The Museum of Modern Love

by Heather Rose

  A professional photographer appeared to be documenting everyone who came and went from the table through a long lens mounted on a tripod. Levin nodded to him and the young man smiled briefly. He wore black pants and a black turtleneck, a three-day growth on his perfect jawline. When you lived in the Village you could be forgiven for thinking that cantilevered cheekbones and sculptured bodies were taking over the world.

  The middle-aged woman sitting opposite the person Levin assumed was Marina Abramović had never been beautiful. She left after only a few minutes and the crowd took the opportunity to dissipate. Levin heard comments as people made their way to the stairs.

  ‘Is that all that happens? Does she just sit?’

  ‘Don’t you want to see the Picassos?’

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance we’ll get a table? My feet are killing me.’

  ‘Do you really want to try to get to M&M’s World today?’

  ‘Have you seen the Tim Burton? It’s so crowded.’

  ‘Is there a restroom on this floor?’

  ‘What time was she meant to be here?’

  Levin returned to the side of the square where he could see both people in profile once more. He sat down on the floor. A young man now sat opposite the woman. He was strikingly handsome with luminous eyes, a wide mouth and shoulder-length curls, the face of an angel sent to visit dying children. Levin was interested to see if the woman would respond to this aesthetic but she didn’t, as far as he could see. She maintained the exact same gaze she’d been giving everyone else. She gazed gently and intently. Her body didn’t move. She sat very straight with her hands in her lap. From time to time her eyelids blinked but nothing else.

  A hush descended on the atrium. It became evident that the young man was weeping. It wasn’t a dramatic gesture. Tears were running down his face while his glistening angel eyes continued to gaze at the woman. After some time, the woman began to weep in the same silent passive way. The weeping went on as if they could both see they must settle for losing something. Levin looked about and realised the atrium had quietly filled again and everyone was staring at the two people.

  Levin thought there ought to be music. The woman in red was surrounded by the crowd and she was alone. It was utterly public but intensely private. A woman beside Levin pulled out her handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Catching his glance, she smiled self-consciously. Along the row of faces watching the performance, Levin saw that many eyes were wet with tears.

  Time went by and the man at the table was no longer weeping. He was leaning in towards the woman. Everything between the man and the woman became microscopic. Levin felt that something was lifting right out of the man and creeping away. He didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was unfolding. The woman seemed to become enormous, as if she stretched out and touched the walls and stood as tall as all six floors of the atrium. Levin closed his eyes and breathed. His heart was racing. When he opened them again, she was once more a woman in a red dress, the right size, no longer young but full of virility and elegance. Something about her was as alluring as polished wood or light catching a sleeve of antique silk.

  The afternoon passed. Levin didn’t want to leave. The man on the chair stayed too and the gaze between him and the woman never wavered. People moved in and out of the room, their mingled voices rising and falling. At 5.15 pm an announcement over the loudspeaker informed them the gallery would be closing in fifteen minutes. The suddenness of it made Levin jump. People leaned away from walls and looked about. Men and women rose from the floor, stretching out knees and hips and calves. Gathering their belongings, they smiled at each other, lifting their eyebrows in looks of mutual curiosity. Others shook their heads almost imperceptibly, as if they had quite forgotten where they were and how late was the hour. Soon there was just a smattering of onlookers keen for the last moment.

  The man and the woman remained motionless in the centre of the room, their gazes still locked. At 5.25 a MoMA official walked across the square and spoke quietly to the man. He bowed his head to the woman and stood up. Some people clapped.

  ‘The gallery is closed,’ another official said. ‘Please leave.’

  Levin stood and stretched. His knees ached and numbness became pain as he walked towards the stairs. The woman was alone at the table, her head bowed. Only the photographer remained. Levin looked for the man with the angel eyes in the emptying lobby, but he had disappeared.

  Emerging onto West 53rd, he heard a woman remark to her female companion, ‘She must be dying for the restroom.’

  ‘What day is this?’ the friend asked.

  ‘Day twenty-three, I think,’ the woman replied. ‘She’s got a long way to go.’

  ‘I expect she has one of those tubes,’ the companion offered. ‘You know, and a bag. I mean, who could wait all day?’

  ‘You mean a catheter?’ the first woman asked.

  They disappeared into the subway entrance. Levin headed east to Fifth. He walked hearing nothing but the hush of the gallery crowd and the silence between the man and the woman. It was an oboe, he thought. An oboe that played off against a viola.

  Once home he wished that Lydia was there. He wanted to tell her about the woman in the red dress and the crowd and the walk home. But the apartment was silent. He sat at the Steinway and, working up and down the keyboard, he teased out the melody he had glimpsed. He played as the city grew black and neon suffused the sky.

  I watched him. There is nothing more beautiful than watching an artist at work. They are as waterfalls shot with sunshine.

  Night crowds ebbed and flowed across Washington Square below. Levin’s shoulders and hands grew weary. At last, in an act of utter tenderness, he let his hand drift across the black sheen of the Steinway before closing the lid over the keys.

  In bed, he turned onto his right side, imagining that at any moment Lydia would slip in beside him and hold him, and darkness would wing them to sleep.

  There I left him and went back to MoMA. I stood in the atrium and considered the two empty chairs and the simple table. Every hour of the day an artist falls to earth and we fall beside them. I fell a long time ago with Arky Levin. But I fell before that beside Marina Abramović.

  JANE MILLER WAS NOT AN artist. She noted Levin’s dark pants, white shirt and blue linen jacket, his wavy silver hair and round glasses, the slip-on shoes and manicured hands. She would have liked to speak to him but he seemed lost in thought and she did not want to interrupt. The lunchtime crowd about her was swelling along the boundaries of the square. A boy of maybe sixteen was sitting opposite Marina Abramović. Jane observed the great mop of brown hair above the boy’s elfish face. The sweet turned-up nose. The oversized jacket the boy wore and his long feet. He slouched in the chair as if Abramović was a school principal about to lecture him on his behaviour. But he did not take his eyes from hers.

  Earlier that morning Jane had strolled through the lobby of her hotel and out onto Greenwich Street, catching sight of the silhouette of a man standing high on the edge of a nearby building. She had squinted, puzzled, ready to be alarmed. But then with a thrill she recognised it as one of the Antony Gormley sculptures dotting New York’s skyline through spring. On rooftops uptown and down, the city was being visited by watchful beings who appeared to speak not to the mortals moving on the pavements below, but to the space beyond the building. Take one step and fall twenty, thirty, fifty storeys down.

  What was the space beyond? Jane wondered. What did the rush of air between life and death taste of? Did crashing to the ground at velocity move you deeper, faster into death than simply dying in your sleep? And if you were under the influence of morphine did you go whole or did you depart in pieces, leaving fragments of yourself floating about in the room? She had wondered a lot about that after Karl’s death. How could she ensure all his best parts went with him? Little bits of him seemed to remain. In her head she said his name over and over, as if making up for the fact that she rarely said it aloud any
more. She missed him achingly, gapingly, excruciatingly. Her body hadn’t regulated itself to solitude. She’d needed extra blankets all winter. Now that she was in New York, she wanted to talk to him more than ever. She hadn’t realised travelling alone could be such a quiet experience. Other than the hellos she exchanged with the staff at reception, or the short conversations with a waiter, there was no one to tell about the things she was seeing for the very first time. I’m here! she wanted to tell everyone. I’m here in New York!

  Perhaps it was really Karl on the tops of all those buildings; not thirty-one sculptures in cast iron and fibreglass, but her husband watching out for her as she moved across the city. Impulsively, she had waved up at the sculpture and smiled.

  She had taken the E train from Canal to 53rd, liking how it had become familiar in the past three days. Passing the Dunkin’ Donuts store wafting hot baked goods, climbing the stairs. The pavement was patterned with years of grey gum which at first she had mistaken for confetti. The noise of traffic, the movement of people, it was all intense. But there was also the surprise of sea air blowing between buildings. This time she wasn’t ferrying a bunch of students on an excursion. She wasn’t trying to explain anything to Karl. She had only herself to consider, and it had been a long time since life was that. Better still, she had two more weeks in which to do whatever she liked.

  Jane considered again the words stencilled on the wall of the atrium that she had now read several times:

  The Artist is Present distorts the line between everyday routine and ceremony. Positioned in the vast atrium within a square of light, the familiar configuration of a table and chairs has been elevated to another domain.

  Visitors are encouraged to sit silently across from the artist for a duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the artwork rather than remaining spectators.

  Though Abramović is silent, maintaining a nearly sculptural presence with a fixed pose and gaze, the performance is an invitation to engage in and complete a unique situation . . .

  She frowned at the line: distorts the line between everyday routine and ceremony. Rather like Karl being dead, she thought. His death had distorted the everyday routine. He could not be called to supper or asked to please fix the broken lock on the back door. Yet she wanted so badly to believe he could still hear her, see her. She had spent every day for weeks saying, Please, God, let him get better . . . please don’t let him die. And then, Please, God, let him die. Please don’t let him suffer any more. But God had proved useless other than being the person to whom she could direct such requests.

  She had likewise begged the flowers in her garden, the oak tree at the start of the driveway, clouds above the greenhouse. Even the lilies in the Monet print on their bedroom wall. She had looked for any kind of power that might make the everyday something more than a battle of time and biology. But nothing had made a stick of difference. He had died, her Karl, and not pleasantly. Reluctant. Frustrated. Frightened. Desperately wanting there to be more life.

  She kept a candle burning by his photograph on the hall table, and every time she left the house or returned, she said, Hello, Karl. She continued to set a place for him at dinner. She didn’t serve him food—she wasn’t mad—but she laid a knife, a fork, a plate and a water glass and that felt entirely natural. She wasn’t ready to let him go and she didn’t think he was ready to go either.

  Sometimes she was certain Karl was sitting in his chair. So they spent the evening like that, her reading, him just quiet. Sometimes she put a ball game on for him and he seemed to like that too. She was somewhere between everyday routine and ceremony. A ceremony for the letting-go of life. It was called mourning, but it was much more like the farm at night. Smell and sound were heightened, and other senses came into play. Texture, memory, scale. Mourning had its own intense, pungent intimacy.

  A woman’s voice behind Jane said, ‘If she was painted she would be a Renoir.’

  ‘Without the dancing or the spring flowers,’ a man’s voice replied.

  ‘God, don’t you think she must be bored?’ the woman said.

  Abramović was now sitting opposite a woman in a soft blue top. They were of an age and they looked into each other with an acute regard.

  Then Jane heard the woman say, ‘Is it art, do you think, what she’s doing?’

  ‘How do you define art?’ the man asked.

  Jane glanced back and saw the man and woman wore matching trench coats. And the woman was possibly his third wife. At least twenty years younger.

  ‘I don’t want to argue with you,’ the woman said.

  ‘But I’m not arguing,’ he said, in a Midwestern drawl. ‘What you have to understand is that art is irrelevant. If everything goes to crap, it won’t be art that saves us. Art won’t matter one iota. You can’t write your way alive, or paint your way out of death. Sitting is not art, no matter how long you do it for.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ the woman asked as she continued gazing at the two people in the centre of the room.

  ‘It’s sitting,’ the man said. ‘Nothing changes that. Like running or eating.’

  ‘Maybe it’s meditation,’ the woman said.

  The man chuckled. ‘Who wants to see a Bosnian meditate?’

  ‘Serbian.’

  ‘Still the last people in the world anyone should take advice from.’

  ‘But she’s an artist.’

  ‘Double whammy,’ the man said. ‘Serbian artist.’

  ‘She’s doing something, otherwise all these people, they wouldn’t stay.’

  ‘Yeah, and Warhol painted tins of soup and sold them for millions. Rothko painted big red squares. And someone put a shark in formaldehyde. You put anything in a frame, call it art, get enough publicity, and people will think it has to be important.’

  ‘People are stupid, right?’ the woman said.

  ‘Most people,’ the man conceded.

  ‘Except you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Shall we go?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go.’

  Jane wanted to follow the couple and argue with the man. She wanted to insist that he was wrong. Instead, she turned to the silver-haired man beside her and said, ‘I think art saves people all the time.’

  The man on her left was, of course, Arky Levin. He blinked, and looked confused. Jane saw she had disturbed him.

  ‘I know art has saved me on several occasions,’ she said. Quickly she reprised for him the conversation she had overheard, that she had assumed he too must have overheard. Levin offered her a slightly baffled smile.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Jane said. ‘I interrupted your thoughts. It just alarmed me.’

  ‘Maybe he’s right,’ said Levin. ‘Maybe what we do isn’t that important.’

  Jane nodded, hearing the ‘we’ and wondering what sort of artist he was. ‘But you only have to come here to see what pleasure art brings,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Levin. ‘Excuse me.’ He got up and went to the bathroom. When he returned Jane saw him choose a place further along—no doubt, she thought, so he didn’t have to talk to a complete stranger.

  Jane watched as the black woman left the table and was replaced by a young Asian man. As time passed he slid sideways in the chair, but his gaze remained unwavering. She wanted to tell him to sit up straight.

  Jane wondered how many times she had looked into Karl’s eyes for more than a few seconds. In twenty-eight years of married life, what was the sum total of eye contact they had ever made? What might they have seen in each other, if they’d really looked? Her restlessness as she marked another batch of essays, folded another load of towels, did another round of dishes, planned another week of food? Had he been restless too? Might she have seen deep in his eyes some coastline he wanted to visit? Some little house overlooking a beach that required only the barest upkeep and no paddocks or fields? Sometimes he had talked about going big-game fishing in the Gulf, but they’d never been. Once a year he’d taken five days of
f and gone hunting deer with old school friends.

  In ten years I will be as old as Marina Abramović, Jane thought. In twenty-five years I’ll be as old as my mother. Twenty-five years ago I was just twenty-nine. There’s still time. Please let there still be time.

  Earlier that morning she had pretended that in fact she lived here in New York. She had made the bed and smoothed the quilt. She ran her hand across the carved beading of the bedhead and imagined spending Christmas here. She would walk in the snow in Central Park, see the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center, choose gifts at Barneys. She would be a person with friends who had interesting pasts and they’d invite her to their favourite restaurants.

  It was not the time to be making decisions. Everyone told her that. Three different people had given her copies of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as if that would solve everything. She knew people meant well, but she hadn’t been able to read it. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything. She was too busy listening for Karl.

  She imagined him lying on the bed reading the papers at the hotel, fully dressed for the day, his sagging boat shoes, his cable cardigan. He would be happy for her to be off trawling her galleries. He would spend the morning finding a diner where he could have a second breakfast and watch the world go by. He would be sure to find someone to talk to. That was Karl. It was one of the things they’d had in common. The way each of them would come home with conversations they’d had with complete strangers.

  MUCH TO HIS SURPRISE LEVIN found himself going uptown to MoMA almost every day. He walked across the lower lobby and deposited his raincoat and umbrella at the members’ end of the cloakroom, then checked himself through the electronic gates. The lobby was crowded today. Perhaps it was the blustery weather. The place looked like it was full of students.