The Danish Girl

It was the first time that Einar sensed how he was turning the world on its head by dressing as Lili. He could eliminate himself by pulling the camisole with the scallop-lace hem over his head. Einar could duck out of society by lifting his elbows and clasping the triple strand of Spanish pearls around his neck. He could comb his long soft hair around his face, and then tilt his head like an eager adolescent girl.

Then Henrik took Lili’s hand. The wiry hairs on his wrist startled her, because the only hand she had ever held was Greta’s.

“Tell me about yourself, Lili,” Henrik said.

“I was named for the flower.”

“Why do girls say silly things like that?”

“Because it’s true.”

“I don’t believe girls when they say they’re like a flower.”

“I’m not sure what else I can tell you.”

“Start with where you come from.”

“Jutland. A little village called Bluetooth, on a bog.” She told Henrik about the lucerne grass fields, about the icy rain that could punch holes in the side of the farmhouse.

“If I were to give you an acorn to eat,” Henrik said, “who would you want to be?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“But make a wish.”

“I can’t.”

“Okay then, don’t make a wish.” And then Henrik began to tell the story of a Polish prince who freed every woman in his country from another day’s labor; that was who Henrik wanted to be.

Before she knew it, it was late, the very middle of the night. The wind had picked up, and the oak tree, with its ear-shaped leaves, was bending as if to overhear Henrik and Lili. The moon had slipped away, and all was dark except the gold light coming through the portals of the Radhuset. Henrik had taken Lili’s hand, kneading the fleshy base of the thumb, but it felt to Lili as if the hand and thumb belonged to someone else. It was as if someone else were coming to claim her.

“Shouldn’t we have met sooner than tonight?” Henrik said, his fingers trembling, fidgeting with a loose thread on the cuff of his coat.

Lili heard Einar laugh, a bubbly air pocket of a giggle; inside the air pocket was the distantly sour breath of Einar. Einar was chuckling about the clumsiness of another man courting and carrying on. Had he ever said something so ridiculous to Greta? Not likely; Greta would have told him to cut the nonsense. She would have shaken her silver bracelets and said, “Oh, for Pete ’s sake,” her eyes rolling in her head. She would have said she ’d leave the restaurant if Einar didn’t stop treating her like a child. Greta would have abruptly turned to the haddock on her plate and not spoken again until there was nothing left but the hollow head resting in a bed of vinegar. Then she would have kissed Einar and walked him home.

“I need to go look for Greta,” Lili said.

A fog had rolled in from the harbor, and now she was cold. The thought came this way: Lili, with her bare forearms, was feeling the wind, not Einar; she felt the quick damp air run through the nearly invisible vine of hair that grew up the nape of her neck. Deeper, beneath the chiffon and the camisole and finally the woolen drawstring underpants, Einar was becoming cold, too-but only as you become cold by watching a coatless person struggle against the chill. He realized that Lili and he shared something: a pair of oyster-blue lungs; a chugging heart; their eyes, often rimmed pink with fatigue. But in the skull it was almost as if there were two brains, a walnut halved: his and hers.

“Tell Greta I’ll walk you home,” Henrik said.

Lili said, “Only if you promise to leave me around the corner from the Widow House. Einar might be waiting up, and he wouldn’t want to see me alone with a stranger. Then he and Greta would worry whether or not I’m old enough to live in Copenhagen. They’re like that, always wondering what to do with me, wondering if I’m about to stumble across trouble.”

Henrik, whose lips were flat and purple and cracked just down the middle, kissed Lili. His head swooped in, his mouth landed on hers and then pulled away. He did it again, and again, while his hand kneaded the flesh above her elbow, and then the small of her back.

What surprised her most about a man’s kiss was the scratch of the whiskers, and the dense hot weight of a young man’s arm. The tip of his tongue was strangely smooth, as if a scalding tea had burned off the bumpy buds. Lili wanted to push him away and say she couldn’t do this, but it suddenly seemed like an impossible task. As if her hand could never shove away Henrik, whose corkscrew hair was twisting like rope around her throat.

Henrik pulled her from the iron bench. She was worried that he might embrace her and feel through the dress her oddly shaped body, bony and breastless, with a painful, swollen ache tucked between her thighs. He led Lili down a side corridor in the Radhuset, his hand offered as a tow. His head seemed like a puppet’s, bobbing happily; it was round and cranial, with a touch of Mongol in the forehead. And this was why, perhaps, Einar felt free to grip Henrik’s moist fist and follow: it was a game, part of the game of Lili, and games counted for nearly nothing. Games weren’t art, they weren’t painting; and they certainly weren’t life. Not once before-and not even tonight with Henrik’s hand sweating in his palm-did Einar ever consider himself abnormal, or off the mark. His doctor, when he’d gone to him last year with a question about their inability to produce children, had asked, “Do you ever long for someone other than your wife, Einar? For another man, perhaps?” “No, never. Not at all,” he replied. “Your inkling is wrong.” Einar told the doctor that he, too, became disturbed when he saw the men with the quick, frightened eyes and the excessively pink skin loitering near the toilethouse in Orstedsparken. Homosexual! How far from the truth!

And, again, this was why Einar held Henrik’s hand and ran down the back passageway with the Danish flags hanging from the burnished beams. Why he tripped in the sennep-yellow shoes Greta had first given him that April afternoon when she needed a pair of legs to paint. Why he allowed the narrow slip-dress to bind his stride: Einar was playing a game. He knew it. Greta knew it. But he also knew nothing, nothing about himself.

Outside in Radhuspladsen, a tram clanged by, its bell friendly and sad. Three Norwegians were sitting on the rim of the fountain, laughing and drunk.

“Which way?” Henrik asked. He seemed shorter on the street, out on the open plads that smelled of the nearby cart selling coffee and spice biscuits. There was something hot in the secret pit of Einar’s stomach, and all he could do was look around at the fountain and the bronze lurblowers and the steep pitch of the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square.

“Where to?” Henrik asked again. He looked to the sky, his nostrils trembling.

Then Einar had an idea; Lili had an idea. And as strange as it might seem, it was like that: floating somewhere above Radhuspladsen Einar watched Lili, with her determined upper lip, whisper to Henrik, “Come.” He heard her think: Greta will never know. What Lili was referring to-Greta will never know what?-Einar didn’t find out. When he, Einar, the remote owner of the borrowed body, was about to ask Lili what she was referring to; when he, Einar, floating above like a circling ghost, was about to lean in and ask-not exactly the way a driver at a fork asks himself which road to take, but almost-What won’t Greta know?, just then Lili, with her forearms flushed with heat, with chiffon in her fists, her half of the walnut brain electric with the current of thought, felt a warm trickle run from her nose to her lips.

“My God, you’re bleeding!” Henrik cried.

She brought her hand to her nose. The blood was thick, running over her mouth. The music from the Radhuset was ringing in her nose. With each drop she felt more cleansed, empty but cleansed.

“What happened?” Henrik asked. “How did this happen?” He was yelling, and the blood seemed to run a little heavier in gratitude for his concern. “Let me get you some help.” Before she could stop him, he was running across Radhuspladsen to some people getting into a car. He was about to tap the shoulder of a woman holding open the door. Lili watched Henrik’s finger slowly unfurl. Then she realized.

Lili tried to call “No!”-but she couldn’t speak at all. Henrik was tapping the black sturdy back of Greta, who was on the street putting Helene into the Royal Greenland Trading Company’s official car.

It was as if Greta never saw Henrik. She only saw Lili, her blood bright across Radhuspladsen. Greta’s face tightened, and Lili thought she heard Greta whisper, “Oh no. For God ’s sake, no.” The next thing Lili knew, Greta’s blue scarf, the one Lili had been secretly borrowing, was pressed to her nose, and she was collapsing into Greta’s