The Danish Girl

feeling a sense of relief when its door latch caught and she was alone. The trouble was, she couldn’t paint alone. She needed Lili.

They had been in Paris only a month when Greta said, “I want to celebrate our arrival with Lili.” Greta could see the terror in her husband ’s eyes, the way his pupils expanded and shrank. Lili hadn’t yet appeared in Paris. It was one of the reasons they had left Copenhagen. After the visit to Dr. Hexler’s, a letter had arrived from him. Greta had opened the letter and read Hexler’s threat of reporting Einar and Lili to the health authorities. “He could become a danger to society.” Greta imagined Dr. Hexler dictating the letter to the red-haired nurse through the hose with the funnel on the end. The shock of the letter-that anyone besides herself should try to control Lili’s future-upset her deeply, and she wasn’t thinking properly when Einar, home from a visit with Anna, entered the apartment. Before she could stop herself, Greta quickly dropped the letter into the iron stove. “Hans has written,” she said. “He thinks we should move to Paris.” And then, “We’re going to move at once.”

Lili arrived in Paris by knocking on the door of Greta’s hotel room. Lili’s hair was longer now, a darker brown with the sheen of good furniture, combs studded with baby pearls holding it back. She was wearing a dress Greta had never seen before. It was purple silk with a scoop-neck collar that dipped toward a crack of cleavage. “You bought a new dress?” Greta asked. For some reason this made Lili blush, a cloud of red appearing on her throat and her chest. Greta was curious about the cleavage Einar had managed to squeeze together. Was his chest doughy enough to push into a beginner’s corset and offer up as a pair of breasts?

They went to the Palais Garnier to hear Faust. Immediately Greta became aware of the men noticing Lili as she floated up the gold-railed stairs. “That man with the black hair is looking at you. If we’re not careful, he might come over.”

Their seats were next to a couple who had just returned from California. “Twelve months in Los Angeles,” the man said. “My wife had to pry me away.” He mentioned visiting Pasadena on New Year’s Day to watch the Tournament of Roses. “Even the horses’ manes were braided with flowers,” the wife reported. Then the opera began and Greta sat back. She found it difficult to concentrate on Dr. Faust, who was regretful in his dark laboratory, while she had Lili on her right and on her left a man who had recently walked by her family home off Orange Grove Boulevard. Her leg jiggled; she mindlessly rolled the bone in her wrist. She knew something had begun to unfurl tonight. What was it Carlisle used to say about her? No stopping good old Greta once she gets going. No one can stop her at all.

At the intermission, both Lili and the man’s wife excused themselves. The man, who was middle-aged and wore a beard, leaned into Greta and asked, “Is there any way I could see your cousin later on?”

But Greta denied the man at the Opera Lili. Just as she would later deny herself her own longings-denied because she hardly recognized them. While she and Einar were still at the Oscar Wilde hotel, Hans would pick Greta up in the dark lobby and walk her to his office on the rue de Rivoli. Hans had agreed to talk with her about her career. But at some point when they were crossing the Pont Neuf, Hans’s hand would fall to the small of her back and he would say, “I suppose I don’t have to tell you how pretty you are.”

The first time this occurred she swatted his hand away, believing it must have fallen there by accident. Then it happened again, a week later. And again. The fourth time, Greta told herself that she couldn’t allow him to touch her like this. How could she ever face Einar again? she would think when Hans’s hand caressed her spine as they crossed the river. Still walking, Greta felt nothing, inside or out, only the hand on her back. It occurred to her that her husband hadn’t touched her in a very long time.

They continued on to his office, into the windowless study behind the front room with the file cabinets where Hans looked up names for Greta to contact. He opened a folder and ran his finger down a list of patrons and said, “You should write him… and him… but be sure to avoid him.” Standing next to Hans, Greta thought she felt a finger on her arm, but that was impossible because the file was open in both his hands. She thought she felt his touch again on the small of her back; but no, he hadn’t set down the file.

“Do you suppose we’ll be all right here?” she said.

A smile nearly cracked Hans’s lips. “What do you mean?”

“Einar and me? In Paris? Do you suppose we can get along here just fine?”

His smile disappeared. “Yes, of course. You have each other.” And then, “But don’t forget about me.” His face was leaning almost imperceptibly toward her. There was something between them-not the file, but something else. They said nothing.

But Hans can’t be for me, Greta thought. If anyone should have Hans, it should be Lili. Even though it was cool in the back office she suddenly felt warm and sticky, as if a moist film of dirt covered her. Had she done anything irreversibly wrong?

“I’d like you to become my dealer,” she said. “I’d like you to handle my paintings.”

“But I only deal in old masters and nineteenth-century pictures.”

“Maybe it’s time you took on a modern painter.”

“But that wouldn’t make any sense.” And then, “Listen, Greta, there ’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” He moved closer to her, the folder still in his hand. The light in the room was gray, and Hans looked like an adolescent not yet used to his new, larger body.

“Don’t say another word until you agree to take me on.” She didn’t want to, but she moved to the opposite side of the desk. In between Greta and Hans now lay a tabletop of paperwork. All at once she wanted to both let him hold her and to run back to the hotel room, across the Pont Neuf, where Einar was probably waiting, shivering by the stove.

“Let me put it this way,” she said. “I’m giving you the chance to take me on right now. If you decide not to, I’m sure you’ll regret it one day.” She was rubbing at the shallow scar in her cheek.

“How will I regret it?”

“You’ll regret it because one day you’ll say to yourself, I could have had her. That Greta Wegener could have been mine.”

“But I’m not turning you away,” Hans said. “Don’t you understand?”

But Greta did understand. Or at least she understood Hans’s intentions. What she couldn’t figure out was the hummingbird patter in her chest-why wasn’t she scorning Hans for making such an untoward advance? Why wasn’t she reminding him how much this would hurt Einar? Why couldn’t she even bring herself to say his name?

“Is it a deal?” she said.

“What?”

“Are you going to represent me? Or am I going to have to leave now?”

“Greta, be reasonable.”

“I think I am. This is the most reasonable response I can think of.”

They both stood leaning on their opposite ends of the desk. The stacks of documents were held down by bronze paperweights shaped like frogs. Everywhere she read his name, on the papers, over and over. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. Hans Axgil. It reminded her of when she was little and she had practiced her penmanship: Greta Greta Greta.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“What?”

“Represent you.”

She didn’t know what to say. She thanked him and gathered her things. She offered her hand. “I suppose a handshake is in order,” she said. He took her hand, and there it was, her hand lost in the mitt of his, nearly trapped; but then he released her.

“Bring me some paintings next week,” he said.

“Next week,” and Greta stepped into the front room of Hans’s office, where the sunlight and the city noise poured through the windows, and the typewriter of a clerk clacked and clacked.

CHAPTER Fifteen

The smell of blood woke Einar. He got out of bed, careful not to disturb Greta. She looked uneasy, her face caught in a bad dream. The blood was trickling down his inner thigh, one slow hot line. A bubble of blood was