Justine. Iben Mondrup
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.
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.