The Museum of Modern Love(64)

‘She’s tiny!’

‘She looks great!’

She was dressed very simply in pale pants, a white wrap, her hair back in a ponytail. She had perfect cheekbones and looked to have aged carefully with no obvious work. The guard bent his head and spoke into her ear. She nodded and smiled at him. Marina sat at the table with her head bowed. The room had filled. People flocked to the white line, sitting, standing. Levin had never seen so many people. He felt giddy with fatigue; grimy and stiff from the night he had just spent on the pavement outside MoMA with forty-three other people desperate to sit with Marina on the second-last day of The Artist is Present.

The guard nodded and Miranda Richardson moved to the empty wooden chair. The crowd hushed. Cameras clicked, flashes blinked.

‘No photographs,’ a guard said loudly.

A man on the opposite side of the square openly ignored the guard and continued to aim his baby Minolta. People clandestinely positioned their phones in their hands and clicked away.

Marina raised her head, opened her eyes and gazed at the actress. A flicker, perhaps only imagined, passed across Marina’s face. The room swelled with an inaudible sigh. The city beyond vibrated with its eight million people, but there for a moment within the square everything was still.

For ten minutes Marina and the actress gazed unwaveringly into each other’s eyes, then the actress bowed her head, stood up, and walked back across the square. The guard scooped up her soft brown sandals and handed them to her.

Next the woman accompanying the actress crossed the floor and sat. Marina opened her eyes and looked up again. The room shifted about. There were seven people ahead of Levin.

Healayas had been beside him for much of the night. He had told her his plan to wait in the queue and she said she couldn’t miss the chance to interview the people who were willing to sleep on concrete in order to participate in an art event.

‘But not me,’ said Levin. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not, if you don’t want to be interviewed,’ she said. ‘I’ll just keep you company.’

Still, he had been surprised and delighted when she had arrived at 9 pm and thrown her duffle bag and an air mattress down next to him, explaining to the boy next to Levin that she was a journalist and she wasn’t jumping the queue or planning on sitting. She was just here doing her job. The boy looked so struck by her beauty, Levin thought Healayas could have told him anything and he’d have agreed.

Levin inflated the mattress for her as Healayas worked her way along the queue. He couldn’t quite believe the madness of what he was doing. All his life he had avoided camping.

Healayas had told him to buy an air mattress, but he’d thought it would be overkill. By midnight he regretted acutely that he’d only brought his Pilates mat. For twenty bucks at Kmart he could have been comfortable. He could have cried at his own inadequacies that seemed, under the rigid overlit sky, to be countless.

‘You can’t be afraid of stars. How did I not know that?’ Healayas had laughed as the chill crept into their coats and hats and they huddled against the wall in their respective sleeping bags.

‘It’s not something I can help.’

‘Well, be afraid of the sea. Or cars. Something that can kill you—but not something so beautiful, Arky.’

‘It’s just emptiness. In fact, it’s the past rushing at us. Everything out there, other than the sun, died years ago.’

‘That’s kind of depressing. How do you get around such miserable thoughts?’

He had laughed. ‘Music.’

‘Is that enough?’

‘Probably not.’

Along the queue the conversation slowly grew subdued. They settled down and waited for sleep to overtake the night.

At some point Healayas rolled over and looked at Levin on his pathetic layer of rubber. She grinned at him. He gazed back.

‘Come. You look so alone there. Come cuddle me.’

And he had. For a few sweet hours he had held Healayas Breen, and later she had held him, on an air mattress outside MoMA, spooning together like two children at a sleepover, while the city carried on around them.

Levin dreamed of Lydia. They were both laid out on funeral biers and elaborately clothed in traditional garments for the dead. They were being carried by a crowd of anonymous mourners into a funeral home. But they weren’t dead. He had woken her, ran with her from the funeral home and across the street into a cafe, where he had kissed her passionately. When he woke he remembered a fight they’d had.

‘What you’re dissatisfied with has to be about you, Arky,’ Lydia had said to him.

‘Well, fine, seeing your life is always going so well.’

‘Are you serious? Have you noticed something about my life?’

‘I’ve noticed lots of things.’

‘But not the fact that . . . fuck, Arky, you are so blind.’

‘I do notice . . . but I’m the last person you help. It’s always Alice first, then your clients, your girlfriends. I mean, when the fuck is it going to be about me?’

‘It is about you, sweetheart. It’s always about you. Everything is done for you, and you don’t even notice. But I can’t keep doing it. It’s not my responsibility. I am pretty busy over here in my own life. Sorry if my being fulfilled in my life confronts you. So sorry if I don’t have time to provide your fulfilment as well.’