The next day, the girl behind the bureau located more books for Einar. Books called
Some of the books were old, from the last century, dust on their spines. Their pages turned with such a brisk crinkling noise that Einar feared the students would look up from their work on the long reading table and, from the twist of fear and relief in Einar’s face, learn who he really was.
Anne-Marie would place the books in front of Einar in a little tilted stand that held them at an angle. She lent him a string of lead beads wrapped in felt that held the page open while Einar copied sentences into his pewter- backed notebook.
The tables were wide and nicked, and they made Einar think of the worktables the Copenhagen fisherwomen used when chopping chub heads at the Gammel Strand fish market. In front of Einar, there was enough room on the table to fan out several books around him, and with their sand-colored pages open he began to think of them as his little shoal of protection. And that was how it felt to read them, during those mornings when he would slip out of the apartment: as if each sentence about the male and female would protect Einar over the next year, when everything, as he had promised himself, would change.
He eventually read enough to become convinced that he too possessed the female organs. Buried in the cavity of his body were Lili’s organs, the bloody packets and folds of flesh that made her who she was. At first it was hard to believe, but then the notion of it-that this wasn’t a mental problem, but a physical one-made more and more sense to him. He imagined a uterus shoved up behind his testicles. He imagined breasts somehow trapped by his ribcage.
Einar spent a week in the reading room, and there was a point each day when he would become so overwhelmed by what he was discovering that he ’d rest his head on his arms and softly cry.
If he nodded off, Anne-Marie, with her small white hand, would nudge Einar back to work. “It’s noon,” she’d say, and for a second he would become confused: Noon?
Oh, yes. Noon.
Carlisle had taken to asking Einar to join him in the afternoons. “Meet me at noon?” Carlisle would say each morning as Einar was slipping out the front door, nearly lost in a white heat of anticipation about what was waiting for him at the library.
“I’m not sure I can,” Einar would reply.
“But why not?” Greta would say.
Carlisle knew not to ask Greta to join them. He once told Einar that even when they were little, she would sigh with disappointment whenever Carlisle suggested they head down to the archery range in the Arroyo Seco. “She was always too busy to explore,” Carlisle would say. “Reading Dickens, writing poetry, painting scenes of the San Gabriels, painting pictures of me. But she never showed them to me. I’d ask to see one of her little watercolors and she would blush, and fold her arms against her chest.”
So Carlisle turned to Einar. He had to prod Einar at first. There was something about Carlisle ’s blue eyes, which were clearer than Greta’s, that seemed capable of reading Einar’s thoughts. He found it difficult to sit still next to Carlisle, shifting his weight from one hip to the other, sitting up and then retreating in the rope-bottom chair.
Carlisle bought a car, an Alfa Romeo Sport Spider. It was red with spoke-wheels and a running board with a red toolbox bolted to it. He liked to drive with the canvas top pushed back. The dash was black with six dials and a little silver handlebar that Einar would cling to as Carlisle shot around a corner. The floors were made of dimpled steel, and as Carlisle drove the Spider around Paris, Einar could feel the heat from the engine through the soles of his shoes.
“You should really learn to trust people more,” Carlisle said one day in the car, his hand moving chummily from the gear stick with its black-ball knob to Einar’s knee. He was driving Einar out to a tennis stadium in Auteuil. The stadium was next to the Bois de Boulogne, a concrete bowl rising up among the poplar trees. It was late morning, and the sun was high and blank in the blue-white sky. The flags around the rim of the stadium were hanging limply. There were iron gates around the tennis park, and men in green blazers and straw hats were taking tickets and ripping them in two.
A man led Einar and Carlisle to a little sloping box that was painted green. There were four wicker chairs in the box, each with a striped cushion. The box was at the baseline of the tennis court, which was made of crushed clay as red as the rouge Lili once purchased at the front counter of Fonnesbech’s.
On the court, two women were warming up. One was from Lyon; the sail of her long pleated skirt was white, and she cut across the court like a schooner. The other was an American, a girl from New York, the program reported; she was tall and dark, her hair as short and shiny as an aviator’s leather cap.
“Nobody expects her to win,” Carlisle said of the American. He was holding his hand to his forehead to block out the sun. His jaw was exactly the same as Greta’s: square, a bit long, pegged with a mouthful of good teeth. Their skin was the same, too: brown after only an hour of sun, a bit coarse in the throat. It was a throat Einar used to kiss passionately in the night. It was what he had liked most about Greta, even more than kissing her mouth: bringing his lips to her long throat and sucking lightly, licking in a little swirling motion, nipping, drilling away at the spot on her throat that was open and veined.
“Sometime I’d like to visit California,” Einar said. The match had begun, the American serving. She tossed the ball high, and Einar could almost see the muscles in her shoulder turn as she brought her racquet through the air. Greta often said she thought of oranges hitting the ground when she heard a tennis ball; Einar thought of the ryegrass court behind the brick villa, the powdered-sugar lines blowing in the wind.
“Does Greta ever say anything about it?” Carlisle asked. “About coming home?”
“I’ve heard her say a lot would have to change before she would go back.” Greta once said that neither of them would fit in there, in Pasadena, where rumor crossed the valley as rapidly as a blue jay in the breeze. “It’s not a place for you and me,” she had said.
“I wonder what she means,” Carlisle said.
“You know Greta. She doesn’t want people talking about her.”
“But in some ways she does.”
The American girl won the first game, her drop shot barely lifting over the net cord and then falling deceptively to the clay.
“Have you ever thought about coming out for a visit?” Carlisle asked. “To California? Maybe come out for the winter to paint?” He was fanning himself with the program; he held his bad leg out, the knee locked. “Come out and paint the eucalyptus and the cypress? Or one of the orange groves? You’d like it.”
“Not without Greta,” Einar said.
And Carlisle, who at the same time was and was not exactly like his sister, said, “But why not?”
Einar crossed his legs, his foot shifting the wicker chair in front of him. The girl from Lyon sailed across the court, her skirt taut, to return a backhand from the sneaky American, hitting the dirty white ball up the line for a winner. The crowd, which was handsome and hatted and collectively smelled like lavender and lime, erupted into a cheer.
Carlisle turned to Einar. He was smiling and applauding, and his forehead was beginning to sweat; and then, when the stadium fell silent to allow the girl from Lyon the peace to serve, he said, “I know about Lili.”
Einar could smell the clay, its rich dustiness, and the wind blowing through the poplars. “I’m not sure I know what you’re-”
But Carlisle stopped him. Carlisle placed his elbows on his knees and stared at the court and began to tell Einar about the letters Greta had been writing over the past year. They would arrive once a week fat in the mailbox, a half-dozen sheets of blue tissuey paper covered with her cramped words; she wrote them in such a fury that she didn’t use margins, the small tight writing crossing the page from edge to edge. “There’s someone called Lili,” she
