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.
The 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.
Of 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.
Back 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.
Marianne 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.
<
br /> “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?
Five
Grandpa was trained as a building painter, but that didn’t interest him. Art, however, did. He and my grandmother lived in a ground-floor apartment in a building in the outskirts of Copenhagen. When the building was undergoing renovation, Grandpa finagled the basement spaces and outfitted them as a studio.
“Painting, my girl, is wisdom,” he said. “Mark my words. If the brand is good, that is. And, unfortunately, that’s not often the case.”
For Grandpa it was all about the body, about its majesty and its deterioration. That meant figure studies of men and women en masse—not to mention meat. He’d stop in the middle of the street and stare intensely at some passerby, evaluating the random person’s potential as a nude model and forming an impression of the covered body’s lines and crevices, the skin’s tactility beneath the clothes. Was it pimpled? Was it smooth? Maybe scarred?
Grandpa was productive and affiliated with an art association that had a couple of permanent exhibitions a year, and so he showed for a loyal audience in an Odense gallery.
“That’s enough for me. I don’t want any more attention than that. Why would I need all that hullabaloo?” he said.
He worked in the basement together with me. Instead of knocking on the staircase door, I called to him from the sidewalk beneath the window. We took the back way, down into the dark, and we closed the door behind us, him unpacking his brushes while I uncovered the paints on the palette. Together we said:
“Ohh, this is peace.”
Every time he needed a new color for the palette, it was my job to find it in the tube box.
“Zinc white!” he’d growl. “Carmine!”
I organized the tubes according to shades, naples, indigo. I’d browse the rainbow and find the exact reddish-blue tint for which he asked.
Sometimes he’d use me as a model. I had to sit completely still while he sketched the motif, and while he painted, a stone was I. Afterward, when I saw the finished painting, I didn’t recognize myself. My head was red and blue and pink with greenish shadows. My mouth was violet and white, and my eyes glinted yellow. Grandpa explained that that’s what the colors’ nuances looked like in the light. Nothing is what one imagines. Skin color, red or white, colors themselves don’t exist, they must be seen in context.
“Now take a look here,” he said. “Next to light green, gray looks light red. Can you see that? And next to violet it becomes yellow. Pretty unbelievable, huh?”
Colors are unstable, always ready to surrender. His face lit up when he talked about them. When he looked at me. When his gaze swung between me and the canvas, and brushes and spatula went to work.
One afternoon I came home and found Grandpa extremely excited. Before I could call to him, he’d already rushed down the stairs and stood at the door.
“We have to go to the basement right now, right now, come on, come on,” he said.
“What about Grandma?”
“Why are you always so concerned about her? I’ve taken care of her already. What did you think? That she was just sitting up there waiting?”
Down in the basement Grandpa switched on the ceiling bulb, and a couple of steps later he was at the padlock to the studio.
“Now you’ll just see what I’ve got. You won’t believe your eyes,” he said, opening the door.
A cloying scent filled the basement hall.
“One, two, three,” Grandpa said and drew a paper bag off a large pile on the work table. “What do you say to that?”
On the table was a heap of bones with flesh and tendons bared.
“It’s bones. Horse bones, my girl. Horse bones.”
Grandpa lifted a pair of the naked limbs, he rummaged around in the pile to bring them entirely to light.
“See, aren’t they wonderful. Just take a look here.”
He held out a shank.
“And I got them for a song. Down at the butcher’s, you know, the one right across from the station. It was pure luck. It was only because the guy the bones were meant for didn’t want them. His dog died, apparently. Of course, there’s dogs and then there’s dogs. It was a Great Dane. That’s a little dog-horse right there.”
I had no idea what to say. I’d never seen so many dead animals before in all my life. Grandpa grabbed me.
“Time to paint, Justine! By the devil, it’s time to go to work!”
Grandpa began his flesh-and-bone painting process. From every side and angle, with and without the meat, he painted those bones, and as time wore on, in the various stages of decomposition. The smell in the cellar transformed from a sickly odor to a stench no one but he could tolerate. The police came and kicked the door in, thinking there had been a crime. Fortunately, Grandpa was done by then. It might’ve been difficult to convince him he was disturbing the peace with his nonsense.
The paintings were there when I moved into the house two years ago. They stood in the garden shed on the shelves he’d built for them. Height, width and depth designed to fit the formats. I opened the shed and stepped into my grandfather’s mind.
There were paintings from back before I was born. My grandmother was there. She was naked. She was dressed in blue. She glinted red.
Once upon a time she was a woman with friends and occupations, my Grandpa said. It was only after my mother was born that she changed. She began speaking in tongues at the onset of labor. The birth was long and it stalled several times. Each time the contractions returned, Grandpa said, my grandmother thought the devil had come to rip her guts out. Help me, kill him, she shrieked. Help me, kill him.
Grandpa’s voice rose to a falsetto whenever he mimicked that terrible shriek.
Finally, she was so exhausted the doctors began to doubt she could have the baby, but then my mother came out, a prodigious child, blue-violet, almost five kilos.
Grandma looked pretty in the soft colors of the painting. That’s how she looked, Grandpa said.
In the first months after the birth she slipped in and out of her fantasies. Finally, they engulfed her. She grew disinterested, Grandpa said, taken by a disease that had always dwelt within her body, but that had only emerged when she became a mother. My grandmother couldn’t do it, so Grandpa was a mother to my mother. When my grandmother came home after three months in the hospital, he cared for her, too, as well as minding his own work.
Grandpa had explored the same color spectra over and over in his paintings—pink, and the way gray becomes green. I borrowed a cart and hauled the paintings to the bulk waste. The next day I retrieved them again. It was beginning to rain. They hung in the heat from the wood stove and reeked. They stood in a row along the wall, lay in a pile on the floor, and then were packed in bubble wrap with protective corners and placed in Ane’s attic. All the self-portraits Grandpa did from the torso up, the cadaver paintings, and many, many studies of a child’s skin went to the gallery in Odense on the condition that they transfer some money to me whenever anything sold.
The first time I took him to the academy was because we were going to see the school’s June exhibition. The summer day was dry and hot with plenty of sun and ease. The neighborhood around Charlottenborg, a sixteenth-century palace, and the streets behind it frothed with activity as people swept back and forth with works meant for display.
Grandpa hobbled along. On the way up the stairs leading to the studios we were bowled over by a girl who then collapsed forward onto the pavement.
“She ate a pot brownie,” her boyfriend mumbled, glancing at Grandpa.
The girl pushed herself up and stumbled over to a gate and vomited.
“No, I’m not going in there,” Grandpa said and halted.
Finally, we succeeded in forcing our way through the people crowding the
stairs. We’d nearly reached the top and stood at the entrance to a space created by tarpaulins from a surplus stock. Beneath the canopy were pillows and blankets.
“Come in, come in,” a young man called through the odor of incense. “There’s just enough room for you here.”
Ravi Shankar’s sitar thrummed from between the pillows.
“You’re not going in there,” Grandpa said, grabbing my arm.
Farther back in the large apartment, on the other side of the chill-out space, Ane stood and waved with some of the others from our group. They were drinking red. A pair of girls squeezed past us, drawing Grandpa in with them.
The painting students had divvied up the place so that each person had his own space. The paintings hung in rows along the newly primed white walls and resembled something from an expensive gallery. Grandpa wandered the spaces and occasionally halted before a canvas. And then he rubbed his thumb over the surface or scratched at the paint.
“Acrylic,” he growled and it was a curse word.
“What do they want with all that junk?” he asked when we again stood out on the street.
He was an old man, one meter and sixty with his cane and a well-worn cardigan dating from the seventies, self-patched with large stitches.
“Nothing much.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
“I’m not interested in what you meant.”
I took Grandpa down to Nyhavn and bought him a whisky, but somehow he’d become stuck in the pillow room, he simply couldn’t leave it.
“It smelled strange. Didn’t you think so, Justine? What were they doing in there? Do you think they were smoking weed?”
“How should I know? I never even went in.”
Justine Page 4
