David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

As Dr. Hexler’s X-ray machine continued to clang, Greta pressed her forehead against the black glass window. Maybe she’d been wrong; maybe her husband didn’t need to see a doctor. She wondered if she should have listened to his protests.

On the other side of the glass, Einar was lying strapped to the gurney. He looked beautiful, with his eyes closed, his skin a soft gray through the glass. The small mound of his nose rose up from his face. “Are you sure he ’s comfortable?” she asked Dr. Hexler.

“For the most part.”

She’d worried that Einar was slipping away from her. It sometimes bothered her that Einar never became jealous when a man on the street ran his eyes over her breasts; the only time he commented on it was when he was dressed as Lili, and then he’d say, “How lucky you are.”

In her consultation with Dr. Hexler the week before, he had said there was a possibility of a tumor in the pelvis that could be causing both infertility and Einar’s confused state of masculinity. “I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve read about it. It can go undetected, with its only manifestations being odd behavior.” Part of her wanted the theory to make sense. Part of her wanted to believe that a little scalpel curved like a scythe could slice free the tumor, its rind as blood-orange and tight as a persimmon, and Einar would return to their marriage.

On the other side of the window there was a crash of metal, but Dr. Hexler said, “Everything’s fine.” Einar was writhing on the gurney, his legs pressing against the straps. They were so taut with tension that Greta thought the straps might snap and Einar’s body would fling itself across the room. “When will you be finished?” she asked Hexler. “Are you sure everything is going all right?” She fingered the ends of her hair, thinking at once how she hated its coarseness and that if anything were ever to happen to Einar, she wouldn’t know what to do.

“An X ray takes time,” Vlademar said.

“Is it hurting him? It looks like he’s in pain.”

“Not really,” Dr. Hexler said. “There might be a small surface burn or ulceration, but not much else.”

“He’ll feel a bit sick in the stomach,” Vlademar added.

“It will do him good,” Dr. Hexler said. He was calm-faced, with stubby black lashes that beat around his eyes. He stuttered the first syllable of every sentence, but his voice was dark with authority. After all, the clinic drew the richest men in Denmark, men with bellies loose over their belts who, in their flurry to manufacture rubber shoes and mineral dyes and superphosphates and Portland cement, lost control of all that hung below their belts.

“And if it’s the devil your husband’s got in him,” Vlademar added, “I’ll zap it out.”

“That ’s the beauty of the X ray,” Hexler said. “It burns away the bad and keeps the good. It might not be an exaggeration to call it a miracle.” Both men smiled, their teeth reflected in the black glass, and Greta felt something small and regretful beneath her breast.

When it was over, Vlademar moved Einar to a room with two small windows and a folding screen on casters. He slept for an hour while Greta sketched. She was drawing Lili, asleep in the institute’s bed. If the X ray found a tumor and Dr. Hexler removed it, then what would happen? Would she never again see Lili in Einar’s face, in his lips, in the pale green veins that ran on the underside of his wrists like rivers on a map? She had contacted Dr. Hexler in the first place in order to ease Einar’s mind-or had it been to ease her own? No, she had first telephoned Hexler, from the little booth at the post office, because she knew she had to do something for Einar. Wasn’t it her responsibility to make sure he got the proper attention? If she ’d ever promised herself anything, it was that she’d never let her husband simply slip away. Not after Teddy Cross. Greta thought of the blood bursting from Einar’s nose, seeping through the lap of Lili’s dress.

Einar turned in the bed, moaning. He was pale, his skin loose on his cheek. Greta placed a warm cloth across his forehead. Part of her hoped Hexler would instruct Einar to live freely as Lili, to take a job as a salesgirl behind the glass counter at Fonnesbech’s department store. Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life. “I know you’ll be as happy as your mother and father,” a cousin from Newport Beach had written after her marriage to Einar; it was all Greta could do to keep herself from burning the cousin from her memory. But I’m not like them, she told herself as she shredded the letter into the iron stove. We’re not like them. That was long before Lili showed up, but even then Greta knew she had married a man who would take her someplace unlike anywhere she ’d ever been. It was what she had first seen in Teddy, although that turned out not to be the case with him. But Einar was different. He was strange. He almost didn’t belong to this world. And on most days, Greta felt, neither did she.

Beneath the window, Dr. Hexler’s bare rosebushes were trembling in the wind. The other window overlooked the sea. There were black clouds, as dark and full as ink in water. A fishing boat was struggling to return to harbor. But how could she remain married to a man who sometimes wanted to live as a woman? I’m not going to let something like that stop me, she told herself, her sketchbook in her lap. Greta and Einar would do what they wanted. No one could keep her from doing as she pleased. Perhaps they would have to move someplace where no one knew them. Where nothing spoke for them-no gossip, no family name, no previously established reputation. Nothing except their paintings and the little whisper of Lili’s voice.

She was ready, Greta told herself. For whom or what or where, she wasn’t sure, but she was always ready.

Einar stirred again in his bed, struggling to lift his head. The bulb overhead cast a yellow bell of light on his face, and his cheeks looked hollow. Hadn’t he looked fine just this morning? But maybe she hadn’t paid enough attention to Einar during the past few months. Maybe he had become ill in front of her eyes and she had failed to notice until now. How busy she ’d become, painting and selling her work and writing Hans in Paris about arranging a visit for Lili, about the availability of an apartment in the Marais, with two skylights, one for herself and one for Einar-what with all of that, Greta might have missed something grave fading into the face of her husband. She thought of Teddy Cross.

“Greta,” Einar said. “Am I all right?”

“You will be. Rest some more.”

“What happened?”

“It was a strong X ray. Nothing to worry about.”

Einar pressed the side of his face into the pillow. He fell asleep again. There he was, Greta’s husband. With his fine skin, and his small head with the temples that dented softly, almost like a baby’s. With his nose flaring with breath. With his smell of turpentine and talc. With the skin around his eyes red and nearly on fire.

Greta replaced the cloth across his forehead.

When Dr. Hexler finally arrived, Greta said, “At last.”

They went into the corridor. “Is he going to be all right?”

“He’ll be better tomorrow, and even better the day after.” Greta thought she saw concern in the wrinkles around Dr. Hexler’s mouth. “The X ray didn’t show anything.”

“No tumor?”