The Museum of Modern Love (14 page)

‘MY LAST DAY,' JANE SAID,
pulling a face.

‘What time is your flight?' Levin enquired.

‘Five pm. I'll stay as long as I can.'

Levin thought to tell Jane that he could hear, just beyond the strain of human ears, music playing inside the square. The sort of music that happens when children run through water, or a flock of birds takes off above a lake into an evening sky, or when sunshine strikes the petals of flowers. Sometimes he thought he heard a sitar or the clear melody of the oud, with its half-pear back and its broken neck. He had once been a boy in Seattle trying to catch the music of the wind. Now he was a man stretching his fingers towards his potential before it slipped from his grasp.

‘I would have liked to see Frida Kahlo paint her,' Jane said. ‘I wonder what implements of pain she might assign Marina as she sits in the chair? Do you remember when the Pool of Reflection froze solid last winter and people walked on water, there on Capitol Hill? Did you see the pictures? It struck me as biblical, I guess. And here . . . here, they come and sit with her and it's a little bit biblical too.'

Levin nodded, still listening to the music in his head.

‘You know Brittika, the PhD student I introduced you to in the queue? The Chinese girl from Amsterdam with the pink hair? We were talking about how people give the Pollock on the fourth floor a minute or two and move on. But they stop and stare at Marina for hours. Lots of us come back again and again. And look!' She indicated the crowd about the square and the long queue of people waiting to take their place at the table. ‘They're from everywhere. London, Ireland, France, Portugal, Egypt, Israel, Vienna, Australia. They're spending their precious days in New York coming back here again and again. I've never seen anyone spend this much time staring at an artwork.'

Levin nodded.

‘She looks tired, doesn't she?' said Jane. ‘I imagine that hundreds of pairs of eyes staring into yours might do that.'

Marina was looking particularly pale, her eyes red rimmed as if she was on the edge of an infection. Her skin was the colour of candle wax. A lunch crowd was filling the atrium. Another person sat. He had a shaved head and a broad, keen face.

Jane said, ‘
What am I here for?
I think this is still the question we want answered. Maybe that's why we come here. Maybe we think she knows.'

Levin looked at her. He was about to reply when a young woman on the other side of him, voluptuous in a stretch paisley shirt, asked, as if requiring him to solve a minor argument for her, ‘What do you see in it?'

He shrugged. ‘Lots of things.'

The girl said, ‘I think she's like a tree that has rooted herself to this place. A silver princess gum.'

‘That is such a girl thing to say,' the young man beside her said, grinning at Levin.

‘Well, what tree do you think she is?' she asked her companion.
‘I don't know. A baobab. Something exotic.'

‘And you two?' the girl persisted.

‘Oh, maybe a monkey-puzzle tree,' said Jane, laughing. ‘Arky?'

‘I don't really know trees,' he said.

The young people went back to their own conversation. Jane fell silent as she continued watching the two people in the centre of the room regarding one other. Regard was too distant a term for it. It was as if they were drinking each other in.

Levin smothered a yawn. He had slept badly. He'd woken at 1.05 am and hadn't been able to fall asleep again. He'd gotten up and watched an episode of
The Sopranos
. He'd tried listlessly to masturbate as he sat on the couch then gave it up. It seemed too much of an effort and he didn't want to conjure Lydia for such purposes. Eventually he'd put on his headphones and worked away in his studio. He played over old compositions, thinking of a show he might give one day that featured all his best work. He considered the club he'd hire and the guest list.

The city had buzzed on regardless of the hour. The tribe of New York burning through life. He felt the curve of the world and, standing at the window, he rather hoped someone would drop a line and haul him up.

He had been to the doctor the week before and been given cream for the rash on his hand. It hadn't been their regular doctor, but a locum while Dr Kapelus was on leave. The doctor had suggested some routine blood and urine tests, just to see if there was anything amiss. When they came back, it turned out Levin's cholesterol was up, but nothing serious for his age. No medication required. Kidney function good. Blood pressure one thirty over eighty and heart rate seventy-four. Everything was fine. ‘Exercise would be good,' said the doctor, ‘for the insomnia. The sweats may be caffeine-related. But life has a whole bundle of things lurking about for men over fifty. Stress is the most
insidious. Exercise is your best friend. And it keeps the weight down. That and not too much Ben & Jerry's. Do you swim, play tennis, cycle?'

‘Yes, tennis,' he had said, remembering Hal's invitation to resume their summer games.

The doctor had advised him to slow down on the coffee. Even stop altogether for six weeks and see if it helped his sleep cycle. What was he eating that might be stimulating his metabolism? the doctor had asked. ‘Too much red meat? Not enough water during the day?'

Levin had gone four days without coffee but nothing had changed. Not even a headache. And still he'd woken in the night.

He said to Jane, ‘Last night on the TV there was a news pull-through I kept seeing. It said:
A man who went for a late-night swim was found by tourists.
It was only later that I realised I had missed the first few words. In fact, the pull-through read:
The body of a man who went for a late-night swim was found by tourists.
Three words made such a difference.'

‘Especially for the man,' Jane said.

Especially for the man. Levin had wondered all his life what would take him off. Would it also be a random act of fate? Or would it be protracted and painful? He worried that he was starting to forget things. He'd walk into the bedroom to get something and have no recollection what it was. He'd go to the market certain of what he needed and find himself staring blankly at the shelves. His recall of movie titles and actors, even film composers, took longer. Sometimes things didn't occur to him until the next day or even days later. By which time he'd forgotten why his brain had been so urgently searching for that particular fact in the first place.

‘I think there would be more forgiveness,' Jane said. ‘If we did more of it. Imagine in Arabic countries, in Africa,
even here in America, if men did this with their wife, their wives, every day. Looked into each other's eyes. Or soldiers with soldiers. Children with teachers. Heads of governments. Perhaps it would be good to have someone to practise on before you tried it on someone very important to you . . .' She laughed. ‘But really, imagine!'

Levin thought of his film score for
Kawa
. He had called the first track
Awakening
. The Winter King met a young woman living in the forest. A woman bound by a spell. She had lived in the forest a hundred years or more. (It was a fairytale, after all.) They fell in love and had a child. But when the child arrived, it was to bring the woman the greatest loneliness of all. Levin didn't know how to write that bit. Everything he tried felt like a cliché.

In the wakeful hours between midnight and dawn, it was as if he himself was looking for a path across the river, a perfect beat of stones that would carry him to the far bank without washing him downstream. The river was not kind or helpful. And sometimes there was ice all around him and he was cold. The forest was death overgrown with life. In those desperate hours when he knew himself more alone than he had ever been in his life, he was sure he would lose sight of the track he had made and never be able to find his way back through the trees. At 1.05 or 3.17 or 4.24 am he was never sure of his footing. And he saw Lydia in all the shadows.

‘If you do sit, please write and tell me about it,' Jane said. ‘Here, I'll give you my email.' She scribbled her details on a piece of notepaper. ‘This will all seem so far away and unreal once I get back home.'

‘You'll be able to watch on the live feed,' Levin suggested, indicating the camera on the atrium's wall.

‘I'll write my mobile number too. If you are about to sit, will you text me? I would love to watch.'

‘Sure,' he said.

‘I don't expect many composers have sat with her,' Jane said.

‘Maybe not.' He was ready for Jane to go. He hated drawn-out goodbyes. He would never email her.

She hesitated and then she said, ‘Arky, my parents were married for sixty years. My mother never came to New York. She always thought she'd get lost. My father came several times for the races.'

He nodded, uncertain of why she was telling him this, now she was about to leave.

‘Is your wife home again?' she asked.

‘No.'

‘Is it irreparable?'

He looked at her and was surprised to see kindness there.

‘Yes.'

‘But you still love her . . .'

Levin nodded. ‘I do.'

‘So, have you tried?'

‘She's made it very clear.'

‘You know, Arky, we don't know each other very well, but probably as well as we ever will. So I just want to say this before I go. Karl and I, we were together for twenty-eight years. Now I've lost him and there's no chance to say all the things I never said. I think, if I dare be so bold as to give advice—which I know men always hate—you should try with everything you have. I just hate seeing love go to waste.'

Loneliness was silent, almost soundproof, he thought. ‘I need to get home,' he said.

‘Alright,' she said, startled, as he jumped to his feet.

‘Something just fell into place with the film score.'

‘That's marvellous,' she said, standing up beside him. ‘Go! Go! Quick!'

He kissed her cheek. ‘Well. It was . . .'

She smiled. ‘Thank you. It's been a great pleasure meeting you, Arky. Do let me know if you sit with Marina.'

‘I will,' he said, patting the pocket where he had placed her note, wanting to be the sort of man who would.

At home he sat down in his studio and did what he had done almost all of his life. He wandered through arpeggios, through chord modulations in minor and major keys, letting the mood take him, feeling the augmented colours of both. Seeing the profile of Abramović, the pale silent face. He saw a woman alone in the midst of a forest of faces. Then he heard it. There was a heart song, a step between loneliness and connection. The music of forest and water. There, in the notes, was the music of time and solitude and yearning for love.

His hands ran up and down the keyboard, the crisp notes of the Steinway cool and white and black under his fingers. A rush of energy ran down his arms. He heard the theme that would run in and out of the film, threading the scenes together. Raindrops falling on leaves, a moon in the sky and this melody. He understood how the melody could progress into other passages. He glimpsed what might come before and after. He played it over and over, seeing the woman who was human by day and a fish by night slipping into the water at sunset, waking and stepping from the river at dawn, the forest gleaming in tiny fragments as light returned to tree and fern, rock and bird, lichen and fungi. The woman standing in the endless wave of water and holding the stories of the world together.

He thought of Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, opus 95, the haunting call of horns, the quiet moments of pause. But this was the piano calling, beckoning to the sun. This was a story about how the world was born and how it would change, and nothing would be the same.

NOW THAT LEVIN HAD FINALLY
got himself out of the way and allowed the music to come in, I went to see Jane depart New York. There are artists and there are facilitators. I bless the facilitators. They are the lubricants of the artistic process. The engine oil of creativity. Beware the artist who believes they have failed, their genius gone unrecognised or unrewarded in the precise way they demanded, and so turns to teaching. So too the parent or friend who offers the wisdom of their experience by telling the young artist they will never succeed, that the world is too big and they too small, that their dream is invalid for the usual practical reasons. Or the person who from the lofty perch of no art believes they could have been great if they had written or painted or made the film. How hard can it be, after all? I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger. But Jane is not angry. Jane is considering the chauffeur.

She could smell a fragrance on him. Sandalwood, perhaps, and a hint of cinnamon. She observed his even hairline and slightly heavy neck above the collar of his white shirt. She would have liked to ask him all manner of things. How had he come to be in
New York? Was he happy? What did he make of God or Allah? What did he think of Obama? What did he most like to eat? What would he have done with his life if he could be seventeen again? But instead she sat and watched the skyline drop into suburbs and the broad expanse of freeway escape the city under a damp colourless sky. She thought it would be wonderful to be home and have the grandchildren ask questions, and put her own to rest for a while.