apple jabbing up.
The X-ray machine was the shape of an inverted L, its metal casing painted a muddy green. It extended over the gurney, a large gray eye of a lens pointed at the stretch of skin between Einar’s navel and his groin. There was a black glass window in the room, behind which, Einar imagined, Dr. Hexler was instructing Vlademar which round- knobbed levers to pull. It occurred to Einar, as the lights in the room dimmed and the machine coughed and then whirred, its casing vibrating tinnily, that this was only the beginning of doctors and tests. Somehow Einar knew the X rays would show nothing, and Dr. Hexler would either order more or send him to a second specialist, or a third. And Einar didn’t mind, not just then, because anything seemed worth undertaking for the sake of Greta and Lili.
Einar had expected the X ray’s light to be gold and flecked, but it was invisible, and he felt nothing. At first Einar thought the machine wasn’t working. He nearly sat up and asked, “Is something wrong?”
Then the X-ray machine switched into a higher gear, its whirring lifting an octave. The dented green metal casing rattled more, sounding like a baking sheet shaking dry. Then Einar wondered if he felt something on his stomach, but he wasn’t sure. He thought of a stomach alive with glow worms nested from the Bluetooth bog. He wondered if he felt a warm, fizzy feeling or if he was imagining it. He propped himself up on his elbows to look down, but there was nothing different about his stomach, gray in the dimmed room. “Please be still,” Dr. Hexler said through a funnel speaker. “Lie back down.”
But nothing was happening, or what seemed to Einar like nothing. The machine was clattering, and a blank feeling spread across his abdomen: he couldn’t tell if he felt something hot there or not. Then he thought he felt the pinch of a burn, but when he looked again, his stomach was just the same. “Lie still, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler’s voice boomed again. “This is serious.”
Einar couldn’t tell how long the machine had been running. Had two minutes passed, or twenty? And when would it end? The room dimmed further, now nearly black, and a yellow ring of light rippled around the gray lens. Einar was bored, and then, suddenly, sleepy. He closed his eyes, and it felt as if his body was becoming densely heavy. He thought about looking down to his stomach one last time, but his arms wouldn’t move to lift him. How had he become so tired? His head felt like a lead ball attached to his neck. In his throat Einar tasted his morning coffee.
“Try to go to sleep, Mr. Wegener,” Hexler said. The machine roared even louder, and Einar felt something hot press against his stomach.
Then Einar knew something was wrong. He opened his eyes just long enough to see someone lean his forehead against the black glass window, then a second forehead pressing, smudging. If Greta were here, Einar thought dreamily, she would unstrap me and take me home. She would kick the green machine until it stopped. A crash of whipping metal shook the room, but Einar couldn’t open his eyes to see what had happened. If Greta were here, she’d yell at Hexler to turn off the damn machine. If Greta were here… but Einar couldn’t finish the thought because he was asleep-no, beyond sleep.
CHAPTER Twelve
As Dr. Hexler’s X-ray machine continued to clang, Greta pressed her forehead against the black glass window. Maybe she’d been wrong; maybe her husband didn’t need to see a doctor. She wondered if she should have listened to his protests.
On the other side of the glass, Einar was lying strapped to the gurney. He looked beautiful, with his eyes closed, his skin a soft gray through the glass. The small mound of his nose rose up from his face. “Are you sure he ’s comfortable?” she asked Dr. Hexler.
“For the most part.”
She’d worried that Einar was slipping away from her. It sometimes bothered her that Einar never became jealous when a man on the street ran his eyes over her breasts; the only time he commented on it was when he was dressed as Lili, and then he’d say, “How lucky you are.”
In her consultation with Dr. Hexler the week before, he had said there was a possibility of a tumor in the pelvis that could be causing both infertility and Einar’s confused state of masculinity. “I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve read about it. It can go undetected, with its only manifestations being odd behavior.” Part of her wanted the theory to make sense. Part of her wanted to believe that a little scalpel curved like a scythe could slice free the tumor, its rind as blood-orange and tight as a persimmon, and Einar would return to their marriage.
On the other side of the window there was a crash of metal, but Dr. Hexler said, “Everything’s fine.” Einar was writhing on the gurney, his legs pressing against the straps. They were so taut with tension that Greta thought the straps might snap and Einar’s body would fling itself across the room. “When will you be finished?” she asked Hexler. “Are you sure everything is going all right?” She fingered the ends of her hair, thinking at once how she hated its coarseness and that if anything were ever to happen to Einar, she wouldn’t know what to do.
“An X ray takes time,” Vlademar said.
“Is it hurting him? It looks like he’s in pain.”
“Not really,” Dr. Hexler said. “There might be a small surface burn or ulceration, but not much else.”
“He’ll feel a bit sick in the stomach,” Vlademar added.
“It will do him good,” Dr. Hexler said. He was calm-faced, with stubby black lashes that beat around his eyes. He stuttered the first syllable of every sentence, but his voice was dark with authority. After all, the clinic drew the richest men in Denmark, men with bellies loose over their belts who, in their flurry to manufacture rubber shoes and mineral dyes and superphosphates and Portland cement, lost control of all that hung below their belts.
“And if it’s the devil your husband’s got in him,” Vlademar added, “I’ll zap it out.”
“That ’s the beauty of the X ray,” Hexler said. “It burns away the bad and keeps the good. It might not be an exaggeration to call it a miracle.” Both men smiled, their teeth reflected in the black glass, and Greta felt something small and regretful beneath her breast.
When it was over, Vlademar moved Einar to a room with two small windows and a folding screen on casters. He slept for an hour while Greta sketched. She was drawing Lili, asleep in the institute’s bed. If the X ray found a tumor and Dr. Hexler removed it, then what would happen? Would she never again see Lili in Einar’s face, in his lips, in the pale green veins that ran on the underside of his wrists like rivers on a map? She had contacted Dr. Hexler in the first place in order to ease Einar’s mind-or had it been to ease her own? No, she had first telephoned Hexler, from the little booth at the post office, because she knew she had to do something for Einar. Wasn’t it her responsibility to make sure he got the proper attention? If she ’d ever promised herself anything, it was that she’d never let her husband simply slip away. Not after Teddy Cross. Greta thought of the blood bursting from Einar’s nose, seeping through the lap of Lili’s dress.
Einar turned in the bed, moaning. He was pale, his skin loose on his cheek. Greta placed a warm cloth across his forehead. Part of her hoped Hexler would instruct Einar to live freely as Lili, to take a job as a salesgirl behind the glass counter at Fonnesbech’s department store. Part of Greta wanted to be married to the most scandalous man in the world. It had always annoyed her when people assumed that just because she had married she was now seeking a conventional life. “I know you’ll be as happy as your mother and father,” a cousin from Newport Beach had written after her marriage to Einar; it was all Greta could do to keep herself from burning the cousin from her memory. But I’m not like them, she told herself as she shredded the letter into the iron stove.
Beneath the window, Dr. Hexler’s bare rosebushes were trembling in the wind. The other window overlooked the sea. There were black clouds, as dark and full as ink in water. A fishing boat was struggling to return to harbor. But how could she remain married to a man who sometimes wanted to live as a woman? I’m not going to let something like that stop me, she told herself, her sketchbook in her lap. Greta and Einar would do what they wanted. No one could keep her from doing as she pleased. Perhaps they would have to move someplace where no one knew them. Where nothing spoke for them-no gossip, no family name, no previously established reputation.
