The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (28 page)

“Well, what’s this?” he said, looking amused.

“I just want to see.” I pulled him along with me toward the arch, now with its statues complete. There was a couple beneath it saying a prolonged good-bye. I walked to the side and saw, there, just what I had hoped for. The same white stone. “I wonder . . . ,” I said, and picked it up. And it was there.

I turned to him, laughing, the key in my hand.

Only in brief flashes does it come to us that we may never see someone again. It is an absurd thought; a car crash or heart attack or rare disease may take anyone, and the last may be that matinee you sneaked to together, or the tipsy lunch, or the silly phone argument that one more meeting would dilute; equally, the melodramatic moments in hospitals and airports and apartment doorways are no assurance of an ending. They are just the preparation for one. And it is doubly true with lovers, for with them it is not just the person who might vanish, but the beating heart itself. With people, the end is rarely in our minds; it takes a man with a scythe to remind us. With lovers, though, the end is always there. It is a death as certain as the real death, and those of us in love, as at the bedside, begin to prepare ourselves. We might say it isn’t working, or I can’t give you what you need, and yet a day later there he is in your arms, and who can help it? There is the good-bye, and the good-bye, and the good-bye, and which will stick? Who can ever say, this is the last? Only one is true, but all of them feel true, and the tears we shed are equal every time.

“Nobody comes up here,” I said to Nathan as he looked at me in amazement. “Nobody even knows it exists.”

O
NLY TWO PROCEDURES LEFT AFTER THIS ONE
.
H
OW DOES
it end?
I lay on Cerletti’s table, letting the electricity trickle out of me. Tomorrow I would be in 1919, then a week later in 1942, and there would be one last bolt of lightning before I awakened, at last, back home. We would all be home, for good. What would I do in mine, with Felix gone again? How would I talk to Nathan, now that another Greta had put us in touch? Was anything better than it had been before? Well, each world was changed. Each one worth loving. But did we still each love our own?

I smiled at my doctor. Tomorrow, Felix’s wedding. But today: Felix’s memorial.

Ruth had warned me no one would come dressed as Felix, but what an assortment came to my house that day! Felix in the awful plaid shirt Alan threw out long ago. Felix in a swimsuit and tank top and towel. Felix in a Cub Scout uniform. As a cowboy, on our last Halloween. And in the white linen shirt he wore at their “wedding.” And with his arm in a cast that time he fell off his bicycle. There they all were, dressed as Felix, drinking from my plastic cups and looking at the spread of photographs that covered my dining room table.

Even Ruth had been unable to resist, in her way; she wore a long white beaded gown. She explained with irritation: “Oh, I’m sure he wore this at some point. He was always borrowing my clothes.” Then she turned to a black man in tennis whites and asked if the plural was Felixes or Felices? “You know,” she said, “like dominatrices?”

In the mail, among the condolence cards, a simple letter. Why did I recognize the handwriting?

Ms. Wells
,

Thank you for your interest in my father’s property in Massachusetts. Feel free to give a call and come up anytime, I’m always around. There is a regular train. I look forward to meeting you
.

Leo Barrow

Here, again, in honor of my brother: the dead brought back to life. I stared at the signature and thought,
Greta, you devil, what the hell are you up to?

I found a knife and dinged it against an empty glass, and watched the whole crowd turn to look at me. In blond wigs or baseball caps or towels done up as turbans. “Thank you all for coming!” I shouted as the talking faded away. “Thank you! It was a year ago today we lost my brother. He was a ridiculous person. He was the kind of person who insisted on a costume party, no matter the occasion!” A laugh from the crowd. “Thank you for indulging him. He loved life, he hated to leave it. He would tell you, ‘I understood nothing . . .’”

L
ATER, AS THE
wine warmed the crowd, people changed out of costumes and became more comfortable. It was the closest approach of Halley’s comet since its last time around, almost eighty years before, at the time of Mark Twain’s death, and even New Yorkers were curious. We moved some chairs, and brought up blankets from Ruth’s flat, but it was bitterly cold up there and the blankets went only so far. People found their coats and hats and scarves. Despite the cold, or perhaps because of it, there was a jolly camp-out air to things and one man had found my barbecue and a broken wooden crate and created a bonfire in miniature. I was not feeling well; I assumed it was the wine.

And then I heard Ruth whisper in my ear: “Darling, he’s come.” I turned around to the skyline: indigo New York against lavender New Jersey. And a silhouetted man cautiously approaching.

“Hello, Nathan.”

“A
ND SO
,”
HE
said, after we had embraced and stood a foot apart again with our glasses of punch.

“And so,” I said, smiling.

Taller, somehow, than he had been lying in his sickbed reaching for me. Taller, brighter, stronger; he had not suffered as that other Nathan had suffered; he had not heard stories of death in submarines, or trenches. My Nathan, calm and kind and tough as ever, bearded and bespectacled in a brown jacket and plaid shirt, a scarf printed with frogs that his new wife must have given him. As a costume, he held a little birdcage with a stuffed canary. Felix and his bird. He had the wary expression of a man who has been called to a meeting whose purpose he has not yet been informed of, and I thought that perhaps we might start instantly on the conversation that was loading itself up within our heads, cocking, aiming—when he stood sideways and put the safety back on, so to speak, by remarking very blandly: “I have missed your aunt.” I set myself sideways as well, and the old foolish lover in me knew him well enough to know he meant what he said, and yet could not help imagining that he was really saying he missed me.

“Don’t tell me you missed Ruth!”

He shrugged. “Yes, I even missed your crazy aunt Ruth.”

“She doesn’t miss you,” I said, trying to tease this out. “She says you always broke things.”

“I don’t have anyone in my life as interesting as Ruth anymore,” he said. “I remember that summer she came to Alan’s house and gave us each a bottle of Incest Repellent.” Grinning, hands in his pockets, shaking his head. “
Incest
Repellent!”

I laughed. “You got used to her.”

So this was why. Here, a moment like this. Laughing and comfortable with each other. The sensation like wandering lost in streets and alleys late at night, down passages that seem farther and farther from your destination, until at last you turn a corner and see the green wooden fence you know so well, and think, with great relief:
I’m home!

There he was before me: the real Nathan. Of course no more real than any of the others, no more original, but this transport back to a world I knew could not persuade me of it. Because this was the man I loved. That old gesture, checking his breast pocket for his wallet. This was the man I loved, not any other. Yet even still, something had changed forever. Not that I didn’t love him as always, and still felt the reverberations of our embrace as a gong shivers for an hour after it has made its bellow. But that, after everything I’d seen and done, I knew. That even with the spider of old love remaking its broken web between us, here on the roof. Even with his eyes looking into mine. Even so—that I would never have him back.

“Well, I will be careful with her punch this time. You look well, Greta,” he said. It was the thing a lover says to the woman he left long ago. Meaning: You look like you are no longer in pain. We moved an inch apart.

“I’ve had a wild ride this year,” I told him, laughing.

He smiled, again warily, unsure if the joke was on him. I touched his chest: “No, no,” I said. “No, no, Nathan, not because of you. It’s something . . . I can’t explain it to you. I’ve seen myself from all sides.”

“That’s a rare thing to do.”

“I’ve seen you, too. I understand things, I think.” What I wanted to say was:
I understand that it wasn’t that you didn’t want to be with me anymore, but you didn’t want to be yourself anymore, the one you were with me
. But all I said was: “You look well, too.”

And it seemed as if that might be all. We smiled our kind smiles, and he touched my cheek, I’m sure because it felt safe to do so. Now that the danger had passed. There were shouts at the edge of the roof—Aunt Ruth with her hand to the telescope as if to a lorgnette—and we looked. Pinpoint stars and the little brushstroke of the comet hanging there. Come around again.

And suddenly I turned to him and said: “Nathan, there’s nothing to lose, so I’m going to say everything. I never thought before how unlikely it was. With all the possible ways it could have gone. To have what we did, at least. Ten years.”

He had nothing to say to that, perhaps not wanting to stop me, perhaps also not wanting to encourage me. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder and then, impulsively, I kissed him lightly on the mouth. I felt his tense worried lips, dry from the cold, and smelled, extraordinarily, the pipe-smoke scent I knew from another world, and the soapy odor from another, and beneath it all the unchanging Nathan I had held in every world but this one. I pulled back and squeezed his shoulder.

I smiled and said, “Who else has been so lucky for so long?”

Those separate men, the different men he was, in different worlds. Perhaps it’s because I knew Nathan so well, and knew his moods; of him thinking beside me: so quiet! Of him silencing the alarm so I could sleep another hour: so kind! Of him reading some infuriating news in the paper: so angry! I could roll them all into one ball and put it in my brain as one person. Even before my travels, I had met and lived with these different men: the quiet one, the kind one, the angry one. Just as Nathan had lived with those same men himself. For others are not the only ones forced to face our other selves; above all, we must face them. On my last visit to 1942, Felix showed me a photograph of the two of us. It had been taken the week before. And while I knew it was not me, I could not tell which one it was. Perhaps one day they will invent a camera to capture the fleeting self—not the soul, but the self—and we can truly see which one we were, on any particular day, and mark the shifting lives we lead that we pretend belong to one person alone. Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as the angels?