by Heather Rose
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 irrationa
lly, 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.
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.