The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

  ‘Seventy-five days,’ she said. ‘Are you sure? Can you do it? È un periodo lungo.’

  ‘Sì,’ he had said, not understanding then how long seventy-five days could be. Perhaps Marina hadn’t either.

  They conversed always in Italian. He spoke English badly. His Serbian was hello, goodbye, thank you, tomorrow, hungry, delicious, one, two, three, love. She spoke German and French too, and Dutch, and in every language she was funny, intense, and her accent rumbled with Balkan vowels and consonants.

  ‘I will stay with you for the entire show,’ he said. Even then he felt his devotion to her. ‘Every day, so that nothing, no one is missed. Every face. We will capture every face.’

  So here he was, and spring was gracing the city outside. The children in the strollers who came into the atrium had bare legs and were no longer swathed and booted. He smelled rain on trench coats and wind in the wraps and scarves.

  For seventy-five days he was an archivist. Every day he took the clipboard and moved along the queue of people and had them sign the permission form to be photographed, making their images available to Marina for any future works, books, films, performances. Nearly everyone signed. Then he returned to his camera and photographed face after face. Every face. He captured the moment when they first sat and their eyes connected with Marina. Then he waited until their emotions began to surface, and he captured them again and again.

  A sitting could last two minutes or two hours. Or an entire day. He hadn’t expected people to do that. Nor had any of la famiglia di Marina. So many expressions crossed the faces of those who sat. He looked for intensity. He looked for the moment when the person sitting was consumed by the indecipherable. He felt as if he was inside a world of raw truth. Who would have imagined there would be such faces? He had photographed architecture, history, musicians. Now, day after day, he looked into the human face, painted with curiosity, and he saw the abyss of history within a human heart. Every one was its own beaten, salvaged, polished, engraved, carved, luminous form.

  He captured this ephemeral thing, a communion between an artist and her audience. The chair opposite her was an invitation. Come sit if you wish.

  Here in New York, where time was everyone’s currency, and to gaze deeply into the face of another was possibly a sign of madness, people were flocking to sit with Marina Abramović. She wasn’t so much stealing hearts, he thought, as awakening them. The light that came into their eyes. Their intelligence, their sadness, all of it tumbled out as people sat. Marco, with his long lens and archivist’s eye, captured them all. Il devoto ed i devoti.

  WHEN BRITTIKA VAN DER SAR returned to New York for the third time, she went straight to MoMA, ignoring her desire for a shower after the overnight flight from Amsterdam. Marco, the photographer, recognised her and nodded when he saw her. Carlos, who must have sat fifteen times by now, was sitting again. Carlos had a social media following. On Twitter there was an IsatwithMarina hashtag. She saw the silver-haired film composer on the sidelines too, the one Jane had introduced her to. He was in his usual position, seated on a red pillow. He was entirely absorbed in the two people at the table, as if he was watching a movie. She wondered what was going on in his life that this was what took up his time. She must interview him.

  Today she was lucky and the queue moved fast. By mid-afternoon it was finally her turn. She strode to the table. She wanted to get it right this time. She gazed into Abramović’s brown eyes, sure there was a flicker of recognition, a warming. Brittika smiled and hoped Marco had got just that moment.

  She was aware of the noise of the crowd milling and staring. She hoped she looked confident but she felt only nervousness. Why didn’t other people seem to be afraid of the crowd when they sat? It was the hardest thing to pretend confidence when you didn’t feel it.

  Her heart was beating hard in her chest and her hands were shaking. There was a sort of tremor running down her spine. Did people on TV get nervous? Did Marina get nervous? Was she nervous right now?

  When I get my PhD, I’ll stop feeling like this, thought Brittika. Six more months. Then I won’t feel like a fake any more.

  Marco had told her that Marina’s team had taken bets, before the show started, on how many people would sit. Marina’s assistant, Davide Balliano, had predicted more than half a million visitors and fifteen hundred sitters. They had all thought he was way too ambitious. But The Artist is Present was over halfway through and Davide had already won the bet on the visitor numbers and more than a thousand people had sat in the chair opposite Marina.

  Brittika readjusted herself. She took a breath and let it out slowly. She maintained the gaze with Abramović but her heart wouldn’t settle. She thought of stories about Marina to distract her. She wanted to get to twenty minutes. Let the record show she had made it to twenty minutes.

  She thought about the time Marina had brought a friend home from school and they had taken one of her father’s revolvers from the glass display cabinet. Marina had loaded a single bullet into the chamber of the gun and spun the cylinder. Then she held the muzzle to her head and pulled the trigger. Click. No shot. Then her friend spun the cylinder and held the gun to his head. He pressed the trigger. Click. No shot. They had both fallen about laughing.

  When Marina was still living at home at age twenty-eight, she wanted to do a show where she would walk on stage dressed the way her mother would have liked her to. In a nice skirt and blouse, or a dress and gloves, with hair and make-up done. Marina would stand and look at the public and then put one bullet in the chamber of the gun. She would spin the cylinder, put the gun to her temple, and shoot. If she didn’t die, then she would dress in the clothes she wanted to wear, looking how she wanted to look, and leave.

  She had also wanted to make a room where, when people entered, they would undress and all their clothes would be washed, dried and ironed then returned. The naked visitors would then dress in their clean clothes and exit the room. Laundromat as performance art. The university had refused to permit it.

  Brittika thought of the little Citroën van parked at the entrance to the retrospective upstairs. Marina and Ulay had driven all over Europe in it, with their dog Alba. It no longer held the narrow mattress they had slept on for five years, the cooking equipment, the books that came and went as they travelled, the retsina bottles, Marina’s latest knitting project. Alba was long dead. Gone too were the pale headlights pinning the road to their van, the goats that gave them milk in the morning, the walks on cliff tops, through forests and across town squares listening to conversations. Watching games of backgammon and boules. Making plans for this show and that. Gone was that relationship.

  Brittika wondered if she would ever meet someone who made her feel the way Marina and Ulay had once felt about each other. She couldn’t imagine living and working with someone. To let them hold a bow and arrow to your heart like Marina had in Rest Energy. Or take your breath, like in Breathing In/Breathing Out, until you were almost poisoned by the other person’s carbon dioxide. Or to bind your hair together. That one made her particularly claustrophobic and she grimaced.

  She hoped Marco hadn’t caught that. She realised her heart had settled and the quiver down her spine was less insistent. She refocused on Marina’s eyes and tried to be open.

  I don’t want to love like you’ve loved, she thought as she looked at Marina. Brittika knew she became way too intense with guys. Her last relationship had ended badly. She had basically stalked him. It embarrassed her to think back on it. She hoped Marco hadn’t taken her photograph just then either.

  She saw that Marina’s gaze was lingering in the space just before Brittika’s face as if there was another world right in front of her that Brittika couldn’t see. What was Marina seeing?

  Art did not stop, that’s what Marina had said. Art did not get to five o’clock and say, “That’s it, the day is done, go think about TV or making dinner.” It wasn’t like that. It was there all the time: when you were chopping vegetables, talking with a friend, r
eading a newspaper, listening to music, having a party. It was always there offering suggestions, wanting you to go write or draw, sing or play. Wanting you to imagine big things, to connect with an audience, to use energy, to find energy. It wasn’t ready when you were, it didn’t come when you wanted it or leave when you were done. It took its time. It was often late, or slow, or not what you had in mind.

  Brittika thought about how when she arrived home late her mother had always thought to put food aside for her. How she always left the lamp on in the hallway. Put fresh linen on her bed. As if her mother wanted Brittika to be sure that she was loved. That was the problem of adoption. You weren’t. Not first off. Not enough to keep. Her birth mother had been a woman in China who had probably already given birth to one child. Or who had wanted a son, and so had given Brittika up in the hope that next time . . .

  But she had been adopted and knew nothing other than her parents who had done so much for her. She was trying to do everything she could to make them know she appreciated them. But it wasn’t easy to do that. She had urges to do things that she didn’t understand. Without a sense of history, she didn’t know why she’d had such an interest in sex from such a young age. It had already got her into trouble.

  She wasn’t sure she was essentially a good person. She thought when she could afford it, it would be good for her to live alone because the idea of it frightened her. She imagined a cottage by the sand dunes on the little island of Terschelling in the North Sea. Maybe she’d try to go there to finish the last draft of her PhD.

  Brittika had a theory that Abramović didn’t like being alone. Sitting at this table was part of that fear. Marina had been a solitary child, living with her grandmother for the first six years of her life, and seeing her father and mother only on Sundays. She had returned home to live with her parents when her brother was born. Not long after, she was hospitalised for a year with a blood condition. Her mother never came to visit.

  Nobody might have come to The Artist is Present. The show could have opened and, after a few days, once the Abramović fans had come and gone, it might have wilted and died. People might have stood on the sidelines, frowned, scoffed and dismissed it. That was always the risk. The work might not have connected with anyone. Marina Abramović might have come all this way, from Belgrade to New York via forty years of art, to be alone at this table for three long months.

  And then, for a long time, Brittika simply sat, and there was a luminescence that descended as if the skylight six floors above them was sending a cone of sunlight down into the atrium. Marina’s face looked as if it was made of stone as ancient as the face of the Sphinx, but now it was a man’s face, and now an opal.

  At some point Brittika saw a small square package in the air between Marina and herself. The package floated towards her and she could see it was gently vibrating. Without moving, somehow Brittika was able to reach out and take the package between her fingers. It smelled of wool wash. She thought of her mother in a pool of lamplight practising her calligraphy. She saw her father hanging out washing. She felt the smallness of herself. She thought of how she would lie awake and talk to Jesus as a child and several times she was sure Jesus had talked back.

  She unwrapped the gold leaf around the package and within it she saw her soul. It was dark and eternal like starlight but shaped like a small mochi ball. She slipped it into her mouth and swallowed it.

  When she finally stood and left the chair, the room had become a place of strangers. She had forgotten what language she was meant to speak. She went out into the street.

  Later, lying on the grass in Central Park and staring at clouds, she felt as if parts of herself had flown away, or come home.

  ‘HEALAYAS? IT’S ARKY.’

  ‘Arky? Hi! Are you okay?’

  Her voice was the same as ever. Suddenly Levin didn’t know what he’d been afraid of, or why he hadn’t called her months ago.

  ‘I saw you sat with Marina Abramović,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I have—twice now.’

  ‘Could we talk about it?’

  ‘Bien sûr. Will you come over?’

  ‘Umm . . .’

  ‘I could make something.’

  ‘Really? Thank you. I’d like that. Okay. What time?’

  ‘Anytime. Tonight? Just come over. I’ve really missed you.’

  ‘I thought you might like to do the vocals. On the new soundtrack I’m working on.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it.’

  ‘I’ll bring a few tracks.’

  ‘Okay. So does seven work?’

  He looked at his watch, calculated the trip and his need to shower and shave. ‘Sure.’

  ‘À bientôt,’ she said.

  Healayas lived on Sixth Avenue, a few blocks north of the park. New apartments were multiplying inside old civic buildings. Cafes were replacing locksmiths. A new movie theatre had opened. But Harlem had been making itself over for millions of years. Before white and black, there were Indians, and before Indians there had been mastodons and bison. Before that there had been dinosaurs and glaciers and before that a great inland sea just waiting for the Appalachian Mountains to rise up out of the ocean and make Manhattan Island.

  Levin took the A train express to 125th and then walked. He’d finally unpacked his old vinyls and had come across some Morrissey, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and several Leonard Cohen albums that Tom had given him years back. It had felt good to play music loud with the doors open onto the balcony and let the sound ripple out over the treetops on Washington Square.

  Healayas’s apartment was at the top of a brownstone fenced with polished steel, interrupted only by a gate with a video keypad and a slot for mail. The owner had gutted the first two floors but Healayas’s apartment on the top floor remained unrenovated. Levin pressed the intercom. Healayas buzzed him in and he walked down the laneway and climbed the side stairs.

  The door was open to the warm evening. She came towards him, embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘It’s good to see you, Arky. You don’t have to be quite so good at avoiding everyone, you know. We all miss you. I’m making gazpacho. I thought in this heat gazpacho followed by pasta with garlic prawns.’

  She moved about the kitchen in cut-off blue jeans, a small red t-shirt, coloured leather ties on her wrists, her hair pinned back and falling between her shoulder blades in black ringlets. She was chopping garlic, parsley, grating lemon rind, tossing them together in a bowl, slicing bread.

  Tom had met Healayas at a party in Aspen at Hunter S. Thompson’s place. Healayas was years younger, but that hadn’t stopped Tom. She had also had been with someone else at the time, but at the end of the holiday, she and Tom went back to Los Angeles together.

  They had been a vivid couple. He knew Tom had asked her to marry him, and Healayas had not given him an answer. Once Tom had said to him that Healayas was Teflon. Everywhere they went, men slid off her. Did he mind? No, he said to Levin. He had to keep reassuring her that he wasn’t going anywhere. But he did. He used to say Leonard Cohen must have been thinking of her when he wrote:

  I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the dark

  oh one by one she had to tell them

  that her name was Joan of Arc.

  I was in that army, yes, I stayed a little while;

  I want to thank you, Joan of Arc,

  for treating me so well.

  Levin had played that song again just this afternoon and heard other lyrics that had stuck on repeat in his mind.

  And the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend

  And all the rain falls down amen

  On the work of last year’s man.

  On the table was fresh ciabatta, a dish of olive oil and another of dukkah. Healayas opened the bottle of wine he had brought. Plucking two glasses from a shelf, she poured for them and sat, looking at Levin across the wooden counter-top.

  ‘So, tell me, what’s new, Arky?’

  ‘I’ve been working on a soundtrack. It’s
a feature length animation. A company called Izumi that’s partnered with Warner. Japanese director.’

  ‘An animation? Is that a first for you?’

  ‘It is,’ said Levin. ‘But I like it.’

  ‘So how does it work with the Japanese director? You go there? He comes here?’

  ‘We Skype. But I may go there soon. We may even do the final soundtrack in Tokyo.’

  ‘You want to play me something?’

  ‘Later. I’ve got some lyrics I’d love your thoughts on.’

  He explained the script Seiji Isoda had adapted about a woman who was a fish by night and how she falls in love with a man who is also a bear and the King of Winter.

  ‘What is the problem? What makes the tension?’ Healayas asked.

  ‘They have a child, and the child has to choose whether to be a bear like her father, which means leaving, or stay and be a fish like her mother.’

  ‘To become your mother or your father, that is the eternal question,’ said Healayas. She stared out over the low rooftops of South Harlem. The heat hung damp in the air. A thunderstorm was brewing.

  ‘So no happy ending?’ she asked.

  Levin shook his head.

  ‘A truthful story.’ Healayas shrugged. ‘And the music? It has to be evocative, no?

  ‘Yes, but not biblical like The Mission, or fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. And not like The Last of the Mohicans or Dances with Wolves. I want it to be stranger. And wondrous. Like combining Guillermo Del Toro with Terrence Malick in music. I haven’t got it right yet.’

  ‘Have you seen Lydia?’ Healayas asked as if this was a casual question.

  Levin blinked and shook his head. ‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’

  Healayas put English spinach into a colander and rinsed it. Then she wrapped the leaves in a clean tea towel and flicked the water from them before arranging the salad in a red bowl. ‘Then we won’t,’ she said slowly. ‘Best to get the elephant out of the room though.’