The Museum of Modern Love (4 page)

In ten years I will be as old as Marina Abramović, Jane thought. In twenty-five years I'll be as old as my mother. Twenty-five years ago I was just twenty-nine. There's still time. Please let there still be time.

Earlier that morning she had pretended that in fact she lived here in New York. She had made the bed and smoothed the quilt. She ran her hand across the carved beading of the bedhead and imagined spending Christmas here. She would walk in the snow in Central Park, see the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center, choose gifts at Barneys. She would be a person with friends who had interesting pasts and they'd invite her to their favourite restaurants.

It was not the time to be making decisions. Everyone told her that. Three different people had given her copies of Joan Didion's
The Year of Magical Thinking
as if that would solve everything. She knew people meant well, but she hadn't been able to read it. She hadn't been able to concentrate on anything. She was too busy listening for Karl.

She imagined him lying on the bed reading the papers at the hotel, fully dressed for the day, his sagging boat shoes, his cable cardigan. He would be happy for her to be off trawling her galleries. He would spend the morning finding a diner where he could have a second breakfast and watch the world go by. He would be sure to find someone to talk to. That was Karl. It was one of the things they'd had in common. The way each of them would come home with conversations they'd had with complete strangers.

MUCH TO HIS SURPRISE LEVIN
found himself going uptown to MoMA almost every day. He walked across the lower lobby and deposited his raincoat and umbrella at the members' end of the cloakroom, then checked himself through the electronic gates. The lobby was crowded today. Perhaps it was the blustery weather. The place looked like it was full of students.

He stared up at the big blue Tim Burton balloon. At the foot of the stairs, leaning against the white wall, he overheard a girl describe her sister's wedding cake and for a moment he was in Mexico with Lydia on their honeymoon. The sound of mariachis prowling for custom, the scent of the night and the dreadful sky.

His mother had bought him a telescope for his seventh birthday, but the abyss of the night had terrified him even then. He had worried about clinging to the earth by just his feet. It didn't seem enough. And all that matter, spiralling towards him, light and dark racing at him through millennia and so much of it utterly unknown. His father had died when he was four years old after only a few weeks of illness. ‘A headache, some vomiting, and then he was too sick to move,' his mother had told him. The vagueness of this had haunted him all his life—that simply a headache and vomiting could lead to death.

His mother had taken him every year to see the little plaque in the white concrete wall where his father's ashes resided. But his father's spirit, she said, was out there, somewhere, indicating the sky above. There was nothing to be afraid of. Didn't he, like her, feel that other beings lived out there? This couldn't be the only habitable planet in the entire universe. They didn't have to be scary or blue or have strange powers. They wouldn't abduct him. There were forces at work, unseen forces that were there for good. They would look after him. Yes, these same forces had loved his father too, but maybe they had needed him back. Eventually everyone went back. It was nothing to worry about.

Nothing she said had ever reassured him. He was on a planet that had undergone cataclysmic events on a regular basis. Human life was a sort of genetic accident. The world was spinning in an inconceivable infinity and life, every form of life, was a fragile experiment.

During his teenage years he was prescribed various anti-anxiety medications. None of them numbed or deluded him enough. When he was sixteen, his mother died. What do women who have drunk chamomile tea each night before bed, believed in invisible forces and played Chopin études before breakfast die of? A falling tree in a storm.

He'd dispersed her ashes on the rose garden at the crematorium. Whatever those gritty remnants of bone and skin were, they were not what he remembered. Her music wasn't there. Her expectations of him. The things she disagreed with. The things they'd argued over.

His aloneness was confirmed. He went to live with his father's parents. It had all happened fast. They came to help him take what he needed before the house was sold. He had packed a bag with his clothes wrapped around every record he'd ever collected, said goodbye to the house, the winding road that led past his
school, past the wholefood store where he'd worked stacking organic fruit and vegetables, bagging almonds, weighing granola.

They'd flown into LA and on the trip to Santa Barbara he'd found that the light of the city obliterated the void beyond. He resolved that wherever he ended up, it was going to have to be somewhere big. So when he moved to New York a few years later, and found the stars in their gaping darkness were nowhere to be seen, eclipsed by SoHo apartments and Midtown high-rises, Chinatown neons and flashy Fifth Avenue commercial buildings, by coal-consuming giants in the Financial District, stately old ladies on the park and brown-brick boxes on the East River, he felt he had won. That humanity had won. New York was brighter than the universe bearing down on them. For this alone he had decided that he could live here forever and entirely expected to.

He still wondered often about his health. An ageing body was an unreliable mechanism. What was happening to his cells? He knew everything was meant to renew every seven years, or every thirty days—he couldn't remember which. He never did get sick. He didn't get colds, he didn't get headaches and he had only once had food poisoning. But he had regular medicals.

‘Fit as a buffalo,' his doctor liked to say to him. ‘Blood pressure one ten over seventy, pulse sixty-five, bloods are good. You're doing fine for a man your age, Arky. Just fine.'

The buffalo nearly died out, Levin thought.

For a brief moment in the lobby, across the crowd, he caught the gaze of a woman leaning on the wall away from the stairs. She looked vaguely familiar. She held his gaze for a moment, gave him the briefest smile, and he realised she was the woman from a day or two ago. The one who had started talking to him about being saved. Nothing was going to save her from her shirt, he thought. She had the look of a tourist from the Deep South.
The kind who might tend her garden in a large hat. The crowd was swelling towards the stairs and he lost sight of her.

He wasn't sure why he needed to keep returning to the sidelines of this strange performance, but he kept finding himself taking the train, walking in the door, climbing the stairs, taking his place by the white line. The atrium was a magnet, or maybe it was Abramović. Something about this was important, but he couldn't say why.

JANE MILLER TRANSFERRED HER GAZE
to the rather shabby accountant she had met on her first day at MoMA. She knew that ever since the Abramović performance began back in March, the accountant had come to the gallery almost every day at lunchtime to sit and watch. Matthew? Matthew, that's right; that was his name. She made her way over to him.

‘Why, you're early today.'

‘I suddenly had the urge to see how it all starts,' Matthew replied, looking a little awkward.

‘Well, hold on to your hat,' Jane said.

The guard standing on the stairs indicated to the crowd that there was one minute to go. She put a hand on Matthew's arm.

‘There's no hurry. Unless you're planning to sit with her.'

‘No,' he said. ‘Not today.'

‘Then let's let these eager bunnies hustle and bustle and we can just take our time, find a nice place on the side of the room and be the observers that we are.'

She didn't know why she'd begun to talk like someone from a Tennessee Williams play. She observed in a flash Matthew's dusty brown loafers, the suit that didn't match his shoes nor
work very well with his shirt. The plain tie and the blue kindness of his eyes. Karl was everywhere.

At 10.30 they watched as fifty, sixty people took flight up the stairs, running, stumbling, pushing each other, fleeing towards art. Racing to join a queue to make eye contact with an artist.

No one will ever know I was here, Jane thought. There will be no picture of me taken by the photographer. Nothing recorded of my attendance in a book, no picture of me on the website. In fact, she thought, my whole life, but for the family photographs, will go unrecorded. A grove of olive trees that I've planted. The pullovers I knitted which will wear right out within a generation or two. Probably by then people will give up wearing anything that needs handwashing.

The farm was more than a hundred years old when she and Karl had moved back. The front garden had been the careful design of Karl's grandmother, and the vegetables and herbs the work of his mother. Jane had seen little she wanted to change. She had always liked certainty. It was one of the pleasures of being a teacher. There was a great deal of structure to rely on. A calendar, a curriculum, the types of students one had every year. She had a sudden sense, not entirely unpleasant, that uncertainty might have its appeal, going forward. But she put that thought away, like linen in a drawer, and thought instead of Gustav Metzger. Metzger liked to drape cloths over things. He had draped cloth over images of the Holocaust. He might drop a cloth right over Marina Abramović. Leave only her hands visible. Would people still sit in the chair opposite if she were draped in a cloth? Or was it her very real eyes and very real skin, her very real heart beating in her body, that drew them to her? Perhaps she was the most accessible person some of them had ever seen. Jane thought of her students, the snatched conversations in the first weeks as they flitted by her desk, until they
knew her to have a sense of humour. Knew she would listen. And then how some of them had talked! What a thing, to be seen, Jane had surmised, early in her teaching career. For a child, it was everything.

She had worried irrationally, once the end was certain, that she had not spent enough time seeing Karl for all he was. She had rubbed his feet, trying to memorise the cloudy right big toenail, the slender middle toes, the way the two smallest toes on each foot curved inwards like parentheses. She tried to take in the curve of his ears. She wasn't sure whether, if she'd been shown his hand in a police line-up of ten similar hands, she would have known it above all others. She wanted to think she would, but she couldn't lie to herself.

She had watched all the weight drop off him. Not that the years of peach cobblers and pecan pies, fried chicken and cornbread, bacon and waffles had contributed much in the way of additional weight. He'd been six foot four and always well-built. Still, all of it, in the end, every scrap of weight and muscle and even some of his height, fell away, leaving him a Giacometti man, all lean purpose against the wind of death.

He had told her so many things in the last weeks and days. How farming had run out his patience with God. He said all he really trusted were chemicals and good equipment because seed and weather were a problem marriage unless it was genetically modified, and that felt like a dance with the devil all its own, though he'd felt he had no choice. That's what the devil does, he'd said: gives you no choice. They weren't great thoughts to prepare a man for dying.

He said he wished they'd travelled like she'd wanted to when the children had grown. He wished he'd known this was coming. How they might have sold the farm, if he'd been brave enough,
and gone and done those other things they'd planned before his parents had left him to carry on with everything. And he hadn't felt strong enough, not after all those Millers had worked so hard, generation after generation. The farm had survived the war, survived the weevils and, by God, it was going to survive him, that's what he said. It was what his father had said before him. That kind of teaching goes in hard. Still, they might have made other choices. Stayed in New Mexico where they'd met while he was passing through on a road trip that was taking him west to surf the beaches of California.