The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “Mr. Tandy must have been upset,” I heard her say. “I know how important your brother is to him.”

  I turned to study her.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  I suppose she was a woman who saw through absolutely everything, and bore the burden of it. How frustrating it must have been, to watch the rest of us blind to it all, or pretending to be blind, when it was all so obvious if one just looked directly at each person, and listened precisely to what they said, and watched what they did, and cared enough to imagine their lives. The rest of us, throwing up our hands in defeat at ever understanding another person. When there she stood, Mrs. Green, aware of it all. And cursed to say nothing, do nothing, but simply watch the farce unfold.

  “I think Mr. Tandy is one person you can count on,” she said carefully.

  “Mrs. Green,” I said, “I believe I can also count on you.”

  I watched as, without any expression, merely her right hand holding her cigarette and her left venturing to her apron to return the pack, she listened to my words and said merely: “Thank you, ma’am.”

  WITH ALL THE worries on my mind, having my brother in jail was the worst. So it was a great relief when Alan called and said he had found where they were holding Felix: of all surprising places, Ellis Island. He had pulled some strings so that I could go visit him—that afternoon, if I wanted to. I dressed as soberly as possible, in a belted collarless jacket and shirtwaist; it seemed the proper outfit for a government prison. Alan, broad and silver haired, smiled when he saw me in the doorway. “All-American girl,” he murmured. “Good, very good.” He himself wore a suit with a flag pin on the lapel and an armband showing a golden Statue of Liberty on a field of blue. I asked, and he said it was his division in the last war, the Seventy-Seventh, from Manhattan. I do not know why this had never occurred to me: that of course the veterans of the last war would so closely overlap the next. He took my arm.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  It was a taxi, then a ferry past the Statue of Liberty itself, green and tarnished and amazing as always, then a long process of identification at Ellis Island. We waited in the beautiful main hall until I was shown into a small anteroom with a table and Felix seated in a chair, a wry grin on his face. Dressed in a gray uniform, he looked shockingly thin. All at once, the joy of seeing him again pushed me into the room to embrace him.

  “How’s Ingrid?” he asked, first thing. “And Tomas?” His son.

  “They’re at her father’s in D.C. Alan sent a telegram that we were coming to visit you.” I said this all in a hurry, and then added, “They’re fine.”

  “Where is Alan?” he asked, looking around, though there was no one in the room but us and a red-haired guard, smoking a cigarette and staring at my legs.

  “He had to stay outside, only relatives can visit,” I said. The guard caught my eye and I glared, which only made him smile. “How are you? How has it been? Oh my God, I’m so glad to see you, I thought you’d been shipped to Wyoming.”

  Felix waved his hand. “It’s fine, I’m fine. It’s boring as hell, bubs.” Something in his eyes said it was more than boredom, though God knows boredom is enough for men like him.

  “We’re going to get you out of here,” I said, taking his hand. “Well, not me, I’m powerless. Alan is going to get you out.”

  “We’ll see. They haven’t even told me why they’re holding me.”

  “It’s a panic. It’s to look like they’re taking action. Alan says they are starting to send some men home on probation, the ones who aren’t really risks. We have to persuade them that’s you.”

  “I’ve been on very good behavior.”

  I said that would be unusual, and he laughed at last. He was not beaten down, not yet. It was not like him to be easily broken.

  The guard said it was time and opened the door. I stood reluctantly. “Tell Ingrid I love her,” Felix said, squeezing my hand, and we stood. “And tell Alan . . . ,” he began, and met my eyes very calmly. “Tell him thank you.”

  “Hold tight. We love you.” I made my way to the door, to the grinning guard.

  “I miss you, bubs.”

  The guard took my arm, but I shook it off. I turned around and said, “Felix, I miss you every single day.”

  “HE ISN’T ANY harm to anyone,” I found myself fuming back home with Nathan. “He isn’t a member of . . . the Bund or anything.”

  Nathan nodded. We sat a chair apart, the piecrust side table between us, enough to hold two thick, sweating glasses. I wore a plain wool dress and rubbed my feet in that gesture, somewhat lost, of women done with a day in heels. Nathan wore an old gray sweater, patched in suede at the elbows, rewoven by Mrs. Green’s remarkable hand, leaving the faint bird prints of lost stitches across the front, and he produced a pipe to smoke. I could see he was forcing his mind and body to relax. Was he thinking of the war? Or was he thinking of the other woman? We did not talk of it. We talked of Felix.

  “He’s a writer,” he said. “They always worry about writers.”

  I found a handkerchief and blew my nose. “He’s a journalist. He’s an American journalist for an American paper.”

  “He’s an easy target,” he said, then added, “for all kinds of reasons.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He should have been more discreet.”

  I sat in shock at what Nathan had said, and he seemed to reel himself inward from it, as well, turning to his whiskey and his pipe and not meeting my eye. I heard him mumbling about the state of America now that we were at war, and how our artistic friends had to be cautious; I heard him carefully raking his way back over the tracks he had made. Somehow I assumed, in that age, that what my brother was—it was unthinkable. Never entering the minds of ordinary people. But it was not unthinkable; it was merely unmentionable. A faggot in the family; everybody has one. Seen coming out of notorious bars, in the company of notorious men; it was not such a big town after all. Who knows how long my observant doctor husband had known this, and kept it from me? Who knows how many visits and dinners we’d had with Felix where he studied and categorized my brother like a patient with a disease? Sighing inwardly at the family secrets, as we always do with other families, pitying them for what they will not see about themselves? Smiling to himself? I wanted very much to let him know I understood. That if we were to snigger at my brother, perhaps we could open fire on every man who acted the part of a married man but hid his real heart elsewhere. If so, Nathan should be prepared for the first shot.

  “Nathan . . . ,” I began.

  And yet to open up the topic would be to undo all the stitches we had made to our marriage. Sex would be out in the open, and love, and heartbreak, and humiliation and desire and all of it, all the working apparatus of the human heart clicking in its springs and gears before us. I needed to speak, but it was not time for that. It was too late for that. It was time to let things remain as they were.

  “I want to make sure you have everything,” I said.

  This happens at good-byes, when everything must be said, but anything at all would break the spell, would unravel what had been knitting together over the hours. So I watched him, and went through the items in his duffel that, with Mrs. Green’s advice, I had bought him: a bristle clothes brush with a saddle-stitched handle, capeskin gloves, a hurricane pipe that would not go out in wind, a hurricane lighter, pair after pair of warm English socks, a pigskin writing case, and something called a “camp-lite”: a travel light that could be covered by a mirror, for shaving in the dark, or reading in a tent, or flash-code signaling to faraway encampments. It was a foolish set of items, looking back. But it was all our minds could fathom: a Swedish widow and a time traveler who did not know her history.

  “I think I’m set,” he told me, taking one last sip from his glass and setting it down.

  For it was too late. He was leaving in a few days. For me, it was thirteen procedures. So I was leaving as well. He did not know it, but this was good-by
e.

  “We should get some sleep,” he said. “It’s another long day tomorrow, and I have to close things up.”

  “Of course.”

  “Alan will call. We’ll know more tomorrow.”

  “I hope so.”

  He gave me a long look, and I saw something else churning in his mind, about to surface, but then of course the phone rang. He did not pick it up at first. The words were there still, too important to discard. Not with life here measured in minutes. I stood up. It rang again. I heard Fee stirring in his bedroom. Nathan stood there with his hand on the banister, lips pressed together.

  I said, “It could be Alan.”

  He nodded. The phone rang again. “Or a patient. Why not lie down awhile? I’ll be done soon.”

  I went into the bedroom and made myself into the woman I had first awakened to: in a cream nightgown and long, brushed hair. I heard the apartment door open and close; he had gone out again. I lay down on the bed. It was my last night here with him. I knew I would travel the instant my eyes closed; I felt the cold wind blowing through the cracks around that little door. In a few moments it would open; I would be blown through. But I willed myself to stay awake, and it was just over an hour before I heard him enter the house. Familiar sound of a hat and coat on a hook, the footsteps in the hall. But different, somehow. Unsure, unsteady.

  I went into the hallway and saw the light under the bathroom door, and the sound of him stumbling in there. “Darling?” I shouted, and the stumbling stopped. “Darling, is that you? Is everything okay?”

  “Fine!” he yelled. I saw my purse sitting where it always sat on our mirrored console, right below his hat on its hook. It seemed like a portrait of us, right there. The hat, the purse. A moon, a mountain. He said he was tired, and was running a bath, not to worry about him.

  “Want me to come in?”

  He said not to. Click of a lock, rush of sound. Only a husband would not know that the lock had not worked in a long time. I crept closer down the hallway, past the shelves of little glass and ceramic animals, the lambs all in their row. I put my ear against the smooth white paint of our old door, the same in every age. The water was a tiger’s roar, but beneath it anyone, anyone who cared, could have heard him. The desperate, almost inhuman noises of a broken heart.

  We had been here before. In this same house, at this same hour. How clearly I recalled sitting in my chair, reading a book, while white bean soup simmered on the stove. His face when he came in, as if he had witnessed a murder. The beard all gleaming with droplets. The sound of him sobbing like a boy. Violins dervishing around him. And me, in my chair with my book and the big brass lamp casting a hoop of gold across my lap. Wanting to tell him that I was angry and hurt and grateful. How I did not go to him. All of this, all of it had happened before.

  Did I have to suffer everything in threes?

  I waited and listened, my cheek against cold paint. The water rushing, and my husband sobbing, and the absurd little animals on their shelves, shivering from the rush of pipes. One little centaur was moving almost imperceptibly toward its doom. The hallway of this world, which in the last few weeks I had gotten used to; the cut silhouettes of Fee as a baby, and as a boy; the moon over its mountain; the little tin of face cream I had bought (Primrose: “You’re as old as your throat!”); umbrellas peering alertly from their stand; the views of kitchen and bedroom and living room; all the alien tableaux of my life. Who was I saving it for? How did I ever dream it would be perfected? Here was a man in pain, behind this badly locked door. In another world, I had sat in the other room and read my book until he’d done his piece, until he had come out and had his whiskey and his soup, and we never spoke about the great thing that had occurred. In another world, he had left me anyway. I stood in the hallway, ready to leave. The water would not stop. The sobbing would not stop. The centaur moved its last half inch and toppled to the floor, breaking back to horse and man.

  This time, I went to him.

  DECEMBER 12, 1985

  SLOWLY I AWOKE, WITH A LONG SIGH, AND LOOKED AROUND the bare white modern walls of my 1985 house. Felix, I thought. Felix is in trouble. And Nathan . . . Now it was my real life that seemed strange: no portrait of my mother-in-law, no postered bed, no gleaming chrome wastebasket or vanity strewn with lace and nylons. Just the white-black-red I had known for years. Somehow, even though I had picked out everything myself, it seemed so false. The stark photos, the red-lacquered lamp, the one black brushstroke on the eastern wall. Like a woman pretending to be an artist. Like a woman pretending she had no heart.

  “I SEE YOU’RE back!”

  When she opened her apartment door, Ruth burst into that old wicked smile. She wore large turquoise beads and a striped caftan. Apparently she had set Felix’s bird free, for it stood on an ornamental pig, cocking its little head. She hugged me and began telling me how sad the other Gretas had been this time around.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “Both of them. The one from nineteen eighteen wouldn’t talk about it.” She took my hand. “But the one from nineteen forty-one. She missed her son. She missed Nathan.”

  I pictured myself, the midcentury mother, sitting in this room with a cup of Ruth’s tepid tea, spending even one day in a world shorn of everything that made her life: her husband, her child. What a nightmare it must be for her.

  She smiled and let go of my hand, heading back to the couch, where she was folding laundry. “She missed him so much that she met up with him.”

  I shook my head. “I should have expected that. When?”

  “Last week,” she said, straightening the cushions. “They went out to lunch. I think it was at the Gate, they make such wonderful cocktails—”

  “Oh God. With Nathan? Oh God.”

  A crease of irritation. “Of course with Nathan,” she said. “She thinks of him as her husband. She’s not a little peeved that you managed to lose him here, I’ll have you know!”

  I took a deep breath. “She’s trying to change things. But she doesn’t know . . .”

  “It’s nice to have you back, dear, at least for a while,” she said, beginning to pick up stray clothes. “I feel like I’m dealing with multiple personalities. I had a friend, Lisa, who at very inconvenient times would be overtaken by the warrior spirit Gida—”

  “I’m getting too attached. I’m doing more than . . . inhabiting these women. I’m becoming them.”

  “Usually a vegetarian, she would suddenly demand red meat,” Ruth finished, folding a pillowcase in quarters.

  “I’m becoming Nathan’s wife. Fee’s mother. I’m becoming Leo’s lover. Well, I was.”

  Ruth’s expression filled with worry. “What do you mean?”

  I smiled sadly for a moment. “It ended.”

  She frowned. “What happened?”

  “She couldn’t hurt him that way. And she didn’t want to leave Nathan. What is Felix’s bird doing out? You know he doesn’t like that.”

  “Our Felix is dead, darling.”

  “He’s in jail.”

  “Not again?”

  I told her it was a different Felix, and that I was terrified for him. And I told her about Nathan, his mistress, and how he had left her, all over again. How this time, something was different. I was different . . .

  She interrupted me: “Greta, I want you to tell me honestly.” She clutched her turquoise beads in one hand, watching my expression intently. “Why haven’t you, any of you, mentioned what I’m like in those other worlds?”

  “I told you, you’re just the same, you’re the only one who doesn’t change. Turbans and parties and—”

  “Not that one. In nineteen forty-one.”

  The cat began to knead my leg and, for a moment, I let her, until her claws got through and pricked me. I looked back at Ruth and she was smiling.

  “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

  I hope you never have to tell someone that they are dead. That there are not endless possible worlds for them, endless possible selv
es. That, in at least one of them, they do not exist at all.

  “They sent me to Dr. Cerletti,” I began, looking at my lap, “because I had a nervous breakdown after the accident. We were both in the car, sideswiped by a taxi. I broke my arm, and you—”

  “Were smashed to Nirvana.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Ruth. It was losing you that sent me traveling.” From somewhere on the street, a police siren came into earshot.

  “I knew it,” she told me. “From how all of you acted, especially this last one. Clutching me all the time, clinging to me like a child. I suppose that’s how you act with Felix.”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you. I guess I thought I wouldn’t have to.”

  She stood and began to sort the underthings again. “It’s strange, it’s like an afterlife, living here. Somewhere, I’m dead. Probably in so many worlds, most worlds. We’re so breakable, and we never guess it.”

  “I’m sorry.” So strange to tell the dead that you are sorry for their loss, when they are also the bereaved.

  Her head jerked around. “It’s so unlikely to be alive, isn’t it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise right moment, you’d think it would never happen.” She stood looking at a painting with a hand to her cheek, then watched the cat making its way across the top of the sofa toward the bird. “Life, it’s so unlikely,” she said, then turned to me again. “It’s so much better than we think it is, isn’t it?”

  I VISITED DR. Cerletti’s machine—“things are progressing, just six weeks left”—and slept that night, knowing I would not see Nathan leaving for war. I would go, as always, to 1918 until next week’s procedure. Far away in 1941, Nathan would be shipping out, and I would not get a chance to say good-bye. The 1918 Greta would be there. Standing in the door and waving to a soldier husband, as she had done before.

  Nathan. The night before, I had been in 1941 and heard my husband come home, sobbing. I thought of how I went to him. How I worked the tricky lock open and found Nathan naked on the floor, weeping beside the bathtub’s waterfall, showing me just his military haircut. His face when he looked up—how strange that we can never predict what that face will look like, even of the one we love! Ill shaped, mutilated by sorrow: a different man. How his hands went out—no, please, no—as I knelt down and held him, kissing his forehead, and how his body relaxed as it accepted me, too weak to protest, too naked. “I know,” I kept saying. Nathan murmured, no, no, but that was all he could say beneath his tears. “I know, I know, I know,” I whispered over and over, smoothing his hair with my hand, because I did know, because I, too, had kept a lover, and another me had left him. Did it matter if our reasons were different? “You loved her.” How he did not deny it. How somehow our betrayals felt equal now, vanquished by each other, so that here we were, holding each other beside the bathwater’s thunder.