The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  “I wonder what she means,” Carlisle said.

  “You know Greta. She doesn’t want people talking about her.”

  “But in some ways she does.”

  The American girl won the first game, her drop shot barely lifting over the net cord and then falling deceptively to the clay.

  “Have you ever thought about coming out for a visit?” Carlisle asked. “To California? Maybe come out for the winter to paint?” He was fanning himself with the program; he held his bad leg out, the knee locked. “Come out and paint the eucalyptus and the cypress? Or one of the orange groves? You’d like it.”

  “Not without Greta,” Einar said.

  And Carlisle, who at the same time was and was not exactly like his sister, said, “But why not?”

  Einar crossed his legs, his foot shifting the wicker chair in front of him. The girl from Lyon sailed across the court, her skirt taut, to return a backhand from the sneaky American, hitting the dirty white ball up the line for a winner. The crowd, which was handsome and hatted and collectively smelled like lavender and lime, erupted into a cheer.

  Carlisle turned to Einar. He was smiling and applauding, and his forehead was beginning to sweat; and then, when the stadium fell silent to allow the girl from Lyon the peace to serve, he said, “I know about Lili.”

  Einar could smell the clay, its rich dustiness, and the wind blowing through the poplars. “I’m not sure I know what you’re—”

  But Carlisle stopped him. Carlisle placed his elbows on his knees and stared at the court and began to tell Einar about the letters Greta had been writing over the past year. They would arrive once a week fat in the mailbox, a half-dozen sheets of blue tissuey paper covered with her cramped words; she wrote them in such a fury that she didn’t use margins, the small tight writing crossing the page from edge to edge. “There’s someone called Lili,” she wrote for the first time maybe a year before. “A girl from the bogs of Denmark whom I’ve taken in.” The letters would describe Lili making her way around Paris, kneeling to feed the pigeons in the park, her skirt bunching around her on the gravel path. They described Lili sitting for hours on the stool in Greta’s studio on the rue Vielle du Temple, the light from the window on her face. The letters arrived almost weekly, a summary of the previous days with Lili. They never mentioned Einar, and when Carlisle would reply “How’s Einar?” or “My best to Einar,” and even once, “Isn’t this your tenth wedding anniversary?” Greta never acknowledged the inquiry.

  One day, after about six months of the weekly letters, a slim envelope arrived in Carlisle’s mailbox. He remembered the day, he told Einar, because the black January rains had been falling for a week, and his leg was aching is if it had been hit by the buggy only the previous afternoon. He went down his driveway to the mailbox, his bamboo cane in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The ink on the envelope smeared in the rain, and he opened it in his foyer, which was dark with paneled Pasadena oak. He read the letter as the water dripped from his hair onto the single page. “Einar is leaving me,” Greta’s letter began. “You are right. After ten years he is leaving me.” Immediately Carlisle considered driving over to the post office on Colorado Street and sending a telegram. He put on his rubber coat while reading the rest of the letter, and it was only then that Carlisle began to understand what Greta meant.

  A second letter arrived the next day, and then another, the day after. What followed was an almost daily account of Lili. The pages were just as crammed with description as before, but now tiny sketches of a girl’s face would interrupt the sentences: Lili in a hat pinned with dry violets; Lili reading Le Monde; Lili staring up, her eyes round, at the sky.

  “Then Greta started mailing me sketches from her notebook. Studies for her paintings of Lili. She sent me the one of Lili in the lemon grove. And Lili in the wedding party.” He stopped while the American girl served. “They’re beautiful. She’s beautiful, Einar.”

  “Then you know.”

  “It didn’t take me long to understand,” Carlisle said. “Of course I don’t know much about this,” he said. A small brown bird landed on the rail of the box. Its head revolved, looking for seed. “But I’d like to help. I’d like to meet Lili. To see if there’s anything I can do. You see, it’s Greta’s way of doing things, sending the letters and drawings. She ’d never come out and ask for help. But I can tell she needs it. I can tell she thinks you could stand some help, even more than she can give you.” And then, “It’s hard on her. You can’t forget that this is just as hard on her.”

  “She said that?”

  “Greta would never say anything like that. But I can tell.”

  Einar and Carlisle watched the tennis. The day was warm, the girls toweling their faces. “Have you seen a doctor?” Carlisle asked.

  Einar told him about Dr. Hexler. Just saying his name brought back the nausea; he could nearly feel a throb in his gut.

  “I don’t see why you’d go to a medical doctor,” Carlisle said. “Shouldn’t you talk to someone about how you feel? About what you’re thinking? I’m going to take you to someone. I’ve looked up some names, and I’m going to take you to talk to someone who just might help. Help you resolve this once and for all. Not to worry, Einar. I have an idea.”

  And this was what Einar remembered most: the sight of Carlisle’s long legs out of the corner of his eyes, the bad leg now at a hard angle. And the American girl on the court becoming sweaty, a wet spot developing on her blouse just beneath her breasts. And her face, which was dark and plain; and how her head was large and her arms long, and there was something about her that didn’t seem right. Like the thin tendril of a vein that pulsed up her forearm. Or the shadow above her lip. And how the whole stadium was rooting against her, more and more as she took a bigger lead against the blond girl from Lyon. It seemed the whole world was against her—everyone except Carlisle, who leaned over and said, “Don’t you want her to win? Wouldn’t it be more fun for her to win?”

  First Carlisle drove Einar to see Dr. McBride. He was an American psychiatrist connected to the embassy, his practice on the rue de Tilsitt, down the street from the passport office. Dr. McBride had a wiry bush of hair and a mustache that was black and gray. He was heavy in the throat and stomach, and he wore white shirts starched as stiff as paper. He was from Boston, and during Einar’s meeting with him he kept referring to himself as a “black Irishman.” When he smiled, there was a flash of gold at the back of his mouth.

  Dr. McBride’s office was more like a lawyer’s than a doctor’s. His desk was double-pillared and inlaid with a sheet of green leather. There was a wall of bookshelves, and a row of oak filing cabinets. By the window a medical dictionary was open on a stand. While Einar told Dr. McBride about Lili, the doctor sat blank-faced, pushing his eyeglasses up and down the bridge of his nose. When the telephone rang, Dr. McBride ignored it and urged Einar to continue. “What’s the longest you’ve lived as Lili?” he asked.

  “Over a month,” Einar said. “Last winter she was here for a long time.” Einar thought about the past winter, when more often than not he would go to bed and have no idea who he would be when he woke in the morning. One night Lili and Greta found themselves held up at knife-point after leaving the Opéra. The thief was a little man in a black pea coat, and his knife didn’t look especially sharp in the winter moonlight. But he waved it at them and demanded their purses. The man hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he kept kicking the ground with one foot, saying, “I’m serious, mademoiselles. Don’t think I’m not serious.” When Lili moved to hand over her purse, Greta tried to take her wrist, saying, “Lili, don’t.” But the man snatched the purse, and then he was lunging for Greta’s, who cried, “Oh no you don’t!” Greta began to run down the street, toward the Opéra, which was gold in the night. Lili remained against the wall, the thief in front of her. His foot struck the sidewalk again, and he seemed to be trying to think of what to do next. Greta was a block away when she turned around. Lili could only make out her silhoue
tte: her fists on her hips, her feet apart. Then she started walking back toward Lili and the thief. The man smiled nervously. “She ’s crazy,” he said, his foot kicking the sidewalk. He turned his wrist so that now his knife, which wasn’t much more than a piece of flatware, was pointing down. Then he began to run away from Greta.

  “Do you think of Einar when you are Lili?” Dr. McBride asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “But you think of Lili when you are Einar?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think about?” He removed the cap from his pen and placed the open instrument on a blank sheet of paper.

  “Most of the time I just think her thoughts,” he said. Einar explained that if he were eating an apple tart sprinkled with cinnamon he’d wonder if he should save a slice for Lili. If he were arguing with the butcher, who tended to press his thumb against the scale, Einar would wonder if Lili would argue. He would convince himself that she wouldn’t take on the butcher, who was skinny and handsome with spiky blond hair; and so, mid-sentence, Einar would apologize and ask the butcher to continue wrapping his lamb.

  Dr. McBride pushed up his eyeglasses.

  Across the street at the café, Carlisle was waiting. Einar now thought of him, reading his Baedeker, pulling the pencil from behind his ear and marking a recommended site. Just then he was probably finishing his coffee and checking his watch.

  “And how do you feel about men?” Dr. McBride asked. “Do you hate them?”

  “Hate men?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But it would be natural for you to hate men.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “And Lili? How does she feel about men?”

  “She doesn’t hate men.”

  Dr. McBride poured some water from a silver pitcher. “Does she like men?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  The doctor took a sip. Einar could see the impression his lips left on the rim of the glass, and suddenly Einar realized he was thirsty.

  “Has she ever kissed a man?”

  Einar was trying to think of a way to ask for a glass of water, but it seemed impossible. He thought perhaps he should simply stand up and pour himself one, but that felt impossible too. And so Einar just sat there, and he felt like a child in Dr. McBride ’s chair, which was covered in an itchy yellow wool.

  “Mr. Wegener, I’m only asking because—”

  “Yes,” Einar said. “Yes, she ’s kissed a man.”

  “Did she like it?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “I thought I was asking her.”

  “Do I look like Lili?” Einar said. “Do I look like a woman to you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, then—”

  Dr. McBride’s telephone rang, and together they stared at its black receiver, which trembled with each ring. Finally it went silent.

  “I’m afraid you are a homosexual,” Dr. McBride eventually said. He capped his pen with a little click.

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  “You’re not the first person this has happened to,” Dr. McBride said.

  “But I’m not a homosexual. That isn’t my problem. There’s another person living inside me,” Einar said, rising from the chair. “A girl named Lili.”

  “And it breaks my heart,” Dr. McBride continued, “when I have to tell men like you that there’s nothing I can do for them. As a black Irishman, I find it very sad.” He sipped from his waterglass, his lips clamping on the rim. Then he stood, moving around to the front of his desk. His hand moved to Einar’s shoulder, nudged him to the door. “My only advice is that you restrain yourself. You’re going to have to always fight your desires. Ignore them, Mr. Wegener. If you don’t . . . well, then, you’ll always be alone.”

  Einar met Carlisle at the café. He knew Dr. McBride was wrong. Not so long ago Einar might have believed the doctor and sulked away in pity for himself. But Einar told Carlisle that it had been a waste of time. “Nobody is going to understand me,” he said. “I don’t see the point of any of this.”

  “But that’s not true,” Carlisle protested. “We need to find you the right doctor. That ’s all. So Dr. McBride doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what? That doesn’t mean you should give up.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you’re unhappy.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Because of Greta.”

  A few days later, Carlisle drove Einar to the Etablissement Hydro thérapique, a hospital known for its care of nervous maladies. The hospital was out toward Meudon, hidden from the road behind a grove of sycamore trees. There was an attendant at the gate, who pushed his face into the car and asked whom they were visiting. “Dr. Christophe Mai,” Carlisle said. The attendant eyed them, biting his lip. He passed them a clipboard to sign.

  The hospital was a new building, a deep box of cement and glass. It was shaded by more sycamores, and plane trees scarred in the trunk. Steel grates covered the windows on the ground floor, their padlocks bright in the sun.

  They had to sign another sheet of paper at the front entrance, and a third when they finally arrived at Dr. Mai’s office. A nurse, a woman with white curls, told them to wait in a little room that, once she closed the door behind her, felt securely sealed.

  “I didn’t tell Greta where we were going today,” Carlisle said. A few days earlier Einar had overheard them talking about him. “He doesn’t need to see a psychiatrist,” she had said, her voice traveling via the crack beneath the door. “Besides, I think I know someone who can help him. And he isn’t a psychiatrist. This is someone who can really do something.” Then her voice fell, and the rest Einar failed to hear.

  Dr. Mai’s office was brown and smelled of cigarettes. Einar could hear feet shuffling outside in the hallway. There was something so unpleasant about the hospital that a little sensation rose up inside him, telling him that this was where he belonged. In the brown carpeting, there were tracks from carts, and Einar began to imagine himself strapped to a cart that would wheel him into the deepest part of the hospital, from which he would never return.

  “Do you really think Dr. Mai can help me?”

  “I hope so, but we’ll have to see.” Carlisle was wearing a seersucker blazer and crisply pleated trousers and a yellow tie. Einar admired his optimism, the way he sat expectantly in his summer clothes. “We’ve got to at least try.”

  He knew Carlisle was right. He couldn’t live much longer like this. Much of the muscle on his body had disappeared over the past six months; Dr. McBride had weighed him, and when the little black weights slid over to the left, Einar realized he didn’t weigh much more than when he was a boy. Einar had begun to notice a peculiar color in his skin: a gray-blue like the sky at dawn, as if his blood were somehow running at a slower pace. And a weakness of breath that caused his eyesight to quit whenever he ran more than a few paces, or whenever a sharp sudden noise, like the crack! of a motorcar, surprised him. And the bleeding, which Einar both dreaded and welcomed. When he felt the first spurt of it on his lip or between his legs, he would become dizzy. No one would tell him this, but Einar knew it was because he was female inside. He’d read about it: the buried female organs of the hermaphrodite hemorrhaging irregularly, as if in protest.

  Dr. Mai turned out to be a pleasant man. His hair was dark and he was wearing a yellow tie that was oddly similar to Carlisle ’s. They both laughed about it, and then Dr. Mai led Einar into the examining room.

  The room was tiled, with a window that looked through an iron grate into the park of sycamores and plane trees. Dr. Mai dragged back a heavy green curtain to reveal his examining table. “Please sit down,” he said, his hand falling on the table’s pad. “Tell me why you’re here.”

  He was leaning against a cabinet with glass doors. He was holding a clipboard to his chest, and he nodded as he listened to Einar explain Lili. Once or twice Dr.
Mai adjusted the knot of his tie. Occasionally he wrote something down.

  “I don’t really know what kind of help I’m looking for,” Einar was saying. “I don’t think I can keep living like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t know who I really am.”

  With that, Dr. Mai ended the interview. He excused himself, leaving Einar on the padded table, his feet swaying. Outside in the park, a nurse was walking a young man in striped pajamas, his bathrobe hanging open. The man had a beard, and there was a frailty to his step, as if the nurse, whose apron ran to her feet, were the only thing propping him up.

  When Dr. Mai returned he said, “Thank you for visiting me.” He shook Einar’s hand and led him to Carlisle.

  On the drive back into Paris, they said nothing for a long time. Einar watched Carlisle’s hand on the gearshift, and Carlisle looked down the road. Finally he said, “The doctor wants to admit you to the hospital.”

  “For what?”

  “He suspects schizophrenia.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Einar said. He looked over to Carlisle, who kept his eyes on the traffic. In front of them was a truck, and each time it hit a rut, gravel would spill from its bed onto the Spider’s hood. “How could I be schizophrenic?” Einar said again.

  “He wanted me to sign the papers to admit you right then.”

  “But that’s not right. I’m not schizophrenic.”

  “I told him it wasn’t that urgent.”

  “But you don’t think I’m schizophrenic, do you? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, I don’t. But when you explain it . . . when you explain Lili, it does sound like you think there are two people. Two separate people.”

  “Because there are.” It was evening, and the traffic had slowed because a German shepherd had been hit; it was lying in the middle of the road, and each car had to pick its way around it. The dog was dead, but it appeared uninjured, its head resting up on the granite curb of the rond-point.