The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (15 page)

“Stop this, Greta. You’re not talking like yourself.”

“I know you, Felix,” I said as he put down his napkin. “I know you.” But then a group of German singers were upon us, waving their steins and swaying in unison, the waitress laughing. In their worn brown suits and battered hats, red faced and weary, the immigrants from our father’s homeland surrounded us with their welcoming song of summer, and sun, and my brother and I could only sit and smile and listen.

Ohhh
,
willkommen, willkommen, willkommen
Sonnenschein . . .

A
ND, IN
1985, a lunch with Alan.

We talked of autumn, and Felix, of course. We talked of my procedures, his drug schedule and taking leave from his job. How funny to see him, after another lunch where he was all business in his pressed blue suit. Here: cowboy shirt again, all in grays this time, and worn blue jeans, and veins that pulsed in his temples below the short cap of silver hair. A cane beside his chair. How handsome he must have been when he was young.

We talked of parties long ago, and laughed about them. We talked about how he relented with his new romance, and saw him oftener than he should. He was drinking wine again. But what I remember most about that time in 1985, before I took my ride again, what I recall about that lunch with Alan was a story he told me about Felix.

They had gone to an East Village theater, run-down and small, not so different from the one where Leo acted out
The House of Mirth
. “I don’t remember the show, exactly. Something about war, with puppets, that god-awful kind of thing. But there was a book at the exit where you could write your comments. Felix liked to read that kind of thing.” He was smiling out the window to where a young man in a hat walked by, something familiar about him. “And he called me over to show me what a Frenchwoman had written—I assume she was French, her name seemed French—it was so funny.” He chuckled to himself, pushing around his salad. “I understood nothing!” he said, with a French accent. “But it was a great show!”

I laughed and looked again, but the young man was gone.

“I should have put that on his headstone. That sums him up, don’t you think?” I nodded and grinned to share another memory with him. He pushed his shoulders back and sat up straight: “I understood nothing, but it was a great show!”

A
ND SO, AFTER
three weeks, a message left that afternoon:

Hello, Greta. It’s Nathan
.

What a curious mystery it was, standing in my hall with my coat and hat and scarf, too warm in my warm apartment, staring at my answering machine and hearing Nathan’s voice. A reminder, first, of the sad state of my life here. And, second, of the presence of these other Gretas. For that other woman had taken advantage of her time in this world to call him.

I had taken pains to try to fix my other lives. I wondered, what were her plans for mine?

I’ll give you a call when I get back. It’s nice to be back in touch. Bye now
.

Standing there in my old hallway, hearing the voice of my old lover, who in two other worlds had become my husband. The other Greta took my photographs and answered the phone and met friends for drinks, much as I had in my deepest depression, when I did these daily tasks as if they were assigned by another. Back then, the world was alien because I had sunk beneath it. And now, it felt the same because I knew it could be otherwise.

Eleven procedures finished, only fourteen left for me. November had turned to December and I wondered how long that 1918 Greta could keep away from that electric jar. Wondering when she would decide to lie down again, and fall asleep, and watch the lights behind her eyes join together in a tunnel from her world. When I would see those other people, in that other world, who seemed like friends from a trip I’d taken long ago.

I made myself my dinner and ate it in front of the television. Images of the space shuttle seemed like science fiction to me now. And in my mind were two conflicting thoughts. One was that I wished to continue my travels, continue the adventure the way, it seemed, I was meant to have it. And the other, of course, was that I, too, could put a halt to things. Waking tomorrow with Nathan and telling him I was cured, that I needed no more of Dr. Cerletti. After all, any of us could stop things. Would it be so terrible, to be trapped there? Then he could stay there sleeping beside me forever. In the world where I had never lost him.

But who would want to be in my world? Which other Greta could possibly love this place, find something or someone worth sacrificing their life for?

I went to the answering machine but could not bring myself to press Erase.

A
ND THAT NIGHT,
at last, I traveled to that other world.

R
INGING OF BELLS ON THE STREET, NOT JUST IN MY HEAD;
the sounds of a 1918 world already preparing for Christmas. The room was soft and calm, as if awaiting me, and a crack in the window let in a little cold air that turned the pages of a bedside book, one after another, at the speed a ghost might read them. Bells and salesmen and the scent of chestnuts. Italian voices. The smell of gaslight and coal-fire stoves.

I was back.

In the kitchen, to my surprise, I found my aunt rummaging in the icebox.

“Good morning,” I said. “I’m back. Are you making me breakfast?”

She was in her white kimono and looked like she needed a brandy. “It’s for me,” she said, running a hand through her unkempt hair. “I’m out of milk. So are you it looks like, and I don’t blame the maid I blame the mistress.” She turned back to the icebox.

I put my hands in my gown pockets. Was she, in fact, the same solid Ruth I had known my whole life? Because looking at her, leaning into the icebox, I could see little differences I had not noticed before. For instance: She was noticeably thinner; she could hardly keep a bracelet on her wrist. There was a common illustration in those days of two women in war. Under the picture of a fat, smiling lady with a lorgnette, it read: “Waste Makes Waist.” And under the proud, thinner version of that woman: “War Develops the Spirit.” I had not ever thought of my aunt, with her parties and excesses, as the latter. But I suppose she, too, had felt privation during the war; instead of moderation, like most housewives, it was all feast or famine, and her festivals were followed by weeks of Postum and porridge. Of course she had no milk. And here she was, raiding my icebox. “I’m not good with maids,” I told her. “Make me coffee. I’ve been gone a long time, but I’m back.”

Ruth looked up and examined me, then smiled. “Are you?”

I posed in the doorway like a poster for home defense. “I’m your niece from nineteen eighty-five.”

Those bracelets jangled on her meager wrist as she looked me up and down. “Oh,” she sighed. “I’m so glad it’s you. A lot has happened. It’s ended.”

“The war,” I said. “I know. I was here.” I looked around the kitchen and saw it was in disorder; Millie must have had a day or two off, and my other self had let things go.

“Not the war,” she said, shaking her head.

I walked over to her and knelt down. “Ruth, just tell me.”

She blinked and said, “She ended things with Leo.”

I tried to understand how this could be. When it was the desire to be with Leo that had kept her in this world. “But,” I began, “I thought they went away . . .”

She took my hand and patted it. “It’s good you’re back. My own Greta is inconsolable. Do you really want coffee? All I have downstairs is champagne.”

“W
HAT HAPPENED IN
the cabin?” I asked her when we got to her apartment. She said it was her last bottle of champagne, and I begged her not to open it, to save it for a better occasion, but of course she said it was so like me to think there would be some better occasion, you can’t marry such hopes, they won’t be faithful to you.

“She couldn’t bear it,” Ruth told me, standing before the silver trelliswork of her wallpaper. New flowers sat in the green vase: lilies. “Making Leo promises she couldn’t keep.”

I tried to imagine them in a snowy cabin, Leo sitting on the floor and talking in that low, passionate voice. Myself on the bed, shaking my head. And still it made no sense. Had I gotten it wrong? Had she not really loved him, after all?

“What promises?” I asked.

“He wanted her to leave Nathan, of course,” Ruth said, pulling the champagne out of a cabinet in her bookcase. “And she wouldn’t.”

“I understand that,” I said, looking around me in bafflement. “But it doesn’t sound like her.” I found myself angered by this other version of me, almost as you are angered by some drunken thing you did the night before, and which now seems senseless and stupid. Sitting in that cabin and denying herself what she wanted most.

Ruth pulled back the sleeves of her kimono as she held the bottle. “If it had been you, it might have worked. You were the one who finally took a risk, you’re the one who had her go away with Leo.” She smiled. “That made me so happy, with all this war and death. You made things come alive. And you’re the one, I think, who could have kept him. When Nathan returned.” The bottle went: pop! She looked at me under her newly painted eyebrows. “But she’s not you.”

I stood there silently as she poured the champagne into little glass teacups.

“She’s not you,” she said, sipping from hers. “She truly loves him.”

“Yes,” I said, somehow knowing it within me. “Yes, she does.” The champagne was warm.

“She said it wasn’t fair to him. And she’s afraid of Nathan, what he might do to him,” she said ruefully. It sounded like such an odd fear of such a gentle man. “That’s not what she told Leo, though. Lovers don’t leave if there’s any hope at all. She just said never to come back. It broke her heart to say it.”

“Oh, it’s so sad.”

“How awful to watch lovers part,” Ruth said, “when they don’t have to.” She seemed absorbed in this thought, and we sat for a moment in silence. I pictured Greta leaving Leo at Grand Central Station, where he stood calling her name, walking away and forcing herself not to look back. I could so easily imagine the pain inside her; I had felt it myself with Nathan. Not similar pain, but that exact pain.

“What will happen to him?” I asked.

“He’ll probably marry. That’s what they do, young men. I should know.” She looked out the window and I wondered what memory floated through her mind. “They marry, and in a few years you’ll get a letter asking to see you once again, just for the sake of old memories,” she said, looking me straight in the eye now, “and I advise you not to do it. You don’t want to see the expression on his face. You’ll sit there in the cafe expecting him to arrive with the same flowers and deep eyes, and he will, too, but he’ll come down the street and see you and he won’t be able to hide it. The shock.”

“That his feelings have faded.”

“No,” she said sadly, “that you’ve grown old.”

Aunt Ruth stared into her champagne, which she held with both hands. Against the trellised wallpaper, she seemed like a woman from the East. She seemed to be thinking, and then she asked, looking up with sympathy on her face:

“Do you think you could have loved him?”

I thought of that handsome young man. His touch on the arch, his kiss, that night with the clothes hanging all around us. How he looked in the morning. If my other self turned him away, then I would have to as well. “My heart is with Nathan.”

A furrow in her brow. “I don’t know what your other Nathans are like,” she said, then gestured with one kimono-sleeved hand. “But remember, you haven’t met this one.”