David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

“Do you really think Dr. Mai can help me?”

“I hope so, but we’ll have to see.” Carlisle was wearing a seersucker blazer and crisply pleated trousers and a yellow tie. Einar admired his optimism, the way he sat expectantly in his summer clothes. “We’ve got to at least try.”

He knew Carlisle was right. He couldn’t live much longer like this. Much of the muscle on his body had disappeared over the past six months; Dr. McBride had weighed him, and when the little black weights slid over to the left, Einar realized he didn’t weigh much more than when he was a boy. Einar had begun to notice a peculiar color in his skin: a gray-blue like the sky at dawn, as if his blood were somehow running at a slower pace. And a weakness of breath that caused his eyesight to quit whenever he ran more than a few paces, or whenever a sharp sudden noise, like the crack! of a motorcar, surprised him. And the bleeding, which Einar both dreaded and welcomed. When he felt the first spurt of it on his lip or between his legs, he would become dizzy. No one would tell him this, but Einar knew it was because he was female inside. He’d read about it: the buried female organs of the hermaphrodite hemorrhaging irregularly, as if in protest.

Dr. Mai turned out to be a pleasant man. His hair was dark and he was wearing a yellow tie that was oddly similar to Carlisle ’s. They both laughed about it, and then Dr. Mai led Einar into the examining room.

The room was tiled, with a window that looked through an iron grate into the park of sycamores and plane trees. Dr. Mai dragged back a heavy green curtain to reveal his examining table. “Please sit down,” he said, his hand falling on the table’s pad. “Tell me why you’re here.”

He was leaning against a cabinet with glass doors. He was holding a clipboard to his chest, and he nodded as he listened to Einar explain Lili. Once or twice Dr. Mai adjusted the knot of his tie. Occasionally he wrote something down.

“I don’t really know what kind of help I’m looking for,” Einar was saying. “I don’t think I can keep living like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know who I really am.”

With that, Dr. Mai ended the interview. He excused himself, leaving Einar on the padded table, his feet swaying. Outside in the park, a nurse was walking a young man in striped pajamas, his bathrobe hanging open. The man had a beard, and there was a frailty to his step, as if the nurse, whose apron ran to her feet, were the only thing propping him up.

When Dr. Mai returned he said, “Thank you for visiting me.” He shook Einar’s hand and led him to Carlisle.

On the drive back into Paris, they said nothing for a long time. Einar watched Carlisle’s hand on the gearshift, and Carlisle looked down the road. Finally he said, “The doctor wants to admit you to the hospital.”

“For what?”

“He suspects schizophrenia.”

“But that’s impossible,” Einar said. He looked over to Carlisle, who kept his eyes on the traffic. In front of them was a truck, and each time it hit a rut, gravel would spill from its bed onto the Spider’s hood. “How could I be schizophrenic?” Einar said again.

“He wanted me to sign the papers to admit you right then.”

“But that’s not right. I’m not schizophrenic.”

“I told him it wasn’t that urgent.”

“But you don’t think I’m schizophrenic, do you? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, I don’t. But when you explain it… when you explain Lili, it does sound like you think there are two people. Two separate people.”

“Because there are.” It was evening, and the traffic had slowed because a German shepherd had been hit; it was lying in the middle of the road, and each car had to pick its way around it. The dog was dead, but it appeared uninjured, its head resting up on the granite curb of the rond-point.

“Do you think Greta thinks that? Do you think she believes I’m insane?”

“Not at all,” Carlisle said. “She’s the one who believes in Lili the most.”

They passed the German shepherd, and the traffic opened up. “Should I listen to Dr. Mai? Do you think maybe I should stay with him for a little while?”

“You’ll have to think about it,” he said. Carlisle’s hand was holding the black ball of the gearshift, and Einar felt there was something Carlisle wanted to say. With the wind, and the coughing exhaust of auto-buses, it was difficult to talk. The city traffic was heavy, and Einar looked to Carlisle, as if to urge him to say what he wanted. Tell me what you’re thinking, Einar wanted to say, but didn’t. Something was hanging between them, and then they were in the Marais, in front of the apartment, and the something passed, gone as the Spider’s motor went idle. Carlisle said, “Don’t tell her where we’ve been.”

Tired, Einar went to bed after supper, and Greta joined him even before he nodded off.

“So early for you,” he said.

“I’m tired tonight. I’ve worked through the past few nights. Delivered half a dozen sketches this week. To say nothing of Lili’s portrait on the mudflat.” And then, “You did a lovely job with the background. I couldn’t be happier with it. Hans said the same. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”

He felt her at his side, her long body warm beneath the summer sheet. Her knee was touching his leg, her hand curled at his chest. It was as much as they touched each other now, but somehow it seemed even more intimate than those nights early in their marriage when she would tug off his tie and loosen his belt: the curled hand like a little animal nuzzling his chest; the knee pressing reassuredly; the damp heat of her breath; her hair like a vine growing across his throat. “Do you think I’m going insane?” he said.

She sat up. “Insane? Who told you that?”

“No one. But do you?”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Who’s been telling you that? Did Carlisle say something to you?”

“No. It’s just that I sometimes don’t know what’s going on with me.”

“But that’s not true,” she said. “We know exactly what’s going on with you. Inside of you lives Lili. In your soul is a pretty young lady named Lili. It’s as simple as that. It has nothing to do with being crazy.”

“I was just wondering what you thought of me.”

“I think you’re the bravest man I know,” she said. “Now go to sleep.” And her fist curled tighter, and the strand of hair crept across his throat, and her knee pulled away.

A week went by. He spent a day cleaning out his studio, rolling up his old canvases and storing them in the corner, glad to get them out of the way. He enjoyed painting Greta’s backgrounds, but he didn’t miss creating something on his own. Sometimes, when he thought about his abandoned career, he felt as if he were at last finished with a tedious chore. And when he thought of his many paintings-so many dark bogs, so many stormy heaths-he felt nothing. The thought of coming up with a new idea exhausted him, the thought of conjuring and then sketching a new scene. It was someone else who had done all those little landscapes, he told himself. What was it he used to tell his students at the Royal Academy? If you can live without painting, then go right ahead. It’s a much simpler life.

Einar was sleeping late and rising tired. Each morning he’d promise himself that he would live the day as Einar, but when he went to the wardrobe to dress, it was like coming across the belongings of an ancestor in the attic.

More often than not, Lili would emerge from the bedroom and sit on the stool in Greta’s studio. Her shoulders would hunch and she would play with her shawl in her lap; or she’d turn her back on Greta, who was painting another portrait, and look out the window, down the street, for Hans or Carlisle.