This was the household, then, her casita, from which Greta set out one afternoon that summer. It was hot, the black traffic exhaust hanging heavily. The sun was dull in a hazy sky, reducing the sparkle of the city. The beige front stone of the buildings looked soft, like warm cheese. Women walked with handkerchiefs, swabbing sweat from their throats.
The Métro was even hotter, its handrail sticky. It was only June, and she and Einar wouldn’t take their holiday in Menton for another several weeks. She wondered if she would make it—something about the summer would have to change, Greta told herself—but then the train scraped along its rails and stopped.
She emerged from the station in Passy, where the air felt cooler. There was a breeze, and a scent of cut lawn, and the trickle of a fountain. She heard the springy thud of a tennis ball landing on red clay. She heard someone beating a rug.
The apartment house was a former villa, built from yellow granite and copperwork. It had a little half-circle drive that was spotted with motor oil, and a sentry of rose trees clipped into tight pompoms. The front door was made of glass and ironwork. Above it was a terrace, its door open, a drape blowing. Greta heard a woman’s laugh, followed by a man’s.
Anna had rented the second-floor apartment. She was singing three nights of Carmen at the Palais Garnier; after her performance, she ’d eat a midnight supper of cold crab claw at Prunier’s. Lately she’d begun to swear she would never return to Copenhagen. “It ’s just too orderly for me,” she ’d say, a hand balled against her breast.
Anna answered the door. Her blond hair was tight in a bun at the nape of her neck. The skin in her throat seemed to be scarring into permanent brown lines where her folds of fat lay. She was wearing a large ruby cocktail ring, designed like an exploding star. She had made a name for herself in the opera world; skinny young men with deeply sunk eyes sent her unset gems, ginger-snap cookies, and nervously written cards.
The living room was small, arranged with a settee with gold legs and a tapestry pattern on the cushion. There was a slim vase of tiger lilies, the buds veined and green. A maid in black uniform was serving lemonade and anisette. A man, tall and oddly dressed in a dark overcoat, was standing behind the chair.
“This is Professor Bolk,” Anna said.
“I guessed that,” Greta said. “But aren’t you warm?”
“Professor Alfred Bolk.” He offered his hand. “For some reason, I’m always a bit cold,” he said, shaking his shoulders slightly in his coat. His blue eyes were dark and flecked with gold. He had hair like the dark blond of good wood, oiled back over his head so that it curled up at his neck. He was wearing a blue silk tie with a large knot and a diamond pin. His calling cards he carried in a silver case. He was from Dresden, where he ran the Municipal Women’s Clinic.
The maid served Professor Bolk coffee poured over ice. “I can’t take lemon,” he explained, lifting his glass. There was a breeze from the terrace door, and Greta sat next to the professor on the sofa. He smiled politely, his shoulders up. She supposed she should wait for him to ask questions, but she suddenly felt a need to tell someone about Lili and Einar. “It’s about my husband,” she began.
“Yes, I understand there’s a certain little girl named Lili.”
So he knew. At first, Greta didn’t know what to say. Yes, where to begin? Had it all started that day four years ago when she asked him to try on Anna’s shoes? Or was there something else? “He’s convinced he ’s a woman inside,” she said.
Professor Bolk made a small noise of sucking air between his teeth. He nodded quickly.
“And to tell the truth,” Greta said, “so am I.” She described the short-sleeved dresses and the sennep-yellow shoes and the specially sewn camisole; she reported on Einar’s outings to the Bains du Pont-Solférino and the shopping sprees at Bon Marché on the rue du Bac. She spoke of Henrik and Hans and the few other men over whom Lili’s heart had swollen up and burst with a pinprick of frustration. She said, “She’s quite beautiful, Lili is.”
“These men . . . this Hans . . . is there anything else I should know?”
“Not really.” She thought of Hans, who probably that very minute was hanging the camellia portrait in his gallery. It didn’t happen very often, but nothing disappointed her more than when Hans stopped by the studio and, with his fingers rubbing his chin, rejected a painting. “Not good enough,” he’d say two, three times a year, shocking Greta, leaving her incapable of moving, of seeing Hans to the door. Sometimes, when the world was quiet, she wondered if such crushing disappointment could be worth it.
It had been Anna who first mentioned a doctor. “Should he maybe see someone?” she said one day. She and Greta were in a frame store down the street from the Oscar Wilde hotel. There were bins of old frames, some that weighed over one hundred pounds. The frames were dusty, dirtying their skirts. Then she said, “I’m worried about him.”
“I told you what happened with Hexler back in Denmark. I don’t know if he could take another doctor. It might crush him.”
“Doesn’t it concern you just a little? About how ill he looks? How thin he’s become? It sometimes seems he’s hardly there at all.”
Greta thought about this. Yes, Einar looked pale to her, with thin blue pads spreading beneath his eyes. A translucence had developed in his skin. Greta had seen this, but had it worried her, more than everything else? And the bleeding, returning irregularly for more than four years now. She ’d learned to live with him, with his transformation. Yes, it was as if Einar were on a perpetual track of transformation, as if these changes—the mysterious blood, the hollow cheeks, the unfulfilled longing—would never cease, would lead to no end. And when she thought about it, who wasn’t always changing? Wasn’t everybody always turning into someone new? In a bin with a chained lid, Greta found the perfect frame, its lip painted gold, for her latest painting of Lili. “But if you know someone,” she said to Anna, “if you have a doctor in mind, maybe I should talk to him. It couldn’t hurt, could it?”
Professor Bolk said, “I’d like to examine your husband.” This made Greta think of Hexler and his clanging X-ray machine. She wondered if Einar would ever let her take him to another doctor. Professor Bolk sipped his coffee, and pulled a notepad from his pocket.
“I don’t think your husband is insane,” the professor offered. “I’m sure other doctors will tell you your husband’s insane. But that’s not what I think.” There was a painting of Lili in Anna’s living room. It showed her on a bench in a park. Behind her two men were talking, their hats in their hands. The painting hung above a side table full of silver-framed photographs of Anna, in wig and costume, hugging friends after performances. Greta had painted the park scene the year before, when Lili would show up at the casita and stay for three weeks and then disappear for another six, and when Greta was learning to work and live more and more without her husband. For a while the year before, when he refused to speak to her except as Lili, she herself had thought he had gone insane. He’d taken on a look, which came and went, of trance: eyes so dark that all she could see in them was a reflection of herself.
“I’ve met another man like him,” Professor Bolk said. “A tram conductor. A young man, handsome enough, pretty even, slender, pale of course, a bit light on his feet. Nervous man, but who could blame him for that, what with his situation? He came to see me, and the first thing I noticed—how could I not?—was that he had breasts bigger than many teenage girls. By the time he came to see me he ’d started calling himself Sieglinde. It was peculiar. One day he arrived at the clinic begging to be admitted. The other doctors said we couldn’t admit a man to the Municipal Women’s Clinic. They refused to examine him. But I agreed to, and one afternoon—I’ll never forget it—I discovered he was both male and female.”
Greta thought about what this might mean, about the horrible sight of what must have lay lifelessly, like the extra flesh on the very old, between the man’s legs. “What did you say to him?” she asked.
The breeze l
ifted the drapes, and there was the sound of boys playing tennis; then their mother calling them inside.
“I told him I could help him. I told him I could help him choose.”
There was a part of Greta that wanted to ask, “Choose what?” At once, she knew and didn’t know the answer. For even Greta, who recently had often thought to herself, Oh, if only Einar could choose who he wanted to be . . . for even Greta could not imagine that a real choice was possible. She sat on the gold-legged sofa and thought about Einar, who in some ways no longer existed at all. It was as if someone—yes, someone—had already chosen for him.
“What happened to the man?” asked Anna.
“He said he wanted to be a woman. He said all he wanted was to be loved by a man. He was willing to do anything for it. He came to me in my office, wearing a felt hat and a green dress. He carried a pocket watch like a man, I remember, because he pulled it out during our meeting and kept looking at it, saying he had to go because he had come to splitting his days in half, living the mornings as a woman and the afternoons as a man.
“This was many years ago, when I was still a young surgeon. Technically I knew exactly what I could do for him. But I had never performed such complicated surgery, not then. And so for a month I stayed up at night reading medical texts. I attended amputations, studied sutures. Anytime a woman at the clinic had her uterus removed, I watched in the operating amphitheater. Then I’d study the specimen in our laboratory. Finally one day, when I was ready, I told Sieglinde I wanted to schedule a surgery.
“He had lost a lot of weight by then. He was quite weak. He must have been too frightened to eat. But he agreed to let me attempt it on him. He cried when I told him I could do it. He said he was crying because he felt like he was killing somebody. ‘Sacrificing somebody,’ that ’s what he said.
“I set the surgery for a Thursday morning. It was going to be in the large amphitheater; there were that many people who asked to come. A few doctors from the Pirna Clinic as well. I knew that if I succeeded I would have done something extraordinary, something no one had even dreamed of. Who could think it possible, going from man to woman? Who would risk his career to try something that sounds like something from a myth? Well, I would.”
Professor Bolk shook out his coat.
“But then early that Thursday morning, the nurse went to Sieglinde’s room and discovered that he was gone. He’d left his belongings, his felt hat, his pocket watch, his green dress, everything. But he was gone.” Professor Bolk drained his remaining coffee.
And Greta finished her lemonade, and Anna rose to call the maid (“Les boissons,” in a snappy voice), and Greta studied the professor, his left knee angled over his right. This time she knew she was right; he was no Hexler. He understood. He was like her, she thought. He could see things, too. She wouldn’t have to think it over; her decision came like a clean blow to the head, with a pop of light at the back of her eyes. It made her start, jumping slightly in the settee, and Greta, who once in the south of France had nearly killed herself and Einar too by accidentally losing control of their motorcar and hurling it toward a cliff spotted with mimosas springing from the rocks, thought: I must take Lili to Dresden. She and I will have to go.
CHAPTER Seventeen
The next day, the girl behind the bureau located more books for Einar. Books called The Sexes; The Normal and Abnormal Man; A Scientific Study of Sexual Immorality; and Die sexuelle Krise, published in Dresden twenty years earlier. Most were about theories of gender development based on hypothesis and casual experimentation on laboratory rats. In one Einar read about a man, a Bavarian aristocrat, who was born with both a penis and a vagina. There was something about his plight—the confusion as a child, the parental abandonment, his hopeless hunt for a place in the world—that made Einar close his eyes and think, Yes, I know. There was a chapter on the myth of Hermes and Aphrodite. The book explained sexual pathology, and something called sexual interme diacy. Somehow Einar knew he was reading about himself. He recognized the duality, the lack of complete identification with either sex. He read about the Bavarian, and a dull distant pang lay at rest in Einar’s chest.
Some of the books were old, from the last century, dust on their spines. Their pages turned with such a brisk crinkling noise that Einar feared the students would look up from their work on the long reading table and, from the twist of fear and relief in Einar’s face, learn who he really was.
Anne-Marie would place the books in front of Einar in a little tilted stand that held them at an angle. She lent him a string of lead beads wrapped in felt that held the page open while Einar copied sentences into his pewter-backed notebook.
The tables were wide and nicked, and they made Einar think of the worktables the Copenhagen fisherwomen used when chopping chub heads at the Gammel Strand fish market. In front of Einar, there was enough room on the table to fan out several books around him, and with their sand-colored pages open he began to think of them as his little shoal of protection. And that was how it felt to read them, during those mornings when he would slip out of the apartment: as if each sentence about the male and female would protect Einar over the next year, when everything, as he had promised himself, would change.
He eventually read enough to become convinced that he too possessed the female organs. Buried in the cavity of his body were Lili’s organs, the bloody packets and folds of flesh that made her who she was. At first it was hard to believe, but then the notion of it—that this wasn’t a mental problem, but a physical one—made more and more sense to him. He imagined a uterus shoved up behind his testicles. He imagined breasts somehow trapped by his ribcage.
Einar spent a week in the reading room, and there was a point each day when he would become so overwhelmed by what he was discovering that he ’d rest his head on his arms and softly cry.
If he nodded off, Anne-Marie, with her small white hand, would nudge Einar back to work. “It’s noon,” she’d say, and for a second he would become confused: Noon?
Oh, yes. Noon.
Carlisle had taken to asking Einar to join him in the afternoons. “Meet me at noon?” Carlisle would say each morning as Einar was slipping out the front door, nearly lost in a white heat of anticipation about what was waiting for him at the library.
“I’m not sure I can,” Einar would reply.
“But why not?” Greta would say.
Carlisle knew not to ask Greta to join them. He once told Einar that even when they were little, she would sigh with disappointment whenever Carlisle suggested they head down to the archery range in the Arroyo Seco. “She was always too busy to explore,” Carlisle would say. “Reading Dickens, writing poetry, painting scenes of the San Gabriels, painting pictures of me. But she never showed them to me. I’d ask to see one of her little watercolors and she would blush, and fold her arms against her chest.”
So Carlisle turned to Einar. He had to prod Einar at first. There was something about Carlisle ’s blue eyes, which were clearer than Greta’s, that seemed capable of reading Einar’s thoughts. He found it difficult to sit still next to Carlisle, shifting his weight from one hip to the other, sitting up and then retreating in the rope-bottom chair.
Carlisle bought a car, an Alfa Romeo Sport Spider. It was red with spoke-wheels and a running board with a red toolbox bolted to it. He liked to drive with the canvas top pushed back. The dash was black with six dials and a little silver handlebar that Einar would cling to as Carlisle shot around a corner. The floors were made of dimpled steel, and as Carlisle drove the Spider around Paris, Einar could feel the heat from the engine through the soles of his shoes.
“You should really learn to trust people more,” Carlisle said one day in the car, his hand moving chummily from the gear stick with its black-ball knob to Einar’s knee. He was driving Einar out to a tennis stadium in Auteuil. The stadium was next to the Bois de Boulogne, a concrete bowl rising up among the poplar trees. It was late morning, and the sun was high and blank in the blue-white sky. The flags a
round the rim of the stadium were hanging limply. There were iron gates around the tennis park, and men in green blazers and straw hats were taking tickets and ripping them in two.
A man led Einar and Carlisle to a little sloping box that was painted green. There were four wicker chairs in the box, each with a striped cushion. The box was at the baseline of the tennis court, which was made of crushed clay as red as the rouge Lili once purchased at the front counter of Fonnesbech’s.
On the court, two women were warming up. One was from Lyon; the sail of her long pleated skirt was white, and she cut across the court like a schooner. The other was an American, a girl from New York, the program reported; she was tall and dark, her hair as short and shiny as an aviator’s leather cap.
“Nobody expects her to win,” Carlisle said of the American. He was holding his hand to his forehead to block out the sun. His jaw was exactly the same as Greta’s: square, a bit long, pegged with a mouthful of good teeth. Their skin was the same, too: brown after only an hour of sun, a bit coarse in the throat. It was a throat Einar used to kiss passionately in the night. It was what he had liked most about Greta, even more than kissing her mouth: bringing his lips to her long throat and sucking lightly, licking in a little swirling motion, nipping, drilling away at the spot on her throat that was open and veined.
“Sometime I’d like to visit California,” Einar said. The match had begun, the American serving. She tossed the ball high, and Einar could almost see the muscles in her shoulder turn as she brought her racquet through the air. Greta often said she thought of oranges hitting the ground when she heard a tennis ball; Einar thought of the ryegrass court behind the brick villa, the powdered-sugar lines blowing in the wind.
“Does Greta ever say anything about it?” Carlisle asked. “About coming home?”
“I’ve heard her say a lot would have to change before she would go back.” Greta once said that neither of them would fit in there, in Pasadena, where rumor crossed the valley as rapidly as a blue jay in the breeze. “It’s not a place for you and me,” she had said.
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