Authors: Kerri A.; Iben; Pierce Mondrup
Justine (10 page)
“What are you doing?” he asked. “I can't keep my fangs away. You're forcing me into this.”
He touched my cheek with the back of his hand.
“Hey now,” I said. “Are you out to destroy your wife?”
“That's pretty far out,” he said. “I tend not to do things like that. But things for me are getting a little hot.”
His hand fumbled at my throat and his breath became uneven.
”I'm ready to explode. Where are you hiding your ignition?” I asked.
“Are you out to destroy your wife?” he asked and groaned. “Should we commit double murder?”
I called Vita's name. The woman was an idea that slipped between my fingers. His hands were around my neck. His mouth was insatiable.
“You're burning, you're so burning hot,” he mumbled and struggled with his jacket. “Can I see you again?”
Vita sat at the kitchen table working on a sketch far, far away.
“During the week? Soon, at least?”
She lifted her head and looked at me, both near and distant in her thoughts.
“What do I get out of it?” I asked.
“A crime of passion,” he said.
I
told Vita that if she was meeting up with Hilde and Eva anyway, at least they could stop by an exhibit on Overgaden that I was part of.
“No, I don't think so, Justine,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “That exhibit is all about space. That's what you're all interested in, right?”
“Yes, of course, but . . . We'll see it another time.”
She said it was infuriating that the curators hadn't included any sculptors, even though that wasn't actually the case. The sculptors had built a kind of library: a social sculpture where you could exchange books. I'd placed a couple of books on the shelves myself.
She was meeting the others on Saturday. Vita turned, waved a gloved hand, and looked like someone from a farewell scene in a movie. She was running late.
Hilde's boyfriend, on the other hand, was breathlessly on time. He'd run the whole way from the bus station. He stopped at the door.
“Okay?” he said.
“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?”
“Ohâthat'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?”
V
ita, 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.
B
ack 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 wasâbut 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.”
I
t'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 workâbut then am I really an artist?
Now I think if only I had Grandpa'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 breastsâit just wouldn't work.
R
andi 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?
