The Museum of Modern Love(66)

Flavours washed over her tongue, sweet, soft, bright, dense. She tasted and with the taste came pictures. Faces returned to her and patterns, carpets, smells that made her think of rooms and people. Vanilla. It came back as if someone had typed the word on her mind and she read it to herself, sounding it out with some inner voice.

There was no outer voice. She was a silent observer of the room and its visitors. She was a recipient of sound. She was an inhabitant. She was a watcher and she was observed.

Shadows and sunlight moved in particles across the glass. She was the silence of mist coming in from the sea. She was the forming and unforming of clouds, paint stroke after paint stroke brushing the sky. She was the hush of waves on the heartbeat of the coast and every moment was new and new and new again.

Now there was flavour on her tongue. Now she swallowed. Now she woke. Now she saw birds leaping into the sky. Now she saw the sea discoloured and rippled, the sand darkened. Now there was music. Music? Was that music? Yes. Yes.

Music swirled her through fragments and the road of memories coiled, rising up, wanting to whisper a name, make a sound, a sound, but no words for that were allowed inside her.

She dreamed her body was laid out, her feet in Manhattan and her head resting in the Great Lakes. She stretched herself further up into Canada, south to Boston and Washington. She pushed her hands and fingers across into the Midwest, slipping them up into the grooves of the Rockies, stretched her toes all the way down to Florida. Her other arm reached all the way to the grey pebbled beaches of Portugal. Her body continued to slip and stretch out around the world. Her skin swam into coastlines and over mountains. She gazed out into the void of darkness and she wanted to step off the world and slip away into starlight. She was sure that was the way home.

Home, she thought. Home. The words in her mind had been drained and emptied. A noise lived within her and like her it had no voice. Like her it could not move. It could not reach out and speak to the people who came to the room. Together she and the loneliness watched the light and the dark and all the colours in between that the sea and the sky made for her each day and she understood that something was waiting. Something was waiting and the stars could not have her back yet.

On the table by the window, letters and postcards accumulated. The nursing staff set them out so that Lydia could see them. They understood it was a strange case. It was Ms Fiorentino’s explicit wishes, spelled out in court documents, to be left alone save for her daughter and a few select girlfriends who came regularly. But it was hard, seeing it. It was hard to see anyone in the state she was in. She gave no indication of hearing or seeing anything at all. Her physiotherapy indicated that her body was, for the time being, able to maintain some strength. But it was probably only a matter of time before she had another stroke or her kidneys gave out. It was a horrible condition and people didn’t last very long once it had gone this far.

They had seen worse, and they had seen better. This wasn’t a place from which many people got to go home. But every now and again there was a sort of miracle. Sometimes the stroke victims regained movement. Sometimes the coma people woke up.

The staff read aloud to Lydia the letters that came every week from someone called Yolanda.

Dear Mrs Fiorentino,

I hope you are feeling better every day. This week I made for Mr Levin a lamb casserole and the frittata he always likes because the weather is warmer. Rigby is enjoying the couch by the piano and prefers to eat at the moment only tinned sardines. The lemon tree is showing signs of liking life out on the balcony.



And always every letter concluded with the same few lines.

I restocked with the usual items and everything is ready for when you are well enough to come home.

We all miss you very much and keep you in our prayers.

Yolanda





AND SO, AT LAST, THESE two people meet in person on two chairs opposite one another. Marina Abramovi? and Arky Levin. I am assigned to stand beside them—memoirist, intuit, animus, good spirit, genius, whim that I am. House elf to the artists of paint, music, body, voice, form, word. I have acquired the habit of never saying too much. And the trick of dropping in, rapping on the door of their minds in the moment before waking, in the moment of solitude staring out a window, in a cafe where everything for a moment stops, under a tree watching sunlight, when life is a set of dominos falling into place or a single moment of revelation about what comes next.

Of course, it can be years between moments. Mostly people say no. They say no, I don’t want to get out of bed. No, I don’t want to work that hard. No, today I don’t have time. No, I’m not listening right now. People say no so often, and then they wonder why they feel so desperate. Desperation does not especially interest me. Being available, paintbrush in hand, pen, keyboard, clay, stage, strings at the ready, is much more attractive. And sometimes I just need to wake things up.

Do you see now the difficulty of my task? All that they are is stored up loud and insistent inside them. But what does it take to be an artist? They have to listen. But do they listen? Most people are filled up with a lifetime of noise and distraction that’s hard to get past. At least that’s how it feels.

Levin was listening now. He was pinned to the chair. Pinned to Marina’s face. She was more formidable than he had imagined. Her eyes were moist ebony. He had imagined those eyes looking at him morning after morning, but they were deeper, she was further away and so much closer too. Was she seeing him? What was she seeing? From the crowd there was a percussive undertone that might have been breathing or heartbeats. Levin’s own pulse was slippery. Above him the atrium soared into the sunlight. He thought of Leonard Cohen.