The Museum of Modern Love(58)

BACK IN GEORGIA, JANE MILLER watched the webcam that was her eye into the atrium. The camera was angled to capture the floor of the square. Jane could just see the far edge with feet, crossed legs, bags sprawled amid waiting people. She’d had an email from Matthew, the shabby-shoed lawyer. It had been sweet and funny. And then a text had come through from Brittika, the young Dutch girl doing her PhD. Next in line. Nervous.

I’m part of a community, Jane thought. She couldn’t see the queue, only the young woman currently sitting opposite Marina. She was crossing and then uncrossing her arms and legs. She sat forward and then she sat back. She scratched and then crossed her arms again, but still she sat, as if Marina was her opponent in a silent battle of wills. The girl put her hands in her pockets. She wiggled and crossed her legs again.

‘What are you trying to prove?’ Jane asked aloud. ‘Why stay if you’re so uncomfortable?’

But despite her restlessness, the young woman did stay, and she appeared to be returning Marina’s gaze with a petulant stare. Marina in turn was a rock that loved her regardless of what happened. Jane peered more closely at the young woman. She looked familiar. She opened the monograph of the show she had purchased in the MoMA store. Flicking through the pages she found a girl straddling a bicycle seat, high up on a wall, her arms outstretched, completely naked. She thought it looked decidedly like the girl sitting in the chair. Was the young woman one of Marina’s re-performers? One of the cast of thirty or so who had been specially trained by Marina?

The media had all but dismissed the re-enactments, saying the young people lacked the charisma Marina and Ulay had brought to the original performances. Perhaps the young woman was naked and ready for work under her trench coat, Jane considered.

The young woman gave a final irritated wriggle and stood up. She was quickly replaced by Brittika, unmistakeable with her trademark pink bob.

The phone rang and Jane answered it. ‘Hi, Bob, I’m in the middle of something right now,’ she said. ‘How about five? Great. See you then.’

Brittika settled in the chair opposite Marina. Marina lifted her head and Brittika took off the summer frock she was wearing to reveal her entirely naked body.

Jane’s eyes opened wide and an ‘Oh’ escaped her lips.

Within moments the guards were upon Brittika, heaving her from the chair, and Jane lost sight of them as they moved out of the scope of the webcam.

In another moment, an older man replaced Brittika at the table. Marina, who had dropped her head, lifted it again, locked eyes with the man, and the performance continued.

What had Brittika been thinking? Jane wondered. She was certain Brittika was off in some room where she could be charged with . . . what? Public nudity? Indecency? But there were people upstairs naked. Jane hoped they’d let her dress again, let her have that dignity. She wondered if people had clapped. She considered calling Brittika, but to say what? What were you thinking? What on earth were you thinking?

At 5 pm she met with Bob, their farm manager, and they went through the last month’s results. Since Karl’s diagnosis she had thought a lot about the chemicals they used every day on the cotton. Known to cause cancers, tumours, mutations in fish, birds and humans. It had been one of the few things she and Karl had fought about over the years, but they’d stopped fighting once he got the tumour. She thought about their workers and wondered how much longer she could go on just because the world needed cotton. She’d talked organics to Bob, but she might as well have said she wanted him to become a Muslim.

Her eldest daughter had called and invited her to dinner, and Jane was pleased to go. It was so hot and muggy and there were only so many meals for one that she could get excited about.

Coming home later, in the cool of evening, there was a startlingly yellow full moon. The house was no noisier than it had been when she left. The rooms no fuller. The bed no untidier. She tossed two cushions off the couch onto the floor just to give the sense of something having happened. After her daughter’s home, with her three little children banging about, the contrast was hard to bear. Jane never thought she’d miss the rattle and roar of a football game on the television. Or spreadsheets on the kitchen table with Karl calling her to come in here and look at these projections because he couldn’t make it add up.

She sat again at the computer and went over the latest profit and loss, assessing the costs that had escalated and the subsidies from government that had boosted income. After a while she reopened the MoMA website and looked at the photographs of the latest people who had sat. The expressions were so curiously raw, she thought. Like that moon tonight. Entirely unguarded. Evidence that life had been going on a long, long time and still no one was any the wiser about how to explain it. The mystery of individuality despite every indication that we were all pretty much the same. It was a fact of human beings, the variation of physical differences and the sameness of motivations.

She wondered if, after all, she was silly not to have sat. She did not think of herself as lacking courage. But she could count on one hand the things she could describe as truly brave acts. Childbirth three times over. And burying Karl. Literally watching him go into the ground. She thought she’d split in two just standing there.

She thought of how Marina and Ulay had walked all that way to say goodbye to one another. And the fact he had come back, on the very first day of The Artist is Present, to sit with her. That had touched her very much. Ulay’s face in the photograph. The mischief in his eyes and the look of knowing old love.