“An X ray takes time,” Vlademar said.
“Is it hurting him? It looks like he’s in pain.”
“Not really,” Dr. Hexler said. “There might be a small surface burn or ulceration, but not much else.”
“He’ll feel a bit sick in the stomach,” Vlademar added.
“It will do him good,” Dr. Hexler said. He was calm-faced, with stubby black lashes that beat around his eyes. He stuttered the first syllable of every sentence, but his voice was dark with authority. After all, the clinic drew the richest men in Denmark, men with bellies loose over their belts who, in their flurry to manufacture rubber shoes and mineral dyes and superphosphates and Portland cement, lost control of all that hung below their belts.
“And if it’s the devil your husband’s got in him,” Vlademar added, “I’ll zap it out.”
“That ’s the beauty of the X ray,” Hexler said. “It burns away the bad and keeps the good. It might not be an exaggeration to call it a miracle.” Both men smiled, their teeth reflected in the black glass, and Greta felt something small and regretful beneath her breast.
When it was over, Vlademar moved Einar to a room with two small windows and a folding screen on casters. He slept for an hour while Greta sketched. She was drawing Lili, asleep in the institute’s bed. If the X ray found a tumor and Dr. Hexler removed it, then what would happen? Would she never again see Lili in Einar’s face, in his lips, in the pale green veins that ran on the underside of his wrists like rivers on a map? She had contacted Dr. Hexler in the first place in order to ease Einar’s mind—or had it been to ease her own? No, she had first telephoned Hexler, from the little booth at the post office, because she knew she had to do something for Einar. Wasn’t it her responsibility to make sure he got the proper attention? If she ’d ever promised herself anything, it was that she’d never let her husband simply slip away. Not after Teddy Cross. Greta thought of the blood bursting from Einar’s nose, seeping through the lap of Lili’s dress.
Einar turned in the bed, moaning. He was pale, his skin loose on his cheek. Greta placed a warm cloth across his forehead. Part of her hoped Hexler would instruct Einar to live freely as Lili, to take a job as a salesgirl behind the glass counter at Fonnesbech’s department store. Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life. “I know you’ll be as happy as your mother and father,” a cousin from Newport Beach had written after her marriage to Einar; it was all Greta could do to keep herself from burning the cousin from her memory. But I’m not like them, she told herself as she shredded the letter into the iron stove. We’re not like them. That was long before Lili showed up, but even then Greta knew she had married a man who would take her someplace unlike anywhere she ’d ever been. It was what she had first seen in Teddy, although that turned out not to be the case with him. But Einar was different. He was strange. He almost didn’t belong to this world. And on most days, Greta felt, neither did she.
Beneath the window, Dr. Hexler’s bare rosebushes were trembling in the wind. The other window overlooked the sea. There were black clouds, as dark and full as ink in water. A fishing boat was struggling to return to harbor. But how could she remain married to a man who sometimes wanted to live as a woman? I’m not going to let something like that stop me, she told herself, her sketchbook in her lap. Greta and Einar would do what they wanted. No one could keep her from doing as she pleased. Perhaps they would have to move someplace where no one knew them. Where nothing spoke for them—no gossip, no family name, no previously established reputation. Nothing except their paintings and the little whisper of Lili’s voice.
She was ready, Greta told herself. For whom or what or where, she wasn’t sure, but she was always ready.
Einar stirred again in his bed, struggling to lift his head. The bulb overhead cast a yellow bell of light on his face, and his cheeks looked hollow. Hadn’t he looked fine just this morning? But maybe she hadn’t paid enough attention to Einar during the past few months. Maybe he had become ill in front of her eyes and she had failed to notice until now. How busy she ’d become, painting and selling her work and writing Hans in Paris about arranging a visit for Lili, about the availability of an apartment in the Marais, with two skylights, one for herself and one for Einar—what with all of that, Greta might have missed something grave fading into the face of her husband. She thought of Teddy Cross.
“Greta,” Einar said. “Am I all right?”
“You will be. Rest some more.”
“What happened?”
“It was a strong X ray. Nothing to worry about.”
Einar pressed the side of his face into the pillow. He fell asleep again. There he was, Greta’s husband. With his fine skin, and his small head with the temples that dented softly, almost like a baby’s. With his nose flaring with breath. With his smell of turpentine and talc. With the skin around his eyes red and nearly on fire.
Greta replaced the cloth across his forehead.
When Dr. Hexler finally arrived, Greta said, “At last.”
They went into the corridor. “Is he going to be all right?”
“He’ll be better tomorrow, and even better the day after.” Greta thought she saw concern in the wrinkles around Dr. Hexler’s mouth. “The X ray didn’t show anything.”
“No tumor?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what ’s wrong with him?” Greta asked.
“In terms of his physical health, nothing at all.”
“What about the bleeding?”
“It’s hard to be sure, but probably nothing more than his diet. Be sure he avoids any stony fruit and fish bones.”
“Do you really think that’s all there is to it? His diet?” Greta took one step back. “Do you really believe he’s a perfectly healthy man, Dr. Hexler?”
“His health is normal. But is he a normal man? Not at all. Your husband isn’t well.”
“What can I do?”
“Do you keep a lock on your wardrobe? To keep him out of your clothes?”
“Of course not.”
“You should do so immediately.”
“What good would that do? Besides, he has dresses of his own.”
“Get rid of them right away. You shouldn’t be encouraging this, Mrs. Wegener. If he thinks you approve of it, he might think it’s all right for him to pretend he ’s Lili.” Dr. Hexler paused. “Then he’ll have no hope. You haven’t been encouraging this, have you? I hope for his sake that you’ve never told him that you approve.”
It was what Greta feared most, that somehow Lili would be blamed on her. That she had somehow harmed her husband. The corridor’s walls were dull yellow and scratched. Next to Greta was a portrait of Dr. Hexler, the type of portrait she used to paint.
One day just a few weeks before, Greta received a telephone call from Rasmussen, saying that Lili had come into the gallery. “I of course recognized her from your paintings,” he said. “But something might have been wrong. She seemed weak, or thirsty.” Rasmussen said he had given Lili a chair, and she quickly fell asleep, one silver bubble on her lips. Soon after, Baroness Haggard came to the gallery with her Egyptian chauffeur. The baroness liked to think of herself as the most current of the aristocracy, and she couldn’t get over the irony—the “modernism,” as she put it—of coming across the paintings’ subject sleeping before the paintings themselves. The gallery filled with the soft leather sound of the baroness’s ostrich gloves applauding “the whole moment.” Five paintings were hanging, paintings done in the heat of late August in southern France, each lit as if from behind by the slow, creeping Menton sun. They showed Lili just as she now was in the chair: tentative, inward, exotic in size and poise, with her large nose and bony knees, her lids oily, her face bright. “The baroness bought all five,” Rasmussen had reported. “And Lili slept through the whole transaction. Greta, is something wrong with her? I certainly hope no
t. You aren’t keeping her out too late, are you? Take care of her, Greta. For your sake.”
“You’re really not concerned about the bleeding?” Greta asked Dr. Hexler. “Not in the least?”
“Not as much as I am about his delusion that he is a woman,” the doctor said. “Even an X ray can’t cure that. Would you like me to talk to Einar? I can tell him that he ’s injuring himself.”
“But is he?” Greta finally asked. “I mean, is he really?”
“Well, of course. I trust you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener. I trust you’d agree that if this doesn’t stop, we ’ll have to take more drastic measures. That a man like your husband can’t live much of a life. Of course Denmark is very open, but this isn’t about openness. It’s about sanity, wouldn’t you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener? Wouldn’t you agree that there ’s something not quite sane about your husband’s desires? That you and I, as responsible citizens, cannot let your husband free to roam as Lili? Not even in Copenhagen. Not even on occasion. Not even under your supervision. I trust you’ll agree with me that we should do whatever it takes to get this demon out of him, because that is what it is, don’t you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener? A demon. Mrs. Wegener, don’t you agree?”
And just then, Greta, who was thirty and a Californian and who could count at least three instances when she had nearly killed herself by accident—the second, for example, was when she performed a handstand on the teak railing of the Frederik VIII, which first carried her family to Denmark when she was ten—realized that Dr. Hexler knew very little, if anything at all. She’d been wrong, and she heard Einar moan in his bed, behind the folding screen.
Part Two
Paris, 1929
CHAPTER Thirteen
Just off the boulevard de Sebastopol, north of Les Halles Centrales, there was a little street that ran for two blocks. Over the years the street ’s name had changed. It was once known as the rue du Poivre—a pepper warehouse had thrived and failed there. When it was known as the rue des Semaines, there was a hotel for returning soldiers. But now it was known—at least colloquially, because the blue-and-white street sign was missing—as the rue de la Nuit. The buildings on the street were black, with coalsoot on the windowsills, on the abandoned gas lamps, in the trough of the pissoir, on the torn awning of the tobacco shop, which also peddled in wheat vodka and girls. The doors on the street were numbered but signless. No one aside from the tobacco shop proprietor, who had a red mustache that caught the crumbs of his morning brioche, seemed to live on the street or conduct any sort of business, legitimate or otherwise. Number 22 was a door with a bubble-glass window, beyond that a hallway that smelled like the sooty pissoir. At the top of the stairs, another door, this one dented with kicks, and beyond that a counter with a woman named, or so she said, Madame Jasmin-Carton, and her Manx cat, Sophie.
Madame Jasmin-Carton was fat but still young. A thick brown fur grew on her forearms, in which her gold chain bracelets sometimes snagged. She once told Einar that one of her girls had gone off and married a Greek prince, leaving Madame Jasmin-Carton with the Manx cat. She also reported that over the years the visitors to her salles de plaisir included ambassadors, a prime minister, and a good dozen counts.
For five francs Madame Jasmin-Carton would give Einar a key chained to a brass bulb. The key admitted him to Salle No. 3, a narrow room with an armchair covered in green wool, a wire wastepaper basket thoughtfully emptied, and two small windows with their black shades drawn. There was a bulb in the ceiling that cast light around the green chair. Behind a smell of ammonia was the trace of something salty and bitter and wet.
It was May now, two sunny, warm days for every cold one. The narrow room was always cold. In the winter Einar had sat in the green chair in his overcoat and watched the puffs of his breath. He hadn’t been coming to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s long enough to know, but he imagined that in August the dim walls—already yellow from tobacco, and streaked—would sweat on their own.
Today, Einar peeled off his jacket, which had panel pockets and a fashionable looped belt. Greta had bought the jacket for Einar, as she did nearly all his clothes; she trusted he knew nothing of how to dress for Paris. Except of course Lili’s clothes: the drop-waist dresses with the matching silk headbands, the kid gloves that pulled past the elbow with pearly clasps, the shoes with the rhinestone ankle straps. Lili bought those herself. In a marmalade jar Einar would set aside Lili’s weekly allowance, and she would spend her way through it in two or three days, her hand reaching into the jar’s narrow mouth and snatching the cen times. The Lili money: that was the entry in Einar’s budget. He would look for francs in the pockets of his gabardine slacks to give her more. If he found none, sometimes Lili would run to Greta, who with Lili only seemed to know the words “yes” and “more.”
Einar lifted one of the black shades in the little room. Behind the smudged glass was a girl in a leotard and black stockings, one foot on a bentwood chair. She was dancing, although there was no music. Peering out of another little window was the face of a man, his oily nose pressed white to the glass. His breath left a stain of fog. The girl seemed aware of Einar and the other man; before she’d yank off a bit of clothing she would look around, although not directly at the their flat-nosed faces, and dip her chin.
She peeled a pair of gloves similar to Lili’s off the fleshy pipe of her arm. The girl was not pretty: black hair electric and dry, a horse’s jaw, hips too wide and stomach too narrow. But there was something lovely in her modesty, Einar thought; in the way she neatly draped her gloves and then her leotard and finally her stockings over the back of the bentwood chair, as if she knew she would need them again.
Soon she was naked except for her shoes. She started to dance more energetically, her toes pointing, her hands held out. She threw her head back, exposing her white-blue trachea pressing against her skin.
For almost six months Einar had been visiting Madame Jasmin-Carton’s, heading out in the afternoon when Greta was meeting with a collector or one of the magazine editors at La Vie Parisienne or L’Illustration who hired her to sketch their stories. But Einar didn’t go to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s for the same reason as the other men, who would press their pocked noses against the little windows, their tongues like sea urchins mashing up against a fishmonger’s glass. He only wanted to watch the girls strip and dance, to study the curve and heft of their breasts, to watch the thighs, eerily white and tremulous like the skin on a bowl of steamed milk, flap open and closed—he could almost hear the knee bones slap together through the greasy glass window. He also liked the underside of their forearms, where their veins, hot with shame and resentment, would flow greenly; and the pad of flesh that swelled beneath the navel—that part of a woman made him think of the pillow carried by a ring bearer at a wedding. He visited Madame Jasmin-Carton’s to examine women, to see how their bodies attached limb to trunk and produced a female. How the girl with the electric black hair would hold her chin down as she distractedly cupped each custardy breast. How the girl after her, a blonde with a wiry body, walked around the half-circle black room with her fists on her hips, which were all bone. Or how the girl from last Tuesday, whom Einar had never seen before, parted her freckled thighs and flashed her genitalia. The thighs closed quickly, and then she danced angrily, the sweat pouring down her neck, while the pink image of her sex burned in Einar’s eyes, even when he shut them and tried to forget who he was or where he was; even later, when he lay down next to Greta and tried to sleep while her bedside lamp burned and her fat-tipped pencil scratched away at the leather-spined notebook that held drawing after drawing, a career’s worth, of Lili.
Einar and Greta now lived in the Marais. They’d left Copenhagen over three years before. It had been Greta’s idea. One day a letter had arrived at the Widow House, and Einar could recall Greta reading it quickly and then lifting the lid of the iron stove and dropping it in. He could recall the brief yellow light that poured from the stove as it devoured the letter. Then she told Einar that Hans
wanted them to move to Paris. “He thinks, and so do I, it would be best,” she said. “But why’d you burn his letter?” Einar asked. “Because I didn’t want Lili to see it. I don’t want her to know that Hans wants to see her again.”
They rented an apartment in a cut-stone townhouse on the rue Vieille du Temple. The apartment was on the fourth floor, the top, with skylights cut into the steep roof and windows facing the street. The rear faced the courtyard, where during the summer geraniums grew in window boxes wired to the ledges and laundry stiffened on the line. The townhouse was just down the street from the Hôtel de Rohan, with its entrance curving into the sidewalk and the two great black doors of its gate. The street was narrow but drained well in winter, and sliced through the Marais with its grand hôtels reconfigured as government offices or warehouses for dry-goods importers or simply abandoned, and its Jewish shops, where Einar and Greta would buy dried fruit and sandwiches on Sundays when everything else was closed.
The apartment had two workrooms. Einar’s, with a few landscapes of the bog perched on oversized easels. And Greta’s, with her Lili paintings, sold before they dried, and the spot on the wall, perpetually wet and thick, where she dabbed out her colors until they were just right: the brown of Lili’s hair, which turned to honey after one swim in an August sea; the purply red of the blush that clasped around the base of her throat; the silvery white of the inside of her elbows. Each workroom had a daybed covered with kilims. Sometimes at night Greta would sleep there when she was too tired to climb into the bed they shared in the little room at the back of the apartment, where there was a darkness that felt to Einar like a cocoon. In their bedroom, with the lamps turned off, it was too dark for Einar to see even his hand in front of his face, and this he liked, and he’d lie there until dawn, when the laundry pulley would squeak and one of their neighbors would get busy hanging out another load.
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