“If it’s not, it doesn’t matter,” I said.
“No, there’s no problem. You look great.”
“I’m not interested, I think.”
“Is that why you’ve put on the armor?”
“You’re calling my skin an armor?”
“Can I touch you?”
“You can hold me,” I said and turned.
Hilde’s boyfriend, Finn was his name, took a couple steps back.
“I . . .”
“Touch my ass,” I said.
“But you’re all shiny.”
“It’s just grease.”
“Why did you smear it on your ass?”
“Are you going to or not?”
“Hell yes, I will. I definitely will.”
“Then touch me.”
He reached his hand out and touched me with a finger or two, maybe three.
“Slap me,” I said.
“Like this?”
“Yes. Feel how it stings your fingers? That’s the oil.”
“Or this?”
“Oh—that’s good.”
“Want more? Like this?”
I turned around. He was standing very close with eyes no longer brown but purple. His upper lip had curled, revealing his teeth.
“Come here, you . . .” he said.
“Dog.”
“Can I take you from behind?”
“I’m glad you asked. Won’t you ask nicely, though?”
“Pretty please?”
“Use your teeth.”
“Here.”
“Where it’s soft, yeah. You like that?”
Vita, you’re beautiful up there, beautiful as a twinkling star that falls and drifts, beautiful when you make me visible. You encircle my waist and crush my breasts. You say:
“We’re an odd synthesis. Two interlocking pieces.”
Could be it’s the part about interlocking that confuses me. I also think we’re two pieces. We’re a whole puzzle that’s been cast into the air and caught in the box.
“The energy that surrounds you penetrates everything,” you say.
You like observing me from a distance. You. The bitch. Vita. Intimacy’s epicenter. Lying there fiddling with your earlobe and following the drooping arch of your breasts with a finger. You drift silently and gently on the soft wind from me that blows and blows, almost imperceptibly, I’m the wind in your sail. You’ve assumed a different tone, a different color, a different form. Lying there fiddling with your earlobe. Watching you roll onto your side and wake. One gliding motion and you’re gone from sight.
Nine
Back when Grandpa was, he worked steadily in the house, back and forth between the armchair and the canvas. He hardly looked up when I came in, but his paintbrush made an elaborate arc.
“Have I told you about value scales?” he asked, blinking at me.
Of course he had, and he’d also told me about highlights and complementary colors, red changing to purple and so forth.
“You can use it in your own work sometime, you know,” he said, placing a purple simultaneous contrast near the yellow.
I sat down and opened my computer. Grandpa worked his spatula around the painting with a squelching sound. Then he evidently changed his mind and went out into the yard and stood there looking around.
“Dum-da-dum-da-dej, rains a-coming,” he said.
“It’s clearing up,” I said.
“It’s going to rain, my child. It’s going to rain.”
Grandpa came in again and put some wood on the stove, one, two, three pieces and some kindling.
“I’m your child,” I said.
The old man with the paint-splattered clothes stopped. He turned and looked at me.
“You are my child,” he said. “No, you’re not. I’ve never had a child like you. Like hell I have.”
Grandpa returned to the easel and found his spatula.
“Your mother,” he said, “she’s my child. No, poppycock. She’s no longer a child. Even if one could say she acts that way. But damn it, she’s not anymore. Or what do I know. I’ve got no idea how she acts where she’s at now. How would I know that? Your mother is my child. No, there I go saying it again. She was my child. That’s what I meant to say. Was. She was nothing like you, my girl. Of course, I just said my girl, but you know what I mean. Don’t you? Yes, sure you do. She was a sweet girl. She was a very, very sweet girl. A little sugar. You should’ve heard her voice. Crisp as a tiny bell. And she could say the sweetest things. She called me papa. She sure did. Who would’ve known what was hiding inside? It was nothing on the surface, that’s for sure. As captivating as she was—but her temper, let me tell you. She had a terrible temper that surfaced from time to time. Yes, there certainly was a difference between what was on the inside and what was on the outside. That we learned. Not immediately. No, it became apparent with time. Once you made her mad, though, and that certainly happened, you couldn’t make it right again. She could stomp around for days on end. Yes, indeed. You yourself know how it was. That was more than just a couple of days, though. That was several years. More than a few years went by. But when she was small, it wasn’t so bad. Even if it was bad enough. One time I got her a bag of sunflower seeds. I don’t remember where I got them from, but I had them. They made her so happy. She shelled and shelled and ate as many of them as she could. The rest she planted in the garden. Right over there. Next to the spot where the shed used to be. Yes, right there. She’d be a gardener, that’s what the little thing said. She was so diligent and watered and watered. Every day she watered them. And one day, luckily, the seeds began to sprout. Otherwise, she would’ve been so disappointed. And they grew. Your mother was so proud. She was a soldier, that child. You can almost picture her there, how she sat watching over those little seedlings. Just think, some hungry snail might come by. Ah, me. After a while, she had a whole little forest growing there. Unfortunately, it didn’t end so well. You probably don’t know about it. In any case, I haven’t told you. Probably not your father either. Or has he? He doesn’t understand shit about what happened, the ignorant son of a bitch, and by God, he never has. He didn’t give a damn about it, he didn’t give a damn about it at all. The thing with the flowers ended in a terrible uproar. Yes, not with your mother, but with your grandmother. Oh, I’d nearly forgotten it. The evening your grandmother went out into the garden. For some reason or other, she went into your mother’s flowerbed. And you know, there they stood. Thirty big sunflowers with their yellow heads. And she got the crazy idea that the devil himself had sent his eyes growing out of the ground to spy on her. She moaned and shrieked. What a spectacle she made. I couldn’t calm her down again. She just couldn’t let go of that insane idea. I was forced to cut down the whole mess and burn them before she’d simmer down again. You can imagine how your mother took it. Not well. Not well. She was so unhappy. First she threw a fit. Then she didn’t speak a word for several weeks.”
Grandpa settled into the armchair and leaned his head back.
“Ah, me,” he said.
“Is it also true what my dad said, about how she thought there were worms in my mother’s hair?”
“Oh yeah, that story. No, she didn’t have it easy. It was never good again. But you know that for yourself.”
“I do?”
“She wouldn’t come home again,” he said. “She simply refused to let me help her.”
“I don’t think you could’ve helped her, Grandpa.”
“A little more than I did, anyway, I could’ve done. But she wouldn’t have it.”
“No, she wouldn’t.”
“And now it’s too late.”
“Yes.”
“My sweet child.”
It’s strange and a law of sorts that one can’t go back to what was. Now that I’ve sent it all packing, there’s just empty space and a bunch of indeterminate whatever.
I’m an artist without a work—but then am I really an artist?
Now I think if only I had Gran
dpa’s painting to turn to . . . I think: If only I were Grandpa, or some other painter, safely anchored in the notion that everything can be formulated in painted reality. Now I’m wondering what I actually know about painting, or about painters, for that matter? And now something is knocking on memory’s door, and in waltzes the memory of Grandpa’s paintbrushes and pallet, and the paintings I painted, and Ane glancing up from the easel with absent eyes, completely lost in her painted world. Present there is also Ane’s friend, Lord preserve us, Randi, with her breasts, huge, yes, enormous, yes, vulgar, but in no way sensual. Could it be that I also want to be Randi? It’s something of a thought experiment, everything would be so easy, or so I think, but what do I know about Randi and what it’s like to be her? Would it make things easier? Simpler? Randi might potentially be a good object, she might replace me for a time, but I’d never be like her, so no, it’s doomed to failure. Not because of her breasts—it just wouldn’t work.
Randi works for a private hospital north of Copenhagen. Ane has known her since they were kids in Jutland, where the sun always shone and the world was a breeze.
“What’s great is that it’s actually wonderful having a friend who’s not an artist,” Ane said and invited both of us to her place one Friday evening.
She was a tall, attractive girl, Randi, with a huge chest and narrow waist. She found my name amusing.
“Depends on how you look at it,” I said.
At the table we all sat across from each other. Randi said that she was an anesthetic nurse at Højen.
“They do all sorts of operations,” Ane said. “Breasts, liposuction, face lifts, lips and . . .”
“So do tons of women come to you for cunt jobs to make them look nice?” I asked.
“Tons and tons. Some do come, yes,” said Randi, “and we call it a vagina.”
“I’m sure I’d be willing to have something done if my body changes too much after I’ve given birth,” Ane said.
Her eyes told me to behave.
“Plenty of women do that,” said Randi. “We just helped a girl whose baby would only nurse at one breast. Not like that’s big deal. But it meant that when she stopped nursing, you know, one breast was a lot longer than the other. As you can imagine, she wasn’t too happy with that. In any case, I wouldn’t be. But she came to us and got her breasts done. And now you can’t tell the difference between them.”
“Wow, that was lucky,” I said.
“If I ever needed it, I’m sure they’ve gotten so good at breast jobs that you can’t even tell,” Ane said.
“Absolutely,” Randi said. “We’re really good at it now. But we’re always getting better and better.”
“The best is yet to come,” I said.
But then Randi said that she herself had had a boob job. There was nothing wrong with what she’d had before, she just wanted something bigger. Randi pulled up her tight blouse to reveal a white-lace bra with huge cups that she opened with a twist at the back, and out popped two perfectly round breasts. I stared into the red eyes of her nipples.
“Where did they insert them?” Ane asked, leaning forward.
“Right here under the areola,” Randi said and pointed at the underside.
“And there’s no mark?” Ane asked.
“No, huh? You can touch it if you like,” Randi said.
Ane pressed a finger to one arch. The breast gave elastically.
“It feels totally real?” Ane said.
We were done eating, and I stared at Randi’s breasts beneath her blouse, two springy domes. Randi crossed her arms over her chest and pressed them together. Ane changed the candles in the sticks. Randi and her breasts leaned back in the chair. Ane pulled up her jacket to reveal breasts that were pale and distended and full of mammary glands. Randi lay down on the couch. Ane talked. Randi’s breasts poked up like two domes in the air. If she stood on her head with those breasts, then what?
But then it was time for Randi to go, because the next day she had the morning shift. In the entryway everyone’s breasts got squeezed together, and suddenly my hands reached out and stroked up Randi’s body to reach the domes from below. They were firm, they were yielding, they were heavy, they were warm. The face over the breasts became white, white turning red. Then Randi ripped her breasts from my hands and said goodbye and good night.
“Why should you stand there groping her breasts?” Ane asked after the door had been slammed. “You think they’re disgusting, right.”
“They were enormous,” I said. “They were simply enormous. They were pure art.”
Not too long after the dinner with Randi, Ane returned giddy from a weekend trip to London. They’d been traveling together, they’d visited boutiques and cafes, “and Randi has got us an exhibit at her clinic’s art society,” she said.
It had been a long time since Ane had exhibited anything, and she thought it might be fun to do a small show with some drawings or paintings at Randi’s workplace.
“It’s an art society, Ane,” I said.
“Yeah, so what?” she asked.
“So it’s not serious, that’s all.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said Ane. “But if we get to paint some paintings and we make a little money in the process, who cares?”
“I’m not a painter.”
“So? You’ll paint anyway. You probably learned loads of stuff from your grandfather.”
“But has Randi seen any of your paintings?”
“No.”
“Then how does she know that they’d like to hang them?”
“Come on, Justine, let’s just do it for shits and grins. Let’s make some money for once?” Ane said.
I said: “Yes. Yes, let’s do it. Let’s have some fun.” I’d also like to be close to Grandpa, after all. Or what was left of him.
Around the same time, Vita was working on a monument to a dead physicist. Her idea was to give his groundbreaking theories three dimensional form, so they’d unfold and intertwine into a single mirror-smooth object. In addition to that project she’d received another commission, a decoration for the Holmen Operahuset.
“How great that we’re both so busy,” she said. “Shouldn’t you figure out what you’re doing for your X-Room exhibition soon?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I have all the time I’ll need.”
Vita continued working on her drawing; she looked like cells in a state of controlled reproduction.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, “shouldn’t you just keep working with that sculptural idea? You have such a refined spatial sense. I still kick myself for not buying your ice floes that time. But I just didn’t know where I was going to put them.”
“I didn’t have the space either. That’s why I gave them away.”
“So you’ve said.”
“They look good where they’re at now.”
“You could just give it a try, you know,” she said. “You could always go back to what you usually do after that. No one is saying you have to do sculpture all the time.”
“I’d rather do this,” I said. “I have an idea for something I want to try out.”
Suddenly, I was extremely grateful to Ane for coming with Randi’s offer.
We decided we’d paint together out in the garden and not spend a krone on supplies. We still had Grandpa’s big box of colors, after all. Some of the tubes were dried out, but most were usable as they lay in rainbow array with Grandpa’s large fingerprints on the lids and labels. We also found his old pallet hiding behind a bookcase. Ane used a glass scraper to get the paint off. She was wearing one of the smocks that could still close around her belly. As she sweated the paint flew like bits of lint around her.
We painted and painted. Ane painted still lifes and the organisms leaped from the canvas. She found her themes in the garden. Even though it was only approaching spring with snowdrops and winter aconite, everything in Ane’s paintings overgrew itself. Apple trees blossomed, stamens became long tongues and petals swelled
to sails.
I sketched my themes with Grandpa’s charcoals. The sketch, Grandpa used to say, the sketch is not just a prelude, it’s the actual skeleton, supple and full of energy and immediacy. What you cover it with is ooze, and it’s a helluva job to transform that ooze into flesh in order to get down to the skeleton again.
I saw the painting’s skeleton there before me and prepared the pallet with zinc white and ocher and umber. The base was a composition of cold and warm tones, just as I’d been taught. Then came the shadows and highlights and layer after layer of nuances. And then came the longdrawn decomposition, the honing and the tightening.
Vita stopped by and looked over our shoulders, she chatted and was content. Ane suggested that she join the exhibit with some small sized objects, something that would fit the architecture. Vita thought that sounded exciting. Randi also came by. She thought Ane’s paintings were insanely beautiful, she said, and she was looking forward to showing them to the other people at work.
Ane’s paintings would hang first and then mine. At the opening Ane sold every single one. It was a Friday afternoon just before closing, the art society’s president gave a speech and toasted Ane for her unbelievably animate pictures. Ane thanked him. She had on a light purple dress and red Mao shoes with a big colorful scarf wrapped around her hair. With her little belly, she resembled one of her own paintings. Drinks and praise circulated, and then began the sale of the paintings. Right off the president reserved three paintings for himself, and the rest went quickly. Red dots appeared, soon the twenty small paintings’ future pathways out into the world were framed.
The following month it was my turn to hang paintings, but now I was in the middle of something else and had forgotten that I was Grandpa the Painter. My house and garden had been transformed into a working studio where the settlement for the X-Room was taking shape.
Ane was upset. She didn’t know how she was going to tell to Randi that I didn’t want to exhibit after all. I didn’t know how I should explain to Ane that I’d just wanted to be Grandpa, and that I felt I’d succeeded for a small instant, and that that was enough in itself; I never wanted to be something other or different than the me I now once was. Ane was upset that she was the reason that the clinic’s walls would remain empty. I suggested that she should keep her own paintings on display, but she didn’t want to. So I went ahead and hung the pictures.
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