The Danish Girl

like a child in Dr. McBride ’s chair, which was covered in an itchy yellow wool.

“Mr. Wegener, I’m only asking because-”

“Yes,” Einar said. “Yes, she ’s kissed a man.”

“Did she like it?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“I thought I was asking her.”

“Do I look like Lili?” Einar said. “Do I look like a woman to you?”

“Not really.”

“Well, then-”

Dr. McBride’s telephone rang, and together they stared at its black receiver, which trembled with each ring. Finally it went silent.

“I’m afraid you are a homosexual,” Dr. McBride eventually said. He capped his pen with a little click.

“I don’t think you understand.”

“You’re not the first person this has happened to,” Dr. McBride said.

“But I’m not a homosexual. That isn’t my problem. There’s another person living inside me,” Einar said, rising from the chair. “A girl named Lili.”

“And it breaks my heart,” Dr. McBride continued, “when I have to tell men like you that there’s nothing I can do for them. As a black Irishman, I find it very sad.” He sipped from his waterglass, his lips clamping on the rim. Then he stood, moving around to the front of his desk. His hand moved to Einar’s shoulder, nudged him to the door. “My only advice is that you restrain yourself. You’re going to have to always fight your desires. Ignore them, Mr. Wegener. If you don’t… well, then, you’ll always be alone.”

Einar met Carlisle at the cafe. He knew Dr. McBride was wrong. Not so long ago Einar might have believed the doctor and sulked away in pity for himself. But Einar told Carlisle that it had been a waste of time. “Nobody is going to understand me,” he said. “I don’t see the point of any of this.”

“But that’s not true,” Carlisle protested. “We need to find you the right doctor. That ’s all. So Dr. McBride doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what? That doesn’t mean you should give up.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you’re unhappy.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Because of Greta.”

A few days later, Carlisle drove Einar to the Etablissement Hydro therapique, a hospital known for its care of nervous maladies. The hospital was out toward Meudon, hidden from the road behind a grove of sycamore trees. There was an attendant at the gate, who pushed his face into the car and asked whom they were visiting. “Dr. Christophe Mai,” Carlisle said. The attendant eyed them, biting his lip. He passed them a clipboard to sign.

The hospital was a new building, a deep box of cement and glass. It was shaded by more sycamores, and plane trees scarred in the trunk. Steel grates covered the windows on the ground floor, their padlocks bright in the sun.

They had to sign another sheet of paper at the front entrance, and a third when they finally arrived at Dr. Mai’s office. A nurse, a woman with white curls, told them to wait in a little room that, once she closed the door behind her, felt securely sealed.

“I didn’t tell Greta where we were going today,” Carlisle said. A few days earlier Einar had overheard them talking about him. “He doesn’t need to see a psychiatrist,” she had said, her voice traveling via the crack beneath the door. “Besides, I think I know someone who can help him. And he isn’t a psychiatrist. This is someone who can really do something.” Then her voice fell, and the rest Einar failed to hear.

Dr. Mai’s office was brown and smelled of cigarettes. Einar could hear feet shuffling outside in the hallway. There was something so unpleasant about the hospital that a little sensation rose up inside him, telling him that this was where he belonged. In the brown carpeting, there were tracks from carts, and Einar began to imagine himself strapped to a cart that would wheel him into the deepest part of the hospital, from which he would never return.

“Do you really think Dr. Mai can help me?”

“I hope so, but we’ll have to see.” Carlisle was wearing a seersucker blazer and crisply pleated trousers and a yellow tie. Einar admired his optimism, the way he sat expectantly in his summer clothes. “We’ve got to at least try.”

He knew Carlisle was right. He couldn’t live much longer like this. Much of the muscle on his body had disappeared over the past six months; Dr. McBride had weighed him, and when the little black weights slid over to the left, Einar realized he didn’t weigh much more than when he was a boy. Einar had begun to notice a peculiar color in his skin: a gray-blue like the sky at dawn, as if his blood were somehow running at a slower pace. And a weakness of breath that caused his eyesight to quit whenever he ran more than a few paces, or whenever a sharp sudden noise, like the crack! of a motorcar, surprised him. And the bleeding, which Einar both dreaded and welcomed. When he felt the first spurt of it on his lip or between his legs, he would become dizzy. No one would tell him this, but Einar knew it was because he was female inside. He’d read about it: the buried female organs of the hermaphrodite hemorrhaging irregularly, as if in protest.

Dr. Mai turned out to be a pleasant man. His hair was dark and he was wearing a yellow tie that was oddly similar to Carlisle ’s. They both laughed about it, and then Dr. Mai led Einar into the examining room.

The room was tiled, with a window that looked through an iron grate into the park of sycamores and plane trees. Dr. Mai dragged back a heavy green curtain to reveal his examining table. “Please sit down,” he said, his hand falling on the table’s pad. “Tell me why you’re here.”

He was leaning against a cabinet with glass doors. He was holding a clipboard to his chest, and he nodded as he listened to Einar explain Lili. Once or twice Dr. Mai adjusted the knot of his tie. Occasionally he wrote something down.

“I don’t really know what kind of help I’m looking for,” Einar was saying. “I don’t think I can keep living like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know who I really am.”

With that, Dr. Mai ended the interview. He excused himself, leaving Einar on the padded table, his feet swaying. Outside in the park, a nurse was walking a young man in striped pajamas, his bathrobe hanging open. The man had a beard, and there was a frailty to his step, as if the nurse, whose apron ran to her feet, were the only thing propping him up.

When Dr. Mai returned he said, “Thank you for visiting me.” He shook Einar’s hand and led him to Carlisle.

On the drive back into Paris, they said nothing for a long time. Einar watched Carlisle’s hand on the gearshift, and Carlisle looked down the road. Finally he said, “The doctor wants to admit you to the hospital.”

“For what?”

“He suspects schizophrenia.”

“But that’s impossible,” Einar said. He looked over to Carlisle, who kept his eyes on the traffic. In front of them was a truck, and each time it hit a rut, gravel would spill from its bed onto the Spider’s hood. “How could I be schizophrenic?” Einar said again.

“He wanted me to sign the papers to admit you right then.”

“But that’s not right. I’m not schizophrenic.”

“I told him it wasn’t that urgent.”

“But you don’t think I’m schizophrenic, do you? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, I don’t. But when you explain it… when you explain Lili, it does sound like you think there are two people. Two separate people.”

“Because there are.” It was evening, and the traffic had slowed because a German shepherd had been hit; it was lying in the middle of the road, and each car had to pick its way around it. The dog was dead, but it appeared uninjured, its head resting up on the granite curb of the rond-point.

“Do you think Greta thinks that? Do you think she believes I’m insane?”

“Not at all,” Carlisle said. “She’s the one who believes in Lili the most.”

They passed the German shepherd, and the traffic opened up. “Should I listen to Dr. Mai? Do you think maybe I should stay with him for a little while?”