“You’re the one who made that video of the woman doing the drum dance, right?” he asks.
He rummages about, not just with his hand, but with his whole arm, no, with his whole body in my space.
“I don’t think so. I’m some other.”
“Some other? How can you be some other? Other than who?”
“Than myself.”
“I’m pretty sure it was you, and . . .”
“I don’t think so.”
At this point, I’ve turned around and left, because he can’t help it, after all, he’s just that open, pure and simple. But he’s unconcerned and on my heels, I can hear him, now he’s reached the door, he collides with it, uses a hip to push it open and enters the workshop balancing two cups, “coffee,” he says. His voice is so wry and he’s asked for it now.
“Do you live out here?” he asks.
The coffee makes a thin stripe down his hand and there’s a nimbus around him. Youth, I think, and inhale, a distinctive odor, sharp and dry.
“I do, too.”
He takes a chair, places his arms on the rests, brown and hairy, and asks if he can smoke. Apparently, it doesn’t faze him when I say no; the hair surges from his armpits like crimped fur.
“Wasn’t it you in that video? But you don’t want to talk about it, right?”
Now he stands up. Is he leaving already? No. He begins to flip the paintings.
“Stop that,” I say.
Now he’s leaving. No. He’s giving me a wry look. Like he thinks he’s got me figured out. Let him think that. I can tell he assumes things with me are off-kilter.
Now he’s leaving. He draws a current of air behind, sharp and dry.
You’d almost think nothing had happened. Kluden is right where it’s always been and Kelly is behind the bar. She’s working the night shift, just like the night before.
She opens a beer as soon as I walk in, sets it down in front of me, and pronounces a name that could be mine, I recognize it in any case.
“Well now,” Per Olsvig says, “you again?”
He’s sitting at the end of the bar.
“He hasn’t gone home,” Kelly says.
“Sure I have,” Olsvig says. “I went to my fucking job.”
It’s the same conversation about paid work, which is a necessity, even if you’re an artist. In a moment he’ll tell us everything he can’t recall saying before. That’s memory-slinging for you. They land on Kluden’s linoleum floor, back in the corners and beneath the bar stools, where they stick.
“I was doing my thing at the grocery store,” Olsvig says. “See, that’s honest work with honest people. None of that pretentious piss you all go around and do.”
Olsvig drains a shot and orders another on tab. He’s so gray. No. Now he shifts slightly and the light from the lamp over the bar falls red onto his face. In a moment I’ll buy him a beer. I feel like I’ve missed him, even though he’s so crass. There’s an open place right beside him.
“Do I know you?” he asks. “Nah, I’m just ribbing you, Justine, come here and sit next to me.”
We know each other as well as the song pumping through the room: “Stairway to Heaven.” The sound is like the smoke was massive. Searing. His hooded jersey is thick with grime and old paint, but I can’t detect an odor, and my head rests comfortably on his shoulder. He sucks heavily on his cigarette, then stubs the rest into the ashtray, taps the rhythm with his finger on the counter. The door opens, we don’t see who comes in, if they know us, it’ll happen. Olsvig lights a new cigarette.
“Ahh,” he says, “what a day.”
The beer is cold and curative. Right now I need Kelly, Olsvig, and “a Tuborg Gold,” I say, “no, two!”
He kisses my forehead. Now I want his short arms around me.
“Forty-two,” Kelly says.
“Put in on my tab,” Olsvig says.
His cheeks are lightly swollen with scattered stubble. I couldn’t care less, I want to be inside his body, behind the bluster and gestures, back behind it all, away.
Somehow Per Olsvig just couldn’t help it. He graduated from the academy of arts about a year ago, and before that he was already selling his paintings. I was actually there the night it began. Olsvig owed a gallery owner some money, and instead of taking his money, the gallery owner told him he could display a couple of paintings and see whether or not they sold. Before half a day was gone, the gallery sold the first one and the second one shortly thereafter. The owner was beside himself. A mass of drinks were had at Kluden. He wanted everything in Olsvig’s studio, all that came from Olsvig’s fingers was pure gold, at least for a while. Until it stopped.
Bo left a coffee cup and a stain. Vita notices of course. She notices everything, but acts like it’s nothing. Right there, that’s where she entered. Wait, didn’t she just wander in through the wall?
“Why didn’t you use the door?” I ask.
Obviously, she’s not going to answer. She’d rather talk about something else. That’s unusual. She wants to talk about “sex . . . you know exactly what I mean,” she says. “You head to the sack as soon as you meet someone. Do you even think about anything else?”
“What do you mean by sex? He was just sweet,” I say. “I didn’t do anything. Where’s all this coming from?”
“Who isn’t sweet?” she asks. “Who isn’t sweet and lovely in your eyes? Who isn’t so unbelievably wonderful that you just can’t help ripping their clothes off? And you know exactly what I mean.”
“That’s the way people meet,” I say. “To claim otherwise is wrong. First there’s sex, the naked and the raw. And everything else comes after that. Besides, he knows he’s sexy.”
“Oh right, you’re so smart. So in touch with yourself,” she says.
“Could be. But do you really have to spit like that?”
“Hey, I thought you liked secretions.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Obviously, he knows he’s sexy,” she says. “He has you right where he wants you. As usual, you think you’re in complete control. But you don’t control anything. You’re so transparent. So is he, of course. I give it two days before you’re swapping spit.”
“Nothing happens. Sometimes it just up and happens,” I say.
“Don’t go thinking that you’re the only person capable of being attracted to someone else. Actually, we’re all capable. But that doesn’t mean that we just run around and do it with anyone. We stop ourselves before it comes to sex.”
She walks through the wall.
“That’s pretty smart,” she says, looking down at herself.
“Smart.”
Ane came all the way out here while I snoozed, right through the door, no slipping through the wall like Vita. Her timing isn’t the best, I was in the middle of a party at some other allotment society, Våren, I think it was. Bo was also there, in shorts. His legs stuck out the bottom with crinkly hair and large, well-trimmed hooves. He was confiding something and was leaning over me with his entire weight