David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

They were intimate infrequently. Typically Greta blamed herself. She ’d stay up late painting, or reading, and by the time she’d pull back the bedclothes and slip underneath, Einar would be asleep. Sometimes she would nudge him, hoping to wake him. But Einar was a sound sleeper, and soon she too would fall asleep. She would hold him through the night, waking up like that, with her arm over his chest. Their eyes would meet in the quiet of morning. Often she would long to touch him, and as her hand began to stroke first his chest and then his thigh, Einar would rub his fists in his eyes and leap out of bed. “Is there anything wrong?” Greta would call, still wrapped in the bedclothes. “Not a thing,” he’d reply, running the water in the bath. “Nothing at all.”

The times they did make love, usually instigated by Greta but not always, Greta would end up feeling as if something inappropriate had occurred. As if she should no longer want to touch him. As if he were no longer her husband.

Now Lili shifted. Her body, which reminded Greta of a long coil, was on its side, the freckles on her back staring out at Greta, the single raised mole in the shape of Zealand as horrible and black as a leech. Lili’s hip, beneath the pilled summer sheet, raised up like the camelback sofa in the living room of the rented apartment. Where had this curved hip come from?-curved like the corniche that snaked up the Côte from the Italian border to Nice; curved like the bulbous vases with the slender necks Teddy had thrown on his foot-powered wheel. It seemed like the hip of a woman, not her husband’s. It felt as if someone she didn’t know was in her bed. Greta thought about the hip until dawn arrived on the apartment’s narrow terraces, and a rain cooled the room off so that Lili had to snap the summer sheet to her chin for warmth, the mound of the hip disappearing beneath the taut tent of the sheet. They fell asleep again, and when Greta woke she found Lili holding two cups of coffee. Lili was smiling, and then she tried to slip back beneath the sheet, but the coffee cups tipped. Greta watched the coffee spill across the bed, toward her hand, and Lili began to cry.

Later, in the afternoon, when Einar was behind the spare bedroom’s door transforming himself into Lili, Greta stripped the bed. She took the sheet, musty and milky with the mixed smell of Einar and Lili and the coffee, and held it over the terrace rail, bringing a match to its corner. Something in her wanted to see it burn away. Soon the sheet was billowing with fire, and Greta watched the flame-edged bits break away as she thought about Teddy and Einar. Scraps of sheet, trailing thin black smoke, were fluttering from the terrace, delicately rising and dipping in the summer breeze and eventually landing in the waxy leaves of the lemon and orange trees in the park below. A woman from the street called to Greta, but she ignored her, and Greta shut her eyes.

She never told Einar about the fire in Teddy’s pottery studio on Colorado Street. In the front office there was a shallow fireplace decorated with Teddy’s orange mission-style tiles. One day in January, in a fit of tidying, Greta crammed the Christmas garlands into the hearth, where a low fire was already smoldering. A white, thick smoke began to rise from the brittle greens. Then there was a crackling that popped with such a buckshot piercing that it brought Teddy from his workshop in the rear. He stood in the double door. In his face Greta could read the question: What are you doing? Then, together, they watched a flame lift out of the smoking garland; then a second reached out like an arm and lit the wicker rocking chair.

Almost instantly the room was on fire. Teddy pulled Greta out to Colorado Street. They weren’t on the sidewalk more than a few seconds when the fists of the flames punched through the twin plate-glass windows. Greta and Teddy stepped into the street, into the traffic, drivers slowing with O-mouthed leers and the horses bucking violently away from the burning building and the cars careening away.

Everything Greta thought of saying just then sounded despicable. An apology would sound empty, she told herself over and over, as the flames rose higher than the streetlamps and the telephone lines, which normally sagged under the weight of blue jays. What a sight it was, and yet there was nothing for Greta to say except “What have I done?”

“I can always start over,” Teddy said. Inside, cracking and exploding and shattering into black bits of nothing, were hundreds of vases and tiles, his two kilns, his file cabinet stuffed with orders, his self-made potter’s life. Still stuck in Greta’s mouth was that empty apology. It felt glued to her tongue, like a cube of ice that wouldn’t melt. For several minutes, she couldn’t say anything else, not until the building’s roof fell in on itself, as lightly as a burning, billowing sheet.

“I didn’t mean to.” She wondered if Teddy would believe her. As a reporter from the American Weekly showed up at the scene, his pencils tucked into the band that held up his shirtsleeves, Greta wondered if anyone in Pasadena would believe her.

“I know,” Teddy said, over and over. He took Greta’s hand in his own and stopped her from saying another thing. They watched the flames pull down the front wall. They watched the firemen unroll their flat, limp hose. Greta and Teddy watched, standing silently, until a damp gurgle rose up in his throat and emerged from his lips as an ominous cough.

When Einar asked her about it, Greta told him things he couldn’t remember.

“You mean you’ve forgotten?” she said the next morning. “That you asked him to meet you again?”

Einar could recall only part of the previous night. When Greta told him that Lili had stood on her toes to kiss Hans goodnight, he became so embarrassed that he pulled a wire chair to the terrace and, for nearly an hour, stared out over the lemon trees in the park. It didn’t seem possible. It was as if he hadn’t been there.

“He was happy to meet Lili. And he spoke so fondly of Einar. He can’t wait to see you again. Do you remember that?” Greta asked. She hadn’t slept well. Her eyes were nearly lost in their sockets. “You promised him that he could see Lili again today.”

“It wasn’t me,” Einar said. “It was Lili.”

“Yes,” Greta said. “It was Lili. I keep forgetting.”

“If you didn’t want her to visit us here, then why didn’t you say so?”

“Of course I wanted Lili to visit. It ’s just that…” and Greta paused. “It’s just that I’m not sure what you want me to do about her.” She turned in the camelback sofa and began to pick at the abalone in the Chinese screen.

“There’s nothing for you to do,” Einar said. “Don’t you see?”

He wondered why Greta couldn’t let Lili come and go without worrying so much. If it didn’t upset him, then why should Greta become concerned? If only she would quietly welcome Lili when it was time to paint her portrait. If only Greta wouldn’t pry with her questions-to say nothing about her eyes-when Lili slipped in and out of the apartment. Sometimes just knowing Greta was on the other side of the door, waiting for Lili to return, was enough to fill her with a moist little fury that collected in the pits of her arms.

And yet Einar knew that he and, yes, Lili, too, needed Greta.

Hans was expecting Lili at four o’clock. They had agreed to meet in front of the municipal casino, which sat on the Promenade du Midi behind the rocky beach. Greta was painting in the living room that morning. Einar was trying to paint in the foyer, which had a view of the backside of St-Michel Church, its stone dark and red with morning shadow. Every fifteen minutes or so Greta would mutter “Goddammit”-like the soft quarter gong of a mantel clock.