The Danish Girl

by David Ebershoff

  “It all makes me a little worried,” Lili said, as Henrik’s face moved closer to hers.

  “Stop,” Henrik said. “Please don’t worry about me.” The shop’s sign continued to rattle on its arm, and Henrik and Lili set out for his studio on the other side of the Inderhavn, where, later, after Henrik had poured her red wine and fed her strawberries and showed her his paintings of the sea, they kissed.

  “You’re blushing even more,” Greta now said. She turned on a lamp and began to rinse her brushes in a jar. “Do you need a pill?” Greta asked. “Are you feeling all right?”

  Lili didn’t know how to tell Greta. When they’d moved back to Copenhagen, Lili had said, “Do you really think we should go on living together? Two women in this apartment?”

  “Are you worried about what people might say?” Greta said. “Is that it?”

  And Lili, who wasn’t entirely sure why she had said it, answered, “No. Not at all. It’s just that . . . I was thinking of you.”

  No, Lili couldn’t tell Greta about Henrik, at least not yet. After all, where would Lili begin? The kiss in the dim light of his studio? The wrap of Henrik’s arm around Lili’s shoulders as he walked her into Kongens Have at dusk just as the governesses were wheeling their prams home for the evening? His hand, which was backed with thick black hair, holding her throat, and then the soft cushion of her breast? The letter from Henrik slipped to Lili the next day via the Cantonese laundress, the folded square of paper smudged with ink professing love and regret. Yes, where would Lili begin? Only three weeks had passed since the meeting at the art supply store, but it felt to Lili as if during that time her life had begun anew. How could she tell Greta that?

  “I feel like going out for a walk,” Lili said, standing.

  “I’m not done yet,” Greta said. “Sit for just a few more minutes?”

  “I feel like going now, before it gets dark.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “All alone?”

  Lili nodded, an inexhaustible doubleness welling up inside her: she both loved and resented Greta for caring so much. It was as simple as that.

  She opened the wardrobe’s closet for her coat and scarf. Greta began to tidy her paints and her brushes and her easel. Edvard IV started barking at Lili’s ankles. The last angled sunlight shot into the apartment. The horn of the Bornholm ferry called, and while she pulled on a blue felt coat with bamboo-hook buttons, Lili thought about walking to the dock and climbing the gangway and taking a seat in the cabin that looked across the bow toward that little island in the sea.

  But she wouldn’t set sail, at least not yet. “I’ll be back,” she heard herself saying.

  “Yes, well . . . good.” And then, “You’re sure you don’t want company?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “All right then.” Greta hoisted Edvard IV into her arms and stood in the center of the apartment, in a sinking pane of light, as Lili prepared to leave her. Lili felt the need to escape. Henrik had told her he’d be working late in his studio. “Look for the light,” he wrote in a note smuggled into the apartment in the folded laundry.

  “Will you be gone long?”

  Lili shook her head. “I’m not really sure.” She was ready, buttoned into her coat. She would have to tell Greta about Henrik, but not tonight. “Good night,” she said, feeling something, and when she opened the door she found Hans, his knuckle raised and about to knock.

  He came in. Lili remained at the door. He looked tired, his tie loose. He asked them to join him for dinner. Lili said, “I was just on my way out.” Greta said that Lili had become quite busy lately. She sounded angry about it, from the way she told Hans about Lili’s new job at Fonnes bech’s department store, standing behind the perfume counter. “They hired me because I speak French,” Lili explained, still in her coat. The manager at Fonnesbech’s, a woman whose black blouse flattened out her breasts, asked Lili to speak to the customers with an accent. “Speak like a Frenchwoman. Pretend you’re someone else. The store is a stage!” Each day Lili arranged the cut-glass bottles on a silver tray and held her eyes low and quietly asked the passing shoppers if they’d like a dab to the wrist.

  “I should be going,” Lili said. She moved to kiss Hans goodbye.

  He said he’d like to join her walk, but then Greta said that Lili wanted to be alone. “I’ll come just for a bit,” he said. “Then I’ll be back, Greta, and we’ll have some supper.”

  On the street, the night was damp. Across the way a woman was knocking on Dr. Møller’s door. Lili and Hans hesitated outside the Widow House’s door. “Where to?” he said.

  “I was headed to Christianshavn. But you don’t have to come with me,” she said. “It’s too far.”

  “How’s Greta been lately?”

  “You know Greta. Always the same.”

  “That’s not true. Is she settling back all right?”

  Lili stopped and wondered what he meant. Wasn’t that the frustrat ingly wonderful thing about Greta? That she was always the same—always painting, always planning, always pulling back her hair?

  “She’s fine.” And then, “I think she’s angry with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes I wonder why she let me go through with all of this in the first place. If she thought everything was going to be the same afterward.”

  “She never thought that,” Hans said. “She always knew what it meant.”

  The woman, whose arm was in a sling, was admitted to Dr. Møller’s house. Lili heard a shout from the sailor’s window above.

  Then Hans asked, “Where are you going, Lili?” He took her hands between his and began rubbing away the cold. Sometimes Lili was surprised that she didn’t simply crumble beneath the touch of a man. She could hardly believe that her flesh and bone could withstand the scrutiny of a man’s fingertips. She felt this even more with Henrik, whose hands had pressed every knuckle of her spine. His hands had cupped her shoulders and she had expected herself to fold up like a piece of paper, but it didn’t happen, and Henrik had continued touching her, kissing her.

  “We’ve known each other a long time,” Hans said.

  “I think I’ve fallen in love,” Lili began. She told Hans about Henrik, about how they would kiss in his studio in the evening and all Lili could think of was never again returning to the Widow House.

  “I thought that might be the case,” Hans said. “Why haven’t you told Greta?”

  “She’d be jealous. She’d try to stop it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She tried to stop it once before.”

  “Wasn’t that a long time ago?”

  Lili thought about this. He was right, of course. Even so, he didn’t know Greta the way she did. He hadn’t endured the slanting glare every time she set out from the apartment, or when she returned late at night. What was it Greta once said to Lili? “Obviously I’m not your mother, but just the same I’d like to know where you’re keeping yourself these days.”

  “Doesn’t she have a right to know?” Hans asked.

  “Greta?” She wasn’t always like that, Lili had to admit. Wasn’t there the time just last week when Greta met Lili at the employees’ entrance of Fonnesbech’s and said, “Sorry to change our plans, but Hans and I are going to have dinner. I’m sure you won’t mind fending for yourself.” Hadn’t Greta said, the other day when they were waking from a nap, “I had a dream about you getting married.”

  “Can I walk you to the bridge?” Hans said.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Go back up and see Greta.” Then it occurred to her how close he and Greta had become: the shared meals at the long table; the quiet evenings in the Widow House, playing poker until Lili returned; the way Greta had uncharacteristically begun to rely on him, saying more and more often, “Let me check with Hans.”

  “Do you want to marry her?” Lili said.

  “I haven’t asked her.”

  “Bu
t you will?”

  “If she lets me.”

  Lili wasn’t jealous; why should she be? She felt relief, although at the same time she felt the pull of a rushing memory: Hans and Einar playing outside the farmhouse; the apron hanging next to the stovepipe; Greta nearly chasing Einar through the halls of the Royal Academy; Greta trotting down the aisle of St. Alban’s Church on their wedding day, always in a hurry. Lili’s life had flipped itself over, and she was grateful.

  “She won’t marry me until she knows that you are settled and living well.”

  “She said that?”

  “She didn’t have to.”

  There was another shout from the sailor above, and the slam of a window. Lili and Hans smiled. In the streetlight Hans looked as young as a boy. His cowlick stood up, his cheeks pink on the point. Lili could see his breath, could see her own breath mixing with his. “You’re a whore!” the sailor yelled, as he always did.

  “Have I done anything wrong?” Lili asked.

  “No,” Hans said, releasing her hands, kissing her goodbye on the forehead. “But neither has Greta.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-six

  After thinking about it, Greta abandoned her latest portrait of Lili. The nape of the neck was wrong, too fat at the stump; and Greta had painted her back too wide, the stretch from one shoulder to the other nearly filling the canvas. It was ugly, and Greta folded it up and burned it in the iron-footed stove in the corner, the paint fumes burning her throat.

  It wasn’t the first painting that had failed, or the last. She had tried to complete the first group of portraits since returning to Copenhagen, but they continued to turn out misconceived. Lili was either oversized or strangely colored, or the dreamy white light Greta liked to paint into Lili’s cheeks came off as curdy. While Lili was at Fonnesbech’s perfume counter, Greta once tried hiring a model from the Royal Academy. She picked out the smallest boy in the class, a reedy blond with heavy lashes who tucked his sweaters into his trousers. She set out the lacquer trunk in front of the window and asked the boy to stand on it with his hands clasped at the small of his back. “Look at your feet,” Greta instructed, settling behind her easel. The canvas was blank, and its bumpy grain suddenly seemed impossible to sketch over. She penciled in the curve of his head and the line of his flank. But after an hour the portrait began to look cartoonish, with huge, watery eyes and an hourglass waist. She handed the boy ten kroner and sent him home.

  There were other models: a handsome woman who was a cook at the Palace Hotel, and a man with a waxed mustache who, when asked to strip to his undershirt, revealed a chest that was a black carpet of hair.

  “The market is tightening,” Hans said the night he came to visit, when he returned to the apartment after seeing Lili out. The gallery on Krystalgade was closed, its windows smudged with whitewash. The proprietor had disappeared; some said he fled to Poland with bad debts; others said he was now loading crates of curry on the Asiatic Company’s docks. And he was just one of many. The Henningsen porcelain factory, which had ordered another twenty kilns to produce soup bowls for America, collapsed. Herr Petzholdt’s cement churners went idle. Rumor mixed with the burnt-butter scent spewing out of the Otto Mønsted margarine factory. And the aerodrome, which once had buzzed like a beehive, sat blank and quiet, sending off the few emigrants and receiving only the occasional air freighter on its clean white strip.

  “Nobody’s buying anything,” Hans said, holding his chin in his hand, studying the paintings Greta had arranged around the room. “I’d like to wait for things to get better before we take these out. Now’s not the time. Perhaps next year.”

  “Next year?” Greta stood back and looked at her work. None were beautiful; none had the glow of light for which she had become known. She’d forgotten how to create it, the backlight that brought Lili’s face to life. The only painting that seemed to have any merit was her portrait of Professor Bolk: tall and large-handed and sturdy in his wool suit with the windowpane plaid. The others didn’t compare, Greta saw; and she saw Hans, with his wrinkled brow, trying to find a way to tell her.

  “I was thinking of traveling to America,” Hans said. “To see if there’s any business left there.”

  “To New York?”

  “And to California.”

  “To California?” Greta leaned against the wall, amid her paintings, and thought of Hans removing his felt-brimmed hat for the first time beneath the Pasadena sun.

  Carlisle was on his way over to Copenhagen, booking passage via Hamburg. He had written that the winter had been dry in Pasadena, the poppy beds burned out by March. This was in response to Greta’s one-sentence note: “Einar is dead.” And Carlisle wrote in return: “Pasadena is dry, and the Los Angeles River isn’t running, and why don’t you and Lili come for a visit?” And then, “How is Lili? Is she happy?” Greta buttoned away his letter in the pocket of her smock.

  On some afternoons, Greta would slip into Fonnesbech’s and watch Lili, across the counters displaying the kid gloves and silk scarves folded into triangles: Lili behind the glass case, her amber beads against the collar of her uniform and her hair falling into her eyes. A customer would pass and Lili would hold up a finger, and the lady would stop and bring a bottle of perfume to her nose. A smile and a sale, and Greta would watch it from across the floor, behind a rack of half-priced umbrellas. Greta spied like this a few times, but the last time was when she left Fonnesbech’s and came home to a cable from Carlisle: “I’m sailing on Saturday.”

  And here was Hans, saying he was thinking of traveling to California himself. “I don’t suppose you’d want to go with me?” he said.

  “To California?”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “And don’t tell me you can’t.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  And Greta didn’t say it, for even she knew it would sound absurd. But who would look after Lili? She thought of Carlisle right then, sunning his leg on a canvas chaise on the deck of the Estonia.

  “Greta, I could use your help,” Hans said.

  “My help?”

  “In America.”

  She took a step back from Hans; he seemed so much taller than she: had she never noticed how high he stood? It was getting late, and they hadn’t eaten. Edvard IV was lapping at the water in his bowl. Her husband’s boyhood friend, that was who he was. But Hans didn’t seem like that anymore; as if that part of him—those memories of him—had vanished with Einar.

  “Give it some thought,” Hans said.

  “I could give you names to look up. I could write letters of introduction, if that’s what you need. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she was saying.

  “That’s not it. Don’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  His hand fell to the small of her back.

  “But what about Lili?” she said.

  “She’ll be fine on her own,” Hans said.

  “I couldn’t leave her,” Greta said. His hand was caressing her hip. It was a spring night and the shutters were shaking in the wind, and Greta thought of the house on the hill in Pasadena where in the summer the Santa Anas flung eucalyptus branches against the screens.

  “You’ll have to,” Hans said. He wrapped his arms around her. She could feel his heart beating beneath his shirt, and she could feel her own in her throat.

  When he arrived, Carlisle didn’t stay in the spare bedroom. Instead, he took a room at the Palace Hotel, with a view out over Rådhuspladsen and the three-dragon fountain. He said he liked the sound in the square of the trams crossing lines, and the call of the man selling spice biscuits from his cart. Carlisle said he liked looking at the long brick wall of Tivoli, which was reopening for the season, the seats of the Ferris wheel shaking in the sky. He said he liked visiting Lili at the counter at Fonnesbech’s, where she had earned a little lapel pin for being the month’s number-one salesgirl. He said he liked seeing her busy and walking down Strøget, chatting with the other salesgirls as they emerged from th
e employee entrance in their matching blue suits. Carlisle said to Greta that he thought Lili should live on her own.

  “What makes you say that?” Greta answered.

  “She’s a grown woman.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Anyway, it’s up to her.”

  “Do you mean that?” he said.

  “Of course I mean that,” said Greta, who never saw a mirror-image of herself when she looked at her twin.

  One night the previous week Greta had been standing in the doorway of a building opposite Fonnesbech’s employee entrance. It was early evening, and she had hurried out of the Widow House so quickly that she’d forgotten to change out of her smock. She held her hands in the pockets, fingering the photographs of Teddy and Einar, the letters from them, their wedding bands. She was pressing herself against the portico of an apartment house with a horsehair doormat.

  She waited only a few minutes until the metal door swung open, filling the tiny street with light and the chatter of girls. Their shoes began to clack against the grate in the sidewalk.

  Greta waited for Lili to join up with three or four girls headed to the Turkish coffee house where young people lounged on the floor propped up by pillows embroidered with silk thread and little mirrors. “See you tomorrow,” two girls called to the rest. “Good night,” another said. “Have fun,” a fourth said over her shoulder, with a wave. The girls’ cheeks were downy and curved with baby fat, and their ponytails swayed as they walked down the little street and then turned onto Strøget. Lili was still talking with other girls, one with a sack of groceries, another with some sort of brace around her hand. Greta couldn’t hear what they were saying, but then the rest of the girls said, “So long.” And at last Lili was alone in the street. She checked her watch and looked to the low, damp sky.