Just off the boulevard de Sebastopol, north of Les Halles Centrales, there was a little street that ran for two blocks. Over the years the street ’s name had changed. It was once known as the rue du Poivre-a pepper warehouse had thrived and failed there. When it was known as the rue des Semaines, there was a hotel for returning soldiers. But now it was known-at least colloquially, because the blue-and-white street sign was missing-as the rue de la Nuit. The buildings on the street were black, with coalsoot on the windowsills, on the abandoned gas lamps, in the trough of the pissoir, on the torn awning of the tobacco shop, which also peddled in wheat vodka and girls. The doors on the street were numbered but signless. No one aside from the tobacco shop proprietor, who had a red mustache that caught the crumbs of his morning brioche, seemed to live on the street or conduct any sort of business, legitimate or otherwise. Number 22 was a door with a bubble-glass window, beyond that a hallway that smelled like the sooty pissoir. At the top of the stairs, another door, this one dented with kicks, and beyond that a counter with a woman named, or so she said, Madame Jasmin-Carton, and her Manx cat, Sophie.
Madame Jasmin-Carton was fat but still young. A thick brown fur grew on her forearms, in which her gold chain bracelets sometimes snagged. She once told Einar that one of her girls had gone off and married a Greek prince, leaving Madame Jasmin-Carton with the Manx cat. She also reported that over the years the visitors to her salles de plaisir included ambassadors, a prime minister, and a good dozen counts.
For five francs Madame Jasmin-Carton would give Einar a key chained to a brass bulb. The key admitted him to Salle No. 3, a narrow room with an armchair covered in green wool, a wire wastepaper basket thoughtfully emptied, and two small windows with their black shades drawn. There was a bulb in the ceiling that cast light around the green chair. Behind a smell of ammonia was the trace of something salty and bitter and wet.
It was May now, two sunny, warm days for every cold one. The narrow room was always cold. In the winter Einar had sat in the green chair in his overcoat and watched the puffs of his breath. He hadn’t been coming to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s long enough to know, but he imagined that in August the dim walls-already yellow from tobacco, and streaked-would sweat on their own.
Today, Einar peeled off his jacket, which had panel pockets and a fashionable looped belt. Greta had bought the jacket for Einar, as she did nearly all his clothes; she trusted he knew nothing of how to dress for Paris. Except of course Lili’s clothes: the drop-waist dresses with the matching silk headbands, the kid gloves that pulled past the elbow with pearly clasps, the shoes with the rhinestone ankle straps. Lili bought those herself. In a marmalade jar Einar would set aside Lili’s weekly allowance, and she would spend her way through it in two or three days, her hand reaching into the jar’s narrow mouth and snatching the cen times. The Lili money: that was the entry in Einar’s budget. He would look for francs in the pockets of his gabardine slacks to give her more. If he found none, sometimes Lili would run to Greta, who with Lili only seemed to know the words “yes” and “more.”
Einar lifted one of the black shades in the little room. Behind the smudged glass was a girl in a leotard and black stockings, one foot on a bentwood chair. She was dancing, although there was no music. Peering out of another little window was the face of a man, his oily nose pressed white to the glass. His breath left a stain of fog. The girl seemed aware of Einar and the other man; before she’d yank off a bit of clothing she would look around, although not directly at the their flat-nosed faces, and dip her chin.
She peeled a pair of gloves similar to Lili’s off the fleshy pipe of her arm. The girl was not pretty: black hair electric and dry, a horse’s jaw, hips too wide and stomach too narrow. But there was something lovely in her modesty, Einar thought; in the way she neatly draped her gloves and then her leotard and finally her stockings over the back of the bentwood chair, as if she knew she would need them again.
Soon she was naked except for her shoes. She started to dance more energetically, her toes pointing, her hands held out. She threw her head back, exposing her white-blue trachea pressing against her skin.
For almost six months Einar had been visiting Madame Jasmin-Carton’s, heading out in the afternoon when Greta was meeting with a collector or one of the magazine editors at La Vie Parisienne or L’Illustration who hired her to sketch their stories. But Einar didn’t go to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s for the same reason as the other men, who would press their pocked noses against the little windows, their tongues like sea urchins mashing up against a fishmonger’s glass. He only wanted to watch the girls strip and dance, to study the curve and heft of their breasts, to watch the thighs, eerily white and tremulous like the skin on a bowl of steamed milk, flap open and closed-he could almost hear the knee bones slap together through the greasy glass window. He also liked the underside of their forearms, where their veins, hot with shame and resentment, would flow greenly; and the pad of flesh that swelled beneath the navel-that part of a woman made him think of the pillow carried by a ring bearer at a wedding. He visited Madame Jasmin-Carton’s to examine women, to see how their bodies attached limb to trunk and produced a female. How the girl with the electric black hair would hold her chin down as she distractedly cupped each custardy breast. How the girl after her, a blonde with a wiry body, walked around the half-circle black room with her fists on her hips, which were all bone. Or how the girl from last Tuesday, whom Einar had never seen before, parted her freckled thighs and flashed her genitalia. The thighs closed quickly, and then she danced angrily, the sweat pouring down her neck, while the pink image of her sex burned in Einar’s eyes, even when he shut them and tried to forget who he was or where he was; even later, when he lay down next to Greta and tried to sleep while her bedside lamp burned and her fat-tipped pencil scratched away at the leather-spined notebook that held drawing after drawing, a career’s worth, of Lili.
Einar and Greta now lived in the Marais. They’d left Copenhagen over three years before. It had been Greta’s idea. One day a letter had arrived at the Widow House, and Einar could recall Greta reading it quickly and then lifting the lid of the iron stove and dropping it in. He could recall the brief yellow light that poured from the stove as it devoured the letter. Then she told Einar that Hans wanted them to move to Paris. “He thinks, and so do I, it would be best,” she said. “But why’d you burn his letter?” Einar asked. “Because I didn’t want Lili to see it. I don’t want her to know that Hans wants to see her again.”
They rented an apartment in a cut-stone townhouse on the rue Vieille du Temple. The apartment was on the fourth floor, the top, with skylights cut into the steep roof and windows facing the street. The rear faced the courtyard, where during the summer geraniums grew in window boxes wired to the ledges and laundry stiffened on the line. The townhouse was just down the street from the Hôtel de Rohan, with its entrance curving into the sidewalk and the two great black doors of its gate. The street was narrow but drained well in winter, and sliced through the Marais with its grand hôtels reconfigured as government offices or warehouses for dry-goods importers or simply abandoned, and its Jewish shops, where Einar and Greta would buy dried fruit and sandwiches on Sundays when everything else was closed.
The apartment had two workrooms. Einar’s, with a few landscapes of the bog perched on oversized easels. And Greta’s, with her Lili paintings, sold before they dried, and the spot on the wall, perpetually wet and thick, where she dabbed out her colors until they were just right: the brown of Lili’s hair, which turned to honey after one swim in an August sea; the purply red of the blush that clasped around the base of her throat; the silvery white of the inside of her elbows. Each workroom had a daybed covered with kilims. Sometimes at night Greta would sleep there when she was too tired to climb into the bed they shared in the little room at the back of the apartment, where there was a darkness that felt to Einar like a cocoon. In their bedroom, with the lamps turned off, it was too dark for Einar to see even his hand in front of his face, and this he liked, and he’d lie there until dawn, when the laundry pulley would squeak and one of their neighbors would get busy hanging out another load.
In the summer mornings Lili would rise and ride the omnibus down to the Bains du Pont-Solférino on the quai des Tuileries. The pool had a row of changing cabanas that were made of striped canvas, like tall, narrow tents. Inside Lili would change into her bathing dress, carefully arranging herself beneath the frilled skirt so that she could remain, as she thought of it, modest. Since they left Denmark her body had changed, and now her breasts were fleshy with muscle gone soft, enough to fill the little dented cups of her bathing dress. Her rubber bathing cap, with its pneumatic smell, would pull her hair back, tugging on her cheeks and giving her an exotic look with her eyes slanted and her mouth flattened out. Lili had learned to carry a hand mirror with her, and in the canvas cabana, in the summer mornings, she would look at herself, waving the mirror across each inch of her skin, until the pool attendant would flap the canvas and demand if mademoiselle needed some assistance.
With that, Lili would slip into the pool, holding her head above the water. She would bathe for thirty minutes, her shoulders turning as each arm lifted over her head with the motion of a windmill, until the other women in the pool-for this pool, like the tearoom where she sometimes took her coffee and croissant, was reserved for ladies-would stop and hang on to the lip of the pool to watch little Lili, so graceful, so long-armed, so, they would cluck, puissante.
It was what she liked most: her head gliding across the surface of the pool like a little duck; the other ladies in their wool bathing dresses watching her with their mixture of indifference and gossipy intrigue; the way she could pull herself from the pool, her fingertips pruned, and pat the towel down her arms as she dried in the glittering light that reflected off the Seine. She would watch the traffic across the river. And Lili would think that all of this was possible because she and Greta had left Denmark. She would think, in the summer mornings, on the lip of the pool filled with Seine water, that she was free. Paris had freed her. Greta had freed her. Einar, she would think, was slipping away. Einar was freeing her. A shiver would run up her damp spine; her shoulders would shudder.
In the cabana, after returning the pink towel to the attendant, she would peel off the bathing dress, and if she was in a particularly strong trance about her life and the possibility of it all, she would let out a little gasp when she discovered that down there, between her white, goose-pimpled thighs, lay a certain shriveled thing. It was so vile to her that she would snap closed her thighs, tucking it away, her knee bones smacking; she could hear the muffled smack, and the sound of it-like two felt-wrapped cymbals meeting in crescendo-would remind Lili, would remind Einar, of the girl at Madame Jasmin-Carton’s who had danced resentfully and snapped her knees together in such a harsh manner that he could hear the smack of bone even through the smudged glass.
And so there Einar would be-a little Danish man in the changing cabana of Paris’s finest ladies’ pool. At first he would be confused, his face blank in the hand mirror. He wouldn’t know where he was, couldn’t recognize the reverse stripes of the inside of the cabana’s canvas. Didn’t recognize the slip and splash of the ladies swimming laps. The only clothing on the hanger was a simple brown dress with a belt. Black shoes with wedgy heels. A purse with a few coins and a lipstick. A chiffon scarf patterned with pears. He was a man, he would suddenly think, and yet he had no way back to the apartment unless he put on all these clothes. Then he’d see the double string of Danish amber beads; his grandmother had worn them her whole life, even when farming the sphagnum fields, the beads around her throat clickety-clacketing against her sternum as she stooped to fill in the hole of a red fox. She had given them to Greta, who hated amber, who gave them to Einar; and Einar-he recalled-gave them to a little girl named Lili.
It came to him like that: in pieces, slowly, triggered by the amber beads or the swat of the attendant’s hand against the canvas door as she inquired once again whether mademoiselle needed assistance. He would put on the brown dress and the wedgy shoes as best he could. He would burn with shame as he clasped the belt, although now it would seem to him that he knew nothing about the tricky snaps and clasps of a woman’s dress. His purse held only a few francs; more weren’t coming for another three days, he knew. But Einar would decide against walking and take a cab back to the apartment because the discomfort of the brown dress was too much to bear on the streets of Paris. The scarf hung over the back of the chair, nearly fluttering on its own, and Einar couldn’t bear to tie it over his head and around his throat. It looked as if it might strangle him, the gauzy chiffon with the yellow pears. It belonged to someone else.
And so Einar would set out from the ladies’ pool in Lili’s clothes, with the rubber bathing cap still on his head, dropping a franc into the attendant’s ever-extended hand, gliding like the little duck on the pool’s surface, above the whispery gossip of the French ladies who would linger at the pool until it was time to return home and help their Polish maids prepare lunch for their pinafored children, while Einar, sloppy and red-eyed in Lili’s clothes, would return to Greta, who, in the course of the morning, had set the props and sketched the study for another painting of Lili.
One day in early May, Einar was sitting in the place des Vosges, on a bench beneath a hedge of trees. The wind kept lifting the fountain’s trickle, throwing it at his feet and staining the sand-colored gravel around him. In the morning Lili had gone for a swim. In the afternoon, Einar had returned to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s and witnessed through the little black glass a man and woman make love on the floor. It had cost him three times the usual entry fee; Madame Jasmin-Carton had been advertising the spectacle for a month on note cards tacked above the peep windows. The note cards, with the information of the public liaison neatly printed out, reminded Einar of the notes Lili and Greta had used to communicate with each other during the early days in Denmark: as if there were something about the crisp, echoey air of Copenhagen that couldn’t support the secret words they needed to say.
The boy was tall and stringy, not much more than an adolescent with his bluish-white skin and sleepy blue eyes and ribs that could be counted one, two, three. He quickly peeled himself out of his cheap tweed suit, and then helped the woman, who was older, out of her dress. Not counting himself, Einar had never before seen a man sexually aroused, the way it pointed up like a spear in the first inches of its trajectory. The boy’s was red-tipped and drippy and angry. The woman took it in her easily, and then, at just that moment, seemed grateful. They thrashed around on the floor of the little dark half-circle room, while pressed to every window was the face of a man old enough to be the boy’s grandfather. Quickly he finished up, his seed flying up in a heavy arc into the woman’s puckered face. He stood and bowed. He left the room, his tweed suit a bundle under his arm. Only then, when Einar looked down into his own lap, did he discover the salty stain, as if a teacup of seawater had overturned. Then he knew, although he supposed he had always known: he wanted the boy to do that to Lili. To kiss her just before the boy’s chest flushed red and his mouth twisted with pleasure.
After that, Einar found himself on the bench in the place des Vosges. He opened his coat to allow his lap, which he had rinsed out in Madame’s hand basin, to dry. Children were splashing each other in the fountain and pushing hoops across the gravel paths, and one girl was flying a paper kite shaped like a bat. Italian governesses were talking loudly over their prams parked in a circle. Einar turned away from them, embarrassed by his stain. The sun had been warm at the pool that morning, but now it kept slipping behind streamers of clouds, the park suddenly turning gray, the children, it seemed, mere cutouts of themselves. Einar’s lap wouldn’t dry. The wet wool reminded him of the dogs on the farm in Bluetooth, how they’d come home from a day hunting for frogs. They’d be crusty and dank, their fur hard, and they’d never really lose that wet smell.
The little girl with the kite let out a scream. The string had slipped out of her hand and now the kite was tumbling from the sky. She was following it with her finger as it fell. Then she began to run, the bow in her hair flopping against her ears. Her governess yelled for her to stop. The governess looked angry, her Italian face red and stormy. She told the little girl, Martine, to wait by the pram. The kite was hurtling toward the earth, its black paper fluttering in its frame. Then it crashed near Einar’s foot.
The governess snatched the crumpled kite with a pretty hand and a hiss. Then she took Martine ’s wrist and led her back to the pram, pulling her close to her side. The other governesses were standing under the hedge of trees, their prams huddled together at the bumper. When Martine and her governess joined them, they all looked over their shoulders in suspicion. Then the pack wheeled away, the squeak of their wheels a cry.
This was when Einar knew something had to change. Einar had become a man governesses feared in a park. Einar was a man with suspicious stains on his clothes.
It was May 1929, and he would give himself exactly one year. The park was dim, the sun hidden by clouds. The hedge of trees, with their fresh leaves shaking, looked cold. Again, a wind lifted the trickling water from the fountain and sprayed it onto the gravel. If in exactly one year Lili and Einar weren’t sorted out, he would come to the park and kill himself.
It made him straighten his back. He could no longer bear the chaos in his life. Greta owned a silver-plated pistol from her California days. She’d grown up with it tucked in her stocking. He would return to the park with it and, under the black May night, he would press it to his temple.
Einar heard footsteps running toward him, and he looked up from his lap. It was Martine in her yellow pinafore. She looked frightened but enthusiastic. She stopped running and inched closer. Her soft hand reached out. Between Einar and her lay the kite’s tail, a row of rag-bows on a string. Martine wanted it, and from the little smile pushing through her frown, Einar could tell she wanted to be friendly with him. She grabbed the tail. Then she laughed, her face like gold. When she curtsied and said “Merci,” everything Einar knew about himself pressed together as one: the cottongrass apron strings around his waist; his head held in Greta’s young hands; Lili in the sennep-yellow shoes in the Widow House; Lili this morning swimming laps in the river pool. Einar and Lili were one, but it was time to split them in two. He had one year.
“Martine-Martine!” called the governess. Martine’s buckle shoes ground through the gravel. One year, Einar told himself. And then again, from over her shoulder, Martine called cheerfully, “Merci.” She waved, and Einar and Lili as one waved in return.
After three years in Paris, Greta had never worked harder in her life. In the mornings, when Lili was out doing the marketing or bathing at the pool, Greta would complete her magazine assignments. There was an editor at La Vie Parisienne who called nearly every week, panic in his fussy voice, asking for a quick drawing of the opera’s latest production of Carmen, or a sketch to accompany the story on the exhibition of dinosaur bones at the Grand Palais. Really, there was no need to accept such a job, Greta would tell herself. Her name had been appearing in the magazines for a couple of years; but on the telephone the editor would squeak about his need for artwork. As Greta, the phone receiver between her chin and shoulder, watched Lili slip out of the apartment, Greta would think to herself, Oh, why not? Yes, she would do the sketch. Yes, she could deliver it by the morning. But I really must be getting to it, Greta would say, replacing the receiver in its cradle and then going to the window to see Lili, quick in the daylight, off to the Marché Buci, her pink spring coat bright against the dull, rain-soaked street.
Not until Lili returned would Greta’s real work begin. Then she would boil a cup of tea for Lili and say, “Come sit here,” posing her on a stool, or next to a potted palm tree, placing the cup and saucer into Lili’s hands. No matter the weather, Lili would always return to the apartment cold, her hands trembling. Greta feared she didn’t have enough flesh on her frame, but she could never get her to eat anything more. The bleeding returned every now and then, once every few months, announced by a slow drop of blood inching across Lili’s upper lip. Then she would lie in bed for days, as if stored in those few crimson drops was all her energy. Greta had taken Einar to one or two French doctors, but as soon as they began to probe with their questions (“Is there anything else I should know about your husband?”), she would realize that none of them would have any more answers than Dr. Hexler. She would worry as Lili lay in bed, sleeping through the day, staining the sheets, which Greta would later have to shove into the incinerator behind the apartment. But then, after a few days, sometimes a week, just as quickly as it had begun, the bleeding would cease. “How dull it is to spend a week in bed,” Lili would say, throwing the bolster pillow to the carpet.
If she were to count them up, Greta would discover that she had more than one hundred paintings of Lili by now: Lili bathing in the pool; Lili as a member of a wedding party; Lili examining carrots at the market. But most were Lili set in landscapes, on a heath, in an olive grove, against the blue line of the Kattegat Sea. Always her eyes brown and huge, hooded; the delicate curve of her plucked eyebrows; hair parted around the ear to reveal an amber earring hanging against her neck.
Einar himself no longer painted. “I’m having a hard time imagining the bog,” he’d call from his studio, where his canvases and his paints were kept tidy. Out of habit he continued to order bottles of paint from Munich, even though the best paints in the world were sold just across the river at Sennelier, where the clerk kept a perpetually pregnant cat. Greta hated the cat, whose bloated stomach sagged to the floor, but she enjoyed visiting with the clerk, a man named Du Brul, who often said, with his Van Dyke goatee twitching madly, that she was his most important lady customer. “And some believe a lady cannot paint!” he ’d say as she left the store with a box of paint bottles wrapped in newsprint, the cat hissing as if she were about to give birth.
The apartment on the rue Vieille du Temple had a central room big enough for a long table and two reading chairs by the gas fireplace. There was a red velvet ottoman in the room, large and round, with an upholstered column rising from its center, like the kind in shoe stores. And an oak rocker, with a brown leather cushion, shipped over from Pasadena. She had begun to call the apartment the casita. It didn’t look like a casita, with its split-beam ceilings and the portes-fenêtres with their copper lock-bolts separating the rooms. But for some reason it made her think of the casita on the rim of the Arroyo Seco she and Teddy Cross had moved into after they left Bakersfield. The sunlight that poured in from the mossy brick patio had helped Teddy rise every day with another idea for a pot to throw on his wheel, or two colors to combine for a glaze. He had worked quickly and freely when they lived there. There was an avocado tree in the back garden that produced more heavy green grenades of fruit than they could possibly eat or give away. “I want to be like the avocado tree,” Teddy would say. “Constantly producing.” Now in Paris, in the casita, Greta thought of herself as the avocado tree. From the branch of her filbert brush the Lili paintings continued to drop and drop and drop.
For a while she regretted Einar’s abandoned career. Many of his landscapes hung in the apartment, crown molding to baseboard. They were a constant and sometimes sad reminder of their inverted lives. At least to Greta. Never did Einar admit that he missed his artist’s life. But she sometimes missed it for him, finding it hard to understand how one who had spent his life creating could simply stop. She supposed his old drive-the need to turn to a blank canvas with a chestful of ideas and fear-was now transferred to Lili.
Within a year of their arrival in Paris, Hans had begun to sell the Lili paintings. With the magazines calling, Greta’s name began to float around Paris, in the cafés along boulevard St-Germain, in the salons where artists and writers lay on zebra-skin rugs drinking distilled liqueurs made from yellow plums. So many Americans in Paris, too, each talking about the other, eyeing one another in that American way. Greta tried to stay clear of them, of the circle that gathered nightly at 27 rue de Fleurus. She remained suspicious of them, and they of her, she knew. Their nights of fireside gossip about who was or wasn’t modern didn’t interest Greta. And in those societies of wit and airs, Greta knew, there was no room for Lili or Einar.
But the demand for the Lili paintings continued, and just as Greta began to feel as if she couldn’t keep up, she had an idea. She was painting Lili in a field of lucerne grass in rural Denmark. To do this she had Lili stand in her studio with her fists on her hips. The portrait of Lili Greta managed easily enough, although she had to imagine the flat Danish summer sunlight on Lili’s face. But the background of the field, with the grass rising behind Lili, didn’t interest Greta very much. To paint the grass properly, and the distant kettle-hole lakes, would take Greta several days; first the horizon would have to dry, then the lakes, then the first layer of grass, then a second and a third.
“Would you like to finish this one up for me?” Greta asked Einar one day. It was May 1929, and Einar had been out the whole afternoon. He returned to the apartment saying he’d spent the afternoon in the place des Vosges, “Watching the children fly their kites.” He looked especially thin in his tweed suit, his coat over his arm. “Is everything all right?” she asked as he loosened his tie and went to make himself a cup of tea. In his shoulders Greta saw a sadness, a new melancholy blacker than anything she had seen before; they hung like a frown. His hand sat cold and lifeless in hers. “I’m having a hard time keeping up. Why don’t you start doing some of my backgrounds? You know better than me what a field of lucerne grass should look like.”
With Edvard IV in his lap, Einar thought about this. His shirt was wrinkled, and next to him on the table was a plate of pears. “Do you think I can?” he said.
She led him into her studio, showed him the half-finished portrait. “I think there should be a kettle-hole lake on the horizon,” she said.
Einar stared at the half-finished painting. He looked at it blankly, as if he didn’t recognize the girl. Then, slowly, an understanding filled his eyes, the lids pulling back, his brow smoothing out. “A few things are missing,” he said. “Yes, there should be a lake, and also a single willow growing from the bank of a stream. And perhaps a farmhouse. Too far off in the horizon to be sure what it is, just a pale brown blur of something. But there ’d probably be a farmhouse.”
He stayed up most of the night with the painting, smudging his shirt and his pants. Greta was happy to see him at work again, and she began to think of other paintings she could share with Einar. Even if it meant fewer afternoons with Lili, she wanted Einar to have his work. As she prepared for bed she heard him in her studio, the clink of the glass paint bottles. She couldn’t wait to call Hans in the morning to tell him that Einar was painting again. That she ’d found a way to produce even more Lili paintings. “You’ll never believe who’s helping me out,” she’d say. The memory of Hans at the Gare du Nord over three years ago revisited her. It was when she and Einar first arrived in Paris, with only a handful of addresses in their notebooks. Hans was waiting at the train station, his camel hair coat a still beige column in the crowd of black wool. “You’ll be fine,” he assured Greta, kissing her cheek. He clasped both his hands around Einar’s neck, kissing his forehead. Hans chauffeured them to a hotel on the left bank a few blocks from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Then he kissed them goodbye. Greta remembered feeling crushed, that Hans would meet them with open arms and then disappear so quickly. She watched his Borreby head slip through the lobby door. Einar must have felt the same disappointment, or worse. “Do you suppose Hans didn’t want us to come?” he said. Greta was wondering that herself, but she reminded Einar how busy Hans was. In truth, she had sensed a grave reluctance from Hans, in his stance as straight and steely as one of the columns supporting the station’s roof.
Einar said, “Do you suppose we’re too Danish for his taste? Too provincial?” And Greta, who looked at her husband with his bog-brown eyes and his shaking fingers and Edvard IV in his arms, replied, “It’s him, not us.”
At the hotel they let two rooms, trimmed in red, one with a curtained alcove. The hotel’s factotum declared proudly that Oscar Wilde had lived his final weeks there. “He passed on in the alcove,” the proprietress reported with a dip of her chin.
Greta took little note of this bit of history. It seemed too depressing a fact for her to press onto Einar. They lived in the two rooms for several months while they hunted for an apartment. After only a few days the hotel became dreary, with its curling wallpaper and rust stain bleeding in the sink. But Einar insisted that he pay for their lodging, which ruled out the nicer apartments available at the Hôtel du Rhin or the Edouard VII. “There’s really no need to suffer,” Greta had said, proposing more luxurious surroundings, and perhaps a view and decent maid service for evening coffee. “Are you really suffering?” Einar replied, causing Greta to drop the subject. She sensed the unease between them that happened when they traveled.
There was a little stove in the corner on which she would boil water for their coffee. They took to sleeping in the alcove, in the bed that sagged in the middle and placed them close to the wall that permitted every squeal from the next room to pass through. Einar set up his easel in the room with the alcove; Greta took the second room, feeling a sense of relief when its door latch caught and she was alone. The trouble was, she couldn’t paint alone. She needed Lili.
They had been in Paris only a month when Greta said, “I want to celebrate our arrival with Lili.” Greta could see the terror in her husband ’s eyes, the way his pupils expanded and shrank. Lili hadn’t yet appeared in Paris. It was one of the reasons they had left Copenhagen. After the visit to Dr. Hexler’s, a letter had arrived from him. Greta had opened the letter and read Hexler’s threat of reporting Einar and Lili to the health authorities. “He could become a danger to society.” Greta imagined Dr. Hexler dictating the letter to the red-haired nurse through the hose with the funnel on the end. The shock of the letter-that anyone besides herself should try to control Lili’s future-upset her deeply, and she wasn’t thinking properly when Einar, home from a visit with Anna, entered the apartment. Before she could stop herself, Greta quickly dropped the letter into the iron stove. “Hans has written,” she said. “He thinks we should move to Paris.” And then, “We’re going to move at once.”
Lili arrived in Paris by knocking on the door of Greta’s hotel room. Lili’s hair was longer now, a darker brown with the sheen of good furniture, combs studded with baby pearls holding it back. She was wearing a dress Greta had never seen before. It was purple silk with a scoop-neck collar that dipped toward a crack of cleavage. “You bought a new dress?” Greta asked. For some reason this made Lili blush, a cloud of red appearing on her throat and her chest. Greta was curious about the cleavage Einar had managed to squeeze together. Was his chest doughy enough to push into a beginner’s corset and offer up as a pair of breasts?
They went to the Palais Garnier to hear Faust. Immediately Greta became aware of the men noticing Lili as she floated up the gold-railed stairs. “That man with the black hair is looking at you. If we’re not careful, he might come over.”
Their seats were next to a couple who had just returned from California. “Twelve months in Los Angeles,” the man said. “My wife had to pry me away.” He mentioned visiting Pasadena on New Year’s Day to watch the Tournament of Roses. “Even the horses’ manes were braided with flowers,” the wife reported. Then the opera began and Greta sat back. She found it difficult to concentrate on Dr. Faust, who was regretful in his dark laboratory, while she had Lili on her right and on her left a man who had recently walked by her family home off Orange Grove Boulevard. Her leg jiggled; she mindlessly rolled the bone in her wrist. She knew something had begun to unfurl tonight. What was it Carlisle used to say about her? No stopping good old Greta once she gets going. No one can stop her at all.
At the intermission, both Lili and the man’s wife excused themselves. The man, who was middle-aged and wore a beard, leaned into Greta and asked, “Is there any way I could see your cousin later on?”
But Greta denied the man at the Opéra Lili. Just as she would later deny herself her own longings-denied because she hardly recognized them. While she and Einar were still at the Oscar Wilde hotel, Hans would pick Greta up in the dark lobby and walk her to his office on the rue de Rivoli. Hans had agreed to talk with her about her career. But at some point when they were crossing the Pont Neuf, Hans’s hand would fall to the small of her back and he would say, “I suppose I don’t have to tell you how pretty you are.”
The first time this occurred she swatted his hand away, believing it must have fallen there by accident. Then it happened again, a week later. And again. The fourth time, Greta told herself that she couldn’t allow him to touch her like this. How could she ever face Einar again? she would think when Hans’s hand caressed her spine as they crossed the river. Still walking, Greta felt nothing, inside or out, only the hand on her back. It occurred to her that her husband hadn’t touched her in a very long time.
They continued on to his office, into the windowless study behind the front room with the file cabinets where Hans looked up names for Greta to contact. He opened a folder and ran his finger down a list of patrons and said, “You should write him… and him… but be sure to avoid him.” Standing next to Hans, Greta thought she felt a finger on her arm, but that was impossible because the file was open in both his hands. She thought she felt his touch again on the small of her back; but no, he hadn’t set down the file.
“Do you suppose we’ll be all right here?” she said.
A smile nearly cracked Hans’s lips. “What do you mean?”
“Einar and me? In Paris? Do you suppose we can get along here just fine?”
His smile disappeared. “Yes, of course. You have each other.” And then, “But don’t forget about me.” His face was leaning almost imperceptibly toward her. There was something between them-not the file, but something else. They said nothing.
But Hans can’t be for me, Greta thought. If anyone should have Hans, it should be Lili. Even though it was cool in the back office she suddenly felt warm and sticky, as if a moist film of dirt covered her. Had she done anything irreversibly wrong?
“I’d like you to become my dealer,” she said. “I’d like you to handle my paintings.”
“But I only deal in old masters and nineteenth-century pictures.”
“Maybe it’s time you took on a modern painter.”
“But that wouldn’t make any sense.” And then, “Listen, Greta, there ’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He moved closer to her, the folder still in his hand. The light in the room was gray, and Hans looked like an adolescent not yet used to his new, larger body.
“Don’t say another word until you agree to take me on.” She didn’t want to, but she moved to the opposite side of the desk. In between Greta and Hans now lay a tabletop of paperwork. All at once she wanted to both let him hold her and to run back to the hotel room, across the Pont Neuf, where Einar was probably waiting, shivering by the stove.
“Let me put it this way,” she said. “I’m giving you the chance to take me on right now. If you decide not to, I’m sure you’ll regret it one day.” She was rubbing at the shallow scar in her cheek.
“How will I regret it?”
“You’ll regret it because one day you’ll say to yourself, I could have had her. That Greta Wegener could have been mine.”
“But I’m not turning you away,” Hans said. “Don’t you understand?”
But Greta did understand. Or at least she understood Hans’s intentions. What she couldn’t figure out was the hummingbird patter in her chest-why wasn’t she scorning Hans for making such an untoward advance? Why wasn’t she reminding him how much this would hurt Einar? Why couldn’t she even bring herself to say his name?
“Is it a deal?” she said.
“What?”
“Are you going to represent me? Or am I going to have to leave now?”
“Greta, be reasonable.”
“I think I am. This is the most reasonable response I can think of.”
They both stood leaning on their opposite ends of the desk. The stacks of documents were held down by bronze paperweights shaped like frogs. Everywhere she read his name, on the papers, over and over. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. It reminded her of when she was little and she had practiced her penmanship: Greta Greta Greta.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“What?”
“Represent you.”
She didn’t know what to say. She thanked him and gathered her things. She offered her hand. “I suppose a handshake is in order,” she said. He took her hand, and there it was, her hand lost in the mitt of his, nearly trapped; but then he released her.
“Bring me some paintings next week,” he said.
“Next week,” and Greta stepped into the front room of Hans’s office, where the sunlight and the city noise poured through the windows, and the typewriter of a clerk clacked and clacked.
The smell of blood woke Einar. He got out of bed, careful not to disturb Greta. She looked uneasy, her face caught in a bad dream. The blood was trickling down his inner thigh, one slow hot line. A bubble of blood was caught in his nostril. He had woken as Lili.
In the spare bedroom, dawn fell on the pickled-ash wardrobe. Greta had given the top section to Lili. The bottom drawers were still Greta’s, shut with a hair lock. In the mirror, Lili saw her bloody nose, her nightshirt with the single stain of blood. She was unlike Greta. The blood never worried her, it came and went, and Lili would take to bed with it like a cold. To her, it was part of all this, she thought as she dressed-shimmying the skirt over her hips, brushing the static out of her hair. It was June, and a month had passed since Einar had decided, on the bench in the park, that his and Lili’s lives would have to part. Lili felt the threat of that, as if time were no longer endless.
At the Marché Buci the morning dew was drying. There were alleys and alleys of vendors, each with a stall protected by a zinc roof. The vendors were laying out their tables of cracked porcelain, their bureaus with the missing handles, their racks of clothes. One woman sold only ivory dice. A man had a collection of ballet slippers which he had a hard time parting with. There was a woman who sold fine skirts and blouses. She was in her forties, with short gray hair and chipped front teeth. Her name was Madame Le Bon, born in Algeria. Over the years she had come to know Lili’s taste, and she would hunt the death sales in Passy for the felt skirts Lili liked, and the white blouses with appliqué in the collar. Madame Le Bon knew Lili’s shoe size, knew she wouldn’t wear pairs that exposed her nailless toe. She bought camisoles for Lili that were small in the bust, and old-fashioned whalebone corsets that helped with that problem. She knew Lili liked crystal drop earrings and, for the winter, a rabbit-fur muff.
Lili was thumbing through Madame Le Bon’s rack when she noticed a young man with a high forehead looking at the picture books in the next stall. His topcoat was hanging over his arm, a canvas suitcase at his feet. He was standing at an odd angle, as if all his weight were on one foot. He seemed uninterested in the picture books, flipping through their pages and then looking at up Lili. Twice their eyes met; the second time he smiled.
Lili turned her back and held a plaid skirt up to her waist. “That’s a nice one,” Madame Le Bon said from her chair. She had created a little changing room by hanging bedsheets to a laundry line. “Try it on,” she said, holding back the sheet.
Inside the sun was bright through the sheets. The skirt fit well, and outside Lili heard a foreigner’s voice ask Madame Le Bon if she sold men’s clothes.
“Nothing for you, I’m afraid,” she said. “Only for your wife.”
The foreigner laughed. Lili then heard hangers being pushed along the pipe of a rack.
When she emerged from the stall, the man was folding and unfolding cardigans on a table. He fingered the pearly buttons and checked the cuffs for fray. “You have nice things,” he said, smiling first at Madame Le Bon and then at Lili. His blue eyes were big on his face; in the hollow of each cheek were one or two pocks. He was tall, and on the breeze was his aftershave, and Lili, closing her eyes, could imagine him pouring the yellow tonic into the cup of his hand and then slapping his throat. It was as if she already knew him.
Madame Le Bon logged the plaid skirt into her register. The man set down the cardigan and approached Lili with a gentle limp. “Excuse me,” he said in slow French. “Mademoiselle.” He shuffled toward Lili. “I was just noticing-”
But Lili didn’t want to talk to him; not just yet. She took the sack with the skirt, quickly thanked Madame Le Bon, and ducked behind the changing stall and into the next booth, where a bald man sold damaged china dolls.
When Lili got home Greta was up, moving around the apartment with a damp rag. Carlisle was arriving this morning for a summer visit. The apartment needed cleaning, feathery puffs of dust blowing about in the corners. Greta refused to hire a maid. “I don’t need one,” she ’d say, swatting dust with her gloves. “I’m not the type of woman who has a maid.” But to tell the truth, she was.
“He ’ll be here within the hour,” Greta said. She was wearing a brown wool dress that clung to her in a pretty way. “Are you going to stay dressed as Lili?” she asked.
“I thought I might.”
“But I don’t think he should meet Lili right away. Not first. Not before Einar.”
Greta was right, and yet part of Einar wanted Lili to be the first to meet Carlisle, as if she were his better half. He hung the plaid skirt in the wardrobe and undressed, down to the square-cut silk underwear. The silk was an oyster gray. It was soft; it made the tiniest swish when he walked. He didn’t want to replace the silk underwear with the wool shorts and undershirt that itched, that trapped the heat and set him on fire on a warm day. He didn’t want Lili to be completely folded away in the wardrobe. He hated tucking her away. When he shut his eyes, Einar saw only her; he couldn’t come up with a picture of himself.
He pulled on his trousers. Then he left the apartment. “Where are you going?” Greta asked. “He’ll be here any minute.”
The sky was cloudless. Long, cool shadows cast themselves from the buildings onto the street. Trash was wet in the gutter. Einar felt lonely, and he wondered if anybody in the world would ever know him. A wind hurled up the street, and it felt as if it were passing through his ribs.
He walked to the short street north of Les Halles. Not very many people were around, only the tobacco shop owner leaning in his door frame, a fat woman waiting for an autobus, a man walking quickly in a suit too tight for him, his bowler hat pulled down.
In the hallway of number 22 there was a wine-stained scarf lying on the stairs that led to Madame Jasmin-Carton’s door. “Early today,” she said, stroking her cat. She passed Einar the key to Salle No. 3. It had become his regular room. The armchair covered in green wool. The wire wastepaper basket always emptied-a weak illusion that no one else ever used the room. And the two windows on opposite ends of the room with their black shades drawn. Einar had always lifted the shade of the window on the right. Pulled its taut cord and let the shade roll up with a snap. He couldn’t count the number of times he had sat in the green armchair with his breath fogging on the window while a girl, genitalia exposed, danced on the other side. It had become a habit, almost daily, like swimming at the bains, or his walk to the corner of the rue Etienne-Marcel to fetch the mail at the Hôtel des Postes, most of which was for Greta. And Madame Jasmin-Carton never charged him less than five francs, never offered a discount, although he wasn’t sure he would have wanted one. She did, however, let him stay in Salle No. 3 as long as he wanted; sometimes he’d sit in the green wool chair for half a day. He had slept there. Once he brought a baguette and an apple and some Gruyère and ate his lunch while a woman with a belly that hung like a sandbag danced around a rocking horse.
But the other window shade Einar never touched. That was because he knew what was in there. He somehow knew that once he had pulled that shade he would never return to the window on the right.
Today, however, it felt as if there was only one window in Salle No. 3, the little black one on the left. And so he pulled on the left window’s shade. It snapped open, and Einar peered through.
On the other side was a room painted black, with a wood-plank floor separating at the seam. There was a little box, also painted black, on which a young man had planted one foot. His legs were hairy, making Einar think of Madame Jasmin-Carton’s arms. He was an average-sized boy, a bit soft in the middle and smooth-chested. His tongue was hanging from his mouth and his hands were on his hips. He was rolling them, which caused his half-hard penis to flop about with the weight of a smelt on a dock. From his smile, Einar could tell the boy was in love with himself.
He didn’t know how long he watched the boy bouncing on the balls of his feet, his penis growing and shrinking like a lever going up and down. Einar didn’t remember falling to his knees and pushing his nose to the glass, but that was how he found himself. He didn’t recall unbuckling his pants, but they were bunched at his ankles. He didn’t know when he had removed his coat and tie and his shirt, but there they were, in a pile on the green armchair.
There were other windows looking into the boy’s room. And in one, just opposite Einar, was a man with a little grin on his face. Einar couldn’t make out much other than the grin, which seemed lit by a lamp of its own. He seemed to like the boy as much as Einar did, from the way that grin burned. But after a few minutes of staring across the room to the face of the man, Einar began to see his eyes. They were blue, he thought, and seemed focused not on the boy, who now had his penis in his hand and his other hand fondling a nipple the size of a centime, but on Einar. The man peeled his lips farther apart, and the grin seemed to burn even brighter.
Einar stepped out of his trousers, dropped them on the green armchair. He was part Einar, part Lili. A man in Lili’s oyster-gray underpants and a matching camisole that hung delicately from her shoulders. Einar could see a faint reflection of himself in the window’s glass. For some reason, he didn’t feel garish. He felt-it was the first time he had ever used this word to describe Lili-pretty. Lili now felt relaxed: her bare white shoulders reflecting in the glass, the pretty little cove at the base of her throat. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to be staring at her in her intimate underthings, the straps of the camisole across her shoulders. As if something inside Einar had snapped, like the canvas window shade, and told him, more plainly than ever before, that this was who he was: Einar was a guise. Peel away the trousers and the striped necktie, which Greta had given him on his last birthday, and only Lili was left. He knew this; he had known this. Einar had eleven months. His year was slipping away. It was warm in the little room, and in the window’s reflection he saw Lili’s forehead damp with perspiration, glowing like a half-moon.
The dancer continued, seemingly unaware of Einar and the other man. The boy’s eyes were closed, his hips rocking, a creep of black hair showing in the pits of his arms. The man across the room continued to stare, his smile widening even further. The light somehow shifted, and Einar could see his eyes nearly turn gold.
Standing at the window, Einar began to fondle his breasts through the camisole. His nipples were hard, aching. As he rubbed them, an underwater feeling rippled through Einar. His knees were becoming weak, damp at the back. Einar stood back from the window to give the man a full view, to let him see his hips wrapped in the silk, let him see his legs, which were as smooth as the boy’s were hairy. Einar wanted the man to see Lili’s body. Einar stepped back far enough so the man could see all of him, except from that position in Salle No. 3 Einar couldn’t see the man. Not that it mattered. And so for several minutes Einar rubbed himself in the window, imitating the motions he ’d seen the girls perform over the months through the window on the right.
When Einar moved closer to the window and peered across the room, both the boy and the man were gone. Suddenly Einar became embarrassed. How had he come to this-showing off his odd-shaped body, the camisole cupping his soft chest, his inner thighs pale and soft, silvery under the light, to a couple of strangers? He sat in the armchair on his pile of clothes, pulling his knees to his chest.
Then there was a light knock on the door, two taps. Then again.
“Yes?” Einar said.
“It’s me.” It was a man’s voice.
Einar said nothing, stayed still in the armchair. This was what he wanted more than anything in the world, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Then another two taps on the door. His mouth was dry; his heart was climbing his throat. Einar wanted the man to know that he was welcome. Silent in the armchair, Einar wanted the man to know it was all right.
But nothing happened, and Einar thought the chance for… for something had fallen away.
Then the man quickly pushed himself through the door. He stood with his back pressed against it, his chest filling with breath. He was about Einar’s age, but white at the temples, whiskery. He had dark skin, a large nose. He was wearing a black overcoat, buttoned to the throat. Around him was a faint scent of salt. Einar remained seated, the man a foot or two away. He nodded. Einar brought his hand to his brow.
The man smiled. His teeth looked sharp, angled. He seemed to have more teeth than most men. The lower half of his face seemed to be all teeth. “You’re very pretty,” the man said.
Einar sank back in the chair. The man seemed to like what he saw. He unbuttoned his overcoat, split it open. Beneath he was wearing a businessman’s suit with a wide stripe in the wool. With the knot of his tie diamond-shaped, he was well groomed except for one thing: his fly was open and through it poked the eye of his penis.
He stepped toward Einar. Then another step. The head of his penis was peeking from beyond the foreskin. It smelled salty, and Einar began to think of the beaches of Jutland, of Skagen, where his mother was laid to sea in the fishing net picked clean of gills, and then the man’s penis was only inches from Einar’s mouth, and Einar closed his eyes. A blur of images ran through his head: the bay-inn with the seaweed roof, the bricks of peat stacked in the fields, the white boulder speckled with mica, Hans lifting Einar’s imaginary hair to tie the apron.
Einar’s mouth opened. He could almost taste something bitter and warm, and just as Einar’s tongue emerged from his mouth and the man took one final step closer, just when Einar knew for sure that Lili was here to stay and very soon Einar would have to disappear, just then there was a heavy knock on the door, and then another, and it was Madame Jasmin-Carton, yelling for them to come out at once, yelling angrily, in disgust, with her Manx cat mewing as violently as her mistress, as if someone had just stepped on her long-lost tail.
It was early afternoon when Einar emerged from Madame Jasmin-Carton’s. She had given him less than a minute to dress and leave her premises forever. He was on the black street with his clothes rumpled and untucked and his necktie in his hand. The tobacco shop owner was standing in his door, picking at his mustache, eyeing Einar. There was no one else on the street. Einar had hoped that the man would be waiting outside Madame Jasmin-Carton’s, that they would go to the little café around the corner for a coffee and, perhaps, a carafe of red wine. But he wasn’t there, just the tobacco shop owner and a little brown dog.
Einar entered the pissoir. Its metal walls smelled wet. Next to the basin Einar straightened his clothes and tied his tie. The little brown dog followed Einar in, and begged.
For months Einar had been thinking about visiting the Bibliothèque Nationale, and at last he set out. It occupied a block of buildings, bordered by the rue Vivienne, the rue Colbert, the rue de Richelieu, and the rue des Petits-Champs. Hans had arranged for Einar’s ticket of admittance, writing the library’s administration on his behalf. The Salle de Travail des Imprimés, with its hundreds of seats, had a desk in the middle of the room where Einar had to fill out a bulletin personnel, registering the purpose of his visit: researching a lost girl. There he also wrote on slips of paper the names of books he wanted. The librarian behind the bureau was girlish, with downy cheeks and a shell-pink clip holding back her bangs. Her name was Anne-Marie, and she spoke so softly that Einar had to lean toward her face and smell her peanutty breath. When he handed her the slips of paper with the names of half a dozen scientific books on sexual problems, she blushed but then set out to do her job.
Einar sat down at one of the long reading tables. A student a few chairs down looked up from his notebook, then returned to his work. The room was cold, motes of dust in the lamplight. The long table was scratched. The sound of a page turning filled the room. Einar was worried that he looked suspicious, coming in here at his age, his trousers wrinkled, a faint sweaty scent sticking to him. Should he go find the washroom and look at himself in the mirror?
Anne-Marie delivered the books to his table. She said only, “We will be closing today at four.”
Einar ran his hand over the books; three were in German, two in French, the last from America. He opened the most recent, called Sexual Fluidity, published in Vienna, written by Professor Johann Hoffmann. Professor Hoffmann had performed experiments on guinea pigs and rats. In one, he grew breast glands in a once-male rat rich enough to feed a second rat’s litter. “Pregnancy, however,” Professor Hoffmann wrote, “remains elusive.”
Einar looked up from the book. The student had fallen asleep on his notebook. Anne-Marie was busy loading a cart. He thought of himself as the formerly male rat. A rat on its wheel running through his head. Now the rat couldn’t stop. It was too late. The experiment continued. What was it Greta was always saying? Worst thing in the world is to give up! Hands swatting through the air, silver bracelets jangling. She was always saying that, and: Come on now, Einar. When will you ever learn?
Einar thought of the promise he’d made to himself in the park last month: something would have to change. May had slipped into June, just as the months had slipped into years. More than four years ago, Lili was born on the lacquer trunk.
At four o’clock Anne-Marie rang a brass handbell. “Please leave your materials on the table,” she announced. She had to rock the shoulder of the student to wake him. To Einar, she pressed her lips together till they turned white and then nodded goodbye.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll never know how helpful this has been.”
She blushed again, and then said, a little smile emerging, “Should I set aside these books? Will you need them tomorrow?” Her hand, which was pale and no larger than a baby starfish, fell softly on Einar’s arm. “I think I know of some others. I’ll pull them for you in the morning. They might be what you’re looking for.” She paused. “I mean, if that ’s what you want.”
Much to Greta’s concern, Carlisle’s foot dragged through the gravel of the Tuileries. Each night he soaked his leg up to the knee in a tub of Epsom salt and white table wine, a balm his roommate at Stanford, who went on to become a surgeon in La Jolla, had first concocted. Carlisle had become an architect, building bungalows in Pasadena in orange groves that were being paved into neighborhoods. They were small houses, built for teachers at Pasadena Poly and Westridge School for Girls, for policemen, for the migrants from Indiana and Illinois who ran the bakeries and the printing shops along Colorado Street. He sent Greta pictures, and sometimes she put her chin in her fist and dreamed of one of the bungalows, with a screened-in sleeping porch and windows shaded by Blood of China camellia trees: not that she really saw herself settling into one of the little houses, but sometimes she wanted to stop and wonder.
Carlisle’s face was handsome and long, his hair less yellow-white than Greta’s and with more kink in the strand. He had never married, spending his evenings at his drafting table or in his oak rocker with a green-glass lamp pulled near for reading. There were girls, he reported to Greta in his letters, girls who joined his table at the Valley Hunt Club or who worked as assistants on his jobs, but no one who meant much. “I can wait,” he would write, and Greta would think, holding the letter in the sunlight at the window, So can I.
The spare bedroom in the casita had an iron bed and brocade wallpaper. There was a lamp with a fringed shade that Greta worried wouldn’t provide enough light. The charcuterie on the corner had lent her a zinc tub for the Epsom-and-white-wine balm; typically geese lay dead in it, their necks curled over its rim.
In the mornings Carlisle would take his coffee and croissant at the long table in the casita’s front room, his bad leg a thin rail in his pajamas. At first Einar would slip out of the apartment just as the knob on Carlisle’s door began to turn. Einar was timid around Carlisle, Greta noticed. He would quiet his step whenever he passed Carlisle’s door, as if to avoid a chance meeting in the hall, beneath the crystal-bowl lamp. At dinner, Einar’s shoulders would bunch up, as if it pained him trying to think of something to say. Greta wondered if something had passed between them, a harsh word, perhaps an insult. Something invisible seemed to be hanging between them, a thread of will that she couldn’t quite, at least not yet, understand.
Once, Carlisle invited Einar to a vapor bath on the rue des Mathurins. It wasn’t like the Bains du Pont-Solférino, out in the sunlight along the Seine. Instead, it was a pool for men in a gymnasium with steamy air and yellow marble tiles and palm trees drooping in Chinese cachepots. When Einar and Carlisle returned from the bath, Einar immediately locked himself in his room. “What happened?” Greta asked her brother. And Carlisle, whose eyes were red from the water, said, “Nothing. He just said he didn’t want to swim. Said he didn’t know you had to swim naked.” And then, “He nearly fainted at the sight of it. But hasn’t he ever been to a Turkish bath?”
“It’s the Dane in him,” Greta said, knowing it wasn’t true. Why, she thought, the Danes would look for any excuse to remove their clothes and prance around.
Shortly after Carlisle arrived, Hans stopped by one morning to look over Greta’s latest paintings. There were two to show him: the first was Lili, large and flat, on the beach in Bornholm; the second was Lili standing next to a Blood of China camellia tree. Einar had painted the sea in the background of the first, working steadily and tidily on its pale blue summer tide. The camellia tree, however, he couldn’t quite pull off, unfamiliar as he was with the puckering red blossoms and the buds as shiny and tight as acorns. She ’d taken on an assignment from Vogue-illustrating next winter’s fox-lined coats-and so the only time she had to finish the camellia portrait was in the middle of the night. For three nights she stayed up, delicately painting the bloom of petals in each flower, with the hint of sorbet-yellow at its center, while Einar and Carlisle slept, her studio silent except for Edvard IV’s occasional sigh.
She finished the painting only hours before Hans arrived to see it. “Still wet,” she said, serving him coffee, and a cup for Carlisle, another for Einar, who was fresh from a bath, his hair wet at the tips.
“It’s a good one,” Hans was saying, looking at the camellia painting. “Very Oriental. That’s what they like these days. Maybe you should try painting her in an embroidered kimono?”
“I don’t want to make her look cheap,” she said.
“Don’t do that,” Einar said, so quietly Greta wasn’t sure if the others had heard.
“That’s not what I meant,” Hans said. He was in a pale summer suit, his legs crossed, his fingers drumming the long table. Carlisle was on the velvet ottoman, Einar in the rocker. It was the first time the three men had been together, and Greta kept moving her eyes from her brother, with his leg up on the velvet cushion, to her husband, with the wet tips of his hair against his thin throat, to Hans. She felt as if she were a different person with each of them. As if she rolled out a different repartee for each of them; and maybe she did. She wondered if they felt that they knew her at all. Perhaps she could be wrong, but it was how she felt-as if each of them wanted something different from her.
Hans had respected her wishes, withdrawing his attention, remaining focused on selling her work. There were times, when they found themselves alone, in the back room of his office or in her studio while Lili was out, when Greta could feel his eyes on her. But when his back was turned she couldn’t help staring, at the spread of his shoulders, at the blond hair creeping over his collar. She knew what she was longing for, but she forced herself to shove it aside. “Not while Einar’s still…” In her chest she could feel the clamps closing with a clang. She expected those passions, such heartswell, from Lili. Not from herself, not anymore, not now, with a studio full of unfinished portraits and assignments from the magazines waiting to be drawn, and her light-stepped husband weak in body, confused in mind, and her brother showing up in Paris with his incomplete statement “I’ve come to help,” and Hans, at her long workman’s table, his long fingers drumming the pine top, waiting for the paint of the camellias to dry, waiting for a second cup of coffee, waiting for Greta to produce a painting of Lili in a kimono, waiting, patiently, with a flat brow, simply waiting for Greta to fall into his arms.
This was the household, then, her casita, from which Greta set out one afternoon that summer. It was hot, the black traffic exhaust hanging heavily. The sun was dull in a hazy sky, reducing the sparkle of the city. The beige front stone of the buildings looked soft, like warm cheese. Women walked with handkerchiefs, swabbing sweat from their throats.
The Métro was even hotter, its handrail sticky. It was only June, and she and Einar wouldn’t take their holiday in Menton for another several weeks. She wondered if she would make it-something about the summer would have to change, Greta told herself-but then the train scraped along its rails and stopped.
She emerged from the station in Passy, where the air felt cooler. There was a breeze, and a scent of cut lawn, and the trickle of a fountain. She heard the springy thud of a tennis ball landing on red clay. She heard someone beating a rug.
The apartment house was a former villa, built from yellow granite and copperwork. It had a little half-circle drive that was spotted with motor oil, and a sentry of rose trees clipped into tight pompoms. The front door was made of glass and ironwork. Above it was a terrace, its door open, a drape blowing. Greta heard a woman’s laugh, followed by a man’s.
Anna had rented the second-floor apartment. She was singing three nights of Carmen at the Palais Garnier; after her performance, she ’d eat a midnight supper of cold crab claw at Prunier’s. Lately she’d begun to swear she would never return to Copenhagen. “It ’s just too orderly for me,” she ’d say, a hand balled against her breast.
Anna answered the door. Her blond hair was tight in a bun at the nape of her neck. The skin in her throat seemed to be scarring into permanent brown lines where her folds of fat lay. She was wearing a large ruby cocktail ring, designed like an exploding star. She had made a name for herself in the opera world; skinny young men with deeply sunk eyes sent her unset gems, ginger-snap cookies, and nervously written cards.
The living room was small, arranged with a settee with gold legs and a tapestry pattern on the cushion. There was a slim vase of tiger lilies, the buds veined and green. A maid in black uniform was serving lemonade and anisette. A man, tall and oddly dressed in a dark overcoat, was standing behind the chair.
“This is Professor Bolk,” Anna said.
“I guessed that,” Greta said. “But aren’t you warm?”
“Professor Alfred Bolk.” He offered his hand. “For some reason, I’m always a bit cold,” he said, shaking his shoulders slightly in his coat. His blue eyes were dark and flecked with gold. He had hair like the dark blond of good wood, oiled back over his head so that it curled up at his neck. He was wearing a blue silk tie with a large knot and a diamond pin. His calling cards he carried in a silver case. He was from Dresden, where he ran the Municipal Women’s Clinic.
The maid served Professor Bolk coffee poured over ice. “I can’t take lemon,” he explained, lifting his glass. There was a breeze from the terrace door, and Greta sat next to the professor on the sofa. He smiled politely, his shoulders up. She supposed she should wait for him to ask questions, but she suddenly felt a need to tell someone about Lili and Einar. “It’s about my husband,” she began.
“Yes, I understand there’s a certain little girl named Lili.”
So he knew. At first, Greta didn’t know what to say. Yes, where to begin? Had it all started that day four years ago when she asked him to try on Anna’s shoes? Or was there something else? “He’s convinced he ’s a woman inside,” she said.
Professor Bolk made a small noise of sucking air between his teeth. He nodded quickly.
“And to tell the truth,” Greta said, “so am I.” She described the short-sleeved dresses and the sennep-yellow shoes and the specially sewn camisole; she reported on Einar’s outings to the Bains du Pont-Solférino and the shopping sprees at Bon Marché on the rue du Bac. She spoke of Henrik and Hans and the few other men over whom Lili’s heart had swollen up and burst with a pinprick of frustration. She said, “She’s quite beautiful, Lili is.”
“These men… this Hans… is there anything else I should know?”
“Not really.” She thought of Hans, who probably that very minute was hanging the camellia portrait in his gallery. It didn’t happen very often, but nothing disappointed her more than when Hans stopped by the studio and, with his fingers rubbing his chin, rejected a painting. “Not good enough,” he’d say two, three times a year, shocking Greta, leaving her incapable of moving, of seeing Hans to the door. Sometimes, when the world was quiet, she wondered if such crushing disappointment could be worth it.
It had been Anna who first mentioned a doctor. “Should he maybe see someone?” she said one day. She and Greta were in a frame store down the street from the Oscar Wilde hotel. There were bins of old frames, some that weighed over one hundred pounds. The frames were dusty, dirtying their skirts. Then she said, “I’m worried about him.”
“I told you what happened with Hexler back in Denmark. I don’t know if he could take another doctor. It might crush him.”
“Doesn’t it concern you just a little? About how ill he looks? How thin he’s become? It sometimes seems he’s hardly there at all.”
Greta thought about this. Yes, Einar looked pale to her, with thin blue pads spreading beneath his eyes. A translucence had developed in his skin. Greta had seen this, but had it worried her, more than everything else? And the bleeding, returning irregularly for more than four years now. She ’d learned to live with him, with his transformation. Yes, it was as if Einar were on a perpetual track of transformation, as if these changes-the mysterious blood, the hollow cheeks, the unfulfilled longing-would never cease, would lead to no end. And when she thought about it, who wasn’t always changing? Wasn’t everybody always turning into someone new? In a bin with a chained lid, Greta found the perfect frame, its lip painted gold, for her latest painting of Lili. “But if you know someone,” she said to Anna, “if you have a doctor in mind, maybe I should talk to him. It couldn’t hurt, could it?”
Professor Bolk said, “I’d like to examine your husband.” This made Greta think of Hexler and his clanging X-ray machine. She wondered if Einar would ever let her take him to another doctor. Professor Bolk sipped his coffee, and pulled a notepad from his pocket.
“I don’t think your husband is insane,” the professor offered. “I’m sure other doctors will tell you your husband’s insane. But that’s not what I think.” There was a painting of Lili in Anna’s living room. It showed her on a bench in a park. Behind her two men were talking, their hats in their hands. The painting hung above a side table full of silver-framed photographs of Anna, in wig and costume, hugging friends after performances. Greta had painted the park scene the year before, when Lili would show up at the casita and stay for three weeks and then disappear for another six, and when Greta was learning to work and live more and more without her husband. For a while the year before, when he refused to speak to her except as Lili, she herself had thought he had gone insane. He’d taken on a look, which came and went, of trance: eyes so dark that all she could see in them was a reflection of herself.
“I’ve met another man like him,” Professor Bolk said. “A tram conductor. A young man, handsome enough, pretty even, slender, pale of course, a bit light on his feet. Nervous man, but who could blame him for that, what with his situation? He came to see me, and the first thing I noticed-how could I not?-was that he had breasts bigger than many teenage girls. By the time he came to see me he ’d started calling himself Sieglinde. It was peculiar. One day he arrived at the clinic begging to be admitted. The other doctors said we couldn’t admit a man to the Municipal Women’s Clinic. They refused to examine him. But I agreed to, and one afternoon-I’ll never forget it-I discovered he was both male and female.”
Greta thought about what this might mean, about the horrible sight of what must have lay lifelessly, like the extra flesh on the very old, between the man’s legs. “What did you say to him?” she asked.
The breeze lifted the drapes, and there was the sound of boys playing tennis; then their mother calling them inside.
“I told him I could help him. I told him I could help him choose.”
There was a part of Greta that wanted to ask, “Choose what?” At once, she knew and didn’t know the answer. For even Greta, who recently had often thought to herself, Oh, if only Einar could choose who he wanted to be… for even Greta could not imagine that a real choice was possible. She sat on the gold-legged sofa and thought about Einar, who in some ways no longer existed at all. It was as if someone-yes, someone-had already chosen for him.
“What happened to the man?” asked Anna.
“He said he wanted to be a woman. He said all he wanted was to be loved by a man. He was willing to do anything for it. He came to me in my office, wearing a felt hat and a green dress. He carried a pocket watch like a man, I remember, because he pulled it out during our meeting and kept looking at it, saying he had to go because he had come to splitting his days in half, living the mornings as a woman and the afternoons as a man.
“This was many years ago, when I was still a young surgeon. Technically I knew exactly what I could do for him. But I had never performed such complicated surgery, not then. And so for a month I stayed up at night reading medical texts. I attended amputations, studied sutures. Anytime a woman at the clinic had her uterus removed, I watched in the operating amphitheater. Then I’d study the specimen in our laboratory. Finally one day, when I was ready, I told Sieglinde I wanted to schedule a surgery.
“He had lost a lot of weight by then. He was quite weak. He must have been too frightened to eat. But he agreed to let me attempt it on him. He cried when I told him I could do it. He said he was crying because he felt like he was killing somebody. ‘Sacrificing somebody,’ that ’s what he said.
“I set the surgery for a Thursday morning. It was going to be in the large amphitheater; there were that many people who asked to come. A few doctors from the Pirna Clinic as well. I knew that if I succeeded I would have done something extraordinary, something no one had even dreamed of. Who could think it possible, going from man to woman? Who would risk his career to try something that sounds like something from a myth? Well, I would.”
Professor Bolk shook out his coat.
“But then early that Thursday morning, the nurse went to Sieglinde’s room and discovered that he was gone. He’d left his belongings, his felt hat, his pocket watch, his green dress, everything. But he was gone.” Professor Bolk drained his remaining coffee.
And Greta finished her lemonade, and Anna rose to call the maid (“Les boissons,” in a snappy voice), and Greta studied the professor, his left knee angled over his right. This time she knew she was right; he was no Hexler. He understood. He was like her, she thought. He could see things, too. She wouldn’t have to think it over; her decision came like a clean blow to the head, with a pop of light at the back of her eyes. It made her start, jumping slightly in the settee, and Greta, who once in the south of France had nearly killed herself and Einar too by accidentally losing control of their motorcar and hurling it toward a cliff spotted with mimosas springing from the rocks, thought: I must take Lili to Dresden. She and I will have to go.
The next day, the girl behind the bureau located more books for Einar. Books called The Sexes; The Normal and Abnormal Man; A Scientific Study of Sexual Immorality; and Die sexuelle Krise, published in Dresden twenty years earlier. Most were about theories of gender development based on hypothesis and casual experimentation on laboratory rats. In one Einar read about a man, a Bavarian aristocrat, who was born with both a penis and a vagina. There was something about his plight-the confusion as a child, the parental abandonment, his hopeless hunt for a place in the world-that made Einar close his eyes and think, Yes, I know. There was a chapter on the myth of Hermes and Aphrodite. The book explained sexual pathology, and something called sexual interme diacy. Somehow Einar knew he was reading about himself. He recognized the duality, the lack of complete identification with either sex. He read about the Bavarian, and a dull distant pang lay at rest in Einar’s chest.
Some of the books were old, from the last century, dust on their spines. Their pages turned with such a brisk crinkling noise that Einar feared the students would look up from their work on the long reading table and, from the twist of fear and relief in Einar’s face, learn who he really was.
Anne-Marie would place the books in front of Einar in a little tilted stand that held them at an angle. She lent him a string of lead beads wrapped in felt that held the page open while Einar copied sentences into his pewter-backed notebook.
The tables were wide and nicked, and they made Einar think of the worktables the Copenhagen fisherwomen used when chopping chub heads at the Gammel Strand fish market. In front of Einar, there was enough room on the table to fan out several books around him, and with their sand-colored pages open he began to think of them as his little shoal of protection. And that was how it felt to read them, during those mornings when he would slip out of the apartment: as if each sentence about the male and female would protect Einar over the next year, when everything, as he had promised himself, would change.
He eventually read enough to become convinced that he too possessed the female organs. Buried in the cavity of his body were Lili’s organs, the bloody packets and folds of flesh that made her who she was. At first it was hard to believe, but then the notion of it-that this wasn’t a mental problem, but a physical one-made more and more sense to him. He imagined a uterus shoved up behind his testicles. He imagined breasts somehow trapped by his ribcage.
Einar spent a week in the reading room, and there was a point each day when he would become so overwhelmed by what he was discovering that he ’d rest his head on his arms and softly cry.
If he nodded off, Anne-Marie, with her small white hand, would nudge Einar back to work. “It’s noon,” she’d say, and for a second he would become confused: Noon?
Oh, yes. Noon.
Carlisle had taken to asking Einar to join him in the afternoons. “Meet me at noon?” Carlisle would say each morning as Einar was slipping out the front door, nearly lost in a white heat of anticipation about what was waiting for him at the library.
“I’m not sure I can,” Einar would reply.
“But why not?” Greta would say.
Carlisle knew not to ask Greta to join them. He once told Einar that even when they were little, she would sigh with disappointment whenever Carlisle suggested they head down to the archery range in the Arroyo Seco. “She was always too busy to explore,” Carlisle would say. “Reading Dickens, writing poetry, painting scenes of the San Gabriels, painting pictures of me. But she never showed them to me. I’d ask to see one of her little watercolors and she would blush, and fold her arms against her chest.”
So Carlisle turned to Einar. He had to prod Einar at first. There was something about Carlisle ’s blue eyes, which were clearer than Greta’s, that seemed capable of reading Einar’s thoughts. He found it difficult to sit still next to Carlisle, shifting his weight from one hip to the other, sitting up and then retreating in the rope-bottom chair.
Carlisle bought a car, an Alfa Romeo Sport Spider. It was red with spoke-wheels and a running board with a red toolbox bolted to it. He liked to drive with the canvas top pushed back. The dash was black with six dials and a little silver handlebar that Einar would cling to as Carlisle shot around a corner. The floors were made of dimpled steel, and as Carlisle drove the Spider around Paris, Einar could feel the heat from the engine through the soles of his shoes.
“You should really learn to trust people more,” Carlisle said one day in the car, his hand moving chummily from the gear stick with its black-ball knob to Einar’s knee. He was driving Einar out to a tennis stadium in Auteuil. The stadium was next to the Bois de Boulogne, a concrete bowl rising up among the poplar trees. It was late morning, and the sun was high and blank in the blue-white sky. The flags around the rim of the stadium were hanging limply. There were iron gates around the tennis park, and men in green blazers and straw hats were taking tickets and ripping them in two.
A man led Einar and Carlisle to a little sloping box that was painted green. There were four wicker chairs in the box, each with a striped cushion. The box was at the baseline of the tennis court, which was made of crushed clay as red as the rouge Lili once purchased at the front counter of Fonnesbech’s.
On the court, two women were warming up. One was from Lyon; the sail of her long pleated skirt was white, and she cut across the court like a schooner. The other was an American, a girl from New York, the program reported; she was tall and dark, her hair as short and shiny as an aviator’s leather cap.
“Nobody expects her to win,” Carlisle said of the American. He was holding his hand to his forehead to block out the sun. His jaw was exactly the same as Greta’s: square, a bit long, pegged with a mouthful of good teeth. Their skin was the same, too: brown after only an hour of sun, a bit coarse in the throat. It was a throat Einar used to kiss passionately in the night. It was what he had liked most about Greta, even more than kissing her mouth: bringing his lips to her long throat and sucking lightly, licking in a little swirling motion, nipping, drilling away at the spot on her throat that was open and veined.
“Sometime I’d like to visit California,” Einar said. The match had begun, the American serving. She tossed the ball high, and Einar could almost see the muscles in her shoulder turn as she brought her racquet through the air. Greta often said she thought of oranges hitting the ground when she heard a tennis ball; Einar thought of the ryegrass court behind the brick villa, the powdered-sugar lines blowing in the wind.
“Does Greta ever say anything about it?” Carlisle asked. “About coming home?”
“I’ve heard her say a lot would have to change before she would go back.” Greta once said that neither of them would fit in there, in Pasadena, where rumor crossed the valley as rapidly as a blue jay in the breeze. “It’s not a place for you and me,” she had said.
“I wonder what she means,” Carlisle said.
“You know Greta. She doesn’t want people talking about her.”
“But in some ways she does.”
The American girl won the first game, her drop shot barely lifting over the net cord and then falling deceptively to the clay.
“Have you ever thought about coming out for a visit?” Carlisle asked. “To California? Maybe come out for the winter to paint?” He was fanning himself with the program; he held his bad leg out, the knee locked. “Come out and paint the eucalyptus and the cypress? Or one of the orange groves? You’d like it.”
“Not without Greta,” Einar said.
And Carlisle, who at the same time was and was not exactly like his sister, said, “But why not?”
Einar crossed his legs, his foot shifting the wicker chair in front of him. The girl from Lyon sailed across the court, her skirt taut, to return a backhand from the sneaky American, hitting the dirty white ball up the line for a winner. The crowd, which was handsome and hatted and collectively smelled like lavender and lime, erupted into a cheer.
Carlisle turned to Einar. He was smiling and applauding, and his forehead was beginning to sweat; and then, when the stadium fell silent to allow the girl from Lyon the peace to serve, he said, “I know about Lili.”
Einar could smell the clay, its rich dustiness, and the wind blowing through the poplars. “I’m not sure I know what you’re-”
But Carlisle stopped him. Carlisle placed his elbows on his knees and stared at the court and began to tell Einar about the letters Greta had been writing over the past year. They would arrive once a week fat in the mailbox, a half-dozen sheets of blue tissuey paper covered with her cramped words; she wrote them in such a fury that she didn’t use margins, the small tight writing crossing the page from edge to edge. “There’s someone called Lili,” she wrote for the first time maybe a year before. “A girl from the bogs of Denmark whom I’ve taken in.” The letters would describe Lili making her way around Paris, kneeling to feed the pigeons in the park, her skirt bunching around her on the gravel path. They described Lili sitting for hours on the stool in Greta’s studio on the rue Vielle du Temple, the light from the window on her face. The letters arrived almost weekly, a summary of the previous days with Lili. They never mentioned Einar, and when Carlisle would reply “How’s Einar?” or “My best to Einar,” and even once, “Isn’t this your tenth wedding anniversary?” Greta never acknowledged the inquiry.
One day, after about six months of the weekly letters, a slim envelope arrived in Carlisle’s mailbox. He remembered the day, he told Einar, because the black January rains had been falling for a week, and his leg was aching is if it had been hit by the buggy only the previous afternoon. He went down his driveway to the mailbox, his bamboo cane in one hand and an umbrella in the other. The ink on the envelope smeared in the rain, and he opened it in his foyer, which was dark with paneled Pasadena oak. He read the letter as the water dripped from his hair onto the single page. “Einar is leaving me,” Greta’s letter began. “You are right. After ten years he is leaving me.” Immediately Carlisle considered driving over to the post office on Colorado Street and sending a telegram. He put on his rubber coat while reading the rest of the letter, and it was only then that Carlisle began to understand what Greta meant.
A second letter arrived the next day, and then another, the day after. What followed was an almost daily account of Lili. The pages were just as crammed with description as before, but now tiny sketches of a girl’s face would interrupt the sentences: Lili in a hat pinned with dry violets; Lili reading Le Monde; Lili staring up, her eyes round, at the sky.
“Then Greta started mailing me sketches from her notebook. Studies for her paintings of Lili. She sent me the one of Lili in the lemon grove. And Lili in the wedding party.” He stopped while the American girl served. “They’re beautiful. She’s beautiful, Einar.”
“Then you know.”
“It didn’t take me long to understand,” Carlisle said. “Of course I don’t know much about this,” he said. A small brown bird landed on the rail of the box. Its head revolved, looking for seed. “But I’d like to help. I’d like to meet Lili. To see if there’s anything I can do. You see, it’s Greta’s way of doing things, sending the letters and drawings. She ’d never come out and ask for help. But I can tell she needs it. I can tell she thinks you could stand some help, even more than she can give you.” And then, “It’s hard on her. You can’t forget that this is just as hard on her.”
“She said that?”
“Greta would never say anything like that. But I can tell.”
Einar and Carlisle watched the tennis. The day was warm, the girls toweling their faces. “Have you seen a doctor?” Carlisle asked.
Einar told him about Dr. Hexler. Just saying his name brought back the nausea; he could nearly feel a throb in his gut.
“I don’t see why you’d go to a medical doctor,” Carlisle said. “Shouldn’t you talk to someone about how you feel? About what you’re thinking? I’m going to take you to someone. I’ve looked up some names, and I’m going to take you to talk to someone who just might help. Help you resolve this once and for all. Not to worry, Einar. I have an idea.”
And this was what Einar remembered most: the sight of Carlisle’s long legs out of the corner of his eyes, the bad leg now at a hard angle. And the American girl on the court becoming sweaty, a wet spot developing on her blouse just beneath her breasts. And her face, which was dark and plain; and how her head was large and her arms long, and there was something about her that didn’t seem right. Like the thin tendril of a vein that pulsed up her forearm. Or the shadow above her lip. And how the whole stadium was rooting against her, more and more as she took a bigger lead against the blond girl from Lyon. It seemed the whole world was against her-everyone except Carlisle, who leaned over and said, “Don’t you want her to win? Wouldn’t it be more fun for her to win?”
First Carlisle drove Einar to see Dr. McBride. He was an American psychiatrist connected to the embassy, his practice on the rue de Tilsitt, down the street from the passport office. Dr. McBride had a wiry bush of hair and a mustache that was black and gray. He was heavy in the throat and stomach, and he wore white shirts starched as stiff as paper. He was from Boston, and during Einar’s meeting with him he kept referring to himself as a “black Irishman.” When he smiled, there was a flash of gold at the back of his mouth.
Dr. McBride’s office was more like a lawyer’s than a doctor’s. His desk was double-pillared and inlaid with a sheet of green leather. There was a wall of bookshelves, and a row of oak filing cabinets. By the window a medical dictionary was open on a stand. While Einar told Dr. McBride about Lili, the doctor sat blank-faced, pushing his eyeglasses up and down the bridge of his nose. When the telephone rang, Dr. McBride ignored it and urged Einar to continue. “What’s the longest you’ve lived as Lili?” he asked.
“Over a month,” Einar said. “Last winter she was here for a long time.” Einar thought about the past winter, when more often than not he would go to bed and have no idea who he would be when he woke in the morning. One night Lili and Greta found themselves held up at knife-point after leaving the Opéra. The thief was a little man in a black pea coat, and his knife didn’t look especially sharp in the winter moonlight. But he waved it at them and demanded their purses. The man hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he kept kicking the ground with one foot, saying, “I’m serious, mademoiselles. Don’t think I’m not serious.” When Lili moved to hand over her purse, Greta tried to take her wrist, saying, “Lili, don’t.” But the man snatched the purse, and then he was lunging for Greta’s, who cried, “Oh no you don’t!” Greta began to run down the street, toward the Opéra, which was gold in the night. Lili remained against the wall, the thief in front of her. His foot struck the sidewalk again, and he seemed to be trying to think of what to do next. Greta was a block away when she turned around. Lili could only make out her silhouette: her fists on her hips, her feet apart. Then she started walking back toward Lili and the thief. The man smiled nervously. “She ’s crazy,” he said, his foot kicking the sidewalk. He turned his wrist so that now his knife, which wasn’t much more than a piece of flatware, was pointing down. Then he began to run away from Greta.
“Do you think of Einar when you are Lili?” Dr. McBride asked.
“Not at all.”
“But you think of Lili when you are Einar?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think about?” He removed the cap from his pen and placed the open instrument on a blank sheet of paper.
“Most of the time I just think her thoughts,” he said. Einar explained that if he were eating an apple tart sprinkled with cinnamon he’d wonder if he should save a slice for Lili. If he were arguing with the butcher, who tended to press his thumb against the scale, Einar would wonder if Lili would argue. He would convince himself that she wouldn’t take on the butcher, who was skinny and handsome with spiky blond hair; and so, mid-sentence, Einar would apologize and ask the butcher to continue wrapping his lamb.
Dr. McBride pushed up his eyeglasses.
Across the street at the café, Carlisle was waiting. Einar now thought of him, reading his Baedeker, pulling the pencil from behind his ear and marking a recommended site. Just then he was probably finishing his coffee and checking his watch.
“And how do you feel about men?” Dr. McBride asked. “Do you hate them?”
“Hate men?”
“Yes.”
“Of course not.”
“But it would be natural for you to hate men.”
“But I don’t.”
“And Lili? How does she feel about men?”
“She doesn’t hate men.”
Dr. McBride poured some water from a silver pitcher. “Does she like men?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
The doctor took a sip. Einar could see the impression his lips left on the rim of the glass, and suddenly Einar realized he was thirsty.
“Has she ever kissed a man?”
Einar was trying to think of a way to ask for a glass of water, but it seemed impossible. He thought perhaps he should simply stand up and pour himself one, but that felt impossible too. And so Einar just sat there, and he felt like a child in Dr. McBride ’s chair, which was covered in an itchy yellow wool.
“Mr. Wegener, I’m only asking because-”
“Yes,” Einar said. “Yes, she ’s kissed a man.”
“Did she like it?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“I thought I was asking her.”
“Do I look like Lili?” Einar said. “Do I look like a woman to you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, then-”
Dr. McBride’s telephone rang, and together they stared at its black receiver, which trembled with each ring. Finally it went silent.
“I’m afraid you are a homosexual,” Dr. McBride eventually said. He capped his pen with a little click.
“I don’t think you understand.”
“You’re not the first person this has happened to,” Dr. McBride said.
“But I’m not a homosexual. That isn’t my problem. There’s another person living inside me,” Einar said, rising from the chair. “A girl named Lili.”
“And it breaks my heart,” Dr. McBride continued, “when I have to tell men like you that there’s nothing I can do for them. As a black Irishman, I find it very sad.” He sipped from his waterglass, his lips clamping on the rim. Then he stood, moving around to the front of his desk. His hand moved to Einar’s shoulder, nudged him to the door. “My only advice is that you restrain yourself. You’re going to have to always fight your desires. Ignore them, Mr. Wegener. If you don’t… well, then, you’ll always be alone.”
Einar met Carlisle at the café. He knew Dr. McBride was wrong. Not so long ago Einar might have believed the doctor and sulked away in pity for himself. But Einar told Carlisle that it had been a waste of time. “Nobody is going to understand me,” he said. “I don’t see the point of any of this.”
“But that’s not true,” Carlisle protested. “We need to find you the right doctor. That ’s all. So Dr. McBride doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what? That doesn’t mean you should give up.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you’re unhappy.”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because of Greta.”
A few days later, Carlisle drove Einar to the Etablissement Hydro thérapique, a hospital known for its care of nervous maladies. The hospital was out toward Meudon, hidden from the road behind a grove of sycamore trees. There was an attendant at the gate, who pushed his face into the car and asked whom they were visiting. “Dr. Christophe Mai,” Carlisle said. The attendant eyed them, biting his lip. He passed them a clipboard to sign.
The hospital was a new building, a deep box of cement and glass. It was shaded by more sycamores, and plane trees scarred in the trunk. Steel grates covered the windows on the ground floor, their padlocks bright in the sun.
They had to sign another sheet of paper at the front entrance, and a third when they finally arrived at Dr. Mai’s office. A nurse, a woman with white curls, told them to wait in a little room that, once she closed the door behind her, felt securely sealed.
“I didn’t tell Greta where we were going today,” Carlisle said. A few days earlier Einar had overheard them talking about him. “He doesn’t need to see a psychiatrist,” she had said, her voice traveling via the crack beneath the door. “Besides, I think I know someone who can help him. And he isn’t a psychiatrist. This is someone who can really do something.” Then her voice fell, and the rest Einar failed to hear.
Dr. Mai’s office was brown and smelled of cigarettes. Einar could hear feet shuffling outside in the hallway. There was something so unpleasant about the hospital that a little sensation rose up inside him, telling him that this was where he belonged. In the brown carpeting, there were tracks from carts, and Einar began to imagine himself strapped to a cart that would wheel him into the deepest part of the hospital, from which he would never return.
“Do you really think Dr. Mai can help me?”
“I hope so, but we’ll have to see.” Carlisle was wearing a seersucker blazer and crisply pleated trousers and a yellow tie. Einar admired his optimism, the way he sat expectantly in his summer clothes. “We’ve got to at least try.”
He knew Carlisle was right. He couldn’t live much longer like this. Much of the muscle on his body had disappeared over the past six months; Dr. McBride had weighed him, and when the little black weights slid over to the left, Einar realized he didn’t weigh much more than when he was a boy. Einar had begun to notice a peculiar color in his skin: a gray-blue like the sky at dawn, as if his blood were somehow running at a slower pace. And a weakness of breath that caused his eyesight to quit whenever he ran more than a few paces, or whenever a sharp sudden noise, like the crack! of a motorcar, surprised him. And the bleeding, which Einar both dreaded and welcomed. When he felt the first spurt of it on his lip or between his legs, he would become dizzy. No one would tell him this, but Einar knew it was because he was female inside. He’d read about it: the buried female organs of the hermaphrodite hemorrhaging irregularly, as if in protest.
Dr. Mai turned out to be a pleasant man. His hair was dark and he was wearing a yellow tie that was oddly similar to Carlisle ’s. They both laughed about it, and then Dr. Mai led Einar into the examining room.
The room was tiled, with a window that looked through an iron grate into the park of sycamores and plane trees. Dr. Mai dragged back a heavy green curtain to reveal his examining table. “Please sit down,” he said, his hand falling on the table’s pad. “Tell me why you’re here.”
He was leaning against a cabinet with glass doors. He was holding a clipboard to his chest, and he nodded as he listened to Einar explain Lili. Once or twice Dr. Mai adjusted the knot of his tie. Occasionally he wrote something down.
“I don’t really know what kind of help I’m looking for,” Einar was saying. “I don’t think I can keep living like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know who I really am.”
With that, Dr. Mai ended the interview. He excused himself, leaving Einar on the padded table, his feet swaying. Outside in the park, a nurse was walking a young man in striped pajamas, his bathrobe hanging open. The man had a beard, and there was a frailty to his step, as if the nurse, whose apron ran to her feet, were the only thing propping him up.
When Dr. Mai returned he said, “Thank you for visiting me.” He shook Einar’s hand and led him to Carlisle.
On the drive back into Paris, they said nothing for a long time. Einar watched Carlisle’s hand on the gearshift, and Carlisle looked down the road. Finally he said, “The doctor wants to admit you to the hospital.”
“For what?”
“He suspects schizophrenia.”
“But that’s impossible,” Einar said. He looked over to Carlisle, who kept his eyes on the traffic. In front of them was a truck, and each time it hit a rut, gravel would spill from its bed onto the Spider’s hood. “How could I be schizophrenic?” Einar said again.
“He wanted me to sign the papers to admit you right then.”
“But that’s not right. I’m not schizophrenic.”
“I told him it wasn’t that urgent.”
“But you don’t think I’m schizophrenic, do you? That just doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, I don’t. But when you explain it… when you explain Lili, it does sound like you think there are two people. Two separate people.”
“Because there are.” It was evening, and the traffic had slowed because a German shepherd had been hit; it was lying in the middle of the road, and each car had to pick its way around it. The dog was dead, but it appeared uninjured, its head resting up on the granite curb of the rond-point.
“Do you think Greta thinks that? Do you think she believes I’m insane?”
“Not at all,” Carlisle said. “She’s the one who believes in Lili the most.”
They passed the German shepherd, and the traffic opened up. “Should I listen to Dr. Mai? Do you think maybe I should stay with him for a little while?”
“You’ll have to think about it,” he said. Carlisle’s hand was holding the black ball of the gearshift, and Einar felt there was something Carlisle wanted to say. With the wind, and the coughing exhaust of auto-buses, it was difficult to talk. The city traffic was heavy, and Einar looked to Carlisle, as if to urge him to say what he wanted. Tell me what you’re thinking, Einar wanted to say, but didn’t. Something was hanging between them, and then they were in the Marais, in front of the apartment, and the something passed, gone as the Spider’s motor went idle. Carlisle said, “Don’t tell her where we’ve been.”
Tired, Einar went to bed after supper, and Greta joined him even before he nodded off.
“So early for you,” he said.
“I’m tired tonight. I’ve worked through the past few nights. Delivered half a dozen sketches this week. To say nothing of Lili’s portrait on the mudflat.” And then, “You did a lovely job with the background. I couldn’t be happier with it. Hans said the same. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”
He felt her at his side, her long body warm beneath the summer sheet. Her knee was touching his leg, her hand curled at his chest. It was as much as they touched each other now, but somehow it seemed even more intimate than those nights early in their marriage when she would tug off his tie and loosen his belt: the curled hand like a little animal nuzzling his chest; the knee pressing reassuredly; the damp heat of her breath; her hair like a vine growing across his throat. “Do you think I’m going insane?” he said.
She sat up. “Insane? Who told you that?”
“No one. But do you?”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Who’s been telling you that? Did Carlisle say something to you?”
“No. It’s just that I sometimes don’t know what’s going on with me.”
“But that’s not true,” she said. “We know exactly what’s going on with you. Inside of you lives Lili. In your soul is a pretty young lady named Lili. It’s as simple as that. It has nothing to do with being crazy.”
“I was just wondering what you thought of me.”
“I think you’re the bravest man I know,” she said. “Now go to sleep.” And her fist curled tighter, and the strand of hair crept across his throat, and her knee pulled away.
A week went by. He spent a day cleaning out his studio, rolling up his old canvases and storing them in the corner, glad to get them out of the way. He enjoyed painting Greta’s backgrounds, but he didn’t miss creating something on his own. Sometimes, when he thought about his abandoned career, he felt as if he were at last finished with a tedious chore. And when he thought of his many paintings-so many dark bogs, so many stormy heaths-he felt nothing. The thought of coming up with a new idea exhausted him, the thought of conjuring and then sketching a new scene. It was someone else who had done all those little landscapes, he told himself. What was it he used to tell his students at the Royal Academy? If you can live without painting, then go right ahead. It’s a much simpler life.
Einar was sleeping late and rising tired. Each morning he’d promise himself that he would live the day as Einar, but when he went to the wardrobe to dress, it was like coming across the belongings of an ancestor in the attic.
More often than not, Lili would emerge from the bedroom and sit on the stool in Greta’s studio. Her shoulders would hunch and she would play with her shawl in her lap; or she’d turn her back on Greta, who was painting another portrait, and look out the window, down the street, for Hans or Carlisle.
Carlisle next suggested Dr. Buson, a junior member of a psychiatric clinic in Auteuil. “How did you hear of him?” Einar asked Carlisle, who in six weeks had settled into Paris faster than Einar had in three years. Already he was into his second box of calling cards, and held weekend invitations to Versailles and St-Malo. There was a tailor on the rue de la Paix who knew from memory Carlisle’s shirt size.
He was driving Einar to Dr. Buson’s clinic, and Einar could feel the heat of the engine through the metal floor.
“Hans gave me his name,” Carlisle said.
“Hans?”
“Yes. I called him up. Told him a friend of mine needed to see a doctor. I didn’t say who.”
“But what if he-”
“He won’t,” Carlisle said. And then, “So what if he does? He’s your oldest friend, isn’t he?” Now, with his blond hair blowing around his face, Carlisle could have been no one in the world but Greta’s twin; he pushed his hair over his ears.
“Hans asked about you,” Carlisle continued. “He said he knows something’s wrong. He said he saw you one day walking along the quai du Louvre, heading down to the Seine, and he almost didn’t recognize you.”
Carlisle’s hand was fiddling with the wiper gauge, and Einar kept expecting it to fall from the little knob to his knee again. “He told me you walked right by him,” Carlisle said. “Said he called your name but you just walked by.”
It sounded impossible. “By Hans?” Einar said, and in the reflection of the car’s window Einar could see the vaguest outline of himself, as if he were just barely there. He heard Carlisle suggest, “Maybe you should tell him. He’d understand.”
Dr. Buson, who was about Einar’s age, was of Genevois origin. He had black hair that stood up at the crown, and his face was thin in the cheeks, his nose long. He had a way of turning his head to the left when he spoke, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not he would make his next statement a question. Buson met Einar and Carlisle in a little white room with a reclining chair over which hung the silver bowl of an examination lamp. There was a cart on casters, its top covered with a green cloth. Lying on the cloth in a fan shape were a dozen scissors, each a different size. On the wall was a pull-down chart of the human brain.
This time Carlisle joined Einar in the interview. For some reason, Carlisle made Einar feel small, as if Carlisle were Einar’s father and would both answer and ask the questions. Next to him, Einar hardly felt capable of speaking. The window looked into a courtyard, which was dark with rain, and Einar watched a couple of nurses trot across the paving stones.
Dr. Buson was explaining how he treated people with confused states of identity. “Usually they want some sense of peace in their lives,” he was saying. “And that means choosing.”
Carlisle was taking notes, and Einar suddenly found it remarkable that he could travel from California and take Einar on as if he were his most important project. He didn’t have to do it, Einar knew. Carlisle didn’t have to try to understand. Outside in the courtyard, a nurse slipped on the wet stones, and when her colleague pulled her up, the nurse turned over her hand to reveal a bloody palm.
“In some ways I think people who come to see me are rather lucky,” Dr. Buson was saying. He was sitting on a steel stool that could be raised and lowered with a spin. He was wearing black trousers beneath his laboratory coat, and black silk socks. “They’re lucky because I say to them, ‘Who do you want to be?’ And they get to choose. It isn’t easy. But wouldn’t we all want to have someone ask us who’d we like to be? Maybe just a little?”
“Of course,” Carlisle said, nodding, jotting something in his notepad. Einar felt lucky to have Carlisle there, driving him to all the doctors, putting his hands on the steering wheel after each miserable appointment and saying, “Don’t worry. There’s a doctor for you.” Something in Einar settled, and he felt his breath slow. He wished that Greta were the one trying to help.
“And that leads me to my procedure,” Dr. Buson was saying. “It’s a rather new operation, one that I’m quite excited about because it’s so full of promise.”
“What is it?” Einar said.
“Now I don’t want you to get too excited when I tell you, because it sounds more complicated than it is. It sounds drastic but it really isn’t. It’s a rather simple surgery that is working on people with behavior problems. The results so far are better than any other treatment I’ve ever seen.”
“Do you think it would work on someone like me?”
“I’m sure of it,” Dr. Buson said. “It’s called a lobotomy.”
“What is that?” Einar asked.
“It’s a simple surgical procedure for cutting nerve pathways in the front part of the brain.”
“Brain surgery?”
“Yes, but it isn’t complicated. I don’t have to cut open the cranium. No, that’s the beauty of it. All I have to do is drill a few holes in your forehead, right about here… and here.” Dr. Buson touched Einar’s head, at his temples, and then at a spot just above his nose. “Once I’ve put the holes in your head then I can go in and sever some of the nerve fibers, those that control your personality.”
“But how do you know which ones control my behavior?”
“Well, that’s what I’ve discovered recently. Haven’t you read about me in the paper?”
“It was a friend who sent us here,” Carlisle said.
“Well, he must have seen the articles. There’s been quite a bit of press.”
“But is it safe?” Carlisle finally asked.
“As safe as many other things. Listen, I know it sounds radical. But I’ve had a man come to me who believed he was five people, not just two, and I went into his brain and fixed him up.”
“How is he now?” Einar asked.
“He lives with his mother. He’s very quiet, but happy. She was the one who brought him to me, his mother was.”
“But what would happen to me?”
“You would come to the hospital. I’d prepare you for surgery. It’s important that you’re rested and that your body isn’t weak. I’d have you come to the hospital and gain some strength before I took you into the operating room. It takes no time at all. And then you’d rest. The actual surgery, it takes only a few hours. And then in about two weeks you’d be ready to leave.”
“And from there where would I go?” Einar asked.
“Oh, but I thought you already knew that.” Dr. Buson’s foot stretched out, jiggling the cart on its casters. “You’ll have to sort out some things before you come in for the surgery. You won’t be the same after it’s over.”
“Is it really all that simple?” Carlisle said.
“Usually.”
“But who would I be after you did this?” asked Einar.
“That,” Dr. Buson said, “is something we still cannot predict. We’ll just have to see.”
Einar could hear the clack of clogs against the paving stones in the courtyard. The rain was beginning to fall harder, now tapping the window. Dr. Buson spun a little on his stool. And Carlisle continued to take notes on his pad. Outside, the nurse with the injured hand reemerged from a doorway with an oval window above it. Her hand was bound in gauze. She was laughing with her colleague, and the two girls-they were barely twenty, probably only aides-ran across the courtyard to the other side, where there was another door with an oval window just above, this one gold and bright with light and streaked with rain.
When Greta met Professor Bolk for the second time, in the early fall of 1929, she arrived with a list of questions written in a notepad with an aluminum spiral along the top. Paris was now gray, the trees shaking themselves free of their leaves. Women stepped out into the streets busy pulling gloves across their knuckles, and the shoulders of men were hunched up around their ears.
They met in a café on the rue St-Antoine at a table in the window that allowed Greta a view of the men and women emerging from the depths of the Métro, their faces soured by the weather. Professor Bolk was waiting for her, his thimble of espresso drained. He seemed displeased with her for arriving late; Greta offered up her excuses-a painting she couldn’t leave, the telephone ringing-while Professor Bolk sat stone-faced, scraping the underside of his thumbnail with a little stainless-steel knife.
He was handsome, Greta thought, with a long face and a chin that was dimpled like the bottom of an apple. His knees did not fit properly beneath the tabletop, which was round and stained, the marble scratched and rusted and as rough as slate. A little band of cut-out brass circled the piece of marble, and Greta found it uncomfortable to lean in to talk privately with Professor Bolk, the piece of brass pressing into the underside of her arm.
“I can help your husband,” Professor Bolk was saying. At his feet was a bag with a gold buckle and half-loop handles, and Greta wondered if it could be as simple as Professor Bolk arriving at the casita’s door with that black bag and spending a few hours alone with Einar. She told herself it wouldn’t work out like that, but she wished it could, the way she sometimes wished Carlisle would rub enough spearmint oil into his bad leg and it would heal, or the way she had wished Teddy Cross would sit in the sun long enough to burn the illness from his bones.
“But he won’t be your husband when I’m finished,” Professor Bolk continued, opening his bag. He pulled out a book covered in green mar bleized paper, the leather of the spine chipped and worn like the seat of an old reading chair.
Professor Bolk found the right page, and then he looked up, his eyes meeting Greta’s, uncaging a wingbeat in her chest. On the page was a diagram of a man’s body showing both the skeleton and the organs in a busy display of parallel and crossing lines that made Greta think of one of the Baedeker maps from Paris and Its Environs Carlisle had used when he first arrived. The man in the diagram represented an average adult male, Professor Bolk explained; his arms were spread out, and his genitals were hanging like grapes on a vine. The page was dog-eared and smudged with pencil markings.
“As you can see,” Professor Bolk said, “the male pelvis is a cavity. The sex organs hang outside. In the pelvis there’s nothing much but the lines of intestine, all of which can be rearranged.”
Greta ordered a second coffee, and was suddenly struck with a desire for a dish of quartered oranges; something made her think of Pasadena.
“I’m curious about your husband’s pelvis,” Professor Bolk said. It was a strange way of putting it, Greta thought, although she liked Professor Bolk, warming to him as he told her about his training. He had studied in Vienna and Berlin, at the Charité Hospital, where he was one of the few men ever to develop specialties in both surgery and psychology. During the war, when he was a young surgeon whose legs were still growing and whose voice hadn’t dropped to its final basso timbre, he amputated more than five hundred limbs-if one counted all the fingers he chopped off in an attempt to salvage a hand half-destroyed by a grenade whose lead time was a little shorter than the captain had promised. Bolk had operated in tents whose flap doors trembled in the wind of bombs; sacrificing a leg but saving a man, all in the glow of matchlight. The ambulance runners would serve up on wood-board stretchers men with their abdomens blown apart, sliding the half-alive soldiers onto Professor Bolk’s operating table, which was still wet from the previous man’s blood. The first time Bolk received a man like that, with the middle of his body reduced to an open bowl of guts, Bolk couldn’t think of what to do. But the man was dying in front of him, the soldier’s eyes rolling in his head and begging Bolk for help. The gas tanks were almost empty, and so there was no way to put the man fully out. Instead, Bolk lay a sheet of gauze across the young man’s face and set to work.
It was winter, and hailstones were pelting the tent, and the torches were blowing out, and the corpses were stacked like firewood, and Bolk decided that if he could sort out enough of the intestines-the liver and kidneys were okay, in fact-then maybe the boy could live, although he would never shit properly again. The blood seeped up Bolk’s sleeves, and for an hour he didn’t lift the gauze from the boy’s face because, even though he was unconscious from the pain, Bolk knew he couldn’t bear to see the agony fluttering in the boy’s eyelids. Bolk sewed carefully, unable to see much. As a boy Bolk had skinned pigs, and the inside of the soldier felt no different from that of a hog: warm and slick and dense, like plunging your arm into a pot of winter stew.
As the night deepened and the shelling lifted but the freezing rain fell only harder, Bolk began to stretch what was left of the soldier’s skin over his wound. There was a nurse in a bloodied apron, Fräulein Schäpers, and the patient she’d been attending had just vomited his innards on her, and then instantly died. She took half a minute to wipe her face and then joined Bolk. Together they stretched the soldier’s skin, from just beneath his sternum to the flaps of it hanging over his pelvis. Fräulein Schäpers held the flesh together as Bolk ran a cord thicker than a bootlace through the soldier, pulling the skin as tight as the canvas seats of the collapsing stools in the tent with the stovepipe chimney that served as their canteen.
The young man lived, at least long enough to be loaded into an ambulance truck racked with shelves for the patients, shelves that would make Bolk think of the bakery trucks that used to careen around Gendarmen markt, delivering the daily loaves on which he would dine when he was a medical student and poor and determined to become a doctor all of Germany would admire.
“Five hundred limbs and five hundred lives,” Professor Bolk said to Greta at the café on the rue St-Antoine. “They say I saved five hundred lives, although I can’t really be sure.”
Outside, leaves were stuck to the top step of the entrance of the Métro, and people would arrive and slip, although everyone managed to catch the green copper rail just in time. But Greta watched, waiting for someone to fall and scrape his hand, or worse, although Greta didn’t want to see it, she just knew it would happen.
“When can I meet your husband?” Professor Bolk asked.
Greta thought of Einar on the steps of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; even at that age-he was already a professor, for heaven’s sake-Einar looked like a boy just on the eve of puberty, as if they both knew in the morning he would lift his arm to wash and discover the first thread of gold-brown hair. He had never been right physically, Greta knew. But now she wondered if it had ever mattered. Perhaps she should send Professor Bolk back to Dresden alone, she thought, playing with the spoon in her coffee cup. She suddenly wondered whom she loved more, Einar or Teddy Cross. She told herself it didn’t matter, although she didn’t believe it. She wished she could decide and settle down with the satisfaction of the information, but she didn’t know. And then she thought of Lili: the pretty bone at the top of her spine; the delicate way she held her hands as if she were about to land them on the keys of a piano; her whispery voice like the breeze that floated up through the papery petals of the Iceland poppies that filled the planting beds of Pasadena in winter; her white ankles crossed and quiet. Whom did she love more, Greta asked herself-and then Professor Bolk cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple lifting, and said, as if there were no doubt, “So. I will see you and Lili in Dresden.”
But Greta couldn’t take Einar to Dresden. At least not yet. There were many reasons, including the private exhibition of her latest paintings, all of which showed Lili lying on a table, her hands folded over her stomach, her eyes sealed as if dead. The paintings, which were small, the size of a good dictionary, hung in the parquet foyer of a countess who lived within calling distance of not only the best atelier in Paris, but also the best apothecary, who knew everything about masks of Normandy mud and female rinses mixed of lime juice and the Pure Pasadena Extract Greta gave him in exchange for the cosmetic appliances like the Derma clean machine that Lili required more and more.
The paintings-there were only eight-sold in an afternoon, to people whose chauffeurs were waiting in the open doors of Nürburg convertible limousines on the street below, the burl-walnut paneling reflecting the early-autumn sun. Hans had arranged the show, which he told more than one newspaper editor was the first must-see of la rentrée. He was wearing an opal pin in his suit’s lapel. He squeezed Greta’s hand when each painting was pulled from the countess’s walls, which were trimmed with a picture-frame molding clogged with a century of paint. And Greta, despite the continuous accumulation of her fortune in the main branch of Landmandsbanken, found her eyes glazing over as she watched the leather hoods of checkbooks open and the pens scratch through the carbon paper.
That was one reason she could not take Einar to Dresden right away. A second reason was Carlisle, who was contemplating staying in Paris through Christmas. If she knew anything, she knew Carlisle was quite like herself in at least one way: his impulse to take on a project with an obsessive need to reach a solution. There had never been a painting Greta hadn’t finished. True, even she could now admit, many-especially during her early years in Denmark-had never been any good. Oh, if she could only return to Copenhagen on the blackest night and pull from the walls of all those offices along Vesterbrogade and Nørre Farimagsgade the drably official paintings she had produced when she was so young, so unsure of what she wanted to, or could, achieve! She thought of a severe portrait of Herr I. Glückstadt, the financier behind the East Asiatic Company and the Copenhagen Free Harbor; she had applied straight silver paint to reproduce his cap of hair; and his right hand, clutching a pen, was no more than a square, a blurry block, of flesh-colored paint.
And Greta knew that she and Carlisle shared this same need to continue working; inside their nearly identical-sized bodies hung an urge to achieve. One day, Carlisle had returned to the casita with a burst of news that had forced Greta to rest her brush in the cup of turpentine and sit on the daybed.
“Einar and I have met with some doctors,” he began. Driving around in his convertible had given Carlisle some color, and his face was even more handsome than Greta had recalled. When she closed her eyes and listened to her brother’s voice, which was flat and precise, she nearly thought she was listening to a recording of herself.
Carlisle described the visits, the futility of them, the humiliation Einar had endured. “He can bear more than most men,” Carlisle was saying, and Greta thought to herself, Yes, I already know.
“But there is one doctor,” Carlisle continued. “Dr. Buson. He thinks he can help him. He’s dealt with this before. With people who think they’re-” And here Carlisle’s voice cracked, something which Greta’s never did. “Who think they’re more than one person.”
Carlisle explained the lobotomy, the sharp little drills that Dr. Buson had set out on the cart with casters. He had made it sound no more complicated than swatting a fly.
“I think it’s what Einar wants to do,” Carlisle said.
“That’s too bad, because I’ve found a doctor myself,” Greta interrupted. She had pressed coffee grounds through a cylinder of steaming water, and now she was pouring it. When she went to look, there was no cream in the kitchen, and something inside her welled up-as if she were a little girl in the mansion in Pasadena and one of the Japanese maids had failed to set out the promised dish of candied dates-and she had to keep herself from stomping her foot. Even Greta hated it when she became petty, but sometimes she couldn’t help herself.
“He thinks he can help Einar change,” she continued. She apologized for not having any cream; she thought of saying, “I suppose I’m no good at managing both the house and my work, even if I like to think I am,” but decided it would sound insincere, or ungrateful, or something-oh, she didn’t know what-and now she became hot beneath her long skirt and the blouse that was tight in the sleeves, and she wondered why she was discussing her husband with her brother, why Carlisle should have any say at all.
But she stopped herself.
“But Dr. Buson thinks he can help Einar change,” Carlisle said. “Is your doctor proposing the same thing? Did he say anything about the drills through the forehead?”
“Professor Bolk thinks he can change Einar into a woman,” Greta said. “Not mentally, but physically.”
“But how?”
“Through surgery,” Greta said. “There are three surgeries that the professor wants to try.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“Trust me.”
“Of course I trust you. But what kind of surgery?”
“Transforming surgery.”
“Have you told Einar?” Carlisle asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
“It sounds terribly risky.”
“No more than what you’re proposing.”
Carlisle was on the velvet ottoman, his leg up. She liked having him stay with them, to fill the morning hours while Lili slept, to stay with Greta when Lili set out on errands and a bathe. She supposed in some ways she had silently asked for his help. “I’m not going to let him go see Buson,” she said. “He could come back a child, an infant practically.”
“It has to be Einar’s decision,” Carlisle said. “He’s an adult, he’ll have to decide.” Always the reasonable one, her brother. Sometimes too pragmatic for Greta.
Greta sipped her coffee; how she hated black coffee! She said, “It’s up to Einar.” And then, “Of course.”
And that was another reason why Greta couldn’t take Einar to Dresden just yet. She would have to find the day, when she was free and Einar was happy because Lili had visited recently and her stay hadn’t been painful but joyous: with a victorious game of badminton on the lawn behind Anna’s apartment, or an evening of cinema at the Gaumont-Palace; after a day like this was when Greta could explain to Einar his options for what to do next with Lili. It wouldn’t be easy. Greta imagined Carlisle had done a fine job convincing Einar about Dr. Buson’s skill, about the potential of the lobotomy, which to her sounded both gruesome and cruel. She would never let Einar go through with something like that. But Carlisle was right about one thing: Einar would have to decide for himself. Greta would have to make him believe, as she did, that Bolk could solve their problem, the problem that had both defined and ruined their marriage, more resolutely than any other man in the world. Bolk had already returned to Dresden, and so she would have to convince Einar on her own: take his hand in hers, push her hair over her ears, and explain the promise, the glittering promise, that lay in Dresden.
And yet there was one more reason why Greta hesitated taking Einar to Dresden.
By March of 1918 the winter rains had ended, and Pasadena was green, as green as the jade Buddha Akiko kept in her dormer room on the third floor of the Waud mansion. Greta and Teddy had buried baby Carlisle in the Bakersfield strawberry fields and resettled in Pasadena, saddened and, as Mrs. Waud stressed by the way she anxiously played with her rings, a bit scarred.
But at least the rains had ended, and Pasadena was green, with its winter rye lawns like blankets of felt, its beds of snapdragons springing forth with pink and white blossoms, the Iceland poppies floating above the soil. In the orange groves, the white blossoms were like jackets of snow. To Greta, the roots of the orange trees looked like elbows pushing through the damp soil; they were the dull color of flesh, and just as thick as a man’s arm. The rains had softened the ground for the earthworms, which, in their blue-gray skins, reminded Greta of baby Carlisle’s birth matter. She’d never forget the wormlike color of the cord, twisted like a corkscrew. Nor the bluish mucus sealing the baby’s eyes, or the sheen of her own fluids covering him, as if he were encased in a thin, greasy sheet of protection, one her own body, in its independent wisdom, had designed.
She thought of this that spring when she was managing the orange groves in her father’s absence. She’d survey the land in the car with the flip-down windshield that carried her through the mud. She was supervising the crews, mostly teenage boys from Tecate and Tucson, hired to pick the understock. Beneath a tree whose fruit was falling prematurely, she saw a nest of worms slide through a clod of dirt. And this, now, made Greta think of Teddy and his cough. For nearly a year the sputum had hurled from his lungs, and at night he would soak the sheets in a sweat so icy that at first Greta had thought he’d spilled a glass of water into their bed. At the sound of the first cough, which had crept ominously up his throat like a ball of broken glass, she had suggested a doctor. He would cough and she would lift the telephone receiver to call Dr. Richardson, an egg-shaped man originally from North Carolina. But Teddy would argue, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not going to see any doctor.”
Greta would return the receiver to its cradle and say only, “All right.” She’d have to wait until he was out of the house to make the phone call. Whenever he coughed and brought his handkerchief-which she herself had taken to pressing with a black iron-to his mouth, Greta would glance out of the corner of her eye to see if anything had come up with the cough. Sometimes it was dry, and she would silently sigh. But other times the cough would be phlegmy and a sluggy whitish fluid would swing from Teddy’s mouth to his handkerchief. And then, more and more, he would hack up a thick clot of blood. Because Greta, and not Akiko, would rinse all of Teddy’s laundry, including his handkerchiefs, she would see just how much blood he was coughing up. She would have to change the sheets nightly, and dip the handkerchiefs, and sometimes his shirts, into tubs of bleach, the bitter chlorine smell rising to her nostrils and stinging her eyes. The blood didn’t come out easily, and she would rub her fingertips raw trying to rid the handkerchiefs of their stains, which reminded Greta of the dropcloths she used around her easels back when she was painting, which now, settled in the casita in Pasadena, she wasn’t doing at all. But still, whenever Greta lifted the receiver, Teddy would say, “I’m not going to see any doctor, because I’m not sick, for chrissakes.”
A couple of times she managed to summon Dr. Richardson to the casita. Teddy would greet him in the sun room, his hair falling into his eyes. “You know how a wife can be,” Teddy would say. “Always worrying over nothing. But honestly, Doc, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Then what about your cough?” Greta would interrupt.
“Nothing more than a farmer’s hack. If you grew up in the fields you’d be coughing too,” he’d say, smiling, laughing, causing Dr. Richardson and Greta both to laugh as well, even though Greta saw nothing funny in what Teddy was doing.
“It’s probably nothing,” Richardson would say. “But do you mind if I take a look?”
“As a matter of fact I would.” The sun room had a floor paved with tiles Teddy had cast at his studio. They were the orange color of amber and laid with a black grout. In the winter, the tiles were too cold to stand on even in socks.
“Then call me if it gets any worse,” Dr. Richardson would say, clasping his bag in retreat.
And Greta, who more than anything else wanted to be a good wife, who didn’t want her husband to snicker with his buddies over how possessive and sneaky and shrill she’d become, would push her hair back over her ears and say, “All right then. If you’re not going to see Richardson, you’d better damn well take good care of yourself.”
The reason she considered this spring, the spring of 1918, greener than any other she could recall was that Teddy’s room in the sanitarium, where he was now settled, had a view of both the Arroyo Seco and the San Gabriel Mountains; she would sit in the chair at the window and study the green while Teddy slept. The sanitarium was a tan stucco building with a bell tower that hung on the lip of a cliff over the arroyo. There was a path around the property that was lined with rosebushes. The rooms were diamond-shaped and had hand-crank windows with views both north and south. Teddy’s bed was white iron, and every morning a nurse would come and get him into his rocking chair and then roll up the blue-striped mattress, where it would sit on the open springs at the foot of the bed like a huge roll of taffy.
Teddy had been in the sanitarium most of the winter, and rather than improving, he seemed only to worsen with each week. His cheeks were hollow, and his eyes clogged with something that looked like spoiled milk. Greta would arrive in the morning and immediately dab his eyes clean with the corner of her skirt. Then she would comb his hair, which had thinned to nothing more than a few colorless strands. On some mornings, his fever would be running so high that his forehead would be wet, and yet he was too weak to lift his own arm to wipe his brow. More than once she’d arrive and find him in his rocking chair like this: at the hand-crank window, in the sunlight, burning up from the fever and the flannel bathrobe that the nurse had tied around his hollow waist. From the way his face was twisted up, Greta could see he was trying to lift his arm to drag the flannel sleeve across his forehead; the sweat was dripping from his chin as if he’d been caught in a downpour. But this was March, and the winter rains were over, and all of Pasadena was jade green; instead of the clear blank sunlight burning the tuberculosis out of his lungs and his marrow, it was only setting Teddy on fire, so that before ten o’clock and the first arrival of his twice-a-day glass of kumquat juice, Teddy would have fainted beneath the weight of his fever.
By April, Teddy was sleeping more and more. Greta would sit in the rocker, the white padding on its arms worn threadbare, while he lay in bed on his side. Sometimes he would shift in his sleep, and the springs would creak, and it would sound to Greta like a groan from his bones, which were filled with tuberculosis, like an eclair stuffed with cream. His doctor, a man named Hightower, would come to the room, his white coat open over a cheap brown suit. Teddy continued to refuse treatment from Dr. Richardson, who treated not only every Waud in Pasadena but also the families of Henrietta and Margaret and Dottie Anne. “Dr. Hightower is fine for me,” he’d say. “I don’t need a fancy person’s doctor.”
“What the hell is ‘a fancy person’s doctor’ anyway?” Greta would say, regretting her raised voice the moment it escaped her throat. She didn’t want to contradict him; more than anything she didn’t want to hurt Teddy by saying she knew more than he. That was how she felt about it, and so she politely tolerated Dr. Hightower during his daily visits. The doctor was always in a rush, and he often did not have the proper paperwork in the manila file shoved up under his arm. He was a lanky man, with Norwegian-blond hair, like very light coffee. A transplant from Chicago, and there was something about the tips of his extremities-his nose, his ears, his nubby fingers-that looked frostbitten.
“How’re you feeling today?” Dr. Hightower would ask.
“A little better,” Teddy would say, honestly believing it, or unaware that it was possible to answer anything else. Dr. Hightower would nod and check something off on a chart in his file. Greta would excuse herself to make a call over to the grovehouse, where a load of orange pickers up from Tecate was expected any hour. And with the receiver at the nurse’s station pressed against her ear, Greta would make a second call to Richardson, saying only, “He’s getting worse.”
Her mother visited, usually in the afternoons when Teddy would have his one good hour. Greta and Teddy sat silently while Mrs. Waud rattled on about opening up the beach house in Del Mar, or about the telegram from Greta’s father, who was reporting even more enthusiastically than the newspapers that the end of the war was near. Greta silently hoped her mother would intervene in that way only she could: throwing open the drapes and nudging Teddy out of bed and into a hot mineral bath, bringing a cup of tea laced with bourbon to his lips. “Alrighty, now let’s get you well!” Mrs. Waud would say, rubbing her hands together and pushing the loose strands of hair back over her ears. “Enough of this tuberculosis nonsense!” Mrs. Waud would say-or at least Greta secretly hoped she would say. But Mrs. Waud never did; she left Teddy to Greta. She would pull on her gloves at the end of the visit and then kiss Teddy’s forehead through her surgical mask and simply say, “I want you sitting up the next time I come.” She would then slit up her eyes and look over at Greta. In the corridor outside the room, Mrs. Waud would remove her mask and say, “Make sure he’s getting the best care, Greta.”
“He won’t see Richardson.”
“He simply must.”
And Greta would telephone Richardson again, giving Teddy’s latest status.
“Yes, I know,” Dr. Richardson would say. “I’ve consulted with Dr. Hightower. To be honest with you, I’m not sure there’s anything more I could do for him. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
When Carlisle drove down from Stanford to visit, he pulled Greta aside and said, “I don’t like this Hightower. Where’d he come from?” She explained that he was assigned by the sanitarium, but Carlisle interrupted her: “Maybe it’s time to bring in Richardson.”
“I’ve tried.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She thought about this. She heard Teddy cough on the other side of the door. The wire springs of the bed trembled. There was a deep wheezing gasp for breath. “I’ll have to think about it. I’m sure there’s something, yes. I’ll just have to think about it.”
“You know how serious this is, don’t you?” Carlisle said, taking her hand.
“But Teddy’s strong,” she said.
Later that afternoon, when Carlisle had left, and the sun was sliding over the foothills, and the purply shadows were falling like blankets on the canyons of Pasadena, Greta took Teddy’s cold hand. The pulse on the underside of his wrist was faint, and at first she didn’t think it was there at all. But it tapped lightly, infrequently. “Teddy?” she said. “Teddy, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel any better today?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m worse. Worse than I’ve ever been.”
“But you’ll be getting better. Teddy? Do me a favor? I’ve called Richardson. He’s coming by in the morning. Please let him take a look at you. That’s all I’m asking. He’s a good doctor. He saved me when I was little and had the chicken pox. I had a fever of a hundred and six, and everyone, including Carlisle, had written me off, and here I am today as strong as anyone, with nothing left of that damn disease except for this little scar.”
“Greta, dear?” Teddy said, the tendons in his throat leaping. “I’m dying, dear. You know that, don’t you? I’m not going to get any better.”
And to tell the truth, she didn’t know that, not until just then. But of course he was dying; he was closer to dead than alive: his arms were thin and loose with yellowing flesh, his eyes infected, his lungs sponges so heavily soaked with blood and sputum that they would sink straight to the bottom of the Pacific. And his bones, that was the cruelest part: his bones were sopped; there was a wet living fire gnawing away at his bones. She thought of the pain he must be bearing but about which he never complained. It nearly killed her to have her husband in pain. “I’m sorry,” Teddy said.
“Whatever for?”
“For leaving you.”
“But you’re not leaving me.”
“And I’m sorry for asking you to do this,” he said.
“Do what? What are you talking about?” She felt a panicky film of sweat spread across her back. The room was warm with the effluvia of malady. She should crank open the window, she was thinking. Give poor Teddy some fresh air.
“Would you help me with it?”
“With what?” She didn’t understand him, and she thought about calling Richardson and reporting that Teddy was now speaking nonsense. An ominous sign, she knew Richardson would say, his drawl heavy on the phone line.
“Take that pillow… the rubber one. Put it over my face for just a little bit. It won’t take long.”
She stopped. Now she understood. A final request from her husband, whom she wanted to please more than anyone in the world. More than anything she wanted him to leave this world still in love with her, gratitude his final memory. A rubber pillow sat in the rocking chair; Teddy was trying to lift his hand to point.
“Just hold it against my face for a minute or two,” he said. “It’ll be easier that way.”
“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “I can’t. Dr. Richardson will be here in the morning. Wait until then. Let him take a look at you. He might know what’s next for you. But just hold on till then. Please stop talking about that pillow. Please stop pointing at that pillow.” The sweat was collecting at the small of her back, and on her blouse beneath her breasts. It was almost as if she had a fever, her forehead slick, a drop of sweat slipping past her ear.
She turned the window crank and felt the cool air. The pillow was black, with thick edges, and smelled like a tire. Teddy was still pointing at it. “Yes,” he said. “Bring it over here.” She touched it, its skin thick like a hot-water bottle. It was limp, only half-filled with air. “Greta, my dear… one last thing. Just press it against my face. I can’t take this any longer.”
She picked up the pillow and held it to her chest, the rubbery smell filling her. She couldn’t do it. Such a horrible way to die, beneath this smelly old thing, rubber the last scent of your life. Worse than what was going to kill him, she told herself, fingering the pillow’s elastic edge. Worse than anything she’d ever imagined. No, she couldn’t do it, and she threw the pillow out the window, the black pad falling like an injured raven into the Arroyo Seco below.
Teddy parted his lips, his tongue appearing. He was trying to say something, but the effort overcame him and he fell asleep.
Greta moved to his side and held her palm in front of his mouth. The breath was no stronger than the wake of a butterfly. As evening fell all around, the halls of the sanitarium became silent. The blue jays made a last dash in the ponderosa outside Teddy’s window, and Greta took his cold moist hand. She could no longer look at him, turning her head to the hand-crank window, watching the Arroyo Seco become a black pit. The San Gabriel Mountains turned into black silhouettes of something large, something black and faceless looming over the valley where the Wauds lived among the canyons and the orange groves, and where Greta was holding her breath until she thought she would pass out; and when she finally gasped for air and blotted the tears with her cuff, she dropped Teddy’s hand. Again she placed her palm beneath his nose, and then, in the night, she knew, by his own will, Teddy Cross was gone.