‘Isn’t that some kind of inverted snobbery?’ I said.
‘Now you’re being rude,’ he said. ‘I know you mean well, though. You’re trying to figure out who I am, aren’t you?’
I nodded. He chinked our glasses.
‘You won’t be able to, Vallin. I’ll never be whole, but I am a very strong half-person. Is that good enough for you?’
We emptied our glasses and ordered two more suits.
‘Let’s talk about Diana,’ he said. ‘Such an intensely beautiful and divinely distracted woman.’
The latest American neurological research explains that the brain has three regions for love.
The first is primordial and is all about sex and ensuring the survival of the species: fuck her, fuck him. But in prehistoric times, people lived in small clans, and inbreeding became a serious problem.
Therefore the brain developed a new region and invented attraction, a state transmitted by dopamine, a hormone that activates the brain’s reward centre to release a sense of invincibility.
A male member of the clan might see a female on the other side of the river, and attraction (or dopamine) made him capable of swimming across to the other bank, fighting off other males and mating with the female from the other clan, thus transcending the cycle of inbreeding, and conceiving offspring with the best possible genetic make-up. Clans mingled and produced healthy children.
With evolution the human brain increased in size, and in order to contain it our heads grew bigger. Unhelpfully bigger, as it happens. Whereas nearly all mammalian young are viable from day one, human babies are capable of looking after themselves only from the age of three, and since the skull of a three-year-old would be too big for women to give birth to, children had to be let out early, so the brain needed something new to make the male hang around until the child was strong enough to stand on its own two feet. Thus evolved the third region.
This was devoted to more long-term association, what we call relationships, and for these, oxytocin is essential. Oxytocin is a hormone that stimulates our desire to attach ourselves to others, for which reason it is also often referred to as the bonding hormone. The greatest concentration of oxytocin is found between the newborn child and the breastfeeding mother and serves to bond them inseparably together. When we hug another person, our levels of oxytocin, and thereby our desire to bond, are significantly increased during the hour that follows.
If a couple stops touching, their oxytocin will plummet, and with it their desire to bond.
Couples who stay together are either faithful to convention and willing to disregard their own individual wants and needs, and thereby, I suppose, each other’s, or else they are good at producing oxytocin, which means they enjoy more frequent physical contact.
If a hug equals more oxycotin for an hour, I calculate that a shag must be good for at least twenty-four hours.
The fact that many couples do not desire physical contact with each other is attributed mainly to poor communication. To maintain positive communication, for each negative exchange you must have four good ones. If that balance tips, physical contact will be affected and with it the desire to bond. So staying together more than four years requires a concerted effort.
Or stimulation from without.
So the brain has three regions for love, and it is a remarkable and somewhat under-investigated fact that these three regions can function simultaneously and independently of one another. Basically, you can want to fuck one person while being in love with a second and more profoundly emotionally attached to a third.
The brain is able to handle love more dynamically than we let ourselves think, and the fact that we do not exploit the opportunities presented to us may be ascribed to culturally accepted rules and norms of behaviour that serve to generate stagnation, unhappiness and broken relationships rather than happiness, desire and new energy.
COPENHAGEN, JUNE 2008
The right cause had never really come along for me, though there had been plenty on offer: peace marches, No to this, that or the other, solidarity with peoples and places you had never heard of. The protest generation of the sixties had been enriched by a wealth of causes they could unite against or in favour of, and most of these had been relatively easy to relate to and win. I have always envied them for having been able to get together and break down the rigid structures of the fifties, for having had something they felt they could fight for.
They held meetings and discussed weighty issues. We held dinner parties.
So it came as a surprise to me that I suddenly had a cause of my own: my struggle against coupledom was directed at something concrete. I wanted to tear something down that didn’t work, and what little I had revealed to my circle of friends, by definition radically minded, free-thinking people one and all, indicated to me that resistance would be fierce. But I was so certain there was a wealth of happiness to be had if my argument prevailed that I was ready to do whatever it took to win a new set of terms to live by.
The final spur to my resolve came at a Tuesday-night dinner at Helene and Tue Nissen’s.
Being a boss did not suit Helene at all, and now she was a boss all the time. When I first met her she wore hoodies and jeans, now it was all knee-length skirts, midweek blouses in drab colours and shoes with leather soles. The zealous sound they made when she came striding across the parquet flooring was a fairly precise auditory encapsulation of her state of mind. Tue tried, more or less intentionally, to create an equilibrium by being in no hurry to do anything whatsoever. On the face of it he looked serene, which he wasn’t. His enormous royalty cheques provided the foundation of a life without worry, but the brash and enterprising man Helene had fallen in love with was no longer in the building. The two people who less than two years before had cast all decency to the wind and fucked themselves silly under my nose were quite removed from the couple who now exchanged an arid kiss in the doorway.
I had got into a bad habit of skipping our Tuesday-night dinners, but for Charlie’s sake, and because I at least in theory applauded the idea, I had dragged myself over there.
Helene did roast chicken with new potatoes. The organic fowl was near-atomised and the potatoes boiled to sludge.
‘How’s the writing coming along?’ she asked.
‘I’ve done fifty pages,’ I said.
‘Send them to Bernhard, Mikkel.’
‘I remember the feeling of writing something important,’ said Tue. ‘But lounging around with a glass of wine in your hand isn’t bad either.’
Helene stood up, pushing her chair back with such force it nearly toppled over. She went over and stuck her head in the American-sized fridge.
‘Didn’t we have some cucumber salad?’
‘You used it in that Thai dish the other day,’ said Tue.
‘No, I bought a new jar at Meyers Deli. You didn’t take it anywhere, did you?’
‘Are you asking me if I took it with me to get my hair cut?’
She rummaged around, placing items from the fridge on to the counter and taking the opportunity to bin stuff that was past its sell-by date: pasteurised egg yolks for the mayonnaise that never got made, an unopened organic calf-liver pâté, a jar of vindaloo paste from a grocer’s in Vesterbro. But the cucumber salad from Meyers Deli had vanished without a trace and in the meantime her dinner had gone cold.
I put Charlie to bed and Tue got the table ready with coffee, Armagnac and Rød Ravnsborg.
‘Clara says you and Diana still aren’t a couple,’ said Helene. I was beginning to tire of it coming up all the time.
‘Does that mean you’re allowed to go to bed with others?’ said Tue.
‘Whatever we want,’ I said.
‘Sounds ambitious,’ he said, gazing into his beer.
‘You can do anything when you’re in love,’ said Helene.
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ said Tue.
‘Does she want children?’ said Helene.
‘She can’t,’ said Tue. ‘She�
�s carving a big career for herself. It doesn’t go with children.’
‘I’m carving a career too,’ said Helene.
Show me a single couple who don’t sound like a rubbish theatre piece.
A muffled bass was pumping away somewhere and I couldn’t sleep.
For a while I’d had the feeling my book was more than just a love story from the eighties, and now it was clear to me. The story of Signe and Søren was the demise of a dream, the very symbol of coupledom’s legitimacy having come to an end. But the book was going to be about more than that. It would encapsulate my life and thoughts. It would be a manifesto.
Two hundred and thirty-five years before, Goethe and the young Werther infused passion into coupledom: romantic love, the notion of forever being complemented by another.
Our brains were designed to separate sex, attraction and deeper interdependence, and yet we made do with the monogamous relationship and all it occasioned in the way of jealousy, latent dissatisfaction and infidelity. The fear of losing each other kept us together, rather than the desire to give.
This wasn’t about me wanting to satisfy some superficial desire to surf around for instant satisfaction. What I wanted was limitless love and sublime trust. We had to allow each other to do whatever we wanted.
Love becomes greater the more we share it.
We were going to rise up. We were going to fly together.
I was shaking. I sat down at the computer and wrote:
Goodbye coupledom, thanks for nothing.
Stig Nissen was in a dreadful Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt and was trying to high-five the photographer, who rolled his eyes behind Stig’s back.
The shoot took place in a rear building off Sct. Gertrudsstræde: big studio, original Italian coffee maker, expensive clothes in brand carrier bags dumped in a corner, lamps and cables, catering crew from Grill Bar on Ny Østergade.
‘Once the girls have got some slap on we’re pretty much ready to go,’ said the photographer. The music was Fleetwood Mac.
Diana’s make-up was dramatic, Lisa was sober and her hair had been crimped.
Mille had brought her own entourage of minions, these numbering a stylist, a make-up artist, a hairdresser and a couple of assistants. Her hair was done up in waves like Lauren Bacall. She snapped an order at Nikolaj Krogh, air-kissed Stig Nissen, and delivered a jaunty comment to the photographer.
Everyone else she brazenly ignored. Stig called everyone to attention.
‘This here, people, is fashion history. Here we have the team that’s going to make Dusk Denmark’s biggest high-street fashion brand since Margit and Erik ran Studio 54. Rock ’n’ roll!’
‘Right,’ said the photographer, indicating where he wanted us, in front of a white canvas backdrop.
The first thing I noticed was how plump Mille had become. She looked like she’d been stuffing herself with ladlefuls of mayonnaise while confined to bed. Her ample cheeks had spread under her eyes, reducing them to small slits and making her look like a self-important pig.
‘Let’s have some bubbly,’ said Stig Nissen.
Black-clad waiters handed out champagne glasses and filled them up.
‘Where are the clothes?’ said Mille.
‘The collection samples have been delayed,’ said Stig Nissen.
‘So what do we do?’
‘We think outside the box,’ said Stig Nissen. ‘Exploit the challenge actively. Before Dusk there was nothing. Do you follow me?’
‘Not really,’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘We’re doing it in the buff!’ said Stig Nissen.
‘Is this a joke?’ said Mille.
‘I’ll respect anyone who’s not up to it,’ said Stig Nissen.
Mille muttered some obscenity to Nikolaj Krogh and stomped off with her entourage. Nikolaj Krogh had been mountain-biking all winter and had nothing to hide, and Lisa had already derobed.
‘Let’s have Diana in front,’ said Stig.
‘And if you, Nikolaj, would like to stand behind her and cover her boobs. Do you remember Janet Jackson?’
Nikolaj Krogh placed his hands over Diana’s soft breasts.
‘Lisa, you cover Diana’s fanny with one hand.’
‘We’re flying,’ said the photographer.
‘This is going to be bloody brilliant,’ said Stig Nissen. ‘Lezzers are the new black.’
Afterwards, we sat and had some food in little clusters on the floor, and it was striking how much Nikolaj and Lisa had to talk about and how well they suited each other.
‘Have you got any plans for the summer?’ said Nikolaj Krogh.
‘I’m writing and Diana’s drawing,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you come up to our summer house at Nordhusvej and set up an artists’ camp?’
Diana did a little jig in the gravel outside the Grøften restaurant in the Tivoli Gardens. In her jacket pocket were two hundred and thirty thousand kroner. We had been to Bindesbøll’s and bought Armani, we had been to Christiania and bought spliffs, we had eaten foie gras and oysters at Alsace, fucked each other against a tree and laughed our heads off by the lake in the Østre Anlæg park.
We yapped like little Pekinese lapdogs when Jan came striding up in an African smock and a wide-brimmed hat.
‘I’ve been at the gallery for hours drinking white wine with the most gorgeous advertising man. He bought a big canvas and wants to make me house artist for his agency.’
We ordered large, jubilant draught beers, two substantial pieces of smørrebrød, each with fjord shrimps, and a bottle of Rød Aalborg aquavit, and I was just getting into my stride about Grøften being Denmark’s original answer to the great Parisian brasseries, when I noticed Rie Becker, and if it hadn’t been for her looking me up and down as though she were assessing me, I might not have bothered.
The perceptive, pigtailed MA in communication studies had mutated into a platinum-blonde glam bitch with garish tattoos and a leather waistcoat, and it was a mistake to wave to her and then disorienting to be suddenly exchanging cheek kisses, but the biggest surprise was that Jan invited her to join us and made room at the table.
‘It must be so boring writing about art, surely?’ he said.
It dawned on me that Rie Becker had crossed over, which explained why she was so obsequious to Diana.
Rie Becker possessed little more than the average gallery-goer’s knowledge about art when her newspaper’s powers-that-be decided to make the modern art scene a focus area and sent their star columnist off into the field. She worked sixty hours a week, she told us, approaching the art world from a sociological and business-oriented perspective rather than, as tradition prescribed, rewording gallery press releases or penning humble lines about this or another artist’s relationship to birch trees.
Jan kept her going with questions, and she found it increasingly hard to conceal her smugness and had little issue at all with the sound of her own voice.
‘It’s a disaster for the Danish art scene that all of a sudden any old binman can afford to have art hanging on his walls,’ she said, and not because anyone had asked her to have an opinion about it.
‘Aren’t binmen allowed to buy art?’ I said.
‘Certainly, but unqualified purchasers create stagnation, and artists submit to the temptation of reproducing themselves. There’s prestige in owning a Diana Kiss. Aren’t you tempted to give the binman what he wants, Diana?’
‘Do you want a Rød Aalborg?’ said Diana.
‘Are your next works going to be tapestries too?’ said Rie Becker.
‘Down your neck,’ said Diana.
‘Did you go to the Christmas market at the Academy?’ Rie Becker went on. ‘The first-year students were selling kids’ drawings for twenty thousand. Join the dots! If anyone’s got any ambition at all besides peeing their pants to keep warm, they’d do well to get out and go somewhere else. Why aren’t you in Berlin, Diana?’
‘I’m moving there now,’ said Jan.
‘Are you an artist too?’
‘Let’s all go back and have champagne on the roof,’ said Jan.
Rie Becker had an opinion about everything along the way: Latvian prostitutes, children’s prams, energy drinks, the restoration of rear courtyards, Friday nights and eventually Vesterbro.
‘It’s turned into Jutland. I got out by the skin of my teeth before it all went Buena Vista Social Club.’
Diana made sure to lag behind.
‘I’ve got to deliver the drawings in four days,’ she said.
‘Don’t listen to her,’ I said.
‘It’s more me, really.’
Jan was already busy sorting out his canvases in the studio and had installed Rie Becker on the rooftop terrace, where to my boundless annoyance she sat back to front on her chair with a spliff in her hand and a glass of the Egly-Ouriet Grand Cru Jan said he was never going to open.
‘Right, vernissage!’ he called out.
Rie Becker sidled in with a New Yorker smile on her face, and Jan twirled his fringe in terror. She stepped up close to a painting to study a detail, took a blast of her spliff and spoke as smoke curled about her mouth.
‘This is really good, Jan.’
‘Thanks!’ he said, trying to control his voice.
‘Technically, it’s very good indeed.’
‘But?’ said Jan.
‘But you’re out of sync.’
‘You mean it reminds you of nothing you’ve ever seen before?’ he said.
‘It reminds me of Francis Bacon,’ she said.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Jan.
Rie Becker stared obliquely into the air above in order to find her words.
‘You hear a good joke and want to pass it on, but halfway through you realise you’ve forgotten the punchline. Does that make sense?’
She turned to Diana, a little pirouette.
‘I’d like to see what you’re up to at the moment, Diana.’
‘I can’t oblige, I’m afraid,’ said Diana.
Rie Becker snorted. ‘Oblige?’
‘Don’t snort,’ I said.
‘Oh, peeved, are we?’ she said, and snorted again.
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