The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

teakettle and a fingernail—for no good reason, really, except that sometimes Greta became overwhelmed with a curiosity about her husband and what he did when he was away from her: what he was reading, where he ate his lunch, to whom he spoke and about what. It’s not because I’m jealous, Greta told herself, delicately resealing the envelope. No, it’s simply because I’m in love.
    Rasmussen was bald, with Chinese-shaped eyes, a widower. He lived with his two children in an apartment near Amalienborg. When he said he ’d hang her most recent paintings, Greta was tempted to say she didn’t want his help. Then she thought about it and realized she did. To Einar she coyly said, “I’m not sure whether you spoke to Rasmussen or not. But thankfully he’s come around.”
    At a furniture store on Ravnsborggade she bought ten chairs and re-tacked their cushions in red damask. The chairs she placed in front of each painting at the gallery. “For reflection,” she suggested to Rasmussen, arranging them just so. Then she wrote every European newspaper editor on the list Einar had put together over the years. The invitation announced an important debut—words Greta had trouble putting down, so boastful they seemed, so transactional, but she went ahead, at Einar’s urging. “If that’s what it takes,” she said. She hand-delivered the invitation to the offices of Berlingske Tidende , Nationaltidende , and Politiken , where a clerk in a little gray cap turned her away with a sneer.
    Greta’s paintings were oversized and glossy with a shellacking process she created from varnish. They were so shiny and hard you could clean them like windows. The few critics who came to the gallery picked their way around the red damask chairs and ate the honey crackers Greta had set out in a silver dish. She escorted the critics, whose little notepads remained open and disturbingly blank. “This one is Anna Fonsmark. You know, the mezzo-soprano,” Greta would say. “The trouble I had getting her to pose!” Or, “He’s the furrier to the king. Did you notice the wreath of minks in the corner, symbolizing his trade?” When she said things like that she regretted them immediately; the crassness of her comments would ring in the air as if it were echoing off the shellacked paintings. She would think of her mother, and Greta would blush. But sometimes Greta was filled with too much immediate energy to stop and think and plan and plot. The energy was the fluid running up and down her Western spine.
    She had to admit to herself that some of the critics had come only because she was Einar Wegener’s wife. “How’s Einar’s work coming along?” a few would ask. “When can we expect his next show?” One critic came because she was a Californian and he wanted to hear about the plein-air painters working there—as if Greta might know anything at all about the bearded men mixing their paints in the startling sunlight of Laguna Niguel.
    The gallery on Krystalgade was cramped and, in the heat wave that coincided with her exhibition, smelled of the cheese shop next door. Greta worried that the odor of fontina would settle into her canvases, but Einar told her it was impossible, not with the shellac. “They’re impenetrable,” he remarked of her paintings, which sounded—once it was said, hovering between the two of them like a bat—unkind.
    The next day, when Greta returned to the apartment, she found Lili crocheting a hair net, the needles clicking in her lap. Neither Einar nor Greta ever figured out the origins of Lili’s bloody nose at the Artists Ball. But about a month after, her nose began to bleed again, a couple of warm red bursts over the course of three days in July. Einar said it was nothing, but Greta worried, like a mother watching a son’s cough. Recently, in the middle of the night, Greta had begun to climb out of bed and go to her easel to paint an ashen Lili collapsing in Henrik’s arms. The painting was large,