David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

But Lili didn’t want to talk to him; not just yet. She took the sack with the skirt, quickly thanked Madame Le Bon, and ducked behind the changing stall and into the next booth, where a bald man sold damaged china dolls.

When Lili got home Greta was up, moving around the apartment with a damp rag. Carlisle was arriving this morning for a summer visit. The apartment needed cleaning, feathery puffs of dust blowing about in the corners. Greta refused to hire a maid. “I don’t need one,” she ’d say, swatting dust with her gloves. “I’m not the type of woman who has a maid.” But to tell the truth, she was.

“He ’ll be here within the hour,” Greta said. She was wearing a brown wool dress that clung to her in a pretty way. “Are you going to stay dressed as Lili?” she asked.

“I thought I might.”

“But I don’t think he should meet Lili right away. Not first. Not before Einar.”

Greta was right, and yet part of Einar wanted Lili to be the first to meet Carlisle, as if she were his better half. He hung the plaid skirt in the wardrobe and undressed, down to the square-cut silk underwear. The silk was an oyster gray. It was soft; it made the tiniest swish when he walked. He didn’t want to replace the silk underwear with the wool shorts and undershirt that itched, that trapped the heat and set him on fire on a warm day. He didn’t want Lili to be completely folded away in the wardrobe. He hated tucking her away. When he shut his eyes, Einar saw only her; he couldn’t come up with a picture of himself.

He pulled on his trousers. Then he left the apartment. “Where are you going?” Greta asked. “He’ll be here any minute.”

The sky was cloudless. Long, cool shadows cast themselves from the buildings onto the street. Trash was wet in the gutter. Einar felt lonely, and he wondered if anybody in the world would ever know him. A wind hurled up the street, and it felt as if it were passing through his ribs.

He walked to the short street north of Les Halles. Not very many people were around, only the tobacco shop owner leaning in his door frame, a fat woman waiting for an autobus, a man walking quickly in a suit too tight for him, his bowler hat pulled down.

In the hallway of number 22 there was a wine-stained scarf lying on the stairs that led to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s door. “Early today,” she said, stroking her cat. She passed Einar the key to Salle No. 3. It had become his regular room. The armchair covered in green wool. The wire wastepaper basket always emptied-a weak illusion that no one else ever used the room. And the two windows on opposite ends of the room with their black shades drawn. Einar had always lifted the shade of the window on the right. Pulled its taut cord and let the shade roll up with a snap. He couldn’t count the number of times he had sat in the green armchair with his breath fogging on the window while a girl, genitalia exposed, danced on the other side. It had become a habit, almost daily, like swimming at the bains, or his walk to the corner of the rue Etienne-Marcel to fetch the mail at the Hôtel des Postes, most of which was for Greta. And Madame Jasmin-Carton never charged him less than five francs, never offered a discount, although he wasn’t sure he would have wanted one. She did, however, let him stay in Salle No. 3 as long as he wanted; sometimes he’d sit in the green wool chair for half a day. He had slept there. Once he brought a baguette and an apple and some Gruyère and ate his lunch while a woman with a belly that hung like a sandbag danced around a rocking horse.

But the other window shade Einar never touched. That was because he knew what was in there. He somehow knew that once he had pulled that shade he would never return to the window on the right.

Today, however, it felt as if there was only one window in Salle No. 3, the little black one on the left. And so he pulled on the left window’s shade. It snapped open, and Einar peered through.

On the other side was a room painted black, with a wood-plank floor separating at the seam. There was a little box, also painted black, on which a young man had planted one foot. His legs were hairy, making Einar think of Madame Jasmin-Carton’s arms. He was an average-sized boy, a bit soft in the middle and smooth-chested. His tongue was hanging from his mouth and his hands were on his hips. He was rolling them, which caused his half-hard penis to flop about with the weight of a smelt on a dock. From his smile, Einar could tell the boy was in love with himself.

He didn’t know how long he watched the boy bouncing on the balls of his feet, his penis growing and shrinking like a lever going up and down. Einar didn’t remember falling to his knees and pushing his nose to the glass, but that was how he found himself. He didn’t recall unbuckling his pants, but they were bunched at his ankles. He didn’t know when he had removed his coat and tie and his shirt, but there they were, in a pile on the green armchair.

There were other windows looking into the boy’s room. And in one, just opposite Einar, was a man with a little grin on his face. Einar couldn’t make out much other than the grin, which seemed lit by a lamp of its own. He seemed to like the boy as much as Einar did, from the way that grin burned. But after a few minutes of staring across the room to the face of the man, Einar began to see his eyes. They were blue, he thought, and seemed focused not on the boy, who now had his penis in his hand and his other hand fondling a nipple the size of a centime, but on Einar. The man peeled his lips farther apart, and the grin seemed to burn even brighter.

Einar stepped out of his trousers, dropped them on the green armchair. He was part Einar, part Lili. A man in Lili’s oyster-gray underpants and a matching camisole that hung delicately from her shoulders. Einar could see a faint reflection of himself in the window’s glass. For some reason, he didn’t feel garish. He felt-it was the first time he had ever used this word to describe Lili-pretty. Lili now felt relaxed: her bare white shoulders reflecting in the glass, the pretty little cove at the base of her throat. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to be staring at her in her intimate underthings, the straps of the camisole across her shoulders. As if something inside Einar had snapped, like the canvas window shade, and told him, more plainly than ever before, that this was who he was: Einar was a guise. Peel away the trousers and the striped necktie, which Greta had given him on his last birthday, and only Lili was left. He knew this; he had known this. Einar had eleven months. His year was slipping away. It was warm in the little room, and in the window’s reflection he saw Lili’s forehead damp with perspiration, glowing like a half-moon.

The dancer continued, seemingly unaware of Einar and the other man. The boy’s eyes were closed, his hips rocking, a creep of black hair showing in the pits of his arms. The man across the room continued to stare, his smile widening even further. The light somehow shifted, and Einar could see his eyes nearly turn gold.

Standing at the window, Einar began to fondle his breasts through the camisole. His nipples were hard, aching. As he rubbed them, an underwater feeling rippled through Einar. His knees were becoming weak, damp at the back. Einar stood back from the window to give the man a full view, to let him see his hips wrapped in the silk, let him see his legs, which were as smooth as the boy’s were hairy. Einar wanted the man to see Lili’s body. Einar stepped back far enough so the man could see all of him, except from that position in Salle No. 3 Einar couldn’t see the man. Not that it mattered. And so for several minutes Einar rubbed himself in the window, imitating the motions he ’d seen the girls perform over the months through the window on the right.