David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

Greta could feel her nails pressing into the palms of her hands as she said, “You just wait and see. I’ll bring who I want. I’m not going to go with my own brother.” She was playing with her hair, and staring at her mother, and upstairs was the tap-tap-tap of the tennis ball. “Just wait and see,” Greta said. “After all, I’m going to be eighteen.”

The next week Greta caught Einar on the stairs in the Royal Academy. He was holding the white balustrade when she placed her hand on his wrist and said, “May I talk to you?”

It was late and no one else was around and the stairwell was quiet. Professor Wegener was wearing a brown suit with a white collar tinged brown. He was carrying a small blank canvas the size of a book. “We ’re having a supper to celebrate my birthday,” Greta said. “I’m going to be eighteen. My twin brother and me.” And then, “I was wondering if you’d want to come along?”

Einar looked as if he’d eaten something rotten, the color seeping from his face. “Miss, please,” he finally said. “Maybe you ought to enroll in another seminar? It might be best.” He touched his throat, as if something delicate and cherished were dangling there.

It was then that Greta realized that Professor Wegener was in some ways even younger than she. His face was a boy’s, with a small mouth and perpetually red ears. His pale brown hair was hanging impishly over his forehead. Just then something told Greta to cup Einar’s face in her hands. He jumped slightly as her fingers fell on his cheeks, but then he was still. She held her professor’s narrow head, his warm temples between her palms. Greta continued to hold Einar, and he let her. Then she kissed him, the small canvas tucked between them. It was then that Greta knew Einar Wegener was not only the man she wanted to escort her to her eighteenth birthday party but also the man she would marry. “Aren’t you a pretty man,” she said.

“May I go?” Einar asked, pulling away.

“You mean to the party?”

“Well, that’s not-”

“Of course you can go to the party. That’s why I asked you.”

Then, to both their surprise, Einar turned his face to Greta’s for a second kiss.

But before the party, before Greta turned eighteen, Greta’s father decided Europe was no longer safe. Not long after Germany struck out for France, Greta’s father sent his family home from Denmark. “If the Kaiser will roll through Belgium, what’s to stop him from detouring up here?” he asked at the blond-wood table in the dining room. “Good point,” Greta’s mother replied, floating around the room with bundles of shipping straw. Greta, who felt like a fleeing refugee, boarded the Princess Dagmar with nothing in her pocket but a short note from Einar that said only: “Please forget me. It’s probably for the best.”

Now, more than ten years later, in the damp spring of 1925, Greta felt as if she were holding a secret about her husband. The first few weeks after the session with Anna’s dress, Greta and Einar said nothing about it. They stayed busy at their easels, carefully stepping out of each other’s way. The portrait of Anna was complete, and now Greta was looking for another commission. On one or two occasions, at dinner or while they both were reading late at night, something would make Greta think of the dress, and she would nearly call him Lili. But she managed to stop herself. Only once did she respond to a question of his by saying, “What was that, Lili?” Immediately she apologized. They both laughed and she kissed his forehead. She didn’t think of it again, and it was as if Lili were nothing more than a character in a play they had seen at the Folketeatret.

Then, one evening, Greta was reading about the Social Liberals in Politiken , the lamp shedding a cone of light around her chair. Einar moved toward her and sat at her feet, placing his head in her lap. Its warm heaviness rested against her thighs as she read the newspaper. She stroked his hair, her hand lifting every minute or so to turn the page. When she finished, she folded it up to begin the crossword puzzle, pulling a pencil from the patch pocket of her smock.

“I’ve been thinking about her,” Einar said.

“Who’s that?”

“Little Lili.”

“Then why don’t we see her again?” Greta said, her face barely lifting from the puzzle, her finger smudged with newsprint brushing at the chicken-pox scar.

Greta could say things without really meaning them, her urge to contradict, to be radical, perpetually bubbling up inside. Throughout their marriage she had made equally absurd proposals: Why don’t we move back to Pasadena to harvest oranges? Why don’t we start a little clinic in our apartment for the prostitutes of Istedgade? Why don’t we move someplace neutral, like Nevada, where no one will ever know who we are? Things are said in the great cave of wedlock, and thankfully most just hover, small and black and harmlessly upside down like a sleeping bat. At least that ’s how Greta thought of it; what Einar thought, she couldn’t say.

She once tried to paint a sleeping bat-the black double membrane of skin draped over the mouse body-but she failed. She lacked the technical skill for the elongated fingers and the small, clawed thumb; for the gray translucence in the stretched wings. She had not trained to paint the haunch of animals. Over the years Einar, who occasionally painted a sow or a sparrow or even Edvard IV into his landscapes, had promised he would teach her. But whenever they would sit down to a lesson, something would happen: a cable would arrive from California, the laundress would ping! her finger cymbals from the street, the telephone would ring with a call from one of Einar’s patrons, who were often silver-haired and titled and lived behind narrow green shutters that remained latched with a little hook.

A few days later, Greta was returning to the Widow House from a meeting with a gallery owner who eventually would reject her paintings. The dealer, a handsome man with a freckle like a chocolate stain on his throat, hadn’t actually turned Greta away; but the way he tapped his fingers against his chin told Greta he wasn’t impressed. “All portraits?” he had asked. The man knew, as did all of Copenhagen, that she was married to Einar Wegener. Greta felt that because of this the dealer expected quaint landscapes from her. “Do you ever think your pictures are perhaps too”-he struggled for the right word-“rapturous?” This just about boiled up Greta, and she felt the heat catching inside her dress, the one with the tuxedo lapels. Too rapturous? How could anything be too rapturous? She snatched her portfolio from the dealer’s hand and turned on her heel. She was still warm and damp in the face by the time she arrived at the top of the stairs of the Widow House.

When she opened the door, she found a girl sitting in the rope-bottom chair, and at first Greta couldn’t think who she was. The girl was facing the window, a book in her hands and Edvard IV in her lap. She was wearing a blue dress with a detachable white collar, and lying across the bone at the top of her spine was one of Greta’s gold chains. The girl-did Greta know her?-smelled of mint and milk.

The sailor below was yelling at his wife, and each time the word “whore” came through the floorboards, the girl’s neck would blush. And then it would fade. “Luder,” the man yelled over and over, and so rose and fell the flush in the girl’s throat.

“Lili?” Greta finally said.

“It’s a wonderful book.” Lili lifted the history of California that Greta’s father had shipped over in a crate with tins of sugared lemons, the supply of Pure Pasadena Extract, and a gunnysack of eucalyptus bells for steaming her face.