The Museum of Modern Love(31)

NOW THAT LEVIN HAD FINALLY got himself out of the way and allowed the music to come in, I went to see Jane depart New York. There are artists and there are facilitators. I bless the facilitators. They are the lubricants of the artistic process. The engine oil of creativity. Beware the artist who believes they have failed, their genius gone unrecognised or unrewarded in the precise way they demanded, and so turns to teaching. So too the parent or friend who offers the wisdom of their experience by telling the young artist they will never succeed, that the world is too big and they too small, that their dream is invalid for the usual practical reasons. Or the person who from the lofty perch of no art believes they could have been great if they had written or painted or made the film. How hard can it be, after all? I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger. But Jane is not angry. Jane is considering the chauffeur.

She could smell a fragrance on him. Sandalwood, perhaps, and a hint of cinnamon. She observed his even hairline and slightly heavy neck above the collar of his white shirt. She would have liked to ask him all manner of things. How had he come to be in New York? Was he happy? What did he make of God or Allah? What did he think of Obama? What did he most like to eat? What would he have done with his life if he could be seventeen again? But instead she sat and watched the skyline drop into suburbs and the broad expanse of freeway escape the city under a damp colourless sky. She thought it would be wonderful to be home and have the grandchildren ask questions, and put her own to rest for a while.

She had spent sixteen days watching Marina Abramovi? sit at a table. She had seen people return day after day. Some of them had waited for hours to sit. Many of them had missed out. Hundreds of thousands had come to witness or participate in The Artist is Present and it was only halfway through. It would go on without her. She would not be here to see it end, but she had been a tiny fragment of it. A shoe on the edge of the live cam, a blurred face in the crowd.

She reflected on the visit she had taken to the site of the World Trade Center. The scale of it had shocked her. It wasn’t just two buildings. It was an entire city block reduced to a massive pit of gravel dotted with yellow machinery. Best to lay a field of grass, she thought. Best to landscape a high conical hill with a view and the sky for consideration with a water garden that traced a meandering course down every side. She thought of a design she had seen in a magazine. A museum in Cairo with a rain room so that children, who might live their whole childhood without the skies ever opening, could experience more than forty different types of precipitation.

The world was filled with information, Jane thought. It was impossible to do more than scratch the surface in a lifetime. It was too much of a coincidence that roads were like arteries, that buildings were like penises, that clouds were like paintings, that war was a hunt and water like thought. She wondered what it would be like to let nature have a hill of green where the Twin Towers had once stood. To have the sea breeze blow upon the faces of those who came to grieve and pray and reflect. What a small miracle it would be for a hill to be restored to the landscape of Manhattan when only four hundred years ago the whole island had been nothing but hills and forests. But flatness suited roads and the foundations of buildings. Flatness suited grids and underground systems. Flatness suited transport and even walking. The mountains and hills had been pushed outwards into the sea, the rivers sent underground, the forests turned into lumber, the birds and deer evicted. To put one big hill back, that would be something. What would old DeWitt Clinton think of that? she wondered.

Marina Abramovi? had brought something new into the city. She had made of herself a rock in the centre of a town where everything moved and had been moving en masse for hundreds of years. She had brought her European history, her family history, her personal history and, like a true New York pioneer, she had bent the city to her will. And she had done it through art.

At the airport Jane bought a Cosmos magazine and waited. When she was settled on the plane, the flight was delayed for two hours. She read and she watched night venture in from the Atlantic. In the seat beside her, a young man tapped furiously on his iPad, texted on his phone, busy in his world. At last the flight was cleared. Her champagne glass was removed along with an empty water bottle and snack wrappers. The plane began taxiing, building up momentum.

In that wild rush against gravity, she always felt certain that it could never work, metal and wings and hundreds of people inside a great elongated box being lifted into the sky. But of course the miracle happened. They were above Manhattan, above the soaring grid of buildings, the great harbour with the Statue of Liberty somewhere below. Lights indicating life and activity stretching as far as the eye could see. They curved north, west, south and she was going home. She closed her eyes and for a moment she was back in the atrium and she wondered, if she had sat with Abramovi?, what might she have seen or felt? Had it been enough to sit on the sidelines? Had she somehow missed an opportunity for something life-changing, some act of courage? Her hand reflexively reached for Karl’s to squeeze. She had a vivid urge to, for a moment, lay her head on the shoulder of the young man beside her. To pretend for a moment that there was someone who loved her close by.

Maybe I could go back, near the end, she thought. I could come back. I could see her on her last day, when she stands up. How marvellous it would be to see Marina Abramovi? stand up at the end of her seventy-five days.