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again.
    I attempted an excuse. I said:
    â€œI’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.
    â€œDid you get lost?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t think so,” I said.
    â€œWhich opening are you looking for?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œNow 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.
    â€œI’ve never seen that one before,” I said.
    â€œWell, it’s only been shown once.”
    â€œNow I see it.”
    I circled the sculpture.
    â€œIt’s quivering,” I said.
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œI see a boob,” I said.
    â€œI think I’m about to finalize an agreement to place both,” she said.
    We went out into the winter garden behind the workshop. Here there was a bronze drop. There was also a bench. Vita’s energies swirled around the glass conservatory, they flowed from her in tingling streams. Her strong, clean hands, the pale nape beneath her hair, the way she avoided touching me, reached for a watering can, dusted the sand off her hands. We sat side by side. The ease of her movements and the weight of her gaze.

I thought that now I nearly had her, and yet I didn’t have her at all, but sat blanching instead in my workshop. I began to bike the opposite of my normal route, but I never saw her. She works a ton, I thought. Finally, I called her and asked if she wanted to go out, I don’t know, somewhere or other. Vita didn’t have a lot of spare time. She was so smooth.
    One day when I saw that her windows were lit and was certain she was home, I simply went back with a bottle of wine. She opened up and . . . oh, but she was beautiful.
    The evening ended with us coming over to my place and looking at my things. Vita wanted to watch the video that had gotten me into the academy. We laughed together. At the video. She was impressed and astonished. She thought I was