His wife knew first. “Do me a small favor?” Greta called from the bedroom that first afternoon. “Just help me with something for a little bit?”
“Of course,” Einar said, his eyes on the canvas. “Anything at all.”
The day was cool, the chill blowing in from the Baltic. They were in their apartment in the Widow House, Einar, small and not yet thirty-five, painting from memory a winter scene of the Kattegat Sea. The black water was white-capped and cruel, the grave of hundreds of fishermen returning to Copenhagen with their salted catch. The neighbor below was a sailor, a man with a bullet-shaped head who cursed his wife. When Einar painted the gray curl of each wave, he imagined the sailor drowning, a desperate hand raised, his potato-vodka voice still calling his wife a port whore. It was how Einar knew just how dark to mix his paints: gray enough to swallow a man like that, to fold over like batter his sinking growl.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” said Greta, younger than her husband and handsome with a wide flat face. “Then we can start.”
In this way as well Einar was different from his wife. He painted the land and the sea-small rectangles lit by June’s angled light, or dimmed by the dull January sun. Greta painted portraits, often to full scale, of mildly important people with pink lips and shine in the grain of their hair. Herr I. Glückstadt, the financier behind the Copenhagen Free Harbor. Christian Dahlgaard, furrier to the king. Ivar Knudsen, member of the shipbuilding firm Burmeister and Wain. Today was to have been Anna Fonsmark, mezzo-soprano from the Royal Danish Opera. Managing directors and industry titans commissioned Greta to paint portraits that hung in offices, above a filing cabinet, or along a corridor nicked by a worker’s cart.
Greta appeared in the door frame. “You sure you won’t mind stopping for a bit to help me out?” she said, her hair pulled back. “I wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t important. It’s just that Anna’s canceled again. So would you mind trying on her stockings?” Greta asked. “And her shoes?”
The April sun was behind Greta, filtering through the silk hanging limply in her hand. Through the window, Einar could see the tower of the Rundetårn, like an enormous brick chimney, and above it the Deutscher Aero-Lloyd puttering out on its daily return to Berlin.
“Greta?” Einar said. “What do you mean?” An oily bead of paint dropped from his brush to his boot. Edvard IV began to bark, his white head turning from Einar to Greta and back.
“Anna’s canceled again,” Greta said. “She has an extra rehearsal of Carmen. I need a pair of legs to finish her portrait, or I’ll never get it done. And then I thought to myself, yours might do.”
Greta moved toward him, the shoes in her other hand sennep-yellow with pewter buckles. She was wearing her button-front smock with the patch pockets where she tucked things she didn’t want Einar to see.
“But I can’t wear Anna’s shoes,” Einar said. Looking at them, Einar imagined that the shoes might in fact fit his feet, which were small and arched and padded softly on the heel. His toes were slender, with a few fine black hairs. He imagined the wrinkled roll of the stocking gliding over the white bone of his ankle. Over the small cushion of his calf. Clicking into the hook of a garter. Einar had to shut his eyes.
The shoes were like the ones they had seen the previous week in the window of Fonnesbech’s department store, displayed on a mannequin in a midnight-blue dress. Einar and Greta had stopped to admire the window, which was trimmed with a garland of jonquils. Greta said, “Pretty, yes?” When he didn’t respond, his reflection wide-eyed in the plate glass, Greta had to pull him away from Fonnesbech’s window. She tugged him down the street, past the pipe shop, saying, “Einar, are you all right?”
The front room of the apartment served as their studio. Its ceiling was ribbed with thin beams and vaulted like an upside-down dory. Sea mist had warped the dormer windows, and the floor tilted imperceptibly to the west. In the afternoon, when the sun beat against the Widow House, a faint smell of herring would seep from its walls. In winter the skylights would leak, a cold drizzle bubbling the paint on the wall. Einar and Greta stood their easels beneath the twin skylights, next to the boxes of oil paint ordered from Herr Salathoff in Munich, and the racks of blank canvases. When Einar and Greta weren’t painting, they protected everything beneath green tarps the sailor below had abandoned on the landing.
“Why do you want me to wear her shoes?” Einar asked. He sat in the rope-bottom chair that had come from the backshed of his grandmother’s farm. Edvard IV jumped into his lap; the dog was trembling from the yelling of the sailor below.
“For my painting of Anna,” Greta said. And then, “I’d do it for you.” On the point of her cheek was a single shallow chicken-pox scar. Her finger was brushing it gently, something she did, Einar knew, when she was anxious.
Greta knelt to unlace Einar’s boots. Her hair was long and yellow, more Danish in color than his; she would push it behind her ears whenever she wanted to get busy on something new. Now it was slipping over her face as she picked at the knot in Einar’s laces. She smelled of orange oil, which her mother shipped over once a year in a case of brown bottles labeled PURE PASADENA EXTRACT. Her mother thought Greta was baking tea cakes with the oil, but instead Greta used it to dab behind her ears.
Greta began to wash Einar’s feet in the basin. She was gentle but efficient, quickly pulling the sea sponge between his toes. Einar rolled up his trousers even further. His calves looked, he suddenly thought, shapely. He delicately pointed his foot, and Edvard IV moved to lick the water from his little toe, the one that was hammer-headed and born without a nail.
“We’ll keep this our secret, Greta?” Einar whispered. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” He was both frightened and excited, and the child ’s fist of his heart was beating in his throat.
“Who would I tell?”
“Anna.”
“Anna doesn’t need to know,” Greta said. Even so, Anna was an opera singer, Einar thought. She was used to men dressing in women’s clothes. And women in men’s, the Hosenrolle. It was the oldest deceit in the world. And on the opera stage it meant nothing at all-nothing but confusion. A confusion that was always resolved in the final act.
“Nobody needs to know anything,” Greta said, and Einar, who felt as if a white stage light were on him, began to relax and work the stocking up his calf.
“You’re putting it on backwards,” Greta said, righting the seam. “Pull gently.”
The second stocking ripped. “Do you have another?” Einar asked.
Greta’s face froze, as if she was just realizing something; then she went to a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. The wardrobe had a closet on top with an oval mirror in its door, and three drawers with brass-hoop handles; the top one Greta locked with a little key.
“These are heavier,” Greta said, handing Einar a second pair. Folded neatly into a square, the stockings looked to Einar like a patch of flesh-a patch of Greta’s skin, brown from a summer holiday in Menton. “Please be careful,” she said. “I was going to wear them tomorrow.”
The part through Greta’s hair revealed a strip of silvery-white flesh, and Einar began to wonder what she was thinking beneath it. With her eyes slanted up and her mouth pinched, she seemed intent on something. Einar felt incapable of asking; he nearly felt bound, with an old paint rag tied across his mouth. And so he wondered about his wife silently, with a touch of resentment ripening beneath his face, which was pale and smooth and quite like the skin of a white peach. “Aren’t you a pretty man,” she had said, years ago, when they were first alone.
Greta must have noticed his discomfort, because she reached out and held Einar’s cheeks and said, “It means nothing.” And then, “When will you stop worrying about what other people think?”
Einar loved it when Greta made such declarations-the way she’d swat her hands through the air and claim her beliefs as the faith of the rest of the world. He thought it her most American trait, that and her taste for silver jewelry.
“It’s a good thing you don’t have much hair on your legs,” Greta said, as if noticing it for the first time. She was mixing her oil paints in the little ceramic Knabstrup bowls. Greta had finished the upper half of Anna’s body, which years of digesting buttered salmon had buried in a fine layer of fat. Einar was impressed with the way Greta had painted Anna’s hands holding a bouquet of day lilies. The fingers were carefully rendered, the knuckles puckered, the nails clear but opaque. The lilies were a pretty moon-white, stained with rusty pollen. Greta was an inconsistent painter, but Einar never told her so. Instead, he praised as much as he could, perhaps too much. But he helped her wherever possible, and would try to teach her techniques he thought she didn’t know, especially about light and distance. If Greta ever found the right subject, Einar had no doubt, she would become a fine painter. Outside the Widow House a cloud shifted, and sunlight fell on the half-portrait of Anna.
The model’s platform Greta used was a lacquer trunk bought from the Cantonese laundress who would make a pickup every other day, announcing herself not with a call from the street but with the ping! of the gold cymbals strapped to her fingers.
Standing on the trunk, Einar began to feel dizzy and warm. He looked down at his shins, the silk smooth except for a few hairs bursting through like the tiny hard fuzz on a bean. The yellow shoes looked too dainty to support him, but his feet felt natural arched up, as if he was stretching a long-unused muscle. Something began to run through Einar’s head, and it made him think of a fox chasing a fieldmouse: the thin red nose of the fox digging for the mouse through the folds of a pulse field.
“Stand still,” Greta said. Einar looked out the window and saw the fluted dome of the Royal Theatre, where he sometimes painted sets for the opera company. Right now, inside, Anna was rehearsing Carmen, her soft arms raised defiantly in front of the scrim he’d painted of the Seville bullring. Sometimes when Einar was at the theatre painting, Anna’s voice would rise in the hall like a chute of copper. It would make him tremble so much that his brush would smudge the backdrop, and he would rub his fists against his eyes. Anna’s wasn’t a beautiful voice-rough-edged and sorrowful, a bit used, somehow male and female at once. Yet it had more vibrancy than most Danish voices, which were often thin and white and too pretty to trigger a shiver. Anna’s voice had the heat of the South; it warmed Einar, as if her throat were red with coals. He would climb down from his ladder backstage and move to the theatre ’s wings: he’d watch Anna, in her white lamb’s-wool tunic, open her square mouth as she rehearsed with Conductor Dyvik. She would lean forward when she sang; Anna always said there was a musical gravity pulling her chin toward the orchestra pit. “I think of a thin silver chain connected to the tip of the conductor’s baton and fastened right here,” she would say, pointing to the mole that sat on her chin like a crumb. “Without that little chain, I almost feel I wouldn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know how to be me.”
When Greta painted, she ’d pull her hair back with a tortoiseshell comb; it made her face look larger, as if Einar were looking at it through a bowl of water. Greta was probably the tallest woman he ’d ever known, her head high enough to glance over the half-lace curtains ground-floor residents hung in their street windows. Next to her Einar felt small, as if he were her son, looking up beyond her chin to her eyes, reaching for a hanging hand. Her patch-pocket smock was a special order from the white-bunned seamstress around the corner, who measured Greta’s chest and arms with a yellow tape and with admiration and disbelief that such a large, healthy woman wasn’t a Dane.
Greta painted with a flexible concentration that Einar admired. She was able to dab at the gleam in a left eye and then answer the door and accept the delivery from the Busk Milk Supply Company and return effortlessly to the slightly duller glare in the right. She’d sing what she called campfire songs while she painted. She’d tell the person she was painting about her girlhood in California, where peacocks nested in her father’s orange groves; she’d tell her female subjects-as Einar once overheard upon returning to the apartment ’s door at the top of the dark stairs-about their longer and longer intervals between intimacy: “He takes it so very personally. But I never blame him,” she’d say, and Einar would imagine her pushing her hair behind her ears.
“They’re drooping,” Greta said, pointing her paintbrush at his stockings. “Pull them up.”
“Is this really necessary?”
The sailor below slammed a door, and then it was silent except for his giggling wife.
“Oh, Einar,” Greta said. “Will you ever relax?” Her smile sank and disappeared into her face. Edvard IV trotted into the bedroom, and began to dig through the bedclothes; then came a fed baby’s sigh. He was an old dog, from the farm in Jutland, born in a bog; his mother and the rest of the litter had drowned in the damp peat.
The apartment was in the attic of a building the government opened in the previous century for the widows of fishermen. It had windows facing north, south, and west and, unlike most of the townhouses in Copenhagen, could give Einar and Greta enough room and light to paint. They had almost moved into one of the burgher houses in Christianshavn on the other side of the Inderhavn, where artists were settling in with the prostitutes and the gambling drunks, alongside the cement-mixing firms and the importers. Greta said she could live anywhere, that nothing was too seedy for her; but Einar, who had slept under a thatch roof the first fifteen years of his life, decided against it, and found the space in the Widow House.
The facade was painted red, and the house sat one block from Nyhavns Kanal. The dormer windows stuck out of the steep, clay-tile roof, which was black with moss, and the skylights were cut high in the pitch. The other buildings on the street were whitewashed, with eight-paneled doors painted the color of kelp. Across the way lived a doctor named Møller who received emergency calls from women giving birth in the night. But few motorcars sputtered down the street, which dead-ended at the Inderhavn, making it quiet enough to hear the echo of a shy girl’s cry.
“I need to get back to my own work,” Einar finally said, tired of standing in the shoes, the pewter buckles pressing sharply.
“Does that mean you don’t want to try on her dress?”
When she said the word “dress” his stomach filled with heat, followed by a clot of shame rising in his chest. “No, I don’t think so,” Einar said.
“Not even for a few minutes?” she asked. “I need to paint the hem against her knees.” Greta was sitting on the rope-bottom chair beside him, stroking Einar’s calf through the silk. Her hand was hypnotic, its touch telling him to close his eyes. He could hear nothing but the little rough scratch of her fingernail against the silk.
But then Greta stopped. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Now Einar saw that the door to the pickled-ash wardrobe was open, and hanging inside was Anna’s dress. It was white, with drop beads along the knee-hem and the cuff. A window was cracked, and the dress was swaying gently on the hanger. There was something about the dress-about the dull sheen of its silk, about the bib of lace in the bodice, about the hook-buttons on the cuffs, unlatched and split apart like little mouths-that made Einar want to touch it.
“Do you like it?” Greta asked.
He thought about saying no, but that would have been a lie. He liked the dress, and he could nearly feel the flesh beneath his skin ripening.
“Then just slip it on for a few minutes.” Greta brought it to Einar and held it to his chest.
“Greta,” he said, “what if I-”
“Just take off your shirt,” she said.
And he did.
“What if I-”
“Just close your eyes,” she said.
And he did.
Even with his eyes closed, standing shirtless in front of his wife felt obscene. It felt as if she’d caught him doing something he had promised he would avoid-not like adultery, but more like resuming a bad habit he’d given his word he would quit, like drinking aquavit in the canal bars of Christianshavn or eating frikadeller in bed or shuffling through the deck of suede-backed girlie cards he once bought on a lonely afternoon.
“And your trousers,” Greta said. Her hand reached out, and she politely turned her head. The bedroom window was open, and the brisk fishy air was pimpling his skin.
Einar quickly pulled the dress over his head, adjusting the lap. He was sweating in the pits of his arms, in the small of his back. The heat was making him wish he could close his eyes and return to the days when he was a boy and what dangled between his legs was as small and useless as a white radish.
Greta only said, “Good.” Then she lifted her brush to the canvas. Her blue eyes narrowed, as if examining something on the point of her nose.
A strange watery feeling was filling Einar as he stood on the lacquer trunk, the sunlight moving across him, the scent of herring in the air. The dress was loose everywhere except in the sleeves, and he felt warm and submerged, as if dipping into a summer sea. The fox was chasing the mouse, and there was a distant voice in his head: the soft cry of a scared little girl.
It became difficult for Einar to keep his eyes open, to continue watching Greta’s fast, fishlike movements as her hand darted at the canvas, then pulled away, her silver bracelets and rings turning like a school of chub. It became difficult for him to continue thinking about Anna singing over at the Royal Theatre, her chin leaning toward the conductor’s baton. Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin, as if it were a bandage. Yes, that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze-a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter, for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna’s dress could belong to anyone, even to him.
And just as his eyelids were becoming heavy and the studio was beginning to dim, just as he sighed and let his shoulders fall, and Edvard IV was snoring in the bedroom, just at this moment Anna’s coppery voice sang out, “Take a look at Einar!”
His eyes opened. Greta and Anna were pointing, their faces bright, their lips peeled apart. Edvard IV began to bark in front of Einar. And Einar Wegener couldn’t move.
Greta took from Anna her bouquet of day lilies, a gift from a stage-door fan, and pressed them into Einar’s arms. With his head lifted like a little trumpet player, Edvard IV began to run protective circles around Einar. While the two women laughed some more, Einar’s eyes began to roll back into his head, filling with tears. He was stung by their laughter, along with the perfume of the white lilies, whose rusty pistils were leaving dusty prints in the lap of the dress, against the garish lump in his groin, on the stockings, all over his open wet hands.
“You’re a whore,” the sailor below called tenderly. “You’re one hell of a beautiful whore.”
From downstairs, the silence implied a forgiving kiss. Then there was even louder laughter from Greta and Anna, and just as Einar was about to beg them to leave the studio, to let him change out of the dress in peace, Greta said, her voice soft and careful and unfamiliar, “Why don’t we call you Lili?”
Greta Wegener was twenty-nine, a painter. She was a Californian. She was a Waud, her grandfather, Apsley Haven Waud, rich from land grants, her father, Apsley Jr., richer from orange groves. Before she moved to Denmark when she was ten, the farthest she had ever ventured from Pasadena was San Francisco, where one day she was playing roller hoop in front of her aunt Lizzie’s house on Nob Hill when she accidentally nudged her twin brother into the path of a buggy. Carlisle survived, a long shiny dent permanently sunk into his shin; some people said he was never the same. When she was older, Greta would say that Carlisle had never had what she called a Western spine. “Some Wauds are born with it,” she observed when she was ten and tall and practicing Danish phrases on the teak deck on the voyage over, “and some are not.” The Danes certainly didn’t have Western spines; and yet why should they? So Greta forgave them-at least most of the time. She especially forgave Einar, her first art professor and her second husband. By the spring of 1925 they had been married for more than six years: on certain mornings it felt to Greta like six weeks; on others, six well-lived lives.
Einar and Greta first met at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts on the first of September, 1914, only weeks after the Kaiser rumbled across the hillocks of Luxembourg and Belgium. Greta was seventeen. Einar was in his twenties, already a lecturer in painting, already shy and easily embarrassed around teenagers, a bachelor. Even then she was broad-shouldered, with the posture of an early childhood spent on horseback. She let her hair grow to the small of her back, which seemed a bit provocative on Copenhagen’s few remaining gas-flickering streets. The Danes excused her because she was from California, a place nearly none of them had seen but where they imagined people like Greta lived in open houses shaded by date palms, where stones of gold pushed their way through the black soil in the garden.
One day Greta plucked her eyebrows, and they never grew back, which she saw as more of a convenience than anything else. Each morning she drew them in place with the waxy pencils she bought in the windowless room on the third floor of Magasin du Nord, where women with situations de beauté discreetly shopped. Greta had an irrepressible habit of picking at the pores in her nose anytime she opened a book, and this had already left a few pencil-tip scars in her skin, about which she remained concerned. She thought of herself as the tallest girl in Copenhagen, which probably wasn’t true, what with Grethe Janssen, a lithe beauty and also the mayor’s mistress, dashing in and out of the shops in the lobby of the Hôtel d ’Angleterre in crystal-beaded gowns, even in the middle of the day.
In any case, Greta also thought of herself as the least likely to marry. When a young man-a pan-faced Dane of a declining aristocratic clan or the son of an American steel magnate touring Europe for the year-asked her to the ballet or for a sail through the canals of Christianshavn, her first thought was always: You won’t catch me. All she wanted to be was a bluestocking: a perpetually young woman who was free to paint daily in the light of the window and whose only social company occurred at midnight when a group of eight would meet in Sebastian’s, her favorite public house, for two quick snifters of cherry-flavored Peter Heering before the long-faced police would turn up at one o’clock to shut down the house for the night.
But even Greta knew that not only was this silly, it was also impossible. Why, young Miss Greta Waud would never be permitted to live like that at all.
When she was a little girl, she used to write over and over in her penmanship notebook, “Greta Greta Greta,” deliberately leaving off the “Waud” as if to test what it would be like to be plain old Greta-something no one ever called her. She didn’t want anyone to know who her family was. Even as an adolescent, she never wanted to coast on any sort of connections. She despised anyone who relied excessively on antecedents. What was the point?
She had come to Denmark as a girl when her father, a long-armed man with a lamb-chop beard, took his post at the embassy. “Why would you want to do that?” Greta had said when he first told her of his new assignment. “Now, Greta,” her mother replied, “be nice. He’s your father.” What Greta was forgetting was that his mother, her very own grandmother, Gerda Carlsen, for whom Greta had been named, was a Dane, with blond hair the color of beechwood. Raised on Bornholm, Gerda was known for the blood-red poppies she wore behind her ears-and for being the first girl in the family to leave the Baltic island, sailing not for Copenhagen, like most curious youngsters intent on leaving their family behind, but for southern California, which in those days was like telling your family you were emigrating to the moon. A few years of horsework on the right ranch brought her to the attention of Apsley Waud, Sr., and soon enough the tall girl from Bornholm who wore her hair to her hips and pinned with poppies was a California matriarch. When Greta’s father told her he was taking the family back to Denmark, it was a bit insensitive of her-even Greta had to admit-to fail to make the connection, not to realize that this was her father’s way of making restitution to his mother, to blue-eyed Gerda Carlsen Waud, who lost her life when her son, Apsley Jr., then just a young man, led her to the lip of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco to take her photograph in front of the vista and then watched in horror as the ant-gnawed soil crumbled away and flung his mother into the canyon below, down into the deadly Y-branch of a knotty sycamore.
At the Royal Academy in the autumn of 1914, Greta assumed that most people, particularly the administrators, gossiped about two things: the war and her. She always caused a stir, no matter where she went, what with her train of blond hair like a wake behind her. Especially in southern California. Why, it was only last year, when she returned to Pasadena for a summer of tennis and horseback lessons, when one day the boy who drove the butcher wagon caught her eye. His hair was black and curly and his hot hand pulled her up to the front plank-seat and together they rode down to Wilshire Boulevard and back. She watched him manipulate the iron tongs as he unloaded the rib roasts and the racks of lamb at the houses in Hancock Park. On the ride home, not once did the boy try to kiss her, which disappointed Greta, who for the first time had doubts about the length of her yellow hair. At the end of the ride, the boy said only, “So long.” And so Greta shrugged and went to her room. But the next morning, at the breakfast table, her mother, who was thin in the lip, said, “Greta, my dear. Would you please explain this?” Her mother unfolded a piece of stationery from the American Weekly. On it was a cryptic note that simply said, “Does young Miss Greta Waud plan a career in butchery?” For weeks the threat of a society-page exposure shadowed the mansion. Each morning the fingers-in-mouth whistle of the newspaper boy caused the household to freeze in its step. The story never ran, but of course the gossip eventually leaked. For two days the telephone in the upstairs hall rang and rang and rang. Greta’s father could no longer take his lunch at the California Club downtown, and her mother had a devil of a time securing a second source of meat. Soon her parents canceled the summer in California, and Greta returned to Copenhagen in time for the August aurora borealis and the fireworks bursting over Tivoli.
That September at the end of her youth, when war could be heard in the thunderclouds, Greta enrolled at the Royal Academy. On the first day of classes, it surprised Greta when Einar, standing in front of a blackboard dusty with the ghost of a previous lesson, asked her, “And, Miss? Your name?”
When Greta answered the question, Einar-or Professor Wegener, as she thought of him then-marked his class log and moved on. His eyes, which were as brown and wide as a doll’s, returned to her and then jumped away. Judging by his skittishness, Greta began to think he ’d never met an American in his life. She flipped the panel of her hair over her shoulder, as if waving a flag.
Then, early in the school year, someone must have whispered to Einar about her father and the embassy and maybe even the butcher-wagon story-yes, gossip hopped the Atlantic, even then-because Einar became even more awkward around her. It disappointed her that he was proving to be one of those men who found it impossible to be comfortable around a rich girl. This nearly burned her up alive, because she’d never asked to be rich; not that she minded it all the time, but even so. Einar was unable to recommend which paintings to view in Kunstudstill ingen, and incapable of describing the best route to the art supply shop near Kommunehospitalet. She invited him to a reception at the American embassy for a shipbuilder visiting from Connecticut, but he refused. He declined her request for an escort to the opera. He would hardly look at her when they spoke. But she looked at him, both when they met and from far away, through a window as he crossed the academy’s courtyard, his steps short and fast. He was small in the chest, with a round face, skin pale and eyes so dark that Greta had no idea what lay behind them. Simply by speaking to him, Greta could force a flush through Einar’s face from throat to temple. He was childlike, and this fascinated Greta, in part because she had always been so overgrown and outspoken that people had treated her, even when she was little, more or less like an adult. She once asked him, “Are you married, Professor?” and this caused his eyelids to flutter uncontrollably. His lips pushed together as he attempted to say the seemingly unfamiliar word “No.”
The other students whispered about Professor Wegener. “From a family of gnomes,” one girl said. “Was blind until he was fifteen,” said another girl. “Born in a bog,” said a boy who was trying to get Greta’s attention. The boy painted pictures of Greek statues, and Greta couldn’t think of anything more boring, or anyone. When he asked to take her to ride the Ferris wheel in Tivoli she simply rolled her eyes. “Well, Professor Wegener isn’t going to take you, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” the boy replied, kicking his boot against the trunk of an elm.
At home, her mother, ever mindful of the butcher-wagon incident, studied Greta cautiously whenever she returned for the evening, the light of the fireplace revealing nothing in Greta’s eyes. One evening her mother said, “Greta, my dear, if you don’t arrange an escort for your birthday party, then I’m going to have to ask someone for you.” She was needlepointing at the parlor’s hearth, and Greta could hear Carlisle upstairs in his room bouncing a tennis ball. “I’m sure Countess von der Recke ’s son would like to go with you,” Mrs. Waud was saying. “Of course he doesn’t dance, but he ’s a handsome enough boy, as long as you ignore that awful hump, wouldn’t you agree? Greta?” Greta’s mother lifted her pointy face. The fire in the hearth was weak and red, and the tap-tap-tap of Carlisle’s ball filled the room, causing the chandelier to tremble. “When will he stop that?” Mrs. Waud snapped. “Silly tennis ball.” She folded up her needlepoint and stood, her body taking a rigid stance, as if she were an accusatory arrow pointed in the direction of Carlisle’s room. “I suppose there ’s always Carlisle,” she said with a sigh. And then, as if the flames in the fireplace had suddenly leapt higher and brightened the parlor, Mrs. Waud said, “Well, yes, that’s right. There’s always Carlisle. Why not go with Carlisle? He hasn’t found a girl to take, either. You two could go together, the birthday couple.” But Greta, who remained in the parlor’s door frame, protested with her hands and said, “Carlisle? I can’t go with Carlisle! That wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, I’m quite capable of finding my own escort.” Her mother’s eyebrows, which were gray as pigeon feathers, arched up. She said, “Oh, really? Who?”
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.
“I don’t want to disturb you,” Greta said.
Lili made a feathery murmur. Edvard IV growled lazily, his ears lifting. The door to the apartment was still open, and Greta hadn’t removed her coat. Lili returned to her book, and Greta looked at Lili’s pale neck rising out of the petals of her collar. Greta wasn’t sure what her husband wanted her to do next. She told herself that this was important to Einar, that she should follow his lead-not a natural impulse for Greta. She stood in the entry of the apartment, one hand behind her holding the knob of the door, while Lili sat quietly in the chair, in a pane of sunlight. She ignored Greta, who was hoping Lili would rise and take Greta’s hands in hers. But that didn’t happen, and eventually Greta realized she should leave Lili alone, and so she closed the door to the apartment behind her and headed down the dark stairs and into the street, where she met the Cantonese laundress and sent her away.
Later, when Greta returned to the Widow House, Einar was painting. He was wearing his checked-tweed pants and vest, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. His head looked small in his collar and above the lumpy knot of his tie. His face was full and pink in the cheek, his little pouty mouth sucking on the end of his filbert brush. “It’s coming along,” he said cheerfully. “I finally mixed the right colors for the snow on the heath. Have a look?”
Einar painted scenes so small you could balance the canvases in your hands. This particular painting was dark, a bog in a winter dusk; a thin line of dingy snow was the only distinction between the spongy soil and the sky. “It’s the bog in Bluetooth?” Greta said. Recently she had tired of Einar’s landscapes. She never understood how he could paint them over and over. He would finish off this heath tonight and begin another in the morning.
On the table was a loaf of rye bread. Einar had done the marketing, which wasn’t like him. There was also a tub of shrimp on ice, and a dish of shredded beef. And a bowl of pickled pearl onions, which reminded Greta of the beads she and Carlisle had strung when they were little and he was still too lame to play outside. “Was Lili here?” She felt the need to mention it, for Greta knew that Einar would leave it unsaid.
“For an hour. Maybe less. Can’t you smell her? Her perfume?” He was rinsing his brushes in a jar, the water a pale white like the thin milk Greta had had to buy when she first returned to Denmark after the war.
Greta didn’t know what to say; she didn’t know what her husband wanted her to say. “Is she coming back?”
“Only if you want her to,” Einar said, his back to her.
His shoulders were no wider than a boy’s. So slight a man he was that Greta sometimes felt she could wrap her arms twice around him. She watched his right shoulder shake as he rinsed the brushes, and something in her told her to stand behind him and take hold of his arms, to whisper to him to stand still. All she wanted to do was to allow him his desires, but at the same time she had the irrepressible urge to hold him in her arms and tell him what to do about Lili. And there they were, in the apartment in the attic of the Widow House, with dusk filling the windows, and Greta holding Einar tightly, his arms stiff at his side. Eventually she said-but only as it occurred to her-“It ’s up to Lili. It ’s whatever she wants to do.”
In June the city was throwing the Artists Ball at Rådhuset. For a week Greta kept the invitation in her pocket, wondering what to do about it. Einar had recently said he didn’t want to go to any more balls. But Greta had another idea; she had come to see in Einar’s eyes a longing he wasn’t prepared to admit.
One night at the theatre, she gently asked, “Would you like to go as Lili?” She asked because she guessed it was what Einar wanted. He would never confess such a desire; he rarely confessed anything to her, unless she prodded, in which case his true feelings would pour out, and she would listen patiently, sinking her chin into her fist.
They were at the Royal Theatre, up in the gallery. The red velvet on the armrests was worn bald, and over the proscenium was inscribed the legend EJ BLOT TIL LYST. The black oak floors had been waxed that afternoon, and a sweet medicinal odor hung in the air, making Greta think of the smell of the apartment after Einar had cleaned and mopped.
Einar’s hands were trembling, his throat turning pink. Greta and Einar were nearly as high up as the electric chandelier, with its great smoked-glass balls. The light was revealing the down on Einar’s cheek just beneath his ears, where most men wore sideburns. His beard was so light that he shaved just once a week; there were so few whiskers on his upper lip that Greta could count them if she liked. In his cheek there was a color, like a tea rose, which Greta sometimes envied out of the corner of her eye.
The orchestra was tuning up, preparing for its long descent into Tris tan und Isolde. The couple next to Einar and Greta were discreetly removing their evening slippers. “I thought we said we weren’t going to the ball this year,” Einar finally said.
“We don’t have to go. I just thought-”
The lights dimmed, and the conductor made his way to the head of the pit. For the next five hours Einar sat rigid, his legs pressed together, his program tight in his fist. Greta knew he was thinking of Lili, as if she were a younger sister away for a very long time but now due home. Tonight Anna was singing Brangäne, Isolde ’s maidservant. Her voice made Greta think of coals in a stove, and although it wasn’t pretty like a soprano’s, it was warm at the edges and correct; how else should a maidservant sound? “Some of the most interesting women I know aren’t especially beautiful,” she would later comment to Einar, when they were in bed, when Greta’s hand was beneath the heat of his hip, when she was on the steep cliff of sleep and she couldn’t properly think of where she was, Copenhagen or California.
The next day, when Greta returned from a meeting with another gallery owner, a man who was too mousy and insignificant even to pique Greta with his rejection, she went to kiss Einar. There, on his cheek and in his hair, was the ghost of Lili, the lingering scent of mint and milk.
“Was Lili here again?”
“The whole afternoon.”
“What did she do?”
“She went over to Fonnesbech’s and bought herself a few things.”
“All alone?” Greta said.
Einar nodded. He had finished painting for the day and was in the walnut-armed reading chair, Politiken spread in his hands and Edvard IV curled at his feet. “She said to tell you she wants to go to the ball.”
Greta didn’t say anything. She felt as if someone were explaining the rules of a new parlor game: she was listening and nodding but actually thinking to herself, I hope I understand this better once the game begins.
“You want her to go, don’t you?” Einar asked. “It ’s okay with you if she goes instead of me?”
Greta, who was twisting the tips of her hair into a knot that would later snarl, said, “I don’t mind at all.”
At night Greta would lie in bed, her arm over Einar’s chest. When they married, Einar’s grandmother had given them a beechwood sleigh bed. It was a bit small, like everyone in the Wegener family except Einar’s father. Over the years Greta grew used to sleeping at a diagonal, her legs stacked across Einar’s. Sometimes, when she doubted this life she had created for herself in Denmark, she would feel as if she were a little girl, and Einar, with his china-doll face and his pretty feet, her most beloved toy. When he slept, his lips would pout and glisten. His hair would hang like a wreath around his face. Greta couldn’t count the nights she had stayed up watching his long lashes fluttering while he was dreaming.
Deep in the night their bedroom was silent except for the horn of the ferry leaving for Bornholm, the Baltic island where her grandmother had first come from. More and more, Greta would lie awake thinking about Lili, about her rural face with the tremblingly bold upper lip and her eyes so brown and watery that Greta couldn’t tell whether or not they were on the verge of tears. About Lili’s fleshy little nose, which somehow made her look like a girl still growing into a woman’s body.
Lili turned out to be even shyer than Einar. Or at least at first. Her head would dip when she spoke, and sometimes she would become too nervous to say anything at all. When asked a question as simple as “Did you hear about the terrible fire on the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s docks?” she would stare at Greta or Anna and then turn away. Lili preferred to write notes and prop them around the apartment, leaving postcards bought from the blind woman outside Tivoli’s iron gates on the pickled-ash wardrobe or on the little ledge of Greta’s easel.
But I won’t know anyone at the ball. Do you really think I should go?
Is it fair to leave Einar behind? Won’t he mind?
And once:
I don’t think I’m pretty enough. Please advise.
Greta returned the notes, standing them against a bowl of pears just before leaving the apartment:
It’s too late. I’ve already told everyone you’re coming. Please don’t worry, everyone thinks Lili is Einar’s cousin from Bluetooth. A few have asked if you would need an escort, but I said it wasn’t necessary. You don’t mind, do you? I didn’t think you were-is this the right word?-ready.
In the evenings Einar and Greta would dine with friends at their favorite café along Nyhavns Kanal. Sometimes he ’d become a little drunk on aquavit and boast childishly of the success of one of his exhibitions. “All the paintings sold!” he’d say, reminding Greta of Carlisle, who would endlessly boast of a good grade in geometry, or a handsome new friend.
But Einar’s talk would embarrass Greta, who tried not to listen whenever money was discussed; after all, what was there to say? Couldn’t they pretend it didn’t matter to either of them? She would glare at Einar across the table, salmon bones bare and oily on the platter. She’d never told Einar about the trust her father had sent her off to Denmark with, to say nothing of the income wired into an account at Landmandsbanken at the end of each orange season-not out of selfishness, but because she was too concerned that all that money would transform her into someone else, someone whose company she herself wouldn’t enjoy. One regrettable day she bought the whole apartment building, the Widow House, but she could never bring herself to tell Einar, who each month delivered the rent check to a clerk at Landmandsbanken with a bit of a grudge in his step. Even Greta knew this had been a mistake, but how could she fix it now?
When Einar became excited he’d knock his fists against the table, his hair falling around his face; the collar of his shirt would split open, revealing his smooth pink chest. He was without any fat on his body, except for his soft breasts, which were as small as dumplings. Greta would pat his wrist, trying to urge him to slow down on the aquavit-the way her mother had done when Greta was a girl drinking Tennis Specials at the Valley Hunt Club. But Einar never seemed to understand her signals, and instead he’d bring the slim glass to his lips and smile around the table, as if seeking approval.
Physically, Einar was an unusual man; this Greta knew. She would think this when his shirt would split open further, and everyone at the table could get a peek of his chest, which was as obscene as the breast of a girl a few days into puberty. With his pretty hair and his chin smooth as a teacup, he could be a confusing sight. He was so beautiful that sometimes old women in Kongens Have would break the law and offer him tulips picked from a public bed. His lips were pinker than any of the sticks of color Greta could buy on the third floor of Magasin du Nord.
“Tell them why you won’t be at the ball,” Greta said one night at dinner. It was warm, and they were eating at a table outside in the light of a torch. Earlier, two boats in the canal had collided, and the night smelled of kerosene and split wood.
“The ball?” Einar asked, tilting his head.
“Greta says your cousin is coming from Jutland,” said Helene Albeck, a secretary at the Royal Greenland Trading Company. She was compact in her little green dress with the low-hanging waist; once, when she was drunk, she took Einar’s hand and pressed it against her lap. Einar resisted instantly, which pleased Greta, who had witnessed the incident through a slat in the kitchen door.
“My cousin?” Einar said, sounding confused. His upper lip became dewy, and he said nothing, as if he’d forgotten how to speak.
This happened more than once. Greta would mention Lili to a friend, even to Anna, and Einar’s face would pinch up, as if he had no idea who Lili was. He and Greta never spoke about it afterwards, about his childlike miscomprehension: Lili who? Oh, yes, Lili. My cousin? Yes, my cousin, Lili. The next day the same thing would occur again. It was as if their little secret were really just Greta’s little secret, as if she were plotting behind Einar’s back. She considered discussing it with him directly but decided against it. Perhaps she feared she would crush him. Or that he would resent her intrusion. Or maybe her greatest fear was that Lili would disappear forever, the detachable white collar fluttering as she fled, leaving Greta alone in the Widow House.
Einar’s father was a failed cereal farmer, an expelled member of the Society for Cultivating the Heath. The first night he ever left his mother’s farmhouse in Bluetooth was when he rode up to Skagen, the fingertip of Denmark, to fetch his bride from a shop that sewed fishing nets. He slept in a bay-inn with a seaweed roof and woke at dawn to marry. The second and last night away from Bluetooth he returned to Skagen with his wife’s body and baby Einar wrapped in a plaid blanket. Because the ground around Skagen was too hard with hoarfrost for gravedigging, they wrapped Einar’s mother in a fishing net picked clean of gills and laid her like an anchor into the icy sea. The week before, a gray wave had washed the bay-inn with the seawood roof into the Kattegat, and so this time Einar’s father slept in the net shop, among the rusted hook-needles and the cord and the faint smell of primrose for which Einar’s mother was known.
His father was tall and weak, a victim of delicate bones. He walked with a knotwood staff, holding on to furniture. When Einar was little, his father was bedridden with maladies the doctor simply called rare. During the day Einar would sneak into his father’s room while he was asleep. Einar would find foam collected on his father’s lips, bubbled with breath. Einar would tiptoe forward, reaching to touch his father’s golden curls. Einar had always wanted hair like that, so thick a silver comb could sit in it as prettily as tinsel on a Christmas tree. But even more lovely than his hair was his illness, the mysterious malady that bled away his energy and caused his egg-shaped eyes to turn milky and soft, his fingers yellow and frail. Einar found his father beautiful-a man lost in a useless, wheezing, slightly rank shell of a body. A man confounded by a body that no longer worked for him.
On some days Einar would climb into the small beechwood bed and slip beneath the eiderdown. His grandmother had patched the holes in the comforter with tiny pellets of peppermint gum, and now the bed smelled fresh and green. Einar would lie with his head sunk into the pillow, and little Edvard II would curl between him and his father, his white tail flicking against the bedclothes. The dog would groan and sigh, and then sneeze. Einar would do the same. He did this because he knew how much his father loved Edvard, and Einar wanted his father to love him just the same.
Einar would rest there and feel the weak heat from his father’s bones, his ribs showing through his nightshirt. The green veins in his throat would pulse with exhaustion. Einar would take his father’s hand and hold it until his grandmother, her body small and rectangular, would come to the door and shoo Einar away. “You’ll only make him worse,” she’d say, too busy with the fields and the neighbors calling with sympathy to tend to Einar.
Yet despite his admiration, Einar also resented his father, sometimes cursing him as Einar dug in the bog, his spade cutting through the peat. On the table next to his father’s sickbed was an oval daguerreotype of Einar’s mother, her hair twisted into a wreath around her head, her eyes silvery. Whenever Einar picked it up, his father would take it away and say, “You’re disturbing her.” Opposite the bed was the pickled-ash wardrobe where her clothes waited, exactly as she’d left them the day she gave birth to Einar. A drawer of felt skirts with pebbles sewn into the hem to hold them against the wind; a drawer of wool underclothes, gray as sky; on hangers a few gabardine dresses with muttonchop sleeves; her wedding dress, now yellow, packed in tissue that would break apart at the touch. There was a drawstring bag that rattled with amber beads and a black cameo pin and a small diamond set in prongs.
Every now and then, in a burst of health, his father would leave the farmhouse. One day when he returned from an hour of chat at the neighbor’s kitchen table, he found Einar, small at age seven, in the drawers, the amber beads twisted around his throat, a yellow deck-scarf on his head like long, beautiful hair.
His father’s face turned red, and his eyes seemed to sink into his skull. Einar could hear the angry rattle of his father’s breath in his throat. “You can’t do that!” his father said. “Little boys can’t do that!” And little Einar replied, “But why not?”
His father died when Einar was fourteen. The gravediggers charged an extra ten kroner to shovel out a hole long enough to hold his coffin. In the churchyard his grandmother, who had now buried all her children, gave Einar a small notebook with a pewter cover. “Write your private thoughts in it,” she instructed, her face as flat and round as a saucer; that flat face showed her relief that her queer, unproductive son had at last moved on. The notebook was the size of a playing card, with a lapis lazuli pencil held to the spine by ostrich-leather loops. She had plucked it from a sleeping Prussian soldier when the German Confederation occupied Jutland during the War of 1864. “Took his notebook and then shot him,” she sometimes said, churning her cheese.
Bluetooth was named for one of Denmark’s first kings. No one really knew when it was founded, or where its people came from, although there were myths about the Greenland settlers giving up on that rocky land and releasing their sheep to graze here. It was not much more than a village surrounded by bogs. Everything in Bluetooth was always wet: feet, dogs, and, sometimes in the spring, carpets and the walls of halls. There was a plank walkway that crossed the spongy ground leading to the main road and then the grain fields beyond. Every year the walkway would sink the length of a girl’s arm, and in May, when the hoarfrost would melt to bits no bigger than fish scales, the men of Bluetooth would rehammer the warping planks into the few yellow heaps of solid ground.
As a boy Einar had a friend named Hans who lived on the edge of the village in a brick villa that had the town’s first telephone. One day, before they were close friends, Hans charged Einar an øre to pick up the receiver. He heard nothing, only the staticky hollow silence. “If there were anyone to call, you know I’d let you,” Hans said, throwing his arm around Einar’s shoulder and rocking him gently.
Hans’s father was a baron. His mother, whose gray hair was twisted tightly, spoke to him only in French. Hans had freckles on the lower half of his face and was, like Einar, smaller than most other boys. But unlike Einar, Hans had a voice that was fast and raspy, that of a good, always excited boy who spoke with equal enthusiasm and confidence to his best friend, his Corsican governess, and the red-nosed deacon. He was the type of boy who at night would fall asleep instantly, exhausted and happy, suddenly quieter than the bog. Einar knew this because whenever he slept at the villa, he would lie awake till dawn, too excited ever to seal his eyes.
Hans was two years older than Einar, but that didn’t seem to matter. At fourteen, Hans was small for his age yet taller than Einar. With his head handsomely larger in proportion to his body, Hans seemed, when Einar was twelve, more like an adult than any other boy he knew. Hans understood the grown-ups who ran the world: he knew they didn’t appreciate their inconsistencies being called out. “No, no-say nothing,” he’d advise when Einar’s father, nearly always bemoaning his bedridden state, would throw back the eiderdown and fly to the teapot whenever Mrs. Bohr or Mrs. Lange stopped by for gossip. Or Hans would suggest-the way he did, with his fingers pressed together into a small finlike paddle-not to tell Einar’s father that he wanted to be a painter. “You’ll change your mind again and again. Why worry him now?” Hans would say, his pressed-together fingers touching Einar’s arm, causing the little black hairs to stand alert, their bases pimpled and hard. Because Hans knew so much, Einar thought certainly he must be right. “Dreams shouldn’t be shared,” Hans told Einar one day when teaching him to climb the ancient oak that grew on the edge of the bog. Its roots wrapped mysteriously around a boulder so white and speckled with mica that you couldn’t look directly at it on a sunny day. “I want to run away to Paris, but I’m not going to tell anyone about it. I’m going to keep it to myself. One day I’ll be gone. That’s when people will know,” Hans said, swinging upside down from a branch, his shirt creeping down to expose the hairs sprouting in the bowl of his sternum. Were he to let loose and fall, he’d neatly slip away into the open bubbling mud.
But Hans never disappeared into the bog. By the time Einar was thirteen, he and Hans had become best friends. This surprised Einar, who expected nothing less than scorn from a boy like Hans. Yet instead Hans would ask Einar to play tennis on the rye-grass court marked out with powdered sugar next to the villa. When he discovered Einar couldn’t swing a racquet with any precision, Hans instructed Einar on the rules of umpiring, claiming it was more important anyway. One afternoon Hans and one of his brothers-there were four in all-decided, in an effort to rankle their mother, to play tennis naked. Einar sat in a sweater on a li chened rock, a pink paper parasol set up by Hans protecting him from the sun. Einar tried to call the match objectively, although he felt unprepared to do anything but help Hans win. And so Einar sat on the rock calling the points-“Forty-love for Hans… An ace for Hans”-as Hans and his brother glided over the rye grass chasing the ball, their cheerfully pink penises flopping around like schnauzer tails, causing Einar to heat up under the parasol until Hans’s match point. Then the three boys tow eled off, and Hans’s bare warm arm fell across Einar’s back.
Hans had a paper-and-balsa kite, brought back from Berlin by the baroness. It was shaped like a submarine, and Hans loved to set it sailing up into the sky. He’d lie in the lucerne grass and watch the kite floating above the bog, the spool of string clamped between his knees. “The Kaiser has a kite just like this one,” he ’d say, blades of grass between his lips. He tried to teach Einar to get it aloft, but Einar was never capable of finding the right current of air. Over and over the rice-paper kite would rush up in a column of breeze and then crash to the ground; and each time Einar would watch Hans wince as the kite returned to earth. The boys would rush over to the kite, which would be lying upside down. Einar would say, “I don’t know what happened, Hans. I’m so sorry, Hans.” Hans would pick up the kite and shake off the dandelions and say, “Good as new.” But Einar could never learn to fly the kite; and so one day, when the boys were sprawled on their backs in the lucerne grass, Hans said, “Here. You steer.” He set the spool of string between Einar’s knees and then resettled himself in the field. Einar could feel the foxholes beneath him. Each time the kite pulled on the string the spool would rotate, and Einar’s back would arch up. “That’s right,” Hans said. “Guide her with your knees.” And Einar got more and more used to the spinning spool, and the kite dipping and rising with the wrens. The boys were laughing, their noses burning in the sun. Hans was tickling Einar’s stomach with a reed. His face was so close to Hans’s that he could feel, through the grass, his breath. Einar wanted to lie so close to Hans that their knees would touch, and at that moment Hans seemed open to anything at all. Einar scooted toward his best friend, and the only strip of cloud in the sky peeled itself away, and the sun fell on the boys’ faces. And just then, as Einar moved his bony knee toward Hans’s, an angry gust of wind yanked on the kite, and the spool lifted from the clamp of Einar’s knees. The boys watched the submarine of the kite sail above the elm trees, rising at first, but then crashing into the black center of the bog, which swallowed it as if it were as heavy as a stone.
“Hans,” Einar said.
“It’s okay,” Hans said, his voice a stunned whisper. “Just don’t tell my mother.”
The summer before Einar’s father died, Hans and Einar were playing in Einar’s grandmother’s sphagnum fields, the mud swishing through their boots. It was warm, and they had been in the fields most of the morning, and suddenly Hans touched Einar’s wrist and said, “Einar, dear, what’s for dinner?” It was about noon, and Hans knew no one was in the farmhouse except Einar’s father, who was asleep upright in his bed.
Hans had begun to grow by then. He was fifteen, and his body was filling out to match the size of his head. A fin of an Adam’s apple had appeared in his throat, and he was now much taller than Einar, who at thirteen still hadn’t budged in height. Hans nudged Einar toward the farmhouse. In the kitchen Hans sat at the head of the table and tucked a napkin into his collar. Einar had never before cooked a meal, and he stood blankly at the stove. Hans quietly said, “Light a fire. Boil some water. Drop in a few stone potatoes and a mutton joint.” Then, more vaguely, his gravelly voice suddenly smooth: “Einar. Let’s pretend.”
Hans found Einar’s grandmother’s apron with the cottongrass strings hanging limply next to the stovepipe. He brought it to Einar and cautiously tied it around his waist. Hans touched the nape of Einar’s neck, as if there were a panel of hair he needed to lift aside. “You never played this game?” Hans whispered, his voice hot and creamy on Einar’s ear, his fingers with their gnawed-down nails on Einar’s neck. Hans pulled the apron tighter until Einar had to lift his ribs with an astonished, grateful breath, his lungs filling just as Einar’s father padded into the kitchen, his eyes wide and his mouth puckered into a large O.
Einar felt the apron drop to his feet.
“Leave the boy alone!” His father’s walking stick was raised at Hans.
The door slammed, and the kitchen became shadowy and small. Einar could hear Hans’s boots squish through the mud, heading toward the bog. Einar could hear the wheeze of his father’s breath and then the flat punch of his fist landing on Einar’s cheek. Then, across the bog and the tadpole pools, over the sphagnum field, trailing into the afternoon, came Hans’s voice in a little song:
There once was an old man who lived on a bog And his pretty little son, and their lazy little dog
Greta spent her eighteenth birthday on the Princess Dagmar, sulking at its rail. She hadn’t returned to California since the summer of the butcher-wagon incident. The thought of the whitewashed brick house on the hill, with its view of the eagle-nested Arroyo Seco, the thought of the San Gabriel Mountains purpling at sunset, filled her with regret. She knew her mother would want her to take up with the daughters of her friends-with Henrietta, whose family owned the oceanside oil fields down in El Segundo; with Margaret, whose family owned the newspaper; with Dottie Anne, whose family owned the largest ranch in California, a parcel of land south of Los Angeles not much smaller than all of Denmark. Greta’s parents expected her to proceed as if she were one of them, as if she’d never left, as if she should become the young California woman she was born to be: smart, schooled, horse-trained, and silent. There was the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club, where the girls would descend the staircase in white organdy dresses, albino poinsettia leaves pinned to their hair. “How appropriate that we’d return to Pasadena in time for your coming out,” Greta’s mother clucked nearly every day on the Princess Dagmar on the return voyage. “Thank God for the Germans!”
Greta’s room in the house on the hill had an arched window that overlooked the rear lawn and the roses, their petals fringed brown in the autumn heat. Despite the good light, the room was too small to paint in. After only two days she felt cramped, as if the house, with its three floors of bedrooms and the Japanese maids whose geta sandals clacked up and down the back staircase, were choking her imagination. “Mother, I just have to return to Denmark right away-tomorrow, even! It ’s too confining for me here,” she complained. “Maybe it’s fine for you and Carlisle, but I feel as if I can’t get anything done. I feel as if I’ve forgotten how to paint.”
“But, Greta, dear, that’s impossible,” said her mother, who was busy converting the stable into a garage. “How could California cramp anyone? And compared to little Denmark!” Greta agreed that it didn’t make sense, but this was how she felt.
Her father sent over a statistical survey of Denmark published by the Royal Scientific Control Societies. Greta spent a week with it, studying its charts with both self-pity and longing: last year there were 1,467,000 pigs in Denmark, and 726,000 sheep. The total number of hens: 12,000,000. She would read the figures and then turn her head to the arched window. She memorized them, certain she would need them shortly, although for what, she couldn’t say. Again she’d try her mother: “Can’t I go back? I don’t give a hoot about the Germans!”
Lonely, Greta would walk down to the Arroyo Seco, along the dry riverbed where the killdeer birds hunted for water. The arroyo was burned out in autumn, the sage grass and the mustard shrubs, the desert lavender and the stink lilies all brown brittle bones of plants; the toyon, the coffeeberry, the elderberry, the lemonade sumac all dry in the branch. The air in California was so parched that Greta’s skin was cracking; as she walked along the sandy riverbed she could nearly feel the inner panel of her nose crack and bleed. A gopher hurried in front of her, sensing a hawk circling above. The oak leaves shook crisply in a breeze. She thought about the narrow streets of Copenhagen, where slouching buildings hung to the curb like an old man afraid to step into traffic. She thought about Einar Wegener, who seemed as vague as a dream.
In Copenhagen, everyone had known her but no one ever expected anything from her; she was more exotic than the black-haired laundresses who had wandered across the earth from Canton and now worked in the little shops on Istedgade. In Copenhagen she was given respect no matter how she behaved, the same way the Danes tolerated the dozens of eccentric countesses who needlepointed in their mossy manors. In California, she was once again Miss Greta Waud, twin sister of Carlisle, orange heiress. Eyes continually turned her way. There were fewer than ten men in Los Angeles County suitable for her to marry. There was an Italianate house on the other side of the Arroyo Seco everyone knew she would move into. Its nurseries and screened play-rooms she would fill with children. “There’s no need to wait now,” her mother said the first week back. “Let’s not forget you’ve turned eighteen.” And of course no one had forgotten about the butcher wagon. There was a different boy on the delivery route, but whenever the truck rattled up the drive a brief moment of embarrassment would fall over the whitewashed house.
Lame Carlisle, whose leg had always ached in the Danish chill, was preparing to enter Stanford; it was the first time she became jealous of him-the fact that he was allowed to hobble across the sandy courtyard to class under the clear blank Palo Alto sun while she would have to sit in the sunroom with a sketchbook in her lap.
She started wearing a painter’s smock, and in the front pocket she kept Einar’s note. She sat in the sunroom and wrote him letters, although it was difficult to think of anything she wanted to report to him. She didn’t want to tell him that she hadn’t painted since she left Denmark. She didn’t want to write about the weather; that was something her mother would do. Instead she wrote letters about what she would do when she returned to Copenhagen: re-enroll in the Royal Academy; try to arrange a little exhibit of her paintings at Den Frie Udstilling; convince Einar to escort her to her nineteenth birthday party. During her first month in California she would walk to the post office on Colorado Street to mail the letters. “Could be slow,” the clerk would say through the brass slats in the window. And Greta would reply, “Don’t tell me the Germans have now also ruined the mail!”
She couldn’t live like this, she told one of the Japanese maids, Akiko, a girl with a runny nose. The maid bowed and brought Greta a camellia floating in a silver bowl. Something is going to have to change, Greta told herself as she burned up with anger, although she was mad at no one in particular, except the Kaiser. There she was, the freest girl in Copenhagen, if not the whole world, and now that dirty German had just about ruined her life! An exile-that’s what she’d become. Banished to California, where the rosebushes grew to ten feet and the coyotes in the canyon cried at night. She could hardly believe that she had become the type of girl who looked forward to nothing more in the day than when the mail arrived, a bundle of envelopes, none of them from Einar.
She cabled her father, begging for his permission to return to Denmark. “The sea lanes are no longer safe,” was his answer. She demanded that her mother let her go up to Stanford with Carlisle, but her mother said the only schools appropriate for Greta were the Seven Sisters back in the snowy East.
“I feel like I’m being crushed,” she told her mother.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mrs. Waud replied, busy managing the re-seeding of the winter lawns and the poppy beds.
One day Akiko tapped delicately on Greta’s door and, with her head bowed, brought Greta a pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said. Then she rushed out, her getas clacking. The pamphlet announced the next meeting of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society. Greta thought about the society’s amateurs with their Paris-style palettes and threw away the pamphlet. She turned to her sketch pad but could think of nothing to draw.
A week later, Akiko returned to her door. She handed Greta a second pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said, her hand covering her mouth. “But I think you like.”
It was only after Akiko delivered a third pamphlet that Greta decided to attend a meeting. The society owned a bungalow above Pasadena in the foothills. The previous week, a mountain lion, as yellow as a sunflower, had pounced down from the scrub pine at the end of the road and snatched a neighbor’s baby. The society’s members could talk of nothing else. The agenda was abandoned, and there was a discussion of a mural depicting the scene. “It’ll be called Lion Descending!” someone said. “Why not a mosaic?” another member proposed. The society was made up mostly of women, but there were a few men, many of whom wore felt berets. As the meeting moved closer to agreeing upon a collective painting to be presented to the city library on New Year’s Day, Greta slipped to the back of the room. She had been right.
“You’re not volunteering?” a man said.
It was Teddy Cross, with his white forehead and long neck that tilted to the left. Teddy Cross, who suggested they leave the meeting and visit his ceramics studio on Colorado Street where his kiln burned walnut logs night and day; whose right ankle was meaty with muscle from pumping the foot pedal of his potter’s wheel. Teddy Cross, who would become Greta’s husband as a result of the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club; who, before the end of the Great War, would die beneath Greta’s gaze.
He was the second man Greta loved. She loved Teddy for the slender-necked vases he shaped out of white clay and ground glass. She loved his quiet, stubbly face and the way his mouth would hang open as he dipped his pottery into tubs of glaze. He was from Bakersfield, the son of strawberry farmers; a childhood of squinting had permanently creased the skin around his eyes. He would ask Greta about Copenhagen, about its canals and its king, but would never comment on anything she told him, his eyelids the only thing moving in his face. She told him there was a great landscape painter there who was in love with her, but Teddy only stared. He ’d never been east of the Mojave, and the only time he was in one of the mansions along Orange Grove Boulevard was when he was hired to create tiles for hearths and sleeping-porch floors.
Greta loved the idea of dating him; of taking him around to the tennis-court pavilions where Pasadena’s dinner dances were held that fall; of showing him off to the girls from the Valley Hunt Club, as if to say she wasn’t one of them, not anymore-she’d lived in Europe, after all. She would climb up in the butcher wagon if she wanted, or she would have a ceramicist as an escort.
As expected, Greta’s mother refused to allow Teddy Cross in the house. But that didn’t stop Greta from touring him around Pasadena, visiting boring Henrietta and Margaret and Dottie Anne in their shade gardens. Those girls didn’t seem to mind Teddy, which Greta took to mean they were actually ignoring him. His ceramics were in such demand that, Greta discovered, there was a respectable charm in the way he arrived at parties with bits of clay jammed beneath his fingernails. Greta’s mother, who would often say at the dinner dances that she’d take California’s terra infirma any day over “old, old Europe,” would pat Teddy’s hand whenever they met in public, a gesture that infuriated Greta. Her mother knew that were she to publicly dismiss Teddy Cross, the dispute would end up in the American Weekly.
“They look down at you,” Greta said to Teddy during one of the parties.
“Only some of them,” he replied, seemingly happy to sit with Greta on the wicker couch out by the swimming pool as the Santa Anas blew palm fronds to the ground and the party burned on in the mansion’s windows. If he only knew! Greta would think, ready to fight-whom or what, she didn’t know, but she was ready.
Then one day the mail arrived in its twine-bound bundle, and Akiko delivered a blue envelope to Greta’s door. She looked at it for a long time, balancing its delicate weight in her palm. She could hardly believe Einar had written, and her mind began to race with what he might have to say to her: It seems as if the War is nearly over and we should be together again by Christmas. Or: I’m coming to California on the next crossing. Or maybe even: Your letters mean more to me than I can say.
It was possible, Greta told herself, the envelope in her lap. He could have changed his mind. Anything was possible.
Then Greta ripped through the seal.
The letter was addressed “Dear Miss Waud,” and said only: “Given the course of events, worldly and otherwise, I expect we will never see each other again, which is probably for the best.”
Greta folded the paper and tucked it into her pocket. Why did Einar think like that? she asked herself, wiping her eyes with the hem of her smock. Why didn’t he have any sense of hope at all? Regretfully, she had no idea what she could do.
Then Akiko returned to Greta’s door and said, “It’s Mr. Cross. On the telephone.”
And so on the telephone in the upstairs hall, within earshot of her mother, Greta asked Teddy to escort her to the debutante ball. He agreed on one condition-that Greta stop worrying about how he’d get along with her mother. “I’m going to ask her to dance with me and then you’ll see,” he said. But Greta rolled her eyes, thinking Teddy didn’t know what he was getting himself into. When she hung up, her mother said only, “Well, now that it ’s done, just be sure to help him with his tails.”
There were seven girls in her debutante class. Their escorts were young men home for the holidays from Harvard and Princeton or from army bases in Tennessee and San Francisco. A girl with asthma asked Carlisle, her lungs too weak to need a reliable dancing partner. And Greta, who was for the first time beginning to think that she would have to forget all about Einar Wegener, prepared by practicing her curtsy.
The white dress with the empire waist never fit Greta right. It was flouncy in the shoulders and a fraction too short, revealing her feet. Or at least that’s how Greta felt about it; she could think only of her long, blocky feet showing when she descended the staircase in the Valley Hunt Club’s front hall. The staircase’s banister was wrapped in a garland twisted with evergreens, apples, and red lilies. Guests in white tie were scattered around the club sipping spiked Tennis Specials, politely watching the seven debutantes descend. There were four Christmas trees up for decoration, and in the fireplaces dark flames were gnawing on the redwood logs.
One of the girls brought a silver flask of whiskey, its cap made of mother-of-pearl. She and the other debs passed it around while they dressed and pinned the poinsettia leaves into their hair. The flask made the evening brighter, as if the club manager had turned up the wall sconces to their highest voltage. It made the black fires in the fireplaces seem almost like beasts about to jump the screens.
When Greta reached the foot of the stairs, she curtsied deeply, bringing her chin to the Oriental carpet. The club members applauded, balancing their punch cups. Then she entered the ballroom, and there, waiting, was Teddy Cross. In his white tie he looked taller than usual. His hair was shiny with tonic, and there was something unfamiliar about him: he looked almost Danish, with his dark blond hair and his wrinkled eyes and his good brown tan; with his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling nervously.
Later that night, after the waltzes and the roast beef and the strawberries served in Oregon champagne, Greta and Teddy slipped out of the clubhouse and walked toward the tennis courts. The night was clear and cold, and Greta had to lift her dress from the dew collecting on the baselines. She was a little drunk, she knew, because earlier she had made an unfortunate joke about the strawberries and Teddy’s parents. She apologized to him immediately but, from the way he folded his napkin on the table, he seemed a little hurt.
The walk on the tennis courts was her idea, as if to try to make it up to Teddy, all of this, her strange Pasadena life that she had hurled upon him. But she didn’t have a plan, hadn’t thought of what she would offer him. They reached the pavilion on the far court, where there was a water cooler and a wicker settee painted green. On the sofa, which smelled like dry, termite-eaten wood, they began to kiss.
She couldn’t help thinking how different Teddy’s kiss was from Einar’s. On the Princess Dagmar she had stood at the mirror in her stateroom and kissed herself. The flat cold surface had somehow reminded her of kissing Einar, and she began to think of that kiss on the stairs of the Royal Academy as something similar to kissing herself. But Teddy’s kiss was not like that at all. His lips were rough and firm and the whiskers on his upper lip scratched at her mouth. His neck, nuzzling into her own, was strong and hard.
With the ball playing on in the clubhouse, Greta thought she had better speed things up. She knew what she should do next, but it took her a few minutes of coaching herself. Lift your hand over to his… Oh, it was hard enough thinking about it, let alone actually instigating it! But she wanted to do it, or at least she thought she wanted to, and she was sure it was what Teddy wanted too, what with his neck with its wire-brush whiskers turning and shaking strongly. Greta counted to three and held her breath and reached for Teddy’s fly.
His hand stopped her. “No, no,” he said, holding her wrist.
Greta had never thought he would say no. She knew the moonlight was bright enough that were she to look up into his face she would see the coiled concern for propriety that would embarrass her deeply. Greta thought of the last time she had let a man try to say no to her: and now she and Einar were separated by a continent and a sea, to say nothing of a pyrotechnic war.
On the wicker settee of the Valley Hunt Club’s outermost court, there Greta Waud and Teddy Cross sat for a minute, her wrist still cuffed by his callused hand.
Again she asked herself what to do next, but now, as if propelled by an urge she had never before known, she pushed her face into Teddy’s lap. Greta began to use every trick she had read about in the novels she bought on the naughty side of Copenhagen’s Central Station, and from the chatty, slutty Lithuanian maids who had run her mother’s house. Teddy tried to protest again, but each “no” passed his lips less and less forcefully. Eventually he released her hand.
By the time they were finished her dress was wrinkled and bunched up on the empire waist. His tails had somehow ripped. And Greta, who had never gone this fast or this far, was lying under the thin long heap of Teddy, feeling his heart knock, knock, knock on her breast, and smelling his bitter salty scent damp between her legs. Already she knew what would come next, and Greta wrapped her arms around Teddy’s back in resignation and thought to herself, It ’s okay with me as long as he takes me away from here.
They were married on the last day of February in the garden of the house on Orange Grove Boulevard. The Japanese maids sprinkled the lawn with camellia petals, and Teddy wore a new pair of tails. It was a small wedding, only cousins from San Marino and Hancock Park and Newport Beach. Their neighbor, a chewing-gum heiress from Chicago, attended as well, because, as Mrs. Waud put it through her jaw, she had gone through this with her daughter too. Teddy’s parents were invited, although no one expected them to come; crossing Ridge Route from Bakersfield in February wasn’t always possible.
Immediately after the wedding and a short honeymoon in a garden suite at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where Greta cried every day-not because she was married to Teddy Cross but because she was now even farther from her beloved Denmark and the life she wanted to lead-Greta’s parents sent them to live in Bakersfield. Mr. Waud bought Greta and Teddy a small Spanish house with a red tile roof and Seville grating on the windows and a little garage covered by bougainvillea. Mrs. Waud sent Akiko to live with them. The banister of the Bakersfield house was wrought iron, and the doorways between the rooms were arched. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a small step-down living room with bookshelves. The house was in a grove of date palms, and inside it was always shadowy and cool.
Teddy’s parents came to visit once; they were stooped and their hands were faintly pink from the strawberries. They lived out in the fields, on a few acres of loam, in a two-roomer built from eucalyptus plank. Their eyes were sealed beneath skin folded by the sun, and they were nearly silent in Greta’s step-down living room, holding each other nervously, jointly examining the wealth that lay before them: the Spanish house, the plein-air painting above the fireplace, Akiko’s thick geta sandals clacking as she delivered a tray. Greta poured Mr. and Mrs. Cross iced hibiscus tea, and together they all sat on the white sofas Mrs. Waud had ordered from Gump’s. Everyone was uncomfortable and regretful that things had come to this. Greta drove the senior Crosses back to their house in her Mercer Raceabout, the two-seater forcing Mrs. Cross to curl into Mr. Cross’s lap. Night was falling quickly as the car sped along the road, and the early spring chill was creeping across the fields. A wind was whistling through the furrows, throwing dirt into the air. Greta had to use her wipers to clear the sandy loam from the windshield. In the distance, a gold light burned in the Crosses’ plank house. The soil was blowing so strongly that Greta could see nothing but the light of the house, and it was as if she and Mr. and Mrs. Cross were thinking of the same thing, because just then Mrs. Cross said, “Where Teddy was born.” And Mr. Cross, his hands wrapped around his wife, said, “Always said he ’d be coming back.”
For the rest of the spring, Greta napped on one of the white sofas in the step-down living room. She hated Bakersfield, she hated the Spanish house, she even sometimes hated the baby growing inside her. Not once, however, did she hate Teddy Cross. In the afternoons, she would read while he brought a steady supply of warm washrags for her forehead. Greta was swelling quickly, and she felt sicker with each day. Before May, she was spending nights in the living room as well, too sick and heavy to climb the stairs. Teddy took to sleeping on a cot at her side.
By early June, Bakersfield had settled into its summer heat; it would reach 100 degrees before nine in the morning. Akiko would fold paper fans for Greta; Teddy brought cold compresses instead of hot. And when Greta became really sick, Akiko served Greta cold green tea from a lacquered cup while Teddy read poetry aloud.
But then one day, while Teddy was down in Pasadena collecting a wheel from his old studio, which he had never closed, the heat and the sickness came to an end. Together, Greta and Akiko, whose hair was as black as a raven’s wing, delivered a blue baby boy, the umbilical cord around his neck like a little tie. Greta baptized him Carlisle. A day later, she and Teddy buried him in the yard of the senior Crosses’ eucalyptus house, in the blowing loam, at the rim of the whispering strawberry fields.
The little cobblestone street that stitched across Copenhagen was dark and safe enough, Lili thought, for the privacy of a secret transaction. The street was too narrow for lamps, a window on one side nearly opening into the window on the opposite. The people who lived there were stingy about the light in their front rooms, and all was now dark except for the few businesses still open. There was a Turkish coffee house where customers sat on velvet pillows in the window. Farther down was a bordello, discreet behind its shutters, its brass doorbell shaped like a nipple. Farther was a basement bar, where, as Greta and Lili passed, a skinny man with a waxed mustache quickly disappeared down the steps to a place where he could meet others like himself.
Lili was in a chiffon dress with a linen sailor’s collar and cuffs. The dress was making a soft noise as she walked, and she kept her mind on the swish-swish, nervously trying not to think of what lay ahead. Greta had lent her the rope of pearls that was twisted three times around her throat, hiding most of it. Lili was also wearing a velvet cap, bought only that morning at Fonnesbech’s, and she had sunk into it the pin of Greta’s yellow-diamond and onyx brooch shaped like a monarch butterfly.
“You’re so beautiful I want to kiss you,” Greta had said when Lili was dressing. Greta was so excited that she took Lili in her arms and waltzed her around the apartment while Edvard IV barked and barked. Lili closed her eyes-so stiff and heavy beneath the caking of powder!-and imagined that Copenhagen was a city where both Lili and Einar could live as one.
The street ended on Rådhuspladsen, the great square across from Tivoli. The fountain with spouting dragons was tinkling, and across from the Palace Hotel was a column capped with a pair of bronze Vikings blowing their lure. The square was active, with people entering the midnight ball, and Norwegian tourists excited about tomorrow’s bicycle race from Copenhagen to Oslo.
Greta didn’t push Lili. She let her stand at the edge of Rådhuspladsen and wait until little Lili had filled up inside Einar, like a hand filling a puppet.
Beneath the Rådhuset’s copper-sheathed spire, the four-dialed clock rising more than three hundred feet above her, Lili felt as if she were carrying the greatest secret in the world-she was about to fool all of Copenhagen. At the same time, another part of her knew that this was the most difficult game she would ever play. It made her think of the summer in Bluetooth, and the crashing submarine kite. Einar Wegener, with his small round face, seemed to be slipping down a tunnel. Lili looked at Greta, in her black dress, and felt grateful for all that lay ahead of her. Out of nowhere had come Lili. Yes, thanks were due to Greta.
The people entering city hall looked smart and happy, lagerøl lifting the color in their cheeks. There were young ladies in candy-colored dresses fanning their chests, asking one another where all the famous painters were. “Which one is Ejnar Nielsen?” one woman said. “Is that Erik Henningsen?” There were young men with wax-tipped mustaches and Sumatran cigars. There were the young industrialists, who, with their money made fast from mass-produced crockery and cooking pans molded by hissing machinery, came to move themselves up through society.
“You won’t leave me?” Lili asked Greta.
“Never.”
Yet already Lili was stirring.
Inside the Rådhuset there was a covered courtyard decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. On three sides were open galleries supported by pillars. Above, a canopy of crossing timberbeams. On the stage was an orchestra, and there was a long table with trays of oysters. Hundreds of people were dancing, hands of handsome men on the slender waists of women whose eyelids were painted blue. Two girls on a bench were writing a note to someone, giggling over it. There was a circle of men in tuxedos with their hands in their pockets, their eyes roaming. Lili was stirring. She could hardly take it all in. She felt the wingbeat of panic in her chest, knowing she didn’t belong. She thought about leaving, but it was too late. Lili was at the ball, its smoke and its music already weaving their way through her eyes and ears. If she said she was going to leave, Greta would only tell her to settle down; Greta would tell her not to worry, there was nothing in the world to worry about at all. She’d swat her hands through the air and laugh.
Next to Lili was a tall girl in a strap dress who was smoking a silver cigarette as she talked to a man whose face was so dark he must have been from the South. The woman was slender, her back quilted prettily with muscle, and the man seemed so in love with her that he could only nod and agree and, then, stop her from talking with a long kiss.
“There’s Helene,” Greta said. Across the room was Helene Albeck, her short black hair cut sharply in a way Greta explained was now fashionable in Paris.
“You go talk to her,” Lili said.
“And leave you?”
“I’m not sure I want to talk to anyone just yet.”
Greta crossed through the dancers, her hair down her back. She kissed Helene, who seemed anxious to tell Greta something. At the Royal Greenland Trading Company, Helene managed the paintings, gramo phones, gold-rimmed dinner plates, and other luxuries that were included in the summer shipments that set sail each Tuesday from Copenhagen. For two years Helene had arranged for Einar’s paintings to be crated up and shipped to Godthåb, where an agent would auction them off. The money was slow to return across the North Atlantic, but when it did Einar would proudly present it to Greta in a leather accordion file.
The dancers shifted, and then Greta and Helene were out of sight. Lili was sitting on a mahogany bench carved with mermaids. It was warm in the covered courtyard, and she peeled back her shawl. As she was folding it, a young man came to the bench and said, “May I?” He was tall, and his hair was a yellowy brown with thick corkscrew curls that twirled past his jaw. Out of the corner of her eye Lili watched him check his pocket watch, watched him cross and uncross his legs. He had a faint grainy smell, and his ears were pink with either warmth or nerves.
From her clutch-bag, Lili pulled out the pewter notebook given to Einar by his grandmother, and she started to write notes to herself about the man. He looks like Einar’s father as a young man, she wrote. His father when he was healthy and still working the sphagnum fields. This must be why I’m staring, Lili put down in the little notebook. Why else can’t I stop looking at him? Why can’t I stop looking at his long feet, at the wiry whiskers growing down his cheeks in a half-beard? At the aquiline nose and the full lips. At the thick curly hair.
The man leaned over. “Are you a reporter?”
Lili looked up from her lap.
“A poetess, then?”
“Neither.”
“Then what are you writing?”
“Oh, this?” she said, startled that he had spoken to her. “It ’s nothing at all.” Even though she was sitting next to the man, she couldn’t believe he had noticed her. It felt to her as if no one could see her. She hardly felt real.
“Are you an artist?” the man asked.
But Lili gathered her shawl and her clutch-bag and said, “I’m sorry.”
She was too surprised to find herself here to continue speaking with him. By now she was even warmer, and she had a sudden urge to remove her clothes and swim out to sea. She exited the hall through a portal that led to a back-park.
Outside there was a breeze. An old oak canopied the little park, as if protecting it from someone who had climbed the Rådhuset’s spire to spy. There was a smell of roses and turned soil. The patch of lawn was silvery, the color of the wing of a flying fish. Lili took a few steps and then saw the couple from before, the girl in the strap dress and her admirer, kissing behind an oak scrub. The man was holding the woman’s thigh, her dress pushed up to her hip, the clasp of her garter bright in the night.
Startled, Lili turned away and walked right into the man from the bench.
“Do you know what they say about this old oak?” he said.
“No.”
“They say if you eat its acorns you can make a wish and become anyone you want for a day.”
“Why would they say that?”
“Because it’s true.” He took her hand and led her to a bench.
He turned out to be a painter named Henrik Sandahl. Recently he’d exhibited a series of paintings of North Sea fish: square canvases of plaice, dab, turbot, the elusive, sharp-faced witch. Greta had seen the paintings. One day she returned to the apartment, immediately dropping her bag and her keys, her eyes wide. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told Einar. “You have to go see them for yourself. Who ever thought you could fall in love with the face of a cod?”
“Are you here with someone?” Henrik asked.
“My cousin’s wife.”
“Who’s that?”
Lili told him.
“Einar Wegener?” Henrik said. “I see.”
“Do you know him?” Lili asked.
“No, but he’s a good painter. Better than most people think.” He paused. “I’m sure you know, but many people these days say he ’s old-fashioned.”
It was the first time that Einar sensed how he was turning the world on its head by dressing as Lili. He could eliminate himself by pulling the camisole with the scallop-lace hem over his head. Einar could duck out of society by lifting his elbows and clasping the triple strand of Spanish pearls around his neck. He could comb his long soft hair around his face, and then tilt his head like an eager adolescent girl.
Then Henrik took Lili’s hand. The wiry hairs on his wrist startled her, because the only hand she had ever held was Greta’s.
“Tell me about yourself, Lili,” Henrik said.
“I was named for the flower.”
“Why do girls say silly things like that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“I don’t believe girls when they say they’re like a flower.”
“I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”
“Start with where you come from.”
“Jutland. A little village called Bluetooth, on a bog.” She told Henrik about the lucerne grass fields, about the icy rain that could punch holes in the side of the farmhouse.
“If I were to give you an acorn to eat,” Henrik said, “who would you want to be?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“But make a wish.”
“I can’t.”
“Okay then, don’t make a wish.” And then Henrik began to tell the story of a Polish prince who freed every woman in his country from another day’s labor; that was who Henrik wanted to be.
Before she knew it, it was late, the very middle of the night. The wind had picked up, and the oak tree, with its ear-shaped leaves, was bending as if to overhear Henrik and Lili. The moon had slipped away, and all was dark except the gold light coming through the portals of the Rådhuset. Henrik had taken Lili’s hand, kneading the fleshy base of the thumb, but it felt to Lili as if the hand and thumb belonged to someone else. It was as if someone else were coming to claim her.
“Shouldn’t we have met sooner than tonight?” Henrik said, his fingers trembling, fidgeting with a loose thread on the cuff of his coat.
Lili heard Einar laugh, a bubbly air pocket of a giggle; inside the air pocket was the distantly sour breath of Einar. Einar was chuckling about the clumsiness of another man courting and carrying on. Had he ever said something so ridiculous to Greta? Not likely; Greta would have told him to cut the nonsense. She would have shaken her silver bracelets and said, “Oh, for Pete ’s sake,” her eyes rolling in her head. She would have said she ’d leave the restaurant if Einar didn’t stop treating her like a child. Greta would have abruptly turned to the haddock on her plate and not spoken again until there was nothing left but the hollow head resting in a bed of vinegar. Then she would have kissed Einar and walked him home.
“I need to go look for Greta,” Lili said.
A fog had rolled in from the harbor, and now she was cold. The thought came this way: Lili, with her bare forearms, was feeling the wind, not Einar; she felt the quick damp air run through the nearly invisible vine of hair that grew up the nape of her neck. Deeper, beneath the chiffon and the camisole and finally the woolen drawstring underpants, Einar was becoming cold, too-but only as you become cold by watching a coatless person struggle against the chill. He realized that Lili and he shared something: a pair of oyster-blue lungs; a chugging heart; their eyes, often rimmed pink with fatigue. But in the skull it was almost as if there were two brains, a walnut halved: his and hers.
“Tell Greta I’ll walk you home,” Henrik said.
Lili said, “Only if you promise to leave me around the corner from the Widow House. Einar might be waiting up, and he wouldn’t want to see me alone with a stranger. Then he and Greta would worry whether or not I’m old enough to live in Copenhagen. They’re like that, always wondering what to do with me, wondering if I’m about to stumble across trouble.”
Henrik, whose lips were flat and purple and cracked just down the middle, kissed Lili. His head swooped in, his mouth landed on hers and then pulled away. He did it again, and again, while his hand kneaded the flesh above her elbow, and then the small of her back.
What surprised her most about a man’s kiss was the scratch of the whiskers, and the dense hot weight of a young man’s arm. The tip of his tongue was strangely smooth, as if a scalding tea had burned off the bumpy buds. Lili wanted to push him away and say she couldn’t do this, but it suddenly seemed like an impossible task. As if her hand could never shove away Henrik, whose corkscrew hair was twisting like rope around her throat.
Henrik pulled her from the iron bench. She was worried that he might embrace her and feel through the dress her oddly shaped body, bony and breastless, with a painful, swollen ache tucked between her thighs. He led Lili down a side corridor in the Rådhuset, his hand offered as a tow. His head seemed like a puppet’s, bobbing happily; it was round and cranial, with a touch of Mongol in the forehead. And this was why, perhaps, Einar felt free to grip Henrik’s moist fist and follow: it was a game, part of the game of Lili, and games counted for nearly nothing. Games weren’t art, they weren’t painting; and they certainly weren’t life. Not once before-and not even tonight with Henrik’s hand sweating in his palm-did Einar ever consider himself abnormal, or off the mark. His doctor, when he’d gone to him last year with a question about their inability to produce children, had asked, “Do you ever long for someone other than your wife, Einar? For another man, perhaps?” “No, never. Not at all,” he replied. “Your inkling is wrong.” Einar told the doctor that he, too, became disturbed when he saw the men with the quick, frightened eyes and the excessively pink skin loitering near the toilethouse in Ørstedsparken. Homosexual! How far from the truth!
And, again, this was why Einar held Henrik’s hand and ran down the back passageway with the Danish flags hanging from the burnished beams. Why he tripped in the sennep-yellow shoes Greta had first given him that April afternoon when she needed a pair of legs to paint. Why he allowed the narrow slip-dress to bind his stride: Einar was playing a game. He knew it. Greta knew it. But he also knew nothing, nothing about himself.
Outside in Rådhuspladsen, a tram clanged by, its bell friendly and sad. Three Norwegians were sitting on the rim of the fountain, laughing and drunk.
“Which way?” Henrik asked. He seemed shorter on the street, out on the open plads that smelled of the nearby cart selling coffee and spice biscuits. There was something hot in the secret pit of Einar’s stomach, and all he could do was look around at the fountain and the bronze lurblowers and the steep pitch of the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square.
“Where to?” Henrik asked again. He looked to the sky, his nostrils trembling.
Then Einar had an idea; Lili had an idea. And as strange as it might seem, it was like that: floating somewhere above Rådhuspladsen Einar watched Lili, with her determined upper lip, whisper to Henrik, “Come.” He heard her think: Greta will never know. What Lili was referring to-Greta will never know what?-Einar didn’t find out. When he, Einar, the remote owner of the borrowed body, was about to ask Lili what she was referring to; when he, Einar, floating above like a circling ghost, was about to lean in and ask-not exactly the way a driver at a fork asks himself which road to take, but almost-What won’t Greta know?, just then Lili, with her forearms flushed with heat, with chiffon in her fists, her half of the walnut brain electric with the current of thought, felt a warm trickle run from her nose to her lips.
“My God, you’re bleeding!” Henrik cried.
She brought her hand to her nose. The blood was thick, running over her mouth. The music from the Rådhuset was ringing in her nose. With each drop she felt more cleansed, empty but cleansed.
“What happened?” Henrik asked. “How did this happen?” He was yelling, and the blood seemed to run a little heavier in gratitude for his concern. “Let me get you some help.” Before she could stop him, he was running across Rådhuspladsen to some people getting into a car. He was about to tap the shoulder of a woman holding open the door. Lili watched Henrik’s finger slowly unfurl. Then she realized.
Lili tried to call “No!”-but she couldn’t speak at all. Henrik was tapping the black sturdy back of Greta, who was on the street putting Helene into the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s official car.
It was as if Greta never saw Henrik. She only saw Lili, her blood bright across Rådhuspladsen. Greta’s face tightened, and Lili thought she heard Greta whisper, “Oh no. For God ’s sake, no.” The next thing Lili knew, Greta’s blue scarf, the one Lili had been secretly borrowing, was pressed to her nose, and she was collapsing into Greta’s arms, hearing softly, like a lullaby, “Lili, are you all right? Oh, Lili, please be all right.” And then, “Did he hurt you?”
Lili shook her head.
“How did this happen?” Greta asked, her thumbs rubbing circles into Lili’s temples. Lili couldn’t say anything, could only watch Henrik, frightened of Greta, run across Rådhuspladsen, his legs long and swift, his spiraled hair swaying at the tips, the handsome slap of his foot on the cobble eerily similar to the flat punch of Einar’s father’s hand to his cheek when he discovered Einar in his grandmother’s apron as Hans’s lips pressed toward his neck.
That summer, the dealer who sold Einar’s work agreed to display ten of Greta’s paintings for two weeks. Einar arranged it, requesting the favor-My wife is becoming frustrated, he began in a letter to Herr Rasmussen-on a sheet of letterhead, though Greta wasn’t supposed to know about that. Regretfully, she unsealed the letter Einar asked her to post, using a teakettle and a fingernail-for no good reason, really, except that sometimes Greta became overwhelmed with a curiosity about her husband and what he did when he was away from her: what he was reading, where he ate his lunch, to whom he spoke and about what. It’s not because I’m jealous, Greta told herself, delicately resealing the envelope. No, it’s simply because I’m in love.
Rasmussen was bald, with Chinese-shaped eyes, a widower. He lived with his two children in an apartment near Amalienborg. When he said he ’d hang her most recent paintings, Greta was tempted to say she didn’t want his help. Then she thought about it and realized she did. To Einar she coyly said, “I’m not sure whether you spoke to Rasmussen or not. But thankfully he’s come around.”
At a furniture store on Ravnsborggade she bought ten chairs and re-tacked their cushions in red damask. The chairs she placed in front of each painting at the gallery. “For reflection,” she suggested to Rasmussen, arranging them just so. Then she wrote every European newspaper editor on the list Einar had put together over the years. The invitation announced an important debut-words Greta had trouble putting down, so boastful they seemed, so transactional, but she went ahead, at Einar’s urging. “If that’s what it takes,” she said. She hand-delivered the invitation to the offices of Berlingske Tidende, Nationaltidende, and Politiken, where a clerk in a little gray cap turned her away with a sneer.
Greta’s paintings were oversized and glossy with a shellacking process she created from varnish. They were so shiny and hard you could clean them like windows. The few critics who came to the gallery picked their way around the red damask chairs and ate the honey crackers Greta had set out in a silver dish. She escorted the critics, whose little notepads remained open and disturbingly blank. “This one is Anna Fonsmark. You know, the mezzo-soprano,” Greta would say. “The trouble I had getting her to pose!” Or, “He’s the furrier to the king. Did you notice the wreath of minks in the corner, symbolizing his trade?” When she said things like that she regretted them immediately; the crassness of her comments would ring in the air as if it were echoing off the shellacked paintings. She would think of her mother, and Greta would blush. But sometimes Greta was filled with too much immediate energy to stop and think and plan and plot. The energy was the fluid running up and down her Western spine.
She had to admit to herself that some of the critics had come only because she was Einar Wegener’s wife. “How’s Einar’s work coming along?” a few would ask. “When can we expect his next show?” One critic came because she was a Californian and he wanted to hear about the plein-air painters working there-as if Greta might know anything at all about the bearded men mixing their paints in the startling sunlight of Laguna Niguel.
The gallery on Krystalgade was cramped and, in the heat wave that coincided with her exhibition, smelled of the cheese shop next door. Greta worried that the odor of fontina would settle into her canvases, but Einar told her it was impossible, not with the shellac. “They’re impenetrable,” he remarked of her paintings, which sounded-once it was said, hovering between the two of them like a bat-unkind.
The next day, when Greta returned to the apartment, she found Lili crocheting a hair net, the needles clicking in her lap. Neither Einar nor Greta ever figured out the origins of Lili’s bloody nose at the Artists Ball. But about a month after, her nose began to bleed again, a couple of warm red bursts over the course of three days in July. Einar said it was nothing, but Greta worried, like a mother watching a son’s cough. Recently, in the middle of the night, Greta had begun to climb out of bed and go to her easel to paint an ashen Lili collapsing in Henrik’s arms. The painting was large, nearly life-size, and more real, with its bright colors and flat shapes, than Greta’s memory of Lili bleeding outside the Artists Ball. In the slanting background was the fountain with the spewing dragons, and the bronze Viking lurblowers. A frail Lili filled the painting, a man’s arms around her, his hair falling into her face. She would never forget the sight of it, Greta told herself as she painted, the climbing mix of horror and confusion and outrage still palpable on the knuckles of her spine. She knew something had changed.
“Have you been here long?” Greta now asked Lili.
“Less than an hour.” The needles continued to click in her lap. “I went out. I walked through Kongens Have and crocheted on a bench. Have you seen the roses yet?”
“Do you think it’s a good idea? For you to be outside? All alone?”
“I wasn’t alone,” Lili said. “Henrik met me. He met me on the bench.”
“Henrik,” Greta said. “I see.” Through the corner of her eye, Greta studied her husband. She had no idea what he wanted from this, from Lili, and yet there he was, dressed in a brown skirt and a white blouse with capped sleeves and the old-fashioned shoes with the pewter buckles she had given him that first day. Yes, there he was. A vague regret filled Greta’s throat: she wished she were both more and less involved in the comings and goings of Lili. Greta realized she would never know what exactly was the right thing for her to do.
“How is the fish painter?” Greta asked.
Lili sat forward in her chair and began to tell the story of Henrik’s recent trip to New York, where he dined with Mrs. Rockefeller. “He’s becoming an important painter,” Lili went on, describing the people in the art world who were talking about Henrik. “Did you know he’s an orphan?” Lili said, describing his youth as a sailor’s apprentice on a schooner that fished the North Sea. Lili then reported that Henrik had declared, on the bench in Kongens Have in front of the boxhedge, that he ’d never met a girl like Lili.
“It’s clear he’s taken by you.” Greta could see the heat in Lili’s face. Greta had just returned from an uneventful day at the gallery, her ten paintings all on the wall and unsold. Now all of this-the sight of her husband in the plain brown skirt; the story of Henrik receiving an invitation to dine with Mrs. Rockefeller at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park; the strange thought of Lili and Henrik on a public bench in the shadow of Rosenborg Slot’s turrets-caught up with her. Greta suddenly asked, “Tell me, Lili. Have you ever kissed a man?”
Lili stopped, her lace limp in her lap.
It was almost as if the question had tumbled with its own will out of Greta’s mouth. She had never wondered about this before, because Einar had always been sexually awkward and without initiative. It seemed impossible to Greta that he would have ever pursued such a foreign longing. Why, without her, Einar would never have found Lili. “Would Henrik be the first?” Greta said. “The first to kiss you?”
Lili thought about this, her brow bunching up. Through the floorboards came the potato-vodka voice of the sailor. “Don’t lie to me!” he was yelling. “I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
“In Bluetooth,” Lili began, “there was a boy named Hans.” It was the first Greta had heard of Hans. Lili spoke of him ecstatically, with her fingers pressed together and held up in the air. It was as if she were in a trance as she told Greta of Hans’s climbing tricks on the ancient oak, of his pebbly little voice, of his submarine-shaped kite sinking into the bog.
“And you haven’t heard from him since?” Greta asked.
“I understand he’s moved to Paris,” Lili said, resuming her crocheting. “He’s an art dealer, but that’s all I know. Deals in art for Americans.” Then she rose and went into the bedroom, where Edvard IV was growling in his sleep, and shut the door. An hour later, when Einar emerged, it was as if Lili had never been there. Except for the scent of mint and milk, it was as if she didn’t really exist at all.
By the end of the two weeks none of Greta’s paintings had sold. She could no longer blame her lack of success on the economy, what with the Great War seven years in the past and the Danish economy chugging and panting with growth and speculation. But the failed show didn’t surprise her. Since they had married, Einar’s reputation had overshadowed hers. His little dark paintings of moors and storms-really, some were no more than gray paint on black-earned more and more kroner each year. Meanwhile Greta sold nothing but the drab commissions of corporate directors who refused to crack a smile. The more personal portraits she painted-of Anna, of the blind woman at the gate of Tivoli, and now of Lili-went unnoticed. After all, who would buy Greta’s work over Einar’s, the bright, bold American’s over the subtle, cozy Dane’s? What critic in all of Denmark, where artistic styles from the nineteenth century were still considered new and questionable, would dare praise her style over his? This was how Greta felt; even Einar, when prodded, admitted it might be true. “I hate feeling like this,” she would sometimes say, her cheeks mumpy with an envy that could not be dismissed as petty.
One painting, however, drew some interest. It was a triptych, painted on hinged boards. Greta had started it the day after the ball at Rådhuset. It was three views of a girl’s head at full scale: a girl removed in thought, her eyelids tired and red; a girl white with fear, her cheek hollow; a girl overly excited, her hair slipping from its clip, her lip dewy. Greta had used a fine rabbit’s-hair brush and egg tempera, which gave the girl’s skin a translucence, a nightworm’s glow. On this one painting, she decided not to apply the shellac. Standing in front of it, one or two critics withdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she heard the lead tips scraping against the notepads. One critic cleared his throat; a second, a Frenchman with a little gray wart on the rim of his eye, said to Greta, “This one yours as well?”
But the painting, called Lili Thrice, could not rescue the show. Rasmussen, a short man who had recently sailed to New York to swap paintings by Hammershøi and Krøyer for shares in the steel companies of Pennsylvania, crated up Greta’s portraits for return. “I’ll keep the one of the girl for consignment,” he said, logging it into his books.
It was several weeks later that the clipping from a Parisian art journal arrived in the mail, in care of Rasmussen’s gallery. The article was a summary of Scandinavian modern art; buried in the paragraphs on Denmark’s most talented was a brief mention-most people probably never even saw it-of Greta. “A wild and rhapsodic imagination,” it said of Greta. “Her painting of a young girl named Lili would be frightening if it wasn’t so beautiful.” The review said nothing else. It was as cursory as surveys tend to be. Rasmussen had forwarded the clipping to Greta, who read it with a mixture of feeling she couldn’t articulate to anyone: to her, even more startling than the praise was the absence of Einar’s name. Danish art was summed up, and Einar hovered nowhere. She tucked the clipping into a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. It went beneath the sepia prints of Teddy and the letters from her father in Pasadena describing the orange harvest, the coyote hunts, and the society of lady painters in Santa Monica she could join if she ever decided to leave Denmark for good. Greta would never hand the article to Einar. It was hers; the words of praise were hers. Again, she didn’t feel the need to share.
But Greta couldn’t just read the review and then fold it away in a drawer. No, she had to react, and so she immediately wrote the critic with an idea.
“Thank you for your thoughtful review,” she began.
It will have a special place in my clippings file. Your words were just too kind. I hope you’ll look me up the next time you’re in Copenhagen. Ours is a small city, but refined. Something tells me you haven’t seen it properly. In the meantime, there ’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. My husband, Einar Wegener, the landscapist, has lost track of a close childhood friend. The only thing my husband knows of him is that he lives in Paris and is, perhaps, an art dealer. Would you happen to know him, Hans Axgil, the baron? He’s from Bluetooth, on Jutland. My husband would like to find him. Apparently they were uncommonly close as boys. My husband becomes quite nostalgic-as men do when they recall their youth-when he speaks of Hans and their childhood together in Bluetooth, which is really only a bog. But I thought you might at least know of Hans, since the world of the Arts is smaller than we all think. If you have an address, that would be, again, too kind. Please send it to me, and I’ll be sure to pass it to Einar. He would be grateful.
A week after the Artists Ball, Lili met Henrik in Kongens Have three evenings in a row. Still unsure of herself, she agreed to see him only at dusk, which at the end of June came late after supper. Each night as she dressed, pulling a skirt from the wardrobe, preparing for her assignation, she would become heavy with guilt. Greta would be reading the newspaper in the front room, and Lili could nearly feel Greta’s eye on her as she applied the powder and the lipstick and filled her camisole with rolled socks. Lili would tiptoe around Edvard IV, who was sprawled on the little oval carpet in front of the mirror. Lili would study her profile in the mirror, first from the left, then from the right. She felt sorry about leaving Greta to her newspaper and the cone of light from her reading lamp-but not sorry enough to fail to meet Henrik at the proposed iron streetlamp.
“Are you going out?” Greta asked the first night Lili headed toward the front door, just as the horn of the Bornholm ferry was calling.
“For a walk,” Lili said. “For some fresh air. It ’s too nice to be inside.”
“At this hour?”
“As long as you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Greta said, pointing to the pile of newspapers at her feet that she still wanted to read before going to bed. “But all alone?”
“I won’t be exactly alone.” Lili couldn’t look at Greta when she said this, her eyes averted to the floor. “I’m meeting Henrik.” And then, “But only for a stroll.”
Lili watched Greta’s face. Her cheeks were twitching and it seemed as if she was grinding her teeth. Greta sat up in her reading chair. She sharply creased the newspaper in her lap. “Don’t stay out too late,” she finally said.
Henrik kept Lili waiting nearly twenty minutes beneath the streetlamp. She began to worry that maybe he had changed his mind, that perhaps he had realized something about her. It frightened her, to be alone on the street. But she was also thrilled by the sense of freedom, the rapid pulse in her throat telling her she could do almost anything she pleased.
When Henrik finally arrived, he was out of breath, sweat on his upper lip. He apologized. “I was painting and lost track of time. Does that ever happen to you, Lili? When you nearly forget who or where you are?”
They walked for a half hour, in the warm night. They didn’t say much, and it felt to Lili as if there was nothing to say. Henrik took her hand. When they were on a street empty but for a stray dog, he kissed her.
They met again the next two nights, each time Lili slipping out of the apartment under Greta’s gaze rising above the edge of the newspaper. Each time Henrik arriving late, running, paint beneath his fingernails, splattered in his curls.
“I’d like to meet Greta someday,” Henrik said. “To prove to her I’m not really the type of man who runs away from a fainting woman.”
They stayed out late that third night, past the call of the last tram, past one o’clock when the public houses closed. Lili kept her hand in Henrik’s as they walked through the city, looking in the flat black reflection of shop windows, kissing in the dark provided by doorways. She knew she should return to the Widow House, but something in her wanted to stay out forever.
Lili was sure Greta would be up waiting for her, her eye never having left the front door. But the apartment was dark when Lili got home, and she washed her face and removed her clothes and climbed into bed as Einar.
The next day Greta told Lili she should stop seeing Henrik. “Do you think it’s fair to him?” she asked. “To deceive him like this? What do you think he would think?”
But Lili didn’t quite understand what Greta meant. What would Henrik think about what? Unless Greta plainly told her, often Lili forgot who she was.
“I don’t want to stop seeing him,” she said.
“Then please, stop seeing him for me.”
Lili said she’d try, but even as she said it she knew it would be impossible. As she stood in the front room, by Einar’s empty easel, she knew she was lying to Greta. But Lili couldn’t help it. She could hardly help herself.
And so Lili and Henrik began to meet secretly, at the end of the afternoon, before it was time for Lili to return home for supper. At first it was difficult for Lili to see Henrik in the daylight, with the sun harsh in her face. She feared he would discover that she wasn’t really beautiful, or worse. She would tie a scarf around her head, the knot beneath her chin. She felt comfortable sitting with him only in the darkened Rialto movie house, her hand in his, or in the hushed library of the Royal Academy, the reading room dimmed by green canvas roller shades.
One night Lili told Henrik to meet her by the lake in Ørstedsparken at nine o’clock. There were two swans gliding in the water, and a willow leaning toward the grass. Henrik was late, and when he arrived he kissed her forehead. “I know we only have a few minutes,” he said, his hair brushing her throat.
But Greta was at a reception at the American embassy that night. She would be gone for another few hours, and Lili was about to tell Henrik they could freely dine together at the restaurant with the wainscot walls on Gråbrødre Torv. They could stroll down Langelinie like any other Danish couple out on a fine summer night. She could hardly believe the good news she was about to break to Henrik, who had become used to meeting Lili for twenty minutes at a time. “I have something to tell you,” she said.
Henrik took her hand and kissed it and then held it against his chest. “Oh, Lili-don’t say any more,” he said. “I already know. Don’t worry about anything, but I already know.” His face was open, his eyebrows lifted.
Lili pulled her hand from Henrik’s. It was quiet in the park, the workers who cross it on their way home already at their dinner tables, and a man was loitering near the toilethouse, lighting a book of matches one by one. A second man walked by and then looked over his shoulder.
What does Henrik know? Lili was asking herself, but soon she came to understand.
Henrik’s eyebrows were still lifted, and a terrible shudder rose through Lili, and it suddenly was as if Einar were a third person there- as if he were one step removed from Lili and Henrik’s intimate circle of confession, witnessing it all. There he was, Einar in the young girl’s dress, flirting with a younger man. It was an awful sight.
Lili shuddered again. The man in front of the toilethouse entered, and then there was a loud crash, a trash bin knocked over.
“I’m afraid I can’t see you anymore,” Lili finally said. “I’m going to have to say goodbye to you tonight.”
“What are you talking about?” Henrik said. “Why are you saying this?”
“I just can’t see you anymore. Not right now,” she said.
He reached for Lili’s hand but she refused. “But it doesn’t make any difference to me. Is that what this is about? That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Is this because you think that I won’t-”
“Not right now,” she said again, and Lili left him. She crossed the grass, which was dry in summer, nearly snapping beneath her feet, and up the path out of the park. “Lili,” he cried from beneath the willow. There would be a few hours to rehang Lili’s dress and to bathe and to begin another painting. Einar would wait for Greta, who would come home and unfasten her hat and ask, “Did you have a nice evening?” and who would kiss his forehead in a way that would show them both that Greta had been right.
For their August holiday, Greta and Einar returned, as they did every summer, to Menton, a French harbor town on the border of Italy. After the long summer, Greta said goodbye to Copenhagen with a sense of relief. As their train rattled south and over the Maritime Alps, she felt as if she was leaving something behind.
This year, on a tip from Anna, who in May had sung at the opera in Monte Carlo, Greta and Einar rented an apartment on the avenue Boyer, across the street from Menton’s municipal casino. The apartment’s owner was an American who had hurried to France after the war to buy up the shuttered garment factories of Provence. He became rich and now lived in New York, his mail full of profits from the simple, unlined housedresses he sold to every housewife south of Lyon.
The apartment had a cold orange marble floor and a second bedroom painted red and, in the living room, a Chinese screen inlaid with abalone shell. The front windows opened onto little terraces wide enough for a row of geranium pots and two wire chairs. There Einar and Greta would sit in the hot nights, Greta’s feet on the rail, a rare breeze blowing up from the lemon and orange trees in the park below. Greta was tired, and she and Einar could pass an evening saying no more than “Good night.”
On the fifth day of their holiday, the weather turned. Sirocco winds from North Africa hurtled across the dimpled Mediterranean, up the rocky beach, and through the open terrace doors, knocking over the Chinese screen.
Greta and Einar were napping in the red bedroom when they heard the crash. They found the screen flat against the camelback sofa. The screen had been hiding a rack of sample housedresses manufactured by the apartment’s owner in his factories. The dresses, white with floral prints, were fluttering on the rack, as if a child were tugging on their hems.
They were rather plain, Greta thought, with their ugly cuffed sleeves and button fronts convenient for breast feeding-so plain and practical she began to feel a remote sense of dislike for the women who wore them. She moved to set right the Chinese screen. “Give me a hand?” she said.
Einar was standing next to the sample rack, the dress hems blowing against his leg. His face was still. Greta could see the veins in his temples pulsing. She could see his fingers, which she always thought of as the fingers of a pianist, not a painter, trembling. “I was thinking of asking Lili to visit us,” he said. “She’s never been to France.”
Greta had never turned Lili away. There were times, over the course of the summer, when Einar would announce that Lili would be coming to dinner and Greta, drained from a day attending her failed exhibition, would think, Oh, jeepers, the last thing I want to do right now is dine with my husband dressed up as a girl. But Greta would keep such a thought to herself, biting her lip until she could taste her own blood. She knew she couldn’t stop Einar. She knew, from what had happened with Henrik, that Lili had a will of her own.
In the weeks before they left for Menton, Lili had begun to appear unannounced in the afternoons. Greta would leave the Widow House for an appointment. When she returned she’d find Lili at the window in a loose dress, the back buttons unfastened. Greta would help her finish dressing, clasping a string of amber beads around her throat. It never ceased to startle Greta, finding her husband like that, waiting with the neckline of a dress open across his pale shoulders. She never once said anything to Einar, or to Lili. Instead, she would always welcome Lili as if she were an amusing, foreign friend. She ’d hum and gossip as she helped Lili into her shoes. Greta would tip a bottle of perfume against her forefinger and then run her sweet fingertip down Lili’s throat and up the inside of her arm. She would stand Lili in front of the mirror and whisper, her voice the soft intimate voice of wedlock, “There now… so very pretty.”
All of this Greta did with a sense of devotion, for she always believed she could defy anyone in the world except her husband. It had been the same with Teddy. She could cross her mother and debate her father and snub all of Pasadena and Copenhagen alike, but in her chest was a bottomless well of tolerance for the man she loved. She never questioned it, why she allowed Lili to come into their lives. Anything to make Einar happy, she would tell herself. Anything at all.
And yet, Greta being Greta, this open devotion sometimes chafed against her. After Lili’s assignations with Henrik, Greta began to escort her on her trips into the Copenhagen streets. Lili had told her that she would never see Henrik again, that they’d had a falling-out, but even so, Greta knew there were dozens of other young men who could flatter Lili until she blushed and fell into their arms. And so Greta and Lili would stroll with their arms linked at the elbow through the boxhedges of the park. Greta’s eyes would patrol the gravel paths for potential suitors, knowing what Lili, with her moist brown eyes, could stir in young Danish men. One day Greta took a photograph of Lili at the gate of Rosenborg Slot, the slim brick castle behind Lili blurry and vaguely menacing. Another day Lili stopped Greta at the marionette theatre and sat with the children, her face as tentative, her legs as coltish, as theirs.
“Greta?” Einar said again. He was leaning against the rack of sample dresses. The Chinese screen was still lying against the sofa. “You won’t mind if Lili visits us here?”
Greta began to stand the screen upright. Since they arrived in France she hadn’t painted. She hadn’t met anyone interesting enough to ask to sit for a portrait. The weather had been heavy and humid, making it difficult for paint to dry on the canvas. Over the summer she had begun to change her style, using brighter colors, especially pinks and yellows and golds, and flatter lines and an even larger scale. It was a new way of painting for Greta, and it took her a longer time to start again at a blank canvas. She hardly felt confident about the paintings. With their oversized and pastel tone of joy, her recent paintings required, on Greta’s part, an inner sense of rapture. Nothing made her happier than painting Lili.
Greta thought about starting a full-scale portrait of her on the terrace, a breeze lifting her hair and the hem of her housedress, the little brown roses on the dress a pretty blur, the expression on Lili’s face just like the one on her husband’s at this very moment-hot, anxious, his skin tight and red and about to burst.
Greta and Lili were walking to L’Orchidée on quai Bonaparte. The restaurant was known for its ink-boiled squid, or so Hans had written, proposing an evening to meet. On the street the shops were closed for the night. Little sacks of yesterday’s refuse were resting on the curb. The cobblestones were loose in the road, rutted from the pneumatics of motorcars.
Hans’s letter was in Greta’s pocket, and she was rubbing its corner against her wedding ring as she and Lili walked along rue St.-Michel toward the harbor. To Greta, one of the nicer Danish customs was that the wedding band was worn on the right hand. When she’d returned to Denmark a widow, she’d sworn to herself she would never remove the brushed gold band Teddy had given her. But then Einar offered her his own band, a simple loop of gold. She didn’t know how she could remove Teddy’s ring; she thought of him giving it to her, he clumsily searching his pockets for the little black velvet box. But then Greta realized she wouldn’t have to take off Teddy’s, and now she wore both. She played with the rings equally, turning them on her fingers absentmindedly.
Greta never told Einar much about Teddy Cross. She had returned to Denmark on Armistice Day, a widow for six months, her name again Greta Waud. He died for no good reason at all, she would say when friends asked about her first husband. After all, Greta would think, dying when you’re twenty-four and live in California’s clean dry heat is the result of just that: the cruelty of the world. It made no sense, really. Certainly Teddy didn’t have a Western spine, another unjust fate. Sometimes she ’d also think, with her eyes sealed to stem the regret: perhaps she and Teddy were never meant to be married. Perhaps his love for her was never as great as hers for him.
Greta and Lili were almost at the restaurant when she stopped Lili and said, “Don’t be angry with me, but I have a little surprise for you.” She pushed Lili’s bangs out of her eyes. “I’m sorry for not telling you earlier, but I thought it ’d be easier for you to hear about it just before.”
“Hear about what?”
“That we ’re having dinner with Hans.”
Lili’s face went white, and it was clear that she understood. She pressed her forehead against the window of a closed charcuterie. Inside, skinned piglets were hanging from a rope like pink pennants. Even so, Lili asked, “Hans who?”
“Come on now. No panicking. It’s Hans. He wants to see you.”
The Parisian critic with the wart on the rim of his eye had quickly answered Greta’s letter, sending Hans’s address and a further inquiry about Greta’s painting. The attention from the critic nearly threw Greta into a reverie. Paris was asking after her art! she told herself, opening her box of stationery from Århus and filling her pen with ink. First she wrote the critic: Is there a life for me in Paris? she asked. Should my husband and I consider leaving Denmark, where no one knows what to think of me? Would our lives be freer in Paris?
Then Greta wrote Hans: My husband seems never to have forgotten you, she began. When he is dreaming at his easel, I know he is thinking of you hanging from the oak above the bog. His face softens and nearly shrinks. It is as if he is becoming thirteen again, with shiny eyes and a smooth chin.
Now in his mid-thirties, Hans Axgil had a thin nose and wrists covered with a dense blond hair. He had become a large, sturdy man, his neck rising thick out of his chest; it made Greta think of the old sycamore stump at the rear of her California garden. Einar had described Hans as small, the runt of the bog. His nickname had been Val nød, or walnut; some said it was because in the summer his skin turned pale brown, as if dimly soiled from Bluetooth’s perpetual mud, a pool of which had served as his birth bed when his mother’s coach, overturned in a hailstorm, stranded her and her two maids on a heath with nothing but matchlight and the driver’s canvas coat offered as a nativity tarp.
Now of course Hans was a man, large in a Germanic way. He shook other people’s hands with both of his; those same hands often hooked together at the nape of his neck when he was telling a story. He drank nothing but champagne or water with gas. He dined only on fish, having once eaten a venison chop and then lost his appetite for a month. He was an art dealer, shepherding Dutch masters to rich Americans who collected for the sake of amassing. It was a business, he described, with a smile revealing two incisors like drills, as often immoral. “Not always, but often enough,” he said. Hans’s favorite sport was still tennis. “The best part of France is its terre battue. The red clay. The white tennis balls with the gummy seams. The umpire sitting up in his chair.”
The restaurant was across the road from the harbor. There were eight tables on the sidewalk, beneath striped parasols anchored in tins of rocks. In the harbor, sailboats were arriving home. Brits on holiday stood on the docks, holding hands, the backs of their knees sunburned. On the restaurant ’s tables were vases of marigolds, and sheets of white paper protecting the cloth.
Not until they were about to sit at the table, where Hans was waiting with his hands behind his neck, did Greta become anxious about her plan. Not until now did she worry that Hans might see the resemblance to Einar in Lili’s face. What would Greta do were Hans to lean across the table and say, “Is this pretty little creature my old friend Einar?” It seemed unimaginable; but even so, what would Greta do were Hans to ask such a question? And what would Lili do? Then Greta looked at Lili, pretty in one of the housedresses and tanned from lying on the bathing raft that floated in the sea. Greta shook her head. No, there was no one there but Lili. Even Greta saw only Lili. And besides, Greta thought as the waiter pulled out the chairs at the table and Hans moved to kiss first Greta and then Lili, Hans no longer resembled the boy Einar had described from his youth.
“Yes, now, tell me about Einar,” Hans said as the ink-boiled squid was served in a tureen.
“Alone in Copenhagen tonight, I’m afraid,” Greta answered. “Too busy with his work even for a holiday.”
Lili nodded, bringing the corner of her napkin to her mouth. Hans leaned back in his chair, his fork spearing the squid. He said, “Sounds like Einar.” Hans then told them how Einar used to carry his box of pastels to the side of the road to draw scenes of the bog on the boulders. At night the drawings would wash off in the rain, and the next day he’d haul the box back and sketch again.
“Sometimes he’d draw pictures of you,” Lili said.
“Oh, yes, for hours. I would sit at the edge of the road so he could sketch my face onto a rock.”
Lili, Greta noticed, pushed her shoulders back just a bit, her breasts lifting like the papery, puckered mimosas that grew in the mountains above Menton. Greta forgot, or almost forgot, that they weren’t breasts; they were avocado pits wrapped in silk handkerchiefs, tucked into the summer camisole Greta had bought that morning at the department store by the station.
Greta also noticed the way Lili-with Einar’s dark eyes alive beneath the powder on the lids-spoke with Hans about Jutland. There was a longing in the way she bit her lip before she answered one of Hans’s questions. The way she turned up her chin.
“I know Einar would like to see you sometime,” Lili said. “He told me the day you ran away from Bluetooth was the worst day of his life. He says you were the only one who let him paint in peace, who told him that no matter what, it was okay for him to become a painter.” Her hand, which under the candle lamp looked too bony and fine to be a man’s, uncurled and arced toward Hans’s shoulder.
Later that night she and Greta were riding the cage elevator to the rented apartment. Greta was tired, and she wanted Einar to pull off his dress and wipe his lips. “Hans didn’t figure it out, did he?” she said, her arms folded across her breasts, which, the way things were, hung more flatly than Lili’s. There were two bare bulbs in the socket in the elevator’s ceiling; the light showed the lines in Einar’s forehead and around his mouth where the orangish foundation was collecting into clots. The little fin in Einar’s throat suddenly appeared above his amber beads. His odor was male: the wet-leaf smell that came from the dark coves where his arm met his shoulder, his left leg his right.
Greta fell asleep before Einar came to bed. When she woke, she discovered Lili lying in her camisole beneath the summer sheet. Her hair was matted, her face, in the weak light, clean and beginning to whisker on the cheek. Lili was on her back, the tiny weight of the sheet falling around the pear-shaped bumps of her breasts, and then, lower, around the lump that grew between the legs. Never before had Lili slept with Greta; they had eaten breakfast together in silk kimonos patterned with cranes, and shopped for stockings together, Greta always paying, like a mother or an odd, barren aunt. But Einar had never come to bed dressed as Lili. Greta’s heart, knocking against her chest, felt as hard as the stone of a fruit. Was this to be part of the game, too? Should she kiss Lili as she might kiss her husband?
They were intimate infrequently. Typically Greta blamed herself. She ’d stay up late painting, or reading, and by the time she’d pull back the bedclothes and slip underneath, Einar would be asleep. Sometimes she would nudge him, hoping to wake him. But Einar was a sound sleeper, and soon she too would fall asleep. She would hold him through the night, waking up like that, with her arm over his chest. Their eyes would meet in the quiet of morning. Often she would long to touch him, and as her hand began to stroke first his chest and then his thigh, Einar would rub his fists in his eyes and leap out of bed. “Is there anything wrong?” Greta would call, still wrapped in the bedclothes. “Not a thing,” he’d reply, running the water in the bath. “Nothing at all.”
The times they did make love, usually instigated by Greta but not always, Greta would end up feeling as if something inappropriate had occurred. As if she should no longer want to touch him. As if he were no longer her husband.
Now Lili shifted. Her body, which reminded Greta of a long coil, was on its side, the freckles on her back staring out at Greta, the single raised mole in the shape of Zealand as horrible and black as a leech. Lili’s hip, beneath the pilled summer sheet, raised up like the camelback sofa in the living room of the rented apartment. Where had this curved hip come from?-curved like the corniche that snaked up the Côte from the Italian border to Nice; curved like the bulbous vases with the slender necks Teddy had thrown on his foot-powered wheel. It seemed like the hip of a woman, not her husband’s. It felt as if someone she didn’t know was in her bed. Greta thought about the hip until dawn arrived on the apartment’s narrow terraces, and a rain cooled the room off so that Lili had to snap the summer sheet to her chin for warmth, the mound of the hip disappearing beneath the taut tent of the sheet. They fell asleep again, and when Greta woke she found Lili holding two cups of coffee. Lili was smiling, and then she tried to slip back beneath the sheet, but the coffee cups tipped. Greta watched the coffee spill across the bed, toward her hand, and Lili began to cry.
Later, in the afternoon, when Einar was behind the spare bedroom’s door transforming himself into Lili, Greta stripped the bed. She took the sheet, musty and milky with the mixed smell of Einar and Lili and the coffee, and held it over the terrace rail, bringing a match to its corner. Something in her wanted to see it burn away. Soon the sheet was billowing with fire, and Greta watched the flame-edged bits break away as she thought about Teddy and Einar. Scraps of sheet, trailing thin black smoke, were fluttering from the terrace, delicately rising and dipping in the summer breeze and eventually landing in the waxy leaves of the lemon and orange trees in the park below. A woman from the street called to Greta, but she ignored her, and Greta shut her eyes.
She never told Einar about the fire in Teddy’s pottery studio on Colorado Street. In the front office there was a shallow fireplace decorated with Teddy’s orange mission-style tiles. One day in January, in a fit of tidying, Greta crammed the Christmas garlands into the hearth, where a low fire was already smoldering. A white, thick smoke began to rise from the brittle greens. Then there was a crackling that popped with such a buckshot piercing that it brought Teddy from his workshop in the rear. He stood in the double door. In his face Greta could read the question: What are you doing? Then, together, they watched a flame lift out of the smoking garland; then a second reached out like an arm and lit the wicker rocking chair.
Almost instantly the room was on fire. Teddy pulled Greta out to Colorado Street. They weren’t on the sidewalk more than a few seconds when the fists of the flames punched through the twin plate-glass windows. Greta and Teddy stepped into the street, into the traffic, drivers slowing with O-mouthed leers and the horses bucking violently away from the burning building and the cars careening away.
Everything Greta thought of saying just then sounded despicable. An apology would sound empty, she told herself over and over, as the flames rose higher than the streetlamps and the telephone lines, which normally sagged under the weight of blue jays. What a sight it was, and yet there was nothing for Greta to say except “What have I done?”
“I can always start over,” Teddy said. Inside, cracking and exploding and shattering into black bits of nothing, were hundreds of vases and tiles, his two kilns, his file cabinet stuffed with orders, his self-made potter’s life. Still stuck in Greta’s mouth was that empty apology. It felt glued to her tongue, like a cube of ice that wouldn’t melt. For several minutes, she couldn’t say anything else, not until the building’s roof fell in on itself, as lightly as a burning, billowing sheet.
“I didn’t mean to.” She wondered if Teddy would believe her. As a reporter from the American Weekly showed up at the scene, his pencils tucked into the band that held up his shirtsleeves, Greta wondered if anyone in Pasadena would believe her.
“I know,” Teddy said, over and over. He took Greta’s hand in his own and stopped her from saying another thing. They watched the flames pull down the front wall. They watched the firemen unroll their flat, limp hose. Greta and Teddy watched, standing silently, until a damp gurgle rose up in his throat and emerged from his lips as an ominous cough.
When Einar asked her about it, Greta told him things he couldn’t remember.
“You mean you’ve forgotten?” she said the next morning. “That you asked him to meet you again?”
Einar could recall only part of the previous night. When Greta told him that Lili had stood on her toes to kiss Hans goodnight, he became so embarrassed that he pulled a wire chair to the terrace and, for nearly an hour, stared out over the lemon trees in the park. It didn’t seem possible. It was as if he hadn’t been there.
“He was happy to meet Lili. And he spoke so fondly of Einar. He can’t wait to see you again. Do you remember that?” Greta asked. She hadn’t slept well. Her eyes were nearly lost in their sockets. “You promised him that he could see Lili again today.”
“It wasn’t me,” Einar said. “It was Lili.”
“Yes,” Greta said. “It was Lili. I keep forgetting.”
“If you didn’t want her to visit us here, then why didn’t you say so?”
“Of course I wanted Lili to visit. It ’s just that…” and Greta paused. “It’s just that I’m not sure what you want me to do about her.” She turned in the camelback sofa and began to pick at the abalone in the Chinese screen.
“There’s nothing for you to do,” Einar said. “Don’t you see?”
He wondered why Greta couldn’t let Lili come and go without worrying so much. If it didn’t upset him, then why should Greta become concerned? If only she would quietly welcome Lili when it was time to paint her portrait. If only Greta wouldn’t pry with her questions-to say nothing about her eyes-when Lili slipped in and out of the apartment. Sometimes just knowing Greta was on the other side of the door, waiting for Lili to return, was enough to fill her with a moist little fury that collected in the pits of her arms.
And yet Einar knew that he and, yes, Lili, too, needed Greta.
Hans was expecting Lili at four o’clock. They had agreed to meet in front of the municipal casino, which sat on the Promenade du Midi behind the rocky beach. Greta was painting in the living room that morning. Einar was trying to paint in the foyer, which had a view of the backside of St-Michel Church, its stone dark and red with morning shadow. Every fifteen minutes or so Greta would mutter “Goddammit”-like the soft quarter gong of a mantel clock.
When he checked on her, Greta was leaning against a stool. She had several shades of blue along the rim of her canvas. In her lap was her sketch pad, sooty and smudged. Edvard IV was curled at her feet. Greta looked up, her face nearly as white as Edvard’s coat. “I want to paint Lili,” she said.
“She won’t be here until later,” Einar said. “She doesn’t have to meet Hans until four. Maybe after that?”
“Please get her.” Greta wouldn’t look at him, her voice quieter than usual.
For a moment, Einar felt like defying his wife. He had his own painting to finish. He had told himself that he would call up Lili in the afternoon, that he’d spend the morning painting, which he’d been ignoring so much lately, and buying the groceries at the open market. But now Greta wanted him to choose Lili over himself. Greta wanted him to give up his own painting for hers. He didn’t want to. He didn’t long for Lili just then. He felt as if Greta was forcing him to choose. “Maybe you can spend an hour with her before Hans comes by?”
“Einar,” Greta said. “Please.”
Several of the housedresses were now hanging in the bedroom closet. Greta had said they were ugly, their styles suited for nursemaids, but Einar found their plainness pretty, as if the most ordinary woman in the world might wear one. He thumbed through the hangers on the lead pipe, fingering the little starched collars. The one printed with peonies was a bit sheer; the one printed with frogs was big in the bust, and stained. The morning was warm, and Einar wiped his lip on his sleeve. Something made him feel as if his soul were trapped in a wrought-iron cage: his heart nudging its nose against his ribs, Lili stirring from within, shaking herself awake, rubbing her side against the bars of Einar’s body.
He chose a dress. It was white, printed with pink conch shells. Its hem hung to his calf. The white and pink looked pretty against his leg, which had taken color from the French sun.
The key in the door lock was loose in its hole. He thought about locking it, but he knew Greta would never come in without knocking. Once, early in their marriage, Greta walked in on Einar while he was in the bath singing a folksong: There once was an old man who lived on a bog… It should have been innocent enough, Einar knew, a young wife finding her husband bathing, happily singing to himself. From the tub, Einar could see the arousal filling Greta’s face. “Don’t stop,” she said, moving closer. But Einar could hardly find the strength to breathe, so exposed he felt, so ashamed, his bony arms crossed over his torso, hands like fig leaves. Greta finally realized what she had done, because she said, leaving the bathroom, “I’m so sorry. I should have knocked.”
Now Einar removed his clothes, turning his back to the mirror. In the drawer of the bedstand was a roll of white medical tape and scissors. The tape was gooey and textured like a canvas, and Einar pulled out a length and cut it into five pieces. Each piece he stuck to the edge of the bedpost. Then, shutting his eyes and feeling himself slide down through the tunnel of his soul, Einar pulled his penis back and taped it up in the blank space just beneath his groin.
The undergarments were made from a blend of something stretchy Einar was sure the Americans had invented. “There ’s no use in spending good money on silk for things you’ll only wear once or twice,” Greta had said, handing him the package, and Einar had been too shy to disagree.
The panties were cut in a square shape and were silvery like the abalone inlaid in the screen. The garter belt was cotton, fringed with papery lace. It had eight small brass hooks to support the stockings, a mechanism Einar still found thrillingly complicated. When the avocado seeds had begun to rot in their silk handkerchiefs, he had instead started inserting two Mediterranean sea sponges into the shallow cups of his camisole.
Then he pulled the dress over his head.
He’d begun to think of his makeup box as his palette. Brushstrokes to the brow. Light dabs to the lids. Lines on the lips. Blended streaks on the cheek. It was just like painting-like his brush turning a blank canvas into the winter Kattegat.
The clothes and the rouge were important, but the transformation was really about descending that inner tunnel with something like a dinner bell and waking Lili. She always liked the sound of crystal tinkling. It was about climbing out with her dewy hand in Einar’s, reassuring her that the bright clattering world was hers.
He sat on the bed. He closed his eyes. The street was full of rifle noises from motorcars. The wind was rattling the terrace doors. Behind his eyelids he watched colored lights erupt against the black, like the fireworks shot the previous Saturday over Menton’s harbor. He could hear his heart slow. He could feel the gooey tape strapped against his penis. A little flutter of air rose through Einar’s throat. He gasped as goose pimples ran down his arms, down the knuckles of his spine.
With a shiver, he was Lili. Einar was away. Lili would sit for Greta through the morning. She would walk along the quay with Hans, her hand visoring out the August sun. Einar would be only a reference in conversation: “He misses Bluetooth quite a bit,” Lili would say, the world would hear.
Once again there were two. The walnut halved, the oyster shucked open.
Lili returned to the living room. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” Greta said. She spoke to Lili softly, as if she might crack at the sound of a harsh voice. “Sit here,” Greta said, plumping the pillows on the sofa. “Drape one arm over the back of the sofa, and keep your head turned to the screen.”
The session lasted the rest of the morning and through most of the afternoon. Lili, in the corner of the sofa, staring at the scene of abalone shell-a fishing village, a poet in a pagoda by a willow tree-in the Chinese screen. She became hungry but told herself to ignore it. If Greta didn’t stop, neither would she. She was doing this for Greta. It was her gift to Greta, the only thing Lili could give her. She ’d have to be patient. She ’d have to wait for Greta to tell her what to do.
Later that afternoon, Hans and Lili set out on a stroll through Menton’s streets. They stopped at the stands that sold lemon soap and figurines carved from olive wood and packages of candied figs. They spoke of Jutland, of the slate sky and the hog-trampled earth, of the families who lived on the same land for four hundred years, their children marrying one another, their blood thickening to muck. With his father dead, Hans was now Baron Axgil, although he hated the title. “It’s why I left Denmark,” he said. “The aristocracy was dead. If I’d had a sister, I’m sure my mother would have wanted me to marry her.”
“Are you married now?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“But don’t you want to marry?”
“I did, once. There once was a girl I wanted to marry.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. Drowned in a river.” And then, “Right in front of me.” Hans paid an old woman for a tin of mandarin hand soaps. “But that was quite a while ago. I was practically still a boy.”
Lili could think of nothing to say. There she was, in her housedress, on the street ripe with urine, with Hans.
“Why aren’t you married?” he said. “I would think a girl like you would be married and running a fishery.”
“I wouldn’t want to run a fishery.” She looked up at the sky. How blank and flat it was, cloudless, less blue than Denmark’s. Above Lili and Hans, the sun throbbed. “It’ll be a while before I’m ready to get married. But I want to someday.”
Hans stopped at an open-front store to buy Lili a bottle of orange oil. “But you don’t have forever,” he said. “How old are you?”
How old was Lili? She was younger than Einar, who then was nearly thirty-five. When Lili emerged and Einar withdrew, years were lost: years that had wrinkled the forehead and stooped the shoulders; years that had quieted Einar with resignation. Lili’s posture was the first thing one might notice, its fresh resilience. The second was her soft-voiced curiosity. The third, as Greta reported it, her smell-that of a girl who hadn’t yet soured.
“I really can’t say.”
“You don’t seem like the type of girl who’s too coy to admit her age,” Hans said.
“I’m not,” Lili said. “I’m twenty-four.”
Hans nodded. It was the first fact made up about Lili. As Lili said it, she assumed she’d feel guilty about lying. Instead she felt a bit freer, as if she ’d finally admitted an uncomfortable truth. Lili was twenty-four; she certainly wasn’t as old as Einar. Had she said so, Hans would have thought her a strange fraud.
Hans paid the clerk. The bottle was square and brown, its cork stopper no bigger than the tip of Lili’s pinkie. She tried to pull it out, but couldn’t pry it loose. “Help me?” Lili asked.
“You’re not as helpless as all that,” Hans said. “Give it another tug.”
And Lili did, and this time the little cork popped free and the scent of oranges rose to her nostrils. It made her think of Greta.
“Why don’t I remember you from when I was a boy?” Hans asked.
“You left Bluetooth when I was very young.”
“I suppose that’s right. But Einar never said he had such a beautiful baby cousin.”
When she returned to the apartment, Lili found Greta still in the living room. “Thank God you’re back,” she said. “I want to work some more tonight.” Greta led Lili, who was still holding her packages of the soaps and orange oil, to the camelback sofa. She arranged Lili against the pillows and, with her fingers spread across Lili’s skull like a many-pronged clamp, turned her head toward the Chinese screen.
“I’m tired,” Lili said.
“Then go to sleep,” Greta said, her smock smudged with oily pinks and silvers. “Just lay your head against your arm. I’m going to keep painting a little more.”
The next afternoon, Hans met Lili at the gate of the apartment. Again they walked through the narrow streets that swirled around St-Michel’s hill, then down to the harbor to watch two fishermen sort through their haul of sea urchins. In late August, Menton was hot, the air humid and still. So much warmer than the hottest summer day in Copenhagen, Lili thought. And because Lili had never known such heat-this, after all, was her first trip out of Denmark-she found the weather exhausting. She could feel the housedress sticking to her back as she stood next to Hans, watching the wet net bulging with urchins, Hans’s body so close to her own that she thought perhaps she could feel his hand on her arm, which was burning in the sun. Was it his hand, or something else? Simply a hot breeze?
Two Gypsy children, a boy and a girl, approached Lili and Hans, trying to sell them a little carved elephant. “Real ivory,” they said, pointing at the elephant’s tusk. “A deal for you.” The kids were small and dark around the eyes, and they stared at Lili in a way that made her feel unsafe.
“Let’s go,” she said to Hans, who laid his hand on the warm wet small of her back, steering her away. “I think I need to lie down.”
But when Lili returned home, Greta was waiting for her. She posed Lili in front of her easel, settling her on the sofa. “Sit still,” Greta said. “I’m not done.”
The next day Hans drove Lili up the corniche to Villefranche, his Targa Florio’s spoke-wheels shooting shellrocks down to the sea. “Next time don’t leave Einar up in Denmark!” he yelled, his voice as pebbly as it was when he was a boy. “Even good old Einar should have a holiday!” The wind was warm in Lili’s face, and by the late afternoon again she was feeling weak in the stomach. Hans had to rent a room at the Hôtel de l’Univers for Lili to rest in. “I’ll be just downstairs having a coffee and an anisette,” he said, tipping his hat. Later, when she emerged from the narrow room, Lili found Hans off the lobby in the Restaurant de la Ré gence. She was barely out of her dreamy state and only said, “Sometimes I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
On another day-trip Hans and Lili drove to Nice to shop for paintings in the antique stalls. “Why doesn’t Greta ever want to come along with us?” Hans inquired. “Too busy painting, I guess,” Lili said. “She works harder than anyone I know. Harder than Einar. One day she’s going to be famous. You’ll see.” Lili could feel Hans’s eyes on her as she said this, and she found it remarkable that such a man as Hans would pay any attention to her opinions at all. In one of the stalls, tended by a woman with soft white fuzz on her chin, Lili found an oval burial portrait of a young man, his cheeks oddly colored and his eyes closed. She bought it for fifteen francs, and Hans promptly bought it from her for thirty. And he asked, “Are you feeling all right today?”
Each day, before her outings with Hans, Lili would pose for Greta on the sofa. She ’d hold a book about French birds, or Edvard IV, in her lap, because her hands when empty would twitch nervously. Except for noise from the street, the apartment was quiet and the mantel clock would tick so slowly that at least once each afternoon Lili would rise to make sure it was properly wound. Then she would stick her head over the rail of the terrace, waiting for the hour when Hans would call at the gate. He’d taken to yelling up from the street: “Lili! Hurry up and come down!” and she would run down the seven flights of tiled stairs, too impatient to wait for the caged elevator.
But before he arrived, Greta would clap her hands together and say, “That’s it! Hold your face just like that-that ’s what I want. Lili waiting, waiting for Hans.”
One day Lili and Hans were at an outdoor café at the foot of St-Michel’s steps. Five or six Gypsy children, their clothes dirty, came to their table selling postcards, the photographs of the Côte ’s beaches hand-tinted with colored pencils. Hans bought a set for Lili.
The air was thick, the sun hot on Lili’s neck. The beer in her glass was turning brown. The week of afternoons with Hans had begun to fill Lili with expectations, and she now wondered what Hans thought of her. He had taken a stroll on the promenade with Lili; he had linked her arm through the curve of his elbow; Hans, with his dark chuckle and his billowing linen shirts, with his brown skin deepening in the August sun, with his long-lost nickname Valnød, had come to know Lili, but not Einar. Hans hadn’t seen Einar since they were boys. It was Lili and not Einar who had felt the rough tips of Hans’s fingers on her skin.
“I’m very glad I’ve met you,” she said.
“So am I.”
“And that we ’re able to get to know each other, in this way.”
Hans nodded. He was looking through the set of postcards, holding up his favorites-of the municipal casino, of a citrus grove at the foot of a hill-for Lili to inspect. “Yes, you’re a terrific girl, Lili. You’ll make some lad very happy one day.”
Then Hans must have realized what Lili was feeling, because he set down his cigarette and the postcards and said, “Oh, Lili? Did you think that maybe… with us? Then I’m very sorry. But it’s just that I’m too old for you, Lili. I’ve become too much of a grouch for someone like you.”
Hans began to tell Lili about the girl he loved and lost. He said his mother had asked him never to return to Bluetooth when Ingrid-it was years ago, all of this-became pregnant. They settled in Paris, across from the Panthéon, in a wallpapered flat. She was skinny, except for her growing stomach, with long freckled arms. They went swimming on an August afternoon, not unlike today, Hans added, nodding toward the sky. At a river with a bed of white rocks and sprinkled with yellowing leaves. Ingrid waded into the water, her arms out for balance. Hans watched from the shore, eating a piece of ham. And then Ingrid’s ankle turned and she cried out, and a current pulled her under. “I couldn’t get to her in time,” Hans said.
Apart from that tragedy, his life had been good. “Because I left Denmark,” he said. “Life there is too neat and orderly for me. Too cozy.” Greta would sometimes say that as well, when she couldn’t paint and friends invited them to another smorgasbord. “Too cozy to work,” she ’d say, her silver bracelets shaking. “Too cozy to be free.”
“And now I’ve been on my own so long I’m not sure I could ever get married. Too stuck in my old ways, I am.”
“Don’t you think marriage is the one single thing we all should hope for most in life? Doesn’t it make you more whole than living all alone?”
“Not always.”
“I think it does. Marriage is like a third person,” Lili said. “It creates someone else, more than just the two of you.”
“Yes, but not always for the best,” Hans said. “Anyway, how would you know anything about all of this?”
Just then something told Lili to check her purse. Her hand felt the empty iron of the chair’s back. “It’s gone,” she said so softly that Hans’s forehead lifted and he murmured, “What?” Again, “My purse is gone.”
“The Gypsies,” Hans said, jumping to his feet. The café was in a small square with six alleyways running into it. Hans ran a few feet down one alley and realized the Gypsies weren’t there, and then ran into the next, his face reddening.
“Let’s go to the police,” he finally said, leaving francs on the table. He warned another woman whose pull-string satchel was hanging from her chair. He pulled Lili’s hand. He must have seen the white in her cheek, because he kissed it, gently.
The only thing in the purse was a little wad of money and a lipstick. The purse was Greta’s, a cream kid bag with loop handles. Other than the lipstick and a few dresses and two pairs of shoes and her camisoles and underwear, Lili owned nothing. She was free of possessions, and that was part of the appeal in those early days of Lili-that she came and went, and there was nothing more to concern her than the wind lifting her hem.
The police station was on a place with orange trees growing in a little center park. The evening sun reflected in the station’s front windows, and Lili could hear the clatter of the shop owners closing their shutters. Lili realized her sunglasses were also in the purse, a funny pair with flip-up lenses Greta’s father had sent from California. Greta would be angry that they were gone, that Lili had failed to pay attention to who or what was around her; and just then, just as Hans and Lili reached the steps of the police station, where a family of dingy white cats was rolling on its backs, just then Lili realized that she couldn’t report the stolen purse. She stopped on the steps.
Lili had no identification, she had no passport; why-and it had never occurred to her, nor had anyone ever bothered to ask-she didn’t even have a family name.
“Let’s not make a fuss about this,” she said. “It’s just a silly old purse.”
“Then you’ll never get it back.”
“But it isn’t worth the trouble,” she said. “And Greta is waiting. I just realized I’m late. I’m sure she ’s waiting for me. She wanted to paint this evening.”
“She’ll understand.”
“Something tells me she wants to see me right now,” Lili said. “I just have this funny feeling.”
“Come on now. Let’s go inside.” Hans took Lili’s wrist. A pull up the first step. He was still being playful, in a fatherly sort of way. He tugged again, and this time the pressure on her wrist hurt a little more, although it was no more painful than an aggressive handshake.
And just then-why, she would never know-something told both Lili and Hans to look down at the front of her dress. Growing on the white housedress patterned with conch shells was a round stain of blood, a stain so red it was nearly black. It was seeping outward like the ringed wave of a pebble landing in a pond.
“Lili? Are you hurt?”
“No, no,” she said. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. But I should be getting home. Back to Greta.” Lili could feel herself shrinking inward, retreating back down the tunnel, back to Lili’s lair.
“Let me help you. How can I help you?”
As each second passed Hans felt farther away; his voice sounded as if it were traveling through a dull iron pipe. It was like at the Rådhuset ball: the blood was heavy, but she felt nothing. Where it was coming from she had no idea. She was both alarmed and amazed, like a child who has accidentally killed an animal. A little voice in her head shouted, “Hurry!”-a frantic little voice equally panicked and enjoying the small brief drama of an afternoon in Menton in August. Lili left Hans on the steps of the police station, turning three corners immediately, running away from him as the Gypsy children had run off from her, the stain on her dress spreading as persistently, as appallingly, as a disease.
Greta’s new style was to paint with pastel-bright colors, especially yellows and candy pinks and ice blues. She still painted only portraits. She still used the paints that arrived in glass bottles with unreliable stoppers from the firm in Munich. But where her previous paintings were serious and straightforward and official, her new paintings, in their levity and color, looked, as Lili once said, like taffy. The paintings were large and depicted their subject, by now almost always Lili, outdoors, in a field of poppies, in a lemon grove, or against the hills of Provence.
While she painted, Greta thought of nothing, or what felt to her like nothing: her brain, her thoughts, felt as light as the paints she mixed into her palette. It reminded her of driving into the sun, as if painting were about pressing on blindly but in good faith. On her best days, ecstasy would fill her as she pivoted from her paint box to the canvas, and it was as if there were a white light blocking out everything but her imagination. When her painting was working, when the brush strokes were capturing the exact curve of Lili’s head, or the depth of her dark eyes, Greta would hear a rustling in her head that reminded her of the bamboo prod der knocking oranges from her father’s orange trees. Painting well was like harvesting fruit: the beautiful dense thud of an orange hitting the California loam.
Even so, Greta was surprised by the reception the Lili paintings received in Copenhagen that fall. Rasmussen offered to hang them in his gallery for two weeks in October. Her original triptych, Lili Thrice, sold outright, after a brief dispute between a Swede in purple pigskin gloves and a young professor from the Royal Academy. Her portrait of Lili sleeping on the camelback sofa fetched more than 250 kroner; it wasn’t as much as Einar’s paintings earned, but closer than ever before.
“I need to see Lili every day,” Greta said to him. She was beginning to miss Lili when she wasn’t around. Greta had always been an early riser, up well before dawn, before the first ferry call or rattle from the street. That fall, there were mornings when Greta woke even earlier than that, the apartment so black she couldn’t see her hand before her. She would sit up in the bed. There next to her lay Einar, still sleeping, at his feet Edvard IV. She herself was still caught in the hazy foyer of sleep, and Greta would wonder, where was Lili? Greta would quickly climb out of bed and begin searching the apartment. Where had Lili gone to? Greta would ask herself, lifting the tarps in the front room, opening the closet of the pickled-ash wardrobe. And only as she unbolted the front door, her lips repeating the question nervously, would Greta fully emerge from the thick mist of sleep.
One morning that autumn, Greta and Einar were in their apartment. It was the first time since April they needed a fire. The stove was a triple-decker, three black iron boxes stacked up on four feet. Greta held a match to the peeling paper of the birch logs inside. The flame took, and began to burn away the bark.
“But Lili can’t come every day,” Einar protested. “I don’t think you understand how hard it is, sending Einar away and asking Lili in. It’s too much to ask every day.” He was dressing Edvard IV in the cable-knit sweater sent up from the fisherman’s wife. “I love it. I love her. But it’s hard.”
“I need to paint Lili every day,” Greta said. “I need your help.”
And then Einar did a strange thing: he crossed the studio and kissed Greta’s neck. Einar had-as Greta thought of it-the Danish chill in him; she couldn’t think of the last time her husband had kissed her anywhere but on her mouth, late at night, when all was black and quiet except for the occasional rambling drunkard being dragged to Dr. Møller’s door across the street.
Einar’s bleeding had returned. He had been fine since the incident in Menton, but then one day recently he pressed a handkerchief to his nose. Greta watched the stain seep through the cotton. It troubled her, and it reminded her of the final months with Teddy Cross.
But just as it suddenly began, the bleeding ceased, leaving no trace except Einar’s red and raw nostrils.
Then one night just the week before, as the first frost was collecting on the windowsills, Greta and Einar were quietly eating their supper. She was sketching in her notebook as she brought forkfuls of herring to her mouth. Einar was sitting idly, stirring his coffee with a spoon-daydreaming, as far as Greta could tell. She looked up from her sketch, a study of a new painting of Lili at a maypole. Across the table the color was draining from Einar’s face. His spine became more erect. He excused himself, leaving a little red spot on the chair.
Over the next two days Greta tried to ask him about the bleeding, about its cause and source, but each time Einar turned away in shame. It was almost as if she were striking him, his cheek jolting from the blow of her question. It was clear to Greta that Einar hoped to hide it from her, cleaning himself with old paint rags he later threw into the canal. But she knew. There was the smell, fresh and peaty. There was his unsettled stomach. There were the bloody rags the next morning clinging to the stone pylon of the canal’s bridge.
One morning Greta went to the post office to make a telephone call in privacy. When she returned to the studio, Lili was lying on a cherry-red chaise borrowed from the props department at the Royal Theatre. Her nightdress was also borrowed; a retiring soprano, whose throat was old and blue and all leaping tendons, had worn it singing Desdemona. It seemed to Greta that Lili never knew how she looked. If she did, she wouldn’t be lying like this, with her legs open, each foot on the floor, ankles drunkenly turned. With her mouth open and her tongue on her lip, she looked as if she were passed out on morphine. Greta liked the image, although she hadn’t planned it. Einar had been up the previous night with a cramp in his stomach and, Greta feared, the bleeding.
“I’ve made an appointment for you,” Greta now said to Lili.
“What kind of appointment?” Lili’s breath began to quicken, her breasts lifting and falling.
“With a doctor.”
Lili sat up. She looked alarmed. It was one of the few times Greta could see Einar edging back into Lili’s face: suddenly the dark blush of whiskers burst onto her upper lip. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Lili said.
“I didn’t say there was.” Greta moved toward the chaise. She tied the satin ribbons on Lili’s sleeve. “But you’ve been sick,” Greta continued, her hands tucking themselves into her smock’s patch pockets, where she stored the gnawed pencils, the picture of Teddy Cross in the waves at Santa Monica beach, a little swatch of the bloody dress Lili had been wearing when she returned to the rented apartment in Menton, crying Hans’s name. “I’m concerned about the bleeding.”
Greta watched Lili’s face: it seemed to be curling at the edges with shame. But Greta knew she was right to bring it up. “We need to know why it’s happening. If you’re not hurting anything by-” she began. Greta shuddered, a chill crossing her back. What was happening to her marriage, she wondered, picking at the ribbons woven into the collar of the nightdress. She wanted a husband. She wanted Lili. “Oh, Einar.”
“Einar isn’t here,” Lili said.
“Please tell him to meet me at Central Station for the 11:04 train to Rungsted,” Greta said. “I’m going to the supply store.”
She went to the wardrobe, looking for a scarf.
“What if Einar doesn’t return in time?” Lili asked. “What if I can’t find him by then?”
“He will.” And then, “Have you seen my scarf? The blue one with the gold fringe?”
Lili looked into her lap. “I don’t think so.”
“It was in my wardrobe. In my drawer. Did you borrow it?”
“I think I left it at the Café Axel,” Lili said. “I’m sure they have it behind the counter. I’ll go get it now.” And then, “Greta, I’m sorry. I didn’t take anything else. I didn’t touch anything else.”
Greta felt the pique bunching up in her shoulders. Something is very wrong, she told herself, and then shoved the thought aside. No, she wasn’t going to let a borrowed scarf upset her marriage. Besides, hadn’t Greta told Lili to take anything that she wanted? Didn’t Greta want, more than anything, to please Lili? “You stay here,” Greta said. “But please make sure Einar makes his train.”
The walls of the Café Axel were yellow from tobacco. Students from the Royal Academy went there for frikadeller and fadøl, which between four and six were half price. When Greta was a student she would take a table by the door and sketch, her pad propped in her lap. When a friend would walk in and ask what she was drawing, she would firmly close her pad and say, “Something for Professor Wegener.”
Greta asked the bartender about the blue scarf. “My cousin thinks she left it here,” she said.
“Who’s your cousin?” The bartender rolled his hands in a tea towel.
“A slight girl. Not as tall as me. Shy.” Greta paused. It was difficult to describe Lili, to think of her floating through the world on her own, with her fluttering white collar and her brown eyes lifting toward handsome strangers. Greta’s nostrils flared.
“Do you mean Lili?” the bartender asked.
Greta nodded.
“Nice girl. Comes in and sits over there, by the door. I’m sure you know this, but the boys fall over themselves trying to get her attention. She ’ll share a beer with one of them and then, when his head is turned, disappear. Yes, she left a scarf.”
He handed it to her, and Greta tied it around her head. There it was again, the faint smell of mint and milk.
Out on the street, the air was damp, its chill deep and salty. Already her summer tan had faded and her hands had chapped. She thought of how beautiful Pasadena was in October, with the burned-out San Gabriel Mountains plum-brown and the bougainvillea climbing chimneys.
Central Station echoed with the efficient swish of moving feet. Pigeons murmured in the timber rafters above, their chalky dung lurching down the red-oak beams. Greta bought a roll of mints from a news-candy boy, whose customers were leaving trails of paper wrappers across the floor.
Einar arrived at the ticket kiosk looking lost. His cheeks were raw from scrubbing, his hair slick with tonic. He had been running, and he wiped his brow anxiously. Only when she saw him in a crowd did Greta think about how small he was, his head barely high enough to rest on another man’s breast. That was how Greta saw him: she exaggerated his slightness; she told herself, she came to believe, that Einar, with his bony wrists and his backside small and curved, was practically a child.
Einar looked up at the pigeons, as if he were in Central Station for the first time. He shyly asked a young girl in a pinafore for the time.
Something in Greta settled down. She went to Einar and kissed him. She straightened his lapel. “Here’s your ticket,” she said. “Inside is the address of the doctor I want you to see.”
“First I want you to tell me something,” Einar said. “I want you to agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.” He was rocking on his heels.
“Of course there’s nothing wrong with you,” Greta said, swatting her hands through the air. “But I still want you to see the doctor.”
“Why?”
“Because of Lili.”
“Poor little girl,” he said.
“If you want Lili to stay-with us, I mean-then I think a doctor should know about her.” Afternoon shoppers, mostly women, were nudging by them, their net bags bulky with cheese and herring.
Greta wondered why she continued to speak of Lili as if she were a third person. It would crush Einar-she could imagine his fine bones crumpling into a heap-were she to admit, aloud at least, that Lili was no more than her husband in a dress. Really, but it was the truth.
“Why are you doing this now?” Einar asked. The red rim of his eyelids nearly made Greta turn the other way.
“I love Lili as much as you do, more than-” but she stopped herself. “The doctor can help her.”
“How? How can anyone but you and me help Lili?”
“Let ’s see what the doctor says.”
Einar tried one last time. “I don’t want to go. Lili wouldn’t want me to go.”
Greta straightened her back, her head lifting. “But I want you to go,” she said. “I’m your wife, Einar.” She pointed him toward track 8 and sent him on his way, her hand falling on the small of his back. “Go on,” she said as he shuffled across the floor, past the news-candy boy, through the trail of paper wrappers, his body slipping into the crowd of shoppers, his head becoming one of a hundred, mostly women, who were busy with Copenhagen errands and fat with children, whose breasts were falling just as Einar’s were lifting, who would one day-Greta knew even then-look at Einar in a crowd and see only themselves.
Einar sat by the window, the noon sun curled in his lap. The train was passing houses with red tile roofs, laundry and children waving in the yards. An old woman was opposite him, her hands around her purse handle. She offered a mint from a foil roll. “Going to Helsingør?”
“To Rungsted,” he said.
“Me too.” A square of open-knit lace was holding up her white hair. Her eyes were snow blue, her earlobes fatty and loose. “You have a friend there?”
“An appointment.”
“A medical appointment?”
Einar nodded, and the old woman said, “I see.” She tugged on her cardigan. “At the radium institute?”
“I believe so,” he said. “My wife made the appointment.” He opened the envelope Greta had given him. Inside was an ecru card with a note Lili had written to Greta last week: Sometimes I feel trapped. Do you ever feel that way? Is it me? Is it Copenhagen? Kisses-
“Your card says Dr. Hexler,” the old woman said. “On the back is Dr. Hexler’s address. It’s on my way. I’ll be happy to take you. Some say he runs the best radium institute in Denmark.” The woman hugged her purse against her breasts. “Some say he can cure almost anything.”
Einar thanked the old woman and then sat back in his seat. Through the window the sun was warm. He had considered skipping the appointment. When she told him to meet her at Central Station, a furious flash of an image ran through his head: that of Greta, her chin high above the crowd, waiting at the station for him to arrive. He thought about defying her and never showing up. He thought about her chin slowly falling as the minutes and hours passed and it became more and more evident that he would not come. She would shuffle home. She would open the door to the apartment in the Widow House and find him waiting for her at the table. Einar would say, “I don’t want to see the doctor.” And she would pause, and then say, “All right.”
“We ’re here,” the old woman on the train said. “Get your things.”
Red waxy cones from the yew trees were lying along Rungsted’s streets. It had rained in the morning, leaving a damp, evergreen smell. The old woman inhaled deeply. She walked quickly, her hips squirming in her skirt. “Don’t be nervous,” she said.
“I’m not nervous.”
“There ’s nothing wrong with being nervous.” They turned onto a street of houses behind low walls with white iron gates. An open-air motorcar drove past them, its engine snapping. The driver, a man in a leather golf hat, waved at the old woman. “Here we are,” the woman said on a corner across from the harbor, at a blue building so indistinguishable it could have been a bakery. She squeezed Einar’s arm, just under the pit. Then she hooked up her collar and headed toward the sea.
Einar had to wait in Dr. Hexler’s examination room for almost an hour. Half the room looked like a parlor, with a carpet and a cabinet-sofa and bookshelves and a spider plant in a stand. The other half had a rubber floor, a padded table, glass jars of clear liquids, and an oversized lamp on casters.
Dr. Hexler entered, saying, “Didn’t the nurse ask you to remove your clothes?” His chin was long and extended with a cleft deep enough to sink a slot. His hair was silver, and when he sat in the chair opposite Einar he revealed a pair of Scottish argyle socks. The woman from the train had said he was equally known for his rose garden, which, outside the clinic’s window, was cropped for the winter.
“Trouble in the marriage?” he said. “Is that what I understand?”
“Not exactly trouble.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Six years,” Einar said. He recalled their wedding in St. Alban’s Church in the park; the young deacon was English and, that morning, nicked by his razor. He had said, in a voice as light as the air floating through the pink-glass windows and into the laps of their wedding guests, “This is a special wedding. I see something special here. In ten years the two of you will be extraordinary people.”
“Any children?” Dr. Hexler asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“You do conduct intercourse, is that right?” Dr. Hexler’s face was stony, and Einar could imagine him in his rose garden with that same face, discovering with grave disappointment a petal-eating mite. “There is regular copulation?”
By now Einar had stripped down to his underpants. The pile of clothes on the chair looked sad, the white shirtsleeves reaching limply from the waist of his trousers. Dr. Hexler waved him to sit on the cabinet-sofa. Through a hose with a funnel on the end he ordered his nurse to bring in coffee and a dish of candied almonds.
“Is there ejaculation?” he continued.
Around Einar, bricks of indignity were being laid. Each insult, from Greta, and now from Dr. Hexler, was a red brick of hurt stacking with the others to build a wall. “Sometimes,” Einar answered.
“Good enough.” Dr. Hexler flipped a page in his notepad. And then, “Your wife tells me you like to dress as a woman.”
“Is that what she said?” Then the nurse entered, a woman with frizzy red hair. She set down the coffee and the almonds. “Sugar?” she asked.
“Mrs. Wegener told me about a girl,” Dr. Hexler continued. “A girl named Lili.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Wegener?” the nurse asked. “Sugar?”
“No. Nothing for me.” She poured the coffee for Dr. Hexler and then left.
“Mr. Wegener, I’m a specialist. There’s virtually no trouble I haven’t treated. If you are embarrassed, please remember that I’m not.”
Einar didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to believe Dr. Hexler would understand; that if he were to tell Hexler about the tunnel that led to Lili’s lair, that if Einar were to admit Lili wasn’t really him but someone else, Hexler would tap a pencil against his lips and say, “Ah, yes. No need to worry. I’ve seen this before.”
Einar began, “Sometimes I feel a need to go find Lili.” He’d come to think of it as a hunger. Not like a hungry stomach an hour before dinner; it was more like when you’ve missed several meals, when you’re hollow. When you’re concerned about where your next plate of food will come from, if it will ever come. It could make Einar dizzy. “Sometimes I lose my breath when I think about her,” Einar said.
“Where do you go to find her?” Dr. Hexler asked. His thick glasses made his eyes look as huge as pickled eggs in a jar of oil.
“Inside me.”
“And is she always there?”
“Yes. Always.”
“What would you think if I were to tell you to stop dressing as her?” Dr. Hexler leaned forward in his chair.
“Do you think I should, Doctor? Do you think I’m hurting something by doing this?” Einar felt small in his underpants, the crack of the couch’s cushions nearly swallowing him. Now Einar wanted some coffee, but he could barely reach to the table for the urn.
Dr. Hexler switched on the examination lamp, its silver bowl whitening with light. “Let’s have a look,” he said. He briefly pressed his hand on Einar’s shoulder as he stood.
“Please stand,” Dr. Hexler said, wheeling over the lamp, its casters trembling. He aimed the light at Einar’s stomach. The few freckles around his navel looked garishly brown, the few black hairs reminding Einar of the dust that gathers in a corner. “Do you feel anything when I do this?” Dr. Hexler asked, his palm against Einar’s stomach.
“No.”
“And this?”
“No.”
“What about here?”
“No.”
“I see.” He was sitting in front of Einar on a steel stool. More than anything else Einar wanted Dr. Hexler to declare that there was nothing wrong with Lili and Einar, that their shared body was no more a malnor mality than a nailless toe, or even Dr. Hexler’s long chin with the cleft so deep it could nearly receive a key.
“How about down there?” he said, pointing a tongue depressor at Einar’s crotch. “May I have a look?”
When Einar lowered his underpants, Dr. Hexler’s face stopped, only his nostrils, with their pores jammed with dots of black, moving. “Appears to be all there,” he said. “You can pull them up again. You seem to be in quite good health. There ’s nothing else you want to tell me about?”
Only the day before, Einar had crammed a rag into his underpants. Had Greta told the doctor about that as well? Einar felt cornered. “There’s something else I suppose I should mention,” he began.
When Einar told him about the bleeding, Dr. Hexler’s shoulders pressed together into a hump. “Yes, your wife said something about this. Is there anything in the blood? Is it clotty?”
“I don’t think so.” Another brick of indignity was mortared into place. The only relief Einar could find just then was from shutting his eyes.
“It’s time for an X ray,” Dr. Hexler said. He seemed surprised when Einar said he’d never had one before. “It will tell us if there ’s something wrong,” Dr. Hexler said. “It may also drive this desire out of you.” From the way his eyebrows lifted above his spectacles, Einar could tell that Dr. Hexler was proud of his clinic’s technology. He went on to discuss gamma rays and natural radium emanating from radium salts. “Ionizing radiation is turning out to be the miracle cure for all sorts of things. It works on ulcers, dry scalp, and most certainly impotence,” he said. “It’s become the treatment of choice.”
“What will it do to me?”
“It will look inside you.” And then, as if offended, “It will treat you.”
“Do I really need one?”
But Dr. Hexler was already sending orders through the funnel.
When they were ready for Einar, a skinny man with a sharp Adam’s apple led him out of Dr. Hexler’s office. This was Vlademar, Hexler’s assistant, and he led Einar to a room with tile walls and a floor raked for runoff, a drain in the corner covered with mesh. White canvas straps hung from the gurney in the middle of the room, the buckles shiny under the lights.
“Let’s strap you in,” Vlademar said. Einar asked if it was necessary. Vlademar grunted his reply, his Adam’s apple jabbing up.
The X-ray machine was the shape of an inverted L, its metal casing painted a muddy green. It extended over the gurney, a large gray eye of a lens pointed at the stretch of skin between Einar’s navel and his groin. There was a black glass window in the room, behind which, Einar imagined, Dr. Hexler was instructing Vlademar which round-knobbed levers to pull. It occurred to Einar, as the lights in the room dimmed and the machine coughed and then whirred, its casing vibrating tinnily, that this was only the beginning of doctors and tests. Somehow Einar knew the X rays would show nothing, and Dr. Hexler would either order more or send him to a second specialist, or a third. And Einar didn’t mind, not just then, because anything seemed worth undertaking for the sake of Greta and Lili.
Einar had expected the X ray’s light to be gold and flecked, but it was invisible, and he felt nothing. At first Einar thought the machine wasn’t working. He nearly sat up and asked, “Is something wrong?”
Then the X-ray machine switched into a higher gear, its whirring lifting an octave. The dented green metal casing rattled more, sounding like a baking sheet shaking dry. Then Einar wondered if he felt something on his stomach, but he wasn’t sure. He thought of a stomach alive with glow worms nested from the Bluetooth bog. He wondered if he felt a warm, fizzy feeling or if he was imagining it. He propped himself up on his elbows to look down, but there was nothing different about his stomach, gray in the dimmed room. “Please be still,” Dr. Hexler said through a funnel speaker. “Lie back down.”
But nothing was happening, or what seemed to Einar like nothing. The machine was clattering, and a blank feeling spread across his abdomen: he couldn’t tell if he felt something hot there or not. Then he thought he felt the pinch of a burn, but when he looked again, his stomach was just the same. “Lie still, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler’s voice boomed again. “This is serious.”
Einar couldn’t tell how long the machine had been running. Had two minutes passed, or twenty? And when would it end? The room dimmed further, now nearly black, and a yellow ring of light rippled around the gray lens. Einar was bored, and then, suddenly, sleepy. He closed his eyes, and it felt as if his body was becoming densely heavy. He thought about looking down to his stomach one last time, but his arms wouldn’t move to lift him. How had he become so tired? His head felt like a lead ball attached to his neck. In his throat Einar tasted his morning coffee.
“Try to go to sleep, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler said. The machine roared even louder, and Einar felt something hot press against his stomach.
Then Einar knew something was wrong. He opened his eyes just long enough to see someone lean his forehead against the black glass window, then a second forehead pressing, smudging. If Greta were here, Einar thought dreamily, she would unstrap me and take me home. She would kick the green machine until it stopped. A crash of whipping metal shook the room, but Einar couldn’t open his eyes to see what had happened. If Greta were here, she’d yell at Hexler to turn off the damn machine. If Greta were here… but Einar couldn’t finish the thought because he was asleep-no, beyond sleep.
As Dr. Hexler’s X-ray machine continued to clang, Greta pressed her forehead against the black glass window. Maybe she’d been wrong; maybe her husband didn’t need to see a doctor. She wondered if she should have listened to his protests.
On the other side of the glass, Einar was lying strapped to the gurney. He looked beautiful, with his eyes closed, his skin a soft gray through the glass. The small mound of his nose rose up from his face. “Are you sure he ’s comfortable?” she asked Dr. Hexler.
“For the most part.”
She’d worried that Einar was slipping away from her. It sometimes bothered her that Einar never became jealous when a man on the street ran his eyes over her breasts; the only time he commented on it was when he was dressed as Lili, and then he’d say, “How lucky you are.”
In her consultation with Dr. Hexler the week before, he had said there was a possibility of a tumor in the pelvis that could be causing both infertility and Einar’s confused state of masculinity. “I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve read about it. It can go undetected, with its only manifestations being odd behavior.” Part of her wanted the theory to make sense. Part of her wanted to believe that a little scalpel curved like a scythe could slice free the tumor, its rind as blood-orange and tight as a persimmon, and Einar would return to their marriage.
On the other side of the window there was a crash of metal, but Dr. Hexler said, “Everything’s fine.” Einar was writhing on the gurney, his legs pressing against the straps. They were so taut with tension that Greta thought the straps might snap and Einar’s body would fling itself across the room. “When will you be finished?” she asked Hexler. “Are you sure everything is going all right?” She fingered the ends of her hair, thinking at once how she hated its coarseness and that if anything were ever to happen to Einar, she wouldn’t know what to do.
“An X ray takes time,” Vlademar said.
“Is it hurting him? It looks like he’s in pain.”
“Not really,” Dr. Hexler said. “There might be a small surface burn or ulceration, but not much else.”
“He’ll feel a bit sick in the stomach,” Vlademar added.
“It will do him good,” Dr. Hexler said. He was calm-faced, with stubby black lashes that beat around his eyes. He stuttered the first syllable of every sentence, but his voice was dark with authority. After all, the clinic drew the richest men in Denmark, men with bellies loose over their belts who, in their flurry to manufacture rubber shoes and mineral dyes and superphosphates and Portland cement, lost control of all that hung below their belts.
“And if it’s the devil your husband’s got in him,” Vlademar added, “I’ll zap it out.”
“That ’s the beauty of the X ray,” Hexler said. “It burns away the bad and keeps the good. It might not be an exaggeration to call it a miracle.” Both men smiled, their teeth reflected in the black glass, and Greta felt something small and regretful beneath her breast.
When it was over, Vlademar moved Einar to a room with two small windows and a folding screen on casters. He slept for an hour while Greta sketched. She was drawing Lili, asleep in the institute’s bed. If the X ray found a tumor and Dr. Hexler removed it, then what would happen? Would she never again see Lili in Einar’s face, in his lips, in the pale green veins that ran on the underside of his wrists like rivers on a map? She had contacted Dr. Hexler in the first place in order to ease Einar’s mind-or had it been to ease her own? No, she had first telephoned Hexler, from the little booth at the post office, because she knew she had to do something for Einar. Wasn’t it her responsibility to make sure he got the proper attention? If she ’d ever promised herself anything, it was that she’d never let her husband simply slip away. Not after Teddy Cross. Greta thought of the blood bursting from Einar’s nose, seeping through the lap of Lili’s dress.
Einar turned in the bed, moaning. He was pale, his skin loose on his cheek. Greta placed a warm cloth across his forehead. Part of her hoped Hexler would instruct Einar to live freely as Lili, to take a job as a salesgirl behind the glass counter at Fonnesbech’s department store. Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life. “I know you’ll be as happy as your mother and father,” a cousin from Newport Beach had written after her marriage to Einar; it was all Greta could do to keep herself from burning the cousin from her memory. But I’m not like them, she told herself as she shredded the letter into the iron stove. We’re not like them. That was long before Lili showed up, but even then Greta knew she had married a man who would take her someplace unlike anywhere she ’d ever been. It was what she had first seen in Teddy, although that turned out not to be the case with him. But Einar was different. He was strange. He almost didn’t belong to this world. And on most days, Greta felt, neither did she.
Beneath the window, Dr. Hexler’s bare rosebushes were trembling in the wind. The other window overlooked the sea. There were black clouds, as dark and full as ink in water. A fishing boat was struggling to return to harbor. But how could she remain married to a man who sometimes wanted to live as a woman? I’m not going to let something like that stop me, she told herself, her sketchbook in her lap. Greta and Einar would do what they wanted. No one could keep her from doing as she pleased. Perhaps they would have to move someplace where no one knew them. Where nothing spoke for them-no gossip, no family name, no previously established reputation. Nothing except their paintings and the little whisper of Lili’s voice.
She was ready, Greta told herself. For whom or what or where, she wasn’t sure, but she was always ready.
Einar stirred again in his bed, struggling to lift his head. The bulb overhead cast a yellow bell of light on his face, and his cheeks looked hollow. Hadn’t he looked fine just this morning? But maybe she hadn’t paid enough attention to Einar during the past few months. Maybe he had become ill in front of her eyes and she had failed to notice until now. How busy she ’d become, painting and selling her work and writing Hans in Paris about arranging a visit for Lili, about the availability of an apartment in the Marais, with two skylights, one for herself and one for Einar-what with all of that, Greta might have missed something grave fading into the face of her husband. She thought of Teddy Cross.
“Greta,” Einar said. “Am I all right?”
“You will be. Rest some more.”
“What happened?”
“It was a strong X ray. Nothing to worry about.”
Einar pressed the side of his face into the pillow. He fell asleep again. There he was, Greta’s husband. With his fine skin, and his small head with the temples that dented softly, almost like a baby’s. With his nose flaring with breath. With his smell of turpentine and talc. With the skin around his eyes red and nearly on fire.
Greta replaced the cloth across his forehead.
When Dr. Hexler finally arrived, Greta said, “At last.”
They went into the corridor. “Is he going to be all right?”
“He’ll be better tomorrow, and even better the day after.” Greta thought she saw concern in the wrinkles around Dr. Hexler’s mouth. “The X ray didn’t show anything.”
“No tumor?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what ’s wrong with him?” Greta asked.
“In terms of his physical health, nothing at all.”
“What about the bleeding?”
“It’s hard to be sure, but probably nothing more than his diet. Be sure he avoids any stony fruit and fish bones.”
“Do you really think that’s all there is to it? His diet?” Greta took one step back. “Do you really believe he’s a perfectly healthy man, Dr. Hexler?”
“His health is normal. But is he a normal man? Not at all. Your husband isn’t well.”
“What can I do?”
“Do you keep a lock on your wardrobe? To keep him out of your clothes?”
“Of course not.”
“You should do so immediately.”
“What good would that do? Besides, he has dresses of his own.”
“Get rid of them right away. You shouldn’t be encouraging this, Mrs. Wegener. If he thinks you approve of it, he might think it’s all right for him to pretend he ’s Lili.” Dr. Hexler paused. “Then he’ll have no hope. You haven’t been encouraging this, have you? I hope for his sake that you’ve never told him that you approve.”
It was what Greta feared most, that somehow Lili would be blamed on her. That she had somehow harmed her husband. The corridor’s walls were dull yellow and scratched. Next to Greta was a portrait of Dr. Hexler, the type of portrait she used to paint.
One day just a few weeks before, Greta received a telephone call from Rasmussen, saying that Lili had come into the gallery. “I of course recognized her from your paintings,” he said. “But something might have been wrong. She seemed weak, or thirsty.” Rasmussen said he had given Lili a chair, and she quickly fell asleep, one silver bubble on her lips. Soon after, Baroness Haggard came to the gallery with her Egyptian chauffeur. The baroness liked to think of herself as the most current of the aristocracy, and she couldn’t get over the irony-the “modernism,” as she put it-of coming across the paintings’ subject sleeping before the paintings themselves. The gallery filled with the soft leather sound of the baroness’s ostrich gloves applauding “the whole moment.” Five paintings were hanging, paintings done in the heat of late August in southern France, each lit as if from behind by the slow, creeping Menton sun. They showed Lili just as she now was in the chair: tentative, inward, exotic in size and poise, with her large nose and bony knees, her lids oily, her face bright. “The baroness bought all five,” Rasmussen had reported. “And Lili slept through the whole transaction. Greta, is something wrong with her? I certainly hope not. You aren’t keeping her out too late, are you? Take care of her, Greta. For your sake.”
“You’re really not concerned about the bleeding?” Greta asked Dr. Hexler. “Not in the least?”
“Not as much as I am about his delusion that he is a woman,” the doctor said. “Even an X ray can’t cure that. Would you like me to talk to Einar? I can tell him that he ’s injuring himself.”
“But is he?” Greta finally asked. “I mean, is he really?”
“Well, of course. I trust you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener. I trust you’d agree that if this doesn’t stop, we ’ll have to take more drastic measures. That a man like your husband can’t live much of a life. Of course Denmark is very open, but this isn’t about openness. It’s about sanity, wouldn’t you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener? Wouldn’t you agree that there ’s something not quite sane about your husband’s desires? That you and I, as responsible citizens, cannot let your husband free to roam as Lili? Not even in Copenhagen. Not even on occasion. Not even under your supervision. I trust you’ll agree with me that we should do whatever it takes to get this demon out of him, because that is what it is, don’t you agree with me, Mrs. Wegener? A demon. Mrs. Wegener, don’t you agree?”
And just then, Greta, who was thirty and a Californian and who could count at least three instances when she had nearly killed herself by accident-the second, for example, was when she performed a handstand on the teak railing of the Frederik VIII, which first carried her family to Denmark when she was ten-realized that Dr. Hexler knew very little, if anything at all. She’d been wrong, and she heard Einar moan in his bed, behind the folding screen.