by Heather Rose
‘Especially for the man,’ Jane said.
Especially for the man. Levin had wondered all his life what would take him off. Would it also be a random act of fate? Or would it be protracted and painful? He worried that he was starting to forget things. He’d walk into the bedroom to get something and have no recollection what it was. He’d go to the market certain of what he needed and find himself staring blankly at the shelves. His recall of movie titles and actors, even film composers, took longer. Sometimes things didn’t occur to him until the next day or even days later. By which time he’d forgotten why his brain had been so urgently searching for that particular fact in the first place.
‘I think there would be more forgiveness,’ Jane said. ‘If we did more of it. Imagine in Arabic countries, in Africa, even here in America, if men did this with their wife, their wives, every day. Looked into each other’s eyes. Or soldiers with soldiers. Children with teachers. Heads of governments. Perhaps it would be good to have someone to practise on before you tried it on someone very important to you . . .’ She laughed. ‘But really, imagine!’
Levin thought of his film score for Kawa. He had called the first track Awakening. The Winter King met a young woman living in the forest. A woman bound by a spell. She had lived in the forest a hundred years or more. (It was a fairytale, after all.) They fell in love and had a child. But when the child arrived, it was to bring the woman the greatest loneliness of all. Levin didn’t know how to write that bit. Everything he tried felt like a cliché.
In the wakeful hours between midnight and dawn, it was as if he himself was looking for a path across the river, a perfect beat of stones that would carry him to the far bank without washing him downstream. The river was not kind or helpful. And sometimes there was ice all around him and he was cold. The forest was death overgrown with life. In those desperate hours when he knew himself more alone than he had ever been in his life, he was sure he would lose sight of the track he had made and never be able to find his way back through the trees. At 1.05 or 3.17 or 4.24 am he was never sure of his footing. And he saw Lydia in all the shadows.
‘If you do sit, please write and tell me about it,’ Jane said. ‘Here, I’ll give you my email.’ She scribbled her details on a piece of notepaper. ‘This will all seem so far away and unreal once I get back home.’
‘You’ll be able to watch on the live feed,’ Levin suggested, indicating the camera on the atrium’s wall.
‘I’ll write my mobile number too. If you are about to sit, will you text me? I would love to watch.’
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘I don’t expect many composers have sat with her,’ Jane said.
‘Maybe not.’ He was ready for Jane to go. He hated drawn-out goodbyes. He would never email her.
She hesitated and then she said, ‘Arky, my parents were married for sixty years. My mother never came to New York. She always thought she’d get lost. My father came several times for the races.’
He nodded, uncertain of why she was telling him this, now she was about to leave.
‘Is your wife home again?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Is it irreparable?’
He looked at her and was surprised to see kindness there.
‘Yes.’
‘But you still love her . . .’
Levin nodded. ‘I do.’
‘So, have you tried?’
‘She’s made it very clear.’
‘You know, Arky, we don’t know each other very well, but probably as well as we ever will. So I just want to say this before I go. Karl and I, we were together for twenty-eight years. Now I’ve lost him and there’s no chance to say all the things I never said. I think, if I dare be so bold as to give advice—which I know men always hate—you should try with everything you have. I just hate seeing love go to waste.’
Loneliness was silent, almost soundproof, he thought. ‘I need to get home,’ he said.
‘Alright,’ she said, startled, as he jumped to his feet.
‘Something just fell into place with the film score.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ she said, standing up beside him. ‘Go! Go! Quick!’
He kissed her cheek. ‘Well. It was . . .’
She smiled. ‘Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure meeting you, Arky. Do let me know if you sit with Marina.’
‘I will,’ he said, patting the pocket where he had placed her note, wanting to be the sort of man who would.
At home he sat down in his studio and did what he had done almost all of his life. He wandered through arpeggios, through chord modulations in minor and major keys, letting the mood take him, feeling the augmented colours of both. Seeing the profile of Abramović, the pale silent face. He saw a woman alone in the midst of a forest of faces. Then he heard it. There was a heart song, a step between loneliness and connection. The music of forest and water. There, in the notes, was the music of time and solitude and yearning for love.
His hands ran up and down the keyboard, the crisp notes of the Steinway cool and white and black under his fingers. A rush of energy ran down his arms. He heard the theme that would run in and out of the film, threading the scenes together. Raindrops falling on leaves, a moon in the sky and this melody. He understood how the melody could progress into other passages. He glimpsed what might come before and after. He played it over and over, seeing the woman who was human by day and a fish by night slipping into the water at sunset, waking and stepping from the river at dawn, the forest gleaming in tiny fragments as light returned to tree and fern, rock and bird, lichen and fungi. The woman standing in the endless wave of water and holding the stories of the world together.
He thought of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, opus 95, the haunting call of horns, the quiet moments of pause. But this was the piano calling, beckoning to the sun. This was a story about how the world was born and how it would change, and nothing would be the same.
NOW THAT LEVIN HAD FINALLY got himself out of the way and allowed the music to come in, I went to see Jane depart New York. There are artists and there are facilitators. I bless the facilitators. They are the lubricants of the artistic process. The engine oil of creativity. Beware the artist who believes they have failed, their genius gone unrecognised or unrewarded in the precise way they demanded, and so turns to teaching. So too the parent or friend who offers the wisdom of their experience by telling the young artist they will never succeed, that the world is too big and they too small, that their dream is invalid for the usual practical reasons. Or the person who from the lofty perch of no art believes they could have been great if they had written or painted or made the film. How hard can it be, after all? I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger. But Jane is not angry. Jane is considering the chauffeur.
She could smell a fragrance on him. Sandalwood, perhaps, and a hint of cinnamon. She observed his even hairline and slightly heavy neck above the collar of his white shirt. She would have liked to ask him all manner of things. How had he come to be in New York? Was he happy? What did he make of God or Allah? What did he think of Obama? What did he most like to eat? What would he have done with his life if he could be seventeen again? But instead she sat and watched the skyline drop into suburbs and the broad expanse of freeway escape the city under a damp colourless sky. She thought it would be wonderful to be home and have the grandchildren ask questions, and put her own to rest for a while.
She had spent sixteen days watching Marina Abramović sit at a table. She had seen people return day after day. Some of them had waited for hours to sit. Many of them had missed out. Hundreds of thousands had come to witness or participate in The Artist is Present and it was only halfway through. It would go on without her. She would not be here to see it end, but she had been a tiny fragment of it. A shoe on the edge of the live cam, a blurred face in the crowd.
She reflected o
n the visit she had taken to the site of the World Trade Center. The scale of it had shocked her. It wasn’t just two buildings. It was an entire city block reduced to a massive pit of gravel dotted with yellow machinery. Best to lay a field of grass, she thought. Best to landscape a high conical hill with a view and the sky for consideration with a water garden that traced a meandering course down every side. She thought of a design she had seen in a magazine. A museum in Cairo with a rain room so that children, who might live their whole childhood without the skies ever opening, could experience more than forty different types of precipitation.
The world was filled with information, Jane thought. It was impossible to do more than scratch the surface in a lifetime. It was too much of a coincidence that roads were like arteries, that buildings were like penises, that clouds were like paintings, that war was a hunt and water like thought. She wondered what it would be like to let nature have a hill of green where the Twin Towers had once stood. To have the sea breeze blow upon the faces of those who came to grieve and pray and reflect. What a small miracle it would be for a hill to be restored to the landscape of Manhattan when only four hundred years ago the whole island had been nothing but hills and forests. But flatness suited roads and the foundations of buildings. Flatness suited grids and underground systems. Flatness suited transport and even walking. The mountains and hills had been pushed outwards into the sea, the rivers sent underground, the forests turned into lumber, the birds and deer evicted. To put one big hill back, that would be something. What would old DeWitt Clinton think of that? she wondered.
Marina Abramović had brought something new into the city. She had made of herself a rock in the centre of a town where everything moved and had been moving en masse for hundreds of years. She had brought her European history, her family history, her personal history and, like a true New York pioneer, she had bent the city to her will. And she had done it through art.
At the airport Jane bought a Cosmos magazine and waited. When she was settled on the plane, the flight was delayed for two hours. She read and she watched night venture in from the Atlantic. In the seat beside her, a young man tapped furiously on his iPad, texted on his phone, busy in his world. At last the flight was cleared. Her champagne glass was removed along with an empty water bottle and snack wrappers. The plane began taxiing, building up momentum.
In that wild rush against gravity, she always felt certain that it could never work, metal and wings and hundreds of people inside a great elongated box being lifted into the sky. But of course the miracle happened. They were above Manhattan, above the soaring grid of buildings, the great harbour with the Statue of Liberty somewhere below. Lights indicating life and activity stretching as far as the eye could see. They curved north, west, south and she was going home. She closed her eyes and for a moment she was back in the atrium and she wondered, if she had sat with Abramović, what might she have seen or felt? Had it been enough to sit on the sidelines? Had she somehow missed an opportunity for something life-changing, some act of courage? Her hand reflexively reached for Karl’s to squeeze. She had a vivid urge to, for a moment, lay her head on the shoulder of the young man beside her. To pretend for a moment that there was someone who loved her close by.
Maybe I could go back, near the end, she thought. I could come back. I could see her on her last day, when she stands up. How marvellous it would be to see Marina Abramović stand up at the end of her seventy-five days.
LEVIN HAD BEEN SITTING FOR sixteen minutes at his kitchen table. He was aware of his neck. It felt a little jammed. He’d woken at 4.30 am and by 5.15, having nothing better to do, dug out the black track pants and the white t-shirt he always wore. He arrived for the 6 am Pilates class at the studio on Lafayette by 5.45. His teacher from last year, he learned, had moved to Arizona, but the new teacher, Maddie, had been helpful. His hamstrings were tight, she’d told him, and his buttocks were tight. Most every part of him was tight, and what was tight had got flabbier. After the class he had felt as if the world was clearer, brighter. His proprioception needed improving, but Maddie had appeared to be pleased with him.
On the way home, he’d eaten scrambled eggs and coffee at a cafe he’d never tried before, and found it good. Back at the apartment, he removed all but two chairs from the dining table and set the remaining chairs exactly opposite each other. On one chair he arranged several pillows from the bed. When that didn’t quite work, he used the three red cushions from the couch and a round white pillow from the spare bedroom. Then he got his black cashmere scarf from the cupboard and arranged that too. ‘Hello, Marina,’ he said. It made a basic enough resemblance.
He sat down on the chair opposite and attempted to relax. He felt a little bit silly, but no one could see him. He smiled at the way he’d arranged her hair, and then stopped himself. He breathed and stared at the white pillow face. He noticed almost instantly his desire to scratch his left shoulder blade. He eased his head gently to the left and to the right. He scratched an eyebrow and rolled his shoulders, rubbed one shoulder blade then the other as best he could against the back of the chair, uncrossed his feet and flexed his fingers. Then he attempted again to sit entirely still.
He tried to imagine Marina’s eyes staring back at him from the pillow face. He glanced at the wide rooftop balcony beyond the glass doors. He could be washing the breakfast dishes, getting on with his day in the studio. He could be taking a walk, going uptown. But he had to see about this sitting business.
He began to think about what he’d just read in the Times over his eggs. How 19 April was a day on which all sorts of big events had occurred. The Oklahoma bombing. The Waco, Texas killings. And further back it had been the start of the American Revolution.
There was a lot of store in dates. Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day and Halloween, Thanksgiving. They’d rented the same house up in Maine after Memorial Day for years when Alice was small. He usually only went the first few days, but Lydia and Alice had stayed for weeks. He liked New York in summer. The hot heavy nights, the sticky evenings with the windows open. The bliss of air-conditioning and cold showers and a breeze coming in off the Hudson. The quiet of the apartment. The welcome relief of solitude day after day. But then he missed Lydia and Alice. When he thought about that time he thought of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and craft beer. Again he tried to focus on Marina looking back at him from across the table. After a while he realised he was looking at the wall of glass cupboards. It looked as if a whole family lived here. He could have managed quite well now with a cup, a bowl and a plate. Yolanda, their housekeeper, put meals in the fridge each week with little notes attached. Twice a week she cleaned out the fridge and everything was new again. Sometimes she left him chocolate brownies or cookies. And she kept the pantry stocked with all the different cat foods Rigby loved.
Lydia had liked to make Sunday lunches for their friends. New friends, old friends, it was all the same to Lydia. Gatherings restored her as if they were exercise. He didn’t have the need for people that she did. Found it almost unfathomable that she’d fly in from Buenos Aires or Seoul and have eighteen people for lunch the next day. But that was Lydia. Always living as if there wasn’t time to slow down. And perhaps she’d been right.
Pillow-Marina, looking back at him, was entirely still. He squinted at her, and she admonished him for his restlessness. Beneath the table, he unlaced his fingers and put them on his legs. Almost immediately, his hand began to itch. And soon his backside. His lower back was tight, and his hips began to ache. It was the Pilates. He had found all those little muscles that never did any work and everything was going to be sore by tomorrow.
The only movement he had noticed the real Marina make was a little lean forward or back. Or a little roll of the shoulders and head. They were done very slowly. What happened if she got too hot or cold? he wondered. Bad luck, he guessed. She could hardly say, Hey, bring me a blanket. The same with urinating. Or, worse, a bowel movement. Surely there came the mid-morning need to take a cr
ap? He had no idea how she managed any of it. Maybe Serbians were just made tougher than other people. He shrugged and stretched his neck. Another broken rule.
By now his arms were feeling heavy at his sides. He turned and looked back at the clock. Seventeen minutes. He sighed, shifted and straightened. But the pain in his buttocks and hips was becoming excruciating.
It would have been better if Lydia had thrown something, he thought. If she had yelled. He wished she had hurt him physically, scarred him somewhere, so he could look at it and say: That was the day. There it is. The day she told me she couldn’t live with me any more.
After Alice had called him about the stroke, he had carefully unpacked the last of the moving boxes marked Lydia Only. He had placed every precious item carefully, debating with himself the correct arrangement of teapots, sculptures, little bowls and boxes. For weeks he bought fresh flowers for her desk, trying to fool himself that in doing so he was luring her home.
He didn’t miss hearing her discuss the education crisis in schools, or what Obama should be doing in his first term while he had the balance of power in the Senate, or how furious she was at him winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and that it was the worst decision since Kissinger won it. And how this winter was going to be the coldest ever recorded, which would cause all sorts of havoc for the agricultural sector, and that sea ice was melting at an unprecedented rate. He didn’t want to know that everything was going haywire. Hadn’t he earned the right to enjoy air-conditioning? He liked well-lit rooms and air travel. He felt helpless to solve any of the things that were going wrong in the world. He was just one person, a musician, a composer. He entertained people. It wasn’t really his problem. He sorted the trash.