arms, hearing softly, like a lullaby, “Lili, are you all right? Oh, Lili, please be all right.” And then, “Did he hurt you?”
Lili shook her head.
“How did this happen?” Greta asked, her thumbs rubbing circles into Lili’s temples. Lili couldn’t say anything, could only watch Henrik, frightened of Greta, run across Radhuspladsen, his legs long and swift, his spiraled hair swaying at the tips, the handsome slap of his foot on the cobble eerily similar to the flat punch of Einar’s father’s hand to his cheek when he discovered Einar in his grandmother’s apron as Hans’s lips pressed toward his neck.
CHAPTER Six
That summer, the dealer who sold Einar’s work agreed to display ten of Greta’s paintings for two weeks. Einar arranged it, requesting the favor-
Rasmussen was bald, with Chinese-shaped eyes, a widower. He lived with his two children in an apartment near Amalienborg. When he said he ’d hang her most recent paintings, Greta was tempted to say she didn’t want his help. Then she thought about it and realized she did. To Einar she coyly said, “I’m not sure whether you spoke to Rasmussen or not. But thankfully he’s come around.”
At a furniture store on Ravnsborggade she bought ten chairs and re-tacked their cushions in red damask. The chairs she placed in front of each painting at the gallery. “For reflection,” she suggested to Rasmussen, arranging them just so. Then she wrote every European newspaper editor on the list Einar had put together over the years. The invitation announced an important debut-words Greta had trouble putting down, so boastful they seemed, so transactional, but she went ahead, at Einar’s urging. “If that’s what it takes,” she said. She hand-delivered the invitation to the offices of
Greta’s paintings were oversized and glossy with a shellacking process she created from varnish. They were so shiny and hard you could clean them like windows. The few critics who came to the gallery picked their way around the red damask chairs and ate the honey crackers Greta had set out in a silver dish. She escorted the critics, whose little notepads remained open and disturbingly blank. “This one is Anna Fonsmark. You know, the mezzo-soprano,” Greta would say. “The trouble I had getting her to pose!” Or, “He’s the furrier to the king. Did you notice the wreath of minks in the corner, symbolizing his trade?” When she said things like that she regretted them immediately; the crassness of her comments would ring in the air as if it were echoing off the shellacked paintings. She would think of her mother, and Greta would blush. But sometimes Greta was filled with too much immediate energy to stop and think and plan and plot. The energy was the fluid running up and down her Western spine.
She had to admit to herself that some of the critics had come only because she was Einar Wegener’s wife. “How’s Einar’s work coming along?” a few would ask. “When can we expect his next show?” One critic came because she was a Californian and he wanted to hear about the plein-air painters working there-as if Greta might know anything at all about the bearded men mixing their paints in the startling sunlight of Laguna Niguel.
The gallery on Krystalgade was cramped and, in the heat wave that coincided with her exhibition, smelled of the cheese shop next door. Greta worried that the odor of fontina would settle into her canvases, but Einar told her it was impossible, not with the shellac. “They’re impenetrable,” he remarked of her paintings, which sounded-once it was said, hovering between the two of them like a bat-unkind.
The next day, when Greta returned to the apartment, she found Lili crocheting a hair net, the needles clicking in her lap. Neither Einar nor Greta ever figured out the origins of Lili’s bloody nose at the Artists Ball. But about a month after, her nose began to bleed again, a couple of warm red bursts over the course of three days in July. Einar said it was nothing, but Greta worried, like a mother watching a son’s cough. Recently, in the middle of the night, Greta had begun to climb out of bed and go to her easel to paint an ashen Lili collapsing in Henrik’s arms. The painting was large, nearly life-size, and more real, with its bright colors and flat shapes, than Greta’s memory of Lili bleeding outside the Artists Ball. In the slanting background was the fountain with the spewing dragons, and the bronze Viking lurblowers. A frail Lili filled the painting, a man’s arms around her, his hair falling into her face. She would never forget the sight of it, Greta told herself as she painted, the climbing mix of horror and confusion and outrage still palpable on the knuckles of her spine. She knew something had changed.
“Have you been here long?” Greta now asked Lili.
“Less than an hour.” The needles continued to click in her lap. “I went out. I walked through Kongens Have and crocheted on a bench. Have you seen the roses yet?”
“Do you think it’s a good idea? For you to be outside? All alone?”
“I wasn’t alone,” Lili said. “Henrik met me. He met me on the bench.”
“Henrik,” Greta said. “I see.” Through the corner of her eye, Greta studied her husband. She had no idea what he wanted from this, from Lili, and yet there he was, dressed in a brown skirt and a white blouse with capped sleeves and the old-fashioned shoes with the pewter buckles she had given him that first day. Yes, there he was. A vague regret filled Greta’s throat: she wished she were both more and less involved in the comings and goings of Lili. Greta realized she would never know what exactly was the right thing for her to do.
“How is the fish painter?” Greta asked.
Lili sat forward in her chair and began to tell the story of Henrik’s recent trip to New York, where he dined with Mrs. Rockefeller. “He’s becoming an important painter,” Lili went on, describing the people in the art world who were talking about Henrik. “Did you know he’s an orphan?” Lili said, describing his youth as a sailor’s apprentice on a schooner that fished the North Sea. Lili then reported that Henrik had declared, on the bench in Kongens Have in front of the boxhedge, that he ’d never met a girl like Lili.
“It’s clear he’s taken by you.” Greta could see the heat in Lili’s face. Greta had just returned from an uneventful day at the gallery, her ten paintings all on the wall and unsold. Now all of this-the sight of her husband in the plain brown skirt; the story of Henrik receiving an invitation to dine with Mrs. Rockefeller at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park; the strange thought of Lili and Henrik on a public bench in the shadow of Rosenborg Slot’s turrets- caught up with her. Greta suddenly asked, “Tell me, Lili. Have you ever kissed a man?”
Lili stopped, her lace limp in her lap.
It was almost as if the question had tumbled with its own will out of Greta’s mouth. She had never wondered about this before, because Einar had always been sexually awkward and without initiative. It seemed impossible to Greta that he would have ever pursued such a foreign longing. Why, without her, Einar would never have found Lili. “Would Henrik be the first?” Greta said. “The first to kiss you?”
Lili thought about this, her brow bunching up. Through the floorboards came the potato-vodka voice of the sailor. “Don’t lie to me!” he was yelling. “I can tell when you’re lying to me.”
“In Bluetooth,” Lili began, “there was a boy named Hans.” It was the first Greta had heard of Hans. Lili spoke of him ecstatically, with her fingers pressed together and held up in the air. It was as if she were in a trance as she told Greta of Hans’s climbing tricks on the ancient oak, of his pebbly little voice, of his submarine-shaped kite sinking into the bog.
“And you haven’t heard from him since?” Greta asked.
“I understand he’s moved to Paris,” Lili said, resuming her crocheting. “He’s an art dealer, but that’s all I know. Deals in art for Americans.” Then she rose and went into the bedroom, where Edvard IV was growling in his sleep, and shut the door. An hour later, when Einar emerged, it was as if Lili had never been there. Except for the scent of mint and milk, it was as if she didn’t really exist at all.
By the end of the two weeks none of Greta’s paintings had sold. She could no longer blame her lack of success on the economy, what with the Great War seven years in the past and the Danish economy chugging and panting with growth and speculation. But the failed show didn’t surprise her. Since they had married, Einar’s reputation had
