The Danish Girl (36 page)

“I’m not stopping her from doing that.” Greta had run into him at the entrance of the Royal Academy of Arts, under the arch. It was April, and the wind was easterly, chilled and salted from the Baltic. Greta turned up her collar against the wind. Students in sawed-off gloves were passing by. “And you, too,” he said.

Greta said nothing, the chill creeping down her spine. She could see out into Kongens Nytorv. In front of the statue of King Christian V, a boy with a blue scarf dangling to his knees was kissing a girl. The thing about Hans was this: he always reminded her of what she didn’t have; of what she’d convinced herself—when she sat in her reading chair waiting for Lili to return, her heart quickening at every false sound in the stairwell—she could go without. What was she afraid of?

“How about driving up to Helsingør with me tomorrow?” he proposed.

“I don’t think I can get away,” she said. The wind picked up, hurtling through the academy’s portico, where the walls were scraped from lorries too wide to pass. Greta and Hans went inside, into one of the side halls, where the plank floors were unvarnished and the walls painted a soft soap-green and the banister running up the staircase was white.

“When will you realize she’s no longer yours?”

“I never said she was.” And then, “I was talking about my work. It isn’t easy to take even a day off from my work.”

“How would you know?”

She felt a sudden loss, as if the cruelty of progress and time had just then grabbed from her her days as a student at the academy; as if her past had remained hers until today. “Einar’s dead,” she heard herself say.

“But Lili isn’t.” He was right. After all, there was Lili, probably this very minute sweeping the apartment, her face caught in a windowpane of sun. Lili with her pretty bony wrists and her eyes nearly black. Just yesterday she had said, “I was thinking about taking a job.”

“Don’t you see I’m a little sad?” Greta said.

“Don’t you see that I want you to tell me that?”

“Hans,” she said. “Maybe I should go.” It was then that Greta realized they were at the foot of the steps where she and Einar had first kissed, and fell in love. The white balustrades and the plank steps worn from decades of tardy students with incomplete assignments shoved up beneath their arms. The paned windows were hooked against the cold. The hall was quiet; no one was around. Where had all the students gone? Greta heard a door somewhere catch in its latch. Then everything fell silent again, and something imperceptible passed from Hans to her, and out the window, in the courtyard, in the long shadow of the academy, the boy with the blue scarf kissed his girl, again and again, and yet again.

CHAPTER Twenty-five

Lili was sitting in the rope-bottom chair, wondering if now was the right time to tell Greta. Lili could see through the window the masts of the herring boats on the canal. Behind her, Greta was painting a portrait of Lili’s back. Greta said nothing as she outlined the painting, and Lili heard only Greta’s bracelets tinkling. Smoldering in the pit of her groin was the leftover pain, so steady that more and more Lili had taught herself to ignore it; the inside of her lip was shredded from biting down. Professor Bolk had promised it would eventually go away.

She thought of the girls at the clinic. The day before Professor Bolk released Lili, they threw her a party in the garden. Two girls pulled a white cast-iron table onto the lawn, a third carried from her room a primrose in a cachepot painted with bunnies. The girls tried to spread a yellow cloth across the table, but the wind was keeping it aloft. Lili sat at the head of the table, on a cold metal chair, watching the cloth fluttering as the girls tried to tie down its corners. The sunlight poured through the yellow cloth, filling Lili’s eyes, the cachepot in her lap.

Frau Krebs gave Lili a box tied with a ribbon. “From the professor,” she said. “He wanted you to have it. He had to go up to Berlin. To St. Norbert Hospital to attend a surgery. He said to tell you goodbye.” The ribbon was tight, and Lili couldn’t pick it open, and so Frau Krebs produced an army knife from her apron and quickly cut through it, which disappointed the girls, because they wanted to weave it through Lili’s hair, which had grown beyond her shoulders during her stay.

The box was large and packed with tissue, and inside Lili found a double-oval silver frame. In one oval was a photograph of Lili lying in the tallgrass on the bank of the Elbe; the photo must have come from Greta, because Lili had never walked down to the river with Professor Bolk. And peering through the second oval was the face of a small man beneath a hat; his eyes were dark and shadowy and his skin so white it was almost glowing, and his neck looked thin in his collar.

From the rope-bottom chair Lili could see the double-portrait frame on the bookshelf. She could hear the scratch of Greta’s pencil against the canvas. Lili’s hair was parted down the middle and fell to both sides of her neck. The amber beads hung around her throat, and she could feel the cold gold of the clasp. Lili had a vision of a stocky woman with hammy legs and callused thumbs who had once worn the beads; Lili of course did not know the woman, but she could see her in rubber and canvas boots in a sphagnum field, the beads slithering down the crevice of her breasts.

It didn’t bother Lili, what she remembered and what she didn’t. She knew that most of her life, her previous life, was like a book she had read as a small child: it was both familiar and forgotten. She could recall a sphagnum field, muddy in spring and pocked with holes belonging to a family of red fox. She could recall the rusty, flat blade of a hoe slapping into the peat. And the hollow
clack!
of amber beads swinging around a throat. Lili could remember the silhouette of a tall boy with a large head walking along the ridge of the sphagnum field. She didn’t know who it was, but Lili knew that there had been a time when she was a small frightened child watching that silhouette, black and flat, on the horizon of the field. Something in her chest would swell as the silhouette moved closer, as his silhouette arm pulled on the brim of his hat; this Lili knew. She could recall telling herself that, yes, she was in love.

“You’re blushing,” Greta said from her easel.

“Am I?” Lili felt the heat in her neck, and the quick collection of sweat around the rim of her face. “I don’t know why,” she said.

But that wasn’t true. A few weeks earlier, she had been on her way to Landmandsbanken to lock away in the safe-deposit box the pearl-and-diamond brooch Greta had given her. But before heading to the bank, Lili had stopped in a basement store to buy two bristle brushes for Greta. The clerk, an old man with knuckles that were pink and soft, was reaching up to a shelf of turpentine. He was assisting a customer, a man with corkscrew hair growing past his ears. Lili couldn’t see the customer’s face, and she felt annoyed with him for having asked for the largest tin of turpentine on the highest shelf. “I’m going to fetch a pair of gloves. I’ll be right back,” the customer said to the clerk, who was still balancing on the ladder. The man turned around and passed Lili, saying, “Excuse me,
frøken
.”

As the man slipped by her, Lili pressed herself against the shelf and held her breath. His hair brushed her cheek, and she smelled a faint scent of grain. “Excuse me,” he said again.

Then Lili knew. She sank her chin into her chest, unsure of what she wanted to happen next. She worried about how she looked, her face probably raw from the wind. On the bottom shelf she stared at children’s sets of watercolors in hinged metal boxes. She knelt to check the price of a red one with a dozen dry pads of colors. She began to pull her hair around her face.

Then Henrik saw her. His hand fell to her shoulder: “Lili? Is it you?”

They stepped outside, the sack holding the tin of turpentine swinging on Henrik’s arm. He was older now, the skin around his eyes thinner and faintly blue. His hair was darker, like stained oak, without much shine. And his throat had thickened, and his wrists. He was no longer pretty; he had become a handsome man.

They went for a coffee around the corner, settling around a table at a café. Henrik told Lili about himself; about his paintings of the sea that sold better in New York than in Denmark; about the automobile accident on Long Island that nearly killed him, the spoke-wheel of his Kissel Gold Bug flying off the running board and into his forehead; about his high-cheeked fiancée from Sutton Place who left him for nothing and no one else, simply because she didn’t love him anymore.

“I forgot,” Lili said suddenly at the café. “I forgot to buy Greta’s brushes.”

He walked her back to the store, only to find it closed. Lili and Henrik were on the street, the store’s sign swaying on its iron arm. “I have some extra ones in my studio,” he said. “We can go get them if you like.” His eyes were tear-shaped, and she had forgotten how short and stubby his eyelashes were. Again there was the scent of grain, like the shuck of wheat.

“It all makes me a little worried,” Lili said, as Henrik’s face moved closer to hers.

“Stop,” Henrik said. “Please don’t worry about me.” The shop’s sign continued to rattle on its arm, and Henrik and Lili set out for his studio on the other side of the Inderhavn, where, later, after Henrik had poured her red wine and fed her strawberries and showed her his paintings of the sea, they kissed.

“You’re blushing even more,” Greta now said. She turned on a lamp and began to rinse her brushes in a jar. “Do you need a pill?” Greta asked. “Are you feeling all right?”

Lili didn’t know how to tell Greta. When they’d moved back to Copenhagen, Lili had said, “Do you really think we should go on living together? Two women in this apartment?”

“Are you worried about what people might say?” Greta said. “Is that it?”

And Lili, who wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it, answered, “No. Not at all. It’s just that . . . I was thinking of you.”

No, Lili couldn’t tell Greta about Henrik, at least not yet. After all, where would Lili begin? The kiss in the dim light of his studio? The wrap of Henrik’s arm around Lili’s shoulders as he walked her into Kongens Have at dusk just as the governesses were wheeling their prams home for the evening? His hand, which was backed with thick black hair, holding her throat, and then the soft cushion of her breast? The letter from Henrik slipped to Lili the next day via the Cantonese laundress, the folded square of paper smudged with ink professing love and regret. Yes, where would Lili begin? Only three weeks had passed since the meeting at the art supply store, but it felt to Lili as if during that time her life had begun anew. How could she tell Greta that?

“I feel like going out for a walk,” Lili said, standing.

“I’m not done yet,” Greta said. “Sit for just a few more minutes?”

“I feel like going now, before it gets dark.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“All alone?”

Lili nodded, an inexhaustible doubleness welling up inside her: she both loved and resented Greta for caring so much. It was as simple as that.

She opened the wardrobe’s closet for her coat and scarf. Greta began to tidy her paints and her brushes and her easel. Edvard IV started barking at Lili’s ankles. The last angled sunlight shot into the apartment. The horn of the Bornholm ferry called, and while she pulled on a blue felt coat with bamboo-hook buttons, Lili thought about walking to the dock and climbing the gangway and taking a seat in the cabin that looked across the bow toward that little island in the sea.

But she wouldn’t set sail, at least not yet. “I’ll be back,” she heard herself saying.

“Yes, well . . . good.” And then, “You’re sure you don’t want company?”

“Not tonight.”

“All right then.” Greta hoisted Edvard IV into her arms and stood in the center of the apartment, in a sinking pane of light, as Lili prepared to leave her. Lili felt the need to escape. Henrik had told her he’d be working late in his studio. “Look for the light,” he wrote in a note smuggled into the apartment in the folded laundry.

“Will you be gone long?”

Lili shook her head. “I’m not really sure.” She was ready, buttoned into her coat. She would have to tell Greta about Henrik, but not tonight. “Good night,” she said, feeling something, and when she opened the door she found Hans, his knuckle raised and about to knock.

He came in. Lili remained at the door. He looked tired, his tie loose. He asked them to join him for dinner. Lili said, “I was just on my way out.” Greta said that Lili had become quite busy lately. She sounded angry about it, from the way she told Hans about Lili’s new job at Fonnes bech’s department store, standing behind the perfume counter. “They hired me because I speak French,” Lili explained, still in her coat. The manager at Fonnesbech’s, a woman whose black blouse flattened out her breasts, asked Lili to speak to the customers with an accent. “Speak like a Frenchwoman. Pretend you’re someone else. The store is a stage!” Each day Lili arranged the cut-glass bottles on a silver tray and held her eyes low and quietly asked the passing shoppers if they’d like a dab to the wrist.