The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

  Each day she took three showers. Every day she changed the tunic and pants she wore for another of identical shape but a new colour. Sometimes she began a Serbian song and, as much as possible, she maintained eye contact with the people in the gallery. Establishing an energy dialogue, Marina had called it.

  Some people came every day and sat for hours on the floor. Someone offered her an apple, placing it up on the platform. It stayed there until one of the staff removed it. When Francesca had visited The House with the Ocean View, the gallery had felt like a church. And now the atrium at MoMA did too.

  ‘Is she reading any of the reviews?’ she asked Dieter.

  Dieter shook his head. ‘I tell myself that if I sit with her for a few minutes, that’s a few minutes in which nothing is wanted of her,’ he said.

  Francesca held his hand. ‘On the last day she’ll stand up and it will be over. She’ll bathe in all the acknowledgement that will come to her and forget what it has cost her. The cost to her organs, her kidneys. Her mind. The hunger. When it’s a complete success—and it will be—she will forget it all. You know her. She will be in diva mode, glorious, radiant, and it will all be in the past. And then she’ll crash.’

  When Francesca had met Dieter, he had been getting over a traumatic break-up.

  ‘You rescued me,’ he liked to tell her in those early years. Abducted his heart and never returned it. She knew he loved Marina. They both loved Marina. He must love Marina. But his heart was hers.

  ‘You have to remember that,’ Francesca continued. ‘To make sure her house is ready for her. It has to be stocked. Ready for her to have complete rest. In the end, this may take something from her that she can’t replace, but if it wasn’t so fraught with danger, and so hard, she would never choose it.’

  Dieter’s eyes filled with tears. They sat there, side by side on the couch. Thirty-four years they had been married. Thirty-four years, four children, five grandchildren, Berlin to New York, and how did they stay this way, where she knew him so intimately that nothing was new, and yet he was still a mystery to himself?

  And the reverse was true, Francesca thought. Perhaps that was the way of long marriage. As they got older, they could never lose track of themselves. They had the other to remind them.

  WHEN LEVIN ARRIVED TO MEET Alice for their Sunday night meal, she was listening to something and reading what appeared to be a large illustrated medical textbook. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. He placed the earbud she handed him in his left ear.

  ‘Evanescence,’ said Alice. ‘Fallen. 2003. Hi.’

  Levin nodded, listening to a wash of surging guitars and soaring vocals.

  ‘They’re making another album right now,’ she added, closing the book slowly as if it was hard to take her eyes from the page.

  ‘What else are you listening to?’

  ‘Hmmm . . . Horehound.’ She met his eyes with her own green ones. ‘So what’s up?’

  ‘It’s a very strange time.’

  ‘And that’s what you wanted to discuss?’

  ‘No. I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you if you’re alright.’

  ‘If I’m alright? Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  Alice wanted to hurt him then. It had taken him all this time to think that maybe she wasn’t okay. But it was hard to be unkind to him. It was like kicking a puppy and she hated that too, that her father was like that. There were shadows under his eyes. He looked thinner. She would not feel sorry for him.

  She said, ‘I cut up a cadaver last week. Well, not all of it. Some of it. The thigh, the gluteus maximus, the little sinews around the hip joint.’

  He looked at her fine white fingers and imagined them unfurling nerves and arteries, her clinical eye observing the simple complexity of that weight-bearing joint.

  ‘I think its normal,’ she went on, ‘to feel a little unhinged when you have to deal with a cadaver for the first time. They told us that, and I’m sure they are watching for it too. I think if you enjoy it, they’d be worried.’

  ‘I guess they don’t want sociopaths qualifying with degrees in medicine,’ said Levin, thinking of Dexter, and how sociopaths, even serial killers, had become the subject of Oscar-winning movies and prime-time viewing on television.

  ‘I’m sure a few have,’ Alice said. It was hard to say which of her fellow students would become the sociopath, or the murderer. Certainly several would become drug addicts. Some probably already were. It was the law of averages, after all. All of medicine was based on it at some level. How many people you had to immunise before the population was safe. How many would die of cancer and how many from heart disease. How many would have a child with a birth defect. How many would contract late-onset diabetes.

  Alice was wearing a red floral dress and a white cardigan embroidered with blue and green butterflies. She had a thing for old-fashioned dresses and mismatching patterns. Levin could never see her without thinking of Björk. But where Björk had a bone wildness in her face, Alice had the sheen of Ingrid Bergman, with those big eyes and big smile in a cream and pink complexion. He’d worried through her teenage years that one day she’d realise that she wasn’t a stick-thin girl in the latest tiny jeans. He worried that she’d get anorexic or bulimic or depressed. But Alice never did. She discovered retro clothes, put them together in a peculiarly individual style, and found friends wherever she went. She had been in and out of love half a dozen times with boys who had made his palms sweat, but nothing and nobody had yet dimmed her kindness, or the light in her eyes—except perhaps him. And this troubled him.

  He hadn’t considered Alice when he’d complied with Lydia’s wishes. He hadn’t thought he needed to. She had her own life. Her own apartment. He had thought, perhaps wrongly, that his job as a father was done. He knew he had tried to be a good father.

  After Alice was born, they had decided it was too great a risk to Lydia to have another baby. So Alice was it. Levin had been relieved. It had been a shock how much noise babies made. It had upended his life. Alice the baby, named after Lydia’s mother, had become the central drawcard for Lydia’s attention. Alice the five-year-old had diaries scheduled around her. Alice the teenager became a vegetarian and suddenly he was eating tofu. Alice determined Lydia’s life. The lateness of the hour she got to bed, the washing that needed doing, the movies they watched, the places they holidayed. Alice toyed with the idea of architecture and worked for a couple of years in Lydia’s firm after senior year, before going to France. Then she applied to medical school at NYU and was accepted. And here she was, and Levin didn’t know how he had got so much older that his daughter was this woman.

  Alice ordered the duck ravioli (vegetarianism having gone the way of the Goth phase that happened about the same time) and Levin the grilled pork chop. After the wine arrived, and the food soon after, she said, as if complying with a social expectation, ‘So, what have you been doing?’

  He told her about the performance at MoMA.

  ‘Oh, Marina Abramović,’ Alice said. ‘I really want to see it. Is it good? What’s she like?’

  ‘Very still.’

  ‘Did you see the naked people upstairs?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen that yet.’

  ‘It’s been all over the news!’ She laughed. ‘How long does she have to sit there for?’

  ‘Until the end of May,’ he said.

  ‘Wow. Really? Did you sit with her?’

  ‘Oh no. No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, there’s a queue, for one thing. There are usually at least twenty people waiting to sit by first thing in the morning and the queue just grows after that. Some people sit for hours and the rest of them all wait for nothing . . .’

  ‘And she never gets up? She just sits there?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But what do people do?’

  ‘We watch her. It’s very strange.’ He shrugged.

  There was a silence and then he thought to say, ‘So, how
goes the world of medicine?’

  ‘It’s big. My brain has to keep taking in all this information and trying to organise it. But the prac work is great. It’s amazing to actually work with a real body and see all this incredible construction of muscles and ligaments, bones and blood vessels.’

  ‘Do the cadavers you work on have names still? Are they John or Nancy?’

  ‘No, they have codes.’

  ‘Is it yours then, for the duration—the body?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, but we share them. There are two of us working on ours. And the third-year students have already removed the face and explored the head. At first we had one that didn’t have much muscle so we got another one. Most of them die quite old so there’s not much muscle left.’

  ‘Of natural circumstances?’ he asked with a smile.

  ‘I think they have to die a certain way for them to be suitable,’ she said, frowning slightly. Clearly this wasn’t an area where jokes were made.

  ‘Is it possible to go all day without urinating?’ he asked.

  ‘If you don’t drink,’ she said, ‘but I think it would be hard. You mean Marina Abramović, right? We’ve been talking about it at school. I mean, she’s got to be getting dehydrated. Unless she drinks all night, but she couldn’t stay awake all day if she did that. We’re all betting she has a catheter. Has she done something like this before?’

  ‘I don’t really know very much about her,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go together one day?’

  ‘And see the nudes upstairs?’ She smiled.

  ‘If I must.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. I’m so busy.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘I saw Healayas the other day,’ Alice told him, scraping the last of the chocolate cake and ice cream off the plate. ‘Have you seen her? Are you guys doing the club again through summer?’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen any of them since . . .’ Levin trailed off. ‘It’s probably too late.’

  ‘You should. It’s such a good gig.’

  ‘Would you come play with us some time?’

  ‘Hmmm . . .’ She looked away.

  ‘This is what Mom wanted, Alice,’ he said. ‘As the person with power of attorney, you know that better than anyone.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, turning to him again. ‘But how would any of us know that’s what she wants?’

  ‘Well, she put it in writing—she made it legal.’

  ‘That was when she was well. That was before she stopped being able to change her mind.’

  ‘Do you think she wants to change her mind?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alice said and tears filled her eyes.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ he asked, finishing his espresso.

  Alice said, ‘I just feel like she’s so alone out there and I can’t visit every weekend.’

  Across the room a baby had started crying. The noise penetrated Levin’s ear with a particular ferocity.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he asked.

  On the sidewalk she kissed his cheek and said, ‘You know, Dad, I’m not really okay about any of this. I just have to keep trusting it will all work out.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘So, thanks for dinner.’

  She walked away and he wanted to cry then. It wasn’t okay with him either and he didn’t trust it would work out. He wanted it to be like it was. He wanted Lydia to come home and see the way he’d arranged everything. He wanted her there in the morning drying her hair on a towel. He wanted her voice on the other end of the phone talking about what they would have for dinner. Maybe if the Kawa score earned him nominations . . . maybe if his new album took off . . . He needed some sort of sign. But without stars, or God, there was nothing to wish upon and nowhere to ask for help.

  THE NEXT MORNING, HE TOOK an early Skype call from the film director, Seiji Isoda, in Tokyo. Then he carefully arranged the three pillows on the chair again, red, red and red, then the round white pillow and the long black cashmere scarf for Abramović’s hair.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. I’m frightened of a pillow, he thought. But why was he frightened? Was he always frightened? Yes, he thought with startling clarity. I am always frightened. He wanted to forget that thought right away.

  He wasn’t a bigger man. He knew that. He was an average man, and something was wrong with him. Where was the feeling that everything was alright? Surely by fifty you were meant to have that locked in?

  Who was he, when all was said and done? Who did people see when they saw him? People said he had nice eyes. Would Marina think he had nice eyes? He wasn’t impressively tall. He wasn’t impressively handsome. Lydia used to remind him to smile. ‘You know, you even frown in your sleep,’ she said. ‘And I whisper to you that I love you, and sometimes your frown goes away.’

  She had been certainty. When everything fell apart, she would be there. It was partly why he always felt so angry when she got sick. He didn’t like that the whole world wobbled when that happened, and he felt small. Small and alone. And now everyone knew. They knew that somehow he had failed Lydia. When she might have needed him the way couples seemed to do when life got tough, she had shunted him to the side.

  He continued to gaze at the pillow face and imagined the dark eyes of Marina Abramović looking back at him. Today he felt more comfortable on the chair. There was a blade of sunshine coming in across the floor and illuminating the edge of the Danish dining table. He liked nice things. He liked the things they had bought that would always have style.

  Mostly Lydia was right. He didn’t like people. Hardly at all. He certainly didn’t like thinking about people. He didn’t want to know about starving people who lived on one corncob a day if they were lucky. He didn’t care about people who would be swallowed up by climate change. He didn’t care about the plastic takeout containers of his life that stretched out behind him in a great wake that probably reached from here to the moon by now. He didn’t even like living on this planet particularly. It seemed complex and often violent.

  He hadn’t much liked growing up. He’d loved his mother but he hadn’t liked her. She had meditated. She had silent days. Days when he was not allowed to speak to her and she did not speak to him. They ate in silence, washed up in silence, went to bed in silence. The piano was the only thing allowed to disturb the house because Levin, his mother assured him, was destined for greatness. She was sure there was some sort of plan at work in the universe, a plan that would see the stars align, and her nights nursing to get him through school, and her weekend shifts at the aged-care facility, would no longer be necessary because Levin was going to be famous.

  He hardly remembered his father. He remembered the night his mother had come into his room. He had been four. He remembered the light from the hallway and the weight of her pressing the sheets down on him and her voice in the dark whispering, ‘Your father is dead, Arky. He’s dead.’

  Perhaps she said more. He didn’t remember. He only remembered that afterwards she had left the room and he had laid there in the darkness. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep breathing. Or if he was even allowed to breathe when his father was dead.

  Levin had a dim memory of his father holding his hand as they walked down a flight of stairs. But perhaps he had made it up. When his mother died, it had simply consolidated his thinking. Bad things happened at any moment. It was an almost unbearable effort being human. Did it matter that he’d loved Lydia? Did it matter that he’d tried to be a good husband and father?

  He had made some nice film scores. He had made some people happy with his music. Other than that, did it really matter how he lived his life? It was hard enough knowing which light bulb to buy. How to understand a software upgrade. How to read the baseball fixture. How to sort out a new phone. The list was endless. If the little things made no sense, what hope was there for big things like marriages?

  He’d done his best. Clearly it hadn’t been enough. He felt immensely sad. He felt as if he’d missed something very im
portant. Lydia had tried to get him to go to therapy. ‘Can you imagine what it would be like to have some freedom around all your worry?’ she’d said. ‘And look what happened to you. It could really help.’

  But he didn’t need help from a stranger. He didn’t want to be some clichéd New Yorker with therapy every Friday morning before the weekend came and everything went pear-shaped.

  Pillow-Marina looked back at him. She said nothing. But she was there. That seemed to matter. Even in her pillow form, it felt good to know she was there. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, dropped his head as he’d seen them do at the museum.

  He got up from the table, noting that he’d sat for almost half an hour, which surprised him because it had felt shorter. He made coffee. He thought about dinner with Alice and decided it seemed to require a follow-up. He didn’t know how to help. He’d never known how to help. It was his great flaw. His father had died and he didn’t know how to help. His mother died and maybe she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t needed to get out of the house that night. She’d liked her night-time drives. But he suspected she had driven away because she needed to be alone. He must have been hard to live with. There was no help for that. It was long ago. He didn’t know how to solve anything but music.

  He sat in his studio, coffee cup in hand, and listened again to the melodies he was discovering for Kawa, and the one melody that might repeat throughout the film. The soundtrack had to evoke love and loss in a world cloaked in snow and he thought, I’m writing the music of this winter. The winter when everything went away.

  Isoda had liked both theme track options he’d sent. The completion of the new scenes would determine which melody they finally chose. Or it might take longer to be sure. They had discussed the possibility of him going to Tokyo next month to Isoda’s studio. With the new scenes he’d have more than forty minutes of footage, but they weren’t consecutive scenes. It was hard to gauge precisely the emotional arc of the story. If he could see the work in progress—see the sketches taking form, see what Isoda was seeing—then he could be sure that the melody would draw the pictures together. If it did there was the score to write, an orchestra waiting for its parts and a studio to book. He’d need vocals and session musos.