The Danish Girl

Greta’s yellow-diamond and onyx brooch shaped like a monarch butterfly.

“You’re so beautiful I want to kiss you,” Greta had said when Lili was dressing. Greta was so excited that she took Lili in her arms and waltzed her around the apartment while Edvard IV barked and barked. Lili closed her eyes-so stiff and heavy beneath the caking of powder!-and imagined that Copenhagen was a city where both Lili and Einar could live as one.

The street ended on Radhuspladsen, the great square across from Tivoli. The fountain with spouting dragons was tinkling, and across from the Palace Hotel was a column capped with a pair of bronze Vikings blowing their lure. The square was active, with people entering the midnight ball, and Norwegian tourists excited about tomorrow’s bicycle race from Copenhagen to Oslo.

Greta didn’t push Lili. She let her stand at the edge of Radhuspladsen and wait until little Lili had filled up inside Einar, like a hand filling a puppet.

Beneath the Radhuset’s copper-sheathed spire, the four-dialed clock rising more than three hundred feet above her, Lili felt as if she were carrying the greatest secret in the world-she was about to fool all of Copenhagen. At the same time, another part of her knew that this was the most difficult game she would ever play. It made her think of the summer in Bluetooth, and the crashing submarine kite. Einar Wegener, with his small round face, seemed to be slipping down a tunnel. Lili looked at Greta, in her black dress, and felt grateful for all that lay ahead of her. Out of nowhere had come Lili. Yes, thanks were due to Greta.

The people entering city hall looked smart and happy, lagerol lifting the color in their cheeks. There were young ladies in candy-colored dresses fanning their chests, asking one another where all the famous painters were. “Which one is Ejnar Nielsen?” one woman said. “Is that Erik Henningsen?” There were young men with wax-tipped mustaches and Sumatran cigars. There were the young industrialists, who, with their money made fast from mass-produced crockery and cooking pans molded by hissing machinery, came to move themselves up through society.

“You won’t leave me?” Lili asked Greta.

“Never.”

Yet already Lili was stirring.

Inside the Radhuset there was a covered courtyard decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. On three sides were open galleries supported by pillars. Above, a canopy of crossing timberbeams. On the stage was an orchestra, and there was a long table with trays of oysters. Hundreds of people were dancing, hands of handsome men on the slender waists of women whose eyelids were painted blue. Two girls on a bench were writing a note to someone, giggling over it. There was a circle of men in tuxedos with their hands in their pockets, their eyes roaming. Lili was stirring. She could hardly take it all in. She felt the wingbeat of panic in her chest, knowing she didn’t belong. She thought about leaving, but it was too late. Lili was at the ball, its smoke and its music already weaving their way through her eyes and ears. If she said she was going to leave, Greta would only tell her to settle down; Greta would tell her not to worry, there was nothing in the world to worry about at all. She’d swat her hands through the air and laugh.

Next to Lili was a tall girl in a strap dress who was smoking a silver cigarette as she talked to a man whose face was so dark he must have been from the South. The woman was slender, her back quilted prettily with muscle, and the man seemed so in love with her that he could only nod and agree and, then, stop her from talking with a long kiss.

“There’s Helene,” Greta said. Across the room was Helene Albeck, her short black hair cut sharply in a way Greta explained was now fashionable in Paris.

“You go talk to her,” Lili said.

“And leave you?”

“I’m not sure I want to talk to anyone just yet.”

Greta crossed through the dancers, her hair down her back. She kissed Helene, who seemed anxious to tell Greta something. At the Royal Greenland Trading Company, Helene managed the paintings, gramo phones, gold- rimmed dinner plates, and other luxuries that were included in the summer shipments that set sail each Tuesday from Copenhagen. For two years Helene had arranged for Einar’s paintings to be crated up and shipped to Godthab, where an agent would auction them off. The money was slow to return across the North Atlantic, but when it did Einar would proudly present it to Greta in a leather accordion file.

The dancers shifted, and then Greta and Helene were out of sight. Lili was sitting on a mahogany bench carved with mermaids. It was warm in the covered courtyard, and she peeled back her shawl. As she was folding it, a young man came to the bench and said, “May I?” He was tall, and his hair was a yellowy brown with thick corkscrew curls that twirled past his jaw. Out of the corner of her eye Lili watched him check his pocket watch, watched him cross and uncross his legs. He had a faint grainy smell, and his ears were pink with either warmth or nerves.

From her clutch-bag, Lili pulled out the pewter notebook given to Einar by his grandmother, and she started to write notes to herself about the man. He looks like Einar’s father as a young man, she wrote. His father when he was healthy and still working the sphagnum fields. This must be why I’m staring, Lili put down in the little notebook. Why else can’t I stop looking at him? Why can’t I stop looking at his long feet, at the wiry whiskers growing down his cheeks in a half-beard? At the aquiline nose and the full lips. At the thick curly hair.

The man leaned over. “Are you a reporter?”

Lili looked up from her lap.

“A poetess, then?”

“Neither.”

“Then what are you writing?”

“Oh, this?” she said, startled that he had spoken to her. “It ’s nothing at all.” Even though she was sitting next to the man, she couldn’t believe he had noticed her. It felt to her as if no one could see her. She hardly felt real.

“Are you an artist?” the man asked.

But Lili gathered her shawl and her clutch-bag and said, “I’m sorry.”

She was too surprised to find herself here to continue speaking with him. By now she was even warmer, and she had a sudden urge to remove her clothes and swim out to sea. She exited the hall through a portal that led to a back-park.

Outside there was a breeze. An old oak canopied the little park, as if protecting it from someone who had climbed the Radhuset’s spire to spy. There was a smell of roses and turned soil. The patch of lawn was silvery, the color of the wing of a flying fish. Lili took a few steps and then saw the couple from before, the girl in the strap dress and her admirer, kissing behind an oak scrub. The man was holding the woman’s thigh, her dress pushed up to her hip, the clasp of her garter bright in the night.

Startled, Lili turned away and walked right into the man from the bench.

“Do you know what they say about this old oak?” he said.

“No.”

“They say if you eat its acorns you can make a wish and become anyone you want for a day.”

“Why would they say that?”

“Because it’s true.” He took her hand and led her to a bench.

He turned out to be a painter named Henrik Sandahl. Recently he’d exhibited a series of paintings of North Sea fish: square canvases of plaice, dab, turbot, the elusive, sharp-faced witch. Greta had seen the paintings. One day she returned to the apartment, immediately dropping her bag and her keys, her eyes wide. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told Einar. “You have to go see them for yourself. Who ever thought you could fall in love with the face of a cod?”

“Are you here with someone?” Henrik asked.

“My cousin’s wife.”

“Who’s that?”

Lili told him.

“Einar Wegener?” Henrik said. “I see.”

“Do you know him?” Lili asked.

“No, but he’s a good painter. Better than most people think.” He paused. “I’m sure you know, but many people these days say he ’s old-fashioned.”