The Danish Girl (7 page)

He was the second man Greta loved. She loved Teddy for the slender-necked vases he shaped out of white clay and ground glass. She loved his quiet, stubbly face and the way his mouth would hang open as he dipped his pottery into tubs of glaze. He was from Bakersfield, the son of strawberry farmers; a childhood of squinting had permanently creased the skin around his eyes. He would ask Greta about Copenhagen, about its canals and its king, but would never comment on anything she told him, his eyelids the only thing moving in his face. She told him there was a great landscape painter there who was in love with her, but Teddy only stared. He ’d never been east of the Mojave, and the only time he was in one of the mansions along Orange Grove Boulevard was when he was hired to create tiles for hearths and sleeping-porch floors.

Greta loved the idea of dating him; of taking him around to the tennis-court pavilions where Pasadena’s dinner dances were held that fall; of showing him off to the girls from the Valley Hunt Club, as if to say she wasn’t one of them, not anymore—she’d lived in Europe, after all. She would climb up in the butcher wagon if she wanted, or she would have a ceramicist as an escort.

As expected, Greta’s mother refused to allow Teddy Cross in the house. But that didn’t stop Greta from touring him around Pasadena, visiting boring Henrietta and Margaret and Dottie Anne in their shade gardens. Those girls didn’t seem to mind Teddy, which Greta took to mean they were actually ignoring him. His ceramics were in such demand that, Greta discovered, there was a respectable charm in the way he arrived at parties with bits of clay jammed beneath his fingernails. Greta’s mother, who would often say at the dinner dances that she’d take California’s
terra infirma
any day over “old, old Europe,” would pat Teddy’s hand whenever they met in public, a gesture that infuriated Greta. Her mother knew that were she to publicly dismiss Teddy Cross, the dispute would end up in the
American Weekly
.

“They look down at you,” Greta said to Teddy during one of the parties.

“Only some of them,” he replied, seemingly happy to sit with Greta on the wicker couch out by the swimming pool as the Santa Anas blew palm fronds to the ground and the party burned on in the mansion’s windows. If he only knew! Greta would think, ready to fight—whom or what, she didn’t know, but she was ready.

Then one day the mail arrived in its twine-bound bundle, and Akiko delivered a blue envelope to Greta’s door. She looked at it for a long time, balancing its delicate weight in her palm. She could hardly believe Einar had written, and her mind began to race with what he might have to say to her:
It seems as if the War is nearly over and we should be together again by Christmas.
Or:
I’m coming to California on the next crossing.
Or maybe even:
Your letters mean more to me than I can say.

It was possible, Greta told herself, the envelope in her lap. He could have changed his mind. Anything was possible.

Then Greta ripped through the seal.

The letter was addressed “Dear Miss Waud,” and said only: “Given the course of events, worldly and otherwise, I expect we will never see each other again, which is probably for the best.”

Greta folded the paper and tucked it into her pocket. Why did Einar think like that? she asked herself, wiping her eyes with the hem of her smock. Why didn’t he have any sense of hope at all? Regretfully, she had no idea what she could do.

Then Akiko returned to Greta’s door and said, “It’s Mr. Cross. On the telephone.”

And so on the telephone in the upstairs hall, within earshot of her mother, Greta asked Teddy to escort her to the debutante ball. He agreed on one condition—that Greta stop worrying about how he’d get along with her mother. “I’m going to ask her to dance with me and then you’ll see,” he said. But Greta rolled her eyes, thinking Teddy didn’t know what he was getting himself into. When she hung up, her mother said only, “Well, now that it ’s done, just be sure to help him with his tails.”

There were seven girls in her debutante class. Their escorts were young men home for the holidays from Harvard and Princeton or from army bases in Tennessee and San Francisco. A girl with asthma asked Carlisle, her lungs too weak to need a reliable dancing partner. And Greta, who was for the first time beginning to think that she would have to forget all about Einar Wegener, prepared by practicing her curtsy.

The white dress with the empire waist never fit Greta right. It was flouncy in the shoulders and a fraction too short, revealing her feet. Or at least that’s how Greta felt about it; she could think only of her long, blocky feet showing when she descended the staircase in the Valley Hunt Club’s front hall. The staircase’s banister was wrapped in a garland twisted with evergreens, apples, and red lilies. Guests in white tie were scattered around the club sipping spiked Tennis Specials, politely watching the seven debutantes descend. There were four Christmas trees up for decoration, and in the fireplaces dark flames were gnawing on the redwood logs.

One of the girls brought a silver flask of whiskey, its cap made of mother-of-pearl. She and the other debs passed it around while they dressed and pinned the poinsettia leaves into their hair. The flask made the evening brighter, as if the club manager had turned up the wall sconces to their highest voltage. It made the black fires in the fireplaces seem almost like beasts about to jump the screens.

When Greta reached the foot of the stairs, she curtsied deeply, bringing her chin to the Oriental carpet. The club members applauded, balancing their punch cups. Then she entered the ballroom, and there, waiting, was Teddy Cross. In his white tie he looked taller than usual. His hair was shiny with tonic, and there was something unfamiliar about him: he looked almost Danish, with his dark blond hair and his wrinkled eyes and his good brown tan; with his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling nervously.

Later that night, after the waltzes and the roast beef and the strawberries served in Oregon champagne, Greta and Teddy slipped out of the clubhouse and walked toward the tennis courts. The night was clear and cold, and Greta had to lift her dress from the dew collecting on the baselines. She was a little drunk, she knew, because earlier she had made an unfortunate joke about the strawberries and Teddy’s parents. She apologized to him immediately but, from the way he folded his napkin on the table, he seemed a little hurt.

The walk on the tennis courts was her idea, as if to try to make it up to Teddy, all of this, her strange Pasadena life that she had hurled upon him. But she didn’t have a plan, hadn’t thought of what she would offer him. They reached the pavilion on the far court, where there was a water cooler and a wicker settee painted green. On the sofa, which smelled like dry, termite-eaten wood, they began to kiss.

She couldn’t help thinking how different Teddy’s kiss was from Einar’s. On the
Princess Dagmar
she had stood at the mirror in her stateroom and kissed herself. The flat cold surface had somehow reminded her of kissing Einar, and she began to think of that kiss on the stairs of the Royal Academy as something similar to kissing herself. But Teddy’s kiss was not like that at all. His lips were rough and firm and the whiskers on his upper lip scratched at her mouth. His neck, nuzzling into her own, was strong and hard.

With the ball playing on in the clubhouse, Greta thought she had better speed things up. She knew what she should do next, but it took her a few minutes of coaching herself. Lift your hand over to his . . . Oh, it was hard enough thinking about it, let alone actually instigating it! But she wanted to do it, or at least she thought she wanted to, and she was sure it was what Teddy wanted too, what with his neck with its wire-brush whiskers turning and shaking strongly. Greta counted to three and held her breath and reached for Teddy’s fly.

His hand stopped her. “No, no,” he said, holding her wrist.

Greta had never thought he would say no. She knew the moonlight was bright enough that were she to look up into his face she would see the coiled concern for propriety that would embarrass her deeply. Greta thought of the last time she had let a man try to say no to her: and now she and Einar were separated by a continent and a sea, to say nothing of a pyrotechnic war.

On the wicker settee of the Valley Hunt Club’s outermost court, there Greta Waud and Teddy Cross sat for a minute, her wrist still cuffed by his callused hand.

Again she asked herself what to do next, but now, as if propelled by an urge she had never before known, she pushed her face into Teddy’s lap. Greta began to use every trick she had read about in the novels she bought on the naughty side of Copenhagen’s Central Station, and from the chatty, slutty Lithuanian maids who had run her mother’s house. Teddy tried to protest again, but each “no” passed his lips less and less forcefully. Eventually he released her hand.

By the time they were finished her dress was wrinkled and bunched up on the empire waist. His tails had somehow ripped. And Greta, who had never gone this fast or this far, was lying under the thin long heap of Teddy, feeling his heart knock, knock, knock on her breast, and smelling his bitter salty scent damp between her legs. Already she knew what would come next, and Greta wrapped her arms around Teddy’s back in resignation and thought to herself, It ’s okay with me as long as he takes me away from here.

They were married on the last day of February in the garden of the house on Orange Grove Boulevard. The Japanese maids sprinkled the lawn with camellia petals, and Teddy wore a new pair of tails. It was a small wedding, only cousins from San Marino and Hancock Park and Newport Beach. Their neighbor, a chewing-gum heiress from Chicago, attended as well, because, as Mrs. Waud put it through her jaw, she had gone through this with her daughter too. Teddy’s parents were invited, although no one expected them to come; crossing Ridge Route from Bakersfield in February wasn’t always possible.

Immediately after the wedding and a short honeymoon in a garden suite at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where Greta cried every day—not because she was married to Teddy Cross but because she was now even farther from her beloved Denmark and the life she wanted to lead—Greta’s parents sent them to live in Bakersfield. Mr. Waud bought Greta and Teddy a small Spanish house with a red tile roof and Seville grating on the windows and a little garage covered by bougainvillea. Mrs. Waud sent Akiko to live with them. The banister of the Bakersfield house was wrought iron, and the doorways between the rooms were arched. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a small step-down living room with bookshelves. The house was in a grove of date palms, and inside it was always shadowy and cool.

Teddy’s parents came to visit once; they were stooped and their hands were faintly pink from the strawberries. They lived out in the fields, on a few acres of loam, in a two-roomer built from eucalyptus plank. Their eyes were sealed beneath skin folded by the sun, and they were nearly silent in Greta’s step-down living room, holding each other nervously, jointly examining the wealth that lay before them: the Spanish house, the plein-air painting above the fireplace, Akiko’s thick geta sandals clacking as she delivered a tray. Greta poured Mr. and Mrs. Cross iced hibiscus tea, and together they all sat on the white sofas Mrs. Waud had ordered from Gump’s. Everyone was uncomfortable and regretful that things had come to this. Greta drove the senior Crosses back to their house in her Mercer Raceabout, the two-seater forcing Mrs. Cross to curl into Mr. Cross’s lap. Night was falling quickly as the car sped along the road, and the early spring chill was creeping across the fields. A wind was whistling through the furrows, throwing dirt into the air. Greta had to use her wipers to clear the sandy loam from the windshield. In the distance, a gold light burned in the Crosses’ plank house. The soil was blowing so strongly that Greta could see nothing but the light of the house, and it was as if she and Mr. and Mrs. Cross were thinking of the same thing, because just then Mrs. Cross said, “Where Teddy was born.” And Mr. Cross, his hands wrapped around his wife, said, “Always said he ’d be coming back.”

For the rest of the spring, Greta napped on one of the white sofas in the step-down living room. She hated Bakersfield, she hated the Spanish house, she even sometimes hated the baby growing inside her. Not once, however, did she hate Teddy Cross. In the afternoons, she would read while he brought a steady supply of warm washrags for her forehead. Greta was swelling quickly, and she felt sicker with each day. Before May, she was spending nights in the living room as well, too sick and heavy to climb the stairs. Teddy took to sleeping on a cot at her side.

By early June, Bakersfield had settled into its summer heat; it would reach 100 degrees before nine in the morning. Akiko would fold paper fans for Greta; Teddy brought cold compresses instead of hot. And when Greta became really sick, Akiko served Greta cold green tea from a lacquered cup while Teddy read poetry aloud.