Justine (5 page)

“Of course I do, man. Tell me.”

“They stink. That's why they're there.”

Johannes was an artist from the academy of arts in Stockholm, but he didn't understand what I meant.

“Doesn't matter,” I said.

Maybe the fish weren't such a good idea after all. Maybe they were actually there in Vita's honor. They were glossier than steel, they were far steelier than steel. I could tell that she hated them, even if she didn't say it. I had Johannes's full attention. Until I became too drunk to talk and took a taxi home to Sønderhaven.

W
hen I returned home like that at night or early in the morning, she was a coldness, a distance. Her body said: Tell me, woman, what actual power do you think you have over me? Her work occupied more time than it usually did, even though she didn't have any particular projects she was supposed to be finishing. She took off to Jutland for the weekend without telling me, maybe she had a friend with her, maybe a colleague. They were going to see a burial mound, she said when I asked. I pictured her walking beneath the winter sky with a red nose and mittens together with Harriet, another sculptor, who'd also developed a sudden interest in antiquity's monuments.

All I could do was lay there at home alone and think about things, twist and turn them, look at them from various angles. I was certain she knew everything. Or did she? Vita said nothing. She was just distracted and distant, if not downright departed.

One time she called me from the central station and asked if I wanted to travel with her to Odense. She was going to an opening at a sculpture park where some of her sculptor friends had fashioned two new bridges, but the trains had been delayed, and then it occurred to her that maybe I'd like to come too. I only needed to pack a couple pairs of underwear and some clothes, she said, and we'd stay at a hotel. Some clothes, some underwear, and some water from the kiosk. No word about that which also has a name: infidelity. Ooh. Ahh. I'll fuck you up. How could you do that? You'll fuck me up. I don't ever want to see you again until I actually want to see you again.

I attempted an excuse. I said:

“I've thought about it . . . that thing that weekend . . . it meant . . .”

I thought of something Ane had said, that I acted like an animal, a filthy, ass-sniffing male dog. Vita put up that expression: Just tell me, bitch . . .

There was nothing to talk about.

I
love her. I already loved her that New Year's Eve when the light had long since departed, everyone had gone home, it was only us tough dogs left.

We dragged the old Christmas trees to the fire pit to celebrate, and oh, what a party. It took an entire can of kerosene to start it, but then the fire took hold. The needles sputtered and rose aloft, and suddenly there was Vita holding a bag against the flames. I shouted for her to come away from there, my voice was rather shrill, more so than I would've thought. It was the sight, she was so beautiful, like electricity. Sparks leaped off her hair and forehead as she stepped away from the flames, and stars and needles burned an image in my mind.

Vita had a workshop in Valby, I knew, and one day I sniffed my way there. It was late on one of the afternoons that Valby's galleries hold their openings. I found the address on a side road with pitted asphalt, and a bell next to the gate. After a while Vita emerged from a flat building. She was wearing a shirt and overalls.

“Did you get lost?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Which opening are you looking for?”

“I don't actually know,” I said and giggled.

The little hall was tidy. Light streamed through a series of small windows set high up. There was a compressor in the middle of the floor, and some tarpaulin covered sculptures farther back.

“Now that you're here, you might as well see them,” Vita said and began removing the tarpaulin from one: a white cylinder like a medium-sized wading pool, about a meter or so high. The cylinder's circular surface was bowled, and to one side of the depression was a sphere: an over-dimensional pea paused on its rolling trajectory to the plate's bottom.

“I've never seen that one before,” I said.

“Well, it's only been shown once.”

“Now I see it.”

I circled the sculpture.

“It's quivering,” I said.

“That's because the depression is cut asymmetrically, so it appears to be sliding. Let me show you the other,” she said and withdrew the tarpaulin from the other sculpture, this one light yellow.

The bowl on this cylinder's surface was bubbled, the surface tension of a water droplet right before it bursts.

“I see a boob,” I said.

“I think I'm about to finalize an agreement to place both,” she said.

We went out into the winter garden behind the workshop. Here there was a bronze drop. There was also a bench. Vita's energies swirled around the glass conservatory, they flowed from her in tingling streams. Her strong, clean hands, the pale nape beneath her hair, the way she avoided touching me, reached for a watering can, dusted the sand off her hands. We sat side by side. The ease of her movements and the weight of her gaze.

I
thought that now I nearly had her, and yet I didn't have her at all, but sat blanching instead in my workshop. I began to bike the opposite of my normal route, but I never saw her. She works a ton, I thought. Finally, I called her and asked if she wanted to go out, I don't know, somewhere or other. Vita didn't have a lot of spare time. She was so smooth.

One day when I saw that her windows were lit and was certain she was home, I simply went back with a bottle of wine. She opened up and . . . oh, but she was beautiful.

The evening ended with us coming over to my place and looking at my things. Vita wanted to watch the video that had gotten me into the academy. We laughed together. At the video. She was impressed and astonished. She thought I was tough. And absurd. Right at the tipping point between the two, she said. We watched more of my videos. And the more we watched, the more serious Vita became.

“There's really something here,” she said. “You obviously have a special force.”

She compared me to a smoldering volcano.

“No,” she said. “You're potential energy. You're . . . you're . . . You're right beneath the surface.”

We drank red wine with flushed cheeks. Vita leaned back her head, arched her throat.

“God, it's late,” she suddenly said, standing up.

In a moment she'll turn around and come and sit down again. Then I'll put my arms around her. Then I'll draw her to my chest.

Her first steps were backward out of the garden while she held my gaze with her body. When she rammed into Launis's hedge, she turned and giggled. She left. She came again. She came again and she came.

T
he small breasts, two drops on a body of desire. There. Slap me right there, she said. I slapped, and the drops trembled, caught her fast with my hands around her throat. Her fingers gave again. Those fingers. Modeled my body without and within: Here's a hill, a ridge, a hole, she said, cylinder, triangle, and cube. A nest, a slit, a grave, a grotto, I said, piss on me, a pot. She combed my hair with sure strokes, brought my locks to general order. I grew canines. Her firm, white body. The cleft. The tightness. Eat me. I wanted to suck her tiny toes always and hear her shout in earnest that I was just as encompassing and just as insistent as the most complex work of art.

O
f all my things she liked, those that behaved like a mass in space were what she liked the best, and it turned out that she was even well acquainted with some of my work. In all the time she'd lived in Sønderhaven, she'd known that I was an artist. She mentioned a work that she immediately proceeded to connect to other artists' works, an American here, and a German there.

Vita was a sculptor because sculpture was related to the body and to philosophy, to the world and to phenomena and all that, she explained. Just like many others in her class, she'd been obsessed by the French theorists that we, who attended the academy later, became familiar with as aftermath. Vita said outright that sculpture was the only true art form. All else was derived from the sculptural. A lesser form of statement.

B
ack when my works existed, and that wasn't more than a couple of days ago, you know, there were three large papier-mâché rocks and a small one, a tent made of hide, and a turf hut you could enter. The plan was this: Four days a week settlement life would take place in the X-Room at the National Gallery of Denmark, with soapstone lamps, cooking vessels, and bone-carving. It would be like a time machine: enter the museum's elevator and then, whoosh, back to settlement life in the 1200s. A father and a mother and a child would bustle around and do what people did back then, it would be a living installation.

The soapstone lamp and the turf hut turned out great. The hut was frothed up and cut from insulation foam, and then painted gray, black, green, becoming brown turf grass. The soapstone lamp was a tin alcohol burner. Jens from the park would play the father, and one of his friends, someone I didn't know, would play the mother. Launis's youngest daughter would be the child. She'd sit and sew on something gray. The father was just returned from the catch. He would sit and carve a bone, or something resembling a bone, but that wasn't so solid. The mother would tend to the cooking. There would be the odors of leather and dried fish.

Now the whole is black and leveled. I whisper it way down where no one, not even myself, can hear: That's good. Shhh.

M
arianne Fillerup was crazy about the settlement. She'd been on a tour I'd conducted at the National Museum of Denmark back when she'd just become inspector for the National Gallery of Denmark. Fillerup followed what was moving and shaking, she said, and it was high time the National Museum showed something like this. I had an interesting and unique way of working, she thought.

I explained the piece to Vita, of course, the individual details, the whole shebang. I was ready to haul over some of the figures I'd carved out of ivory-colored wax, I thought she would like them. It was almost like sculpture.

“Haven't you gone far enough with ironic distance,” she said. “It's no joke, Justine. You're exhibiting in the X-Room. People don't buy just anything.”

That thought hadn't even occurred to me. Anyway, the point wasn't to have them buy something. What joke?