The Danish Girl (21 page)

 

 

It was early afternoon when Einar emerged from Madame Jasmin-Carton’s. She had given him less than a minute to dress and leave her premises forever. He was on the black street with his clothes rumpled and untucked and his necktie in his hand. The tobacco shop owner was standing in his door, picking at his mustache, eyeing Einar. There was no one else on the street. Einar had hoped that the man would be waiting outside Madame Jasmin-Carton’s, that they would go to the little café around the corner for a coffee and, perhaps, a carafe of red wine. But he wasn’t there, just the tobacco shop owner and a little brown dog.

Einar entered the pissoir. Its metal walls smelled wet. Next to the basin Einar straightened his clothes and tied his tie. The little brown dog followed Einar in, and begged.

For months Einar had been thinking about visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale, and at last he set out. It occupied a block of buildings, bordered by the rue Vivienne, the rue Colbert, the rue de Richelieu, and the rue des Petits-Champs. Hans had arranged for Einar’s ticket of admittance, writing the library’s administration on his behalf. The Salle de Travail des Imprimés, with its hundreds of seats, had a desk in the middle of the room where Einar had to fill out a bulletin personnel, registering the purpose of his visit:
researching a lost girl.
There he also wrote on slips of paper the names of books he wanted. The librarian behind the bureau was girlish, with downy cheeks and a shell-pink clip holding back her bangs. Her name was Anne-Marie, and she spoke so softly that Einar had to lean toward her face and smell her peanutty breath. When he handed her the slips of paper with the names of half a dozen scientific books on sexual problems, she blushed but then set out to do her job.

Einar sat down at one of the long reading tables. A student a few chairs down looked up from his notebook, then returned to his work. The room was cold, motes of dust in the lamplight. The long table was scratched. The sound of a page turning filled the room. Einar was worried that he looked suspicious, coming in here at his age, his trousers wrinkled, a faint sweaty scent sticking to him. Should he go find the washroom and look at himself in the mirror?

Anne-Marie delivered the books to his table. She said only, “We will be closing today at four.”

Einar ran his hand over the books; three were in German, two in French, the last from America. He opened the most recent, called
Sexual Fluidity
, published in Vienna, written by Professor Johann Hoffmann. Professor Hoffmann had performed experiments on guinea pigs and rats. In one, he grew breast glands in a once-male rat rich enough to feed a second rat’s litter. “Pregnancy, however,” Professor Hoffmann wrote, “remains elusive.”

Einar looked up from the book. The student had fallen asleep on his notebook. Anne-Marie was busy loading a cart. He thought of himself as the formerly male rat. A rat on its wheel running through his head. Now the rat couldn’t stop. It was too late. The experiment continued. What was it Greta was always saying? Worst thing in the world is to give up! Hands swatting through the air, silver bracelets jangling. She was always saying that, and: Come on now, Einar. When will you ever learn?

Einar thought of the promise he’d made to himself in the park last month: something would have to change. May had slipped into June, just as the months had slipped into years. More than four years ago, Lili was born on the lacquer trunk.

At four o’clock Anne-Marie rang a brass handbell. “Please leave your materials on the table,” she announced. She had to rock the shoulder of the student to wake him. To Einar, she pressed her lips together till they turned white and then nodded goodbye.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll never know how helpful this has been.”

She blushed again, and then said, a little smile emerging, “Should I set aside these books? Will you need them tomorrow?” Her hand, which was pale and no larger than a baby starfish, fell softly on Einar’s arm. “I think I know of some others. I’ll pull them for you in the morning. They might be what you’re looking for.” She paused. “I mean, if that ’s what you want.”

CHAPTER Sixteen

Much to Greta’s concern, Carlisle’s foot dragged through the gravel of the Tuileries. Each night he soaked his leg up to the knee in a tub of Epsom salt and white table wine, a balm his roommate at Stanford, who went on to become a surgeon in La Jolla, had first concocted. Carlisle had become an architect, building bungalows in Pasadena in orange groves that were being paved into neighborhoods. They were small houses, built for teachers at Pasadena Poly and Westridge School for Girls, for policemen, for the migrants from Indiana and Illinois who ran the bakeries and the printing shops along Colorado Street. He sent Greta pictures, and sometimes she put her chin in her fist and dreamed of one of the bungalows, with a screened-in sleeping porch and windows shaded by Blood of China camellia trees: not that she really saw herself settling into one of the little houses, but sometimes she wanted to stop and wonder.

Carlisle’s face was handsome and long, his hair less yellow-white than Greta’s and with more kink in the strand. He had never married, spending his evenings at his drafting table or in his oak rocker with a green-glass lamp pulled near for reading. There were girls, he reported to Greta in his letters, girls who joined his table at the Valley Hunt Club or who worked as assistants on his jobs, but no one who meant much. “I can wait,” he would write, and Greta would think, holding the letter in the sunlight at the window, So can I.

The spare bedroom in the casita had an iron bed and brocade wallpaper. There was a lamp with a fringed shade that Greta worried wouldn’t provide enough light. The charcuterie on the corner had lent her a zinc tub for the Epsom-and-white-wine balm; typically geese lay dead in it, their necks curled over its rim.

In the mornings Carlisle would take his coffee and croissant at the long table in the casita’s front room, his bad leg a thin rail in his pajamas. At first Einar would slip out of the apartment just as the knob on Carlisle’s door began to turn. Einar was timid around Carlisle, Greta noticed. He would quiet his step whenever he passed Carlisle’s door, as if to avoid a chance meeting in the hall, beneath the crystal-bowl lamp. At dinner, Einar’s shoulders would bunch up, as if it pained him trying to think of something to say. Greta wondered if something had passed between them, a harsh word, perhaps an insult. Something invisible seemed to be hanging between them, a thread of will that she couldn’t quite, at least not yet, understand.

Once, Carlisle invited Einar to a vapor bath on the rue des Mathurins. It wasn’t like the Bains du Pont-Solférino, out in the sunlight along the Seine. Instead, it was a pool for men in a gymnasium with steamy air and yellow marble tiles and palm trees drooping in Chinese cachepots. When Einar and Carlisle returned from the bath, Einar immediately locked himself in his room. “What happened?” Greta asked her brother. And Carlisle, whose eyes were red from the water, said, “Nothing. He just said he didn’t want to swim. Said he didn’t know you had to swim naked.” And then, “He nearly fainted at the sight of it. But hasn’t he ever been to a Turkish bath?”

“It’s the Dane in him,” Greta said, knowing it wasn’t true. Why, she thought, the Danes would look for any excuse to remove their clothes and prance around.

Shortly after Carlisle arrived, Hans stopped by one morning to look over Greta’s latest paintings. There were two to show him: the first was Lili, large and flat, on the beach in Bornholm; the second was Lili standing next to a Blood of China camellia tree. Einar had painted the sea in the background of the first, working steadily and tidily on its pale blue summer tide. The camellia tree, however, he couldn’t quite pull off, unfamiliar as he was with the puckering red blossoms and the buds as shiny and tight as acorns. She ’d taken on an assignment from
Vogue
—illustrating next winter’s fox-lined coats—and so the only time she had to finish the camellia portrait was in the middle of the night. For three nights she stayed up, delicately painting the bloom of petals in each flower, with the hint of sorbet-yellow at its center, while Einar and Carlisle slept, her studio silent except for Edvard IV’s occasional sigh.

She finished the painting only hours before Hans arrived to see it. “Still wet,” she said, serving him coffee, and a cup for Carlisle, another for Einar, who was fresh from a bath, his hair wet at the tips.

“It’s a good one,” Hans was saying, looking at the camellia painting. “Very Oriental. That’s what they like these days. Maybe you should try painting her in an embroidered kimono?”

“I don’t want to make her look cheap,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” Einar said, so quietly Greta wasn’t sure if the others had heard.

“That’s not what I meant,” Hans said. He was in a pale summer suit, his legs crossed, his fingers drumming the long table. Carlisle was on the velvet ottoman, Einar in the rocker. It was the first time the three men had been together, and Greta kept moving her eyes from her brother, with his leg up on the velvet cushion, to her husband, with the wet tips of his hair against his thin throat, to Hans. She felt as if she were a different person with each of them. As if she rolled out a different repartee for each of them; and maybe she did. She wondered if they felt that they knew her at all. Perhaps she could be wrong, but it was how she felt—as if each of them wanted something different from her.

Hans had respected her wishes, withdrawing his attention, remaining focused on selling her work. There were times, when they found themselves alone, in the back room of his office or in her studio while Lili was out, when Greta could feel his eyes on her. But when his back was turned she couldn’t help staring, at the spread of his shoulders, at the blond hair creeping over his collar. She knew what she was longing for, but she forced herself to shove it aside. “Not while Einar’s still . . .” In her chest she could feel the clamps closing with a clang. She expected those passions, such heartswell, from Lili. Not from herself, not anymore, not now, with a studio full of unfinished portraits and assignments from the magazines waiting to be drawn, and her light-stepped husband weak in body, confused in mind, and her brother showing up in Paris with his incomplete statement “I’ve come to help,” and Hans, at her long workman’s table, his long fingers drumming the pine top, waiting for the paint of the camellias to dry, waiting for a second cup of coffee, waiting for Greta to produce a painting of Lili in a kimono, waiting, patiently, with a flat brow, simply waiting for Greta to fall into his arms.

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?”