Justine (8 page)

I
've got a camera now, it's a good place to start. I feel like I'm on such secure footing, it simply can't go wrong. Now I've just got to take the pictures. But before that: I need a tripod, then I can do it myself, do myself, timed release.

Trine Markhøj sits in her studio among tools and wood and plaster and clay in plastic sacks piled around a square podium. On the podium is a plastic-packed figure on a modeling stand. I've just knocked, but Trine doesn't look up.

“It's gone totally downhill,” she says. “It'll never, ever amount to anything.”

She leans on the figure that resembles a bowed body beneath the plastic.

“Careful!” I shout.

The small amount of pressure she's applied to the body puts it on the verge of collapse. Now it's happening, bending backward in a sluggish movement that accelerates abruptly until it topples onto the floor.

“There,” Trine Markhøj says. “That's that. What can I help you with?”

She hunts for the tripod beneath the table and behind the cabinet.

“What a good thing you showed up,” she says. “That was just the thing. The last little push. It never would've amounted to shit anyway. Just think, sometimes you can't see it yourself.”

She pulls out a wallpaper roll and a pair of fishing rods. I tell her to leave off looking, but it's no problem at all, she says, and continues.

“See, I also found my water hose.”

She tugs the end of a green hose that proceeds to unwind. Beneath the cabinet she finally finds what I came for: the camera tripod.

“If I need it, I know where to find you,” she says, and transforms to clay, brown masses fall and pile on the podium like a tower.

B
o's come. He asks if I want to go to Vega and hear some reggae, dry, sharp.

“This tripod's fucked,” I say.

I fidget with and press on Trine Markhøj's tripod, what a piece of shit. Bo grasps the tripod between his hands and unfastens the clasps one after the other, adjusts, twists a little lever with a gently rotating wrist. The base rises, shooting out of its cocoon.

“So are you coming?” he asks.

His body nears, wrestles the tripod into a relatively balanced position. Three legs and an appendage. I whack the appendage that dangles and droops.

“Stop it,” he says.

“I'm deciding,” I say.

“Don't you like reggae?”

“Did I say that?”

He leaves.

I'm left with three legs and unsteady, limp hands turning a lever.

V
ita will not, she doesn't want to, she simply will not answer the phone when she sees that it's me calling. No. Vita. Why the fuck is she being so cold? I want to call and ask why, why the hell . . . I'll think of something to ask . . . and then she doesn't answer.

Someone is knocking on the door. Ane walks in with the baby in a sling on her chest. He's sleeping.

“Torben's application has been turned down,” she says, waving away Vita's ghost with a hand.

“We were really counting on him getting that grant. They know good and well we're new parents . . . and how much the money means to us,” she says and starts crying.

The baby wakes up.

“Have you seen her?” I ask.

“Who? Who are you talking about?”

“Vita. I'm talking about Vita. Have you seen her?”

“No. But . . .”

Ane stops crying and that's good.

“Wasn't she going on vacation? Wasn't she just talking about that?” she says. “I don't know what we're going to live off of. I just don't know.”

The boy starts crying.

“I just wish something in life was dependable. I can't take this. Shit, we need something to live off of. What about when I finish up . . . we'll just have nothing, I guess? Spit out into reality with no food and no clothes.”

S
he's taken the stroller and rolled home again, home to Torben. She's left me with a dull feeling. I know she's right, and she knows it, too, even though we pretend it's nothing. It's bad enough with Torben, he deserves to get the short end, but there's an even bigger problem for Ane. Myself I don't even want to think about, just forget it. We discovered it right when we entered the academy of arts, and now the smoke's in the clothes.

At one of our very first joint critique sessions, our painting instructor told us that it was likely that just one, maybe two of us, would ever amount to something, would continue doing art. But he said that he thought we should just drop it, quit for our own sakes, that it was a mistake that we'd ever entered this arena. He didn't think it was possible for us girls to create anything truly interesting. It was always about womanhood, motherhood, or something else sweet and funny and cute, small animals with big eyes, fairytales and feelings. You're terrible concept artists, he said, and meant it.

It was a spoonful of flour in our mouths that we believed to be sugar. We sucked and sucked and thought we'd heard wrong. The instructor's eyes swept over us while we stood pressed together in a workshop stall across from the five paintings that were being critiqued. The paintings showed a woman in different stages of dissolution. Mascara ran down her cheeks. The woman held a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The painter in question had slack shoulders. But then the instructor said it wasn't necessarily her he meant, she really was very sweet. Ane sat and pressed herself into a corner. A couple of weeks later she was scheduled for a critique session with the same instructor. It was already on the calendar.

O
ne Friday after a bunch of openings we had met our painting instructor in the city. He was standing at the bar together with a couple of professors drinking highballs with ice.

“Bitches,” he called.

Me and Ane and a girl named Katrine.

“Girls, come join us for a drink.”

The first professor downed his drink and had trouble walking away. Our instructor stared at us and called for the bartender to hurry and bring three double Havana Clubs.

“You're all three beautiful as goddesses,” he said. “Come on, girls, come, come, come.”

He hustled us between himself and the remaining professor, who followed his colleague's example, packed up, and left.

“Hey, girls. It's just us now,” the painting instructor grinned, guzzling his highball and ordering another.

Katrine left on the excuse she was going to the bathroom.

“Well now,” said the instructor. “Ane. When are you going to show me what you can do?”

Ane blushed, but the instructor drew her closer and kissed her hair.

“Fuck me, you're so hot,” he said.

I kicked him in the shin. He jerked back, still with Ane under his arm. His drink splashed over her and down my arm when my boot struck, and he stiffened. Ane twisted free and left.

“Hey,” he said. “That wasn't what I meant.”

He set his glass down.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He looked completely off. I thought he was about to start swinging or shouting.

“You're welcome to see my things,” I said.

“I don't know anything about videos,” he said.

“How can someone know nothing about videos?” I asked.

“I don't like watching them,” he said.

“What are you drinking?”

“Rum.”

“Two rums,” I told the bartender. “I also do things other than videos.”

“Talk to Ole Willum,” the instructor said. “That's who you should talk to.”

And he downed his drink and left.

R
ikke's standing in front of the gate, Rikke with the soft arms and big hair, the person who's so preoccupied with herself and her career and others, including me. As soon as she sees me, she shouts that she heard about the fire from Per Olsvig. I don't remember saying anything to him about it, but yes, I did.

Rikke, whom I know from Juanna Gomez's guest instructor days, is someone I'd really like to avoid, just like that, but I'm sucked in her direction. Much of what I decide gets nullified and now, against my will, I'm on my way over to talk to her.

“It's totally surreal that your house should just burn like that when you think back to your experience with Juanna,” Rikke says. “If it weren't for the fact that it was so long ago, someone might almost think it was a piece you'd set up. Did you film it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the fire?”

“My camera burned along with everything else. And my computer.”

“But what about that exhibition you're having? Isn't that just around the corner? What are you showing?”

“Paintings, I think.”

“Okay? Crazy. Is it anything I can see?”

“Sometime or other.”

“We're just in the process of researching an exhibition, and I was thinking . . .”

I'd like to set her hair on fire.

J
uanna is a Mexican artist our professor, Gretha Müller, knows. She works with psychoanalysis in her works, and with hypnosis. The first thing she did when she came to the academy was to lie us down in a circle. Rikke, who never misses an opportunity, and who always participates in the good exhibitions, and who generally gets a lot of things handed to her, whispered that a number of places ached within. One of the other girls admitted that she'd consider murdering a certain person if it weren't for the fact you'd get punished. There was also someone who thought he was a vampire. He'd seen an a video online and now he knew there were others who, like himself, longed to taste a woman's blood.

Juanna had learned hypnosis from a relative and she thought it was important that each of us try it out. Rikke was anxious to see me enter a trance. There was no reason not to do it. I wasn't afraid, neither of the trance nor of Rikke.

“Stay calm,” said Juanna. “Most people don't even realize they're hypnotized. That means there's nothing bizarre or mystical about it.”

Juanna's snake eyes stared into mine. She said: “You're completely relaxed. That's right, good, very, very good.”

My neck hurt, I wasn't relaxing at all. My eyelids fluttered, danced, wouldn't stay shut, and I itched everywhere, behind my knee, beneath my foot.

“Now you're completely relaxed, yes, completely relaxed, that's it,” Juanna said, “just close your eyes.”

“I can't keep them closed,” I said, “because then they can't see.”

“But you're already seeing. Now you're seeing. Just let your eyes see whatever they want to now.”

I rubbed my eyelashes as they closed softly over my eyeballs, and suddenly I saw them: flames, and a woman in their midst with sparks leaping from her forehead.

“Tell me what you see,” said Juanna. “You can tell me.”

“But you're burning,” I shouted.

I opened my eyes and saw Rikke burning, she still smelled of grease and flesh.

Rikke thought it was a strong vision, strong and violent, and she was curious to discover what lay beneath it.

“You should've stayed there,” she said. “You were on the verge of something really important, I think.

She wanted me to tell her about it, but I said that since I was no longer in a trance it was pointless.

“That doesn't matter,” she said. “We can still analyze it.”

During the last two days of Juanna's visit, Rikke talked a lot about the fire. For some reason she was obsessed by it, she was eager to see me transform it into a work, and she would make sure the work found its way into an exhibition. Juanna liked the idea, and I thought I'd try to make something out of it. So one afternoon during the vacation I set one of the school's basement spaces on fire and then quenched the flames. Where the flames had consumed the paint, the walls were black and gray, and a small window looking onto the street had cracked in the heat.

Rikke came to see my work. Her face was expectation become disbelief. Then she caught sight of Ane's drawings, forgot the fire and asked Ane if she'd considered of showing them, they were really great, she thought. Ane said it was certainly possible, but where? I stood at a fire site and observed Rikke standing there, consuming Ane and Ane's drawings.