by Heather Rose
‘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.
It’s hard to imagine a man more capable of living in his own cocoon than Levin. Art creates a certain familiarity with loneliness. And possibly with pain. Physical, mental, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all a catalyst. I don’t like to admit that because it’s depressing, but in truth pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time.
It would be easier if humans lived longer. The span is brief. It takes so long even to begin to understand the job ahead. Art is really a sort of sport. To master the leap is essential. It is the game of the leap. Practise, practise, practise, then leap. The starting point may be different for each, but the goal is the same. Do something worthwhile before you die.
Every idea is invisible until it isn’t. Love is invisible yet we can see it. Attraction is the same. Inspiration is invisible, though it sings and dances through every day.
In case you were wondering, I am one of many. We are here in the unseen, just as Levin’s mother suspected. We are here to help. Remember that when you are feeling uncertain.
THERE IS ANOTHER PERSON WATCHING Marina Abramović day after day. She has been dead for three years and she finds death rather as she found life—an inconvenience. Her name is Danica Abramović.
‘Quite a dress,’ Danica was telling the man beside her. ‘What, she thinks she’s a queen? Orthodox red. Blood red. So she remembers. She has not forgotten.’
Nobody can see Danica staring down at the square. Nor do they hear her or smell her. Danica is observing the photographer, Marco Anelli. She has watched him arrive every morning since the show began. She has observed the way he unpacks his equipment.
‘Pah, no soldier, that one. Italian,’ she said, lifting her chin.
She remembers a boy who sang her a love song in a sea cave in Dubrovnik. He had been a Marco too, probably dead now. Her daughter had this Marco in captivity for seventy-five days. It was a long time for a handsome boy like that, she thought, to be staring down his lens at Marina and the years in her face. Still, for all the MoMA guards observing the crowd, it would be Marco who would dive in front of her daughter to stop a blade or bullet. She was sure of that. For that she almost forgave him the Tom Ford sweater. She knew the lure of beautiful things.
Danica saw leaves burning the ground red and orange. Light running through trees like water. The fabric of her lungs was molten silver and her throat mother of pearl. No fear. No flag. No wind. Hadn’t that been a Rumi poem? She saw ahead a man on a white horse and all the breath went out of her. He rode between trees, dancing between bullets. Vojo!
‘They cannot kill me, Danica,’ he shouted to her. He was young with the eyes of a tiger, wild and full of light. ‘If you believe in something you can never die.’
She had nursed him on her lap. She had staunched the blood. She had rolled him over and saw that his back was riddled with bullet holes.
‘Fill them with tobacco!’ he said, laughing.
Her hands were big and clumsy as she plugged the wounds. She rolled him back and his tiger’s eyes were undimmed.
‘We are the dragons of the past,’ he said.
After the war they had married. She had borne him two children, first Marina and then her brother Velimir. Vojo said to her, his voice raw with šljivovica, ‘The age of heroes is gone. Nobody believes any more.’
‘Why would we die for our beliefs when we can live with our doubts?’ she asked, because she wanted to see him smile. If only he still smiled at her.
‘It was all theatre, Dani. You know that. There is nothing left to believe in.’
‘Believe in me. Believe in our children. We have a daughter and a son and they will need everything we can give them.’
He wasn’t a hero then. Not President Tito’s and not hers. He had given all his fight to the war.
She dreamed of him on his white horse, unmoving in a summer field, holding the white flag. The same way Marina had made it look in that photograph. How had she dared to steal her mother’s dream?
‘Dani!’ Vojo called to her. ‘I surrender. I do surrender.’
‘No!’ she cried. ‘Don’t surrender. Never surrender! I could not love you . . .’
But it wasn’t true. She had gone on loving him long after he’d left her for another woman, a younger, more agreeable, less attractive woman; still she had loved him and longed for him to come home.
She remembered Marina, just a girl, asking, ‘What if I can’t be that brave? As brave as Tata?’
‘Are you born of metal or of sand?’ she had asked her daughter.
How deep she had buried her own stories of the war. Why did she never tell Marina when she had the chance? Why did Vojo never say to the children, ‘Look at your Majka—you know what she did?’
Because she was a woman and men did not talk of women in that way after the war. It was as if it had been only a man’s war. And Vojo knew the night sweats and the way she woke up reaching for people who were no longer there, beating at the bedclothes to stop the fire.
In the museum there were so many faces and sometimes when Danica looked at them, every face belonged to her Marina.
‘Run because you can,’ she wished she had told her daughter. ‘Run because you are born of horses and bullets and fire burning the earth and war lighting up the sky. You are born of the people who won. Never forget that.’
At night, while Marina slept, Danica ran as ghosts run, measuring her speed in trees and stars, crossing Central Park and back again.
Some nights she stood and watched her daughter wake to the soft peals of the alarm and drink from a glass beside her bed. Danica saw that Marina was starving for sunshine. For sleep. For days and weeks to rest through the night. But for now there was this hourly ritual to hydrate her body ready for the seven-hour day of sitting and not moving.
Being dead for three years, Danica understood the slow starvation of a life without laughter and friends and conversation.
The alarm sounded again, marking the next hour, and Danica saw Marina wake and untangle herself from her sheets. Danica does not know that Marina has been dreaming of the old apartment in Makedonska Street. She had been hiding in the cake tin until her mother found her and ate her. But Marina had realised that she was a snake, and she slid through her mother’s body and wriggled away across the floor. And there was her father, General Vojo Abramović, on a white horse. Marina the snake had cried out, but her voice was made of air.
Danica can hear Marina urinating in the bathroom, then sees her return to bed.
From across the room, Danica says to her, ‘They cannot kill you. If you believe in something you will never die.’
Marina turns and stares straight at her ghost mother. Danica is thrilled. Marina had sensed her!
‘Are you born of metal or of sand?’ she asked, but her daughter was laying her head on the pillow and closing her eyes.
Danica stood sentinel by the bed and, later, when Marina took her seat at the table in the centre of the atrium, Danica took her place on the balcony. She forgets nothing. She notices everything. When I go by I salute her, though she cannot see me.
Major Danica Rosic Abramović. One-time director of the Museum of the Revolution, Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia.
LEVIN STARTED IN SURPRISE AT seeing the next woman walk across the square and take the empty seat. She was over six feet tall with polished ebony skin and long black tightly curled hair. She wore black jeans over impossibly long, slender legs, a red jacket, red nails, bare feet.
‘Oh my goodness—she’s incredible,’ Jane said.
‘She is.’ Levin smiled.
‘You know her?’ Jane asked.
‘That is Healayas Breen,’ he said. ‘She does Art Review from New York on NPR.’
He did not add that, until recently, Healayas had been one of his closest friends. Or that he’d played piano in Healayas’s band at the Lime Club for the last ten years. Healayas had been Tom’s girlfriend. Tom Washington had given Levin his first film score, the one that had started his career as a composer. Eight films over twenty-five years, theirs had been one of the enduring partnerships. And then Tom had found a younger composer.
‘I just want to try this guy out,’ Tom had said. ‘I think he has something really unique he can bring to this project.’
‘We’ll do another film next year,’ Tom had said at the last party he and Healayas gave together.
Shortly after that, Healayas moved from Los Angeles back to New York.
‘He was a hard dog to keep on the porch—that’s how you say it?’ Healayas had asked Levin and Lydia in her accented English. How a man could ever cheat on Healayas Breen, how he wouldn’t run after her to the ends of the earth, Levin didn’t know.
And then Tom died in an avalanche coming home late one day on Ruthie’s Run. ‘Familiarity is dangerous,’ the coroner said in the Aspen paper. ‘People think they can beat the conditions.’
Levin hadn’t quite forgiven Tom for the hole he’d left. Nor for dying in a stupid accident. He didn’t know why he had to lose people that way. A falling tree for his mother, an avalanche for Tom. Since New Year, Levin had avoided Healayas as he’d avoided everyone else who would have an opinion on Lydia’s situation. Her situation. It was inadequate but that’s what it was. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t remotely normal. But it was their situation and everyone had an opinion about it. No one yet had decided that it was okay for him to do what Lydia had instructed. Get on with his life, his music, and forget all about Lydia’s situation. He was pretty sure where Healayas would stand, but he didn’t want it confirmed. He knew she’d left messages. Sent texts. So had other people. At some point early on, he had turned off the message bank on his mobile. When emails came in, he deleted them unread.
When Marina Abramović raised her head and opened her eyes, he saw Healayas smile at her. Abramović’s face did not change. But after a few minutes she leaned forward in her chair. Healayas, in mirror image, did the same. This was more than regard. Now it was a conversation that was happening entirely in the eyes.
‘How wonderful for an art critic to feel this from the inside,’ Jane murmured. ‘It’s got the art world jumping, this show. Chrissie Iles from the Whitney has come.’
Healayas appeared quite at ease. Her height, the way she moved, you could have imagined her invulnerable. But you would be wrong. On regular occasions it had been Lydia who put her back together again. Lydia who fed her, talked with her—those long, serious, funny conversations women seemed to have together. It was Lydia who had made sure Healayas was invited for dinner, for Thanksgiving, for birthdays.
He wondered if Healayas had seen Lydia. Yes, he felt sure she had. Perhaps only yesterday. Last week. He did not want to think about how Lydia might look. He would not think about that. He got up and stretched his legs.
‘I’ll be back in a while,’ he said to Jane, as if she was his companion, not a stranger. He did not want to sit where Healayas could simply turn her head and see him. He moved back through the crowd to the wall, then stood and observed as people milled and dispersed about him. After a while it appeared Healayas would be there for some time, and his legs ached, so he returned to the space beside Jane. She gave him a brief smile of welcome then continued to watch the two women.
Love accounted for so many things. A series of biological and chemical interactions. A bout of responsibility. An invisible wave of normality that had been romanticised and externalised. A form of required connection to ensure procreation. A strategic response to prevent loneliness and maintain social structures.
He had exhibited all the signs of love. He had felt himself love Lydia over and over again. And there had been the bad patches. When she was sick. Unrecognisable. Not the Lydia he knew. The coroner had been right. Familiarity was dangerous.
He had spent most of Christmas
Day, after he’d left the hospital, walking. He had walked to Brooklyn and on, and it was only when he realised that he couldn’t feel his fingers and toes that he’d finally hailed a cab. He’d slept for almost a day. He didn’t know where that fatigue had come from. But he knew that when she got sick, he got very tired. He remembered how the shampoo had run out. The cat was hungry. The milk had been past its use-by date but he’d used it anyway. He’d ignored the flashing messages on the phone. Lydia’s friends and colleagues stretched far and wide, people who were useful any time of the day and night. But not to him.
He remembered that he had been convinced that it was Lydia’s electric toothbrush on the sink and he’d hunted high and low for his own and ended up using an airline one. Days later he realised it was actually his own toothbrush, but he only recognised it in relation to Lydia’s. He had worried that this was somehow symbolic. Who was he without Lydia? Without her thoughts and clothes and food and friends? Her idea of time and entertainment? Who might he be if he was left to his own patterns and rhythms? How long would it take to become something beyond her? Who would that person be? He hadn’t wanted to know. But he had no choice. If there was one thing he knew, it was that days kept coming at you, no matter if you were ready for them or not.
He started sleeping later. Not waking to Lydia’s usual 5 am start, he found his body inclining towards 7 am, then 8, until he was waking at 8.45 am to the latest snowfall on the deck. He had, until then, been a hot breakfast man. But he began to put on boots and coat and stroll across the square to Third Rail, where he’d order a long macchiato. Sometimes on the way home he’d pick up an onion bagel and toast it with a second coffee he’d make in the espresso machine around 11 am. Sometimes he bought blueberries. He tinkered in his studio, going over old material, considering his next album. He played all his vinyls at whatever hour he liked.
In March he moved Lydia’s things into a lower drawer and arranged his bathroom items on the most convenient shelf. He stacked the dishwasher the way he liked and stopped hearing Lydia correcting him. He let Rigby sleep on the bed beside him. He watched James Horner and Hans Zimmer both lose out for Best Soundtrack at the Oscars. None of this made him happier. Quite the opposite. He worried that the universe had become a little bit spongy. If he put his finger out and prodded it here or there, it might quiver. If life was unknowable, just a dance of unseen forces, then surely it didn’t matter what happened between him and Lydia. But it did. He knew it did. And if this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end.