The Danish Girl (10 page)

“In Bluetooth,” Lili began, “there was a boy named Hans.” It was the first Greta had heard of Hans. Lili spoke of him ecstatically, with her fingers pressed together and held up in the air. It was as if she were in a trance as she told Greta of Hans’s climbing tricks on the ancient oak, of his pebbly little voice, of his submarine-shaped kite sinking into the bog.

“And you haven’t heard from him since?” Greta asked.

“I understand he’s moved to Paris,” Lili said, resuming her crocheting. “He’s an art dealer, but that’s all I know. Deals in art for Americans.” Then she rose and went into the bedroom, where Edvard IV was growling in his sleep, and shut the door. An hour later, when Einar emerged, it was as if Lili had never been there. Except for the scent of mint and milk, it was as if she didn’t really exist at all.

By the end of the two weeks none of Greta’s paintings had sold. She could no longer blame her lack of success on the economy, what with the Great War seven years in the past and the Danish economy chugging and panting with growth and speculation. But the failed show didn’t surprise her. Since they had married, Einar’s reputation had overshadowed hers. His little dark paintings of moors and storms—really, some were no more than gray paint on black—earned more and more kroner each year. Meanwhile Greta sold nothing but the drab commissions of corporate directors who refused to crack a smile. The more personal portraits she painted—of Anna, of the blind woman at the gate of Tivoli, and now of Lili—went unnoticed. After all, who would buy Greta’s work over Einar’s, the bright, bold American’s over the subtle, cozy Dane’s? What critic in all of Denmark, where artistic styles from the nineteenth century were still considered new and questionable, would dare praise her style over his? This was how Greta felt; even Einar, when prodded, admitted it might be true. “I hate feeling like this,” she would sometimes say, her cheeks mumpy with an envy that could not be dismissed as petty.

One painting, however, drew some interest. It was a triptych, painted on hinged boards. Greta had started it the day after the ball at Rådhuset. It was three views of a girl’s head at full scale: a girl removed in thought, her eyelids tired and red; a girl white with fear, her cheek hollow; a girl overly excited, her hair slipping from its clip, her lip dewy. Greta had used a fine rabbit’s-hair brush and egg tempera, which gave the girl’s skin a translucence, a nightworm’s glow. On this one painting, she decided not to apply the shellac. Standing in front of it, one or two critics withdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she heard the lead tips scraping against the notepads. One critic cleared his throat; a second, a Frenchman with a little gray wart on the rim of his eye, said to Greta, “This one yours as well?”

But the painting, called
Lili Thrice
, could not rescue the show. Rasmussen, a short man who had recently sailed to New York to swap paintings by Hammershøi and Krøyer for shares in the steel companies of Pennsylvania, crated up Greta’s portraits for return. “I’ll keep the one of the girl for consignment,” he said, logging it into his books.

It was several weeks later that the clipping from a Parisian art journal arrived in the mail, in care of Rasmussen’s gallery. The article was a summary of Scandinavian modern art; buried in the paragraphs on Denmark’s most talented was a brief mention—most people probably never even saw it—of Greta. “A wild and rhapsodic imagination,” it said of Greta. “Her painting of a young girl named Lili would be frightening if it wasn’t so beautiful.” The review said nothing else. It was as cursory as surveys tend to be. Rasmussen had forwarded the clipping to Greta, who read it with a mixture of feeling she couldn’t articulate to anyone: to her, even more startling than the praise was the absence of Einar’s name. Danish art was summed up, and Einar hovered nowhere. She tucked the clipping into a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. It went beneath the sepia prints of Teddy and the letters from her father in Pasadena describing the orange harvest, the coyote hunts, and the society of lady painters in Santa Monica she could join if she ever decided to leave Denmark for good. Greta would never hand the article to Einar. It was hers; the words of praise were hers. Again, she didn’t feel the need to share.

But Greta couldn’t just read the review and then fold it away in a drawer. No, she had to react, and so she immediately wrote the critic with an idea.

“Thank you for your thoughtful review,” she began.

CHAPTER Seven

A week after the Artists Ball, Lili met Henrik in Kongens Have three evenings in a row. Still unsure of herself, she agreed to see him only at dusk, which at the end of June came late after supper. Each night as she dressed, pulling a skirt from the wardrobe, preparing for her assignation, she would become heavy with guilt. Greta would be reading the newspaper in the front room, and Lili could nearly feel Greta’s eye on her as she applied the powder and the lipstick and filled her camisole with rolled socks. Lili would tiptoe around Edvard IV, who was sprawled on the little oval carpet in front of the mirror. Lili would study her profile in the mirror, first from the left, then from the right. She felt sorry about leaving Greta to her newspaper and the cone of light from her reading lamp—but not sorry enough to fail to meet Henrik at the proposed iron streetlamp.

“Are you going out?” Greta asked the first night Lili headed toward the front door, just as the horn of the Bornholm ferry was calling.

“For a walk,” Lili said. “For some fresh air. It ’s too nice to be inside.”

“At this hour?”

“As long as you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Greta said, pointing to the pile of newspapers at her feet that she still wanted to read before going to bed. “But all alone?”

“I won’t be exactly alone.” Lili couldn’t look at Greta when she said this, her eyes averted to the floor. “I’m meeting Henrik.” And then, “But only for a stroll.”

Lili watched Greta’s face. Her cheeks were twitching and it seemed as if she was grinding her teeth. Greta sat up in her reading chair. She sharply creased the newspaper in her lap. “Don’t stay out too late,” she finally said.

Henrik kept Lili waiting nearly twenty minutes beneath the streetlamp. She began to worry that maybe he had changed his mind, that perhaps he had realized something about her. It frightened her, to be alone on the street. But she was also thrilled by the sense of freedom, the rapid pulse in her throat telling her she could do almost anything she pleased.

When Henrik finally arrived, he was out of breath, sweat on his upper lip. He apologized. “I was painting and lost track of time. Does that ever happen to you, Lili? When you nearly forget who or where you are?”

They walked for a half hour, in the warm night. They didn’t say much, and it felt to Lili as if there was nothing to say. Henrik took her hand. When they were on a street empty but for a stray dog, he kissed her.

They met again the next two nights, each time Lili slipping out of the apartment under Greta’s gaze rising above the edge of the newspaper. Each time Henrik arriving late, running, paint beneath his fingernails, splattered in his curls.

“I’d like to meet Greta someday,” Henrik said. “To prove to her I’m not really the type of man who runs away from a fainting woman.”

They stayed out late that third night, past the call of the last tram, past one o’clock when the public houses closed. Lili kept her hand in Henrik’s as they walked through the city, looking in the flat black reflection of shop windows, kissing in the dark provided by doorways. She knew she should return to the Widow House, but something in her wanted to stay out forever.

Lili was sure Greta would be up waiting for her, her eye never having left the front door. But the apartment was dark when Lili got home, and she washed her face and removed her clothes and climbed into bed as Einar.

The next day Greta told Lili she should stop seeing Henrik. “Do you think it’s fair to him?” she asked. “To deceive him like this? What do you think he would think?”

But Lili didn’t quite understand what Greta meant. What would Henrik think about what? Unless Greta plainly told her, often Lili forgot who she was.

“I don’t want to stop seeing him,” she said.

“Then please, stop seeing him for me.”

Lili said she’d try, but even as she said it she knew it would be impossible. As she stood in the front room, by Einar’s empty easel, she knew she was lying to Greta. But Lili couldn’t help it. She could hardly help herself.

And so Lili and Henrik began to meet secretly, at the end of the afternoon, before it was time for Lili to return home for supper. At first it was difficult for Lili to see Henrik in the daylight, with the sun harsh in her face. She feared he would discover that she wasn’t really beautiful, or worse. She would tie a scarf around her head, the knot beneath her chin. She felt comfortable sitting with him only in the darkened Rialto movie house, her hand in his, or in the hushed library of the Royal Academy, the reading room dimmed by green canvas roller shades.

One night Lili told Henrik to meet her by the lake in Ørstedsparken at nine o’clock. There were two swans gliding in the water, and a willow leaning toward the grass. Henrik was late, and when he arrived he kissed her forehead. “I know we only have a few minutes,” he said, his hair brushing her throat.

But Greta was at a reception at the American embassy that night. She would be gone for another few hours, and Lili was about to tell Henrik they could freely dine together at the restaurant with the wainscot walls on Gråbrødre Torv. They could stroll down Langelinie like any other Danish couple out on a fine summer night. She could hardly believe the good news she was about to break to Henrik, who had become used to meeting Lili for twenty minutes at a time. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

Henrik took her hand and kissed it and then held it against his chest. “Oh, Lili—don’t say any more,” he said. “I already know. Don’t worry about anything, but I already know.” His face was open, his eyebrows lifted.

Lili pulled her hand from Henrik’s. It was quiet in the park, the workers who cross it on their way home already at their dinner tables, and a man was loitering near the toilethouse, lighting a book of matches one by one. A second man walked by and then looked over his shoulder.

What does Henrik know? Lili was asking herself, but soon she came to understand.

Henrik’s eyebrows were still lifted, and a terrible shudder rose through Lili, and it suddenly was as if Einar were a third person there— as if he were one step removed from Lili and Henrik’s intimate circle of confession, witnessing it all. There he was, Einar in the young girl’s dress, flirting with a younger man. It was an awful sight.

Lili shuddered again. The man in front of the toilethouse entered, and then there was a loud crash, a trash bin knocked over.

“I’m afraid I can’t see you anymore,” Lili finally said. “I’m going to have to say goodbye to you tonight.”

“What are you talking about?” Henrik said. “Why are you saying this?”

“I just can’t see you anymore. Not right now,” she said.

He reached for Lili’s hand but she refused. “But it doesn’t make any difference to me. Is that what this is about? That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Is this because you think that I won’t—”

“Not right now,” she said again, and Lili left him. She crossed the grass, which was dry in summer, nearly snapping beneath her feet, and up the path out of the park. “Lili,” he cried from beneath the willow. There would be a few hours to rehang Lili’s dress and to bathe and to begin another painting. Einar would wait for Greta, who would come home and unfasten her hat and ask, “Did you have a nice evening?” and who would kiss his forehead in a way that would show them both that Greta had been right.

CHAPTER Eight