The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

procreation. A strategic response to prevent loneliness and maintain social structures.
    He had exhibited all the signs of love. He had felt himself love Lydia over and over again. And there had been the bad patches. When she was sick. Unrecognisable. Not the Lydia he knew. The coroner had been right. Familiarity was dangerous.
    He had spent most of Christmas Day, after he’d left the hospital, walking. He had walked to Brooklyn and on, and it was only when he realised that he couldn’t feel his fingers andtoes that he’d finally hailed a cab. He’d slept for almost a day. He didn’t know where that fatigue had come from. But he knew that when she got sick, he got very tired. He remembered how the shampoo had run out. The cat was hungry. The milk had been past its use-by date but he’d used it anyway. He’d ignored the flashing messages on the phone. Lydia’s friends and colleagues stretched far and wide, people who were useful any time of the day and night. But not to him.
    He remembered that he had been convinced that it was Lydia’s electric toothbrush on the sink and he’d hunted high and low for his own and ended up using an airline one. Days later he realised it was actually his own toothbrush, but he only recognised it in relation to Lydia’s. He had worried that this was somehow symbolic. Who was he without Lydia? Without her thoughts and clothes and food and friends? Her idea of time and entertainment? Who might he be if he was left to his own patterns and rhythms? How long would it take to become something beyond her? Who would that person be? He hadn’t wanted to know. But he had no choice. If there was one thing he knew, it was that days kept coming at you, no matter if you were ready for them or not.
    He started sleeping later. Not waking to Lydia’s usual 5 am start, he found his body inclining towards 7 am, then 8, until he was waking at 8.45 am to the latest snowfall on the deck. He had, until then, been a hot breakfast man. But he began to put on boots and coat and stroll across the square to Third Rail, where he’d order a long macchiato. Sometimes on the way home he’d pick up an onion bagel and toast it with a second coffee he’d make in the espresso machine around 11 am. Sometimes he bought blueberries. He tinkered in his studio, going over old material, considering his next album. He played all his vinyls at whatever hour he liked.
    In March he moved Lydia’s things into a lower drawer and arranged his bathroom items on the most convenient shelf. He stacked the dishwasher the way he liked and stopped hearing Lydia correcting him. He let Rigby sleep on the bed beside him. He watched James Horner and Hans Zimmer both lose out for Best Soundtrack at the Oscars. None of this made him happier. Quite the opposite. He worried that the universe had become a little bit spongy. If he put his finger out and prodded it here or there, it might quiver. If life was unknowable, just a dance of unseen forces, then surely it didn’t matter what happened between him and Lydia. But it did. He knew it did. And if this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end.
    Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do. Could not do. And all this he thought of as he gazed at Healayas sitting opposite Marina Abramović.
    After almost an hour, Healayas left the chair. Levin rubbed his face, then let his hand linger over his eyes, breathed in that personal moment of privacy. He wanted her to see him, and he did not want her to see him. When he lifted his hand and looked around, she was gone.

ON THE THIRD AFTERNOON THEY spent together watching Marina Abramović, Levin offered to buy Jane a drink when the museum closed. She suggested the bar at her hotel.
    ‘If that’s not too forward. I’m just keen to sit there and it seems strange to do it on my own. And I do want you to know that I’m married. In fact, I’m a widow but only recently. I felt the need to tell