The Museum of Modern Love(43)

Over penne all’arrabbiata Hal said, ‘You really going to stay in the new apartment? It must be pretty lonely.’

Levin grimaced.

‘Maybe you should go to Tokyo and meet up with Isoda’s team there,’ Hal suggested. ‘It might speed things up a little.’

‘Maybe next month.’

‘Well, okay. I’m counting on you to pull this thing off.’

As Hal dropped him off at the square, he asked Levin, ‘Do you ever wonder what your life might have been if you hadn’t loved music?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Levin said. ‘I’ve never wondered that.’

‘You know, that’s the gift. You’ve never had to wonder. Me, I keep being an agent and the birth date on my driver’s licence gets further and further away. It’s like the end of Annie Hall when the guy who plays Woody Allen’s brother thinks he’s a chicken. The psychiatrist asks Woody Allen why he doesn’t get his brother locked up. And Woody says, “I need the eggs.” That’s me. I do what I do because I need the eggs.’

‘Are you quitting, Hal?’ Levin asked, his hand on the door handle.

‘No, Arky. I think what I’m trying to say to you is, you don’t need the eggs. You’ve got real choices. Maybe it’s time to choose.’





HEALAYAS BREEN WALKED SLOWLY THROUGH the Abramovi? retrospective—through rooms of video installations, huge photographs, glass boxes arranged with memorabilia. It was 9 am and she was entirely alone. She had a Sennheiser microphone plugged into her iPhone. It was a prerecord for the show. Her headphones conveyed what the microphone was picking up. She walked quietly, having removed her shoes and tucked them into her orange tote which she abandoned against a wall.

She took a small sip of water, relaxed her shoulders, and then began her introduction, recalling for her listeners how some of the artists currently re-enacting the works of Marina Abramovi? had reported being groped by visitors. One of the artists stated that several men had fondled her breasts as she stood nude in a doorway re-performing the work Imponderabilia.

‘Imponderabilia,’ Healayas said into the microphone, ‘was first performed in Germany by Abramovi? and her partner Ulay. It was meant to remind people that the artist was the doorway to the gallery. Originally Marina and Ulay, both naked, were so close to one another that people entering the gallery had to squeeze between them. But at MoMA, thirty-three years later, it is so controversial to have nude performers that visitors have been given an alternative entrance. The two nudes stand far enough apart that a visitor can slip between them without making any actual contact with skin. Even so, only about forty per cent of visitors choose to walk between the nudes. The remainder choose the traditional entrance at the other end of the room. So the original point about artists and galleries seems to have been lost. And in New York nudity is still considered so shocking that it has made the front pages of the major newspapers.

‘Male performers,’ she continued, ‘have also received unwanted advances, having their genitals stroked and squeezed by visitors. One male performer was apparently removed because he became visibly aroused.’

Everyone had their own forms of submission and rebellion, Healayas considered. All her life people had confided in her. Told her things of an acutely personal nature. Even as a child, it had happened to her. Perhaps they sensed even then that there was nothing they could say that would shock her.

She stopped at a black-and-white film of Abramovi? lying down, her head towards the camera.

‘Bubbles, scales, fish, monotone, monotonous,’ said Abramovi?, the pace of the words slow and deliberate. Looking very young and dark-eyed, Abramovi? was speaking Serbian while the English subtitles translated: Molotov cocktail, eyes, eyelashes, eye focus, pupil . . .

The task was to voice all the words Marina’s mind could muster without repetition and without stopping. If she repeated a word or couldn’t think of any more, the performance ended. Healayas was fascinated by how the words connected to one another. ‘Key, wall, corner, preserves, knife, handle, bread, moussaka, apple cake, condiment, whisky, humidity, embroidery . . .

‘Children, names, milk, youth, whisper, yoghurt, legalised abortion, never, travel, puberty, misunderstanding, disagreement, politician, position, struggle for power, German, Australian, panic, picnic, pistol, tank, machine gun . . . lieutenant colonel, soldier, private, regular, menstruation, masturbation, honey . . .’

Healayas thought that if she had long enough, she could map Abramovi?’s mind by observing the word associations she made. It was words that gave people away. Silence, she knew, after years of interviewing people, was the only safety. Sergio, a former neighbour in Paris, admitted to her that hate came naturally to him. He was a famous academic, but found himself surrounded by hardly anyone intellectually adequate or passingly interesting. Particularly his wife and daughters. Sarah, a friend from California, liked to find YouTube clips about birth defects and torture. Senegal had more than thirty devices for pleasure. Yvette cooked vegetables her husband didn’t like, but was reproachful if he didn’t eat them. He was dying of bowel cancer and confined to bed. Two weeks before he was diagnosed, she had found the little red book of names and numbers and the dates he’d visited that he kept in his glove compartment, but she did not tell him.

Meredith’s husband, Barney, spent the insurance money after her death on a holiday in Antigua. Upon returning home he expanded his interests from the girl he visited on E116th to another further uptown. Margaret shoplifted books. She had several coats specially adapted. She said it was orgasmic leaving with a hardback. John whispered to his father, in the palliative care centre, ‘No one has ever loved you,’ and his father had nodded and said, ‘I know.’