The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  MAPS

  DEDICATION

  For my mothers, grandmothers, and all the women in my life

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  Dedication

  Part One: October to November

  October 30, 1985

  October 31, 1918

  November 1, 1941

  November 7, 1985

  November 8, 1918

  November 14, 1941

  November 15, 1985

  Part Two: November to December

  December 4, 1985

  December 5, 1918

  December 6, 1941

  December 12, 1985

  December 13, 1918

  Part Three: December to End

  December 15, 1918

  December 19, 1941

  December 24, 1985

  December 26, 1918

  December 27, 1941

  January 2, 1986

  January 3, 1919

  January 9, 1942

  January 15, 1986

  January 16, 1919

  January 17, 1986

  January 18, 1919

  January 19, 1942

  January 20, 1986

  January 21, 1919

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Andrew Sean Greer

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  OCTOBER

  TO

  NOVEMBER

  OCTOBER 30, 1985

  THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS ONCE TO EACH OF US.

  For me, it was near Halloween in 1985, at my home in Patchin Place. Even New Yorkers find it hard to spot: a little alley west of Sixth Avenue where the city tilts drunkenly into an eighteenth-century pattern, allowing for such fanciful moments as West Fourth crossing West Eighth and Waverly Place crossing itself. There is West Twelfth and Little West Twelfth. There is Greenwich Street and Greenwich Avenue, the last of which takes a diagonal route along the old Indian trail. If any ghosts still walk there, carrying their corn, no one sees them, or perhaps they are unrecognizable among the freaks and tourists out at all hours, drunk and laughing by my doorstep. They say the tourists are ruining everything. They say they have always said that.

  But I will tell you: Stand on West Tenth where it meets Sixth Avenue, in the turreted shadow of the old Jefferson Market Courthouse with its tall tower. Turn until you see a set of iron gates, so easy to miss, peer through the bars and there: no more than half a city block, lined with thin maples, dead-ending half a dozen doorways down, nothing glamorous, just a little broken alley of brick three-story apartment buildings, built long ago to house the Basque waiters at the Brevoort, and there at the end, on the right, just past the last tree, our door. Scrape your shoes on the old shoe brush embedded in the concrete. Walk through the green front door, and you might turn left to knock on my aunt Ruth’s apartment, or walk upstairs and knock on mine. And at the turn of the staircase, you might stop and read the heights of two children, mine in red grease pencil and, high above in blue, that of my twin brother, Felix.

  Patchin Place. The gates locked and painted black. The houses crouched in solitude. The ivy growing, torn down, growing again; the stones cracked and weedy; not even a borough president would look left on his hurrying way to dinner. Who would ever guess? Behind the gates, the doors, the ivy. Where only a child would look. As you know: That is how magic works. It takes the least likely of us, without foreshadowing, at the hour of its own choosing. It makes a thimblerig of time. And this is exactly how, one Thursday morning, I woke up in another world.

  LET ME START nine months before it happened, in January, when I was out with Felix to walk Alan’s dog. We had locked the green door behind us, and were making our way past the ice-covered gates of Patchin Place while the dog, Lady, sniffed each barren patch of dirt. Cold, cold, cold. The wool collars of our coats were pulled up and we shared Felix’s scarf, wound once around each of our necks, connecting us, my hand in his pocket and his in mine. He was my twin, but not my double, so while he shared my flushed cheeks and bent nose, my red hair and pale complexion, my squinting blue eyes—“fox faced,” our aunt Ruth called us—he was taller, greater somehow. I had to steady Felix on the ice, but he insisted on going out that night without his cane; it was one of his good nights. I still found him so ridiculous in his new mustache. So thin in his new overcoat. It was our thirty-first birthday.

  I said, “It was such a lovely party.”

  Everywhere the shivering hush of a New York winter: the glimpses of high apartments, the shimmer of the frozen streets, the muted glow of restaurants late at night, pyramids of snow at corners hiding trash and coins and keys. The sound of our steps on the sidewalk.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “After I die, I want you to have a birthday party where everyone comes dressed as me.” Always thinking of a party. I remember him as bossy and self-righteously moral as a child, the kind who assigned himself as “fire captain” and forced the rest of the family through ridiculous drills. After our parents’ death, however, and especially after he escaped our shared scrawny adolescence, all that ice melted at once—he became almost a convert to the side of fire itself. He grew restless if a day had no great event in store; he planned many of them himself, and would throw anyone a party if it meant drinks and costumes. Our aunt Ruth approved.

  “Oh hush,” I said. “I’m sorry Nathan had to leave early. But he’s been working, you know.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  I looked at him, his freckled face, that red mustache. Dark commas beneath his eyes. Thin and scared and quiet, all the fire burnt away inside him. Instead of answering, I said, “Look at the ice on all the trees!”

  He let Lady sniff at a fence. “You’ll make Nathan dress up in my old Halloween costume.”

  “The cowgirl.”

  He laughed. “No, Ethel Mermaid. You can sit him in an armchair and feed him drinks. He’ll like that.”

  “You didn’t like our birthday?” I said. “I know it wasn’t much. Could you please teach Alan to bake a cake?”

  “Our birthday cheers me up.” We walked along, looking up at silhouettes in windows. “Don’t neglect Nathan.”

  The light caught the ice on the trees, electrifying them.

  “It’s been ten years. Maybe he could use a little neglect,” I said, holding his arm to steady him.

  On the cold winter street, I heard Felix whisper, “Look there’s another one.”

  He nodded in the direction of a hair salon that had always graced the corner. In the window, a sign: CLOSED FOR BUSINESS. My brother stood for a moment while Lady considered the tree. Felix said simply, “Gone home.”

  That was the phrase: journal of a plague year. The dog-grooming salon. The bead shop. The bartender and the tailor and the waiter down at the Gate. All of the CLOSED FOR BUSINESS signs. And if you asked about that waiter they’d say: “He’s gone home.” The bartender with the bird tattoo: “Gone home.” The boy who lived upstairs and set off the fire alarm: “Gone home.” Danny. Samuel. Patrick. So many ghosts you couldn’t make out the Indians even if they wailed for lost Manahatta.

  A loud bang; a woman had come out of the building: frizzy dyed black hair, trench coat. “You assholes are killing the trees!”

  “Hi,” said Felix sweetly. “We’re your neighbors, it’s nice to meet you.”

  She shook her head, staring at Lady, who was preparing to squat in the frosted grass. “You’re ruining my city,” she said. “Get your dog out of here.”

  Her tone was so harsh we were both shaken; I could feel my brother’s hand clenched in my pocket. I tried to think of something to do or say othe
r than just turning to go. She crossed her arms, defiant.

  Felix said, “I’m sorry, but . . . I don’t think girl dogs hurt the trees.”

  “Get your dog out of here.”

  I watched my brother’s face. So gaunt, barely a reminder of the strong, grinning twin I’d always known, the flushed pink face now worn away. I gripped his arm and began to pull him away; he didn’t need this, not on our birthday. But he would not budge. I saw him building up the courage to say something. I had assumed he had used up all his reserves of courage in the past year.

  “All right,” he said at last, reining in Lady, who stumbled. “But I have one question.”

  The woman smiled smugly and raised an eyebrow.

  He managed a grin. And then he said something that made her take a single step back as we disappeared around the corner and began our nervous laughter together on that cold night of our last birthday. I carried what he said through the tough weeks that followed, then the awful months, the half a year of hell that drove me deeper into sadness than I had ever known. Standing there firmly, calmly, asking that woman a question:

  “When you were a little girl, madam,” he said, gesturing to her, “was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?”

  IT ALL CAME faster than we could plan for. One day Felix was talking cheerfully about the books I had brought him. And then the next morning I was getting a call from Alan saying, “He’s going, it’s too fast now, I think we have to—” And I was rushing over to their apartment to find Felix going in and out of lucidity. Apparently his joints were so swollen it hurt to move, and the pain was beyond reckoning; the headaches had returned with severity, and the last bout of antibiotics had done no good. We stood on either side of him asking over and over, “Do you want to go?” and it was over twenty minutes later that my brother was able to open his eyes and hear us. He could not speak, but he nodded. I could tell from his eyes he was there, and knew.

  PATCHIN PLACE, ALONE with Nathan, mourning my brother. The snow fell heavily upon the gates that winter, and weighed down the maples outside my window. Ruth took Felix’s bird, and I listened to it chirping in the apartment below, staring out, as I did, at a birdless winter day. Felix was wrong about so many things, but he was right about Nathan: I should not have neglected him.

  The man I lived with but never married, my Dr. Michelson, a smart and gentle man, smiling in a red-brown beard and glasses. Long, narrow face, lined with worry at the eyes below a receding heart-shaped hairline. When we first met, I had always thought of Nathan as an “older man,” but after I turned thirty the truth dawned on me that he was only eight years older, and that as time went on the gap would close, until we were both equally old, and the revelation came with a sadness that I would lose something I “had” on him. At forty, he had a slightly sad, pleasantly smiling demeanor that led people to say, “But you’re so young!” What they meant was that he had not grown bitter. He always closed his eyes and smiled at that remark. I suppose it’s because he was what he’d always said he would be. He was a doctor, loved by a woman. He lived in Greenwich Village. Despite the gray in his beard, what I felt kept him young were the childhood hobgoblins he retained as pets: his fear of sharks, even in a swimming pool; his fear of mispronouncing “dour.” He laughed each time he caught himself, and told me so. Who knows how many others went untold? But I grew to love them as intimates, and when after years I heard him saying “dour” correctly on a few separate occasions, it was as if an old one-eyed cat had died.

  You could sum up his personality by the phrase he spoke so soothingly, at every difficult occasion in our courtship: “I leave it to you.” Somehow, it was the antidote to all my fears. Was I spending too much time with Felix, and not enough with him? “I leave it to you.” Should I stay late at work or attend his mother’s party? “I leave it to you.” That phrase drained me of worry; I loved him for it. He became my companion, for ten years. In those last months of Felix’s life, however, Nathan was a ghost I could not see. I ignored him and brushed him aside, and for a while he understood. And then he did not understand. He was so kind, but when crossed could just as easily be cold. And then I lost him.

  Just a few months after Felix’s death, I discovered he had taken a lover. I followed Nathan one evening and found myself before a brick building, the zigzag smile of a fire escape, seeing the silhouettes of my lover and his young woman. Who knows how long I stood there? How long does one stand before a scene of dread? It had begun to snow, in tiny dust flakes, and this lengthened how the light fell from the window onto the street.

  I will always wonder if I did the right thing. I stepped away from the building and I walked back home, and warmed myself within the solitary bed, and never mentioned it to him. With everything going on, with all the grief I had plugged up, I could easily understand his need for ease and attention, for playing husband to this play wife—trying out another life, in a way—and I said to myself, “He will come home to me, not her.” After all, we had shared so many things, including the years before gray hair. Who else would ever fit him so neatly?

  He did come home to me. He did leave her. I know it because one night a few weeks later, when I sat in Patchin Place reading a book while white-bean soup simmered on the stove, still an hour away from being ready, he came home streaked with rain, his face very red and puffy, and something distant in his eyes, as if he’d witnessed a murder. Beard gleaming with droplets. He said hello and kissed my cheek. “I’ll take off these wet things,” he said, and went into the other room and closed the door.

  I heard a violin quartet, not what he usually listened to, but he must have tuned the radio to anything loud enough. But it was not loud enough. I heard it beneath the music, as he sat hidden from me in the other room, the sound he could not control and yet desperately wanted to hide: the sobs of a broken heart.

  In some scene I can barely imagine, he had said some final farewell and kissed her, made love some final time, and pushed his way out the door as she sought for the right thing to say, the thing that would make him stay there. Make him leave me instead of her. He held the doorknob with one shaking hand; they stared at each other. Did he cry yet? For she did not find the words—and here he was. Sitting in the other room, sobbing like a boy. Violins dervishing around him. And here I was, in my chair with my book and the big brass lamp casting a hoop of gold across my lap. Knowing what he had done. Wanting to tell him that I was angry and hurt and grateful. The violins made their bumpy way down the octave. And, after a while, Nathan came out of that room and asked, “Do you want a drink? I’m making one for myself, a whiskey.” There with the grief so plain on his face. How many weeks, months had it been? How many phone calls, letters, nights had he given to her? Over like that, like breaking a neck. “Yes,” I said, putting down my book, “the soup will be ready soon,” and we drank and fed ourselves and did not talk about the great thing that had just happened.

  The real surprise was that, a few months later, he left me after all. In a rental car, parked outside the gates, me in the driver’s seat.

  “Stay with me, Nathan.”

  “No, Greta, I can’t anymore.”

  His hand on the car door, choosing the words that would end our lives together. It did not really matter what they were. I picture myself at that dire moment: pale in the streetlight, tears caught in my nearly invisible lashes, red hair recently cut short in a last bid for change, lips parted as I tried to think of anything left to say. Door handle open, wind rushing in, the last few minutes—I realized the flash of his glasses in the streetlight might be the last I ever saw of him.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I shouted from the car.

  He stared at me coldly for a moment, then touched the door and said, before he shut it, “I leave it to you.”

  “TRY HYPNOSIS,” MY aunt Ruth counseled me, rubbing my temples with oil. “Try est. Try anything but shrinks, darling.” She was my sole companion in those months. I’m sure my father would not have approved of her visits;
he always found his sister flighty, selfish, uncontrolled, the dangerous artist who had to be stopped. The kind of woman, he once told me, who would yell “theater” in a crowded fire. A comfort, an ally, but she knew nothing of my mind.

  Everybody had advice. Try acupuncture, they would tell me when I roused myself for a party. Try acupressure. Try yoga, try running, try pot. Try oats, try bran, try colonics. Quit smoking, quit dairy, quit meat. Quit drinking, quit TV, quit being self-centered. The psychiatrist I found at last, Dr. Gilleo, talked to me endlessly about my dead parents, my childhood memories of golden dogs running on golden afternoons with my brother, and found the ordinary thorns of an ordinary life. Was it so bad, I asked him, to be sad because sad things happened? “There are a number of new antidepressants,” he said. “And we will try them.” I did try them, from Ambivalon to zimelidine. And still they could not shake the nightmare: of answering my door and seeing Felix there, in his absurd mustache, asking to come in, and me telling him he couldn’t. “Why not?” he asked. Nightly I told him, “Because you’re dead.”

  Ruth rubbing my temples, kissing my forehead. “There there, darling. It will pass. It will pass.” Adding, unhelpfully as always, “I think what you need is a lover.”

  It is almost impossible to capture true sadness; it is a deep-sea creature that can never be brought into view. I say that I remember being sad, but in truth I only remember mornings when that person in the bed—the person in which I was contained—could not wake up, could not go to work, could not even do the things that she knew would save her, and instead did only what was bound to destroy her: alcohol, and forbidden cigarettes, and endless lost black hours of loneliness. I’m tempted to distance myself from her, to say, “Oh, that wasn’t me.” But that was me, staring at the wall and longing to crayon-draw all over it and not even having the will for that. Not even the will for suicide. That was me in my room, looking out the window on Patchin Place as the maples turned yellow into autumn.