David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

There were other models: a handsome woman who was a cook at the Palace Hotel, and a man with a waxed mustache who, when asked to strip to his undershirt, revealed a chest that was a black carpet of hair.

“The market is tightening,” Hans said the night he came to visit, when he returned to the apartment after seeing Lili out. The gallery on Krystalgade was closed, its windows smudged with whitewash. The proprietor had disappeared; some said he fled to Poland with bad debts; others said he was now loading crates of curry on the Asiatic Company’s docks. And he was just one of many. The Henningsen porcelain factory, which had ordered another twenty kilns to produce soup bowls for America, collapsed. Herr Petzholdt’s cement churners went idle. Rumor mixed with the burnt-butter scent spewing out of the Otto Mønsted margarine factory. And the aerodrome, which once had buzzed like a beehive, sat blank and quiet, sending off the few emigrants and receiving only the occasional air freighter on its clean white strip.

“Nobody’s buying anything,” Hans said, holding his chin in his hand, studying the paintings Greta had arranged around the room. “I’d like to wait for things to get better before we take these out. Now’s not the time. Perhaps next year.”

“Next year?” Greta stood back and looked at her work. None were beautiful; none had the glow of light for which she had become known. She’d forgotten how to create it, the backlight that brought Lili’s face to life. The only painting that seemed to have any merit was her portrait of Professor Bolk: tall and large-handed and sturdy in his wool suit with the windowpane plaid. The others didn’t compare, Greta saw; and she saw Hans, with his wrinkled brow, trying to find a way to tell her.

“I was thinking of traveling to America,” Hans said. “To see if there’s any business left there.”

“To New York?”

“And to California.”

“To California?” Greta leaned against the wall, amid her paintings, and thought of Hans removing his felt-brimmed hat for the first time beneath the Pasadena sun.

Carlisle was on his way over to Copenhagen, booking passage via Hamburg. He had written that the winter had been dry in Pasadena, the poppy beds burned out by March. This was in response to Greta’s one-sentence note: “Einar is dead.” And Carlisle wrote in return: “Pasadena is dry, and the Los Angeles River isn’t running, and why don’t you and Lili come for a visit?” And then, “How is Lili? Is she happy?” Greta buttoned away his letter in the pocket of her smock.

On some afternoons, Greta would slip into Fonnesbech’s and watch Lili, across the counters displaying the kid gloves and silk scarves folded into triangles: Lili behind the glass case, her amber beads against the collar of her uniform and her hair falling into her eyes. A customer would pass and Lili would hold up a finger, and the lady would stop and bring a bottle of perfume to her nose. A smile and a sale, and Greta would watch it from across the floor, behind a rack of half-priced umbrellas. Greta spied like this a few times, but the last time was when she left Fonnesbech’s and came home to a cable from Carlisle: “I’m sailing on Saturday.”

And here was Hans, saying he was thinking of traveling to California himself. “I don’t suppose you’d want to go with me?” he said.

“To California?”

“Well, sure,” he said. “And don’t tell me you can’t.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

And Greta didn’t say it, for even she knew it would sound absurd. But who would look after Lili? She thought of Carlisle right then, sunning his leg on a canvas chaise on the deck of the Estonia .

“Greta, I could use your help,” Hans said.

“My help?”

“In America.”

She took a step back from Hans; he seemed so much taller than she: had she never noticed how high he stood? It was getting late, and they hadn’t eaten. Edvard IV was lapping at the water in his bowl. Her husband’s boyhood friend, that was who he was. But Hans didn’t seem like that anymore; as if that part of him-those memories of him-had vanished with Einar.

“Give it some thought,” Hans said.

“I could give you names to look up. I could write letters of introduction, if that’s what you need. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all,” she was saying.

“That’s not it. Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

His hand fell to the small of her back.

“But what about Lili?” she said.

“She’ll be fine on her own,” Hans said.

“I couldn’t leave her,” Greta said. His hand was caressing her hip. It was a spring night and the shutters were shaking in the wind, and Greta thought of the house on the hill in Pasadena where in the summer the Santa Anas flung eucalyptus branches against the screens.

“You’ll have to,” Hans said. He wrapped his arms around her. She could feel his heart beating beneath his shirt, and she could feel her own in her throat.

When he arrived, Carlisle didn’t stay in the spare bedroom. Instead, he took a room at the Palace Hotel, with a view out over Rådhuspladsen and the three-dragon fountain. He said he liked the sound in the square of the trams crossing lines, and the call of the man selling spice biscuits from his cart. Carlisle said he liked looking at the long brick wall of Tivoli, which was reopening for the season, the seats of the Ferris wheel shaking in the sky. He said he liked visiting Lili at the counter at Fonnesbech’s, where she had earned a little lapel pin for being the month’s number-one salesgirl. He said he liked seeing her busy and walking down Strøget, chatting with the other salesgirls as they emerged from the employee entrance in their matching blue suits. Carlisle said to Greta that he thought Lili should live on her own.

“What makes you say that?” Greta answered.

“She’s a grown woman.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “Anyway, it’s up to her.”

“Do you mean that?” he said.

“Of course I mean that,” said Greta, who never saw a mirror-image of herself when she looked at her twin.

One night the previous week Greta had been standing in the doorway of a building opposite Fonnesbech’s employee entrance. It was early evening, and she had hurried out of the Widow House so quickly that she’d forgotten to change out of her smock. She held her hands in the pockets, fingering the photographs of Teddy and Einar, the letters from them, their wedding bands. She was pressing herself against the portico of an apartment house with a horsehair doormat.

She waited only a few minutes until the metal door swung open, filling the tiny street with light and the chatter of girls. Their shoes began to clack against the grate in the sidewalk.

Greta waited for Lili to join up with three or four girls headed to the Turkish coffee house where young people lounged on the floor propped up by pillows embroidered with silk thread and little mirrors. “See you tomorrow,” two girls called to the rest. “Good night,” another said. “Have fun,” a fourth said over her shoulder, with a wave. The girls’ cheeks were downy and curved with baby fat, and their ponytails swayed as they walked down the little street and then turned onto Strøget. Lili was still talking with other girls, one with a sack of groceries, another with some sort of brace around her hand. Greta couldn’t hear what they were saying, but then the rest of the girls said, “So long.” And at last Lili was alone in the street. She checked her watch and looked to the low, damp sky.

A woman on a bicycle pedaled by, jittering as she rode against the slick cobblestones. Then Lili tied a scarf over her head and headed down the street. Greta watched her glide away, and very soon Lili was only a blue coat supported by two thin ankles and shoes clickety-clacking in the drizzle.