David Ebershoff - The Danish Girl

In the year since then, Lili had written Professor Bolk often, telling him of her recovery and her afternoons at the perfume counter and Greta’s difficulties painting and of Henrik. Less frequently than Lili wrote, Professor Bolk would reply, on a thin sheet of paper typed by Frau Krebs. “That’s wonderful news,” he’d answer. “If you ever think you’d like to proceed with the last operation, the one we discussed, please let me know right away. I’m even more confident about it than before.”

Now she would go. She hadn’t yet told Greta. But Lili knew more than anything else that she had to return to Dresden to finish what Bolk had started. To prove to the world-no, not to the world but to herself-that indeed she was a woman, and that all her previous life, the little man known as Einar, was simply nature’s gravest mishap, corrected once and for all.

“Then meet me in New York at the end of the summer,” Henrik now said, sitting on his trunk that the next day a deckhand would load onto the ship bound for New York via Hamburg. “It’s settled at last. We’ll marry there.”

A few weeks later, on an early summer morning, Lili was sitting for Greta. She was wearing a white dress with a V collar and an eyelet hem, her hair pinned back. Greta had given Lili a small bouquet of white roses to hold in her lap. She asked Lili to cross her ankles and to lift her chin.

There was so much to tell Greta now-the news of Henrik, and Lili’s determination to return to Dresden. How had she allowed so much to remain unsaid between them? A little secret had grown into a second world that Greta knew nothing about. Lili felt the regret sinking in her bowels: their long intimate life reduced to this.

Greta had been working on the portrait for nearly a week, and it was going well: the light in Lili’s face was alive, and correct; so were her deep-set eyes, and the thin trace of blue in her temples, and the red heat self-consciously burning in Lili’s throat. As she stood at her easel, Greta was telling all this to Lili-how she looked, how the painting was turning out. “This one’s going to be beautiful,” Greta was saying. “At last I’m getting you right. It’s been a while, Lili. I was beginning to wonder.”

Over the past year Lili had watched Greta turn out paintings that looked hurried and poorly planned. One portrait of Lili made her look grotesque, with black oily pupils and hair frizzy with static and swollen shiny lips and the veins in her temples bright and green. Others were weak in resemblance, or bland in color and conception. Not all were bad, but some, and Lili knew that Greta was struggling. It wasn’t like the years in Paris, when everything Greta painted had a shimmering quality, when strangers would look at the portraits of Lili and stroke their chins and say, “Who is this girl?” But even more surprising was Greta’s loss of desire to work. She let more and more days pass when she didn’t paint, strings of days that together would leave Lili wondering, while she was down at Fonnesbech’s, what Greta did to pass the time. “I’m still getting used to being back in Copenhagen,” Greta would sometimes say. “I thought we had left it for good.” Other times she’d say she simply wasn’t in the mood to paint-a sentiment so unlike Greta that Lili would reply, “Is everything all right?”

But on this morning in early summer the most recent portrait looked beautiful. Greta was chatting freely, as she’d done each morning during the week. She was saying, “I don’t suppose I ever told you about the time I asked my mother to sit for a painting. It was when I went back to Pasadena during the war. She was imperious then, managing the household and the garden, searching the grounds for an untrimmed hedge. God save the gardener who left a leaf on the lawn. One day I asked her if I could paint her. She thought about it, and then made me schedule the time with our butler, Mr. Ito. And so I made five appointments to meet her in the breakfast room, where the morning light was good. Teddy Cross and I were seeing each other then, and Mother knew it, but she didn’t want to hear about it. I was eighteen, and about to burst over with love, and all I could think about, let alone talk about, was Teddy. How he spoke about things in his long, slow voice. How his shoulders curved down. How his hair felt to my hand. But my mother didn’t want to hear a single word about Teddy. She’d hold up her hand the moment I began. And so for five mornings I painted her as she sat in the chair at the head of the breakfast-room table, her back to a window with a bougainvillea just outside. It was during an autumn heat wave, and I watched the sweat bubble up on her lip. And all I could do was bite my tongue and say nothing about how I felt.”

“How’d it turn out?” Lili asked.

“The painting? Oh, she hated it. She said it made her look mean. But that isn’t true. It makes her look like a mother who wants to keep her daughter from stepping into something painful but knows she can’t. She knew nothing was going to keep me from Teddy. She knew it, and she pressed her lips together and sat as still as a corpse for five mornings in a row.”

“Where is it?”

“The painting? In Pasadena. In the upstairs hall.”

Then Lili decided it was time to tell Greta. She could no longer keep anything from her. There was a terrible stretch of time in Einar’s life-from the time Hans left Bluetooth until the day he met Greta at the academy-when he lived without anyone to reveal his secrets to. Lili could remember that, the feeling of biting down on one’s thoughts and feelings and storing them up for no one. Then Greta had changed Einar’s life. Lili could remember the feeling of that, too, of realizing, gratefully, that at last the loneliness would fall away. How could she be less than honest with Greta for another minute? “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Greta murmured. Her eyes focused on the canvas; she tightened the tortoiseshell comb holding back her hair. Her hand was moving quickly, dabbing at the canvas and then circling through the paints poured into the Knabstrup bowls, and then returning to the nearly finished portrait of Lili.

But where to begin? What news should Lili deliver first: Henrik a few weeks ago about to board the Albert Herring , his hand fishing in his coat pocket for the diamond ring; the odd, sweet embarrassment they shared when the ring failed to slip past Lili’s knuckle; the telegram from New York, describing the apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street with the limestone front where they would live; and the most recent letter from Professor Bolk asking Lili when he should expect her, he was anxious to see her again. Yes, where to begin?

“This is very hard for me,” Lili was saying. Lili imagined the shock that would flush into Greta’s face; and the anger curling her fists. Lili wished there were another way. Another way for her and Greta. “I’m not sure where to start,” Lili said.

Greta set down her brush. “Are you in love?”

In the apartment below, there was a slam of the door. A few heavy footsteps. A window flinging open.

Lili sat back in the rope-bottom chair. She couldn’t believe that Greta had guessed. She couldn’t believe Greta had known-for Lili was sure that if Greta had known Lili was in love Greta would have tried to stop it. And it was then that Lili realized how wrong she was about Greta. Once again, Lili had been wrong.

“I am,” Lili said.

“Are you sure?” Greta asked.

“Yes, very.”

“Does he love you?”

“I can’t really believe it, but he does.”

“Well, then, not much else matters, does it?” Sunlight was on her, and Lili thought about all the evenings Greta had brushed out Lili’s hair, Greta’s breasts against Lili’s back. She thought about the bed they shared, and how their pinkies would curl around each other in the night. And how the morning light would fall on Greta’s rested face, and Lili would kiss her cheek thinking, Oh, if only I could be as beautiful as you!