The Museum of Modern Love (5 page)

He wanted to know if he had made her happy. Yes, she had told him, she had been happy. Are you sure? he had asked her, following the lines in the counterpane with his fingers. Yes, she had said. Yes.

He worried a lot about heaven in those last days. He wanted to know, before the morphine shunt took him from her, where she would meet him. If there were steps, he'd be there. He'd be waiting. But where? If there was a cottonwood tree . . . an olive grove?

He said, his face so gaunt that only his eyes were familiar, that he would do what he could for the Falcons, too, next season, if he had any say once he got to wherever he was going.

‘What will you miss, Janey?' he asked her. ‘Tell me what you'll miss.'

Your whistle when you come in the door, she had told him. Your shirts on the clothesline. The evenings when we watch fireflies dance under the harvest spotlights. Your heart. The things only you and I remember about the children. The way your skin is always warm. Your coffee mug half empty on the veranda railing at 7 am.

She could have gone on but he was tired and it had been enough. The real answer to his question was everything. She
would miss everything. What she didn't know, what she took for granted about living with Karl and being a wife, was far larger than the things she could name.

‘HELLO THERE,' SAID JANE MILLER
to Levin. ‘I'm Jane. We spoke a few days ago.'

Her pale brown hair was swept back in a simple knot. Her eyes, rather oversized for her face, were the colour of a high blue sky and in some way made up for the lemon shirt and unfashionable jeans. She sat down neatly, like a child on the mat at school, her arms wrapped around her legs.

‘I remember,' said Levin. ‘You're a tourist?'

‘Does it show so badly?' She laughed.

Levin observed her sensible, almost orthopaedic shoes and thought it did.

‘I'm from Georgia. I arrived a week ago. And you? Are you from New York?' she asked him.

‘I was born in Seattle, then moved to L.A. But I've spent most of my life here.'

‘I came to this on my second day in town,' she said, her voice sliding along in an accent that might have come from
Gone With the Wind
, ‘I know I could be off right now wandering the Metropolitan or spiralling the Guggenheim, or taking pictures from the Empire State or visiting Liberty Island, but this is one
of the most curious things I have seen and I can't leave.' She laughed. ‘Have you sat with her yet?'

‘No,' Levin said.

‘But you will?'

Levin shook his head. ‘I'm not sure I want to.'

‘No,' Jane said. ‘It doesn't seem my place either.'

They both observed a man leave the chair opposite Marina Abramović; another man, slender and stooped in a green tweed jacket, took the chair. He left after only ten minutes and next came a young woman with a tiny pair of shoulders and long lank hair. Her dress was thin, as were her shins, and she appeared to be bowed under the weight of a short and exhausting life. At first the girl sat on the edge of the chair as if she might flee at any moment, but as the minutes passed she shifted back and her gaze became curious and focused. Abramović, too, appeared to have roused herself from some deeper place and was returning the gaze with particular intensity.

Jane said, ‘Did you see the woman in the wheelchair sitting opposite Abramović yesterday?'

Levin nodded. He had seen that. A black woman. He had wondered how she got in and out of bed.

‘It struck me how the person who couldn't leave was able to walk away, and the one who couldn't walk couldn't stay,' Jane said. ‘People were saying how they thought that was the performance—a woman who was able to walk sitting opposite a woman who couldn't. But then when she left, people got confused.'

‘Ah,' said Levin.

‘I liked how they just took the chair away and wheeled her in,' said Jane. ‘They didn't make her sit on the chair.'

Levin hadn't noticed that.

‘They did it for another man who was here too—the one with
the big bushy eyebrows and the slightly crossed eyes? I think he's an art critic. A friend of Marina's.'

‘How do you know all this?' Levin asked.

‘Oh, I've been talking to people. There are quite a few who come regularly. Some of them are here every day. Marina fans. Some of them are studying her. Trying to be performance artists or actors. There are lots of students.'

She indicated the young people about the square with their backpacks and scarves.

Behind them someone said, ‘Is it a staring competition?'

She smiled and Levin gave her a wry grin. He'd heard that comment at least once every day he'd come. Clearly Jane had too.

After a while Jane, her eyes not leaving the young girl sitting opposite Abramović, said quietly, ‘I do get annoyed that nearly everyone takes photographs although there are signs everywhere saying not to. The guards come and say, “No photography” and most people put the camera down, but quite a few, as soon as the guard turns his back, snap another one. It must be the teacher in me.'

‘What do you teach?' Levin asked, more from politeness than curiosity.

‘Art. In middle school.'

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour passed and the gaze between the two women, didn't falter. On the shores of the square people shifted slowly, quietly.

Jane said softly, ‘I am sure that what Abramović is saying to that young girl is
grow, little butterfly, grow!
Don't you think she's definitely growing bigger? But you can see it's quite an effort, because inside she's still all slumped and she doesn't really want to be a butterfly, or whatever it is Abramović is suggesting.'

Levin thought that Abramović was definitely encouraging the young woman in some way, using her gaze, and the young woman sat up. Her shoulders straightened. Her head lifted. Her complexion seemed to glow. It was as if the girl knew, wholly, without any artifice, for the first time in her life, that she was beautiful. And strangely, as he looked at her, he saw that she was. He looked about the square and saw people smiling, as if they too could see this transformation taking place right in front of their eyes. Yet when he squinted, there were just two ordinary people sitting on wooden chairs at an ordinary wooden table, gazing into each other's eyes.

‘It's mighty curious,' Jane murmured. ‘Do you know very much about her?'

‘No, nothing. You?'

‘A little. Have you been upstairs to the retrospective?'

‘No.'

‘She's quite a collector. There are receipts, notes, letters. But all the art too. And the re-performers of course. People think we're old-fashioned in the south—but the fuss New York has been making about those nudes . . .' She laughed ‘It's good. You must go up and see it.'

He nodded.

‘It gives this a different context. Her life's been a progression. It's led to this. It's no different to any other artist—Matisse or Kandinsky. But she's used her body. Pain seems to help her get where she wants to go. It's hard to believe she's sixty-three. Can you imagine how painful it must be to sit like that for a whole day, let alone day after day?'

‘Where does she want to go?' Levin asked.

‘I don't know,' Jane said, almost whispering now. ‘But I do feel touched by something here. It's hard to say just what. It makes
me remember the sheep in the stained-glass windows when I was a child at church. They looked grateful to be sheep.'

It was how he had felt when Lydia had agreed to marry him. Grateful. ‘It's good to hammer in your tent pegs, Levin,' his grandfather had said. ‘Saves a lot of bother in life if you know who you're going to see at the end of every day, who you're going to make a family with. You need that. And she's a wonderful girl.'

Levin saw Lydia lying very still and staring out the window. She wasn't reading or listening to music. She simply lay there.

‘Not feeling well?' he had asked her.

‘No,' she had said in a quarter of her voice.

During those episodes when her illness claimed her, Lydia became someone else. Her face lost its animation, the light in her eyes dulled. Everything about her spoke of disappointment. He was certain he disappointed her; that she thought he ought to be a different man when she became ill. But his wasn't a nine-to-five job. If a score was due, it was eighteen-hour days and more. He had to travel, too. There were studios and sessions booked, orchestras waiting, producers asking questions, an editor with a new cut.

If Lydia was having one of her episodes, she wanted to sleep alone and so he ended up in the guest bedroom. Then came the long weeks of recuperation that exhausted them both. She resumed her schedule and yet she was so tired each night.

‘Do you know,' said Jane, after a long silence, ‘that Brancusi, the sculptor, for thirty years or more, worked almost exclusively with two forms—the circle and the square. Every sculpture was a marriage of the egg and the cube.'

‘Okay,' said Levin.

‘They don't look like eggs and cubes,' she said. ‘But when you know, you can see it.'

He saw how her students must see her. This bird of a mind leaping from branch to branch.

‘And once you know,' Jane went on, ‘you can never not see it. I think Abramović probably has the same thing in mind. She's asking us to look at things differently. Maybe to feel something invisible. Mind you, I guess feelings are invisible. Funny how we don't teach that at school. You know, how things that are unseen are nevertheless real. Anyway, what I'm meaning is that when you see the retrospective you'll realise she's always been exploring either intense movement or utter stillness.'

He nodded.

‘Are you an artist?' Jane asked.

‘Musician.'

‘Oh, goodness,' she said when he told her the names of the films he'd written the scores for. ‘I wish I could say I'd seen them all, but I'm sorry. This is one of those New York moments. You're someone famous and—well . . .'

‘I like to think that the best is yet to come,' he said. He had solitude now. He didn't have to think about Tom or Lydia or Alice. He didn't have to think about anyone. He knew there was a tsunami of young composers building behind him, trying to overtake him, but he had years on them, experience, knowledge.

‘Well, really, I'm honoured,' Jane was saying.

He noted her wedding ring. Maybe she was divorced, maybe her husband had found someone else. She didn't seem particularly married. But perhaps he didn't either.

In front of them, the young woman who had transformed into a butterfly had slumped back into her usual self, as if the effort of expansion was all too much. She left the chair, disappeared into the crowd and reappeared by the two young women to Levin's left.

‘You were amazing!' Levin heard one of her friends say. ‘What was it like?'

‘It was scary,' the young woman replied. ‘I was so nervous but she seemed really kind. Oh, God, I feel so silly because I cried.' Her friends embraced her.

Jane leaned towards the girls, her scarf falling on Levin's leg. ‘You looked like you were growing bigger,' she said.

The three young women turned and looked at her and Levin.

‘You looked as if you were growing right out of yourself, becoming this strong, courageous thing,' Jane continued.

The girl stared at Jane and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Really?' she said. ‘That's exactly how it felt.'

Her friends nodded, smiling at Jane, clasping the girl.

‘I'm amazed you could see that,' the girl said to Jane.

‘Don't forget it,' Jane said. ‘That's quite a thing. Thank you for sitting.'

The girl wiped her eyes with a tissue, laughing at her own emotions. Jane turned back to Levin, gave him a brief level smile, and without further comment, withdrew her scarf and returned her gaze to Abramović.

NOW , I DO NOT WANT YOU
to expect a love story. That is not the sort of convergence I had in mind. This is not a story that begins with attraction and ends with a kiss. At least not between Levin and Jane.