The Museum of Modern Love(6)
‘Most people,’ the man conceded.
‘Except you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Shall we go?’ the woman asked.
‘Okay. Let’s go.’
Jane wanted to follow the couple and argue with the man. She wanted to insist that he was wrong. Instead, she turned to the silver-haired man beside her and said, ‘I think art saves people all the time.’
The man on her left was, of course, Arky Levin. He blinked, and looked confused. Jane saw she had disturbed him.
‘I know art has saved me on several occasions,’ she said. Quickly she reprised for him the conversation she had overheard, that she had assumed he too must have overheard. Levin offered her a slightly baffled smile.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jane said. ‘I interrupted your thoughts. It just alarmed me.’
‘Maybe he’s right,’ said Levin. ‘Maybe what we do isn’t that important.’
Jane nodded, hearing the ‘we’ and wondering what sort of artist he was. ‘But you only have to come here to see what pleasure art brings,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Levin. ‘Excuse me.’ He got up and went to the bathroom. When he returned Jane saw him choose a place further along—no doubt, she thought, so he didn’t have to talk to a complete stranger.
Jane watched as the black woman left the table and was replaced by a young Asian man. As time passed he slid sideways in the chair, but his gaze remained unwavering. She wanted to tell him to sit up straight.
Jane wondered how many times she had looked into Karl’s eyes for more than a few seconds. In twenty-eight years of married life, what was the sum total of eye contact they had ever made? What might they have seen in each other, if they’d really looked? Her restlessness as she marked another batch of essays, folded another load of towels, did another round of dishes, planned another week of food? Had he been restless too? Might she have seen deep in his eyes some coastline he wanted to visit? Some little house overlooking a beach that required only the barest upkeep and no paddocks or fields? Sometimes he had talked about going big-game fishing in the Gulf, but they’d never been. Once a year he’d taken five days off and gone hunting deer with old school friends.
In ten years I will be as old as Marina Abramovi?, Jane thought. In twenty-five years I’ll be as old as my mother. Twenty-five years ago I was just twenty-nine. There’s still time. Please let there still be time.
Earlier that morning she had pretended that in fact she lived here in New York. She had made the bed and smoothed the quilt. She ran her hand across the carved beading of the bedhead and imagined spending Christmas here. She would walk in the snow in Central Park, see the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center, choose gifts at Barneys. She would be a person with friends who had interesting pasts and they’d invite her to their favourite restaurants.
It was not the time to be making decisions. Everyone told her that. Three different people had given her copies of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as if that would solve everything. She knew people meant well, but she hadn’t been able to read it. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything. She was too busy listening for Karl.
She imagined him lying on the bed reading the papers at the hotel, fully dressed for the day, his sagging boat shoes, his cable cardigan. He would be happy for her to be off trawling her galleries. He would spend the morning finding a diner where he could have a second breakfast and watch the world go by. He would be sure to find someone to talk to. That was Karl. It was one of the things they’d had in common. The way each of them would come home with conversations they’d had with complete strangers.
MUCH TO HIS SURPRISE LEVIN found himself going uptown to MoMA almost every day. He walked across the lower lobby and deposited his raincoat and umbrella at the members’ end of the cloakroom, then checked himself through the electronic gates. The lobby was crowded today. Perhaps it was the blustery weather. The place looked like it was full of students.
He stared up at the big blue Tim Burton balloon. At the foot of the stairs, leaning against the white wall, he overheard a girl describe her sister’s wedding cake and for a moment he was in Mexico with Lydia on their honeymoon. The sound of mariachis prowling for custom, the scent of the night and the dreadful sky.
His mother had bought him a telescope for his seventh birthday, but the abyss of the night had terrified him even then. He had worried about clinging to the earth by just his feet. It didn’t seem enough. And all that matter, spiralling towards him, light and dark racing at him through millennia and so much of it utterly unknown. His father had died when he was four years old after only a few weeks of illness. ‘A headache, some vomiting, and then he was too sick to move,’ his mother had told him. The vagueness of this had haunted him all his life—that simply a headache and vomiting could lead to death.
His mother had taken him every year to see the little plaque in the white concrete wall where his father’s ashes resided. But his father’s spirit, she said, was out there, somewhere, indicating the sky above. There was nothing to be afraid of. Didn’t he, like her, feel that other beings lived out there? This couldn’t be the only habitable planet in the entire universe. They didn’t have to be scary or blue or have strange powers. They wouldn’t abduct him. There were forces at work, unseen forces that were there for good. They would look after him. Yes, these same forces had loved his father too, but maybe they had needed him back. Eventually everyone went back. It was nothing to worry about.