The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  With Edvard IV in his lap, Einar thought about this. His shirt was wrinkled, and next to him on the table was a plate of pears. “Do you think I can?” he said.

  She led him into her studio, showed him the half-finished portrait. “I think there should be a kettle-hole lake on the horizon,” she said.

  Einar stared at the half-finished painting. He looked at it blankly, as if he didn’t recognize the girl. Then, slowly, an understanding filled his eyes, the lids pulling back, his brow smoothing out. “A few things are missing,” he said. “Yes, there should be a lake, and also a single willow growing from the bank of a stream. And perhaps a farmhouse. Too far off in the horizon to be sure what it is, just a pale brown blur of something. But there ’d probably be a farmhouse.”

  He stayed up most of the night with the painting, smudging his shirt and his pants. Greta was happy to see him at work again, and she began to think of other paintings she could share with Einar. Even if it meant fewer afternoons with Lili, she wanted Einar to have his work. As she prepared for bed she heard him in her studio, the clink of the glass paint bottles. She couldn’t wait to call Hans in the morning to tell him that Einar was painting again. That she ’d found a way to produce even more Lili paintings. “You’ll never believe who’s helping me out,” she’d say. The memory of Hans at the Gare du Nord over three years ago revisited her. It was when she and Einar first arrived in Paris, with only a handful of addresses in their notebooks. Hans was waiting at the train station, his camel hair coat a still beige column in the crowd of black wool. “You’ll be fine,” he assured Greta, kissing her cheek. He clasped both his hands around Einar’s neck, kissing his forehead. Hans chauffeured them to a hotel on the left bank a few blocks from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Then he kissed them goodbye. Greta remembered feeling crushed, that Hans would meet them with open arms and then disappear so quickly. She watched his Borreby head slip through the lobby door. Einar must have felt the same disappointment, or worse. “Do you suppose Hans didn’t want us to come?” he said. Greta was wondering that herself, but she reminded Einar how busy Hans was. In truth, she had sensed a grave reluctance from Hans, in his stance as straight and steely as one of the columns supporting the station’s roof.

  Einar said, “Do you suppose we’re too Danish for his taste? Too provincial?” And Greta, who looked at her husband with his bog-brown eyes and his shaking fingers and Edvard IV in his arms, replied, “It’s him, not us.”

  At the hotel they let two rooms, trimmed in red, one with a curtained alcove. The hotel’s factotum declared proudly that Oscar Wilde had lived his final weeks there. “He passed on in the alcove,” the proprietress reported with a dip of her chin.

  Greta took little note of this bit of history. It seemed too depressing a fact for her to press onto Einar. They lived in the two rooms for several months while they hunted for an apartment. After only a few days the hotel became dreary, with its curling wallpaper and rust stain bleeding in the sink. But Einar insisted that he pay for their lodging, which ruled out the nicer apartments available at the Hôtel du Rhin or the Edouard VII. “There’s really no need to suffer,” Greta had said, proposing more luxurious surroundings, and perhaps a view and decent maid service for evening coffee. “Are you really suffering?” Einar replied, causing Greta to drop the subject. She sensed the unease between them that happened when they traveled.

  There was a little stove in the corner on which she would boil water for their coffee. They took to sleeping in the alcove, in the bed that sagged in the middle and placed them close to the wall that permitted every squeal from the next room to pass through. Einar set up his easel in the room with the alcove; Greta took the second room, feeling a sense of relief when its door latch caught and she was alone. The trouble was, she couldn’t paint alone. She needed Lili.

  They had been in Paris only a month when Greta said, “I want to celebrate our arrival with Lili.” Greta could see the terror in her husband ’s eyes, the way his pupils expanded and shrank. Lili hadn’t yet appeared in Paris. It was one of the reasons they had left Copenhagen. After the visit to Dr. Hexler’s, a letter had arrived from him. Greta had opened the letter and read Hexler’s threat of reporting Einar and Lili to the health authorities. “He could become a danger to society.” Greta imagined Dr. Hexler dictating the letter to the red-haired nurse through the hose with the funnel on the end. The shock of the letter—that anyone besides herself should try to control Lili’s future—upset her deeply, and she wasn’t thinking properly when Einar, home from a visit with Anna, entered the apartment. Before she could stop herself, Greta quickly dropped the letter into the iron stove. “Hans has written,” she said. “He thinks we should move to Paris.” And then, “We’re going to move at once.”

  Lili arrived in Paris by knocking on the door of Greta’s hotel room. Lili’s hair was longer now, a darker brown with the sheen of good furniture, combs studded with baby pearls holding it back. She was wearing a dress Greta had never seen before. It was purple silk with a scoop-neck collar that dipped toward a crack of cleavage. “You bought a new dress?” Greta asked. For some reason this made Lili blush, a cloud of red appearing on her throat and her chest. Greta was curious about the cleavage Einar had managed to squeeze together. Was his chest doughy enough to push into a beginner’s corset and offer up as a pair of breasts?

  They went to the Palais Garnier to hear Faust. Immediately Greta became aware of the men noticing Lili as she floated up the gold-railed stairs. “That man with the black hair is looking at you. If we’re not careful, he might come over.”

  Their seats were next to a couple who had just returned from California. “Twelve months in Los Angeles,” the man said. “My wife had to pry me away.” He mentioned visiting Pasadena on New Year’s Day to watch the Tournament of Roses. “Even the horses’ manes were braided with flowers,” the wife reported. Then the opera began and Greta sat back. She found it difficult to concentrate on Dr. Faust, who was regretful in his dark laboratory, while she had Lili on her right and on her left a man who had recently walked by her family home off Orange Grove Boulevard. Her leg jiggled; she mindlessly rolled the bone in her wrist. She knew something had begun to unfurl tonight. What was it Carlisle used to say about her? No stopping good old Greta once she gets going. No one can stop her at all.

  At the intermission, both Lili and the man’s wife excused themselves. The man, who was middle-aged and wore a beard, leaned into Greta and asked, “Is there any way I could see your cousin later on?”

  But Greta denied the man at the Opéra Lili. Just as she would later deny herself her own longings—denied because she hardly recognized them. While she and Einar were still at the Oscar Wilde hotel, Hans would pick Greta up in the dark lobby and walk her to his office on the rue de Rivoli. Hans had agreed to talk with her about her career. But at some point when they were crossing the Pont Neuf, Hans’s hand would fall to the small of her back and he would say, “I suppose I don’t have to tell you how pretty you are.”

  The first time this occurred she swatted his hand away, believing it must have fallen there by accident. Then it happened again, a week later. And again. The fourth time, Greta told herself that she couldn’t allow him to touch her like this. How could she ever face Einar again? she would think when Hans’s hand caressed her spine as they crossed the river. Still walking, Greta felt nothing, inside or out, only the hand on her back. It occurred to her that her husband hadn’t touched her in a very long time.

  They continued on to his office, into the windowless study behind the front room with the file cabinets where Hans looked up names for Greta to contact. He opened a folder and ran his finger down a list of patrons and said, “You should write him . . . and him . . . but be sure to avoid him.” Standing next to Hans, Greta thought she felt a finger on her arm, but that was impossible because the file was open in both his hands. She thought she felt his touch again on the small of her back; but no, he hadn’t set down the file.

  “Do you suppose w
e’ll be all right here?” she said.

  A smile nearly cracked Hans’s lips. “What do you mean?”

  “Einar and me? In Paris? Do you suppose we can get along here just fine?”

  His smile disappeared. “Yes, of course. You have each other.” And then, “But don’t forget about me.” His face was leaning almost imperceptibly toward her. There was something between them—not the file, but something else. They said nothing.

  But Hans can’t be for me, Greta thought. If anyone should have Hans, it should be Lili. Even though it was cool in the back office she suddenly felt warm and sticky, as if a moist film of dirt covered her. Had she done anything irreversibly wrong?

  “I’d like you to become my dealer,” she said. “I’d like you to handle my paintings.”

  “But I only deal in old masters and nineteenth-century pictures.”

  “Maybe it’s time you took on a modern painter.”

  “But that wouldn’t make any sense.” And then, “Listen, Greta, there ’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He moved closer to her, the folder still in his hand. The light in the room was gray, and Hans looked like an adolescent not yet used to his new, larger body.

  “Don’t say another word until you agree to take me on.” She didn’t want to, but she moved to the opposite side of the desk. In between Greta and Hans now lay a tabletop of paperwork. All at once she wanted to both let him hold her and to run back to the hotel room, across the Pont Neuf, where Einar was probably waiting, shivering by the stove.

  “Let me put it this way,” she said. “I’m giving you the chance to take me on right now. If you decide not to, I’m sure you’ll regret it one day.” She was rubbing at the shallow scar in her cheek.

  “How will I regret it?”

  “You’ll regret it because one day you’ll say to yourself, I could have had her. That Greta Wegener could have been mine.”

  “But I’m not turning you away,” Hans said. “Don’t you understand?”

  But Greta did understand. Or at least she understood Hans’s intentions. What she couldn’t figure out was the hummingbird patter in her chest—why wasn’t she scorning Hans for making such an untoward advance? Why wasn’t she reminding him how much this would hurt Einar? Why couldn’t she even bring herself to say his name?

  “Is it a deal?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to represent me? Or am I going to have to leave now?”

  “Greta, be reasonable.”

  “I think I am. This is the most reasonable response I can think of.”

  They both stood leaning on their opposite ends of the desk. The stacks of documents were held down by bronze paperweights shaped like frogs. Everywhere she read his name, on the papers, over and over. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. It reminded her of when she was little and she had practiced her penmanship: Greta Greta Greta.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Represent you.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She thanked him and gathered her things. She offered her hand. “I suppose a handshake is in order,” she said. He took her hand, and there it was, her hand lost in the mitt of his, nearly trapped; but then he released her.

  “Bring me some paintings next week,” he said.

  “Next week,” and Greta stepped into the front room of Hans’s office, where the sunlight and the city noise poured through the windows, and the typewriter of a clerk clacked and clacked.

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  The smell of blood woke Einar. He got out of bed, careful not to disturb Greta. She looked uneasy, her face caught in a bad dream. The blood was trickling down his inner thigh, one slow hot line. A bubble of blood was caught in his nostril. He had woken as Lili.

  In the spare bedroom, dawn fell on the pickled-ash wardrobe. Greta had given the top section to Lili. The bottom drawers were still Greta’s, shut with a hair lock. In the mirror, Lili saw her bloody nose, her nightshirt with the single stain of blood. She was unlike Greta. The blood never worried her, it came and went, and Lili would take to bed with it like a cold. To her, it was part of all this, she thought as she dressed—shimmying the skirt over her hips, brushing the static out of her hair. It was June, and a month had passed since Einar had decided, on the bench in the park, that his and Lili’s lives would have to part. Lili felt the threat of that, as if time were no longer endless.

  At the Marché Buci the morning dew was drying. There were alleys and alleys of vendors, each with a stall protected by a zinc roof. The vendors were laying out their tables of cracked porcelain, their bureaus with the missing handles, their racks of clothes. One woman sold only ivory dice. A man had a collection of ballet slippers which he had a hard time parting with. There was a woman who sold fine skirts and blouses. She was in her forties, with short gray hair and chipped front teeth. Her name was Madame Le Bon, born in Algeria. Over the years she had come to know Lili’s taste, and she would hunt the death sales in Passy for the felt skirts Lili liked, and the white blouses with appliqué in the collar. Madame Le Bon knew Lili’s shoe size, knew she wouldn’t wear pairs that exposed her nailless toe. She bought camisoles for Lili that were small in the bust, and old-fashioned whalebone corsets that helped with that problem. She knew Lili liked crystal drop earrings and, for the winter, a rabbit-fur muff.

  Lili was thumbing through Madame Le Bon’s rack when she noticed a young man with a high forehead looking at the picture books in the next stall. His topcoat was hanging over his arm, a canvas suitcase at his feet. He was standing at an odd angle, as if all his weight were on one foot. He seemed uninterested in the picture books, flipping through their pages and then looking at up Lili. Twice their eyes met; the second time he smiled.

  Lili turned her back and held a plaid skirt up to her waist. “That’s a nice one,” Madame Le Bon said from her chair. She had created a little changing room by hanging bedsheets to a laundry line. “Try it on,” she said, holding back the sheet.

  Inside the sun was bright through the sheets. The skirt fit well, and outside Lili heard a foreigner’s voice ask Madame Le Bon if she sold men’s clothes.

  “Nothing for you, I’m afraid,” she said. “Only for your wife.”

  The foreigner laughed. Lili then heard hangers being pushed along the pipe of a rack.

  When she emerged from the stall, the man was folding and unfolding cardigans on a table. He fingered the pearly buttons and checked the cuffs for fray. “You have nice things,” he said, smiling first at Madame Le Bon and then at Lili. His blue eyes were big on his face; in the hollow of each cheek were one or two pocks. He was tall, and on the breeze was his aftershave, and Lili, closing her eyes, could imagine him pouring the yellow tonic into the cup of his hand and then slapping his throat. It was as if she already knew him.

  Madame Le Bon logged the plaid skirt into her register. The man set down the cardigan and approached Lili with a gentle limp. “Excuse me,” he said in slow French. “Mademoiselle.” He shuffled toward Lili. “I was just noticing—”

  But Lili didn’t want to talk to him; not just yet. She took the sack with the skirt, quickly thanked Madame Le Bon, and ducked behind the changing stall and into the next booth, where a bald man sold damaged china dolls.

  When Lili got home Greta was up, moving around the apartment with a damp rag. Carlisle was arriving this morning for a summer visit. The apartment needed cleaning, feathery puffs of dust blowing about in the corners. Greta refused to hire a maid. “I don’t need one,” she ’d say, swatting dust with her gloves. “I’m not the type of woman who has a maid.” But to tell the truth, she was.

  “He ’ll be here within the hour,” Greta said. She was wearing a brown wool dress that clung to her in a pretty way. “Are you going to stay dressed as Lili?” she asked.

  “I thought I might.”

  “But I don’t think he should meet Lili right away. Not first. Not before Einar.”

  Greta was right, and yet part of Ein
ar wanted Lili to be the first to meet Carlisle, as if she were his better half. He hung the plaid skirt in the wardrobe and undressed, down to the square-cut silk underwear. The silk was an oyster gray. It was soft; it made the tiniest swish when he walked. He didn’t want to replace the silk underwear with the wool shorts and undershirt that itched, that trapped the heat and set him on fire on a warm day. He didn’t want Lili to be completely folded away in the wardrobe. He hated tucking her away. When he shut his eyes, Einar saw only her; he couldn’t come up with a picture of himself.

  He pulled on his trousers. Then he left the apartment. “Where are you going?” Greta asked. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  The sky was cloudless. Long, cool shadows cast themselves from the buildings onto the street. Trash was wet in the gutter. Einar felt lonely, and he wondered if anybody in the world would ever know him. A wind hurled up the street, and it felt as if it were passing through his ribs.

  He walked to the short street north of Les Halles. Not very many people were around, only the tobacco shop owner leaning in his door frame, a fat woman waiting for an autobus, a man walking quickly in a suit too tight for him, his bowler hat pulled down.

  In the hallway of number 22 there was a wine-stained scarf lying on the stairs that led to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s door. “Early today,” she said, stroking her cat. She passed Einar the key to Salle No. 3. It had become his regular room. The armchair covered in green wool. The wire wastepaper basket always emptied—a weak illusion that no one else ever used the room. And the two windows on opposite ends of the room with their black shades drawn. Einar had always lifted the shade of the window on the right. Pulled its taut cord and let the shade roll up with a snap. He couldn’t count the number of times he had sat in the green armchair with his breath fogging on the window while a girl, genitalia exposed, danced on the other side. It had become a habit, almost daily, like swimming at the bains, or his walk to the corner of the rue Etienne-Marcel to fetch the mail at the Hôtel des Postes, most of which was for Greta. And Madame Jasmin-Carton never charged him less than five francs, never offered a discount, although he wasn’t sure he would have wanted one. She did, however, let him stay in Salle No. 3 as long as he wanted; sometimes he’d sit in the green wool chair for half a day. He had slept there. Once he brought a baguette and an apple and some Gruyère and ate his lunch while a woman with a belly that hung like a sandbag danced around a rocking horse.