The Danish Girl (18 page)

And so Einar would set out from the ladies’ pool in Lili’s clothes, with the rubber bathing cap still on his head, dropping a franc into the attendant’s ever-extended hand, gliding like the little duck on the pool’s surface, above the whispery gossip of the French ladies who would linger at the pool until it was time to return home and help their Polish maids prepare lunch for their pinafored children, while Einar, sloppy and red-eyed in Lili’s clothes, would return to Greta, who, in the course of the morning, had set the props and sketched the study for another painting of Lili.

One day in early May, Einar was sitting in the place des Vosges, on a bench beneath a hedge of trees. The wind kept lifting the fountain’s trickle, throwing it at his feet and staining the sand-colored gravel around him. In the morning Lili had gone for a swim. In the afternoon, Einar had returned to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s and witnessed through the little black glass a man and woman make love on the floor. It had cost him three times the usual entry fee; Madame Jasmin-Carton had been advertising the spectacle for a month on note cards tacked above the peep windows. The note cards, with the information of the public liaison neatly printed out, reminded Einar of the notes Lili and Greta had used to communicate with each other during the early days in Denmark: as if there were something about the crisp, echoey air of Copenhagen that couldn’t support the secret words they needed to say.

The boy was tall and stringy, not much more than an adolescent with his bluish-white skin and sleepy blue eyes and ribs that could be counted one, two, three. He quickly peeled himself out of his cheap tweed suit, and then helped the woman, who was older, out of her dress. Not counting himself, Einar had never before seen a man sexually aroused, the way it pointed up like a spear in the first inches of its trajectory. The boy’s was red-tipped and drippy and angry. The woman took it in her easily, and then, at just that moment, seemed grateful. They thrashed around on the floor of the little dark half-circle room, while pressed to every window was the face of a man old enough to be the boy’s grandfather. Quickly he finished up, his seed flying up in a heavy arc into the woman’s puckered face. He stood and bowed. He left the room, his tweed suit a bundle under his arm. Only then, when Einar looked down into his own lap, did he discover the salty stain, as if a teacup of seawater had overturned. Then he knew, although he supposed he had always known: he wanted the boy to do that to Lili. To kiss her just before the boy’s chest flushed red and his mouth twisted with pleasure.

After that, Einar found himself on the bench in the place des Vosges. He opened his coat to allow his lap, which he had rinsed out in Madame’s hand basin, to dry. Children were splashing each other in the fountain and pushing hoops across the gravel paths, and one girl was flying a paper kite shaped like a bat. Italian governesses were talking loudly over their prams parked in a circle. Einar turned away from them, embarrassed by his stain. The sun had been warm at the pool that morning, but now it kept slipping behind streamers of clouds, the park suddenly turning gray, the children, it seemed, mere cutouts of themselves. Einar’s lap wouldn’t dry. The wet wool reminded him of the dogs on the farm in Bluetooth, how they’d come home from a day hunting for frogs. They’d be crusty and dank, their fur hard, and they’d never really lose that wet smell.

The little girl with the kite let out a scream. The string had slipped out of her hand and now the kite was tumbling from the sky. She was following it with her finger as it fell. Then she began to run, the bow in her hair flopping against her ears. Her governess yelled for her to stop. The governess looked angry, her Italian face red and stormy. She told the little girl, Martine, to wait by the pram. The kite was hurtling toward the earth, its black paper fluttering in its frame. Then it crashed near Einar’s foot.

The governess snatched the crumpled kite with a pretty hand and a hiss. Then she took Martine ’s wrist and led her back to the pram, pulling her close to her side. The other governesses were standing under the hedge of trees, their prams huddled together at the bumper. When Martine and her governess joined them, they all looked over their shoulders in suspicion. Then the pack wheeled away, the squeak of their wheels a cry.

This was when Einar knew something had to change. Einar had become a man governesses feared in a park. Einar was a man with suspicious stains on his clothes.

It was May 1929, and he would give himself exactly one year. The park was dim, the sun hidden by clouds. The hedge of trees, with their fresh leaves shaking, looked cold. Again, a wind lifted the trickling water from the fountain and sprayed it onto the gravel. If in exactly one year Lili and Einar weren’t sorted out, he would come to the park and kill himself.

It made him straighten his back. He could no longer bear the chaos in his life. Greta owned a silver-plated pistol from her California days. She’d grown up with it tucked in her stocking. He would return to the park with it and, under the black May night, he would press it to his temple.

Einar heard footsteps running toward him, and he looked up from his lap. It was Martine in her yellow pinafore. She looked frightened but enthusiastic. She stopped running and inched closer. Her soft hand reached out. Between Einar and her lay the kite’s tail, a row of rag-bows on a string. Martine wanted it, and from the little smile pushing through her frown, Einar could tell she wanted to be friendly with him. She grabbed the tail. Then she laughed, her face like gold. When she curtsied and said
“Merci,”
everything Einar knew about himself pressed together as one: the cottongrass apron strings around his waist; his head held in Greta’s young hands; Lili in the
sennep
-yellow shoes in the Widow House; Lili this morning swimming laps in the river pool. Einar and Lili were one, but it was time to split them in two. He had one year.

“Martine—Martine!” called the governess. Martine’s buckle shoes ground through the gravel. One year, Einar told himself. And then again, from over her shoulder, Martine called cheerfully,
“Merci.”
She waved, and Einar and Lili as one waved in return.

CHAPTER Fourteen

After three years in Paris, Greta had never worked harder in her life. In the mornings, when Lili was out doing the marketing or bathing at the pool, Greta would complete her magazine assignments. There was an editor at
La Vie Parisienne
who called nearly every week, panic in his fussy voice, asking for a quick drawing of the opera’s latest production of
Carmen
, or a sketch to accompany the story on the exhibition of dinosaur bones at the Grand Palais. Really, there was no need to accept such a job, Greta would tell herself. Her name had been appearing in the magazines for a couple of years; but on the telephone the editor would squeak about his need for artwork. As Greta, the phone receiver between her chin and shoulder, watched Lili slip out of the apartment, Greta would think to herself, Oh, why not? Yes, she would do the sketch. Yes, she could deliver it by the morning. But I really must be getting to it, Greta would say, replacing the receiver in its cradle and then going to the window to see Lili, quick in the daylight, off to the Marché Buci, her pink spring coat bright against the dull, rain-soaked street.

Not until Lili returned would Greta’s real work begin. Then she would boil a cup of tea for Lili and say, “Come sit here,” posing her on a stool, or next to a potted palm tree, placing the cup and saucer into Lili’s hands. No matter the weather, Lili would always return to the apartment cold, her hands trembling. Greta feared she didn’t have enough flesh on her frame, but she could never get her to eat anything more. The bleeding returned every now and then, once every few months, announced by a slow drop of blood inching across Lili’s upper lip. Then she would lie in bed for days, as if stored in those few crimson drops was all her energy. Greta had taken Einar to one or two French doctors, but as soon as they began to probe with their questions (“Is there anything else I should know about your husband?”), she would realize that none of them would have any more answers than Dr. Hexler. She would worry as Lili lay in bed, sleeping through the day, staining the sheets, which Greta would later have to shove into the incinerator behind the apartment. But then, after a few days, sometimes a week, just as quickly as it had begun, the bleeding would cease. “How dull it is to spend a week in bed,” Lili would say, throwing the bolster pillow to the carpet.

If she were to count them up, Greta would discover that she had more than one hundred paintings of Lili by now: Lili bathing in the pool; Lili as a member of a wedding party; Lili examining carrots at the market. But most were Lili set in landscapes, on a heath, in an olive grove, against the blue line of the Kattegat Sea. Always her eyes brown and huge, hooded; the delicate curve of her plucked eyebrows; hair parted around the ear to reveal an amber earring hanging against her neck.

Einar himself no longer painted. “I’m having a hard time imagining the bog,” he’d call from his studio, where his canvases and his paints were kept tidy. Out of habit he continued to order bottles of paint from Munich, even though the best paints in the world were sold just across the river at Sennelier, where the clerk kept a perpetually pregnant cat. Greta hated the cat, whose bloated stomach sagged to the floor, but she enjoyed visiting with the clerk, a man named Du Brul, who often said, with his Van Dyke goatee twitching madly, that she was his most important lady customer. “And some believe a lady cannot paint!” he ’d say as she left the store with a box of paint bottles wrapped in newsprint, the cat hissing as if she were about to give birth.

The apartment on the rue Vieille du Temple had a central room big enough for a long table and two reading chairs by the gas fireplace. There was a red velvet ottoman in the room, large and round, with an upholstered column rising from its center, like the kind in shoe stores. And an oak rocker, with a brown leather cushion, shipped over from Pasadena. She had begun to call the apartment the casita. It didn’t look like a casita, with its split-beam ceilings and the
portes-fenêtres
with their copper lock-bolts separating the rooms. But for some reason it made her think of the casita on the rim of the Arroyo Seco she and Teddy Cross had moved into after they left Bakersfield. The sunlight that poured in from the mossy brick patio had helped Teddy rise every day with another idea for a pot to throw on his wheel, or two colors to combine for a glaze. He had worked quickly and freely when they lived there. There was an avocado tree in the back garden that produced more heavy green grenades of fruit than they could possibly eat or give away. “I want to be like the avocado tree,” Teddy would say. “Constantly producing.” Now in Paris, in the casita, Greta thought of herself as the avocado tree. From the branch of her filbert brush the Lili paintings continued to drop and drop and drop.

For a while she regretted Einar’s abandoned career. Many of his landscapes hung in the apartment, crown molding to baseboard. They were a constant and sometimes sad reminder of their inverted lives. At least to Greta. Never did Einar admit that he missed his artist’s life. But she sometimes missed it for him, finding it hard to understand how one who had spent his life creating could simply stop. She supposed his old drive—the need to turn to a blank canvas with a chestful of ideas and fear—was now transferred to Lili.

Within a year of their arrival in Paris, Hans had begun to sell the Lili paintings. With the magazines calling, Greta’s name began to float around Paris, in the cafés along boulevard St-Germain, in the salons where artists and writers lay on zebra-skin rugs drinking distilled liqueurs made from yellow plums. So many Americans in Paris, too, each talking about the other, eyeing one another in that American way. Greta tried to stay clear of them, of the circle that gathered nightly at 27 rue de Fleurus. She remained suspicious of them, and they of her, she knew. Their nights of fireside gossip about who was or wasn’t modern didn’t interest Greta. And in those societies of wit and airs, Greta knew, there was no room for Lili or Einar.