The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (18 page)

S
LOWLY 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 selves. 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
D
R
. 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.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, DESPITE THE COLD
, R
UTH AND
I
MADE
our way to Washington Square, where some horses were out for exercise, shining like leather, and everything was draped in Christmas pine boughs that reminded one that this once had been the countryside of New Amsterdam. A band in uniforms was setting itself up far away, perhaps the Salvation Army, and a woman in a bright green shawl stood watching them, but all I could make out was an enormous drum strapped to a small young man.

I wore a hooded velvet cloak, and Ruth marched along beside me in her black Turkish lambswool coat and hat, playing with the tassels on the belt. “Do you think we should change our names? Anything German is going to leave a bad taste for a little while.”

“Why won’t Felix see me? I try to call and there’s no answer.”

“Maybe he needs some peace and quiet,” she said. “Not that ‘Wells’ sounds German. But I’m thinking maybe I’ll get rid of ‘Ruth.’ Would you mind calling me Aunt Lily?”

I saw a newspaper, taped to a wall. My eye was drawn to the obituaries; the flu epidemic was worsening.
GOODWIN, HARRY, 33
, suddenly, Wednesday night.
KINGSTON, BYRON, 26
, suddenly, at his home. I could not bear to read more; it could have been any morning of dread from 1985. Drum, drum, drum.

“I’m just trying to help him. He got arrested again. In nineteen forty-one.”

She seemed concerned. “Felix? What for?”

I didn’t know quite how to put it. So I simply said, “There’s another war, Ruth.”

She stared at me and that crease appeared between her brows. “Another war,” she repeated. Then she blinked and I saw her mind shaking it off. She did not like to think of terrible things she could not control. “Remember to call me Lily,” she said. “I was thinking maybe you could be Marguerite. And Felix could be George.”

“Has Leo returned?”

“She won’t answer his letters,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with her. She’s so sad. I really wish you were here more often, you’d handle it better.”

“But what about when Nathan comes back?” She shrugged. I wanted to tell her how eager I was to see this third Nathan. Somehow, I imagined a version of my man hardened, perfected by war. But it seemed the wrong time to mention such a thing, with my other self so lonely for her lover.

We neared the arch. Here was something only Ruth and I knew. That there was a door in the marble. That a boy might take me inside. That anything, even a cold city, might have a hidden heart.
I’m sorry about Leo
, I wanted to tell the 1918 Greta, as I looked up at the arch.
I’m sorry I started it, just to have it hurt you. But perhaps there is still a way
. Perhaps it was another of love’s false endings; she could reach her hand out and he would come, just like before. Maybe take one of those ads in the paper, in the personals, that I had read: “HOL. Why were you not over Sunday? ’Twas a lonesome day! PEARL.” After all, the heart can hear only one sound . . .

I changed the topic again: “I keep trying to confront Felix, but he won’t listen.” I heard a little sigh from Ruth and turned to face her. “You know about him, don’t you?”

Our eyes met for a tough moment, and I was treated to that intelligent gaze I recalled from being a child, when I would ask her to take me to the theater and she would examine me, carefully, presumably to gauge if I was ready. “He has a hard fate, dear. I don’t know how you can help a man like him.”

“Ruth, I knew him so well.”

“It’s Aunt Lily.”

“He wasn’t like this, he didn’t try to hide it and marry a woman.”

She retied the tassels at her belt. “Some of these men,” she said, “they can live as they like down here. Downtown. If they have money, and courage. They can go to balls in Harlem and find little hidden saloons and things. You’ve met them at my parties, you know I take care of them. I protect them. They’re brave people. But your brother won’t settle for what those men have. He wants . . .”

“He wants a lover. He had one, in my time. His name was Alan.”

“Alan.”

So I had said it, and she had said it, and we understood each other at last. The drum came from the park in solemn ceremony. “You could follow him one night,” she said plainly. “Then, when you talk with him, he won’t be able to deny it. If that’s really what you want.”