'

‘And we will do the invitation list for the party? Can you talk to Dieter? I cannot wait for a party. It will be so good to laugh.'

She will make it now. Seven days is nothing. Surely.

IT WAS DAY SEVENTY - FOUR AND
the atrium was crowded. Everyone recognised the actors. First it had been Alan Rickman, elegant and focused in a myopic kind of way. Now Miranda Richardson stepped from the middle of a huddle of MoMA staff and waited at the entrance to the square. The whisper of her name went around the atrium like a cave echo.

‘She's tiny!'

‘She looks great!'

She was dressed very simply in pale pants, a white wrap, her hair back in a ponytail. She had perfect cheekbones and looked to have aged carefully with no obvious work. The guard bent his head and spoke into her ear. She nodded and smiled at him. Marina sat at the table with her head bowed. The room had filled. People flocked to the white line, sitting, standing. Levin had never seen so many people. He felt giddy with fatigue; grimy and stiff from the night he had just spent on the pavement outside MoMA with forty-three other people desperate to sit with Marina on the second-last day of
The Artist is Present
.

The guard nodded and Miranda Richardson moved to the empty wooden chair. The crowd hushed. Cameras clicked, flashes blinked.

‘No photographs,' a guard said loudly.

A man on the opposite side of the square openly ignored the guard and continued to aim his baby Minolta. People clandestinely positioned their phones in their hands and clicked away.

Marina raised her head, opened her eyes and gazed at the actress. A flicker, perhaps only imagined, passed across Marina's face. The room swelled with an inaudible sigh. The city beyond vibrated with its eight million people, but there for a moment within the square everything was still.