‘Is chocolate mousse still the king of all beasts?’ she said as she opened the fridge. The dessert was all prepared in little glass bowls.
‘I didn’t think you liked oysters,’ I said.
There was a whole dish of them on the bottom shelf.
‘Tonight I do,’ she said.
‘Are we celebrating?’
‘I spoke to Tue without crying today.’ Tears welled in her eyes, not grief, but because grief was subsiding, or so I assumed, and we hugged without thinking too much about it first.
Tue’s wine cellar comprised several hundred bottles: there was a section devoted to red Burgundy, another to the Italian wines, mostly Barolo, a large selection of German white, a slightly smaller one of white Burgundy, and about fifty bottles of champagne, including a dozen Krug Grand Cuvée, and I went with a Weissburgunder from Bernhard Huber.
Helene went to get dressed and came back in a thin petroleum-blue trouser suit, bare feet in delicate high heels, and a necklace of big, bright red beads. I put Charlie to bed, then dug out the dub version of Horace Andy’s ‘In the Light’. We sat facing one another across the table amid the glasses, plates and cutlery. I considered saying something about the fact that although we’d sat in exactly the same way hundreds of times before it now somehow felt different, but in the end I decided to let the situation exist on its own terms.
Twelve oysters glistened in the space between us and we toasted with the Krug and sipped cautiously: it was like drinking a state of mind; the bass line repeating over and over, the elongated echo of the snare drum. We took an oyster each and enjoyed the shock of suddenly being immersed in the sea. She may have been wanting to say something, but until she did or didn’t I was acutely aware of my own body, seated on the chair with my feet on the floor.
We fried the turbot and swayed together as the heat turned the flesh white. I removed the leaves from twenty Brussels sprouts and steamed them meticulously while Helene worked the butter into the saturated onions, and all of a sudden there was no sound but music and the rhythm of the wooden whisk.
‘You’re glowing,’ I said.
She ran her hand through her hair. My phone thrummed in my pocket. It was Diana.
‘Mikkel, darling, would you be kind and come over?’
The ingratiating tone did not become her.
‘Where are you? Ida-Marie’s dinner party?’
I gave Helene a smile and stepped out into the garden.
‘I’m on my way,’ I said.
‘Was that Diana?’ said Helene, and I nodded. The music had stopped.
Ida-Marie’s dinner party was in the part of the gallery that was normally the back office for Moritz and his secretary. Six round tables for eight had been brought in, with white tableclothes, proper napkins and chunky candles. Diana had been placed between Goldschmidt and a Dutch artist with a fringe and I had to interrupt their conversation to give her a hug.
Her crisis seemed to be over, and counter to expectations I realised that I was enjoying myself. The conversation was engaging and people forgot to drink.
My name had been written on a place card in a personal, cursive hand and I had been put diagonally opposite Diana with Nynne, one of the curators, on my right.
Ida-Marie was in a long, cobalt-blue silk dress and sat between Goldschmidt and a film director with a long square beard who made commercials.
‘Has she sold anything?’ I asked.
‘From what I hear, there are only two canvases left,’ said Nynne.
‘Did Minna Lund buy anything?’
‘Four.’
‘What’s she been painting?’
It was asking for it.
The beholder this and the beholder that, the forcefulness of naivety, and, hey, in came Bourdieu again. I’m making it sound bad, but the truth is that I was quite content with Nynne’s flow and even encouraged her by asking questions, and after a bit we crossed over on to the subject of the big women’s exhibition that had now finally come together, and the name, Athena 08, was predictable enough for me to picture the logo straight away, but I found it interesting, nonetheless, that they were including a special tribute section in honour of Dea Trier Mørch, and it was hardly a coincidence that a commitedly socialist artist from the seventies would now come to the fore again.
‘There’s an aesthetic aspect, of course,’ I said. ‘Woodcuts are modern again, that rather awkward black-and-white mode of expression that was so very much hers, but the ethical side is more important.’
‘We’ve talked a great deal about ethics in our meetings,’ said Nynne.
‘It’ll soon be okay to say solidarity again,’ I said.
‘I do very much admire what you’re doing with Next Love,’ she said. ‘I hear you’ve got your eye on an army barracks.’
We continued our exchange of utterances, gradually moving towards the point at which the women’s exhibition and spiritual love would become two sides of the same coin, and had I not made eye contact with Diana we would undoubtedly have ended up in consensus. Her look was a glare.
Goldschmidt was explaining something to her and was so wrapped up in himself he didn’t notice that she wasn’t paying attention. I frowned with bewilderment and Diana nodded towards the exhibition space, simultaneously acknowledging Goldschmidt’s concluding point with a smile.
Moritz tapped his glass lightly with a spoon and got to his feet.
‘When Ida-Marie presented her new works to me at the end of July, I knew immediately that she had found her way. Never before have I showcased a debuting artist so certain in her endeavour, and fortunately I am not alone in that appraisal. At half past two this afternoon, I received a phone call from Nynne Willer, one of the three curators of Athena 08. Nynne was able to disclose to me that Ida-Marie has been selected to take part in that exhibition. And this is just the beginning! Congratulations!’
Diana did not applaud. The waiters served Gateau Marcel and I crouched down beside her.
‘What were you trying to say just now?’
‘Ida-Marie’s canvases.’
‘Aren’t they any good?’
‘I came too late, but Goldschmidt just told me about them.’
She stood up and took my hand.
‘Let’s go in and have a look.’
There were seven big oil canvases along the main wall, five on the end wall. The seven all shared a dazzling white background, the five were pigeon blue, and all the subjects were in shades of brown. The exhibition was entitled Put Your Worries in My Pocket and it was the meat-packing district, Kødbyen, by night, snapshots of people having a good time together, glasses in hand, and it was easy enough to imagine Ida-Marie sitting there with her sketchpad at Jolene’s and Karriere Bar.
The figures were touching: an arm around a shoulder, holding hands in the balmy nights of summer, laughter and hugs at the bar. Stylised humans with a decidedly sculptural quality, and so pleasingly painted as to approach decoration.
Diana let go of my hand and moved in a slow arc around the big white space.
She pursed her lips and muttered irascibly under her breath, clicked her heels together like a soldier, then strode purposefully back to the dinner.
People were chatting over their chocolate gateau when she returned to the table.
‘You stole my idea!’
She pointed a finger in Ida-Marie’s face.
‘What, did I paint your cunt, Diana?’ said Ida-Marie.
‘We were sitting on Jan’s terrace,’ said Diana. ‘I said I wanted to sit myself down on the street and paint people.’
‘There is actually a rather long tradition of painting popular scenes, if I may say so,’ said Goldschmidt. ‘L.A. Ring portrayed the impoverished land workers, and Willumsen painted a host of street scenes in Italy.’
‘You were painting souls, Ida-Marie,’ said Diana. ‘You told us you didn’t understand what you were doing. Where did this new idea come from?’
‘I don’t need to answer to you, Diana. I’ve
got nothing to defend,’ said Ida-Marie.
‘Mikkel heard you,’ said Diana. ‘Didn’t you, Mikkel?’
‘Diana said you could sit yourself down on the street and paint the people, and Ida-Marie mentioned Søren Hjorth-Nielsen,’ I said.
‘I was thinking out loud,’ said Diana. ‘And you stole my thoughts. Without a word!’
The room was silent. Moritz stepped in.
‘I don’t think this is a matter we should be discussing in the present forum,’ he said, placing a hand on Diana’s shoulder. She shrugged him off, furious.
‘You’ve got nothing to paint, Ida-Marie! I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but now you’ve forced me!’
A woman with a pile of rags in her hair and some pleasant smile lines put her oar in:
‘We all understand your frustration, Diana, but my daughter can hardly be blamed for the curators ignoring you, can they, my dear? Envy is a very human emotion, though hardly one to air in public.’
She led Diana calmly back to her seat.
‘We think you’re a very talented artist, Diana. We wish you the best, we all do. Come and sit down, we’re having such a lovely evening. Did you get some dessert?’
Diana looked down at her gateau.
‘It’s heavenly, I can assure you,’ said Ida-Marie’s mother.
Diana picked up her gateau and raised it slowly towards her mouth:
‘Do you want me to put it in my mouth?’
‘Sit down, dear. Don’t be so silly,’ said Ida-Marie’s mother.
Diana pressed the gateau into her face:
‘Where’s my mouth?’
She began to laugh and repeated the gesture.
‘Where did my mouth go?’
She rubbed the gateau all over her face and all down her neck.
‘Can anyone say what on earth all this is in aid of?’ said Ida-Marie’s mother.
The Dutch artist got to his feet and applauded as Diana was escorted to the door. Everyone else tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.
I couldn’t tell Andreas Møller apart from the horseradish. We were having lunch at Schønnemann’s and I hadn’t slept for two nights. My brain kept skimming through sounds, smells and visual impressions and stopping randomly wherever it chose. I had got so used to Diana’s bestial howls they had become a permanent background noise, but the effervescent fizz of mineral water in my glass and the restaurant’s busy choreography was enough to drive me up the wall: waiters whizzing back and forth with plates and glasses, not to mention the mindless wanderings of its customers from the tables to the toilets and back again, and what was it with those shirts everyone was wearing? Why did we need to see their skin through such thin, white material? The sounds were insufferable: the throaty laughter punctuated by fits of coughing, the clatter of plates, the chinking of glasses. I felt like I was at every table, under the greasy ceiling, on the floor in the midst of miserably neglected footwear.
‘I think we need to talk things through,’ said Andreas Møller.
I picked up my knife to cut into the beef on my plate, then put it down and picked up my glass of water instead.
‘I’ve been suspended,’ he said.
‘That doesn’t sound nice,’ I said, passing in my mind through the corridor between Diana’s and Jan’s apartments with a removal box in my arms; the grey paintwork flaking off the dry wooden floor, the feeling of dust in the throat, and Jan, waddling along in front with the crack of his arse on full display and the smell of his fat, sweaty body mingled with aftershave.
‘Fortunately, I now have something meaningful to be getting on with,’ he said, slowly putting down his knife and fork. ‘I want to thank you for having thought of me.’
He was trying to sound genuine, but I suspected he had prepared this speech in advance, considering his words, playing the scene through in his mind. His thanks rang hollow and I was too far gone, too fragile, to accord his words any sort of value anyway. Instead I just stared at him blankly.
‘We need some beer,’ he said.
He asked about the book and couldn’t have cared less about the answer. He seemed to think the book represented something solid in my life, and I waffled on about the polyamory movement in the USA and the Ranters in the UK, but refrained from telling him about my meeting at the publishers the day before.
Bernhard had invited me in for coffee and it took him three minutes to figure out how things stood. ‘The machinery’s up and running,’ he said. ‘If I have to press stop, I want you to say so now.’
‘Is a hundred pages enough?’ I said.
‘Yes, but no less. How much have you got?’
‘Without Søren I’m down to about thirty or forty.’
‘You’re not going to be done by October the first,’ he said. ‘My suggestion is we get you installed in our writers’ cottage at Vejby Strand, and that you come home with a complete manuscript under your arm.’
‘I want to change the world,’ said Andreas Møller.
‘I’m with you,’ I said, which I most certainly wasn’t.
‘Do you even grasp the magnitude of our mission, Mikkel? It’s so immense, so tremendous that we are unable to fully comprehend its scope with such a feeble apparatus as ours. There is only one way forward.’
‘And what’s that?’ I said.
‘Faith!’
We stared at each other for a long time.
‘You must sweep away the banalities,’ he said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘You will never mean anything to Diana.’
‘I do mean something to her.’
‘The Third Testament is ours to compose, Mikkel Vallin! It is a task requiring complete submission, years of life spent in blinkered dedication, and you aren’t even here! You’ve vanished. You’re fiddling about, contemplating your navel like some neurotic housewife. Pull yourself together, man!’
Lunch was over, and if nothing else, at least I had woken up.
Andreas Møller paid the bill and put on his seaman’s jacket.
‘Mille’s stepping down as chairperson at the next meeting,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should consider doing likewise.’
VEJBY STRAND, SEPTEMBER 2008
The cottage was on top of a ridge and was an ordinary summer cabin with two bedrooms and big panoramic windows that wanted to be posh but looked out on to a cluster of pine trees and a neglected lawn that was riddled with molehills. The whole place stank of mice. Leaves had begun to fall from the trees and lay scattered about the lawn. Usually I was fond of September, the way the air seemed to cleanse and make everything new, but I didn’t find any of this particularly inspiring.
The previous incumbent had left behind half a bag of onions and a green pepper and I went to the shop to get red lentils, coconut milk and curry powder. ‘A little party tonight, is it?’ said the shopkeeper guy, with a nod in the direction of my twelve cans of Classic. ‘Don’t forget the crisps.’ I made enough dal to last me a few days and on the radio all they talked about was a huge firm called Lehman Brothers going bankrupt in the States. I’d never heard of Lehman Brothers. Maybe it was just someone else’s turn to keep hold of the money.
I had three notebooks full of events from the summer camp, little scenes and considerations I’d penned while completely out of it. By half past eight I had drunk four cans and written a page and a half about Emma Goldman, a motherfucker of a Russian-American Jewish battleaxe who stood up against everything and everyone at the beginning of the 1900s and who said:
‘I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases.’
The sun had gone down when I heard the mouse for the first time.
There was a scratching in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I went over and counted to five before opening the cupboard door abruptly. A field mouse leapt into the air and vanished down a crack. It had chewed holes in the bin bag and littered the cupboard with droppings and crumbs. I went
online and read that mice seek refuge indoors in September and after half an hour it got started on the bin bag again. I had a whisky with the fifth can and wrote about Emma Goldman getting deported to Russia, but why was that relevant to my book? I deleted half a page and lay down to sleep on the sofa-bed in the living room. The noises under the sink intensified with the darkness. All through the night I kept waking to the sound of scratching.
‘We’ve got an offer on Fernet Branca,’ said the shopkeeper the next morning. ‘A nice little glass to keep off the chill in the evenings. Can’t be beaten,’ he said.
I went for a walk and the sea had consumed the beach.
The mouse was pluckier now. Perhaps it could tell I was a man of peace. It ate the breadcrumbs off the counter and darted back behind the wall. I read they could go completely flat and pass through cracks seven millimetres wide.
They were still going on about Lehman Brothers on the radio and I needed to get to the shop again before they closed at seven.
‘Always better to get too much in than not enough,’ said the shopkeeper, as he scanned my six-pack of Classic. ‘Staying at the writers’ place, are you?’
I nodded.
‘I thought you looked the type.’
I got into the habit of knocking on the cupboard door before opening it to get to the bin and tried to reinfuse the book with some kind of passion by introducing the scene with Master Licker of Ørby. I was finally getting myself immersed in orgasms and treetops when I saw the mouse out of the corner of my eye.
It scurried across the living-room floor and disappeared behind the bookcase. There, up against the skirting board, was a little nest dotted with droppings and lined with dyed wool that looked like it was from the blanket that lay draped over the armchair.
I pulled the duvet up over my ears to escape the rustling. At three o’clock in the morning I gave in and retreated to the freezing cold bedroom.
Am I Cold Page 29