The Danish Girl (14 page)

And just then—why, she would never know—something told both Lili and Hans to look down at the front of her dress. Growing on the white housedress patterned with conch shells was a round stain of blood, a stain so red it was nearly black. It was seeping outward like the ringed wave of a pebble landing in a pond.

“Lili? Are you hurt?”

“No, no,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. But I should be getting home. Back to Greta.” Lili could feel herself shrinking inward, retreating back down the tunnel, back to Lili’s lair.

“Let me help you. How can I help you?”

As each second passed Hans felt farther away; his voice sounded as if it were traveling through a dull iron pipe. It was like at the Rådhuset ball: the blood was heavy, but she felt nothing. Where it was coming from she had no idea. She was both alarmed and amazed, like a child who has accidentally killed an animal. A little voice in her head shouted, “Hurry!”—a frantic little voice equally panicked and enjoying the small brief drama of an afternoon in Menton in August. Lili left Hans on the steps of the police station, turning three corners immediately, running away from him as the Gypsy children had run off from her, the stain on her dress spreading as persistently, as appallingly, as a disease.

CHAPTER Ten

Greta’s new style was to paint with pastel-bright colors, especially yellows and candy pinks and ice blues. She still painted only portraits. She still used the paints that arrived in glass bottles with unreliable stoppers from the firm in Munich. But where her previous paintings were serious and straightforward and official, her new paintings, in their levity and color, looked, as Lili once said, like taffy. The paintings were large and depicted their subject, by now almost always Lili, outdoors, in a field of poppies, in a lemon grove, or against the hills of Provence.

While she painted, Greta thought of nothing, or what felt to her like nothing: her brain, her thoughts, felt as light as the paints she mixed into her palette. It reminded her of driving into the sun, as if painting were about pressing on blindly but in good faith. On her best days, ecstasy would fill her as she pivoted from her paint box to the canvas, and it was as if there were a white light blocking out everything but her imagination. When her painting was working, when the brush strokes were capturing the exact curve of Lili’s head, or the depth of her dark eyes, Greta would hear a rustling in her head that reminded her of the bamboo prod der knocking oranges from her father’s orange trees. Painting well was like harvesting fruit: the beautiful dense thud of an orange hitting the California loam.

Even so, Greta was surprised by the reception the Lili paintings received in Copenhagen that fall. Rasmussen offered to hang them in his gallery for two weeks in October. Her original triptych,
Lili Thrice
, sold outright, after a brief dispute between a Swede in purple pigskin gloves and a young professor from the Royal Academy. Her portrait of Lili sleeping on the camelback sofa fetched more than 250 kroner; it wasn’t as much as Einar’s paintings earned, but closer than ever before.

“I need to see Lili every day,” Greta said to him. She was beginning to miss Lili when she wasn’t around. Greta had always been an early riser, up well before dawn, before the first ferry call or rattle from the street. That fall, there were mornings when Greta woke even earlier than that, the apartment so black she couldn’t see her hand before her. She would sit up in the bed. There next to her lay Einar, still sleeping, at his feet Edvard IV. She herself was still caught in the hazy foyer of sleep, and Greta would wonder, where was Lili? Greta would quickly climb out of bed and begin searching the apartment. Where had Lili gone to? Greta would ask herself, lifting the tarps in the front room, opening the closet of the pickled-ash wardrobe. And only as she unbolted the front door, her lips repeating the question nervously, would Greta fully emerge from the thick mist of sleep.

One morning that autumn, Greta and Einar were in their apartment. It was the first time since April they needed a fire. The stove was a triple-decker, three black iron boxes stacked up on four feet. Greta held a match to the peeling paper of the birch logs inside. The flame took, and began to burn away the bark.

“But Lili can’t come every day,” Einar protested. “I don’t think you understand how hard it is, sending Einar away and asking Lili in. It’s too much to ask every day.” He was dressing Edvard IV in the cable-knit sweater sent up from the fisherman’s wife. “I love it. I love her. But it’s hard.”

“I need to paint Lili every day,” Greta said. “I need your help.”

And then Einar did a strange thing: he crossed the studio and kissed Greta’s neck. Einar had—as Greta thought of it—the Danish chill in him; she couldn’t think of the last time her husband had kissed her anywhere but on her mouth, late at night, when all was black and quiet except for the occasional rambling drunkard being dragged to Dr. Møller’s door across the street.

Einar’s bleeding had returned. He had been fine since the incident in Menton, but then one day recently he pressed a handkerchief to his nose. Greta watched the stain seep through the cotton. It troubled her, and it reminded her of the final months with Teddy Cross.

But just as it suddenly began, the bleeding ceased, leaving no trace except Einar’s red and raw nostrils.

Then one night just the week before, as the first frost was collecting on the windowsills, Greta and Einar were quietly eating their supper. She was sketching in her notebook as she brought forkfuls of herring to her mouth. Einar was sitting idly, stirring his coffee with a spoon—daydreaming, as far as Greta could tell. She looked up from her sketch, a study of a new painting of Lili at a maypole. Across the table the color was draining from Einar’s face. His spine became more erect. He excused himself, leaving a little red spot on the chair.

Over the next two days Greta tried to ask him about the bleeding, about its cause and source, but each time Einar turned away in shame. It was almost as if she were striking him, his cheek jolting from the blow of her question. It was clear to Greta that Einar hoped to hide it from her, cleaning himself with old paint rags he later threw into the canal. But she knew. There was the smell, fresh and peaty. There was his unsettled stomach. There were the bloody rags the next morning clinging to the stone pylon of the canal’s bridge.

One morning Greta went to the post office to make a telephone call in privacy. When she returned to the studio, Lili was lying on a cherry-red chaise borrowed from the props department at the Royal Theatre. Her nightdress was also borrowed; a retiring soprano, whose throat was old and blue and all leaping tendons, had worn it singing Desdemona. It seemed to Greta that Lili never knew how she looked. If she did, she wouldn’t be lying like this, with her legs open, each foot on the floor, ankles drunkenly turned. With her mouth open and her tongue on her lip, she looked as if she were passed out on morphine. Greta liked the image, although she hadn’t planned it. Einar had been up the previous night with a cramp in his stomach and, Greta feared, the bleeding.

“I’ve made an appointment for you,” Greta now said to Lili.

“What kind of appointment?” Lili’s breath began to quicken, her breasts lifting and falling.

“With a doctor.”

Lili sat up. She looked alarmed. It was one of the few times Greta could see Einar edging back into Lili’s face: suddenly the dark blush of whiskers burst onto her upper lip. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Lili said.

“I didn’t say there was.” Greta moved toward the chaise. She tied the satin ribbons on Lili’s sleeve. “But you’ve been sick,” Greta continued, her hands tucking themselves into her smock’s patch pockets, where she stored the gnawed pencils, the picture of Teddy Cross in the waves at Santa Monica beach, a little swatch of the bloody dress Lili had been wearing when she returned to the rented apartment in Menton, crying Hans’s name. “I’m concerned about the bleeding.”

Greta watched Lili’s face: it seemed to be curling at the edges with shame. But Greta knew she was right to bring it up. “We need to know why it’s happening. If you’re not hurting anything by—” she began. Greta shuddered, a chill crossing her back. What was happening to her marriage, she wondered, picking at the ribbons woven into the collar of the nightdress. She wanted a husband. She wanted Lili. “Oh, Einar.”

“Einar isn’t here,” Lili said.

“Please tell him to meet me at Central Station for the 11:04 train to Rungsted,” Greta said. “I’m going to the supply store.”

She went to the wardrobe, looking for a scarf.

“What if Einar doesn’t return in time?” Lili asked. “What if I can’t find him by then?”

“He will.” And then, “Have you seen my scarf? The blue one with the gold fringe?”

Lili looked into her lap. “I don’t think so.”

“It was in my wardrobe. In my drawer. Did you borrow it?”

“I think I left it at the Café Axel,” Lili said. “I’m sure they have it behind the counter. I’ll go get it now.” And then, “Greta, I’m sorry. I didn’t take anything else. I didn’t touch anything else.”

Greta felt the pique bunching up in her shoulders. Something is very wrong, she told herself, and then shoved the thought aside. No, she wasn’t going to let a borrowed scarf upset her marriage. Besides, hadn’t Greta told Lili to take anything that she wanted? Didn’t Greta want, more than anything, to please Lili? “You stay here,” Greta said. “But please make sure Einar makes his train.”

The walls of the Café Axel were yellow from tobacco. Students from the Royal Academy went there for
frikadeller
and
fadøl,
which between four and six were half price. When Greta was a student she would take a table by the door and sketch, her pad propped in her lap. When a friend would walk in and ask what she was drawing, she would firmly close her pad and say, “Something for Professor Wegener.”

Greta asked the bartender about the blue scarf. “My cousin thinks she left it here,” she said.

“Who’s your cousin?” The bartender rolled his hands in a tea towel.

“A slight girl. Not as tall as me. Shy.” Greta paused. It was difficult to describe Lili, to think of her floating through the world on her own, with her fluttering white collar and her brown eyes lifting toward handsome strangers. Greta’s nostrils flared.

“Do you mean Lili?” the bartender asked.

Greta nodded.

“Nice girl. Comes in and sits over there, by the door. I’m sure you know this, but the boys fall over themselves trying to get her attention. She ’ll share a beer with one of them and then, when his head is turned, disappear. Yes, she left a scarf.”

He handed it to her, and Greta tied it around her head. There it was again, the faint smell of mint and milk.

Out on the street, the air was damp, its chill deep and salty. Already her summer tan had faded and her hands had chapped. She thought of how beautiful Pasadena was in October, with the burned-out San Gabriel Mountains plum-brown and the bougainvillea climbing chimneys.

Central Station echoed with the efficient swish of moving feet. Pigeons murmured in the timber rafters above, their chalky dung lurching down the red-oak beams. Greta bought a roll of mints from a news-candy boy, whose customers were leaving trails of paper wrappers across the floor.

Einar arrived at the ticket kiosk looking lost. His cheeks were raw from scrubbing, his hair slick with tonic. He had been running, and he wiped his brow anxiously. Only when she saw him in a crowd did Greta think about how small he was, his head barely high enough to rest on another man’s breast. That was how Greta saw him: she exaggerated his slightness; she told herself, she came to believe, that Einar, with his bony wrists and his backside small and curved, was practically a child.

Einar looked up at the pigeons, as if he were in Central Station for the first time. He shyly asked a young girl in a pinafore for the time.

Something in Greta settled down. She went to Einar and kissed him. She straightened his lapel. “Here’s your ticket,” she said. “Inside is the address of the doctor I want you to see.”

“First I want you to tell me something,” Einar said. “I want you to agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.” He was rocking on his heels.

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with you,” Greta said, swatting her hands through the air. “But I still want you to see the doctor.”

“Why?”

“Because of Lili.”

“Poor little girl,” he said.

“If you want Lili to stay—with us, I mean—then I think a doctor should know about her.” Afternoon shoppers, mostly women, were nudging by them, their net bags bulky with cheese and herring.

Greta wondered why she continued to speak of Lili as if she were a third person. It would crush Einar—she could imagine his fine bones crumpling into a heap—were she to admit, aloud at least, that Lili was no more than her husband in a dress. Really, but it was the truth.

“Why are you doing this now?” Einar asked. The red rim of his eyelids nearly made Greta turn the other way.