The Museum of Modern Love(60)

Why had she loved Ulay? Why had there been such a force between them? How was it that they had the same birthday? That when they met they were both wearing chopsticks in their hair? That he felt half female while she felt half male. How was it that he felt like the person she had known through lifetimes? As if she had loved him and hurt him time after time, and that she could love him hard enough to destroy him. What was that? What was her rage and her pain, her grief and hollowness? Because for all they’d been, for all they’d travelled, were travelling these thousands of miles, she had no idea what she was going to do with her life beyond this.

Weeks passed. Months passed. One thousand miles. Five hundred miles. The ugliness of the bad hotels brought paradox and Tito, the excess and scarcity of communism. It brought back the controls and limits and corruption of a world she could not wait to be free of. But still she walked. And tried to shed the numbness every day with the sheer beauty of the landscape and the immensity of the human spirit that had built this wall and fought for centuries to protect an empire.

She might have been another sort of woman. She might have had a child, been a mother, a wife. But she couldn’t feel that this time. She didn’t want it. They’d chosen not to. She’d chosen not to. She wanted this life, this one life for herself. And if that was selfish, if that was the harder road, then so be it. She would do it alone. She would find the next step and the next step and the next step. She had no future she could see. She would carve it out for herself as they’d carved out the steps for this wall. On one side was the past, the other the future. One side heaven, the other hell, one side black, the other white, one side night, the other day. Life was duality. She thought she’d found her other half, but it turned out that he was one of her many halves. She could see things in him that she didn’t find kind or good. They irritated her. Stung her. She could see the greater person he might be, but he didn’t want that. Only she wanted that.

‘You can’t love me for something I might become, Marina,’ he had said.

That was something she’d discovered. You could love a person so hard they became unknown to you.

Two hundred miles. One hundred miles. Fifty miles. Twenty miles. Ten miles. Until there was only one more mile.

His team came ahead and told Marina that Ulay had found the best place to meet, a little further on, so he’d wait for her there. As always, she had to take more steps, go the extra mile, to meet him. Up and up and up she went, step after step. And she thought how much she hated him for making her walk this much further. Could he not have trusted that there was a perfectly photogenic spot wherever they naturally met?

Here she was, walking towards him like a bride, but she was no bride and he no groom. She breathed and let it go. Let it go, Marina. There is a river below and the land and the sky is reminding you that everything is changing every moment of every day and you and your feelings are nothing in this.

And there he was, in his blue coat, his blue pants. A blue dragon to her red one. He on one tower, she on the other. She felt her body quiver with the last thread of energy it cost her to take these final steps. Down, down she went, to the bridge. Down, down he went, to the bridge. Moving towards each other. Red dragon, blue dragon.

The sun was sinking. The land was golden, the sky was amethyst, the river mercury. The past was behind them. She sobbed then. Something dry and raw that welled up. He was there, ahead of her, his face, his beloved face, and he was smiling, and she wanted to hold him, to be held. Instead, she reached out her hand and they touched fingers for a moment. Skin to skin one last time, in that way. And then he gave her the briefest, most perfunctory hug.

It was, she thought, inexpressibly sad. This was goodbye. She saw—in his eyes, in his laughing, in his joking with the crew—that this was a performance for him. He was long gone. But it had been her heart.





LEVIN ABSORBED THE QUIET HUM of the atrium about him. There was a brooding light about Marina as the days went by, as if she was incubating another creature inside her.

‘Do you think she’ll make it?’ a woman asked.

‘I am certain,’ her male companion replied with a French accent. ‘But I am also certain that if this killed her, she would be unperturbed.’

Levin agreed. Marina did not seem to be the least bit scared of death. Would Lydia have preferred to die? The thought struck him like a blow. Maybe she would have preferred to die. Maybe she had planned on death. Maybe there had been several scenarios and when she signed the legal papers, she had never really imagined anything being necessary other than her will.

Perhaps she hadn’t only given him his freedom because it was the best thing to do for him. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to face this either. Perhaps she had imagined she could run away from herself, cut herself off from all she had lost. Cut herself off from him, the one person who loved her more than anyone else. Perhaps she wasn’t being brave on her own out there in the Hamptons. Perhaps she was frightened. Perhaps, for once in her life, Lydia was out of her depth. Perhaps she really needed him, but had no way of letting him know. Hal was right. He did have choices. But maybe Lydia didn’t. She’d signed over her choices. She’d insisted that she could do it on her own.

He thought of all the times she’d never called a plumber because she could fix the pipe. For a girl with an impressive trust fund, she wanted to be the one to design the new kitchen in their Columbia apartment and source all the fittings. She had repaired tiles in the bathroom. She had replaced lighting and wallpapered walls. In her work she employed endless professionals, but in her own life, she had been ruthlessly independent.