Teddy Cross. In his white tie he looked taller than usual. His hair was shiny with tonic, and there was something unfamiliar about him: he looked almost Danish, with his dark blond hair and his wrinkled eyes and his good brown tan; with his sharp Adam’s apple rising and falling nervously.
Later that night, after the waltzes and the roast beef and the strawberries served in Oregon champagne, Greta and Teddy slipped out of the clubhouse and walked toward the tennis courts. The night was clear and cold, and Greta had to lift her dress from the dew collecting on the baselines. She was a little drunk, she knew, because earlier she had made an unfortunate joke about the strawberries and Teddy’s parents. She apologized to him immediately but, from the way he folded his napkin on the table, he seemed a little hurt.
The walk on the tennis courts was her idea, as if to try to make it up to Teddy, all of this, her strange Pasadena life that she had hurled upon him. But she didn’t have a plan, hadn’t thought of what she would offer him. They reached the pavilion on the far court, where there was a water cooler and a wicker settee painted green. On the sofa, which smelled like dry, termite-eaten wood, they began to kiss.
She couldn’t help thinking how different Teddy’s kiss was from Einar’s. On the
With the ball playing on in the clubhouse, Greta thought she had better speed things up. She knew what she should do next, but it took her a few minutes of coaching herself. Lift your hand over to his… Oh, it was hard enough thinking about it, let alone actually instigating it! But she wanted to do it, or at least she thought she wanted to, and she was sure it was what Teddy wanted too, what with his neck with its wire-brush whiskers turning and shaking strongly. Greta counted to three and held her breath and reached for Teddy’s fly.
His hand stopped her. “No, no,” he said, holding her wrist.
Greta had never thought he would say no. She knew the moonlight was bright enough that were she to look up into his face she would see the coiled concern for propriety that would embarrass her deeply. Greta thought of the last time she had let a man try to say no to her: and now she and Einar were separated by a continent and a sea, to say nothing of a pyrotechnic war.
On the wicker settee of the Valley Hunt Club’s outermost court, there Greta Waud and Teddy Cross sat for a minute, her wrist still cuffed by his callused hand.
Again she asked herself what to do next, but now, as if propelled by an urge she had never before known, she pushed her face into Teddy’s lap. Greta began to use every trick she had read about in the novels she bought on the naughty side of Copenhagen’s Central Station, and from the chatty, slutty Lithuanian maids who had run her mother’s house. Teddy tried to protest again, but each “no” passed his lips less and less forcefully. Eventually he released her hand.
By the time they were finished her dress was wrinkled and bunched up on the empire waist. His tails had somehow ripped. And Greta, who had never gone this fast or this far, was lying under the thin long heap of Teddy, feeling his heart knock, knock, knock on her breast, and smelling his bitter salty scent damp between her legs. Already she knew what would come next, and Greta wrapped her arms around Teddy’s back in resignation and thought to herself, It ’s okay with me as long as he takes me away from here.
They were married on the last day of February in the garden of the house on Orange Grove Boulevard. The Japanese maids sprinkled the lawn with camellia petals, and Teddy wore a new pair of tails. It was a small wedding, only cousins from San Marino and Hancock Park and Newport Beach. Their neighbor, a chewing-gum heiress from Chicago, attended as well, because, as Mrs. Waud put it through her jaw, she had gone through this with her daughter too. Teddy’s parents were invited, although no one expected them to come; crossing Ridge Route from Bakersfield in February wasn’t always possible.
Immediately after the wedding and a short honeymoon in a garden suite at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where Greta cried every day-not because she was married to Teddy Cross but because she was now even farther from her beloved Denmark and the life she wanted to lead-Greta’s parents sent them to live in Bakersfield. Mr. Waud bought Greta and Teddy a small Spanish house with a red tile roof and Seville grating on the windows and a little garage covered by bougainvillea. Mrs. Waud sent Akiko to live with them. The banister of the Bakersfield house was wrought iron, and the doorways between the rooms were arched. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a small step-down living room with bookshelves. The house was in a grove of date palms, and inside it was always shadowy and cool.
Teddy’s parents came to visit once; they were stooped and their hands were faintly pink from the strawberries. They lived out in the fields, on a few acres of loam, in a two-roomer built from eucalyptus plank. Their eyes were sealed beneath skin folded by the sun, and they were nearly silent in Greta’s step-down living room, holding each other nervously, jointly examining the wealth that lay before them: the Spanish house, the plein-air painting above the fireplace, Akiko’s thick geta sandals clacking as she delivered a tray. Greta poured Mr. and Mrs. Cross iced hibiscus tea, and together they all sat on the white sofas Mrs. Waud had ordered from Gump’s. Everyone was uncomfortable and regretful that things had come to this. Greta drove the senior Crosses back to their house in her Mercer Raceabout, the two-seater forcing Mrs. Cross to curl into Mr. Cross’s lap. Night was falling quickly as the car sped along the road, and the early spring chill was creeping across the fields. A wind was whistling through the furrows, throwing dirt into the air. Greta had to use her wipers to clear the sandy loam from the windshield. In the distance, a gold light burned in the Crosses’ plank house. The soil was blowing so strongly that Greta could see nothing but the light of the house, and it was as if she and Mr. and Mrs. Cross were thinking of the same thing, because just then Mrs. Cross said, “Where Teddy was born.” And Mr. Cross, his hands wrapped around his wife, said, “Always said he ’d be coming back.”
For the rest of the spring, Greta napped on one of the white sofas in the step-down living room. She hated Bakersfield, she hated the Spanish house, she even sometimes hated the baby growing inside her. Not once, however, did she hate Teddy Cross. In the afternoons, she would read while he brought a steady supply of warm washrags for her forehead. Greta was swelling quickly, and she felt sicker with each day. Before May, she was spending nights in the living room as well, too sick and heavy to climb the stairs. Teddy took to sleeping on a cot at her side.
By early June, Bakersfield had settled into its summer heat; it would reach 100 degrees before nine in the morning. Akiko would fold paper fans for Greta; Teddy brought cold compresses instead of hot. And when Greta became really sick, Akiko served Greta cold green tea from a lacquered cup while Teddy read poetry aloud.
But then one day, while Teddy was down in Pasadena collecting a wheel from his old studio, which he had never closed, the heat and the sickness came to an end. Together, Greta and Akiko, whose hair was as black as a raven’s wing, delivered a blue baby boy, the umbilical cord around his neck like a little tie. Greta baptized him Carlisle. A day later, she and Teddy buried him in the yard of the senior Crosses’ eucalyptus house, in the blowing loam, at the rim of the whispering strawberry fields.
CHAPTER Five
The little cobblestone street that stitched across Copenhagen was dark and safe enough, Lili thought, for the privacy of a secret transaction. The street was too narrow for lamps, a window on one side nearly opening into the window on the opposite. The people who lived there were stingy about the light in their front rooms, and all was now dark except for the few businesses still open. There was a Turkish coffee house where customers sat on velvet pillows in the window. Farther down was a bordello, discreet behind its shutters, its brass doorbell shaped like a nipple. Farther was a basement bar, where, as Greta and Lili passed, a skinny man with a waxed mustache quickly disappeared down the steps to a place where he could meet others like himself.
Lili was in a chiffon dress with a linen sailor’s collar and cuffs. The dress was making a soft noise as she walked, and she kept her mind on the
