The Danish Girl (11 page)

For their August holiday, Greta and Einar returned, as they did every summer, to Menton, a French harbor town on the border of Italy. After the long summer, Greta said goodbye to Copenhagen with a sense of relief. As their train rattled south and over the Maritime Alps, she felt as if she was leaving something behind.

This year, on a tip from Anna, who in May had sung at the opera in Monte Carlo, Greta and Einar rented an apartment on the avenue Boyer, across the street from Menton’s municipal casino. The apartment’s owner was an American who had hurried to France after the war to buy up the shuttered garment factories of Provence. He became rich and now lived in New York, his mail full of profits from the simple, unlined housedresses he sold to every housewife south of Lyon.

The apartment had a cold orange marble floor and a second bedroom painted red and, in the living room, a Chinese screen inlaid with abalone shell. The front windows opened onto little terraces wide enough for a row of geranium pots and two wire chairs. There Einar and Greta would sit in the hot nights, Greta’s feet on the rail, a rare breeze blowing up from the lemon and orange trees in the park below. Greta was tired, and she and Einar could pass an evening saying no more than “Good night.”

On the fifth day of their holiday, the weather turned. Sirocco winds from North Africa hurtled across the dimpled Mediterranean, up the rocky beach, and through the open terrace doors, knocking over the Chinese screen.

Greta and Einar were napping in the red bedroom when they heard the crash. They found the screen flat against the camelback sofa. The screen had been hiding a rack of sample housedresses manufactured by the apartment’s owner in his factories. The dresses, white with floral prints, were fluttering on the rack, as if a child were tugging on their hems.

They were rather plain, Greta thought, with their ugly cuffed sleeves and button fronts convenient for breast feeding—so plain and practical she began to feel a remote sense of dislike for the women who wore them. She moved to set right the Chinese screen. “Give me a hand?” she said.

Einar was standing next to the sample rack, the dress hems blowing against his leg. His face was still. Greta could see the veins in his temples pulsing. She could see his fingers, which she always thought of as the fingers of a pianist, not a painter, trembling. “I was thinking of asking Lili to visit us,” he said. “She’s never been to France.”

Greta had never turned Lili away. There were times, over the course of the summer, when Einar would announce that Lili would be coming to dinner and Greta, drained from a day attending her failed exhibition, would think, Oh, jeepers, the last thing I want to do right now is dine with my husband dressed up as a girl. But Greta would keep such a thought to herself, biting her lip until she could taste her own blood. She knew she couldn’t stop Einar. She knew, from what had happened with Henrik, that Lili had a will of her own.

In the weeks before they left for Menton, Lili had begun to appear unannounced in the afternoons. Greta would leave the Widow House for an appointment. When she returned she’d find Lili at the window in a loose dress, the back buttons unfastened. Greta would help her finish dressing, clasping a string of amber beads around her throat. It never ceased to startle Greta, finding her husband like that, waiting with the neckline of a dress open across his pale shoulders. She never once said anything to Einar, or to Lili. Instead, she would always welcome Lili as if she were an amusing, foreign friend. She ’d hum and gossip as she helped Lili into her shoes. Greta would tip a bottle of perfume against her forefinger and then run her sweet fingertip down Lili’s throat and up the inside of her arm. She would stand Lili in front of the mirror and whisper, her voice the soft intimate voice of wedlock, “There now . . . so very pretty.”

All of this Greta did with a sense of devotion, for she always believed she could defy anyone in the world except her husband. It had been the same with Teddy. She could cross her mother and debate her father and snub all of Pasadena and Copenhagen alike, but in her chest was a bottomless well of tolerance for the man she loved. She never questioned it, why she allowed Lili to come into their lives. Anything to make Einar happy, she would tell herself. Anything at all.

And yet, Greta being Greta, this open devotion sometimes chafed against her. After Lili’s assignations with Henrik, Greta began to escort her on her trips into the Copenhagen streets. Lili had told her that she would never see Henrik again, that they’d had a falling-out, but even so, Greta knew there were dozens of other young men who could flatter Lili until she blushed and fell into their arms. And so Greta and Lili would stroll with their arms linked at the elbow through the boxhedges of the park. Greta’s eyes would patrol the gravel paths for potential suitors, knowing what Lili, with her moist brown eyes, could stir in young Danish men. One day Greta took a photograph of Lili at the gate of Rosenborg Slot, the slim brick castle behind Lili blurry and vaguely menacing. Another day Lili stopped Greta at the marionette theatre and sat with the children, her face as tentative, her legs as coltish, as theirs.

“Greta?” Einar said again. He was leaning against the rack of sample dresses. The Chinese screen was still lying against the sofa. “You won’t mind if Lili visits us here?”

Greta began to stand the screen upright. Since they arrived in France she hadn’t painted. She hadn’t met anyone interesting enough to ask to sit for a portrait. The weather had been heavy and humid, making it difficult for paint to dry on the canvas. Over the summer she had begun to change her style, using brighter colors, especially pinks and yellows and golds, and flatter lines and an even larger scale. It was a new way of painting for Greta, and it took her a longer time to start again at a blank canvas. She hardly felt confident about the paintings. With their oversized and pastel tone of joy, her recent paintings required, on Greta’s part, an inner sense of rapture. Nothing made her happier than painting Lili.

Greta thought about starting a full-scale portrait of her on the terrace, a breeze lifting her hair and the hem of her housedress, the little brown roses on the dress a pretty blur, the expression on Lili’s face just like the one on her husband’s at this very moment—hot, anxious, his skin tight and red and about to burst.

 

 

Greta and Lili were walking to L’Orchidée on quai Bonaparte. The restaurant was known for its ink-boiled squid, or so Hans had written, proposing an evening to meet. On the street the shops were closed for the night. Little sacks of yesterday’s refuse were resting on the curb. The cobblestones were loose in the road, rutted from the pneumatics of motorcars.

Hans’s letter was in Greta’s pocket, and she was rubbing its corner against her wedding ring as she and Lili walked along rue St.-Michel toward the harbor. To Greta, one of the nicer Danish customs was that the wedding band was worn on the right hand. When she’d returned to Denmark a widow, she’d sworn to herself she would never remove the brushed gold band Teddy had given her. But then Einar offered her his own band, a simple loop of gold. She didn’t know how she could remove Teddy’s ring; she thought of him giving it to her, he clumsily searching his pockets for the little black velvet box. But then Greta realized she wouldn’t have to take off Teddy’s, and now she wore both. She played with the rings equally, turning them on her fingers absentmindedly.

Greta never told Einar much about Teddy Cross. She had returned to Denmark on Armistice Day, a widow for six months, her name again Greta Waud. He died for no good reason at all, she would say when friends asked about her first husband. After all, Greta would think, dying when you’re twenty-four and live in California’s clean dry heat is the result of just that: the cruelty of the world. It made no sense, really. Certainly Teddy didn’t have a Western spine, another unjust fate. Sometimes she ’d also think, with her eyes sealed to stem the regret: perhaps she and Teddy were never meant to be married. Perhaps his love for her was never as great as hers for him.

Greta and Lili were almost at the restaurant when she stopped Lili and said, “Don’t be angry with me, but I have a little surprise for you.” She pushed Lili’s bangs out of her eyes. “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier, but I thought it ’d be easier for you to hear about it just before.”

“Hear about what?”

“That we ’re having dinner with Hans.”

Lili’s face went white, and it was clear that she understood. She pressed her forehead against the window of a closed charcuterie. Inside, skinned piglets were hanging from a rope like pink pennants. Even so, Lili asked, “Hans who?”

“Come on now. No panicking. It’s Hans. He wants to see you.”

The Parisian critic with the wart on the rim of his eye had quickly answered Greta’s letter, sending Hans’s address and a further inquiry about Greta’s painting. The attention from the critic nearly threw Greta into a reverie. Paris was asking after her art! she told herself, opening her box of stationery from Århus and filling her pen with ink. First she wrote the critic: Is there a life for me in Paris? she asked. Should my husband and I consider leaving Denmark, where no one knows what to think of me? Would our lives be freer in Paris?

Then Greta wrote Hans: My husband seems never to have forgotten you, she began. When he is dreaming at his easel, I know he is thinking of you hanging from the oak above the bog. His face softens and nearly shrinks. It is as if he is becoming thirteen again, with shiny eyes and a smooth chin.

Now in his mid-thirties, Hans Axgil had a thin nose and wrists covered with a dense blond hair. He had become a large, sturdy man, his neck rising thick out of his chest; it made Greta think of the old sycamore stump at the rear of her California garden. Einar had described Hans as small, the runt of the bog. His nickname had been Val nød, or walnut; some said it was because in the summer his skin turned pale brown, as if dimly soiled from Bluetooth’s perpetual mud, a pool of which had served as his birth bed when his mother’s coach, overturned in a hailstorm, stranded her and her two maids on a heath with nothing but matchlight and the driver’s canvas coat offered as a nativity tarp.

Now of course Hans was a man, large in a Germanic way. He shook other people’s hands with both of his; those same hands often hooked together at the nape of his neck when he was telling a story. He drank nothing but champagne or water with gas. He dined only on fish, having once eaten a venison chop and then lost his appetite for a month. He was an art dealer, shepherding Dutch masters to rich Americans who collected for the sake of amassing. It was a business, he described, with a smile revealing two incisors like drills, as often immoral. “Not always, but often enough,” he said. Hans’s favorite sport was still tennis. “The best part of France is its
terre battue.
The red clay. The white tennis balls with the gummy seams. The umpire sitting up in his chair.”

The restaurant was across the road from the harbor. There were eight tables on the sidewalk, beneath striped parasols anchored in tins of rocks. In the harbor, sailboats were arriving home. Brits on holiday stood on the docks, holding hands, the backs of their knees sunburned. On the restaurant ’s tables were vases of marigolds, and sheets of white paper protecting the cloth.

Not until they were about to sit at the table, where Hans was waiting with his hands behind his neck, did Greta become anxious about her plan. Not until now did she worry that Hans might see the resemblance to Einar in Lili’s face. What would Greta do were Hans to lean across the table and say, “Is this pretty little creature my old friend Einar?” It seemed unimaginable; but even so, what would Greta do were Hans to ask such a question? And what would Lili do? Then Greta looked at Lili, pretty in one of the housedresses and tanned from lying on the bathing raft that floated in the sea. Greta shook her head. No, there was no one there but Lili. Even Greta saw only Lili. And besides, Greta thought as the waiter pulled out the chairs at the table and Hans moved to kiss first Greta and then Lili, Hans no longer resembled the boy Einar had described from his youth.

“Yes, now, tell me about Einar,” Hans said as the ink-boiled squid was served in a tureen.

“Alone in Copenhagen tonight, I’m afraid,” Greta answered. “Too busy with his work even for a holiday.”

Lili nodded, bringing the corner of her napkin to her mouth. Hans leaned back in his chair, his fork spearing the squid. He said, “Sounds like Einar.” Hans then told them how Einar used to carry his box of pastels to the side of the road to draw scenes of the bog on the boulders. At night the drawings would wash off in the rain, and the next day he’d haul the box back and sketch again.

“Sometimes he’d draw pictures of you,” Lili said.

“Oh, yes, for hours. I would sit at the edge of the road so he could sketch my face onto a rock.”

Lili, Greta noticed, pushed her shoulders back just a bit, her breasts lifting like the papery, puckered mimosas that grew in the mountains above Menton. Greta forgot, or almost forgot, that they weren’t breasts; they were avocado pits wrapped in silk handkerchiefs, tucked into the summer camisole Greta had bought that morning at the department store by the station.

Greta also noticed the way Lili—with Einar’s dark eyes alive beneath the powder on the lids—spoke with Hans about Jutland. There was a longing in the way she bit her lip before she answered one of Hans’s questions. The way she turned up her chin.

“I know Einar would like to see you sometime,” Lili said. “He told me the day you ran away from Bluetooth was the worst day of his life. He says you were the only one who let him paint in peace, who told him that no matter what, it was okay for him to become a painter.” Her hand, which under the candle lamp looked too bony and fine to be a man’s, uncurled and arced toward Hans’s shoulder.

Later that night she and Greta were riding the cage elevator to the rented apartment. Greta was tired, and she wanted Einar to pull off his dress and wipe his lips. “Hans didn’t figure it out, did he?” she said, her arms folded across her breasts, which, the way things were, hung more flatly than Lili’s. There were two bare bulbs in the socket in the elevator’s ceiling; the light showed the lines in Einar’s forehead and around his mouth where the orangish foundation was collecting into clots. The little fin in Einar’s throat suddenly appeared above his amber beads. His odor was male: the wet-leaf smell that came from the dark coves where his arm met his shoulder, his left leg his right.