The Museum of Modern Love(37)

‘It’s a very strange time.’

‘And that’s what you wanted to discuss?’

‘No. I wanted to see you. I wanted to see you if you’re alright.’

‘If I’m alright? Are you serious?’

‘Yes, I am.’

Alice wanted to hurt him then. It had taken him all this time to think that maybe she wasn’t okay. But it was hard to be unkind to him. It was like kicking a puppy and she hated that too, that her father was like that. There were shadows under his eyes. He looked thinner. She would not feel sorry for him.

She said, ‘I cut up a cadaver last week. Well, not all of it. Some of it. The thigh, the gluteus maximus, the little sinews around the hip joint.’

He looked at her fine white fingers and imagined them unfurling nerves and arteries, her clinical eye observing the simple complexity of that weight-bearing joint.

‘I think its normal,’ she went on, ‘to feel a little unhinged when you have to deal with a cadaver for the first time. They told us that, and I’m sure they are watching for it too. I think if you enjoy it, they’d be worried.’

‘I guess they don’t want sociopaths qualifying with degrees in medicine,’ said Levin, thinking of Dexter, and how sociopaths, even serial killers, had become the subject of Oscar-winning movies and prime-time viewing on television.

‘I’m sure a few have,’ Alice said. It was hard to say which of her fellow students would become the sociopath, or the murderer. Certainly several would become drug addicts. Some probably already were. It was the law of averages, after all. All of medicine was based on it at some level. How many people you had to immunise before the population was safe. How many would die of cancer and how many from heart disease. How many would have a child with a birth defect. How many would contract late-onset diabetes.

Alice was wearing a red floral dress and a white cardigan embroidered with blue and green butterflies. She had a thing for old-fashioned dresses and mismatching patterns. Levin could never see her without thinking of Bj?rk. But where Bj?rk had a bone wildness in her face, Alice had the sheen of Ingrid Bergman, with those big eyes and big smile in a cream and pink complexion. He’d worried through her teenage years that one day she’d realise that she wasn’t a stick-thin girl in the latest tiny jeans. He worried that she’d get anorexic or bulimic or depressed. But Alice never did. She discovered retro clothes, put them together in a peculiarly individual style, and found friends wherever she went. She had been in and out of love half a dozen times with boys who had made his palms sweat, but nothing and nobody had yet dimmed her kindness, or the light in her eyes—except perhaps him. And this troubled him.

He hadn’t considered Alice when he’d complied with Lydia’s wishes. He hadn’t thought he needed to. She had her own life. Her own apartment. He had thought, perhaps wrongly, that his job as a father was done. He knew he had tried to be a good father.

After Alice was born, they had decided it was too great a risk to Lydia to have another baby. So Alice was it. Levin had been relieved. It had been a shock how much noise babies made. It had upended his life. Alice the baby, named after Lydia’s mother, had become the central drawcard for Lydia’s attention. Alice the five-year-old had diaries scheduled around her. Alice the teenager became a vegetarian and suddenly he was eating tofu. Alice determined Lydia’s life. The lateness of the hour she got to bed, the washing that needed doing, the movies they watched, the places they holidayed. Alice toyed with the idea of architecture and worked for a couple of years in Lydia’s firm after senior year, before going to France. Then she applied to medical school at NYU and was accepted. And here she was, and Levin didn’t know how he had got so much older that his daughter was this woman.

Alice ordered the duck ravioli (vegetarianism having gone the way of the Goth phase that happened about the same time) and Levin the grilled pork chop. After the wine arrived, and the food soon after, she said, as if complying with a social expectation, ‘So, what have you been doing?’

He told her about the performance at MoMA.

‘Oh, Marina Abramovi?,’ Alice said. ‘I really want to see it. Is it good? What’s she like?’

‘Very still.’

‘Did you see the naked people upstairs?’

‘No, I haven’t seen that yet.’

‘It’s been all over the news!’ She laughed. ‘How long does she have to sit there for?’

‘Until the end of May,’ he said.

‘Wow. Really? Did you sit with her?’

‘Oh no. No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, there’s a queue, for one thing. There are usually at least twenty people waiting to sit by first thing in the morning and the queue just grows after that. Some people sit for hours and the rest of them all wait for nothing . . .’

‘And she never gets up? She just sits there?’

He nodded.

‘But what do people do?’

‘We watch her. It’s very strange.’ He shrugged.

There was a silence and then he thought to say, ‘So, how goes the world of medicine?’

‘It’s big. My brain has to keep taking in all this information and trying to organise it. But the prac work is great. It’s amazing to actually work with a real body and see all this incredible construction of muscles and ligaments, bones and blood vessels.’