oil paint ordered from Herr Salathoff in Munich, and the racks of blank canvases. When Einar and Greta weren’t painting, they protected everything beneath green tarps the sailor below had abandoned on the landing.
“Why do you want me to wear her shoes?” Einar asked. He sat in the rope-bottom chair that had come from the backshed of his grandmother’s farm. Edvard IV jumped into his lap; the dog was trembling from the yelling of the sailor below.
“For my painting of Anna,” Greta said. And then, “I’d do it for you.” On the point of her cheek was a single shallow chicken-pox scar. Her finger was brushing it gently, something she did, Einar knew, when she was anxious.
Greta knelt to unlace Einar’s boots. Her hair was long and yellow, more Danish in color than his; she would push it behind her ears whenever she wanted to get busy on something new. Now it was slipping over her face as she picked at the knot in Einar’s laces. She smelled of orange oil, which her mother shipped over once a year in a case of brown bottles labeled PURE PASADENA EXTRACT. Her mother thought Greta was baking tea cakes with the oil, but instead Greta used it to dab behind her ears.
Greta began to wash Einar’s feet in the basin. She was gentle but efficient, quickly pulling the sea sponge between his toes. Einar rolled up his trousers even further. His calves looked, he suddenly thought, shapely. He delicately pointed his foot, and Edvard IV moved to lick the water from his little toe, the one that was hammer-headed and born without a nail.
“We’ll keep this our secret, Greta?” Einar whispered. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” He was both frightened and excited, and the child ’s fist of his heart was beating in his throat.
“Who would I tell?”
“Anna.”
“Anna doesn’t need to know,” Greta said. Even so, Anna was an opera singer, Einar thought. She was used to men dressing in women’s clothes. And women in men’s, the Hosenrolle. It was the oldest deceit in the world. And on the opera stage it meant nothing at all—nothing but confusion. A confusion that was always resolved in the final act.
“Nobody needs to know anything,” Greta said, and Einar, who felt as if a white stage light were on him, began to relax and work the stocking up his calf.
“You’re putting it on backwards,” Greta said, righting the seam. “Pull gently.”
The second stocking ripped. “Do you have another?” Einar asked.
Greta’s face froze, as if she was just realizing something; then she went to a drawer in the pickled-ash wardrobe. The wardrobe had a closet on top with an oval mirror in its door, and three drawers with brass-hoop handles; the top one Greta locked with a little key.
“These are heavier,” Greta said, handing Einar a second pair. Folded neatly into a square, the stockings looked to Einar like a patch of flesh—a patch of Greta’s skin, brown from a summer holiday in Menton. “Please be careful,” she said. “I was going to wear them tomorrow.”
The part through Greta’s hair revealed a strip of silvery-white flesh, and Einar began to wonder what she was thinking beneath it. With her eyes slanted up and her mouth pinched, she seemed intent on something. Einar felt incapable of asking; he nearly felt bound, with an old paint rag tied across his mouth. And so he wondered about his wife silently, with a touch of resentment ripening beneath his face, which was pale and smooth and quite like the skin of a white peach. “Aren’t you a pretty man,” she had said, years ago, when they were first alone.
Greta must have noticed his discomfort, because she reached out and held Einar’s cheeks and said, “It means nothing.” And then, “When will you stop worrying about what other people think?”
Einar loved it when Greta made such declarations—the way she’d swat her hands through the air and claim her beliefs as the faith of the rest of the world. He thought it her most American trait, that and her taste for silver jewelry.
“It’s a good thing you don’t have much hair on your legs,” Greta said, as if noticing it for the first time. She was mixing her oil paints in the little ceramic Knabstrup bowls. Greta had finished the upper half of Anna’s body, which years of digesting buttered salmon had buried in a fine layer of fat. Einar was impressed with the way Greta had painted Anna’s hands holding