overshadowed hers. His little dark paintings of moors and storms-really, some were no more than gray paint on black-earned more and more kroner each year. Meanwhile Greta sold nothing but the drab commissions of corporate directors who refused to crack a smile. The more personal portraits she painted-of Anna, of the blind woman at the gate of Tivoli, and now of Lili-went unnoticed. After all, who would buy Greta’s work over Einar’s, the bright, bold American’s over the subtle, cozy Dane’s? What critic in all of Denmark, where artistic styles from the nineteenth century were still considered new and questionable, would dare praise her style over his? This was how Greta felt; even Einar, when prodded, admitted it might be true. “I hate feeling like this,” she would sometimes say, her cheeks mumpy with an envy that could not be dismissed as petty.
One painting, however, drew some interest. It was a triptych, painted on hinged boards. Greta had started it the day after the ball at Radhuset. It was three views of a girl’s head at full scale: a girl removed in thought, her eyelids tired and red; a girl white with fear, her cheek hollow; a girl overly excited, her hair slipping from its clip, her lip dewy. Greta had used a fine rabbit’s-hair brush and egg tempera, which gave the girl’s skin a translucence, a nightworm’s glow. On this one painting, she decided not to apply the shellac. Standing in front of it, one or two critics withdrew their pencils from their breast pockets. Greta’s heart began to beat against her ribs as she heard the lead tips scraping against the notepads. One critic cleared his throat; a second, a Frenchman with a little gray wart on the rim of his eye, said to Greta, “This one yours as well?”
But the painting, called
It was several weeks later that the clipping from a Parisian art journal arrived in the mail, in care of Rasmussen’s gallery. The article was a summary of Scandinavian modern art; buried in the paragraphs on Denmark’s most talented was a brief mention-most people probably never even saw it-of Greta. “A wild and rhapsodic imagination,” it said of Greta. “Her painting of a young girl named Lili would be frightening if it wasn’t so beautiful.” The review said nothing else. It was as cursory as surveys tend to be. Rasmussen had forwarded the clipping to Greta, who read it with a mixture of feeling she couldn’t articulate to anyone: to her, even more startling than the praise was the absence of Einar’s name. Danish art was summed up, and Einar hovered nowhere. She tucked the clipping into a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. It went beneath the sepia prints of Teddy and the letters from her father in Pasadena describing the orange harvest, the coyote hunts, and the society of lady painters in Santa Monica she could join if she ever decided to leave Denmark for good. Greta would never hand the article to Einar. It was hers; the words of praise were hers. Again, she didn’t feel the need to share.
But Greta couldn’t just read the review and then fold it away in a drawer. No, she had to react, and so she immediately wrote the critic with an idea.
“Thank you for your thoughtful review,” she began.
It will have a special place in my clippings file. Your words were just too kind. I hope you’ll look me up the next time you’re in Copenhagen. Ours is a small city, but refined. Something tells me you haven’t seen it properly. In the meantime, there ’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. My husband, Einar Wegener, the landscapist, has lost track of a close childhood friend. The only thing my husband knows of him is that he lives in Paris and is, perhaps, an art dealer. Would you happen to know him, Hans Axgil, the baron? He’s from Bluetooth, on Jutland. My husband would like to find him. Apparently they were uncommonly close as boys. My husband becomes quite nostalgic-as men do when they recall their youth-when he speaks of Hans and their childhood together in Bluetooth, which is really only a bog. But I thought you might at least know of Hans, since the world of the Arts is smaller than we all think. If you have an address, that would be, again, too kind. Please send it to me, and I’ll be sure to pass it to Einar. He would be grateful.
CHAPTER Seven
A week after the Artists Ball, Lili met Henrik in Kongens Have three evenings in a row. Still unsure of herself, she agreed to see him only at dusk, which at the end of June came late after supper. Each night as she dressed, pulling a skirt from the wardrobe, preparing for her assignation, she would become heavy with guilt. Greta would be reading the newspaper in the front room, and Lili could nearly feel Greta’s eye on her as she applied the powder and the lipstick and filled her camisole with rolled socks. Lili would tiptoe around Edvard IV, who was sprawled on the little oval carpet in front of the mirror. Lili would study her profile in the mirror, first from the left, then from the right. She felt sorry about leaving Greta to her newspaper and the cone of light from her reading lamp-but not sorry enough to fail to meet Henrik at the proposed iron streetlamp.
“Are you going out?” Greta asked the first night Lili headed toward the front door, just as the horn of the Bornholm ferry was calling.
“For a walk,” Lili said. “For some fresh air. It ’s too nice to be inside.”
“At this hour?”
“As long as you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” Greta said, pointing to the pile of newspapers at her feet that she still wanted to read before going to bed. “But all alone?”
“I won’t be exactly alone.” Lili couldn’t look at Greta when she said this, her eyes averted to the floor. “I’m meeting Henrik.” And then, “But only for a stroll.”
Lili watched Greta’s face. Her cheeks were twitching and it seemed as if she was grinding her teeth. Greta sat up in her reading chair. She sharply creased the newspaper in her lap. “Don’t stay out too late,” she finally said.
Henrik kept Lili waiting nearly twenty minutes beneath the streetlamp. She began to worry that maybe he had changed his mind, that perhaps he had realized something about her. It frightened her, to be alone on the street. But she was also thrilled by the sense of freedom, the rapid pulse in her throat telling her she could do almost anything she pleased.
When Henrik finally arrived, he was out of breath, sweat on his upper lip. He apologized. “I was painting and lost track of time. Does that ever happen to you, Lili? When you nearly forget who or where you are?”
They walked for a half hour, in the warm night. They didn’t say much, and it felt to Lili as if there was nothing to say. Henrik took her hand. When they were on a street empty but for a stray dog, he kissed her.
They met again the next two nights, each time Lili slipping out of the apartment under Greta’s gaze rising above the edge of the newspaper. Each time Henrik arriving late, running, paint beneath his fingernails, splattered in his curls.
“I’d like to meet Greta someday,” Henrik said. “To prove to her I’m not really the type of man who runs away from a fainting woman.”
They stayed out late that third night, past the call of the last tram, past one o’clock when the public houses closed. Lili kept her hand in Henrik’s as they walked through the city, looking in the flat black reflection of shop windows, kissing in the dark provided by doorways. She knew she should return to the Widow House, but something in her wanted to stay out forever.
Lili was sure Greta would be up waiting for her, her eye never having left the front door. But the apartment was dark when Lili got home, and she washed her face and removed her clothes and climbed into bed as Einar.
The next day Greta told Lili she should stop seeing Henrik. “Do you think it’s fair to him?” she asked. “To deceive him like this? What do you think he would think?”
But Lili didn’t quite understand what Greta meant. What would Henrik think about what? Unless Greta plainly told her, often Lili forgot who she was.
“I don’t want to stop seeing him,” she said.
“Then please, stop seeing him for me.”
Lili said she’d try, but even as she said it she knew it would be impossible. As she stood in the front room, by Einar’s empty easel, she knew she was lying to Greta. But Lili couldn’t help it. She could hardly help herself.
And so Lili and Henrik began to meet secretly, at the end of the afternoon, before it was time for Lili to return home for supper. At first it was difficult for Lili to see Henrik in the daylight, with the sun harsh in her face. She
