The Museum of Modern Love(7)
Nothing she said had ever reassured him. He was on a planet that had undergone cataclysmic events on a regular basis. Human life was a sort of genetic accident. The world was spinning in an inconceivable infinity and life, every form of life, was a fragile experiment.
During his teenage years he was prescribed various anti-anxiety medications. None of them numbed or deluded him enough. When he was sixteen, his mother died. What do women who have drunk chamomile tea each night before bed, believed in invisible forces and played Chopin études before breakfast die of? A falling tree in a storm.
He’d dispersed her ashes on the rose garden at the crematorium. Whatever those gritty remnants of bone and skin were, they were not what he remembered. Her music wasn’t there. Her expectations of him. The things she disagreed with. The things they’d argued over.
His aloneness was confirmed. He went to live with his father’s parents. It had all happened fast. They came to help him take what he needed before the house was sold. He had packed a bag with his clothes wrapped around every record he’d ever collected, said goodbye to the house, the winding road that led past his school, past the wholefood store where he’d worked stacking organic fruit and vegetables, bagging almonds, weighing granola.
They’d flown into LA and on the trip to Santa Barbara he’d found that the light of the city obliterated the void beyond. He resolved that wherever he ended up, it was going to have to be somewhere big. So when he moved to New York a few years later, and found the stars in their gaping darkness were nowhere to be seen, eclipsed by SoHo apartments and Midtown high-rises, Chinatown neons and flashy Fifth Avenue commercial buildings, by coal-consuming giants in the Financial District, stately old ladies on the park and brown-brick boxes on the East River, he felt he had won. That humanity had won. New York was brighter than the universe bearing down on them. For this alone he had decided that he could live here forever and entirely expected to.
He still wondered often about his health. An ageing body was an unreliable mechanism. What was happening to his cells? He knew everything was meant to renew every seven years, or every thirty days—he couldn’t remember which. He never did get sick. He didn’t get colds, he didn’t get headaches and he had only once had food poisoning. But he had regular medicals.
‘Fit as a buffalo,’ his doctor liked to say to him. ‘Blood pressure one ten over seventy, pulse sixty-five, bloods are good. You’re doing fine for a man your age, Arky. Just fine.’
The buffalo nearly died out, Levin thought.
For a brief moment in the lobby, across the crowd, he caught the gaze of a woman leaning on the wall away from the stairs. She looked vaguely familiar. She held his gaze for a moment, gave him the briefest smile, and he realised she was the woman from a day or two ago. The one who had started talking to him about being saved. Nothing was going to save her from her shirt, he thought. She had the look of a tourist from the Deep South. The kind who might tend her garden in a large hat. The crowd was swelling towards the stairs and he lost sight of her.
He wasn’t sure why he needed to keep returning to the sidelines of this strange performance, but he kept finding himself taking the train, walking in the door, climbing the stairs, taking his place by the white line. The atrium was a magnet, or maybe it was Abramovi?. Something about this was important, but he couldn’t say why.
JANE MILLER TRANSFERRED HER GAZE to the rather shabby accountant she had met on her first day at MoMA. She knew that ever since the Abramovi? performance began back in March, the accountant had come to the gallery almost every day at lunchtime to sit and watch. Matthew? Matthew, that’s right; that was his name. She made her way over to him.
‘Why, you’re early today.’
‘I suddenly had the urge to see how it all starts,’ Matthew replied, looking a little awkward.
‘Well, hold on to your hat,’ Jane said.
The guard standing on the stairs indicated to the crowd that there was one minute to go. She put a hand on Matthew’s arm.
‘There’s no hurry. Unless you’re planning to sit with her.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not today.’
‘Then let’s let these eager bunnies hustle and bustle and we can just take our time, find a nice place on the side of the room and be the observers that we are.’
She didn’t know why she’d begun to talk like someone from a Tennessee Williams play. She observed in a flash Matthew’s dusty brown loafers, the suit that didn’t match his shoes nor work very well with his shirt. The plain tie and the blue kindness of his eyes. Karl was everywhere.
At 10.30 they watched as fifty, sixty people took flight up the stairs, running, stumbling, pushing each other, fleeing towards art. Racing to join a queue to make eye contact with an artist.
No one will ever know I was here, Jane thought. There will be no picture of me taken by the photographer. Nothing recorded of my attendance in a book, no picture of me on the website. In fact, she thought, my whole life, but for the family photographs, will go unrecorded. A grove of olive trees that I’ve planted. The pullovers I knitted which will wear right out within a generation or two. Probably by then people will give up wearing anything that needs handwashing.
The farm was more than a hundred years old when she and Karl had moved back. The front garden had been the careful design of Karl’s grandmother, and the vegetables and herbs the work of his mother. Jane had seen little she wanted to change. She had always liked certainty. It was one of the pleasures of being a teacher. There was a great deal of structure to rely on. A calendar, a curriculum, the types of students one had every year. She had a sudden sense, not entirely unpleasant, that uncertainty might have its appeal, going forward. But she put that thought away, like linen in a drawer, and thought instead of Gustav Metzger. Metzger liked to drape cloths over things. He had draped cloth over images of the Holocaust. He might drop a cloth right over Marina Abramovi?. Leave only her hands visible. Would people still sit in the chair opposite if she were draped in a cloth? Or was it her very real eyes and very real skin, her very real heart beating in her body, that drew them to her? Perhaps she was the most accessible person some of them had ever seen. Jane thought of her students, the snatched conversations in the first weeks as they flitted by her desk, until they knew her to have a sense of humour. Knew she would listen. And then how some of them had talked! What a thing, to be seen, Jane had surmised, early in her teaching career. For a child, it was everything.