But the other window shade Einar never touched. That was because he knew what was in there. He somehow knew that once he had pulled that shade he would never return to the window on the right.
Today, however, it felt as if there was only one window in Salle No. 3, the little black one on the left. And so he pulled on the left window’s shade. It snapped open, and Einar peered through.
On the other side was a room painted black, with a wood-plank floor separating at the seam. There was a little box, also painted black, on which a young man had planted one foot. His legs were hairy, making Einar think of Madame Jasmin-Carton’s arms. He was an average-sized boy, a bit soft in the middle and smooth-chested. His tongue was hanging from his mouth and his hands were on his hips. He was rolling them, which caused his half-hard penis to flop about with the weight of a smelt on a dock. From his smile, Einar could tell the boy was in love with himself.
He didn’t know how long he watched the boy bouncing on the balls of his feet, his penis growing and shrinking like a lever going up and down. Einar didn’t remember falling to his knees and pushing his nose to the glass, but that was how he found himself. He didn’t recall unbuckling his pants, but they were bunched at his ankles. He didn’t know when he had removed his coat and tie and his shirt, but there they were, in a pile on the green armchair.
There were other windows looking into the boy’s room. And in one, just opposite Einar, was a man with a little grin on his face. Einar couldn’t make out much other than the grin, which seemed lit by a lamp of its own. He seemed to like the boy as much as Einar did, from the way that grin burned. But after a few minutes of staring across the room to the face of the man, Einar began to see his eyes. They were blue, he thought, and seemed focused not on the boy, who now had his penis in his hand and his other hand fondling a nipple the size of a centime, but on Einar. The man peeled his lips farther apart, and the grin seemed to burn even brighter.
Einar stepped out of his trousers, dropped them on the green armchair. He was part Einar, part Lili. A man in Lili’s oyster-gray underpants and a matching camisole that hung delicately from her shoulders. Einar could see a faint reflection of himself in the window’s glass. For some reason, he didn’t feel garish. He felt—it was the first time he had ever used this word to describe Lili—pretty. Lili now felt relaxed: her bare white shoulders reflecting in the glass, the pretty little cove at the base of her throat. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to be staring at her in her intimate underthings, the straps of the camisole across her shoulders. As if something inside Einar had snapped, like the canvas window shade, and told him, more plainly than ever before, that this was who he was: Einar was a guise. Peel away the trousers and the striped necktie, which Greta had given him on his last birthday, and only Lili was left. He knew this; he had known this. Einar had eleven months. His year was slipping away. It was warm in the little room, and in the window’s reflection he saw Lili’s forehead damp with perspiration, glowing like a half-moon.
The dancer continued, seemingly unaware of Einar and the other man. The boy’s eyes were closed, his hips rocking, a creep of black hair showing in the pits of his arms. The man across the room continued to stare, his smile widening even further. The light somehow shifted, and Einar could see his eyes nearly turn gold.
Standing at the window, Einar began to fondle his breasts through the camisole. His nipples were hard, aching. As he rubbed them, an underwater feeling rippled through Einar. His knees were becoming weak, damp at the back. Einar stood back from the window to give the man a full view, to let him see his hips wrapped in the silk, let him see his legs, which were as smooth as the boy’s were hairy. Einar wanted the man to see Lili’s body. Einar stepped back far enough so the man could see all of him, except from that position in Salle No. 3 Einar couldn’t see the man. Not that it mattered. And so for several minutes Einar rubbed himself in the window, imitating the motions he ’d seen the girls perform over the months through the window on the right.
When Einar moved closer to the window and peered across the room, both the boy and the man were gone. Suddenly Einar became embarrassed. How had he come to this—showing off his odd-shaped body, the camisole cupping his soft chest, his inner thighs pale and soft, silvery under the light, to a couple of strangers? He sat in the armchair on his pile of clothes, pulling his knees to his chest.
Then there was a light knock on the door, two taps. Then again.
“Yes?” Einar said.
“It’s me.” It was a man’s voice.
Einar said nothing, stayed still in the armchair. This was what he wanted more than anything in the world, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Then another two taps on the door. His mouth was dry; his heart was climbing his throat. Einar wanted the man to know that he was welcome. Silent in the armchair, Einar wanted the man to know it was all right.
But nothing happened, and Einar thought the chance for . . . for something had fallen away.
Then the man quickly pushed himself through the door. He stood with his back pressed against it, his chest filling with breath. He was about Einar’s age, but white at the temples, whiskery. He had dark skin, a large nose. He was wearing a black overcoat, buttoned to the throat. Around him was a faint scent of salt. Einar remained seated, the man a foot or two away. He nodded. Einar brought his hand to his brow.
The man smiled. His teeth looked sharp, angled. He seemed to have more teeth than most men. The lower half of his face seemed to be all teeth. “You’re very pretty,” the man said.
Einar sank back in the chair. The man seemed to like what he saw. He unbuttoned his overcoat, split it open. Beneath he was wearing a businessman’s suit with a wide stripe in the wool. With the knot of his tie diamond-shaped, he was well groomed except for one thing: his fly was open and through it poked the eye of his penis.
He stepped toward Einar. Then another step. The head of his penis was peeking from beyond the foreskin. It smelled salty, and Einar began to think of the beaches of Jutland, of Skagen, where his mother was laid to sea in the fishing net picked clean of gills, and then the man’s penis was only inches from Einar’s mouth, and Einar closed his eyes. A blur of images ran through his head: the bay-inn with the seaweed roof, the bricks of peat stacked in the fields, the white boulder speckled with mica, Hans lifting Einar’s imaginary hair to tie the apron.
Einar’s mouth opened. He could almost taste something bitter and warm, and just as Einar’s tongue emerged from his mouth and the man took one final step closer, just when Einar knew for sure that Lili was here to stay and very soon Einar would have to disappear, just then there was a heavy knock on the door, and then another, and it was Madame Jasmin-Carton, yelling for them to come out at once, yelling angrily, in disgust, with her Manx cat mewing as violently as her mistress, as if someone had just stepped on her long-lost tail.
It was early afternoon when Einar emerged from Madame Jasmin-Carton’s. She had given him less than a minute to dress and leave her premises forever. He was on the black street with his clothes rumpled and untucked and his necktie in his hand. The tobacco shop owner was standing in his door, picking at his mustache, eyeing Einar. There was no one else on the street. Einar had hoped that the man would be waiting outside Madame Jasmin-Carton’s, that they would go to the little café around the corner for a coffee and, perhaps, a carafe of red wine. But he wasn’t there, just the tobacco shop owner and a little brown dog.
Einar entered the pissoir. Its metal walls smelled wet. Next to the basin Einar straightened his clothes and tied his tie. The little brown dog followed Einar in, and begged.
For months Einar had been thinking about visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale, and at last he set out. It occupied a block of buildings, bordered by the rue Vivienne, the rue Colbert, the rue de Richelieu, and the rue des Petits-Champs. Hans had arranged for Einar’s ticket of admittance, writing the library’s administration on his behalf. The Salle de Travail des Imprimés,
with its hundreds of seats, had a desk in the middle of the room where Einar had to fill out a bulletin personnel, registering the purpose of his visit: researching a lost girl. There he also wrote on slips of paper the names of books he wanted. The librarian behind the bureau was girlish, with downy cheeks and a shell-pink clip holding back her bangs. Her name was Anne-Marie, and she spoke so softly that Einar had to lean toward her face and smell her peanutty breath. When he handed her the slips of paper with the names of half a dozen scientific books on sexual problems, she blushed but then set out to do her job.
Einar sat down at one of the long reading tables. A student a few chairs down looked up from his notebook, then returned to his work. The room was cold, motes of dust in the lamplight. The long table was scratched. The sound of a page turning filled the room. Einar was worried that he looked suspicious, coming in here at his age, his trousers wrinkled, a faint sweaty scent sticking to him. Should he go find the washroom and look at himself in the mirror?
Anne-Marie delivered the books to his table. She said only, “We will be closing today at four.”
Einar ran his hand over the books; three were in German, two in French, the last from America. He opened the most recent, called Sexual Fluidity, published in Vienna, written by Professor Johann Hoffmann. Professor Hoffmann had performed experiments on guinea pigs and rats. In one, he grew breast glands in a once-male rat rich enough to feed a second rat’s litter. “Pregnancy, however,” Professor Hoffmann wrote, “remains elusive.”
Einar looked up from the book. The student had fallen asleep on his notebook. Anne-Marie was busy loading a cart. He thought of himself as the formerly male rat. A rat on its wheel running through his head. Now the rat couldn’t stop. It was too late. The experiment continued. What was it Greta was always saying? Worst thing in the world is to give up! Hands swatting through the air, silver bracelets jangling. She was always saying that, and: Come on now, Einar. When will you ever learn?
Einar thought of the promise he’d made to himself in the park last month: something would have to change. May had slipped into June, just as the months had slipped into years. More than four years ago, Lili was born on the lacquer trunk.
At four o’clock Anne-Marie rang a brass handbell. “Please leave your materials on the table,” she announced. She had to rock the shoulder of the student to wake him. To Einar, she pressed her lips together till they turned white and then nodded goodbye.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll never know how helpful this has been.”
She blushed again, and then said, a little smile emerging, “Should I set aside these books? Will you need them tomorrow?” Her hand, which was pale and no larger than a baby starfish, fell softly on Einar’s arm. “I think I know of some others. I’ll pull them for you in the morning. They might be what you’re looking for.” She paused. “I mean, if that ’s what you want.”
CHAPTER Sixteen
Much to Greta’s concern, Carlisle’s foot dragged through the gravel of the Tuileries. Each night he soaked his leg up to the knee in a tub of Epsom salt and white table wine, a balm his roommate at Stanford, who went on to become a surgeon in La Jolla, had first concocted. Carlisle had become an architect, building bungalows in Pasadena in orange groves that were being paved into neighborhoods. They were small houses, built for teachers at Pasadena Poly and Westridge School for Girls, for policemen, for the migrants from Indiana and Illinois who ran the bakeries and the printing shops along Colorado Street. He sent Greta pictures, and sometimes she put her chin in her fist and dreamed of one of the bungalows, with a screened-in sleeping porch and windows shaded by Blood of China camellia trees: not that she really saw herself settling into one of the little houses, but sometimes she wanted to stop and wonder.
Carlisle’s face was handsome and long, his hair less yellow-white than Greta’s and with more kink in the strand. He had never married, spending his evenings at his drafting table or in his oak rocker with a green-glass lamp pulled near for reading. There were girls, he reported to Greta in his letters, girls who joined his table at the Valley Hunt Club or who worked as assistants on his jobs, but no one who meant much. “I can wait,” he would write, and Greta would think, holding the letter in the sunlight at the window, So can I.
The spare bedroom in the casita had an iron bed and brocade wallpaper. There was a lamp with a fringed shade that Greta worried wouldn’t provide enough light. The charcuterie on the corner had lent her a zinc tub for the Epsom-and-white-wine balm; typically geese lay dead in it, their necks curled over its rim.
In the mornings Carlisle would take his coffee and croissant at the long table in the casita’s front room, his bad leg a thin rail in his pajamas. At first Einar would slip out of the apartment just as the knob on Carlisle’s door began to turn. Einar was timid around Carlisle, Greta noticed. He would quiet his step whenever he passed Carlisle’s door, as if to avoid a chance meeting in the hall, beneath the crystal-bowl lamp. At dinner, Einar’s shoulders would bunch up, as if it pained him trying to think of something to say. Greta wondered if something had passed between them, a harsh word, perhaps an insult. Something invisible seemed to be hanging between them, a thread of will that she couldn’t quite, at least not yet, understand.
Once, Carlisle invited Einar to a vapor bath on the rue des Mathurins. It wasn’t like the Bains du Pont-Solférino, out in the sunlight along the Seine. Instead, it was a pool for men in a gymnasium with steamy air and yellow marble tiles and palm trees drooping in Chinese cachepots. When Einar and Carlisle returned from the bath, Einar immediately locked himself in his room. “What happened?” Greta asked her brother. And Carlisle, whose eyes were red from the water, said, “Nothing. He just said he didn’t want to swim. Said he didn’t know you had to swim naked.” And then, “He nearly fainted at the sight of it. But hasn’t he ever been to a Turkish bath?”
“It’s the Dane in him,” Greta said, knowing it wasn’t true. Why, she thought, the Danes would look for any excuse to remove their clothes and prance around.
Shortly after Carlisle arrived, Hans stopped by one morning to look over Greta’s latest paintings. There were two to show him: the first was Lili, large and flat, on the beach in Bornholm; the second was Lili standing next to a Blood of China camellia tree. Einar had painted the sea in the background of the first, working steadily and tidily on its pale blue summer tide. The camellia tree, however, he couldn’t quite pull off, unfamiliar as he was with the puckering red blossoms and the buds as shiny and tight as acorns. She ’d taken on an assignment from Vogue—illustrating next winter’s fox-lined coats—and so the only time she had to finish the camellia portrait was in the middle of the night. For three nights she stayed up, delicately painting the bloom of petals in each flower, with the hint of sorbet-yellow at its center, while Einar and Carlisle slept, her studio silent except for Edvard IV’s occasional sigh.
She finished the painting only hours before Hans arrived to see it. “Still wet,” she said, serving him coffee, and a cup for Carlisle, another for Einar, who was fresh from a bath, his hair wet at the tips.
“It’s a good one,” Hans was saying, looking at the camellia painting. “Very Oriental. That’s what they like these days. Maybe you should try painting her in an embroidered kimono?”
“I don’t want to make her look cheap,” she said.
“Don’t do that,” Einar said, so quietly Greta wasn’t sure if the others had heard.
“That’s not what I meant,” Hans said. He was in a pale summer suit, his legs crossed, his fingers drumming the long table. Carlisle was on the velvet ottoman, Einar in the rocker. It was the first time the three men had been together, and Greta kept moving her eyes from her brother, with his leg up on the velvet cushion, to her husband, with the wet tips of his hair against his thin throat, to Hans. She felt as if she were a different person with each of them. As if she rolled out a different repartee for each of them; and maybe she did. She wondered if they felt that they knew her at all. Perhaps she co
uld be wrong, but it was how she felt—as if each of them wanted something different from her.
Hans had respected her wishes, withdrawing his attention, remaining focused on selling her work. There were times, when they found themselves alone, in the back room of his office or in her studio while Lili was out, when Greta could feel his eyes on her. But when his back was turned she couldn’t help staring, at the spread of his shoulders, at the blond hair creeping over his collar. She knew what she was longing for, but she forced herself to shove it aside. “Not while Einar’s still . . .” In her chest she could feel the clamps closing with a clang. She expected those passions, such heartswell, from Lili. Not from herself, not anymore, not now, with a studio full of unfinished portraits and assignments from the magazines waiting to be drawn, and her light-stepped husband weak in body, confused in mind, and her brother showing up in Paris with his incomplete statement “I’ve come to help,” and Hans, at her long workman’s table, his long fingers drumming the pine top, waiting for the paint of the camellias to dry, waiting for a second cup of coffee, waiting for Greta to produce a painting of Lili in a kimono, waiting, patiently, with a flat brow, simply waiting for Greta to fall into his arms.
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