The Danish Girl (24 page)

“I don’t think you understand.”

“You’re not the first person this has happened to,” Dr. McBride said.

“But I’m not a homosexual. That isn’t my problem. There’s another person living inside me,” Einar said, rising from the chair. “A girl named Lili.”

“And it breaks my heart,” Dr. McBride continued, “when I have to tell men like you that there’s nothing I can do for them. As a black Irishman, I find it very sad.” He sipped from his waterglass, his lips clamping on the rim. Then he stood, moving around to the front of his desk. His hand moved to Einar’s shoulder, nudged him to the door. “My only advice is that you restrain yourself. You’re going to have to always fight your desires. Ignore them, Mr. Wegener. If you don’t . . . well, then, you’ll always be alone.”

Einar met Carlisle at the café. He knew Dr. McBride was wrong. Not so long ago Einar might have believed the doctor and sulked away in pity for himself. But Einar told Carlisle that it had been a waste of time. “Nobody is going to understand me,” he said. “I don’t see the point of any of this.”

“But that’s not true,” Carlisle protested. “We need to find you the right doctor. That ’s all. So Dr. McBride doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what? That doesn’t mean you should give up.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re unhappy.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because of Greta.”

A few days later, Carlisle drove Einar to the Etablissement Hydro thérapique, a hospital known for its care of nervous maladies. The hospital was out toward Meudon, hidden from the road behind a grove of sycamore trees. There was an attendant at the gate, who pushed his face into the car and asked whom they were visiting. “Dr. Christophe Mai,” Carlisle said. The attendant eyed them, biting his lip. He passed them a clipboard to sign.

The hospital was a new building, a deep box of cement and glass. It was shaded by more sycamores, and plane trees scarred in the trunk. Steel grates covered the windows on the ground floor, their padlocks bright in the sun.

They had to sign another sheet of paper at the front entrance, and a third when they finally arrived at Dr. Mai’s office. A nurse, a woman with white curls, told them to wait in a little room that, once she closed the door behind her, felt securely sealed.

“I didn’t tell Greta where we were going today,” Carlisle said. A few days earlier Einar had overheard them talking about him. “He doesn’t need to see a psychiatrist,” she had said, her voice traveling via the crack beneath the door. “Besides, I think I know someone who can help him. And he isn’t a psychiatrist. This is someone who can really do something.” Then her voice fell, and the rest Einar failed to hear.

Dr. Mai’s office was brown and smelled of cigarettes. Einar could hear feet shuffling outside in the hallway. There was something so unpleasant about the hospital that a little sensation rose up inside him, telling him that this was where he belonged. In the brown carpeting, there were tracks from carts, and Einar began to imagine himself strapped to a cart that would wheel him into the deepest part of the hospital, from which he would never return.

“Do you really think Dr. Mai can help me?”

“I hope so, but we’ll have to see.” Carlisle was wearing a seersucker blazer and crisply pleated trousers and a yellow tie. Einar admired his optimism, the way he sat expectantly in his summer clothes. “We’ve got to at least try.”

He knew Carlisle was right. He couldn’t live much longer like this. Much of the muscle on his body had disappeared over the past six months; Dr. McBride had weighed him, and when the little black weights slid over to the left, Einar realized he didn’t weigh much more than when he was a boy. Einar had begun to notice a peculiar color in his skin: a gray-blue like the sky at dawn, as if his blood were somehow running at a slower pace. And a weakness of breath that caused his eyesight to quit whenever he ran more than a few paces, or whenever a sharp sudden noise, like the
crack!
of a motorcar, surprised him. And the bleeding, which Einar both dreaded and welcomed. When he felt the first spurt of it on his lip or between his legs, he would become dizzy. No one would tell him this, but Einar knew it was because he was female inside. He’d read about it: the buried female organs of the hermaphrodite hemorrhaging irregularly, as if in protest.

Dr. Mai turned out to be a pleasant man. His hair was dark and he was wearing a yellow tie that was oddly similar to Carlisle ’s. They both laughed about it, and then Dr. Mai led Einar into the examining room.

The room was tiled, with a window that looked through an iron grate into the park of sycamores and plane trees. Dr. Mai dragged back a heavy green curtain to reveal his examining table. “Please sit down,” he said, his hand falling on the table’s pad. “Tell me why you’re here.”

He was leaning against a cabinet with glass doors. He was holding a clipboard to his chest, and he nodded as he listened to Einar explain Lili. Once or twice Dr. Mai adjusted the knot of his tie. Occasionally he wrote something down.

“I don’t really know what kind of help I’m looking for,” Einar was saying. “I don’t think I can keep living like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know who I really am.”

With that, Dr. Mai ended the interview. He excused himself, leaving Einar on the padded table, his feet swaying. Outside in the park, a nurse was walking a young man in striped pajamas, his bathrobe hanging open. The man had a beard, and there was a frailty to his step, as if the nurse, whose apron ran to her feet, were the only thing propping him up.

When Dr. Mai returned he said, “Thank you for visiting me.” He shook Einar’s hand and led him to Carlisle.

On the drive back into Paris, they said nothing for a long time. Einar watched Carlisle’s hand on the gearshift, and Carlisle looked down the road. Finally he said, “The doctor wants to admit you to the hospital.”

“For what?”

“He suspects schizophrenia.”

“But that’s impossible,” Einar said. He looked over to Carlisle, who kept his eyes on the traffic. In front of them was a truck, and each time it hit a rut, gravel would spill from its bed onto the Spider’s hood. “How could I be schizophrenic?” Einar said again.

“He wanted me to sign the papers to admit you right then.”

“But that’s not right. I’m not schizophrenic.”

“I told him it wasn’t that urgent.”

“But you don’t think I’m schizophrenic, do you? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, I don’t. But when you explain it . . . when you explain Lili, it does sound like you think there are two people. Two separate people.”

“Because there are.” It was evening, and the traffic had slowed because a German shepherd had been hit; it was lying in the middle of the road, and each car had to pick its way around it. The dog was dead, but it appeared uninjured, its head resting up on the granite curb of the
rond-point.

“Do you think Greta thinks that? Do you think she believes I’m insane?”

“Not at all,” Carlisle said. “She’s the one who believes in Lili the most.”

They passed the German shepherd, and the traffic opened up. “Should I listen to Dr. Mai? Do you think maybe I should stay with him for a little while?”

“You’ll have to think about it,” he said. Carlisle’s hand was holding the black ball of the gearshift, and Einar felt there was something Carlisle wanted to say. With the wind, and the coughing exhaust of auto-buses, it was difficult to talk. The city traffic was heavy, and Einar looked to Carlisle, as if to urge him to say what he wanted. Tell me what you’re thinking, Einar wanted to say, but didn’t. Something was hanging between them, and then they were in the Marais, in front of the apartment, and the something passed, gone as the Spider’s motor went idle. Carlisle said, “Don’t tell her where we’ve been.”

Tired, Einar went to bed after supper, and Greta joined him even before he nodded off.

“So early for you,” he said.

“I’m tired tonight. I’ve worked through the past few nights. Delivered half a dozen sketches this week. To say nothing of Lili’s portrait on the mudflat.” And then, “You did a lovely job with the background. I couldn’t be happier with it. Hans said the same. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”

He felt her at his side, her long body warm beneath the summer sheet. Her knee was touching his leg, her hand curled at his chest. It was as much as they touched each other now, but somehow it seemed even more intimate than those nights early in their marriage when she would tug off his tie and loosen his belt: the curled hand like a little animal nuzzling his chest; the knee pressing reassuredly; the damp heat of her breath; her hair like a vine growing across his throat. “Do you think I’m going insane?” he said.

She sat up. “Insane? Who told you that?”

“No one. But do you?”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Who’s been telling you that? Did Carlisle say something to you?”

“No. It’s just that I sometimes don’t know what’s going on with me.”

“But that’s not true,” she said. “We know exactly what’s going on with you. Inside of you lives Lili. In your soul is a pretty young lady named Lili. It’s as simple as that. It has nothing to do with being crazy.”

“I was just wondering what you thought of me.”

“I think you’re the bravest man I know,” she said. “Now go to sleep.” And her fist curled tighter, and the strand of hair crept across his throat, and her knee pulled away.

A week went by. He spent a day cleaning out his studio, rolling up his old canvases and storing them in the corner, glad to get them out of the way. He enjoyed painting Greta’s backgrounds, but he didn’t miss creating something on his own. Sometimes, when he thought about his abandoned career, he felt as if he were at last finished with a tedious chore. And when he thought of his many paintings—so many dark bogs, so many stormy heaths—he felt nothing. The thought of coming up with a new idea exhausted him, the thought of conjuring and then sketching a new scene. It was someone else who had done all those little landscapes, he told himself. What was it he used to tell his students at the Royal Academy? If you can live without painting, then go right ahead. It’s a much simpler life.

Einar was sleeping late and rising tired. Each morning he’d promise himself that he would live the day as Einar, but when he went to the wardrobe to dress, it was like coming across the belongings of an ancestor in the attic.

More often than not, Lili would emerge from the bedroom and sit on the stool in Greta’s studio. Her shoulders would hunch and she would play with her shawl in her lap; or she’d turn her back on Greta, who was painting another portrait, and look out the window, down the street, for Hans or Carlisle.

Carlisle next suggested Dr. Buson, a junior member of a psychiatric clinic in Auteuil. “How did you hear of him?” Einar asked Carlisle, who in six weeks had settled into Paris faster than Einar had in three years. Already he was into his second box of calling cards, and held weekend invitations to Versailles and St-Malo. There was a tailor on the rue de la Paix who knew from memory Carlisle’s shirt size.

He was driving Einar to Dr. Buson’s clinic, and Einar could feel the heat of the engine through the metal floor.

“Hans gave me his name,” Carlisle said.

“Hans?”

“Yes. I called him up. Told him a friend of mine needed to see a doctor. I didn’t say who.”

“But what if he—”

“He won’t,” Carlisle said. And then, “So what if he does? He’s your oldest friend, isn’t he?” Now, with his blond hair blowing around his face, Carlisle could have been no one in the world but Greta’s twin; he pushed his hair over his ears.

“Hans asked about you,” Carlisle continued. “He said he knows something’s wrong. He said he saw you one day walking along the quai du Louvre, heading down to the Seine, and he almost didn’t recognize you.”

Carlisle’s hand was fiddling with the wiper gauge, and Einar kept expecting it to fall from the little knob to his knee again. “He told me you walked right by him,” Carlisle said. “Said he called your name but you just walked by.”

It sounded impossible. “By Hans?” Einar said, and in the reflection of the car’s window Einar could see the vaguest outline of himself, as if he were just barely there. He heard Carlisle suggest, “Maybe you should tell him. He’d understand.”

Dr. Buson, who was about Einar’s age, was of Genevois origin. He had black hair that stood up at the crown, and his face was thin in the cheeks, his nose long. He had a way of turning his head to the left when he spoke, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he would make his next statement a question. Buson met Einar and Carlisle in a little white room with a reclining chair over which hung the silver bowl of an examination lamp. There was a cart on casters, its top covered with a green cloth. Lying on the cloth in a fan shape were a dozen scissors, each a different size. On the wall was a pull-down chart of the human brain.

This time Carlisle joined Einar in the interview. For some reason, Carlisle made Einar feel small, as if Carlisle were Einar’s father and would both answer and ask the questions. Next to him, Einar hardly felt capable of speaking. The window looked into a courtyard, which was dark with rain, and Einar watched a couple of nurses trot across the paving stones.

Dr. Buson was explaining how he treated people with confused states of identity. “Usually they want some sense of peace in their lives,” he was saying. “And that means choosing.”

Carlisle was taking notes, and Einar suddenly found it remarkable that he could travel from California and take Einar on as if he were his most important project. He didn’t have to do it, Einar knew. Carlisle didn’t have to try to understand. Outside in the courtyard, a nurse slipped on the wet stones, and when her colleague pulled her up, the nurse turned over her hand to reveal a bloody palm.

“In some ways I think people who come to see me are rather lucky,” Dr. Buson was saying. He was sitting on a steel stool that could be raised and lowered with a spin. He was wearing black trousers beneath his laboratory coat, and black silk socks. “They’re lucky because I say to them, ‘Who do you want to be?’ And they get to choose. It isn’t easy. But wouldn’t we all want to have someone ask us who’d we like to be? Maybe just a little?”