Justine. Iben Mondrup

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 the flames. I shouted for her to come away from there, my voice was rather shrill, more so than I would’ve thought. It was the sight, she was so beautiful, like electricity. Sparks leaped off her hair and forehead as she stepped away from the flames, and stars and needles burned an image in my mind.

      Vita had a workshop in Valby, I knew, and one day I sniffed my way there. It was late on one of the afternoons that Valby’s galleries hold their openings. I found the address on a side road with pitted asphalt, and a bell next to the gate. After a while Vita emerged from a flat building. She was wearing a shirt and overalls.

      “Did you get lost?” she asked.

      “I don’t think so,” I said.

      “Which opening are you looking for?”

      “I don’t actually know,” I said and giggled.

      The little hall was tidy. Light streamed through a series of small windows set high up. There was a compressor in the middle of the floor, and some tarpaulin covered sculptures farther back.

      “Now that you’re here, you might as well see them,” Vita said and began removing the tarpaulin from one: a white cylinder like a medium-sized wading pool, about a meter or so high. The cylinder’s circular surface was bowled, and to one side of the depression was a sphere: an over-dimensional pea paused on its rolling trajectory to the plate’s bottom.

      “I’ve never seen that one before,” I said.

      “Well, it’s only been shown once.”

      “Now I see it.”

      I circled the sculpture.

      “It’s quivering,” I said.

      “That’s because the depression is cut asymmetrically, so it appears to be sliding. Let me show you the other,” she said and withdrew the tarpaulin from the other sculpture, this one light yellow.

      The bowl on this cylinder’s surface was bubbled, the surface tension of a water droplet right before it bursts.

      “I see a boob,” I said.

      “I think I’m about to finalize an agreement to place both,” she said.