by Heather Rose
Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do. Could not do. And all this he thought of as he gazed at Healayas sitting opposite Marina Abramović.
After almost an hour, Healayas left the chair. Levin rubbed his face, then let his hand linger over his eyes, breathed in that personal moment of privacy. He wanted her to see him, and he did not want her to see him. When he lifted his hand and looked around, she was gone.
ON THE THIRD AFTERNOON THEY spent together watching Marina Abramović, Levin offered to buy Jane a drink when the museum closed. She suggested the bar at her hotel.
‘If that’s not too forward. I’m just keen to sit there and it seems strange to do it on my own. And I do want you to know that I’m married. In fact, I’m a widow but only recently. I felt the need to tell you that.’
‘Nice hotel,’ he said, surprised she was staying there. ‘You know Robert De Niro owns it?’
Jane did, although she hadn’t until she’d checked in. She didn’t remember how she’d come to book it. Small decisions had become a mystery to her since Karl’s death. It was as if there were parts of her brain going about life with no awareness on her part.
They took the subway to Canal and walked the few blocks towards the Hudson. Levin didn’t ask any more about her personal circumstances, but now he could see the word widow was pinned to her like a conference badge. It might have been easier, he thought, if he had a simple descriptor too. Turncoat. Coward. Bereaved. Abandoned. Abandoner. Any explanation for his situation seemed to require a paragraph. A debate. A fugue. Sometimes followed by silenzio. Or crescendo.
The barman welcomed them, delivered iced water, a dish of warm olives.
‘I hardly know what to order.’ Jane laughed.
The barman suggested a martini and she agreed. Levin ordered a Guinness. Away from the gallery, he felt as if they were devotees, two people drawn together by an obscure obsession. He realised they might have nothing else in common, and suddenly felt awkward being with her.
‘Do you get to meet the movie stars when you’re the composer?’ Jane asked.
He shook his head. ‘I work for the most part on my own. Then, when the director is happy with what he’s hearing, I put together a team of musicians. It’s very structured. I spend a lot of time consulting with the director, watching edits, but I’m a long way from the actors. When I was younger, I’d spend time on set. There’s not much magic to it. It’s all craft. Lighting. Acting. Editing. The music is just one of the elements to make the illusion seem real.’
‘What inspired you—you know, when you were younger?’
‘Have you seen The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?’
Jane shook her head.
‘It’s an early Clint Eastwood,’ Levin said. ‘Ennio Morricone did the soundtrack. He did The Mission too. It’s a remarkable score.’
‘We saw The Mission,’ Jane said. ‘It was terribly sad.’
‘Well, you’d know the soundtrack to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly too if you heard it.’
Jane said, ‘I have to confess, we’re not really filmgoers.’
‘You and your husband?’ Levin asked.
‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘Karl only died in September last year, so it seems way too early to stop saying we. I’m not very good at this. Can we, you and I, just move on and pretend there’s not a death on my shoulder?’
Levin nodded, instantly disliking the image. He felt certain that she was going to ask him if he was married. But she didn’t.
She smiled and said, ‘So how did that happen? That you started making music for movies?’
‘A friend of mine . . . a writer/director . . . We met at Julliard.’ He shrugged. ‘It often happens that way.’ There was no point in mentioning Tom. It was the death on his shoulder.
Jane said, ‘And you must have won awards?’
‘There’ve been a few.’
‘Oscars?’
‘Three nominations but no win. Still, that’s nothing compared to Randy Newman. He’s been nominated something like seventeen times and only won once.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Jane, ‘I think to be famous must be like having a disease. Everyone who meets you or sits next to you at a dinner, they all know you have it and I’m sure they change how they are because of it.’
‘That’s kind of true,’ said Levin. ‘Unless they have more of it than you, and then you change. And in the film business it’s very obvious who has more of it.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well, I shall promise to try to be entirely unimpressed by you.’
‘That would be terrible,’ said Levin. She was pretty when she smiled, he decided. He would have liked her to be his art teacher back in middle school.
‘Shall we have dinner?’ he asked. ‘We could walk over to the Meatpacking District. Although here is very good.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve eaten here and it’s fabulous. I’ve done the Tribeca Grill too, and the Macao, which was wonderful, but it’s hard on your own not to feel terribly conspicuous. And it seems such a shame to get room service when there’s so much to see.’
‘Well, there’s a little place that does a very good French fusion . . .’
‘Are you sure your wife won’t mind?’ she asked, indicating the ring he wore. ‘You having drinks and dinner with a strange woman you met at MoMA?’
‘No,’ said Levin. ‘She’s . . . away. She travels a lot. She’d be pleased to know I . . .’ Wasn’t lonely, he thought. But instead he said, ‘That I was being hospitable.’
‘Can I have ten minutes? I’ll go upstairs and freshen up. And we won’t talk about my husband or your wife. Shall we agree on that?’ She added, ‘And maybe not cotton farming.’
‘Cotton farming?’
‘It’s what my husband did, until he died. But that’s enough about that.’
When she returned she had swapped her jeans and sweater for a black skirt and a pale blue silk shirt. Her sturdy runners were now a pair of unassuming black flats and her hair was up. Suddenly she was an imperfect replica of Lydia, Levin realised, one from a fun mirror that had slightly distorted her, and he felt a wave of doubt sweep through him. What was he doing? He shrugged. She was a tourist. He was being hospitable.
Outside they were met by a fine but persistent drizzle. The doorman offered them umbrellas.
‘Shall we walk?’ he suggested.
‘Alright,’ said Jane, laughing. ‘It’s an adventure. I’m in New York and I refuse to curb my enthusiasm!’
At first they walked in silence, and then she said, ‘So, Levin, why do you live here, not in LA where the movies are made?’
‘Well, there are a lot of movies made here. And it’s a good town for music, New York, and a better lifestyle.’
‘So are you between jobs?’
‘No,’ Levin said. ‘I’m working on an animation.’
‘For children?’
‘No, adults.’
‘Is that unusual, an animation for adults?’
‘It’s a Japanese film. There’s more of a tradition . . .’
‘But it’s not going so well?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, because you’ve been watching Marina Abramović for—what? Five or six days in a row, if I’m correct.’
Levin grimaced.
‘Is this how you do it? Distraction as a form of gestation?’ she asked.
‘Well, it’s a difficult project. I’ve never done an animation before.’
She nodded. ‘Still, you’ve made a lot of music with great success. Does that help? Knowing that?’
‘Not really.’
They paused at another set of lights. As they waited for the traffic, Jane said, ‘You know, in the twenties there was an artist called Tamara de Lempicka. She was Polish, but she’d studied in Paris and developed a remarkable style. She became one of the most famous painters in Europe. In a way she was a precursor to the whole fame thing that Warhol exploited. Her technique w
as very bold, almost photographic. Despite all her early success, by the time she was thirty-five she never produced anything of significance again.’
‘Is that meant to make me feel better?’ Levin said.
‘No, and yes. I mean, I think every artist . . . well, I’m only a teacher, so I don’t know. But what I’ve observed,’ Jane said, biting her lip and looking sideways at him, ‘is that all art seems to belong to a time. And some of those timeframes are quite short. Either because the world moves on, or the artist does—either metaphorically or literally. So when we do see longevity in an artist’s output—when they go on for decades producing brilliant art—I think it’s more the exception than the rule. What you’ve achieved already, well, it’s incredible. Incredible. And I am sure that whatever this gestation is, while you sit and watch Abramović or whatever, you just have to trust it. Everything is important, that’s what I’ve observed. You have to be alert, and you’ll get going again.’
Levin felt an incredible urge to tell her about Lydia. Several times of late he had been overwhelmed with the urge to blurt the story out to a complete stranger. Someone on the subway or a waitress serving him coffee. Some days it felt as if it was a weight swinging inside him like a pendulum, and if he didn’t tell someone, anyone, it would knock him right over.
This last week he had discovered that if he went out and spent the day at MoMA watching Abramović, he could return to the apartment as if he was some other man, a man returning from a day at the office, a composer who must work a day job and then squeeze his imagination into the silence of the evening. An artist quite alone, quite unobserved. A widower perhaps. Or single. Never married.
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.