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.
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
