the weather, Lili would always return to the apartment cold, her hands trembling. Greta feared she didn’t have enough flesh on her frame, but she could never get her to eat anything more. The bleeding returned every now and then, once every few months, announced by a slow drop of blood inching across Lili’s upper lip. Then she would lie in bed for days, as if stored in those few crimson drops was all her energy. Greta had taken Einar to one or two French doctors, but as soon as they began to probe with their questions (“Is there anything else I should know about your husband?”), she would realize that none of them would have any more answers than Dr. Hexler. She would worry as Lili lay in bed, sleeping through the day, staining the sheets, which Greta would later have to shove into the incinerator behind the apartment. But then, after a few days, sometimes a week, just as quickly as it had begun, the bleeding would cease. “How dull it is to spend a week in bed,” Lili would say, throwing the bolster pillow to the carpet.
If she were to count them up, Greta would discover that she had more than one hundred paintings of Lili by now: Lili bathing in the pool; Lili as a member of a wedding party; Lili examining carrots at the market. But most were Lili set in landscapes, on a heath, in an olive grove, against the blue line of the Kattegat Sea. Always her eyes brown and huge, hooded; the delicate curve of her plucked eyebrows; hair parted around the ear to reveal an amber earring hanging against her neck.
Einar himself no longer painted. “I’m having a hard time imagining the bog,” he’d call from his studio, where his canvases and his paints were kept tidy. Out of habit he continued to order bottles of paint from Munich, even though the best paints in the world were sold just across the river at Sennelier, where the clerk kept a perpetually pregnant cat. Greta hated the cat, whose bloated stomach sagged to the floor, but she enjoyed visiting with the clerk, a man named Du Brul, who often said, with his Van Dyke goatee twitching madly, that she was his most important lady customer. “And some believe a lady cannot paint!” he ’d say as she left the store with a box of paint bottles wrapped in newsprint, the cat hissing as if she were about to give birth.
The apartment on the rue Vieille du Temple had a central room big enough for a long table and two reading chairs by the gas fireplace. There was a red velvet ottoman in the room, large and round, with an upholstered column rising from its center, like the kind in shoe stores. And an oak rocker, with a brown leather cushion, shipped over from Pasadena. She had begun to call the apartment the casita. It didn’t look like a casita, with its split-beam ceilings and the
For a while she regretted Einar’s abandoned career. Many of his landscapes hung in the apartment, crown molding to baseboard. They were a constant and sometimes sad reminder of their inverted lives. At least to Greta. Never did Einar admit that he missed his artist’s life. But she sometimes missed it for him, finding it hard to understand how one who had spent his life creating could simply stop. She supposed his old drive-the need to turn to a blank canvas with a chestful of ideas and fear-was now transferred to Lili.
Within a year of their arrival in Paris, Hans had begun to sell the Lili paintings. With the magazines calling, Greta’s name began to float around Paris, in the cafes along boulevard St-Germain, in the salons where artists and writers lay on zebra-skin rugs drinking distilled liqueurs made from yellow plums. So many Americans in Paris, too, each talking about the other, eyeing one another in that American way. Greta tried to stay clear of them, of the circle that gathered nightly at 27 rue de Fleurus. She remained suspicious of them, and they of her, she knew. Their nights of fireside gossip about who was or wasn’t modern didn’t interest Greta. And in those societies of wit and airs, Greta knew, there was no room for Lili or Einar.
But the demand for the Lili paintings continued, and just as Greta began to feel as if she couldn’t keep up, she had an idea. She was painting Lili in a field of lucerne grass in rural Denmark. To do this she had Lili stand in her studio with her fists on her hips. The portrait of Lili Greta managed easily enough, although she had to imagine the flat Danish summer sunlight on Lili’s face. But the background of the field, with the grass rising behind Lili, didn’t interest Greta very much. To paint the grass properly, and the distant kettle-hole lakes, would take Greta several days; first the horizon would have to dry, then the lakes, then the first layer of grass, then a second and a third.
“Would you like to finish this one up for me?” Greta asked Einar one day. It was May 1929, and Einar had been out the whole afternoon. He returned to the apartment saying he’d spent the afternoon in the place des Vosges, “Watching the children fly their kites.” He looked especially thin in his tweed suit, his coat over his arm. “Is everything all right?” she asked as he loosened his tie and went to make himself a cup of tea. In his shoulders Greta saw a sadness, a new melancholy blacker than anything she had seen before; they hung like a frown. His hand sat cold and lifeless in hers. “I’m having a hard time keeping up. Why don’t you start doing some of my backgrounds? You know better than me what a field of lucerne grass should look like.”
With Edvard IV in his lap, Einar thought about this. His shirt was wrinkled, and next to him on the table was a plate of pears. “Do you think I can?” he said.
She led him into her studio, showed him the half-finished portrait. “I think there should be a kettle-hole lake on the horizon,” she said.
Einar stared at the half-finished painting. He looked at it blankly, as if he didn’t recognize the girl. Then, slowly, an understanding filled his eyes, the lids pulling back, his brow smoothing out. “A few things are missing,” he said. “Yes, there should be a lake, and also a single willow growing from the bank of a stream. And perhaps a farmhouse. Too far off in the horizon to be sure what it is, just a pale brown blur of something. But there ’d probably be a farmhouse.”
He stayed up most of the night with the painting, smudging his shirt and his pants. Greta was happy to see him at work again, and she began to think of other paintings she could share with Einar. Even if it meant fewer afternoons with Lili, she wanted Einar to have his work. As she prepared for bed she heard him in her studio, the clink of the glass paint bottles. She couldn’t wait to call Hans in the morning to tell him that Einar was painting again. That she ’d found a way to produce even more Lili paintings. “You’ll never believe who’s helping me out,” she’d say. The memory of Hans at the Gare du Nord over three years ago revisited her. It was when she and Einar first arrived in Paris, with only a handful of addresses in their notebooks. Hans was waiting at the train station, his camel hair coat a still beige column in the crowd of black wool. “You’ll be fine,” he assured Greta, kissing her cheek. He clasped both his hands around Einar’s neck, kissing his forehead. Hans chauffeured them to a hotel on the left bank a few blocks from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Then he kissed them goodbye. Greta remembered feeling crushed, that Hans would meet them with open arms and then disappear so quickly. She watched his Borreby head slip through the lobby door. Einar must have felt the same disappointment, or worse. “Do you suppose Hans didn’t want us to come?” he said. Greta was wondering that herself, but she reminded Einar how busy Hans was. In truth, she had sensed a grave reluctance from Hans, in his stance as straight and steely as one of the columns supporting the station’s roof.
Einar said, “Do you suppose we’re too Danish for his taste? Too provincial?” And Greta, who looked at her husband with his bog-brown eyes and his shaking fingers and Edvard IV in his arms, replied, “It’s him, not us.”
At the hotel they let two rooms, trimmed in red, one with a curtained alcove. The hotel’s factotum declared proudly that Oscar Wilde had lived his final weeks there. “He passed on in the alcove,” the proprietress reported with a dip of her chin.
Greta took little note of this bit of history. It seemed too depressing a fact for her to press onto Einar. They lived in the two rooms for several months while they hunted for an apartment. After only a few days the hotel became dreary, with its curling wallpaper and rust stain bleeding in the sink. But Einar insisted that he pay for their lodging, which ruled out the nicer apartments available at the Hotel du Rhin or the Edouard VII. “There’s really no need to suffer,” Greta had said, proposing more luxurious surroundings, and perhaps a view and decent maid service for evening coffee. “Are you really suffering?” Einar replied, causing Greta to drop the subject. She sensed the unease between them that happened when they traveled.
There was a little stove in the corner on which she would boil water for their coffee. They took to sleeping in the alcove, in the bed that sagged in the middle and placed them close to the wall that permitted every squeal from the next room to pass through. Einar set up his easel in the room with the alcove; Greta took the second room,
