The Museum of Modern Love(4)

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 Abramovi?.





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 Abramovi?. 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 Abramovi? 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!