The Danish Girl (12 page)

Greta fell asleep before Einar came to bed. When she woke, she discovered Lili lying in her camisole beneath the summer sheet. Her hair was matted, her face, in the weak light, clean and beginning to whisker on the cheek. Lili was on her back, the tiny weight of the sheet falling around the pear-shaped bumps of her breasts, and then, lower, around the lump that grew between the legs. Never before had Lili slept with Greta; they had eaten breakfast together in silk kimonos patterned with cranes, and shopped for stockings together, Greta always paying, like a mother or an odd, barren aunt. But Einar had never come to bed dressed as Lili. Greta’s heart, knocking against her chest, felt as hard as the stone of a fruit. Was this to be part of the game, too? Should she kiss Lili as she might kiss her husband?

They were intimate infrequently. Typically Greta blamed herself. She ’d stay up late painting, or reading, and by the time she’d pull back the bedclothes and slip underneath, Einar would be asleep. Sometimes she would nudge him, hoping to wake him. But Einar was a sound sleeper, and soon she too would fall asleep. She would hold him through the night, waking up like that, with her arm over his chest. Their eyes would meet in the quiet of morning. Often she would long to touch him, and as her hand began to stroke first his chest and then his thigh, Einar would rub his fists in his eyes and leap out of bed. “Is there anything wrong?” Greta would call, still wrapped in the bedclothes. “Not a thing,” he’d reply, running the water in the bath. “Nothing at all.”

The times they did make love, usually instigated by Greta but not always, Greta would end up feeling as if something inappropriate had occurred. As if she should no longer want to touch him. As if he were no longer her husband.

Now Lili shifted. Her body, which reminded Greta of a long coil, was on its side, the freckles on her back staring out at Greta, the single raised mole in the shape of Zealand as horrible and black as a leech. Lili’s hip, beneath the pilled summer sheet, raised up like the camelback sofa in the living room of the rented apartment. Where had this curved hip come from?—curved like the corniche that snaked up the Côte from the Italian border to Nice; curved like the bulbous vases with the slender necks Teddy had thrown on his foot-powered wheel. It seemed like the hip of a woman, not her husband’s. It felt as if someone she didn’t know was in her bed. Greta thought about the hip until dawn arrived on the apartment’s narrow terraces, and a rain cooled the room off so that Lili had to snap the summer sheet to her chin for warmth, the mound of the hip disappearing beneath the taut tent of the sheet. They fell asleep again, and when Greta woke she found Lili holding two cups of coffee. Lili was smiling, and then she tried to slip back beneath the sheet, but the coffee cups tipped. Greta watched the coffee spill across the bed, toward her hand, and Lili began to cry.

Later, in the afternoon, when Einar was behind the spare bedroom’s door transforming himself into Lili, Greta stripped the bed. She took the sheet, musty and milky with the mixed smell of Einar and Lili and the coffee, and held it over the terrace rail, bringing a match to its corner. Something in her wanted to see it burn away. Soon the sheet was billowing with fire, and Greta watched the flame-edged bits break away as she thought about Teddy and Einar. Scraps of sheet, trailing thin black smoke, were fluttering from the terrace, delicately rising and dipping in the summer breeze and eventually landing in the waxy leaves of the lemon and orange trees in the park below. A woman from the street called to Greta, but she ignored her, and Greta shut her eyes.

She never told Einar about the fire in Teddy’s pottery studio on Colorado Street. In the front office there was a shallow fireplace decorated with Teddy’s orange mission-style tiles. One day in January, in a fit of tidying, Greta crammed the Christmas garlands into the hearth, where a low fire was already smoldering. A white, thick smoke began to rise from the brittle greens. Then there was a crackling that popped with such a buckshot piercing that it brought Teddy from his workshop in the rear. He stood in the double door. In his face Greta could read the question:
What are you doing?
Then, together, they watched a flame lift out of the smoking garland; then a second reached out like an arm and lit the wicker rocking chair.

Almost instantly the room was on fire. Teddy pulled Greta out to Colorado Street. They weren’t on the sidewalk more than a few seconds when the fists of the flames punched through the twin plate-glass windows. Greta and Teddy stepped into the street, into the traffic, drivers slowing with O-mouthed leers and the horses bucking violently away from the burning building and the cars careening away.

Everything Greta thought of saying just then sounded despicable. An apology would sound empty, she told herself over and over, as the flames rose higher than the streetlamps and the telephone lines, which normally sagged under the weight of blue jays. What a sight it was, and yet there was nothing for Greta to say except “What have I done?”

“I can always start over,” Teddy said. Inside, cracking and exploding and shattering into black bits of nothing, were hundreds of vases and tiles, his two kilns, his file cabinet stuffed with orders, his self-made potter’s life. Still stuck in Greta’s mouth was that empty apology. It felt glued to her tongue, like a cube of ice that wouldn’t melt. For several minutes, she couldn’t say anything else, not until the building’s roof fell in on itself, as lightly as a burning, billowing sheet.

“I didn’t mean to.” She wondered if Teddy would believe her. As a reporter from the
American Weekly
showed up at the scene, his pencils tucked into the band that held up his shirtsleeves, Greta wondered if anyone in Pasadena would believe her.

“I know,” Teddy said, over and over. He took Greta’s hand in his own and stopped her from saying another thing. They watched the flames pull down the front wall. They watched the firemen unroll their flat, limp hose. Greta and Teddy watched, standing silently, until a damp gurgle rose up in his throat and emerged from his lips as an ominous cough.

CHAPTER Nine

When Einar asked her about it, Greta told him things he couldn’t remember.

“You mean you’ve forgotten?” she said the next morning. “That you asked him to meet you again?”

Einar could recall only part of the previous night. When Greta told him that Lili had stood on her toes to kiss Hans goodnight, he became so embarrassed that he pulled a wire chair to the terrace and, for nearly an hour, stared out over the lemon trees in the park. It didn’t seem possible. It was as if he hadn’t been there.

“He was happy to meet Lili. And he spoke so fondly of Einar. He can’t wait to see you again. Do you remember that?” Greta asked. She hadn’t slept well. Her eyes were nearly lost in their sockets. “You promised him that he could see Lili again today.”

“It wasn’t me,” Einar said. “It was Lili.”

“Yes,” Greta said. “It was Lili. I keep forgetting.”

“If you didn’t want her to visit us here, then why didn’t you say so?”

“Of course I wanted Lili to visit. It ’s just that . . .” and Greta paused. “It’s just that I’m not sure what you want me to do about her.” She turned in the camelback sofa and began to pick at the abalone in the Chinese screen.

“There’s nothing for you to do,” Einar said. “Don’t you see?”

He wondered why Greta couldn’t let Lili come and go without worrying so much. If it didn’t upset him, then why should Greta become concerned? If only she would quietly welcome Lili when it was time to paint her portrait. If only Greta wouldn’t pry with her questions—to say nothing about her eyes—when Lili slipped in and out of the apartment. Sometimes just knowing Greta was on the other side of the door, waiting for Lili to return, was enough to fill her with a moist little fury that collected in the pits of her arms.

And yet Einar knew that he and, yes, Lili, too, needed Greta.

Hans was expecting Lili at four o’clock. They had agreed to meet in front of the municipal casino, which sat on the Promenade du Midi behind the rocky beach. Greta was painting in the living room that morning. Einar was trying to paint in the foyer, which had a view of the backside of St-Michel Church, its stone dark and red with morning shadow. Every fifteen minutes or so Greta would mutter “Goddammit”—like the soft quarter gong of a mantel clock.

When he checked on her, Greta was leaning against a stool. She had several shades of blue along the rim of her canvas. In her lap was her sketch pad, sooty and smudged. Edvard IV was curled at her feet. Greta looked up, her face nearly as white as Edvard’s coat. “I want to paint Lili,” she said.

“She won’t be here until later,” Einar said. “She doesn’t have to meet Hans until four. Maybe after that?”

“Please get her.” Greta wouldn’t look at him, her voice quieter than usual.

For a moment, Einar felt like defying his wife. He had his own painting to finish. He had told himself that he would call up Lili in the afternoon, that he’d spend the morning painting, which he’d been ignoring so much lately, and buying the groceries at the open market. But now Greta wanted him to choose Lili over himself. Greta wanted him to give up his own painting for hers. He didn’t want to. He didn’t long for Lili just then. He felt as if Greta was forcing him to choose. “Maybe you can spend an hour with her before Hans comes by?”

“Einar,” Greta said. “Please.”

Several of the housedresses were now hanging in the bedroom closet. Greta had said they were ugly, their styles suited for nursemaids, but Einar found their plainness pretty, as if the most ordinary woman in the world might wear one. He thumbed through the hangers on the lead pipe, fingering the little starched collars. The one printed with peonies was a bit sheer; the one printed with frogs was big in the bust, and stained. The morning was warm, and Einar wiped his lip on his sleeve. Something made him feel as if his soul were trapped in a wrought-iron cage: his heart nudging its nose against his ribs, Lili stirring from within, shaking herself awake, rubbing her side against the bars of Einar’s body.

He chose a dress. It was white, printed with pink conch shells. Its hem hung to his calf. The white and pink looked pretty against his leg, which had taken color from the French sun.

The key in the door lock was loose in its hole. He thought about locking it, but he knew Greta would never come in without knocking. Once, early in their marriage, Greta walked in on Einar while he was in the bath singing a folksong:
There once was an old man who lived on a bog . . .
It should have been innocent enough, Einar knew, a young wife finding her husband bathing, happily singing to himself. From the tub, Einar could see the arousal filling Greta’s face. “Don’t stop,” she said, moving closer. But Einar could hardly find the strength to breathe, so exposed he felt, so ashamed, his bony arms crossed over his torso, hands like fig leaves. Greta finally realized what she had done, because she said, leaving the bathroom, “I’m so sorry. I should have knocked.”

Now Einar removed his clothes, turning his back to the mirror. In the drawer of the bedstand was a roll of white medical tape and scissors. The tape was gooey and textured like a canvas, and Einar pulled out a length and cut it into five pieces. Each piece he stuck to the edge of the bedpost. Then, shutting his eyes and feeling himself slide down through the tunnel of his soul, Einar pulled his penis back and taped it up in the blank space just beneath his groin.

The undergarments were made from a blend of something stretchy Einar was sure the Americans had invented. “There ’s no use in spending good money on silk for things you’ll only wear once or twice,” Greta had said, handing him the package, and Einar had been too shy to disagree.

The panties were cut in a square shape and were silvery like the abalone inlaid in the screen. The garter belt was cotton, fringed with papery lace. It had eight small brass hooks to support the stockings, a mechanism Einar still found thrillingly complicated. When the avocado seeds had begun to rot in their silk handkerchiefs, he had instead started inserting two Mediterranean sea sponges into the shallow cups of his camisole.

Then he pulled the dress over his head.

He’d begun to think of his makeup box as his palette. Brushstrokes to the brow. Light dabs to the lids. Lines on the lips. Blended streaks on the cheek. It was just like painting—like his brush turning a blank canvas into the winter Kattegat.

The clothes and the rouge were important, but the transformation was really about descending that inner tunnel with something like a dinner bell and waking Lili. She always liked the sound of crystal tinkling. It was about climbing out with her dewy hand in Einar’s, reassuring her that the bright clattering world was hers.

He sat on the bed. He closed his eyes. The street was full of rifle noises from motorcars. The wind was rattling the terrace doors. Behind his eyelids he watched colored lights erupt against the black, like the fireworks shot the previous Saturday over Menton’s harbor. He could hear his heart slow. He could feel the gooey tape strapped against his penis. A little flutter of air rose through Einar’s throat. He gasped as goose pimples ran down his arms, down the knuckles of his spine.