The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Don’t fight for me, Leo.”

  He said nothing in response. He just turned his back on her and walked alone back to the cabin. It was quite cold.

  A MISTAKE, MADE in another world. And here: It could be righted. There was so little time—only six procedures left—and here we all were: with me grasping for Felix, for Alan, before my world killed them again: another bringing Nathan once more into my life, to understand him, to have him in all worlds: and this one: She was trying to pull Leo back through the ether. Each of us: to fix the mistakes we’d made. To say the right words, do the right actions, before the porthole closed. For the first time it occurred to me: Perhaps the Greta from 1918 no longer wanted her world. She wanted one where the snow did not fall on Leo Barrow’s grave.

  I thought of the clothes hanging in that apartment, how the light had made them glow. Like the lanterns of a pleasure garden, with dancing couples and music playing from a sleepy band. Here, it was the swaying railroad lamps and the pillar of steam rising from beside the bridge. The soldiers jostling for another swig from the bottle. The brick warehouses stacked around us so that we stood in a kind of cove, a hidden place. The place where boys might come with nothing else to do, and no money, making the best of what they found around them. The lights of midtown had been dimmed for weeks now, to hide Manhattan’s silhouette from German ships, and only the vague red glow of Times Square burned there like the embers of a fire.

  A bell went off somewhere, and the soldiers began to group as if something was about to happen, but Leo just stood there. I watched as he pulled his collar around his throat. How well I knew those hands. How strange to think that they did not know me.

  How many more times would I have it? The chance to meet someone anew, begin with everything I had done right and wrong, clear all mistakes and start fresh with life? This Leo had not met any other Greta. He was untouched; no electric hand had reached through the dimensions yet to grab him. This one was, for the moment, mine alone. Mine to greet for the first time, see smile for the first time. Sense, perhaps, something stirring inside him that even he was not aware of, as he could not possibly know he had loved me terribly before, and died, and been brought back to life to love me again.

  I pictured how he would look if I approached him. An eyebrow raised, that smile making a dimple in his cheek. His voice so low for a young man:

  “Good evening, ma’am, what’s your name?”

  “I’m Greta Wells.”

  A dark look in his eye. “Leo.”

  There he stood. I took a few steps toward him, watching him from behind: stoop shouldered against the cold, hat jammed onto his head, patches on his elbows, eyes looking right and left. A sudden wind made all the lanterns swing in time and a soldier’s hat went off, with a shout, from his head and over the side of the bridge. Leo laughed.

  There before me: the scarf unwound, the neck pink with warmth and bare to the wind. The soldiers laughing at the rail. Somewhere a key hidden under a rock. But which is worse: To start an affair, knowing how it will go? Or to walk away, knowing it could have been his great love, and leave to someone else a first crack at his heart, which would be broken now in another place, but broken all the same? He looked back at me and caught my eye. The light on his ear, the way it glowed with a child’s softness; everything was returning, could return. For her. Should I fight for you? Is there something worse in life than to make someone love you just because you need it, just because you can?

  Then, from nowhere, he stood bolt upright. From the soldiers I heard a shout: “Here it comes!”

  And from the depths of the train yard, lit by the shaded lights of the train itself, and by the moon, and every ambient light even on that dim night, great clouds of steam rose up like the arrival of a genie from a lamp, billowing soft and warm around us. He was laughing. I saw him as a boy, in the depths of the Depression, running from the sweet smell of the factory with his friends, cookies in their pockets stolen from the loading dock. I saw his childhood there on the streets, playing stickball in short pants, filing down to the public baths with a towel in one hand, a bar of soap in the other, singing “Over There!” with obscene lyrics in a chorus of boys, his jobs as a corner newspaper boy, or handing out playbills, which he would duly dump in the sewer and spend his working hours skinny-dipping in the trash-strewn Hudson. I saw again how close it was, his boyhood. Still on the horizon, where his adult life was so far away it frightened him. Leo as a boy, his features even more outsize, grown up here and not in that cabin up north, where life might have been easier. I saw all the boys charging up the stairs and waiting for this moment, just at sunset, when the old six fifteen came clanging by and they could jump up and down, crumbs in their mouths, and imagine—as the only freedom they knew, in days when nothing was theirs except what they invented—that they could walk on clouds of gold.

  And that is where I left him.

  JANUARY 2, 1986

  IT WAS A NEW YEAR.

  “Dr. Cerletti, how does it end?”

  “What do you mean, Miss Wells?”

  “Six procedures from now. When we finish, do we consider another round?”

  “Your progress has been remarkable. There’s no reason for me to believe we’ll continue. In fact, I don’t think it would be wise. You’ll continue seeing Dr. Gilleo, of course.”

  “But how does it end?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. You’re yourself again. Or on your way.”

  As I left Dr. Cerletti’s office, I saw an elderly woman sitting there where I once had sat, on my first day. High lace collar, bright green shawl, her hands clutching her purse as she stared at the sign for ECT. I paused for a moment. There was something familiar, constant about her. I recalled a park, a median strip, an army band. Could it be? Our eyes linked and, for a moment, I imagined that she and I shared the same blue bolt of lightning, the same strange story.

  Could it be she traveled as well? Nothing seemed impossible anymore. After all, there was nothing special about me, nothing unique; our fate is made, so often, merely by the place where we are standing. The piano falls an inch to our right; we are kept safe. And not because we are special, and the other person is not. But perhaps: because our sorrow is so great, that like a star its gravity can bend the world a little, shift things ever so slightly. Could wear a little hole in the universe. The sorrow of a woman like me, and that frail old woman in the lobby.

  “Mrs. Arnold?” came the nurse’s voice and our gaze broke. I watched her make her slow way into his office, and who knows? Maybe that very night she fell through the void and woke in a world where she was young again? Or married again? Or all alone? I saw the door close behind her; I heard my doctor’s murmuring voice. And as I made my way back to my home, I considered that I could not ask someone how it would end. I could not wait and see. There was no time for that. It was up to me—and the other Gretas—to decide.

  And act.

  JANUARY 3, 1919

  WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET CHABLIS, RUTH?” FELIX asked with delight.

  “I have a diplomat friend,” Ruth replied to my brother, winking, “who stockpiled in nineteen hundred. We all have to stockpile before they vote it away.” Aunt Ruth stood in quite tall boots, wearing a sleeveless, beaded-bodice gown in Peking blue. As if to make up for the simplicity of her dress, she had done her white hair up in strands of pearls, like a wedding cake. “Does my other self have so many pearls?” she asked me mischievously.

  It had taken only a few days to arrange the party, in Ruth’s place, decorated with candles and Bolsheviks and some stunned-looking society people eying the bohemians through monocles. I could not shake the image of Nathan’s face that night, the hardness in it, but was relieved to see it brighten the next day when I asked him where we could go that he missed. “Central Park,” he said, looking up from bed at the prospect. “We could take a long walk. Or the Woolworth Building.” The only trouble came before the party. I found Nathan putting on his coat; he had been called ba
ck for a late night at the clinic, and objected to my being seen at a party without him.

  “I know, darling, I know,” I said. “But it isn’t for me. It’s for Felix. He wants me to introduce him to a publisher.”

  “What publishers do you know?” he asked, then said, “I know you’re used to parties.”

  “I’ll just be gone a moment.”

  “Things have to change, Greta. To how they were.”

  “Things will change, you know they will. We both will have to learn.”

  And at the inclusion of himself in this sentence, he assented to my visit to the party. He took his top hat and looked into my eyes. As long as it was just a moment. And I went down to join the party, aware that I had committed some marital crime.

  “It’s vile,” my brother was saying after downing a glass of Ruth’s wine. We stood together in the room, hovering beside the odd Promethean lamp as Ruth’s pearls jangled in her headdress. I stared out at the carpet, its central figure of a maiden.

  “I know,” my aunt said, sighing as she looked at her glass. “It tastes like wartime butter.”

  “I’ll have another,” Felix said. He had his glass refilled, raised it to me. I watched as he walked off to another side of the room, where a famous man was shouting about the League of Nations, and how it was an abomination against the people’s cause. From beside me, a bald astronomer was talking about Halley’s comet. “I was the only one of your aunt’s friends who knew we would pass through the tail, but it’s harmless, you know,” he said to me, winking. “Of course she wouldn’t listen. Threw an end of the world party anyway.”

  “The effects,” she pronounced gravely, “are not yet known.”

  The astronomer toasted us and moved toward the political discussion. I watched Felix pollinating the room like a bee in clover.

  “He’s not here yet,” I said to Ruth. “I’m worried.”

  She shook her head tipsily. “He’ll come. I told you I telephoned him and explained I needed him to do my will. I’m afraid I sounded like I was loaded with money. It’s a dirty trick you’re playing, Greta.”

  I told her she didn’t understand about love.

  “Oh me,” she said, giggling. “Oh no, not me!”

  It took a little doing on my part, once again visiting the library and going through the city directory, working with the operator until I found the correct number, then forcing Ruth to dial it. Her pretext was preposterous—that she was leaving the country the next day, and could only be found at this party—but she assured me it would work. What a romantic girl I had become! For I had experienced firsthand the sensation of an old love revived, again and again, like a drunk forcing a bar pianist to play the same song over and over, and knew both the ecstasy of rebeginnings and the confusion of how differently, unexpectedly it could go. And yet I wanted to bring this gift, this curse, to Felix. For my brother, I would provide it, in a setting of candles and bad wine and avant-garde attitudes. I would, at last, make something perfect in the world.

  Who had I invited to my party in 1919? It was Alan, of course. I would bring him back to life.

  I listened to Ruth talking about Bolshevism, but in my mind I was picturing how it would go. He would arrive in a black coat and a top hat, handing them gently to the maid, looking around the room with the nervous smile of someone stepping from shore onto a tipping boat. Ruth would approach, in her mermaid headdress of pearls, and hand him a glass of Chablis, murmuring to him about business, and then she would introduce him to me (“Enchanted, madam,” he would say with no recognition, though we had shared the hardest scene of our lives together), and then gesture across the room to where Felix stood. There would be five paces between them, the length of the figured carpet, and Felix would look up and there it would be. Who else had ever seen it, knowing what they saw? We can imagine, introducing two friends, that something electric arcs between them; we can even pretend, later, at their wedding perhaps, that we saw it and knew it and noted it in the diary in our mind, but it isn’t so. Even lovers can’t know; an angel in their mind flies back and rewrites the past to make it perfect, for the stumble of hope and doubt on meeting does not fit the rules of romance. Yet this was different. I was like the one who alone knows, of all the audience, that a celebrity is about to appear upon the stage. Not Alan, entering in his coat and hat. And not Felix, standing to stare, so handsome in his evening clothes. But the third, rising like the figure from the carpet to float between them. It had happened before, was happening in another time, and I alone knew that here it would happen again. The little terror stiffening their bodies; the hot metal in their veins, not unlike the jolt from my magic jar. Terrified, bewildered, charged with wonder. That would happen here, any moment. And I alone would see it.

  “Ruth,” I whispered, and she turned back toward me, motioning for a little man with a hearing aid to leave her. “Ruth, I think Nathan suspects.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said he knows my friend died.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “And I’m sure he had his ways to get through that war.”

  “Ruth, I want to ask you. Is he different? He seems so grim. Is he . . . harder than he was before?”

  She blinked at me and her headdress jingled as she shook her head no.

  I remembered that my other self had been afraid of this Nathan, what he might do. I pictured young Leo under my window. I saw a bit of my other self’s heart.

  Ruth spoke quietly: “You see why I couldn’t blame her.”

  “The other Nathans aren’t like him,” I said. “Not really.”

  “And how about the other Ruth?”

  I looked at her sparkling face. “You didn’t say ‘Ruths.’”

  “Yes, darling, my Greta told me. I’m like Felix. There’s a world where I’m dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as I had said once before to a different woman. “You know, I miss you there. I don’t have an ally, just a servant, and she doesn’t know.”

  “It’s not like anything else in the world, to know you’re dead somewhere. I guess I always thought of myself as a weed, the kind that would grow anywhere, between the cracks of any time. But I’m not. I’m a rare, delicate flower,” she said, laughing. “Me and Felix. And Leo. The right temperature, and air, and soil, or else we wither.”

  “Don’t say that. It was an accident. I’m so sorry.” I felt a touch on my shoulder.

  “I have to go,” I heard my brother say.

  I turned and saw Felix already putting his arms into his overcoat. There was perspiration on his brow and a reddish flush, perhaps the poor Chablis. I said, “No, you can’t. You have to stay, just a minute.”

  “Greta, I have to go,” he said, and there was something desperate in his eyes; he would not look at me, but seemed consumed by something inside him.

  I took his sleeve. “No, I want you to meet someone, please stay!”

  He shook his head, gave me a forced smile, and kissed my cheek. “I have to go, I’ll see you later, enjoy the Bolsheviks,” he said, and without saying good-bye to Ruth (who was talking to a man who had just arrived, his back to me) he took his hat and almost ran out the door. It had all happened so quickly; my plan, carefully built over the past few days, washed away like a castle on the beach. I would have to do it again. There was so little time, not even two weeks left before the wedding itself, and of course not much longer before my own passage would crumble and be blocked forever. Perhaps tomorrow I could arrange another dinner, something he couldn’t leave; I could still force this flower to bloom.

  “Greta,” Ruth said, her hand on my arm, “I want to introduce you to someone.”

  “Ruth, it’s a disaster,” I whispered.

  She gave me a tense smile from beneath her mermaid tiara. “Greta, this is Mr. Tandy.”

  And there he was: Alan, another man returned from the dead.

  He was altered, in this world, as we all were altered. Silvered beard trimmed neatly to a point,
pince-nez sitting on his nose like an insect; stouter, grander, in a white tie and dark suit, smiling more easily than I imagined. I recognized him, under there. Manly and careful, of few words, the Iowa farmboy grown to prominence, his eyes trying to say things his lips could not. Alan, I thought. Alan, you’re dead now. Your ashes sat between roses, and a young man sang for you and I could not bear it. Save him for me. You don’t know how close we are to never existing at all.

  I noticed his eyes, cracked green glaze, glancing at the doorway through which my brother had just gone. I saw the thoughts working there, the blood rushing from his face, and all at once I understood. How stupid I was! To think that nothing moved in the world without me, that it was all a chess game for me to ponder, when in fact the pieces were alive, and moved all on their own accord, for they were not figments of my mind but people.

  “Wonderful to meet you, Mr. Tandy, I’m sorry you just missed my brother.” I looked to Ruth, whose face widened with alarm.

  He sputtered out a few polite words, but the color had not returned to his face.

  “Felix left?” Ruth asked, and I shot her a meaningful look. We should have guessed.

  “That’s a shame,” Alan said, pulling an awkward smile out of some private reserve.

  I said, “He was looking forward to meeting you again.”

  Ruth acted like an actress whose supporting cast has begun to improvise. “You’ve . . . you’ve met him before?”

  Alan said, “Through . . . through my wife . . .”

  But I did not hear the rest of the conversation, for I was already out the door.