The Museum of Modern Love(62)

‘They could have chosen bread, wine, oil,’ she said. ‘Honey, cake, flowers.’

‘Did you really think they would massage you, drink to your health?’ Danica had sighed, sat down, rubbed her forehead. ‘Remember Rochefort, the French lawyer? “I don’t deny that my client was carrying a bomb. But this doesn’t prove he was going to use it. After all, I myself always carry with me all I’d need to commit a rape.” How disappointed you would have been by a room full of pacifists.’

And then Marina had surprised her. She said, ‘I never thought they might kill me.’

‘But . . .’

‘I understand that now.’

And then she had left Belgrade to be with that German. Danica could never accept a German.

And in the end it hadn’t worked out. They had done that walk in China. Some sort of grand romantic gesture. She understood that too. Three thousand miles was barely enough to let someone go. She would have done anything for Vojo. Even killed him if it meant he would love her forever. And whether anyone else knew it, she knew that was what Marina had done. She had made that man hers forever. What other woman would ever live up to her? What other woman would walk three thousand miles for him?

Danica sniffed in the quiet way ghosts do.





WHEN ARNOLD KEEBLE EXPRESSED HIS interest in sitting with Marina Abramovi?, he had been invited to join the VIPs in the green room for the 10.30 start. Ushered into the atrium at 10.25, Keeble was surprised at the intensity of the crowd in the foyer below. A tornado of voices was issuing up the stairs. He could hear someone with a repetitive, irritating laugh and overexcited conversation banging on the white walls. The actor James Franco was with him. They had been introduced in the green room. He admired Franco—particularly his new book of short stories—and told him so. Franco seemed pleased. He had offered Keeble the first sitting. Keeble wondered, as he sat down, if Marina would give any indication of recognising him.

For a moment her dark eyes observed him as if he was a fresh canvas, then she blinked and her gaze settled. It felt like a spotlight had hit him. Life specimen Arnold Keeble. At first it was just the hard chair, the intense white of her dress, her face that seemed to emanate light as if Rembrandt had painted her. But then he felt the lens of her mind asking him a question. He was imagining it. It was part of this game of sitting. This game of mirrors. Still, it niggled at him. She was mute, and yet everything about her was loud. What did she want from him? The scale of the square had expanded so the noise of the crowd felt far away, almost as if he and Marina were underwater.

He thought of his wife, Beatrice, and the coldness that had grown between them since he’d refused to have children. They had agreed, before he married her, there would be no children. It was typical of women to change their minds. But he wouldn’t. There had been scenes. She had tried all sorts of tricks. He’d rather admired her determination to bring a little Keeble into the world. But not enough to allow it to happen. He had taken himself off for a vasectomy and told her about it afterwards. He had wondered if she might leave him, but had guessed she wouldn’t. He’d guessed right. She preferred him to see her suffering. The clothes she needed to buy, the jewellery, the vacations he owed her now that she would never have a baby.

It wasn’t the childlessness that he questioned—even Marina had chosen that. It was significance. What had significance? When he woke in the night, he didn’t want to reach for Beatrice. Of late, he wanted to reach for Healayas Breen. That had disconcerted him.

He didn’t like this train of thought. He wanted to think that Healayas was just another affair. No different to discovering a new vineyard or vintage. A new artist. A new motorbike. Their relationship didn’t matter. It was art direction. He had an exquisite mistress. He had curated his life to be a gallery of careful perfection.

He felt a tear run down his cheek. He blinked and felt confused. Had he been sad? Then he dropped his head, stood up and, putting two hands to his face, rubbed his eyes and cheeks as he returned to where James Franco was standing with the security guard.

When Keeble checked the Flickr feed the next night, he saw he had sat for eight minutes. The photograph captured the moment when that single tear had reached the light on his cheekbone. He would have to answer for it. Had he been moved by the performance? Yes, he could say. I found it moving but also impenetrable. Beatrice would surmise that he had regrets, when she saw the picture. But he didn’t. Regrets would involve thinking about the past. A decade of therapy had taught him that thinking about the past was an expensive hobby.

What exactly had he been thinking? He regarded the photograph, the thick wave of hair, the fine block of nose, the way he held his chin, the uncertainty in his eyes. That was the bit he didn’t recognise. He had liked to think he was never going to get past being a self-indulgent prick, because that was how he’d got to where he was. No one, not a child, not the many pleasures of Healayas Breen, not eight minutes with Marina Abramovi?, not even Beatrice leaving him, was going to change that.

In the hallway of his apartment he stopped and sat down on a bench. Here he could look out over the bonsai garden and, beyond it, the Hudson. He sat for some time until he nodded, as if agreeing with something unsaid, then turned and went into the bedroom.





LIKE ALL ADULT HUMANS, MARINA Abramovi?’s body was made of some forty-three kilograms of oxygen, most in dilution as water. She also had the regular allowance of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and a kilo or so of calcium in her bones. After the main elements, things in the human body get a little smaller. Around seven hundred and fifty milligrams of phosphorous, one hundred and forty grams of potassium, ninety-five grams of chlorine, a little magnesium, a little less zinc. There was also silver, gold, lead, copper, tellurium, zirconium, lithium, mercury and manganese. Even a milligram or so of uranium. The human body is an incantation of earth, air and water.