by Heather Rose
Levin said nothing.
‘So, you want to talk about Marina Abramović?’ Healayas asked.
‘Yes. What was it like to sit with her?’
‘Well, completely unexpected,’ said Healayas, then laughed. ‘I found myself talking to Tom. It was as if he was right there in front of me as real as you are. We were having a meal together. I’m serious. We were just chatting as if it was completely normal.’
‘You mean it was an hallucination?’
‘Well, I guess so, but it sure tasted good.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Same old Tom. But so vivid. It’s stayed with me ever since. I wonder if everyone is having these experiences.’
Levin frowned.
‘Did you see the Colm Tóibín piece?’
‘No,’ Levin said.
‘I’ll get it. Wait.’
She went into the living room and he heard her rustling about, then she reappeared.
Holding a copy of The Times she read aloud. ‘It was like being brought into a room in Enniscorthy when I was a child on the day after a neighbour had died and being allowed to look at the corpse’s face. And then this—listen to this,’ she said. ‘This was serious, too serious maybe, too intimate, too searching. It was either, I felt, what I should do all the time, or what I should never do.’
She looked at Levin. ‘It’s because it feels so on the edge. Like church or a ceremony that you’re not sure you’re really invited to, but you go anyway. It’s remarkable. Haunting. You haven’t sat?’
‘No.’
‘You must, Arky. You must.’
‘Must I?’ he asked.
‘You will love it. Don’t miss out.’
‘I might.’
‘Or you might not.’ Then, changing the subject, she said, ‘Are you going to do the Lime Club with us? I would really love you to. We all want you to do it.’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘I know I can get another pianist, but it wouldn’t feel right without you.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘And I know Alice is interested in doing some dates. I saw her the other day.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, yes, or okay, I’ll think about it?’
‘Yes, I’ll do the season.’
‘Gee, Arky, we try to get an answer out of you for six months, and now you just say yes?’
He shrugged. ‘Sorry.’
There was a pause. Levin sipped his wine and looked about the kitchen at the saucepans hung from hooks on a rack above him, the melted candles on the benchtop, the knife block, the metal sink, the block of soap on a dish on the windowsill, pomegranates in a bowl and tomatoes in another. He felt like he was in a still life. As if sitting here he had caught up to some other part of himself that had been here waiting for him. Last time he’d been here Lydia had been with him. Healayas had cooked them dinner. It was bizarre when he thought that was only a few months back.
Healayas cut bread. Then she took a container of soup from the refrigerator and put it in a blender. ‘Sorry about the noise,’ she said, and he braced as she turned the machine on.
She poured the bright red soup into two dark bowls and tossed small cubes of cucumber and red peppers on top.
‘It’s really good to see you, Arky,’ she said, sliding one bowl towards him. ‘It’s been much too long.’
From Healayas’s speakers came the music he had brought with him. The simple piano, the counterpoint of viola, the introduction of oboes, the answering cellos. A mellow trumpet rising up out of the strings and soaring over treetops.
‘It’s definitely water and forest,’ she said.
‘Oh good,’ Levin said.
‘So, I’m thinking that now it just needs . . . hmmm . . . love?’ Levin sighed. He looked up at the large print on the wall. It was a photograph of Healayas singing. Her hair was loose and she was in a silver singlet, her skin ebony. She looked magnificent as she leaned towards the microphone with her eyes closed.
‘It’s there. It just needs unearthing,’ she said.
Levin sipped the coffee she had made. Turkish, sweet and grainy.
They worked into the night. He on her upright piano, and Healayas feeling her way with the lyrics he had penned. She had an organic, impulsive response to music. She had made him feel at times, over the years they had played together, that classical training had ruined him. When she sang she gave him goose bumps. She had a sound in her voice that sometimes moved him to tears.
After midnight the thunderstorm broke, hammering on the roof too loud for them to continue.
‘I’ll call you a cab. Or you’re welcome to stay. I can make up the sofa bed. We can go out for breakfast?’
He had no idea how he would sleep with her in close proximity. He was unanchored. He wanted desperately to ask her just to hold him, to take him to bed and hold him. But he couldn’t ask such a thing.
‘It’s okay. I’ll walk over and get a cab on Eighth,’ he said.
Was she in a relationship? He never liked to ask. She had sometimes introduced him to men at gigs, but no one had been constant since Tom.
‘So I’ll come over tomorrow afternoon and we’ll put the vocals down?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Okay. See you then.’
‘You know, I’ve never seen it, your new apartment.’
‘I haven’t had anyone over.’
When she kissed him goodnight, she said, ‘You know, Arky, Lydia loves you very much.’
‘Does she?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Have you talked to anyone? I can recommend someone good.’
‘A lawyer?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘A therapist.’
‘I’m fine. Really. I hate it, but it’s fine.’
‘No one is okay through something like this. It eats away at everything. You’re in pain.’
‘Really, if it’s what Lydia wants . . . you know Lydia. She doesn’t change her mind.’
‘We wouldn’t know if she did,’ said Healayas.
‘Oh, God,’ said Levin. He wished this whole topic had not come up.
‘She loves you. I think maybe she wanted to see who you could be . . . who you both could be . . .’
‘So, like a test? Or an experiment?’
‘No. No. Not like that.’
‘I want to see her,’ he said.
Healayas nodded. ‘There’s a tiny chance, I know it’s remote, but still, that she could come out of this, enough to talk, enough to listen to music together . . .’
‘You mean she’d come home?’
Healayas shrugged. ‘Here, a little poem: Even after all this time, the sun never says, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world. You never know what love can create, Arky.’
She hugged him intensely at the door then let him go. ‘See you tomorrow. Here—the umbrella!’
The cab sped downtown past melting lights and through new puddles, the traffic hissing and muted beyond and, inside the cab, the windscreen wipers clicked like a metronome in the storm and the rain fell down. Amen.
UPSTAIRS ON THE SIXTH FLOOR, parked at the entrance to the retrospective, was an old van. It was empty inside. Alice liked the idea of living in a van, being on the road with a band or a boyfriend or both. Marina Abramović had been a kind of rock chick in those days, she thought. Going from gig to gig, performing across Europe.
Above was a huge black-and-white picture of Abramović. Screams and moans could be heard coming from inside the exhibition. A warning advised that the show may be disturbing for some.
Two women stood nearby looking at the sign and one was saying, ‘I tell him to wash his face five times, to clean his teeth five times, to get dressed, and still it isn’t done.’
They nodded together and moved forward. Another couple passed by. The man was saying, ‘Well, I question what these kind of people are doing in art. The business types wanting to make money. That’s a whole other art,’ and
they both laughed.
‘Oh, well, here goes,’ Alice said to her father.
Levin smiled and together they moved into the crowded room. Large screens were showing videos of Abramović. The first had her vigorously brushing her hair. She was saying, ‘Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful’ as she dragged the brush savagely through her long, dark hair. Alice agreed with the sentiment, but was it okay for a beautiful woman to be saying it?
Ahead there was a bottleneck at the doorway with the first of the nude performers. To get a better view, Alice moved away from Levin to the side of the room. A young woman with golden skin and small, awkward breasts stood opposite a lean, immobile man who was also naked. The nude couple held each other’s gaze unflinchingly. The crowd was hesitant. Some people clutched their bags and darted between the two nudes. Others took their time, but rarely did anyone look into the eyes of the performers. Almost every visitor, male and female, turned towards the woman as they stepped through the opening into the next room. Only one person, a man, turned towards the man, but he did not make eye contact. There was a brusque passing, no consideration of buttons or belt clasps against soft flesh.
Alice chose to face the man and felt the heat of his naked body. It was over before she had remembered to look into his eyes. She turned to see Levin looking down at the floor, moving through facing the woman. Alice did not want to think about her father as a sexual being.
Ahead there were two people pointing at one another in a small alcove, their fingers almost touching. Further in, a man and a woman were entwined by their hair, back to back, in a recess of white wall. They also showed no sign of movement other than the blink of their eyes.
In a darkened room a light shone on a huge pile of white plaster cow bones. A large screen showed Abramović in a lab coat and glasses. She appeared to be giving a lecture. Then she took off her coat and began dancing wearing nothing but a black slip, stockings and high black shoes.
Alice wasn’t sure what it was about, but she liked it. It was sort of funny. She moved towards a man lying beneath a skeleton. She became aware, once she was beside him, that he too was also quite naked, and she felt a little embarrassed that she was so close to him. As he breathed, the skeleton appeared to breathe with him.
Alice gazed briefly at the glass cabinets that held letters, photographs and medals. Then she sat on a leather bench and listened under headphones.
Marina was saying in her distinctive accented English: ‘I went to monastery in Ladakh because I wanted to see preparation for lama dancing . . . we are just normal human beings then when I put the mask on my head I become a god and a god can do anything.
‘How to catch the moment of here and now? It’s all about present. A performer can still be distracted—the body performs but the mind is everywhere . . .’
The fat woman beside Alice took off her headphones. ‘It’s breaking up so badly,’ she said loudly. ‘They should fix that. I can’t understand what she’s saying.’
Alice nodded and returned her attention to the voice.
‘Rhythm five. I construct a five-pointed star—construction is made in wood shavings soaked in one hundred litres of petrol . . . communist star, Tito time. On my birth certificate . . . somehow a curse for me. I make a ritual to exorcise the star—cut all my hair and put into the star, cut toenails, cut fingernails . . . big mistake . . . then lie in the centre of the star . . . didn’t know no oxygen in the middle of the star . . . lost consciousness. A doctor saw something wrong. I was being burned and not reacting . . . took me out of the piece and revived me.’
What did her father see in Abramović? Alice frowned. He liked solitude. She remembered the nights when her mother was away on business and Yolanda had left, and she’d hoped he’d come and talk to her, but he just played music. He could go for weeks without ever having a conversation with her, other than telling her about a new film he was working on, the next bit of music he was trying to solve.
When she had begun to learn cello, she thought it might be something they could do together, or maybe that had been Lydia’s plan. But it wasn’t until Alice got back from Paris and he heard her play in her band that he asked her to come play with him in Healayas’s band. She realised before then he simply hadn’t rated her as a musician.
Abramović’s voice in the crackly headphones was saying: ‘Failure is so important. You have to experiment. Failure is part of the process.’
New York attracted extreme things, Alice thought. The French guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers when they were still standing. Abramović sitting for seventy-five days in silence. To fall, to fail, the possibility of disaster was so close.
Alice didn’t like to fail. She had worked hard not to fail. She thought she may be failing her mother but she didn’t know how to solve it. She rose and moved on through the retrospective. In the next room a girl about her own age was naked high on a wall. Alice observed a tiny seat between her legs, a little clear plastic bicycle seat almost invisible in the girl’s pubic hair. Her arms were outstretched. People were standing at the back of the room watching. Alice walked forward and the young woman met her eyes. Alice did not look away. The girl’s arms moved infinitesimally. Her feet were on tiny supports and as Alice watched she saw that the girl was moving incrementally to keep herself pinned to the wall. Alice worried for her so high up and exposed to the concrete floor, people staring at her nudity.
Alice visited her mother every weekend she could. It took three trains, but she read and studied, and it was a new pattern. To dress your mother was a strange thing. It had about it a sense of continuum. Her mother did not make eye contact. Her expression was entirely passive, as if she was daydreaming. She didn’t speak, although sometimes she sighed. Her mother was taken to shower in a wheelchair. The nurses spoke to her, the poem of the health worker recited to reassure the patient of the small and essential tasks of day and night: there we go, sliding you into the chair, now lifting your feet, one, two, that’s it, and now off we go into the bathroom, here we are, that’s right, now off with your nightdress, and shower on, oh lovely, not too hot, not too hot, that’s right, nice and warm, let’s wash your hair, that’s right, let’s close your eyes . . .
They returned her mother to her in towels. Alice had dried the skin between her mother’s toes. She clipped her mother’s toenails and blow-dried her hair. Later, when her mother was again in her chair by the window, wearing a fresh kimono in patterned green silk over white cotton pyjamas, Alice took out nail polish and with careful strokes painted her mother’s fingernails and toenails a sparkling turquoise blue.
She shifted and the artist on the wall gently released Alice from her gaze.
Alice walked into a larger room. It was a performance called The Room with the Ocean View. Her mother had an ocean view now. Her room took in the dunes and the sea and the sea took in Lydia. Lydia liked to sit by the window. She had made noises, appeared in microscopic ways to be agitated if she was moved elsewhere. If Alice sat on the floor and placed her mother’s hand on her head, Lydia made tiny motions with her fingers as if she was attempting to stroke Alice’s hair. This she could only do with her right hand. She could not grip a cup or hold a pencil.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go home?’ she had asked her mother, but there was no reply. The apartment on Columbus that had been their home for twenty years was gone. Alice had seen the new apartment only before her parents had purchased it. She had not been there since her father had moved in. He had never invited her.
Her mother was the sort of person who was greeted by the greengrocer. Who remembered the names of everyone in their building, including most of the maids and nannies that came and went from various apartments. When they ate at Cafe con Leche, the staff gathered around them and made a fuss, knowing Lydia would order the black bean soup, Levin the roast pork and she, Alice, would order the chicharrón de pollo, which as a child she had loved to say almost as much as to eat.
Home was a different
notion now. Home was her clothes and books, the little window by her desk looking down onto a rooftop garden where no one ever sat. There were rituals of Cointreau late on Saturday nights after their weekly gig and huevos rancheros on Sundays. Home was her cello and her bass guitar. Home was being able to rehearse with her fellow band members in the tiny studio below street level on Seventh. Home was the squealing plumbing when the shower ran, and the creak in the floorboards by the fridge.
In The House with the Ocean View, Marina Abramović had created a home comprising three white rooms attached to the walls of the gallery, accessible only by three ladders with knives for steps. From the speakers Abramović’s voice narrated every step and action she had taken over the twelve days she lived up there. ‘I take a deep breath and my chest rises. Then it falls. I remain sitting still. My feet are flat on the floor and spaced hip-width apart. My back is straight against the chair. My head does not move. Only my eyes blink. The rest of my body is motionless.’
Alice could have made a similar account of her mother’s days. She suspected her mother was on a long journey away from the grace of ordinary. She might suffer another stroke. She might die somewhere while her mind was far away. Alice did not know how she would live without her.
Lydia was on the dialysis machine each week. They had completed another round of plasma exchange. To look at her, she appeared as fragile as mist. There was a calm about her that may have been life leaving, or life returning, Alice could not tell.
Yesterday, Alice had laid a brand new Moleskine notebook beside her mother’s chair and a 4B pencil that she knew her mother favoured. Her mother had shown no sign of recognition or acknowledgement when Alice arrived. Only her hand on the top of Alice’s head moving ever so gently seemed to indicate that, somewhere inside, she remembered.
When she was a child, Alice’s scrapbooks had been full of clippings from brochures of taps and door handles, wall and floor claddings, architectural magazines, houses lit for the evening, foodless kitchens, bathrooms without toys, beds without evidence of sleep. Every birthday her mother constructed from cardboard and foam core a new doll’s house according to Alice’s latest ideas—a tree house, a stable, a house five storeys tall, a lighthouse. She had spent a great deal of time watching her mother go from one hundred miles an hour to a complete stop. There was fast Lydia and slow Lydia. Slow Lydia slept a great deal of the time. Slow Lydia lay in bed and watched movies and played cards with Alice. Slow Lydia spent days in hospital. Slow Lydia was there in bed when Alice arrived home from school. When Alice had realised it was only medical knowledge that could save her mother, she had set her sights on becoming a doctor of haematology.