The Danish Girl (9 page)

“Tell Greta I’ll walk you home,” Henrik said.

Lili said, “Only if you promise to leave me around the corner from the Widow House. Einar might be waiting up, and he wouldn’t want to see me alone with a stranger. Then he and Greta would worry whether or not I’m old enough to live in Copenhagen. They’re like that, always wondering what to do with me, wondering if I’m about to stumble across trouble.”

Henrik, whose lips were flat and purple and cracked just down the middle, kissed Lili. His head swooped in, his mouth landed on hers and then pulled away. He did it again, and again, while his hand kneaded the flesh above her elbow, and then the small of her back.

What surprised her most about a man’s kiss was the scratch of the whiskers, and the dense hot weight of a young man’s arm. The tip of his tongue was strangely smooth, as if a scalding tea had burned off the bumpy buds. Lili wanted to push him away and say she couldn’t do this, but it suddenly seemed like an impossible task. As if her hand could never shove away Henrik, whose corkscrew hair was twisting like rope around her throat.

Henrik pulled her from the iron bench. She was worried that he might embrace her and feel through the dress her oddly shaped body, bony and breastless, with a painful, swollen ache tucked between her thighs. He led Lili down a side corridor in the Rådhuset, his hand offered as a tow. His head seemed like a puppet’s, bobbing happily; it was round and cranial, with a touch of Mongol in the forehead. And this was why, perhaps, Einar felt free to grip Henrik’s moist fist and follow: it was a game, part of the game of Lili, and games counted for nearly nothing. Games weren’t art, they weren’t painting; and they certainly weren’t life. Not once before—and not even tonight with Henrik’s hand sweating in his palm—did Einar ever consider himself abnormal, or off the mark. His doctor, when he’d gone to him last year with a question about their inability to produce children, had asked, “Do you ever long for someone other than your wife, Einar? For another man, perhaps?” “No, never. Not at all,” he replied. “Your inkling is wrong.” Einar told the doctor that he, too, became disturbed when he saw the men with the quick, frightened eyes and the excessively pink skin loitering near the toilethouse in Ørstedsparken. Homosexual! How far from the truth!

And, again, this was why Einar held Henrik’s hand and ran down the back passageway with the Danish flags hanging from the burnished beams. Why he tripped in the
sennep-
yellow shoes Greta had first given him that April afternoon when she needed a pair of legs to paint. Why he allowed the narrow slip-dress to bind his stride: Einar was playing a game. He knew it. Greta knew it. But he also knew nothing, nothing about himself.

Outside in Rådhuspladsen, a tram clanged by, its bell friendly and sad. Three Norwegians were sitting on the rim of the fountain, laughing and drunk.

“Which way?” Henrik asked. He seemed shorter on the street, out on the open
plads
that smelled of the nearby cart selling coffee and spice biscuits. There was something hot in the secret pit of Einar’s stomach, and all he could do was look around at the fountain and the bronze lurblowers and the steep pitch of the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square.

“Where to?” Henrik asked again. He looked to the sky, his nostrils trembling.

Then Einar had an idea; Lili had an idea. And as strange as it might seem, it was like that: floating somewhere above Rådhuspladsen Einar watched Lili, with her determined upper lip, whisper to Henrik, “Come.” He heard her think: Greta will never know. What Lili was referring to—Greta will never know what?—Einar didn’t find out. When he, Einar, the remote owner of the borrowed body, was about to ask Lili what she was referring to; when he, Einar, floating above like a circling ghost, was about to lean in and ask—not exactly the way a driver at a fork asks himself which road to take, but almost—
What won’t Greta know?,
just then Lili, with her forearms flushed with heat, with chiffon in her fists, her half of the walnut brain electric with the current of thought, felt a warm trickle run from her nose to her lips.

“My God, you’re bleeding!” Henrik cried.

She brought her hand to her nose. The blood was thick, running over her mouth. The music from the Rådhuset was ringing in her nose. With each drop she felt more cleansed, empty but cleansed.

“What happened?” Henrik asked. “How did this happen?” He was yelling, and the blood seemed to run a little heavier in gratitude for his concern. “Let me get you some help.” Before she could stop him, he was running across Rådhuspladsen to some people getting into a car. He was about to tap the shoulder of a woman holding open the door. Lili watched Henrik’s finger slowly unfurl. Then she realized.

Lili tried to call “No!”—but she couldn’t speak at all. Henrik was tapping the black sturdy back of Greta, who was on the street putting Helene into the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s official car.

It was as if Greta never saw Henrik. She only saw Lili, her blood bright across Rådhuspladsen. Greta’s face tightened, and Lili thought she heard Greta whisper, “Oh no. For God ’s sake, no.” The next thing Lili knew, Greta’s blue scarf, the one Lili had been secretly borrowing, was pressed to her nose, and she was collapsing into Greta’s arms, hearing softly, like a lullaby, “Lili, are you all right? Oh, Lili, please be all right.” And then, “Did he hurt you?”

Lili shook her head.

“How did this happen?” Greta asked, her thumbs rubbing circles into Lili’s temples. Lili couldn’t say anything, could only watch Henrik, frightened of Greta, run across Rådhuspladsen, his legs long and swift, his spiraled hair swaying at the tips, the handsome slap of his foot on the cobble eerily similar to the flat punch of Einar’s father’s hand to his cheek when he discovered Einar in his grandmother’s apron as Hans’s lips pressed toward his neck.

CHAPTER Six

That summer, the dealer who sold Einar’s work agreed to display ten of Greta’s paintings for two weeks. Einar arranged it, requesting the favor—
My wife is becoming frustrated,
he began in a letter to Herr Rasmussen—on a sheet of letterhead, though Greta wasn’t supposed to know about that. Regretfully, she unsealed the letter Einar asked her to post, using a teakettle and a fingernail—for no good reason, really, except that sometimes Greta became overwhelmed with a curiosity about her husband and what he did when he was away from her: what he was reading, where he ate his lunch, to whom he spoke and about what. It’s not because I’m jealous, Greta told herself, delicately resealing the envelope. No, it’s simply because I’m in love.

Rasmussen was bald, with Chinese-shaped eyes, a widower. He lived with his two children in an apartment near Amalienborg. When he said he ’d hang her most recent paintings, Greta was tempted to say she didn’t want his help. Then she thought about it and realized she did. To Einar she coyly said, “I’m not sure whether you spoke to Rasmussen or not. But thankfully he’s come around.”

At a furniture store on Ravnsborggade she bought ten chairs and re-tacked their cushions in red damask. The chairs she placed in front of each painting at the gallery. “For reflection,” she suggested to Rasmussen, arranging them just so. Then she wrote every European newspaper editor on the list Einar had put together over the years. The invitation announced an important debut—words Greta had trouble putting down, so boastful they seemed, so transactional, but she went ahead, at Einar’s urging. “If that’s what it takes,” she said. She hand-delivered the invitation to the offices of
Berlingske Tidende
,
Nationaltidende
, and
Politiken
, where a clerk in a little gray cap turned her away with a sneer.

Greta’s paintings were oversized and glossy with a shellacking process she created from varnish. They were so shiny and hard you could clean them like windows. The few critics who came to the gallery picked their way around the red damask chairs and ate the honey crackers Greta had set out in a silver dish. She escorted the critics, whose little notepads remained open and disturbingly blank. “This one is Anna Fonsmark. You know, the mezzo-soprano,” Greta would say. “The trouble I had getting her to pose!” Or, “He’s the furrier to the king. Did you notice the wreath of minks in the corner, symbolizing his trade?” When she said things like that she regretted them immediately; the crassness of her comments would ring in the air as if it were echoing off the shellacked paintings. She would think of her mother, and Greta would blush. But sometimes Greta was filled with too much immediate energy to stop and think and plan and plot. The energy was the fluid running up and down her Western spine.

She had to admit to herself that some of the critics had come only because she was Einar Wegener’s wife. “How’s Einar’s work coming along?” a few would ask. “When can we expect his next show?” One critic came because she was a Californian and he wanted to hear about the plein-air painters working there—as if Greta might know anything at all about the bearded men mixing their paints in the startling sunlight of Laguna Niguel.

The gallery on Krystalgade was cramped and, in the heat wave that coincided with her exhibition, smelled of the cheese shop next door. Greta worried that the odor of fontina would settle into her canvases, but Einar told her it was impossible, not with the shellac. “They’re impenetrable,” he remarked of her paintings, which sounded—once it was said, hovering between the two of them like a bat—unkind.

The next day, when Greta returned to the apartment, she found Lili crocheting a hair net, the needles clicking in her lap. Neither Einar nor Greta ever figured out the origins of Lili’s bloody nose at the Artists Ball. But about a month after, her nose began to bleed again, a couple of warm red bursts over the course of three days in July. Einar said it was nothing, but Greta worried, like a mother watching a son’s cough. Recently, in the middle of the night, Greta had begun to climb out of bed and go to her easel to paint an ashen Lili collapsing in Henrik’s arms. The painting was large, nearly life-size, and more real, with its bright colors and flat shapes, than Greta’s memory of Lili bleeding outside the Artists Ball. In the slanting background was the fountain with the spewing dragons, and the bronze Viking lurblowers. A frail Lili filled the painting, a man’s arms around her, his hair falling into her face. She would never forget the sight of it, Greta told herself as she painted, the climbing mix of horror and confusion and outrage still palpable on the knuckles of her spine. She knew something had changed.

“Have you been here long?” Greta now asked Lili.

“Less than an hour.” The needles continued to click in her lap. “I went out. I walked through Kongens Have and crocheted on a bench. Have you seen the roses yet?”

“Do you think it’s a good idea? For you to be outside? All alone?”

“I wasn’t alone,” Lili said. “Henrik met me. He met me on the bench.”

“Henrik,” Greta said. “I see.” Through the corner of her eye, Greta studied her husband. She had no idea what he wanted from this, from Lili, and yet there he was, dressed in a brown skirt and a white blouse with capped sleeves and the old-fashioned shoes with the pewter buckles she had given him that first day. Yes, there he was. A vague regret filled Greta’s throat: she wished she were both more and less involved in the comings and goings of Lili. Greta realized she would never know what exactly was the right thing for her to do.

“How is the fish painter?” Greta asked.

Lili sat forward in her chair and began to tell the story of Henrik’s recent trip to New York, where he dined with Mrs. Rockefeller. “He’s becoming an important painter,” Lili went on, describing the people in the art world who were talking about Henrik. “Did you know he’s an orphan?” Lili said, describing his youth as a sailor’s apprentice on a schooner that fished the North Sea. Lili then reported that Henrik had declared, on the bench in Kongens Have in front of the boxhedge, that he ’d never met a girl like Lili.

“It’s clear he’s taken by you.” Greta could see the heat in Lili’s face. Greta had just returned from an uneventful day at the gallery, her ten paintings all on the wall and unsold. Now all of this—the sight of her husband in the plain brown skirt; the story of Henrik receiving an invitation to dine with Mrs. Rockefeller at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park; the strange thought of Lili and Henrik on a public bench in the shadow of Rosenborg Slot’s turrets—caught up with her. Greta suddenly asked, “Tell me, Lili. Have you ever kissed a man?”

Lili stopped, her lace limp in her lap.

It was almost as if the question had tumbled with its own will out of Greta’s mouth. She had never wondered about this before, because Einar had always been sexually awkward and without initiative. It seemed impossible to Greta that he would have ever pursued such a foreign longing. Why, without her, Einar would never have found Lili. “Would Henrik be the first?” Greta said. “The first to kiss you?”

Lili thought about this, her brow bunching up. Through the floorboards came the potato-vodka voice of the sailor. “Don’t lie to me!” he was yelling. “I can tell when you’re lying to me.”