The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  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.

  “I love Lili as much as you do, more than—” but she stopped herself. “The doctor can help her.”

  “How? How can anyone but you and me help Lili?”

  “Let ’s see what the doctor says.”

  Einar tried one last time. “I don’t want to go. Lili wouldn’t want me to go.”

  Greta straightened her back, her head lifting. “But I want you to go,” she said. “I’m your wife, Einar.” She pointed him toward track 8 and sent him on his way, her hand falling on the small of his back. “Go on,” she said as he shuffled across the floor, past the news-candy boy, through the trail of paper wrappers, his body slipping into the crowd of shoppers, his head becoming one of a hundred, mostly women, who were busy with Copenhagen errands and fat with children, whose breasts were falling just as Einar’s were lifting, who would one day—Greta knew even then—look at Einar in a crowd and see only themselves.

  CHAPTER Eleven

  Einar sat by the window, the noon sun curled in his lap. The train was passing houses with red tile roofs, laundry and children waving in the yards. An old woman was opposite him, her hands around her purse handle. She offered a mint from a foil roll. “Going to Helsingør?”

  “To Rungsted,” he said.

  “Me too.” A square of open-knit lace was holding up her white hair. Her eyes were snow blue, her earlobes fatty and loose. “You have a friend there?”

  “An appointment.”

  “A medical appointment?”

  Einar nodded, and the old woman said, “I see.” She tugged on her cardigan. “At the radium institute?”

  “I believe so,” he said. “My wife made the appointment.” He opened the envelope Greta had given him. Inside was an ecru card with a note Lili had written to Greta last week: Sometimes I feel trapped. Do you ever feel that way? Is it me? Is it Copenhagen? Kisses—

  “Your card says Dr. Hexler,” the old woman said. “On the back is Dr. Hexler’s address. It’s on my way. I’ll be happy to take you. Some say he runs the best radium institute in Denmark.” The woman hugged her purse against her breasts. “Some say he can cure almost anything.”

  Einar thanked the old woman and then sat back in his seat. Through the window the sun was warm. He had considered skipping the appointment. When she told him to meet her at Central Station, a furious flash of an image ran through his head: that of Greta, her chin high above the crowd, waiting at the station for him to arrive. He thought about defying her and never showing up. He thought about her chin slowly falling as the minutes and hours passed and it became more and more evident that he would not come. She would shuffle home. She would open the door to the apartment in the Widow House and find him waiting for her at the table. Einar would say, “I don’t want to see the doctor.” And she would pause, and then say, “All right.”

  “We ’re here,” the old woman on the train said. “Get your things.”

  Red waxy cones from the yew trees were lying along Rungsted’s streets. It had rained in the morning, leaving a damp, evergreen smell. The old woman inhaled deeply. She walked quickly, her hips squirming in her skirt. “Don’t be nervous,” she said.

  “I’m not nervous.”

  “There ’s nothing wrong with being nervous.” They turned onto a street of houses behind low walls with white iron gates. An open-air motorcar drove past them, its engine snapping. The driver, a man in a leather golf hat, waved at the old woman. “Here we are,” the woman said on a corner across from the harbor, at a blue building so indistinguishable it could have been a bakery. She squeezed Einar’s arm, just under the pit. Then she hooked up her collar and headed toward the sea.

  Einar had to wait in Dr. Hexler’s examination room for almost an hour. Half the room looked like a parlor, with a carpet and a cabinet-sofa and bookshelves and a spider plant in a stand. The other half had a rubber floor, a padded table, glass jars of clear liquids, and an oversized lamp on casters.

  Dr. Hexler entered, saying, “Didn’t the nurse ask you to remove your clothes?” His chin was long and extended with a cleft deep enough to sink a slot. His hair was silver, and when he sat in the chair opposite Einar he revealed a pair of Scottish argyle socks. The woman from the train had said he was equally known for his rose garden, which, outside the clinic’s window, was cropped for the winter.

  “Trouble in the marriage?” he said. “Is that what I understand?”

  “Not exactly trouble.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Six years,” Einar said. He recalled their wedding in St. Alban’s Church in the park; the young deacon was English and, that morning, nicked by his razor. He had said, in a voice as light as the air floating through the pink-glass windows and into the laps of their wedding guests, “This is a special wedding. I see something special here. In ten years the two of you will be extraordinary people.”

  “Any children?” Dr. Hexler asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not really sure.”

  “You do conduct intercourse, is that right?” Dr. Hexler’s face was stony, and Einar could imagine him in his rose garden with that same face, discovering with grave disappointment a petal-eating mite. “There is regular copulation?”

  By now Einar had stripped down to his underpants. The pile of clothes on the chair looked sad, the white shirtsleeves reaching limply from the waist of his trousers. Dr. Hexler waved him to sit on the cabinet-sofa. Through a hose with a funnel on the end he ordered his nurse to bring in coffee and a dish of candied almonds.

  “Is there ejaculation?” he co
ntinued.

  Around Einar, bricks of indignity were being laid. Each insult, from Greta, and now from Dr. Hexler, was a red brick of hurt stacking with the others to build a wall. “Sometimes,” Einar answered.

  “Good enough.” Dr. Hexler flipped a page in his notepad. And then, “Your wife tells me you like to dress as a woman.”

  “Is that what she said?” Then the nurse entered, a woman with frizzy red hair. She set down the coffee and the almonds. “Sugar?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Wegener told me about a girl,” Dr. Hexler continued. “A girl named Lili.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Wegener?” the nurse asked. “Sugar?”

  “No. Nothing for me.” She poured the coffee for Dr. Hexler and then left.

  “Mr. Wegener, I’m a specialist. There’s virtually no trouble I haven’t treated. If you are embarrassed, please remember that I’m not.”

  Einar didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to believe Dr. Hexler would understand; that if he were to tell Hexler about the tunnel that led to Lili’s lair, that if Einar were to admit Lili wasn’t really him but someone else, Hexler would tap a pencil against his lips and say, “Ah, yes. No need to worry. I’ve seen this before.”

  Einar began, “Sometimes I feel a need to go find Lili.” He’d come to think of it as a hunger. Not like a hungry stomach an hour before dinner; it was more like when you’ve missed several meals, when you’re hollow. When you’re concerned about where your next plate of food will come from, if it will ever come. It could make Einar dizzy. “Sometimes I lose my breath when I think about her,” Einar said.

  “Where do you go to find her?” Dr. Hexler asked. His thick glasses made his eyes look as huge as pickled eggs in a jar of oil.

  “Inside me.”

  “And is she always there?”

  “Yes. Always.”

  “What would you think if I were to tell you to stop dressing as her?” Dr. Hexler leaned forward in his chair.

  “Do you think I should, Doctor? Do you think I’m hurting something by doing this?” Einar felt small in his underpants, the crack of the couch’s cushions nearly swallowing him. Now Einar wanted some coffee, but he could barely reach to the table for the urn.

  Dr. Hexler switched on the examination lamp, its silver bowl whitening with light. “Let’s have a look,” he said. He briefly pressed his hand on Einar’s shoulder as he stood.

  “Please stand,” Dr. Hexler said, wheeling over the lamp, its casters trembling. He aimed the light at Einar’s stomach. The few freckles around his navel looked garishly brown, the few black hairs reminding Einar of the dust that gathers in a corner. “Do you feel anything when I do this?” Dr. Hexler asked, his palm against Einar’s stomach.

  “No.”

  “And this?”

  “No.”

  “What about here?”

  “No.”

  “I see.” He was sitting in front of Einar on a steel stool. More than anything else Einar wanted Dr. Hexler to declare that there was nothing wrong with Lili and Einar, that their shared body was no more a malnor mality than a nailless toe, or even Dr. Hexler’s long chin with the cleft so deep it could nearly receive a key.

  “How about down there?” he said, pointing a tongue depressor at Einar’s crotch. “May I have a look?”

  When Einar lowered his underpants, Dr. Hexler’s face stopped, only his nostrils, with their pores jammed with dots of black, moving. “Appears to be all there,” he said. “You can pull them up again. You seem to be in quite good health. There ’s nothing else you want to tell me about?”

  Only the day before, Einar had crammed a rag into his underpants. Had Greta told the doctor about that as well? Einar felt cornered. “There’s something else I suppose I should mention,” he began.

  When Einar told him about the bleeding, Dr. Hexler’s shoulders pressed together into a hump. “Yes, your wife said something about this. Is there anything in the blood? Is it clotty?”

  “I don’t think so.” Another brick of indignity was mortared into place. The only relief Einar could find just then was from shutting his eyes.

  “It’s time for an X ray,” Dr. Hexler said. He seemed surprised when Einar said he’d never had one before. “It will tell us if there ’s something wrong,” Dr. Hexler said. “It may also drive this desire out of you.” From the way his eyebrows lifted above his spectacles, Einar could tell that Dr. Hexler was proud of his clinic’s technology. He went on to discuss gamma rays and natural radium emanating from radium salts. “Ionizing radiation is turning out to be the miracle cure for all sorts of things. It works on ulcers, dry scalp, and most certainly impotence,” he said. “It’s become the treatment of choice.”

  “What will it do to me?”

  “It will look inside you.” And then, as if offended, “It will treat you.”

  “Do I really need one?”

  But Dr. Hexler was already sending orders through the funnel.

  When they were ready for Einar, a skinny man with a sharp Adam’s apple led him out of Dr. Hexler’s office. This was Vlademar, Hexler’s assistant, and he led Einar to a room with tile walls and a floor raked for runoff, a drain in the corner covered with mesh. White canvas straps hung from the gurney in the middle of the room, the buckles shiny under the lights.

  “Let’s strap you in,” Vlademar said. Einar asked if it was necessary. Vlademar grunted his reply, his Adam’s apple jabbing up.

  The X-ray machine was the shape of an inverted L, its metal casing painted a muddy green. It extended over the gurney, a large gray eye of a lens pointed at the stretch of skin between Einar’s navel and his groin. There was a black glass window in the room, behind which, Einar imagined, Dr. Hexler was instructing Vlademar which round-knobbed levers to pull. It occurred to Einar, as the lights in the room dimmed and the machine coughed and then whirred, its casing vibrating tinnily, that this was only the beginning of doctors and tests. Somehow Einar knew the X rays would show nothing, and Dr. Hexler would either order more or send him to a second specialist, or a third. And Einar didn’t mind, not just then, because anything seemed worth undertaking for the sake of Greta and Lili.

  Einar had expected the X ray’s light to be gold and flecked, but it was invisible, and he felt nothing. At first Einar thought the machine wasn’t working. He nearly sat up and asked, “Is something wrong?”

  Then the X-ray machine switched into a higher gear, its whirring lifting an octave. The dented green metal casing rattled more, sounding like a baking sheet shaking dry. Then Einar wondered if he felt something on his stomach, but he wasn’t sure. He thought of a stomach alive with glow worms nested from the Bluetooth bog. He wondered if he felt a warm, fizzy feeling or if he was imagining it. He propped himself up on his elbows to look down, but there was nothing different about his stomach, gray in the dimmed room. “Please be still,” Dr. Hexler said through a funnel speaker. “Lie back down.”

  But nothing was happening, or what seemed to Einar like nothing. The machine was clattering, and a blank feeling spread across his abdomen: he couldn’t tell if he felt something hot there or not. Then he thought he felt the pinch of a burn, but when he looked again, his stomach was just the same. “Lie still, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler’s voice boomed again. “This is serious.”

  Einar couldn’t tell how long the machine had been running. Had two minutes passed, or twenty? And when would it end? The room dimmed further, now nearly black, and a yellow ring of light rippled around the gray lens. Einar was bored, and then, suddenly, sleepy. He closed his eyes, and it felt as if his body was becoming densely heavy. He thought about looking down to his stomach one last time, but his arms wouldn’t move to lift him. How had he become so tired? His head felt like a lead ball attached to his neck. In his throat Einar tasted his morning coffee.

  “Try to go to sleep, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler said. The machine roared even louder, and Einar felt something hot press against his stomach.

  Then Einar knew something was wrong. He opened his eyes just
long enough to see someone lean his forehead against the black glass window, then a second forehead pressing, smudging. If Greta were here, Einar thought dreamily, she would unstrap me and take me home. She would kick the green machine until it stopped. A crash of whipping metal shook the room, but Einar couldn’t open his eyes to see what had happened. If Greta were here, she’d yell at Hexler to turn off the damn machine. If Greta were here . . . but Einar couldn’t finish the thought because he was asleep—no, beyond sleep.

  CHAPTER Twelve

  As Dr. Hexler’s X-ray machine continued to clang, Greta pressed her forehead against the black glass window. Maybe she’d been wrong; maybe her husband didn’t need to see a doctor. She wondered if she should have listened to his protests.

  On the other side of the glass, Einar was lying strapped to the gurney. He looked beautiful, with his eyes closed, his skin a soft gray through the glass. The small mound of his nose rose up from his face. “Are you sure he ’s comfortable?” she asked Dr. Hexler.

  “For the most part.”

  She’d worried that Einar was slipping away from her. It sometimes bothered her that Einar never became jealous when a man on the street ran his eyes over her breasts; the only time he commented on it was when he was dressed as Lili, and then he’d say, “How lucky you are.”

  In her consultation with Dr. Hexler the week before, he had said there was a possibility of a tumor in the pelvis that could be causing both infertility and Einar’s confused state of masculinity. “I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve read about it. It can go undetected, with its only manifestations being odd behavior.” Part of her wanted the theory to make sense. Part of her wanted to believe that a little scalpel curved like a scythe could slice free the tumor, its rind as blood-orange and tight as a persimmon, and Einar would return to their marriage.

  On the other side of the window there was a crash of metal, but Dr. Hexler said, “Everything’s fine.” Einar was writhing on the gurney, his legs pressing against the straps. They were so taut with tension that Greta thought the straps might snap and Einar’s body would fling itself across the room. “When will you be finished?” she asked Hexler. “Are you sure everything is going all right?” She fingered the ends of her hair, thinking at once how she hated its coarseness and that if anything were ever to happen to Einar, she wouldn’t know what to do.