The Danish Girl (4 page)

 

 

Now, more than ten years later, in the damp spring of 1925, Greta felt as if she were holding a secret about her husband. The first few weeks after the session with Anna’s dress, Greta and Einar said nothing about it. They stayed busy at their easels, carefully stepping out of each other’s way. The portrait of Anna was complete, and now Greta was looking for another commission. On one or two occasions, at dinner or while they both were reading late at night, something would make Greta think of the dress, and she would nearly call him Lili. But she managed to stop herself. Only once did she respond to a question of his by saying, “What was that, Lili?” Immediately she apologized. They both laughed and she kissed his forehead. She didn’t think of it again, and it was as if Lili were nothing more than a character in a play they had seen at the Folketeatret.

Then, one evening, Greta was reading about the Social Liberals in
Politiken
, the lamp shedding a cone of light around her chair. Einar moved toward her and sat at her feet, placing his head in her lap. Its warm heaviness rested against her thighs as she read the newspaper. She stroked his hair, her hand lifting every minute or so to turn the page. When she finished, she folded it up to begin the crossword puzzle, pulling a pencil from the patch pocket of her smock.

“I’ve been thinking about her,” Einar said.

“Who’s that?”

“Little Lili.”

“Then why don’t we see her again?” Greta said, her face barely lifting from the puzzle, her finger smudged with newsprint brushing at the chicken-pox scar.

Greta could say things without really meaning them, her urge to contradict, to be radical, perpetually bubbling up inside. Throughout their marriage she had made equally absurd proposals: Why don’t we move back to Pasadena to harvest oranges? Why don’t we start a little clinic in our apartment for the prostitutes of Istedgade? Why don’t we move someplace neutral, like Nevada, where no one will ever know who we are? Things are said in the great cave of wedlock, and thankfully most just hover, small and black and harmlessly upside down like a sleeping bat. At least that ’s how Greta thought of it; what Einar thought, she couldn’t say.

She once tried to paint a sleeping bat—the black double membrane of skin draped over the mouse body—but she failed. She lacked the technical skill for the elongated fingers and the small, clawed thumb; for the gray translucence in the stretched wings. She had not trained to paint the haunch of animals. Over the years Einar, who occasionally painted a sow or a sparrow or even Edvard IV into his landscapes, had promised he would teach her. But whenever they would sit down to a lesson, something would happen: a cable would arrive from California, the laundress would
ping!
her finger cymbals from the street, the telephone would ring with a call from one of Einar’s patrons, who were often silver-haired and titled and lived behind narrow green shutters that remained latched with a little hook.

A few days later, Greta was returning to the Widow House from a meeting with a gallery owner who eventually would reject her paintings. The dealer, a handsome man with a freckle like a chocolate stain on his throat, hadn’t actually turned Greta away; but the way he tapped his fingers against his chin told Greta he wasn’t impressed. “All portraits?” he had asked. The man knew, as did all of Copenhagen, that she was married to Einar Wegener. Greta felt that because of this the dealer expected quaint landscapes from her. “Do you ever think your pictures are perhaps too”—he struggled for the right word—“rapturous?” This just about boiled up Greta, and she felt the heat catching inside her dress, the one with the tuxedo lapels. Too rapturous? How could anything be too rapturous? She snatched her portfolio from the dealer’s hand and turned on her heel. She was still warm and damp in the face by the time she arrived at the top of the stairs of the Widow House.

When she opened the door, she found a girl sitting in the rope-bottom chair, and at first Greta couldn’t think who she was. The girl was facing the window, a book in her hands and Edvard IV in her lap. She was wearing a blue dress with a detachable white collar, and lying across the bone at the top of her spine was one of Greta’s gold chains. The girl—did Greta know her?—smelled of mint and milk.

The sailor below was yelling at his wife, and each time the word “whore” came through the floorboards, the girl’s neck would blush. And then it would fade.
“Luder,”
the man yelled over and over, and so rose and fell the flush in the girl’s throat.

“Lili?” Greta finally said.

“It’s a wonderful book.” Lili lifted the history of California that Greta’s father had shipped over in a crate with tins of sugared lemons, the supply of Pure Pasadena Extract, and a gunnysack of eucalyptus bells for steaming her face.

“I don’t want to disturb you,” Greta said.

Lili made a feathery murmur. Edvard IV growled lazily, his ears lifting. The door to the apartment was still open, and Greta hadn’t removed her coat. Lili returned to her book, and Greta looked at Lili’s pale neck rising out of the petals of her collar. Greta wasn’t sure what her husband wanted her to do next. She told herself that this was important to Einar, that she should follow his lead—not a natural impulse for Greta. She stood in the entry of the apartment, one hand behind her holding the knob of the door, while Lili sat quietly in the chair, in a pane of sunlight. She ignored Greta, who was hoping Lili would rise and take Greta’s hands in hers. But that didn’t happen, and eventually Greta realized she should leave Lili alone, and so she closed the door to the apartment behind her and headed down the dark stairs and into the street, where she met the Cantonese laundress and sent her away.

Later, when Greta returned to the Widow House, Einar was painting. He was wearing his checked-tweed pants and vest, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. His head looked small in his collar and above the lumpy knot of his tie. His face was full and pink in the cheek, his little pouty mouth sucking on the end of his filbert brush. “It’s coming along,” he said cheerfully. “I finally mixed the right colors for the snow on the heath. Have a look?”

Einar painted scenes so small you could balance the canvases in your hands. This particular painting was dark, a bog in a winter dusk; a thin line of dingy snow was the only distinction between the spongy soil and the sky. “It’s the bog in Bluetooth?” Greta said. Recently she had tired of Einar’s landscapes. She never understood how he could paint them over and over. He would finish off this heath tonight and begin another in the morning.

On the table was a loaf of rye bread. Einar had done the marketing, which wasn’t like him. There was also a tub of shrimp on ice, and a dish of shredded beef. And a bowl of pickled pearl onions, which reminded Greta of the beads she and Carlisle had strung when they were little and he was still too lame to play outside. “Was Lili here?” She felt the need to mention it, for Greta knew that Einar would leave it unsaid.

“For an hour. Maybe less. Can’t you smell her? Her perfume?” He was rinsing his brushes in a jar, the water a pale white like the thin milk Greta had had to buy when she first returned to Denmark after the war.

Greta didn’t know what to say; she didn’t know what her husband wanted her to say. “Is she coming back?”

“Only if you want her to,” Einar said, his back to her.

His shoulders were no wider than a boy’s. So slight a man he was that Greta sometimes felt she could wrap her arms twice around him. She watched his right shoulder shake as he rinsed the brushes, and something in her told her to stand behind him and take hold of his arms, to whisper to him to stand still. All she wanted to do was to allow him his desires, but at the same time she had the irrepressible urge to hold him in her arms and tell him what to do about Lili. And there they were, in the apartment in the attic of the Widow House, with dusk filling the windows, and Greta holding Einar tightly, his arms stiff at his side. Eventually she said—but only as it occurred to her—“It ’s up to Lili. It ’s whatever she wants to do.”

 

 

In June the city was throwing the Artists Ball at Rådhuset. For a week Greta kept the invitation in her pocket, wondering what to do about it. Einar had recently said he didn’t want to go to any more balls. But Greta had another idea; she had come to see in Einar’s eyes a longing he wasn’t prepared to admit.

One night at the theatre, she gently asked, “Would you like to go as Lili?” She asked because she guessed it was what Einar wanted. He would never confess such a desire; he rarely confessed anything to her, unless she prodded, in which case his true feelings would pour out, and she would listen patiently, sinking her chin into her fist.

They were at the Royal Theatre, up in the gallery. The red velvet on the armrests was worn bald, and over the proscenium was inscribed the legend EJ BLOT TIL LYST. The black oak floors had been waxed that afternoon, and a sweet medicinal odor hung in the air, making Greta think of the smell of the apartment after Einar had cleaned and mopped.

Einar’s hands were trembling, his throat turning pink. Greta and Einar were nearly as high up as the electric chandelier, with its great smoked-glass balls. The light was revealing the down on Einar’s cheek just beneath his ears, where most men wore sideburns. His beard was so light that he shaved just once a week; there were so few whiskers on his upper lip that Greta could count them if she liked. In his cheek there was a color, like a tea rose, which Greta sometimes envied out of the corner of her eye.

The orchestra was tuning up, preparing for its long descent into
Tris tan und Isolde
. The couple next to Einar and Greta were discreetly removing their evening slippers. “I thought we said we weren’t going to the ball this year,” Einar finally said.

“We don’t have to go. I just thought—”

The lights dimmed, and the conductor made his way to the head of the pit. For the next five hours Einar sat rigid, his legs pressed together, his program tight in his fist. Greta knew he was thinking of Lili, as if she were a younger sister away for a very long time but now due home. Tonight Anna was singing Brangäne, Isolde ’s maidservant. Her voice made Greta think of coals in a stove, and although it wasn’t pretty like a soprano’s, it was warm at the edges and correct; how else should a maidservant sound? “Some of the most interesting women I know aren’t especially beautiful,” she would later comment to Einar, when they were in bed, when Greta’s hand was beneath the heat of his hip, when she was on the steep cliff of sleep and she couldn’t properly think of where she was, Copenhagen or California.

The next day, when Greta returned from a meeting with another gallery owner, a man who was too mousy and insignificant even to pique Greta with his rejection, she went to kiss Einar. There, on his cheek and in his hair, was the ghost of Lili, the lingering scent of mint and milk.

“Was Lili here again?”

“The whole afternoon.”

“What did she do?”

“She went over to Fonnesbech’s and bought herself a few things.”

“All alone?” Greta said.

Einar nodded. He had finished painting for the day and was in the walnut-armed reading chair,
Politiken
spread in his hands and Edvard IV curled at his feet. “She said to tell you she wants to go to the ball.”

Greta didn’t say anything. She felt as if someone were explaining the rules of a new parlor game: she was listening and nodding but actually thinking to herself, I hope I understand this better once the game begins.

“You want her to go, don’t you?” Einar asked. “It ’s okay with you if she goes instead of me?”

Greta, who was twisting the tips of her hair into a knot that would later snarl, said, “I don’t mind at all.”

At night Greta would lie in bed, her arm over Einar’s chest. When they married, Einar’s grandmother had given them a beechwood sleigh bed. It was a bit small, like everyone in the Wegener family except Einar’s father. Over the years Greta grew used to sleeping at a diagonal, her legs stacked across Einar’s. Sometimes, when she doubted this life she had created for herself in Denmark, she would feel as if she were a little girl, and Einar, with his china-doll face and his pretty feet, her most beloved toy. When he slept, his lips would pout and glisten. His hair would hang like a wreath around his face. Greta couldn’t count the nights she had stayed up watching his long lashes fluttering while he was dreaming.

Deep in the night their bedroom was silent except for the horn of the ferry leaving for Bornholm, the Baltic island where her grandmother had first come from. More and more, Greta would lie awake thinking about Lili, about her rural face with the tremblingly bold upper lip and her eyes so brown and watery that Greta couldn’t tell whether or not they were on the verge of tears. About Lili’s fleshy little nose, which somehow made her look like a girl still growing into a woman’s body.

Lili turned out to be even shyer than Einar. Or at least at first. Her head would dip when she spoke, and sometimes she would become too nervous to say anything at all. When asked a question as simple as “Did you hear about the terrible fire on the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s docks?” she would stare at Greta or Anna and then turn away. Lili preferred to write notes and prop them around the apartment, leaving postcards bought from the blind woman outside Tivoli’s iron gates on the pickled-ash wardrobe or on the little ledge of Greta’s easel.

And once:

Greta returned the notes, standing them against a bowl of pears just before leaving the apartment: