The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

  Levin watched as a slender woman in skinny jeans, a black sweater and pointy white suede boots rose from the chair. She had a striking wizened face and moved like a dancer. Levin felt he should recognise her. Then a child sat. When she left after ten minutes, she had the look of someone who has just performed an act of bravery and was relieved to have escaped uninjured.

  Abramović was looking tired. Other than the almost invisible roll of the neck, and a minute restlessness on the chair, she was inert. Her eyelids rested in a half-gaze, steady and distant. The woman on his right had her fingers across her mouth in rapt awe.

  ‘How does she do it?’ the rapt woman whispered to Levin. ‘To be so still all day?’

  ‘She’s been at it a long time,’ Levin said, feeling like he was becoming an expert.

  ‘Since April, yes?’ the woman looked at him.

  ‘Since 1963.’

  Someone behind them said in a loud voice. ‘So what? She’s a real person, right? What will galleries become next? Black walls? Silence?’

  ‘Shh,’ someone nearby said.

  ‘I’m being shushed,’ the man’s voice continued. ‘It’s not a gallery. It’s a library. Worse, it’s a damn church. They’re all praying.’

  People squeezed past him. On the other side of the square, two children had sat down, their legs crossed like yogic masters, facing one another in imitation of Marina and her sitter. The woman beside him saw them too, and she smiled and nodded at them. The children sat for a few minutes quite seriously, gazing into each other’s eyes. Then the girl fell about giggling and the boy fell on top of her.

  Levin observed a man in the crowd with his left arm inked. The one word he could make out below the folded shirt sleeve was the word kill. Levin looked at the security guards who were in quiet conversation, although their eyes were ever vigilant. What would they do if the man simply stepped into the square and wounded Marina, drew a gun, a blade, raised a fist or took her neck between his hands? He continued to observe the man. What would he, Levin, who had no martial arts skills, no military training, who didn’t even own a hand gun, do if he saw the man draw a weapon? He didn’t want to think about what he might become in such a situation.

  The Kawa soundtrack was almost done. Or as done as it could be until he had the final pictures and an orchestra who knew their parts. Seiji Isoda was planning to arrive in the first week of June with the final edit, which suited Levin perfectly because he didn’t want to miss these last weeks with Marina. Isoda had sent him several tests with the draft tracks striped to the pictures and it was better than Levin had imagined, even if it still lacked an essential connectivity. But Isoda seemed so optimistic. In the end, they decided on New York for recording the final score. Anything else felt too hard.

  Pillow-Marina was still seated in her chair at the dining table in the apartment. Her cashmere hair now comprised three black scarves twisted into the side braid she favoured. The first time Yolanda the housekeeper had come she had dismantled her, folded the scarf and returned the cushions to the couch. But the next time he had left a note. Please do not disturb. (Work in progress.) And since then Marina had sat silently, and each morning, Levin sat opposite her.

  At the piano he chased music into the forest, under water, over rocks and into fish. He chased it all the way downstream to the sea, and there he had found himself on a long pale beach and quite alone. There was no mythical fish-woman to pluck him up and put him back into the river, so he could swim home. There was only Pillow-Marina and the empty apartment. He had tried to capture that too. The true sound of solitude.

  When the music was gone for the night, he looked at the photographs on Flickr of all the people who had sat with Marina. He had never noticed before how the human face could be so varied. And the variation wasn’t in the features, or the colours, although that was part of it. It was in the way the person leaned into their face, or didn’t, they way they looked out with intensity or resignation, with curiosity or fear, and it seemed to indicate the way they saw the world in general. We live as we see, he thought, and he knew Lydia would have been fascinated by the faces too, and he hated thinking of her in the past tense.

  That morning, on the way to MoMA, he’d been following a woman up the stairs from the subway. She was in a long floral halter-neck sundress that all the girls seemed to be wearing now the weather was warm. Her whole back and arms were tattooed with green vines and yellow flowers. When she turned her head, though, he had been startled to discover her face was withered and hard. He thought instantly that she must be a heroin addict and remembered Hal once telling him that the truly poor couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan any more. Manhattan belonged to the rich now. Maybe she was the daughter of old money, or the ex-wife of a famous artist. Still, the contrast of the delicate botanical art and that weary, worn-out face stayed with him. Who had she been when she’d chosen those pictures, compared to who she was now?

  His eyes kept returning to the man with kill on his arm. Then Lydia’s voice said clearly to him, ‘Arky, you’re just seeing the last word. Not the whole sentence. It actually says: Thou shalt not kill.’

  He blinked rapidly. Of course it wasn’t Lydia speaking to him, but it had been so vivid. And perhaps she was right. Would a person bent on killing in public have taken such care to iron his white shirt?

  When the gallery closed for the day, Marina was still alive. There had been no scene and the man in the white shirt had disappeared hours before. Levin took the A train but instead of getting off at West 4 Street he went on to Canal and walked to the river. There he sat on a bench and watched the ferries and cargo ships.

  After his mother died and he’d gone to live with his grandparents, his grandfather had introduced him to Dave Brubeck, Oscar Petersen, Art Tatum, Bill Evans. And his grandmother had loved musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Gilbert and Sullivan. They both encouraged him to keep composing. Working as an usher at the Arlington in his senior year, he fell in love with soundtracks. He loved Jarre’s scores to Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. John Barry’s Born Free score and all those Bond movies—Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun, Thunderball and Goldfinger. And Bernard Herrmann’s soundtracks to Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. He’d go home and practise them. Take them apart. Put them back together. He learned other instruments. His grandfather taught him drums and saxophone, and he picked up guitar. His grandfather said he made anything sound musical. His grandmother told him friends would come.

  Then Levin got a scholarship to Juilliard. He met Tom Washington at a student event. Tom was an actor at the Lee Strasberg school but he wanted to be a director and he was looking for someone to compose the music. Neither of the first two short films they did together amounted to much. Back then Tom wasn’t a particularly good writer, and they did all the special effects themselves. But Tom had the same passion for film that Levin had for music. The third film was an eighteen-minute dark comedy featuring a mute girl who tried to get her boyfriend out of prison. It got picked up on the awards circuit. It was In Competition at Cannes and won in Toronto. People praised the soundtrack. An agent in LA wanted to represent him. Tom was offered a feature and he insisted that Levin was signed for the soundtrack. The budget was more than either of them had ever imagined. And that first feature won Sundance. It won Berlin. The soundtrack was nominated for an Oscar and Tom’s script was nominated for best original screenplay. The lead was nominated for best actor. They didn’t win that year, but Tom was the latest wonder kid and the budgets got bigger fast.

  Levin met Lydia one day at a recording studio he and Tom were using. She was looking it over for her father as a possible investment. He had been sitting in a back room taking a moment out while Tom was on a call. Lydia said she needed to sit down somewhere quiet because she was feeling dizzy, and was it okay if she just hid away in here a few moments because bathrooms made her feel worse.

  She was a second-year architecture student at NYU. He asked if he could call her, make sure she got home alright
, and she gave him her number. When he called and said they should have coffee, she agreed. He delivered flowers to her via the concierge in her building, who was Brazilian and liked being part of this little romance. He rang and played piano until she was asleep. She said, ‘You’re too sweet for me. You don’t know how complicated this can be.’

  A marriage was a series of days, Levin thought. He thought of Lydia in the morning. First the underpants then the bra. Rarely the other way around. Standing in the early light, slipping off the long t-shirt she wore to bed. For years she had always done her bra up from the front and then swivelled it about to cup her breasts. Later, he realised she had stopped doing this and was doing it the way women did it in movies: scooping her breasts into the fabric then reaching behind, duck-winged, and snipping closed the clasps. Bras came in so many fabrics—opaque and transparent, embroidered, spotted, striped, delicate, moulded, lace, satin, black, cream, red and orange. Day after day she poured her perfect handfuls of breasts into sculptured fabric. He would have done anything to hold her breasts for a day.

  He thought of how rarely he had touched her at such moments, as she dressed and undressed. She had seemed unreachable, distant, something to be observed tacitly, a glimpse of long thigh and buttocks.

  The music he heard at such times was Brian Eno’s flashes of sound, light touching here and there, the morning’s texture having the weight of feathers or the static of nylon. Lydia was not by nature a moody person. Quite the opposite. She had an eternal sort of optimism that he had liked. Needed. It was he who brought the static.

  ‘I have this blood condition,’ Lydia said the very first day they met, by way of explanation for her dizziness and the red spots he noticed on her arms. Already, there in that little room, Levin knew he wanted to marry her.

  When he first proposed, she said, ‘I don’t think I should get married. This thing I have, it’s hereditary. My mother died from it. You have to know that it could make things very difficult. I’m not sure I want to put you through that. Losing my mother, it’s wrecked my father. And the doctors all say it’s too dangerous for me to have children. If I ever need an operation . . . well, it’s nasty.’

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ he said.

  They were married, and one year later Lydia was unexpectedly and worryingly pregnant. It was a huge risk, but she wouldn’t consider an abortion.

  ‘It’s meant to be, it must be,’ she said.

  So Alice, who was meant to be, was born. The easiest birth in the world.

  Levin’s grandparents died in the same year, one following the other only days apart, as if they were the head and tail of a kite that had found its way free. In the weeks that followed he had played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 so often that for years it was the one thing that would always put Alice to sleep.

  Being here sounds like this, Levin thought, as the sky darkened, turning the Hudson to pewter. The rumbling of traffic, the lift of wind, the passing of joggers, the parents with strollers, the rollerskaters, the lovers, the great river moving past, taking itself out to sea. Behind him the city bloomed with night lights. Life was the Leonard Cohen songbook, he decided. Bittersweet love, a little sex and a moment of God. Then life moved on. You got over the love, sex came and went, and you forgot about God.

  Perhaps ignoring things was an underestimated art. A critical survival skill even. Ignoring the bullet wound so you could get to the hospital. Ignoring the phone call so you could avoid the news. Ignoring the memories so you didn’t hurt.

  He suspected that instead of the Stop sign that seemed to have haunted his life since Christmas, somewhere there was a Go sign, or a Turn Left sign. If only he could glimpse it out of the corner of his eye, he’d follow it. If only a white rabbit would appear, he’d run after it. If only Lydia would come home and be Lydia again, he’d know what to do.

  BACK IN GEORGIA, JANE MILLER watched the webcam that was her eye into the atrium. The camera was angled to capture the floor of the square. Jane could just see the far edge with feet, crossed legs, bags sprawled amid waiting people. She’d had an email from Matthew, the shabby-shoed lawyer. It had been sweet and funny. And then a text had come through from Brittika, the young Dutch girl doing her PhD. Next in line. Nervous.

  I’m part of a community, Jane thought. She couldn’t see the queue, only the young woman currently sitting opposite Marina. She was crossing and then uncrossing her arms and legs. She sat forward and then she sat back. She scratched and then crossed her arms again, but still she sat, as if Marina was her opponent in a silent battle of wills. The girl put her hands in her pockets. She wiggled and crossed her legs again.

  ‘What are you trying to prove?’ Jane asked aloud. ‘Why stay if you’re so uncomfortable?’

  But despite her restlessness, the young woman did stay, and she appeared to be returning Marina’s gaze with a petulant stare. Marina in turn was a rock that loved her regardless of what happened. Jane peered more closely at the young woman. She looked familiar. She opened the monograph of the show she had purchased in the MoMA store. Flicking through the pages she found a girl straddling a bicycle seat, high up on a wall, her arms outstretched, completely naked. She thought it looked decidedly like the girl sitting in the chair. Was the young woman one of Marina’s re-performers? One of the cast of thirty or so who had been specially trained by Marina?

  The media had all but dismissed the re-enactments, saying the young people lacked the charisma Marina and Ulay had brought to the original performances. Perhaps the young woman was naked and ready for work under her trench coat, Jane considered.

  The young woman gave a final irritated wriggle and stood up. She was quickly replaced by Brittika, unmistakeable with her trademark pink bob.

  The phone rang and Jane answered it. ‘Hi, Bob, I’m in the middle of something right now,’ she said. ‘How about five? Great. See you then.’

  Brittika settled in the chair opposite Marina. Marina lifted her head and Brittika took off the summer frock she was wearing to reveal her entirely naked body.

  Jane’s eyes opened wide and an ‘Oh’ escaped her lips.

  Within moments the guards were upon Brittika, heaving her from the chair, and Jane lost sight of them as they moved out of the scope of the webcam.

  In another moment, an older man replaced Brittika at the table. Marina, who had dropped her head, lifted it again, locked eyes with the man, and the performance continued.

  What had Brittika been thinking? Jane wondered. She was certain Brittika was off in some room where she could be charged with . . . what? Public nudity? Indecency? But there were people upstairs naked. Jane hoped they’d let her dress again, let her have that dignity. She wondered if people had clapped. She considered calling Brittika, but to say what? What were you thinking? What on earth were you thinking?

  At 5 pm she met with Bob, their farm manager, and they went through the last month’s results. Since Karl’s diagnosis she had thought a lot about the chemicals they used every day on the cotton. Known to cause cancers, tumours, mutations in fish, birds and humans. It had been one of the few things she and Karl had fought about over the years, but they’d stopped fighting once he got the tumour. She thought about their workers and wondered how much longer she could go on just because the world needed cotton. She’d talked organics to Bob, but she might as well have said she wanted him to become a Muslim.

  Her eldest daughter had called and invited her to dinner, and Jane was pleased to go. It was so hot and muggy and there were only so many meals for one that she could get excited about.

  Coming home later, in the cool of evening, there was a startlingly yellow full moon. The house was no noisier than it had been when she left. The rooms no fuller. The bed no untidier. She tossed two cushions off the couch onto the floor just to give the sense of something having happened. After her daughter’s home, with her three little children banging about, the contrast was hard to bear. Jane never thought she’d miss the rattle and roar of a football game on the tele
vision. Or spreadsheets on the kitchen table with Karl calling her to come in here and look at these projections because he couldn’t make it add up.

  She sat again at the computer and went over the latest profit and loss, assessing the costs that had escalated and the subsidies from government that had boosted income. After a while she reopened the MoMA website and looked at the photographs of the latest people who had sat. The expressions were so curiously raw, she thought. Like that moon tonight. Entirely unguarded. Evidence that life had been going on a long, long time and still no one was any the wiser about how to explain it. The mystery of individuality despite every indication that we were all pretty much the same. It was a fact of human beings, the variation of physical differences and the sameness of motivations.

  She wondered if, after all, she was silly not to have sat. She did not think of herself as lacking courage. But she could count on one hand the things she could describe as truly brave acts. Childbirth three times over. And burying Karl. Literally watching him go into the ground. She thought she’d split in two just standing there.

  She thought of how Marina and Ulay had walked all that way to say goodbye to one another. And the fact he had come back, on the very first day of The Artist is Present, to sit with her. That had touched her very much. Ulay’s face in the photograph. The mischief in his eyes and the look of knowing old love.

  She could have flown back to New York to see the last days of The Artist is Present. But it was too late to get it organised now. She had a shareholder meeting next week for a company in which she had invested quite a sum. Still, she felt more restless than she had ever felt in her life.

  ‘Maybe I need to walk like Marina. Maybe a walk would help. What do you think of going walking, Karl? But not towards each other. Let’s both go in the same direction,’ she said, regarding his face in the photograph on the desk.

  ‘How about that walk in Spain that is so popular? You remember—I told you about it last weekend when there was that program on the television. We could do that. I could be a little Catholic again after all these years. Maybe a walk would do us both good.’