The Danish Girl

“Please tell him to meet me at Central Station for the 11:04 train to Rungsted,” Greta said. “I’m going to the supply store.”

She went to the wardrobe, looking for a scarf.

“What if Einar doesn’t return in time?” Lili asked. “What if I can’t find him by then?”

“He will.” And then, “Have you seen my scarf? The blue one with the gold fringe?”

Lili looked into her lap. “I don’t think so.”

“It was in my wardrobe. In my drawer. Did you borrow it?”

“I think I left it at the Cafe Axel,” Lili said. “I’m sure they have it behind the counter. I’ll go get it now.” And then, “Greta, I’m sorry. I didn’t take anything else. I didn’t touch anything else.”

Greta felt the pique bunching up in her shoulders. Something is very wrong, she told herself, and then shoved the thought aside. No, she wasn’t going to let a borrowed scarf upset her marriage. Besides, hadn’t Greta told Lili to take anything that she wanted? Didn’t Greta want, more than anything, to please Lili? “You stay here,” Greta said. “But please make sure Einar makes his train.”

The walls of the Cafe Axel were yellow from tobacco. Students from the Royal Academy went there for frikadeller and fadol, which between four and six were half price. When Greta was a student she would take a table by the door and sketch, her pad propped in her lap. When a friend would walk in and ask what she was drawing, she would firmly close her pad and say, “Something for Professor Wegener.”

Greta asked the bartender about the blue scarf. “My cousin thinks she left it here,” she said.

“Who’s your cousin?” The bartender rolled his hands in a tea towel.

“A slight girl. Not as tall as me. Shy.” Greta paused. It was difficult to describe Lili, to think of her floating through the world on her own, with her fluttering white collar and her brown eyes lifting toward handsome strangers. Greta’s nostrils flared.

“Do you mean Lili?” the bartender asked.

Greta nodded.

“Nice girl. Comes in and sits over there, by the door. I’m sure you know this, but the boys fall over themselves trying to get her attention. She ’ll share a beer with one of them and then, when his head is turned, disappear. Yes, she left a scarf.”

He handed it to her, and Greta tied it around her head. There it was again, the faint smell of mint and milk.

Out on the street, the air was damp, its chill deep and salty. Already her summer tan had faded and her hands had chapped. She thought of how beautiful Pasadena was in October, with the burned-out San Gabriel Mountains plum-brown and the bougainvillea climbing chimneys.

Central Station echoed with the efficient swish of moving feet. Pigeons murmured in the timber rafters above, their chalky dung lurching down the red-oak beams. Greta bought a roll of mints from a news-candy boy, whose customers were leaving trails of paper wrappers across the floor.

Einar arrived at the ticket kiosk looking lost. His cheeks were raw from scrubbing, his hair slick with tonic. He had been running, and he wiped his brow anxiously. Only when she saw him in a crowd did Greta think about how small he was, his head barely high enough to rest on another man’s breast. That was how Greta saw him: she exaggerated his slightness; she told herself, she came to believe, that Einar, with his bony wrists and his backside small and curved, was practically a child.

Einar looked up at the pigeons, as if he were in Central Station for the first time. He shyly asked a young girl in a pinafore for the time.

Something in Greta settled down. She went to Einar and kissed him. She straightened his lapel. “Here’s your ticket,” she said. “Inside is the address of the doctor I want you to see.”

“First I want you to tell me something,” Einar said. “I want you to agree that there’s nothing wrong with me.” He was rocking on his heels.

“Of course there’s nothing wrong with you,” Greta said, swatting her hands through the air. “But I still want you to see the doctor.”

“Why?”

“Because of Lili.”

“Poor little girl,” he said.

“If you want Lili to stay-with us, I mean-then I think a doctor should know about her.” Afternoon shoppers, mostly women, were nudging by them, their net bags bulky with cheese and herring.

Greta wondered why she continued to speak of Lili as if she were a third person. It would crush Einar-she could imagine his fine bones crumpling into a heap-were she to admit, aloud at least, that Lili was no more than her husband in a dress. Really, but it was the truth.

“Why are you doing this now?” Einar asked. The red rim of his eyelids nearly made Greta turn the other way.

“I love Lili as much as you do, more than-” but she stopped herself. “The doctor can help her.”

“How? How can anyone but you and me help Lili?”

“Let ’s see what the doctor says.”

Einar tried one last time. “I don’t want to go. Lili wouldn’t want me to go.”

Greta straightened her back, her head lifting. “But I want you to go,” she said. “I’m your wife, Einar.” She pointed him toward track 8 and sent him on his way, her hand falling on the small of his back. “Go on,” she said as he shuffled across the floor, past the news-candy boy, through the trail of paper wrappers, his body slipping into the crowd of shoppers, his head becoming one of a hundred, mostly women, who were busy with Copenhagen errands and fat with children, whose breasts were falling just as Einar’s were lifting, who would one day-Greta knew even then-look at Einar in a crowd and see only themselves.

CHAPTER Eleven

Einar sat by the window, the noon sun curled in his lap. The train was passing houses with red tile roofs, laundry and children waving in the yards. An old woman was opposite him, her hands around her purse handle. She offered a mint from a foil roll. “Going to Helsingor?”

“To Rungsted,” he said.

“Me too.” A square of open-knit lace was holding up her white hair. Her eyes were snow blue, her earlobes fatty and loose. “You have a friend there?”

“An appointment.”

“A medical appointment?”

Einar nodded, and the old woman said, “I see.” She tugged on her cardigan. “At the radium institute?”

“I believe so,” he said. “My wife made the appointment.” He opened the envelope Greta had given him. Inside was an ecru card with a note Lili had written to Greta last week: Sometimes I feel trapped. Do you ever feel that way? Is it me? Is it Copenhagen? Kisses-

“Your card says Dr. Hexler,” the old woman said. “On the back is Dr. Hexler’s address. It’s on my way. I’ll be happy to take you. Some say he runs the best radium institute in Denmark.” The woman hugged her purse against her breasts. “Some say he can cure almost anything.”

Einar thanked the old woman and then sat back in his seat. Through the window the sun was warm. He had considered skipping the appointment. When she told him to meet her at Central Station, a furious flash of an image ran through his head: that of Greta, her chin high above the crowd, waiting at the station for him to arrive. He thought about defying her and never showing up. He thought about her chin slowly falling as the minutes and hours passed and it became more and more evident that he would not come. She would shuffle home. She would open the door to the apartment in the Widow House and find him waiting for her at the table. Einar would say, “I don’t want to see the doctor.” And she would pause, and then say, “All right.”

“We ’re here,” the old woman on the train said. “Get your things.”

Red waxy cones from the yew trees were lying along Rungsted’s streets. It had rained in the morning, leaving a