The Museum of Modern Love(56)

Abramovi? was looking tired. Other than the almost invisible roll of the neck, and a minute restlessness on the chair, she was inert. Her eyelids rested in a half-gaze, steady and distant. The woman on his right had her fingers across her mouth in rapt awe.

‘How does she do it?’ the rapt woman whispered to Levin. ‘To be so still all day?’

‘She’s been at it a long time,’ Levin said, feeling like he was becoming an expert.

‘Since April, yes?’ the woman looked at him.

‘Since 1963.’

Someone behind them said in a loud voice. ‘So what? She’s a real person, right? What will galleries become next? Black walls? Silence?’

‘Shh,’ someone nearby said.

‘I’m being shushed,’ the man’s voice continued. ‘It’s not a gallery. It’s a library. Worse, it’s a damn church. They’re all praying.’

People squeezed past him. On the other side of the square, two children had sat down, their legs crossed like yogic masters, facing one another in imitation of Marina and her sitter. The woman beside him saw them too, and she smiled and nodded at them. The children sat for a few minutes quite seriously, gazing into each other’s eyes. Then the girl fell about giggling and the boy fell on top of her.

Levin observed a man in the crowd with his left arm inked. The one word he could make out below the folded shirt sleeve was the word kill. Levin looked at the security guards who were in quiet conversation, although their eyes were ever vigilant. What would they do if the man simply stepped into the square and wounded Marina, drew a gun, a blade, raised a fist or took her neck between his hands? He continued to observe the man. What would he, Levin, who had no martial arts skills, no military training, who didn’t even own a hand gun, do if he saw the man draw a weapon? He didn’t want to think about what he might become in such a situation.

The Kawa soundtrack was almost done. Or as done as it could be until he had the final pictures and an orchestra who knew their parts. Seiji Isoda was planning to arrive in the first week of June with the final edit, which suited Levin perfectly because he didn’t want to miss these last weeks with Marina. Isoda had sent him several tests with the draft tracks striped to the pictures and it was better than Levin had imagined, even if it still lacked an essential connectivity. But Isoda seemed so optimistic. In the end, they decided on New York for recording the final score. Anything else felt too hard.

Pillow-Marina was still seated in her chair at the dining table in the apartment. Her cashmere hair now comprised three black scarves twisted into the side braid she favoured. The first time Yolanda the housekeeper had come she had dismantled her, folded the scarf and returned the cushions to the couch. But the next time he had left a note. Please do not disturb. (Work in progress.) And since then Marina had sat silently, and each morning, Levin sat opposite her.

At the piano he chased music into the forest, under water, over rocks and into fish. He chased it all the way downstream to the sea, and there he had found himself on a long pale beach and quite alone. There was no mythical fish-woman to pluck him up and put him back into the river, so he could swim home. There was only Pillow-Marina and the empty apartment. He had tried to capture that too. The true sound of solitude.

When the music was gone for the night, he looked at the photographs on Flickr of all the people who had sat with Marina. He had never noticed before how the human face could be so varied. And the variation wasn’t in the features, or the colours, although that was part of it. It was in the way the person leaned into their face, or didn’t, they way they looked out with intensity or resignation, with curiosity or fear, and it seemed to indicate the way they saw the world in general. We live as we see, he thought, and he knew Lydia would have been fascinated by the faces too, and he hated thinking of her in the past tense.

That morning, on the way to MoMA, he’d been following a woman up the stairs from the subway. She was in a long floral halter-neck sundress that all the girls seemed to be wearing now the weather was warm. Her whole back and arms were tattooed with green vines and yellow flowers. When she turned her head, though, he had been startled to discover her face was withered and hard. He thought instantly that she must be a heroin addict and remembered Hal once telling him that the truly poor couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan any more. Manhattan belonged to the rich now. Maybe she was the daughter of old money, or the ex-wife of a famous artist. Still, the contrast of the delicate botanical art and that weary, worn-out face stayed with him. Who had she been when she’d chosen those pictures, compared to who she was now?

His eyes kept returning to the man with kill on his arm. Then Lydia’s voice said clearly to him, ‘Arky, you’re just seeing the last word. Not the whole sentence. It actually says: Thou shalt not kill.’

He blinked rapidly. Of course it wasn’t Lydia speaking to him, but it had been so vivid. And perhaps she was right. Would a person bent on killing in public have taken such care to iron his white shirt?

When the gallery closed for the day, Marina was still alive. There had been no scene and the man in the white shirt had disappeared hours before. Levin took the A train but instead of getting off at West 4 Street he went on to Canal and walked to the river. There he sat on a bench and watched the ferries and cargo ships.

After his mother died and he’d gone to live with his grandparents, his grandfather had introduced him to Dave Brubeck, Oscar Petersen, Art Tatum, Bill Evans. And his grandmother had loved musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Gilbert and Sullivan. They both encouraged him to keep composing. Working as an usher at the Arlington in his senior year, he fell in love with soundtracks. He loved Jarre’s scores to Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. John Barry’s Born Free score and all those Bond movies—Dr No, The Man with the Golden Gun, Thunderball and Goldfinger. And Bernard Herrmann’s soundtracks to Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. He’d go home and practise them. Take them apart. Put them back together. He learned other instruments. His grandfather taught him drums and saxophone, and he picked up guitar. His grandfather said he made anything sound musical. His grandmother told him friends would come.