The Museum of Modern Love(47)
Brittika readjusted herself. She took a breath and let it out slowly. She maintained the gaze with Abramovi? but her heart wouldn’t settle. She thought of stories about Marina to distract her. She wanted to get to twenty minutes. Let the record show she had made it to twenty minutes.
She thought about the time Marina had brought a friend home from school and they had taken one of her father’s revolvers from the glass display cabinet. Marina had loaded a single bullet into the chamber of the gun and spun the cylinder. Then she held the muzzle to her head and pulled the trigger. Click. No shot. Then her friend spun the cylinder and held the gun to his head. He pressed the trigger. Click. No shot. They had both fallen about laughing.
When Marina was still living at home at age twenty-eight, she wanted to do a show where she would walk on stage dressed the way her mother would have liked her to. In a nice skirt and blouse, or a dress and gloves, with hair and make-up done. Marina would stand and look at the public and then put one bullet in the chamber of the gun. She would spin the cylinder, put the gun to her temple, and shoot. If she didn’t die, then she would dress in the clothes she wanted to wear, looking how she wanted to look, and leave.
She had also wanted to make a room where, when people entered, they would undress and all their clothes would be washed, dried and ironed then returned. The naked visitors would then dress in their clean clothes and exit the room. Laundromat as performance art. The university had refused to permit it.
Brittika thought of the little Citro?n van parked at the entrance to the retrospective upstairs. Marina and Ulay had driven all over Europe in it, with their dog Alba. It no longer held the narrow mattress they had slept on for five years, the cooking equipment, the books that came and went as they travelled, the retsina bottles, Marina’s latest knitting project. Alba was long dead. Gone too were the pale headlights pinning the road to their van, the goats that gave them milk in the morning, the walks on cliff tops, through forests and across town squares listening to conversations. Watching games of backgammon and boules. Making plans for this show and that. Gone was that relationship.
Brittika wondered if she would ever meet someone who made her feel the way Marina and Ulay had once felt about each other. She couldn’t imagine living and working with someone. To let them hold a bow and arrow to your heart like Marina had in Rest Energy. Or take your breath, like in Breathing In/Breathing Out, until you were almost poisoned by the other person’s carbon dioxide. Or to bind your hair together. That one made her particularly claustrophobic and she grimaced.
She hoped Marco hadn’t caught that. She realised her heart had settled and the quiver down her spine was less insistent. She refocused on Marina’s eyes and tried to be open.
I don’t want to love like you’ve loved, she thought as she looked at Marina. Brittika knew she became way too intense with guys. Her last relationship had ended badly. She had basically stalked him. It embarrassed her to think back on it. She hoped Marco hadn’t taken her photograph just then either.
She saw that Marina’s gaze was lingering in the space just before Brittika’s face as if there was another world right in front of her that Brittika couldn’t see. What was Marina seeing?
Art did not stop, that’s what Marina had said. Art did not get to five o’clock and say, “That’s it, the day is done, go think about TV or making dinner.” It wasn’t like that. It was there all the time: when you were chopping vegetables, talking with a friend, reading a newspaper, listening to music, having a party. It was always there offering suggestions, wanting you to go write or draw, sing or play. Wanting you to imagine big things, to connect with an audience, to use energy, to find energy. It wasn’t ready when you were, it didn’t come when you wanted it or leave when you were done. It took its time. It was often late, or slow, or not what you had in mind.
Brittika thought about how when she arrived home late her mother had always thought to put food aside for her. How she always left the lamp on in the hallway. Put fresh linen on her bed. As if her mother wanted Brittika to be sure that she was loved. That was the problem of adoption. You weren’t. Not first off. Not enough to keep. Her birth mother had been a woman in China who had probably already given birth to one child. Or who had wanted a son, and so had given Brittika up in the hope that next time . . .
But she had been adopted and knew nothing other than her parents who had done so much for her. She was trying to do everything she could to make them know she appreciated them. But it wasn’t easy to do that. She had urges to do things that she didn’t understand. Without a sense of history, she didn’t know why she’d had such an interest in sex from such a young age. It had already got her into trouble.
She wasn’t sure she was essentially a good person. She thought when she could afford it, it would be good for her to live alone because the idea of it frightened her. She imagined a cottage by the sand dunes on the little island of Terschelling in the North Sea. Maybe she’d try to go there to finish the last draft of her PhD.
Brittika had a theory that Abramovi? didn’t like being alone. Sitting at this table was part of that fear. Marina had been a solitary child, living with her grandmother for the first six years of her life, and seeing her father and mother only on Sundays. She had returned home to live with her parents when her brother was born. Not long after, she was hospitalised for a year with a blood condition. Her mother never came to visit.