“He crawled out one of the attic windows,” Rose shouted.
She forced her way to the window and opened it.
“Torben! Come back in! Right now! You’re going to fucking fall from way up there! You’re drunk!”
The shadow that was Torben continued along the roofline until it reached a point directly above a window bay and stretched itself to full Torben height. Abruptly, it slid out and down, landing on the bay. Rose shrieked and raced through the attic to the window out of which Torben had first disappeared, flailing and kicking to get her shoes off, and was on her way out when Willum intervened.
“I’d never actually tell anybody! I’d never do that! I was just talking!” she yelled to Torben.
Torben was slumped against the bay window. People on the floors below were hanging out of their windows, some hollered that they’d call the police if it didn’t quiet down. Willum shouted back that it was all under control, just some performance art.
Two hours later Torben was back. Rose had finally persuaded him to crawl in and climb onto the sofa with her. She lay there with a beer. After announcing that he wasn’t taking responsibility for someone getting hurt, especially not while they were plastered, Willum went home. Torben sat nodding with a cup of coffee in his hand, and Rose fell asleep on the couch. The others went to bed. Ane and I had planned to sleep on the floor next to the doors facing the river, where it glistened, but Ane wanted to help Torben climb into his sleeping bag first.
The next day Torben was up first, he poured coffee into two vases. Rose was still asleep in her clothes on the couch. Ane wanted to head out immediately. She was going to do something with animals in her book and had bought herself a weekly zoo pass. Before I’d even finished brushing my teeth, she’d left, and she’d taken her sleeping bag with her. Rose woke up and called for Torben, but he was already gone. He’d taken both his sleeping bag and his backpack.
Rose popped open the last beer and lay back down.
“Fuck, he’s not too bright,” she said. “He has no idea what he’s doing when he’s drunk. One time he almost jumped from his workshop at the school.”
“I thought he was afraid of heights,” observed the tall girl who hadn’t started on her book yet.
“I have no fucking clue what his deal is,” Rose said. “But anyway, he can’t control himself for shit. Did he say where he was going?”
I packed my bag with a camera, some India ink, and a pad of paper. The only thing that came to mind when I thought of my book’s pages were bloody cunts and bloody craniums. That’s the exact project that I wanted to create. Unfortunately, my ink was way too blue. I made a mass of doodles, sheer nonsense.
That evening Willum asked how our first day in Berlin went. Rose said that Berlin was boring, and she thought she could work at home as well as here.
“So work here,” Willum said.
Rose snorted and lit a cigarette, apparently unconcerned that we’d all agreed to smoke only in the kitchen.
It got dark and still Ane wasn’t home. Rose lay on the couch with a cigarette stub hanging from the corner of her mouth. Torben wasn’t back either.
“Wake me up when he gets here,” Rose said and fell asleep.
On the water the sky sailed past in gleaming patches.
Ane finally turned up on the third day. Torben, too.
“We were in the Tiergarten,” she said.
Torben flipped through the pages that would eventually make a book.
“Show them to Justine,” Ane said.
Rose, who’d decided her book would just be an ash tray, lit a cigarette and stubbed the previous one out on a piece of paper.
Torben handed me a pile of drawings.
“Assholes,” he said.
“And eyes,” Ane added.
They were done in pen, hairy, wrinkled, protruding wreaths.
“Gross,” Rose said, standing up from the couch and leaving.
Willum flipped through the pages.
“What the hell’s wrong with her?” he said. “These are really great. Just stylized assholes.”
“And eyes,” Ane added.
She collected the sheets and tied a string around them, readying them to be glued and covered.
“Can I see what you did?” she asked.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t do anything?”
Of course I did. For instance, I wondered where the hell she might’ve gone. I’d gone to Tiergarten, and naturally there was no Ane, neither the kiosk woman nor the people standing at the entrance had seen her. It was all a load of crap. Berlin. Willum and his installation, too. And myself. I was also a load of crap.
“Those are some fat assholes,” I said, pointing to the elephant’s iris.
“We slept in a forest,” Ane said.
Torben and Ane stayed in the apartment that night. They put their sleeping pads on the floor beneath the window.
Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, an extremely drunk Rose appeared. She kicked the kitchen chairs and shouted at Torben.
“What do you want?” Ane asked. “Can’t you just leave him alone?”
“What the fuck do you know about it, little Ane? Why are you getting involved anyway?”
“Well, I know he doesn’t want to be with you.”
“He doesn’t want to be with you either, you idiot. You insane little idiot. Sweet, stupid little Ane with all her sweet little stories. If you think he wants to be with you, you’re completely fucking wrong. You don’t know shit about him, do you? No, why should you? One woman’s not enough for him, capiche? He can’t keep his dick in his pants. Not that he goes around bragging about it. At least he’s smart enough for that. And that’s a whole lot smarter than you are.”
“Yeah. Well, and you, too,” Ane said, vanishing into the attic and slamming the door.
On Friday we set out our books on the floor and went through them. In terms of melancholy, Rose’s book was the best, and Willum admitted it was good, even though he thought it’d been an arrogant way to complete the assignment. Willum was also extremely pleased with Ane and Torben’s book. You just couldn’t tell, he said, if it was an eye or an asshole staring you down.
Torben is big. His body, his mouth, all of it. He majored in graphic design with a group of guys who sought, sought, sought toward the extremes. It has to be about men, they said, and established an artist group.
Their first show featured some paintings they’d schlepped to a barracks out in Slagelse. Once there they’d laid them in a pasture so a private could drive over them with a tank.
The exhibit was held in Kolding. At the opening, they sat in the gallery around a card table playing poker, drinking whiskey, and smoking cigars. Torben got so drunk that he shit his pants. In the wee hours of the morning he traipsed around the city wrapped in a T-shirt with shit running down his legs. The rumor made it around the whole school, but Ane, of course, didn’t believe a word.
After that it was exclusively about pushing limits. At one point the group ingested everything it could get its hands on, everything that could be introduced into the human body with reasonable ease.
One guy got addicted to some particularly hard stuff, and eventually he was thrown out of the academy for putting the fancy chairs in the banquet hall up for sale on eBay. After he left, the other guys started shooting at themselves with various implements or cutting themselves. Or they had the others cut them while they taped it on video.
Ane could watch an entire self-torture video to end without blinking, and there was one episode she found especially appealing. It featured Torben sticking a nail in his hand. He did it over and over again, even after he’d made a large, bloody hole.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”
She considered switching to graphic arts, since she thought it would be fun to be a girl surrounded by that sort of guy. I asked:
“What sort of guy?”
“Unco
mpromising,” she said. “Wild.”
However, then she attended one of the department’s get-togethers and the professor didn’t so much as acknowledge her presence. There were other new students that he questioned about this and that, including their interest in graphics.
One of the other aspirants had brought along some photographs that he’d taken the liberty of hanging around the room before everyone arrived. The pictures were taken one night when, returning from the city drunk, he’d danced around his bedroom before the camera in a pair of ridiculous underpants. The guy was chubby and pale, anything but a Chippendale, and the harsh flash only made a hapless situation worse. Despite the fact that there were some really raw pictures, and much was said about loneliness, self-exposure, and sex, the professor failed to see the quality in them. The guy, who was as deft at clarifying his work as he was at being his work, couldn’t make any headway. It was unbearable, Ane thought.
At first Torben wasn’t particularly interested in Ane, who bustled around in her rather overlarge smock and talked shop. However, his indifference, which persisted even after our Berlin trip, actually attracted her. He didn’t want to tie himself down, she said, and you know, she liked that. It was only following the Christmas party during our second year that she seriously managed to pin him down.
Some girls from one of the painting departments had transformed the party’s setting into a three-dimensional work of art. Cheeses hung against a black wall like pock-marked planets. Torben got extremely drunk after bragging that he could down a flask of schnapps in less than half an hour. In the middle of an anthem he fell off the table and split his chin.
Later he tried kicking out the DJ because he thought she was playing shit music, but before he could accomplish the task, a pair of the DJ’s friends came along and threw him out instead. They dragged him out the door and down to the plaza and only let him go when they’d gotten quite far away from the party. When he made his way back to the academy, Ane was there to collect him. She found him in the courtyard and put him in a taxi and and took him back to her place. Right after that he moved in with her.
He’s wanted to pulverize her from the beginning, to move in and force her out. I’m not just imagining it. Perhaps he doesn’t even know it. But I’m certain. Eventually, it’ll become clear. He’s together with her so that in some insidious way he can squeeze her life out.
Four
Now. Vita’s towering up. She’s standing tall and white. From below, her face looks like two nostrils and a chin, and her breasts are two sacs with raspberry nipples, ripe for the plucking, they almost tumble into your hand, plop. They’re visible because her stomach is flat, her tuft of hair smooth. Vita stands directly over my head with legs spread and opens her mouth, dribbles silence.
If she could just relax a little. If she could just relax, she’d see it. Vita still has something we can share, but she tramps around my face and shoves all else aside, everything that I should reasonably be thinking about, everything that needs to be done, works that never even existed as ideas yet. Every time I think of something concrete, my thoughts stall, and there she is again. Her body. Her leg hair. She has goose bumps. She wants to be bitten on the thigh. She says: Bite hard, that’s what I want.
Topple her to the floor, screw her and her head on the floor, screw her hard, spread that flesh, woman, find that finger, rub oblivion into the juicy wound, suck, soothe.
Vita. I know what she means. No use in pretending otherwise. Take, for example, what can I say, take . . . that day at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Vita and I took part in a big exhibit there that featured art from all over Scandinavia. She’d been looking forward to the evening, the lawns, the view over the water, stemmed glasses, and distinguished words about what makes art space a community. It was very evocative and solemn.
We knew most of the guests, so there were plenty of people to talk to and plenty to talk about. Vita had a sculpture out on the lawn reminiscent of a steel top tipped over. We watched out the glass corridor and saw how people couldn’t help but stop and touch the gleaming metal. Important individuals came by, we chatted with them, had our glasses refilled, and toasted almost light-heartedly. It’d been a while since Vita had wanted to go anywhere with me, but since the exhibition was at Louisiana, and since we were both showing pieces, she thought the night might attain a certain level of class.
“It’s going good with me,” she said, and that was good.
I made a point of talking to Lars Henningsen and his wife. Henningsen had been a professor at the academy when Vita was there, and now he sat on one of the major foundations that purchased art. She’d been one of his best students, he confided in me while Vita pretended not to hear. The purchasing committee was going to come and see the exhibit again later that month, they were looking for a sculpture, preferably a large one.
“He has the lifelong grant,” Vita said after Henningsen and his wife had gone. “But I don’t think he does anything anymore. He’s almost blind.”
“Do you think he’ll buy your top?” I asked.
“Obviously,” Vita said.
“Well, couldn’t he also decide to buy my work? Does he know who I am?”
“Who?”
My contribution to the exhibit was a self-made video, a Greenlandic drum dance and some singing, five intense minutes of it. I installed the video in a white room together with three tubs of fish, and it was, for all intents and purposes, impossible to watch the whole video without feeling sick.
“Did you plan on selling the work?” Vita asked.
“I don’t care about money.”
“Then what do you want with Lars Henningsen?”
“I was just curious if he knew who I was.”
“Next time I’ll introduce you,” Vita said, no doubt certain by that point that there wouldn’t be a next time.
She was good at talking to people when it suited her, and that night it suited her. Wine flowed into our stemmed glasses and from there into us. Vita fell into conversation with a female sculptor who lived out on Malmö. They knew each other from the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Arts and talked in a way that was light rather than deep, with emphasis placed on the known and the forgotten. Well, I forgot Vita and grew ebullient. It was the wine combined with the nice weather. Vita talked to an art critic who wanted to write something about her decorations, a whole square out in front of the black monolith-shaped financial center that she was in the process of designing.
I circulated and saw that my video was impacting the senses. The evening wore on, people were leaving. By that point I’d joined a cluster of people who were all complaining about the same thing, and Vita’s brows had acquired their furrow, perhaps because she knew I had no immediate plans to leave. Then I suggested that we go.
“Are you sure you want to?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, come on,” I said and headed toward the exit.
And there stood the rest of the group. One of them, Johannes, was a wild-eyed, good-looking Swedish guy I’d talked to earlier. The group bemoaned us leaving, they wanted us to head into the city with them. Vita was like a person who’d expected to conquer a mountain, only to be confronted by yet another peak, and so she climbed into a taxi.
I sent Vita away with Johannes’s eyes burning a hole in my neck, and it didn’t take too many negotiations before we were standing in a gateway. He took me with huge, scallop-shaped hands, pressed my flesh, marked my skin, supported me with his stalk, and pumped so hard my head grated the rough wall. He came in cascades, filled me with his tenderness, made canine sounds. Afterward, his soft parts withdrew and he became gentle. The eyes, the look, the beast with the gash of a mouth and saliva beneath the chin, he made me want to howl.
“I’m not sure I completely understand all that with the fish,” Johannes said later when we were sitting at the bar. “But who gives a fuck. The film is awesome.”
“Do you want to know? Do you really want to know?” I mumbled.
“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.
When 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.
Justine Page 3
