The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

“Oh, I see,” I said to him.

  We stared at each other for one second. Moonlight made its way over the roofs onto the street, in a small strip, creeping along like an alley cat, lighting up the antique version of my old life. The monkey’s paw. I had been given a world in which my brother was alive, one in which he would not even go to this war, but I had not dreamed precisely enough; this world was a trap.

  “Greta,” he started to say, but stopped.

  There is a truth that everyone knows but you. Each of us has it; no one is immune. Not a secret, not a scandal, but something simple and obvious to everyone else. It can be as simple as losing weight, or as difficult as leaving a husband. How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! You are left to guess, all by yourself. Until the moment comes when it reveals itself to you, and of course this revelation always comes a moment too late.

  “Furlough papers,” came a gruff voice behind us. A big snub-nosed officer in a deep blue uniform. It took a moment for me to understand this was not a man in costume.

  “I’m excused from service, Officer,” said my brother. “I’m German.”

  “Papers.”

  “Yes,” he said, and I could see Felix suppressing his rage. “Yes, right here.”

  I seemed not to have brought any kind of purse. I wondered if I had papers. I wondered what those papers would be.

  What Felix produced was a little card, which went immediately into the officer’s hands; the pink-faced man examined it with a frown. I could see, at the top of the card, in bold copperplate, the words: ALIEN ENEMY REGISTRATION.

  “Who is your employer?” the officer asked.

  “I’m a freelance journalist.”

  “I need an employer.”

  Felix turned to me and said very calmly and quietly, “Go into the party. I’ll find you later.”

  “No!” I shouted.

  The officer pulled him back: “Talk with me, Fritz, not your girl.” He asked who Felix’s associates were in this neighborhood and if he was a member of any German organizations.

  “No!” I insisted to Felix. “I can’t lose you again!”

  “Go, Greta,” Felix hissed as the officer barked again for his attention, asking if he was a member of the Communist Party. I watched the policeman pull my brother out of sight. Red hair, long legs, lederhosen: gone. Standing there in Patchin Place, I cried out for my Hansel—as if my bones had all been broken.

  I DID NOT last long in that world, on that first visit. Ruth found me there, crumpled at her doorstep, and took me up to my apartment. “He’s gone!” I kept saying. “I lost him again!” Passing her door, I saw only fairy-tale costumes and heard only laughter and the chandelier sounds of a party. She whispered, “He’ll be fine, he’ll be fine. But, darling, you should have told me your doctor was coming.”

  She took me into my bedroom, and there stood Dr. Cerletti.

  Small wire-framed glasses, in this world, but bald as ever, in a neat brown suit. He carried a wooden box by its brass handle. “I tried to call, Mrs. Michelson. I apologize, I should have guessed you would forget after yesterday. We’re going to do these at home. It’s as easy to do here as at the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ruth said to the doctor, sitting me on the bed. “She didn’t tell me. I didn’t know.”

  He said nothing, but put the box on a little table, unfolding the lid down the middle like a tackle box. Inside, nested in green velvet, was a glass jar, half coated in foil, from whose lid emerged a brass knob. Sunk in the velvet, around it, lay a silver circlet. A wire led from it to the device. He lifted out the jar and set it before me, then carefully removed the circlet with both hands. “We do these twice a week, Greta,” he said softly, holding it before him. “You remember. I’ll see you again next Wednesday. Eventually, you may be able to do them yourself.”

  “I don’t remember this . . . ,” I said.

  He said it was a capacitor. A Leyden jar. I had only to touch my hand to the knob. I looked up at Ruth and she seemed to be close to tears. Her electric dress glowed in the dim room, making our faces pink above the device. “Go on,” said Dr. Cerletti. “You did it yesterday.” Was this what Alice felt, when she saw the bottle that said DRINK ME? She knew this would help her get there, to the place she desired. That beautiful garden behind the little door.

  He placed the circlet gently on my head. I looked down at the strange jar; there seemed to be water inside. Did I imagine it glowing? And, after a moment, I put out the index finger of my right hand and brought it to the bright brass knob. . . .

  WHEN HE WAS gone, Ruth undressed me and gave me a sleeping pill the doctor had left, although my body wanted nothing but sleep. I recalled the bright spark that leapt from the device to my finger, the blue spark that lit my brain. I kept telling her he was dead, Felix was dead, and she kept trying to hush me, calm me down, when a shout came from the street—“Greta!”—and in my daze I moved to the window, thinking it was Felix escaped from the police. But it was a stranger. Was the device already working? A young man in a Civil War costume below my window, flowers in his hand. Wide clever face, small eyes, an eyebrow raised. An enormous, drunken smile. In the moonlight, his hair gleamed in bolts of brilliantine.

  “Look there, a boy outside my window. He just blew me a kiss,” I said.

  “Oh, darling,” she said, “that’s just Leo. Now sleep, please, go to sleep for me. I didn’t know, Greta.” I looked down and he waved at me, this Leo, before she pulled me back to bed.

  I recall how the flash of her glowing dress against my closing eyelids was like the neon glow of hotels flashing VACANCY VACANCY on a long night ride. I felt the weight of my mind hanging from a branch, pulling, pulling, and before I knew it the stem had snapped and I was falling, blind, into the void.

  THERE ALMOST HAS to be a heaven. If other worlds surround us, just a lightning bolt away, then what would stop us from slipping there? If love has left us, well, then there is a world where it has not. If death has come, then there is a world where it has been kept at bay. Surely it exists, the place where all the wrongs are righted, and so why had I not found that place? Instead, I had been given this: a life in which I had been born in another century, and grew up in corsets and ribbons alongside my twin, and married my Nathan and sent him off to war. A life in which my brother lived, but did not live well.

  So why this one? Why not a perfect world in which nothing slipped from my fingers? For surely, there has to be a heaven. Perhaps it was my job to make one.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1941

  WHAT A STRANGE SLEEP IT WAS! I WOKE: BRIGHT SUN, and light flickering gaily on the ceiling, and the fading sound of bells ringing in the air. The sheets were soft and warm; I felt refreshed, as if I had slept a hundred years. The sound of whispering voices, footsteps, creaking floorboards. But it was the smell that alerted me, even before I opened my eyes. Gone was the gaslight, soot, and manure, the cinnamon and violets of that other world. Here: dust and aftershave. Why aftershave? My eyes opened to a different scene entirely. I could not help but smile. I’m not back at all, not yet, I thought to myself. I’m somewhere else again.

  Golden curtains hung on my bedroom window where green ones had been, and landscape photographs instead of paintings, and yet it was still my room, still my home. Outside: the same low brick buildings of Patchin Place, the yellowed gingko leaves of an autumn in my Village. But where had the prison gone? I looked with interest on an unfamiliar lady’s vanity below a folding mirror: the canisters of creams and powders, the long-handled brush, the hairpins all neat in a tin box. They were all strangers to me, and yet, that was my own red hair snagged in the brush. A mirrored wastepaper basket caught the morning light and sent streamers around the room. It was quite beautiful. Dust and aftershave. It seemed so possible that I could be somewhere else, again, that each morning would unfold anew like a pop-up book of possible lives. So was it any surprise when I heard a knock on the door? Two people
talking, but one particular voice—“Mrs. Green!”—one particular phrase before he walked into the room:

  “I leave it to you!”

  NATHAN, TURNING TO smile at me from the doorway. But he was changed, as everything was changed: clean shaven as he stood above me, with wire-rimmed glasses, khaki uniform. How strange to see him without a beard! He looked so young: same long narrow face, lined with worry at the eyes, same heart-shaped hairline. His hand on my cheek, his smile unforced and kind, his brown eyes darting thoughtfully to a glass of water beside me, which, a moment later, he tilted to my lips and from which I drank. I swallowed and he got up to leave but I found myself grabbing his sleeve with my right hand. My left seemed to be weighed down.

  “Nathan,” I said.

  “Shh,” he said, pressing my arm down by my side again and kneading my hand. “Be quiet and rest. Dr. Cerletti said the first few procedures can be hard.”

  “Everything is changed.”

  “The doctor said you might not remember. Don’t worry about that now.”

  “All right,” I said. I am not one to spoil an enchantment. I looked down at my left arm and saw it was in a plaster cast. With my other hand I touched the cool surface. I could feel the break inside it, and let out a gasp of pain.

  “What is it?”

  I looked into his face, so altered by this clean, smooth jaw and close haircut and whatever life he’d had in this world, and yet instantly him, instantly the headstrong Nathan. I said the obvious: “I’ve broken my arm.”

  “Yes,” he said. “There was an accident.” I tried to lift my body. “Don’t try getting up,” he said, taking my shoulders in his hands to place me back in bed, but I flinched from his touch; I felt I would die if he touched me like that, after all this time.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Something’s changed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not from here. I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Darling, I know you’re confused,” he said, sitting down.

  But I was no longer listening. For out the window I saw there was a change to my view. A billboard, set on a rooftop, whose message never existed in my world.

  “What year is it?”

  He tried to keep the concern from his face as he squeezed my hand. “I have a sleeping pill in the other room, the doctor said it would be harmless—”

  “Nathan, what year is it?”

  “It’s nineteen forty-one, darling. November first, nineteen forty-one.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s all coming back to me.” And as he stroked my hair I tried to smile. I looked out at the billboard with its man-high, looping mint green letters:

  NINETEEN FORTY-ONE—A WORLD of other choices, other chances! With antique taxis honking in the streets, and brass-buttoned policemen shouting from Sixth Avenue, and giant women’s hats floating by the gate of Patchin Place like jellyfish, army boys shouting at girls, the smell of cigarettes and roasted chestnuts, with factory smoke thickening the air—here it was, Manhattan of another time, and not only had my Nathan never left me in this world. Here, he had married me.

  So there were at least three lives to lead. A life in 1918, with a husband away at war. A life in 1941, with him here by my side. There was no question it was the procedure that had brought this impossibility about, but how could I get back? And would it last only as long as the electricity did? Or would I leap every night, from star to star, until I reached a beginning? Or an end?

  “It’s all coming back to me,” I said. And as he stroked my hair I tried to smile. I struggled to right myself: 1941. Be here, I told myself. Be this Greta.

  There had been a car accident, he told me. Almost three weeks before. This Greta I was inhabiting, she had broken more than her arm; she had broken her mind as well, I understood, had become a sad and hysterical wife to this Nathan, dressed in his army doctor uniform. A psychiatrist had been called in, a friend of Nathan’s—a Dr. Cerletti, of course—and with hushed tones and drawn curtains had administered a “procedure” to help me back from the darkness. Of course this was how it went. Of course this was how our minds had connected, in that blue electric flash of madness, across the membrane of three worlds so we switched places, two Gretas and myself, and awoke to different lives.

  “The doctor said your memories would come back, but slowly.” He reached to the table beside me and produced a flat engraved silver case, which he clicked open like a compact to reveal a row of cigarettes as white as teeth. He took one and lit it.

  “You’re a smoker,” I said.

  Nathan squinted at me queerly and stroked my forehead again. “You just rest.” As he moved, its lavender smoke wrote in cursive all around his body. His whole body tilted over me and—dear God!—I could smell some old-new-fashioned cologne, and the crisp starch of his shirt, and the faint leathery grease of whatever was in his hair, but underneath it all I recognized the scent of my old lover. And it was awful, awful to be brought back so thoroughly, nearly as awful as what he next said, breathing into my ear: “Just remember I love you.”

  I had not ever thought that I would cry in front of him again. Not after what he had put me through in my world. There is the thing you hope for and then, beyond it, like a prize kept locked and out of reach behind the counter, there is the thing you dare not hope for. To win it without expectation, without warning and—worst of all—without earning it in any way, is for the world to become a magical place. One in which prayers are not answered, and wrongs are not righted, nor anything kept in balance, but punishments and rewards are given at random, as if by a drunk or insane king. Which is to say: a hurtful place to live. I had to look away so he would not see my absurd tears.

  “Your brother has been by, but Mrs. Green was strict, and our Felix—”

  “Can I see Felix?” I interrupted.

  He laughed. “Well, he’s right outside, waiting for you! He’s asking for you constantly.”

  So he was alive. And what would my brother be like this time? As headstrong and foolish as ever, emotionally overwrought over some new love or another, whatever form that might take in this strange world? Surely times had changed enough since the last time I saw him. There would be no ridiculous fiancée in Washington, no coded look there in his eyes. Surely this time my Felix would be himself, and if that were so—I swore to myself—then I would never close my eyes again, never leave this land that I had traveled to.

  “Send him in! Send him in!” I shouted.

  “At least you remember him. You know, yesterday,” Nathan said, a little mischievously, “you thought you were from the past. Or something like that.”

  “Aren’t we all from the past?” I said, smiling. “Did I say what it was like?”

  “No, but I guess you thought it wasn’t anything like this!” He laughed. “But now you’re back. Really, you feel up to seeing him? We didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “Of course, I’m longing to.”

  This seemed to thrill Nathan. His long, still shockingly beardless face bent in a smile beneath his glasses and vanished into the hall, talking to someone there. The door gleamed in a square of white varnish.

  Left alone, I looked around the room with the sensitive eyes of a detective inspecting a murder scene, looking for clues to this world. It was fairly tidy for a sickroom, though a pair of laddered stockings had been snake-shed onto the vanity beside a bottle of nail polish. On a nearby roll-up secretary lay a pile of envelopes, stationery, and a marbled fountain pen. Gold dust floated everywhere. I tried to take it all in anew. A strange metal machine sat in the corner, something like a sunlamp. That was when I caught sight of my triptych reflection in the vanity’s hinged mirrors.

  It was not me there. The one I had grown so used to seeing, in my own cracked mirror in that other-room-like-this-one: tall and short haired, hips too wide in jeans, breasts too small in blouses, misshapen and flawed, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It was me, of course. Except this woman was beautiful.
Her red hair was brushed high in the front and curled in thick waves on the sides, so carefully and artfully done I could not imagine how she achieved it. And below this, somehow enhanced by the nightgown I wore, was a body flowing in cream satin like a dressmaker’s form, despite the heavy cast. Never had I looked like this. I touched myself with my free hand, unbelieving. For it had not occurred to me that I did not merely shift into another self. I shifted into another body.

  So this, too, was something I would learn to adjust to: the strange sensation of a body not my own. To lift an arm and find it smoother, paler than the one I remembered. To feel the other so broken. Mine, and yet not mine. To touch my face and have my fingers come away with peach foundation, and to put on a string of pearls and find my hands caught in the masses of hair I had not worn since I was a girl. The sharp face I had seen in every mirror: blurred, softened like the rest of me. What another person would have made of the body we were born with.

  “Greta?” came Nathan’s voice from the door, and I was confronted with a new, spectacular tableau. Of course, I thought to myself, why didn’t I expect this?

  There, framed by the white-painted wood, I saw Nathan holding a little boy of about three or four who koala-clung to him. He had small green eyes and sleek waves of brown hair. “Felix,” he was saying to the child. “Hush now. Look, Fee. Your mommy’s here.” Then he set the boy on the floor and, sailor hat falling behind, my son ran joyfully toward me.

  I HAD NEVER considered children. No, that’s not true. I had considered them as people consider moving to a foreign country; they know it would change them forever, but it is a change they never see. We had talked about it, Nathan and I, throughout our relationship. Even at the very beginning, we had a way of checking in with each other. “I just want to see,” he would ask after half a bottle of wine, “how you’re feeling about children? Any change?” And, smiling at his long bearded face, pulled tight in concern, as if by a drawstring, I would say I hadn’t thought about them at all in the time since he’d last asked. “How about you?” I’d counter, leaning back in the couch and hugging a child-cushion, waiting to see if his question were really a statement, but he always shook his head and answered, “No, no change yet.” A pause, then a smile from both of us.