The Museum of Modern Love (8 page)

He'd been tinkering with new ideas. He'd made an album after he and Tom had made their last film together. His first in almost twenty-five years. That album had garnered mixed responses. One reviewer called it ‘overly complex'. He had worn it as a badge of honour. The next album was referred to as ‘an acquired taste'. Worse had been the review that said, ‘It can be disturbing watching an artist change vehicles. Tom Washington's one-time composer is now foraging in modern music for truffles
of genius. What he's lacking, in this wandering ode to everyone from Joe Hisaishi to Philip Glass, is direction.' Levin had been furious, had even thrown something at the wall. His phone. He remembered how Lydia had got the hole replastered.

Still, it had sold, if modestly. Just enough for Levin to think the next album would be the breakthrough. He had started to yearn for a different kind of acknowledgement; not simply for his work, but as revenge. He wanted the Carnegie Hall night. He wanted what Peter Jackson had given Howard Shore when he'd offered him the
Lord of the Rings
films. He wanted to prove to Tom that he'd been a fool to end their partnership. Levin knew he could have done that last film of Tom's. Could have done it better than the young hopeful Tom had employed. Levin was ready for something big. What was the point of turning fifty if you weren't ready to peak?

This is where I watch artists stumble, as they oscillate between force and submission. You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they're inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It's no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.

I HAVE STOOD BESIDE ARTISTS
a very long time. I was there at the rape trial of Artemisia Gentileschi. I was there as she drove the painted blade through the neck of Holofernes. I stood beside her as she wrote, ‘I shall show you what woman is capable of. You will find Caesar's courage in the soul of a woman.' Imagine that, five hundred years ago!

I was there for two decades as Dorothea Therbusch gave her life to her children until at last, when her vile mother-in-law died, she resumed the career she was born to. It was I who visited Camille Claudel in the insane asylum, her brilliant hands idle. I watched her die slowly for thirty years, while I could persuade not a single man, not her lover Rodin, nor her brother, to offer her freedom or clay. I stood beside Meret Oppenheim when she covered the spoon and cup with fur and Max Ernst proclaimed that she, at the age of twenty-three, had outstripped them—Duchamp, Breton and all the Surrealists.

I have seen young women gifted beyond measure—Sofonisba Anguissola at just twenty years of age, Catharina van Hemessen too, Clara Peeters at just thirteen. All of them born before the year 1600. Seek out their paintings if you do not know them. Each had a father who understood their promise and celebrated
their value. Each had a mother with talent, too, but a life of housekeeping, wifery and childrearing expected of her. So many women were neither offered nor were able to acquire paint or palette, canvas, ink, tuition, paper, time. And so we have the great imbalance.

Marina Abramović has been learning to reject expectations her whole life. It is day thirty-one on the road she has titled
The Artist is Present
. She has been hallucinating since day one—sometimes for moments and sometimes for an hour or more. It doesn't look painful, this business of sitting, but believe me it is.

It's sure to get worse before it gets better, the hallucinating, the pain. The body is never forgiving in such circumstances. It does not like to be ignored. There are systems at work that rue the dictatorship of the brain. Endocrine, nervous, circulatory. Lymphatic. Exocrine. Digestive. Urinary. Respiratory. Muscular.

We see Marina's stillness, her gaze, her focus, and inside a war has begun. All those systems trying to function while she remains motionless. And her mind? Well, for all the illusion of calm, it is no less busy than everything else. She is full and she is empty because that is the paradox too. She is swimming in sensations, thoughts, memories and awareness like everyone else, but while this happens she looks into the eyes and hearts of strangers and finds a point of calm. It is her metier to dance on the edge of madness, to vault over pain into the solace of disintegration.

AT THE RESTAURANT JANE AND
Levin commented on the rustic decor, the luck of getting a table, the menu. They both ordered foie gras to start. Behind them a table of twelve women continuously erupted in laughter, making the opportunities for conversation strained.

‘What is it about Abramović's work that fascinates you?' Jane asked.

‘I don't know,' Levin said. ‘She's still a new discovery.'

‘Upstairs in the retrospective,' Jane said, ‘there's a table laid with all sorts of things—like a rose, a bottle of olive oil, a chain, a whip, a bottle of wine, a knife, a hacksaw. A gun and a single bullet. It was a show she did back in 1972. In Italy. She invited the audience to do anything they wanted to her using anything on the table.'

‘And what happened?'

‘Well, they undressed her, they cut her, they decorated her, wrote words on her body. They carried her about, chained her to the table. Finally, someone loaded the gun with the bullet and held it against her head and tried to get Marina to pull the trigger.'

‘What did she do?'

‘She remained entirely passive. She could have died. Some people in the audience stopped the others from harming her.'

‘That's horrible.'

‘When you see the photos, she's weeping. But she didn't run away. She stayed passive for the whole six hours. I can't help but think it must be how she survived her childhood.'

‘Was it bad?'

‘During the Second World War, her mother and father saved each other's lives. You'd think with such a romantic beginning it might have worked out. But it didn't. They hated one another. Her mother ran the home like a military camp.'

The meal went on, washing on the shallows of history, lapping against memory, dipping into the puddles of parenting and career, but avoiding the darker waters of marriage and grief. They stood often on the knoll of Marina Abramović and surveyed the view. The percussion of female laughter from the back table continued, jarring Levin's thoughts and clattering in his eardrums. He and Jane were two observers, gazing at one another across the divide of the table, making eye contact and then slipping away. The wine was good, the food was good, and yet it all fell short. It was an elevator music night, Levin thought, as he helped Jane into her coat and they stepped out onto the cobblestones. It had ultimately been unimportant. An attempt, he thought, at normality.

The rain had stopped and he walked her back to the Greenwich Hotel. The evening had the balmy texture of early summer. They stood on the pavement for a moment before she reached out and shook hands with him. He thought to kiss her cheek but the moment passed. She smiled, thanked him again, and the doorman opened the door.

Levin walked the few blocks across to Washington Square. Night had softened the streets and darkened the doorways. Above
him the sky was umber-glazed and all about him were streetlights, headlights, tail-lights, lit windows, neon and illuminated signs. The stars were defeated. A ruckus of electricity and engineering had beaten them back. By the fountain people lingered, laughing and talking. Children ran about despite the lateness of the hour. Two men played guitars and sang ‘Hey Jude'. Several bystanders joined in. The pavement smelled of steam, rubber and oil. Levin continued on across the street.

He wondered if Jane would have had sex with him, if he had suggested it. It had been a long time since he had suggested it to anyone but Lydia. The idea of getting naked with a stranger was somewhat alarming. But he'd been giving it some thought of late. He thought of Healayas and how he had always wanted to have sex with her. He imagined every man who met her thought the same thing. He would never ask her, but that didn't stop him thinking of it. Tom had been dead wrong not to follow her to New York.

He wasn't sure Jane would be good in bed. She had very plain hands. He wondered what Jane would have said if he had told her his wife was Lydia Fiorentino, the architect. Perhaps Jane had stood in one of Lydia's buildings. Perhaps she had read about Lydia in a magazine.

My wife is in a nursing home
, he imagined saying.
She's been in a coma but now she's not. She'll never walk again. Or talk again. She was the most energetic person when she was well. We knew it was coming. It's genetic. No, I don't see her regularly. I don't see her at all. She wants it that way. She took out a court order. We were happily married. I think so. Our daughter, Alice, is twenty-two. I never got to know her when it was the right time. When was the right time? When she was little? When she was a teenager? It always seemed difficult to know what to talk about with her. She talked to Lydia and then Lydia talked to me. That's how it worked.
I didn't like the music she liked. She went through a whole heavy metal phase I didn't understand. I was busy. I worked. Wasn't that the right thing to do? Didn't that count for something as a father? No, I don't think about challenging the court order. Do I want to see Lydia? Yes and no. Do I miss Alice? I think of her.

He knew if he was a potential client calling Lydia's practice, the receptionist would tell him Ms Fiorentino was on extended leave. She would not tell him that Ms Fiorentino was currently residing at an address in the Hamptons. She would tell him that Lydia's business partner, Selma Hernandez, was taking care of everything. Was he able to make an appointment for when Ms Fiorentino returned? No, the receptionist would reply, not at this time. Because—although she would not say this—Ms Fiorentino's absence would be permanent.

ALICE HAD CALLED TWO DAYS
before Christmas. ‘Dad, I think you'd better come to the hospital. Mom's not so good.'

He'd been watching snow falling over Washington Square and feeling as if life was suddenly new and full of possibility with the new year almost upon them, a new album taking shape in his head, a new apartment. He needed Lydia to reassure him this was really theirs, all three thousand square feet of it. The removalists had finally left. He'd been trying to get the television sorted so he could watch the game at 8.30. It was a critical match if the Giants were to get into the playoffs.

Lydia had called from the airport when her London flight arrived. She had told him she was going to the hospital. These sudden plunges into ill health were becoming more frequent.

He checked his watch. He weighed up how long it would take him to finish programming the channels and whether he could steal another fifteen minutes to get the game to record. The Christmas traffic would be worse with the snow. He gave it up and went to wash his hands, and find his scarf and hat. He'd just have to be back by 8.10 to finish the set-up. It wasn't enough time.