The Museum of Modern Love(8)

She had worried irrationally, once the end was certain, that she had not spent enough time seeing Karl for all he was. She had rubbed his feet, trying to memorise the cloudy right big toenail, the slender middle toes, the way the two smallest toes on each foot curved inwards like parentheses. She tried to take in the curve of his ears. She wasn’t sure whether, if she’d been shown his hand in a police line-up of ten similar hands, she would have known it above all others. She wanted to think she would, but she couldn’t lie to herself.

She had watched all the weight drop off him. Not that the years of peach cobblers and pecan pies, fried chicken and cornbread, bacon and waffles had contributed much in the way of additional weight. He’d been six foot four and always well-built. Still, all of it, in the end, every scrap of weight and muscle and even some of his height, fell away, leaving him a Giacometti man, all lean purpose against the wind of death.

He had told her so many things in the last weeks and days. How farming had run out his patience with God. He said all he really trusted were chemicals and good equipment because seed and weather were a problem marriage unless it was genetically modified, and that felt like a dance with the devil all its own, though he’d felt he had no choice. That’s what the devil does, he’d said: gives you no choice. They weren’t great thoughts to prepare a man for dying.

He said he wished they’d travelled like she’d wanted to when the children had grown. He wished he’d known this was coming. How they might have sold the farm, if he’d been brave enough, and gone and done those other things they’d planned before his parents had left him to carry on with everything. And he hadn’t felt strong enough, not after all those Millers had worked so hard, generation after generation. The farm had survived the war, survived the weevils and, by God, it was going to survive him, that’s what he said. It was what his father had said before him. That kind of teaching goes in hard. Still, they might have made other choices. Stayed in New Mexico where they’d met while he was passing through on a road trip that was taking him west to surf the beaches of California.

He wanted to know if he had made her happy. Yes, she had told him, she had been happy. Are you sure? he had asked her, following the lines in the counterpane with his fingers. Yes, she had said. Yes.

He worried a lot about heaven in those last days. He wanted to know, before the morphine shunt took him from her, where she would meet him. If there were steps, he’d be there. He’d be waiting. But where? If there was a cottonwood tree . . . an olive grove?

He said, his face so gaunt that only his eyes were familiar, that he would do what he could for the Falcons, too, next season, if he had any say once he got to wherever he was going.

‘What will you miss, Janey?’ he asked her. ‘Tell me what you’ll miss.’

Your whistle when you come in the door, she had told him. Your shirts on the clothesline. The evenings when we watch fireflies dance under the harvest spotlights. Your heart. The things only you and I remember about the children. The way your skin is always warm. Your coffee mug half empty on the veranda railing at 7 am.

She could have gone on but he was tired and it had been enough. The real answer to his question was everything. She would miss everything. What she didn’t know, what she took for granted about living with Karl and being a wife, was far larger than the things she could name.





‘HELLO THERE,’ SAID JANE MILLER to Levin. ‘I’m Jane. We spoke a few days ago.’

Her pale brown hair was swept back in a simple knot. Her eyes, rather oversized for her face, were the colour of a high blue sky and in some way made up for the lemon shirt and unfashionable jeans. She sat down neatly, like a child on the mat at school, her arms wrapped around her legs.

‘I remember,’ said Levin. ‘You’re a tourist?’

‘Does it show so badly?’ She laughed.

Levin observed her sensible, almost orthopaedic shoes and thought it did.

‘I’m from Georgia. I arrived a week ago. And you? Are you from New York?’ she asked him.

‘I was born in Seattle, then moved to L.A. But I’ve spent most of my life here.’

‘I came to this on my second day in town,’ she said, her voice sliding along in an accent that might have come from Gone With the Wind, ‘I know I could be off right now wandering the Metropolitan or spiralling the Guggenheim, or taking pictures from the Empire State or visiting Liberty Island, but this is one of the most curious things I have seen and I can’t leave.’ She laughed. ‘Have you sat with her yet?’

‘No,’ Levin said.

‘But you will?’

Levin shook his head. ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘It doesn’t seem my place either.’

They both observed a man leave the chair opposite Marina Abramovi?; another man, slender and stooped in a green tweed jacket, took the chair. He left after only ten minutes and next came a young woman with a tiny pair of shoulders and long lank hair. Her dress was thin, as were her shins, and she appeared to be bowed under the weight of a short and exhausting life. At first the girl sat on the edge of the chair as if she might flee at any moment, but as the minutes passed she shifted back and her gaze became curious and focused. Abramovi?, too, appeared to have roused herself from some deeper place and was returning the gaze with particular intensity.