The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Of course.” He sat back down, the book on his lap.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said. He nodded his head gravely and looked out the window. I watched his throat tense as he swallowed some memory he did not want to share.

  “Greta, I’m leaving.”

  I reached out a hand across the quilt. “No, stay just a minute.”

  He looked down at the book in his lap. “I mean I’m leaving New York,” he said, and faced me resolutely. “I’m going to some small town where no one knows me, where Ingrid’s father can’t ruin me. I’m thinking of Canada.”

  “No one thinks of Canada.”

  A glance out the window, where the alley cat was making its way across the roofs. “Maybe I’ll change my name.” He laughed. “I’ll be Mr. Alan Tandy, as a kind of revenge. Someplace I can start all over.”

  I looked at him in profile, the strong nose and slightly weak chin, the same mustache as the brother I’d lost, the same gray hairs as his 1940s self. A version of my own face. “Quit,” I said to him loudly. “Give up. Start over. I see. I just have one question.”

  He took a deep breath. “Yes, Greta?”

  “When you were a little boy,” I asked, “is this the man you dreamed of becoming?”

  A cloud of anger blotted out his peaceful expression. The alley cat paused and leaped from roof to roof, then glared across the way to us. I wonder what it saw from its perch? A red-haired man planning his escape, his twin sister come from another world one final time. Together in their childhood home, each thinking that somehow, if they left it, life would be better. The silent exchange of expressions, the things that could not be said. The quiver of his lower lip, the former bridegroom, considering the awful question she had put to him.

  He stood up from his chair and sat beside me on the bed. He spoke in a whispered tone. “When you were sick. In your fever,” he said, leaning forward, controlling his emotion as best he could. “You told me about a dream you were having. Do you remember?”

  “Tell me what I said.”

  He looked down at my hand, remembering whatever story I had told him in my madness. “It was in some future world, you said.”

  “Yes, I remember it.”

  “You said you missed me,” he said. “And I wanted to know—”

  “I did miss you.”

  “Did I die in your dream?”

  From the other room I could hear his dreadful bird twittering away; Millie must have removed its cover now that I was well, and it was moved to sing at what it thought was morning. My brother’s face was calm and bore only the few lines of age that the brother I had known would never bear. Another bedroom, another version of that face. The pills, the spoon, the pink elastic.

  “Felix . . .”

  WE HAD PREPARED, Felix. A nurse friend had found us barbiturates and sleeping pills, and I went into the kitchen and found the Jell-O pack we had already bought. On the back, I remember, were instructions for quick hardening, which involved using ice cubes instead of cold water, and I shook heavily as I poured in all the drugs and waited for it to set in the refrigerator. I would go in and hold your hand while Alan whispered to you, and I would run back to check on the Jell-O; it took only an hour or so, but it seemed endless. I was so afraid your pain would increase every minute, and I knew that waiting for death would be the hardest part, though that would not be the hardest for us. When I came back in with the Jell-O, and Alan tried to feed it to you with a spoon, we found that the lesions in your throat were so painful that you were unable to swallow. “Come on, baby,” Alan kept saying, “come on, baby, just swallow a little. Just try.” I cannot describe what it was like to watch it fall from your mouth like a child. To watch your eyes rolling in your head. And your hands tremble with the pain and confusion. It was not something for humans to endure.

  I want you to know it was not you there. I want you to know it is not how I think of you. I did not keep any photographs from that time because it was like watching a family home set on fire. You are always yourself. You are always stubborn and funny and handsome and strong and alive.

  Alan and I had planned for every eventuality. And we knew what to do, how to help you. We managed to get enough of the Jell-O down your throat, because after a while you fell asleep, and once we heard your breathing roughen we took a large plastic bag and—Alan and I together—we put it over your head and held it tight with pink elastic from your sewing kit. Your breath clouded the bag until we could not see your face. I did not think it would ever end, any of the terror of that night, but we watched the bag contract over your features as you breathed your last oxygen. Like a mask. I know you didn’t suffer then; I am sure you were sleeping as soundly as a child, and who knows what your last dreams were of? I like to think you dreamed of the summer house, and the three of us together. Or else our times out on the fire escape smoking weed until we giggled as the sun set. Or maybe—and wouldn’t this be wonderful?—of our childhood by the lake, and our old dead dog Tramp coming from the water and shaking herself all over us so that we screamed. Golden afternoons, that’s what I think. What else would anybody dream of? I held the elastic against your neck and stared at the mask of your face until Alan said, “His pulse is gone. It’s over.”

  I TURNED AWAY from him, saying nothing. How could I say it? But then I saw something that made me pause. As I was looking out at that view I might not see again, I watched as there, on the glass, a set of fingerprints appeared. One by one they materialized on the surface, lit by sunlight. Somehow I knew that Felix would not see them, for they were his own fingerprints, left there in another world. I pictured my brother standing by the window in 1942, touching the glass. The gesture of a trapped person. I thought I saw his breath cloud on its surface, then begin to fade. And I imagined that world I would be going to. Five glowing prints on the glass as he listened to another Greta. Tomorrow, it would be me. In an apron and a kerchief. And she would be in mine, where he was gone.

  “No, in that world,” I said, “you’re perfect. Perfect.”

  The impossible, the unbearable, happens once to each of us.

  HE STOOD UP, my twin brother, without saying a word, and went to the window and put his hand just where the fingerprints had been, breathed onto the glass just where I had seen his breath appear and fade.

  “Stay,” I said. “Stay with me and my child.”

  “No, Greta, I’m leaving. It’s too much.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Don’t ruin the Felix I know with self-pity. He wouldn’t say these things.”

  “I’m not that Felix.”

  “Yes you are. I saw it on Halloween. I saw it in Hansel. What happened to him?”

  “I shot him.”

  “So that’s the end? We’re giving up? At thirty-two, we’re done? Well, let’s find that gun of yours. Let’s finish it off.”

  He listened to me with anger in his eyes, then walked from the window straight to the door, his fingers on the handle. “I’m going to let you rest. Have your procedure.”

  “Let me rest and I won’t ever be back,” I told him.

  I looked at him frozen at the door to my room. How often in life do people make that awful sacrifice, that murder of possibilities? His hand resting on the carved brass doorknob. How often do they stay?

  He looked at me as the bird sang on, welcoming its false morning, and what was in his mind? Did he know what I was saying, truly? Could he tell, from my voice, the way I gripped the bedsheets, that this was my last day? That the sister he would find tomorrow might be the old one, the one he had grown up with, in matching white lace, who knew him as the boy I never met, but who would never understand him as a man? The sun died behind a cloud, and his face grayed out in the shadows, but I recognized the expression. Astonishment, fear. For here was someone who saw him down to his bones. And not just his brand of love, for who knows how that would go? In any age, for any of us? But the one person who knew the best of him.

  Then I said something that made
him take his fingers from the door handle and turn to face me. The sunlight came and went within the room, glowing and fading over us. The bird sang on in its dream.

  “STAY,” I SAID to him. “And I’ll stay, too.”

  MY BROTHER WALKED from the door to stand by the window and stare out upon our little Patchin Place. “They say it’s going to snow tomorrow,” was all he said to me, and I saw that I could keep this promise if I wished. Snow, coating that world, and his waking face lit bright from it. I have never been so jealous of tomorrow. Nineteen forty-two Greta, awakening to a husband before he left for war, to the shouts of her son. And 1919 Greta, in my world: seeking out her young man Leo. We were not in the wrong places at all.

  “Go,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

  “I’ll be fine. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I added: “I’ll still be here.”

  The look in his eyes said: Will you? but he just smiled, tapped his hand on the door, and closed it behind him. Silence floated down upon the room. I looked at my world, the other world I first had entered. I spread my arms out on the coverlet and watched the patterns of light.

  The gate creaking at Patchin Place: some neighbor coming home from work. Horns of ships at sea. Horses on Tenth Street, the clop and whinny of a still unfamiliar world. I could hardly believe my luck, or that it took so long for me to recognize it: The world I had missed all along was the one I hadn’t seen. Ruth to bedevil me every day. My brother to bring back to life, now in the ordinary ways. And a child to raise, together. What is a perfect world except for one that needs you?

  I stood up, unsteadily, and took the wooden box down from the shelf. The hinge opened neatly and showed my jar and crown. I lifted out the jar and set it on the little table, the wire leading to where the circlet remained in its velvet—it was perfectly safe to touch that way. I looked around, thinking, then took the porcelain chopsticks from their place before the fan. Gently, sitting in a chair, I used the chopsticks to disengage the wire from the life; now the jar stood alone, but still full of charge. I paused a moment, staring at the shining object before me. A hammer raised above the machine that brought me here.

  I will never know if I did the right thing. And yet—my other selves, were you also standing before the electrical machines? Did you also shake your heads, refusing this last lightning bolt? Because I know you, 1942 Greta. I know where your heart resided.

  I CAN SEE you so clearly, ironing the sheets of your forties apartment. Wiping your forehead on your arm, the heat an inch from your face. Hair done up in a cloth, beauty put aside. Don’t iron too perfectly; don’t do everything that is asked, or expected. Put your son to bed and read him Peter Pan. Write a letter to Nathan in England. Douse it in enough perfume to last the journey. Write to Felix in California and tell him you’re feeding his bird; my dear Greta, it may not be in you to fathom his heart, but who gets to say? It will be tempting to forget, once it is all over, with your husband and son and house again, to think of it all as a blot of madness in an ordinary life, and iron the sheets and black out the windows. Believe me: It will not work. No one has an ordinary life. Remember awakening those strange mornings, the fearful thrilling sensation. Do not dilute yourself in petty days. Greta: Mark your hour on earth.

  Felix, I remember what you told me by my sickbed in 1942. I remember awakening to hear you speaking of Los Angeles, and I said, I’m sorry, I wasn’t following, California? “Alan’s found a job and a place out there. He thinks he can find me work, they’ve lost so many screenwriters to the draft, it’s a chance. What do you think?” Up came your worried face. But I knew that, outside that door, your bags were already packed to go; you could no more stay here with me, in our little house with Fee, than you could move into the Empire State Building. Alan had beckoned you to another life, away from snow and hatred—or so it seemed—and don’t we come when they beckon? Don’t we step onto the plane and feel the stomach clutch on the takeoff of a possible mistake? Of course we do. Who wants to be the kind of person who doesn’t? Who even wants to know such people? “Go,” I whispered to you. How you gripped your hat and nodded.

  A son to raise, I guess, that’s what you left your sister. A son, a husband overseas who’d been won back, a taciturn housemaid and friend. Don’t think she didn’t cry. But don’t think the stove alarm didn’t go off, signaling that the corn bread was ready; and the mail didn’t arrive with new reminders for old bills; and a lightbulb didn’t crack and blacken in the study; and she didn’t step barefoot on a tin soldier bayoneting her tender instep. Don’t think she didn’t have her own life to lead, and tomatoes to can, and bins to empty, and sugar to ration, and pants to let out, and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio, and air raids in the skies, and boys to discipline, and meatballs to simmer, and all the lovely minutes and hours of Mrs. Michelson of Patchin Place.

  AND WHAT TO tell you, Greta, in my strange cold world, in its strange cold war? To have chosen this, to have traded a beaded, silken world for one of wire and steel; I hope you won’t regret it. You will find things missing. Prussia. Palestine. Persia. Your brother. Your husband. Your unborn child. Alone, perhaps for the first time, a woman alone. I have never met you—and will never meet you!—but I have a sense you’re suited for it. More suited than I ever was. I see you in a long white coat striding up Sixth Avenue, your camera bag under your arm, in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. How strange to sense that my life has always been wrong somehow, like a machine with an ill-made motor, when the solution was so simple: Replace the missing part! Replace the person living it! And see how smoothly it all goes: the coat, the stride, the glasses, up Sixth Avenue and away. I know the heart that churns there; I have felt the wake it leaves. You may awaken some day, months from now, and realize your daughter has been born. The web between us will have dried and blown away, but something will remind you. Will you cry to miss it? Will you mark it somehow?

  How clearly I can see you on that summer day: stepping out of a pollen-dusted rental car. Out the window: a small dirt road, a long stone wall. How strange to see it all again, this time uncovered from the snow that hid it, like furniture in a summer house. The sound of your slamming door is an insult to the quiet all around, the low-tide noise of a million insects. A bird sits on the fence, looking back and forth, back and forth. All for this: someone stepping from the cabin, wiping his hands on his jeans, saying, “You must be the New York woman who called about the property.”

  “Yes, I’m Greta Wells.”

  The bird looks back and forth, back and forth. A handshake—and will the air warp slightly at this fresh impossibility?

  “Leo,” he will say, that same awkward grin, raising a dimple on his wide handsome face. A lifted eyebrow, a chin already blue with a new beard. Back from the dead. You cannot say: You have a little girl. Just nod when he says he could show you around. Out in the woods, you wonder, is there an old treehouse? You cannot say: Hello, love of my life.

  He turns, blue shirt and jeans; you follow. Nothing changes, nothing is lost.

  FOR WE ARE the same woman. How could we not make the same choice? My hand trembled slightly as I stood on the stone hearth, lifted the jar over my head, and then—crack!—it shattered in a bright blue bolt of electricity.

  I felt it in three brains.

  And then it was over. I looked at the broken glass around me. Dorothy, dewitched. Alice, unrabbited. Wendy, never neverlanded.

  I understood nothing, Felix, I thought as I held myself steady against the wall. But it was a great show.

  STANDING IN THAT room, the room in which I first awakened. The passage back to my world in shards upon the floor. Pale lilac wallpaper, ball and thistle. Gold-framed painting, sooted gaslight back plates, long green heavy drapes pulled nearly closed, and the great oval looking glass before me. I sat back on the bed and looked at that reflected woman, who not long before was a stranger. Long waves of red hair, flushed narrow face, a yellow nightgown over a pregnant belly.
The woman I dreamed of becoming?

  I heard a sound in the distance.

  I turned and almost saw it, on some distant sunset-gold roof: a hammer pounding a wooden stake, not unknown at that hour, but how strange the effect on me. The hammer, and after it the faint sound of another, but this one not from my world. And after that: another. The worlds were echoing, one last time. A workman’s hammer, a wooden bowl, a shutting door—whatever they were, each beat in sequence from its time, almost the way the lost memory of a sound will ring out, unprovoked, from the past when the mind hears its twin in the present. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. I sat and listened to them pounding through my body. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. The universe threaded itself together at that moment. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. And we all sat and listened, sat in that exact position, with that exact sound. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. One last time, the drum was sounding, the drum that no one else could hear. Then it occurred to me: It was no drum. It was my three hearts beating.

  And I knew, as the sound faded away and the whip of a carriage outside took its place, the noise of children on the sidewalk, that it would be the last I would ever feel them. The other Gretas. I was once again on my own.

  I lay back on the bed and watched the strip of light cast through the drapes onto the floor. Tomorrow there would be a house to run, a maid to order, a husbandless life to lead, a brother to quarrel with and bully. Tomorrow there would be Ruth’s phonograph playing too loudly downstairs. A dress to mend. A job to find. A daughter growing to meet the world I made for her.

  But for now there was this: that gold spear of sunlight, glowing with the last of the day. The burnt electric smell of spent enchantments. Ruth’s glass where she left it on the vanity, a little champagne sparkling at the bottom, and Felix’s gloves, which he must already be missing.