The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (13 page)

“What happens?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

A little flash of fury. “Your husband comes back, what happens? You said once you would always be able to see me. How can that be? Did you mean when he’s gone to work? Or on a trip? Is that what you meant?”

“I . . . I suppose so, I don’t know what I meant.”

“Your sweetheart,” he said, not bitterly but resigned. “What is wrong with your marriage that you’re here with me?”

Because of Nathan, what he did. She is so lonely
. “It’s an emotional night. I can’t tell you now.”

Leo was not listening: “You don’t really love him, you can’t. The other night, I thought we had time, and maybe you might leave him. So I thought, The hell with it. I’ll just love her.”

“That’s beautiful, Leo.”

His head jerked up. “But you’re not going to leave him.”

From somewhere, a group of men began to sing some old war song.

“No, Leo,” I said. “I’m not going to leave him.”

Who knows what is going on in the minds of others? We stood under the arch, a foot away from each other but as distant as if a national border lay between us. And he did not move, just stared at me, his eyes taking in each aspect of me, one by one, both hands and arms, every part of my face and hair. There was no part of me he was not seeing, now. I smiled, but he did not smile. Leo just stood there and took me in. Who knows what battle raged inside him? It went on, in outward silence, for only a few seconds, but I’m sure it was a long struggle as he inventoried the woman he loved, the bits of her he could not live without, the words she said, the promises and lies and truths, the hope she gave him before one side won at last. He blinked three times and nodded.

“Then good-bye,” he said and walked away into the trees.

I
T HADN
’
T SEEMED
more than misty, but by the time I got home I found I was quite damp, and my black coat and absurd hat veil had become embellished with little diamonds. All around me the crowds were starting to gather, just as on Halloween, but this time in the ordinary costumes of their daily lives. Pretty girls were everywhere, perhaps under the mistaken impression that the soldiers would magically, instantly, be home, and old men had put on their military garb to stand and smoke pipes together on corners. I wanted to shout, “Don’t forget this! It’s going to happen again! You’re going to let it happen!” because of course they would, these young jubilant people; someday they would be the old soldiers on the corner, smoking pipes, approving of a new war. It would seem good, and just. Surely it would to me, as well. I couldn’t stop it, but I wanted them to remember this, the horror they were in for. Not to cheer it.

And yet how could they not? How could I not be drawn into it myself? The girls on the streets, their dresses dampened but not their spirits, standing with bottles of whiskey to hand out to passersby who swigged as if there was no flu epidemic, the ragged young boys running everywhere, unsure of what it was all about, waiting on corners with their hats out for a penny—our future soldiers—and drunks of all varieties, top hat and beat-up derby, singing songs I did not know, and leaning on every railing and lamppost in a toppling world, and then, fireworks! They spiraled sparks and made more noise than light, hissing glimmering above the village, and what vicious Cassandra could shout there was another coming? Who would even dare? Perhaps they knew. There is always another coming, as there was even now, buried in the dirt by my foot, the seed of the oak that would crack the sidewalk in two. I’m sure in my own age, when the cure came, some wicked prophetess would stand there as we cheered in the streets to shout, “You fools! Another’s coming! You won’t remember!” But she would be wrong. Humans remember all too well; we are made this way, and suffer for it. It is the art of living, in drink and dance and love, to forget. So let them, Greta. It was their war, not yours.

It had shocked me, what Leo did. To disappear so quickly into the black, dripping trees. But surely I had really come in at the end of a conversation, a long one he had been having with me all night—without my being there—in which he went over everything I’d said as if it were brand-new, perhaps gave speeches in his cramped room, ones where he persuaded me to leave Nathan, ones where he set up the rules to our affair once my husband returned, ones pleading and angry and forgiving. I’m sure Leo tried every delivery of those words. He was an actor, after all. And so, when he saw me, he had already gone through every possible conversation. I’m sure he didn’t know it himself, but he was only waiting for one answer. And I gave it. And he saw there was no need for pleas or speeches—he had already given them, in every intonation—for they would change nothing. So Leo said good-bye, the only thing he had not practiced saying.

Well, that is that, I thought. For the best, I suppose. And yet . . . I felt a pang of loneliness. Each Greta had found someone to comfort her. What would I go back to? The same solitude? The same months without touching another soul? The only promise I had, for these few travels, was what they had made for me: a husband to hold me at night. A lover to steal a kiss on an arch. That he was not really my husband, or really my lover who left me—did that matter in the end?

I heard the party raging on at Ruth’s, but didn’t have the heart for it. I thought perhaps I’d lie down. It was wearying, getting everything wrong.

I opened the front door, and there was Millie, her face blurred with tears over some private worry—a boy, of course—but I wasn’t up to finding out (probably the mistress never was) so asked her to make a pot of chamomile tea and I would get ready for bed. “You should take tomorrow off,” I told her. “It’s a holiday all round,” to which she replied thank you, ma’am, it was already her day off but wasn’t it grand indeed? To see the boys all coming home at last? Yes, I said, yes, stripping back down to my all-in-one with its absurd split drawers. The bed was miraculously warm—how had it been done?—and then I felt, at my feet, the hot water bottle Millie must have put there telepathically. Or, perhaps, routinely. It was delicious to have needs met I didn’t even know I had.

The tea was set beside me and, beside it, two bland cookies that lingered in my mouth like sand. I flicked the gaslight and the room was violet except for my bed candle, panting like a pet. Out it went—and yet my thoughts had lit another candle in my brain. Felix was not my Felix here. And there was no Nathan. What comfort was there left?
I am so lonely
, I had told Ruth once. It seemed true in two worlds now. I felt sleep coming, the dead leaves of my thoughts gathering in piles behind my eyes, then—

A loud knocking. I heard someone stumbling down the hall. From the window: the sound of armistice joy erupting everywhere. I grabbed a robe and wandered into the hall.

In the open door to my apartment: Aunt Ruth. Shimmering in jet beads, and on her shoulder, a white parrot. Drunk as anything. Slurred speech and one sleepy eye:

“He’s back. He won’t have anything but you. If I were young, I’d go with him this instant, and that’s what you’re going to do. I won’t have it any other way.” To the girl behind me: “Millie, don’t gossip.” To me: “Let us sport us while we may, am I right? Get dressed, go now. Go now before you get a chance to think.” And she staggered back downstairs, but not before the parrot chuckled twice, eyed me, and said: “Drink up! Drink up!” I heard the party roar outrageously as she reentered.

There, under the streetlight, leaning with a bottle of wine against the brick: smiling Leo. Why smiling?

The heart will hear only one sound. A “no” will pass unnoticed, and a “good-bye” will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future with its beloved, and hears only news about that future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only “yes.”

He raised the bottle in greeting, and shrugged his shoulders as if to say: What did you expect? The prisoner in the jail yelled out in favor of peace, and from one window came a snow of torn paper, which blew down our way and settled in his hair. Looking up at me, someone.
You should have waited. You would have had her, the one who loves you. Tonight: She has Nathan, and you have me
. I smiled at him from the doorway, remembering that in my world I was a single woman, and lonely.
So be it
.

N
OT HIS PLACE
, but a friend’s place—a fellow named Rufus who we found at a bar—that would be empty for the night. I found I was quite drunk, but had more champagne when Rufus offered it. Then to the apartment. Up five flights of stairs, a confusing double lock that needed some pool-shark English and a nudge of the hip, and we were in, the light was on, and I began to laugh. How could I not? There, strung from every doorway and knob and cabinet pull was a web work of clothesline and, on it, surely every item Rufus owned hanging damp and drying. Long, absurd socks and sleeveless underthings, all the strange hidden men’s clothing of the early twentieth century, there to amuse me. Collars were pinned in a line, free of their shirts, and cuffs as well. Long woolen garments drooped like hanged men. “Oh Lord,” Leo sighed, and ducked under a clothesline, his head popping up behind it with a grimace. He offered me his hand and I ducked under as well, and we made our way to the middle of the room. “We have some time left. Let’s go away. My father has a farm up north, I’ll take you there, we could just cook and sleep and walk in the snow.” He offered me a last swig of champagne and I took it. This room was dark, but I looked around and saw how the streetlights shone through the handkerchiefs, illuminating them like Chinese lanterns. Hanging there, glowing all around us. Strange how briefly life is worth the pain. I kissed him there with the cloth lamps on their lines, not a room at all but a pleasure park at night, hung with moons. “Oh,” he said, as my hands moved naturally, a lady of the twentieth century. “Oh, wait, oh no.” He struggled in my arms, then relented. I suppose it should have occurred to me that this was 1918, and he was still a virgin.

I
AWOKE, A FEW DAYS LATER, WITH A SLEEPING NATHAN BESIDE
me, his head as still and handsome as if carved from stone, and I lay there and watched him for a long, long time. Sleeping so peacefully beside me: a husband, a father. His face bristling with the day’s new beard, his nose imprinted from the glasses that lay on the nightstand, his lips parted slightly in a dream. Our heart is so elastic that it can contract to a pinpoint, allowing our hours of work and tedium, but expand almost infinitely—filling us like a balloon—for the single hour we wait for a lover to awaken.

He did at last: I saw, in the dim light, his eyes shining as they gazed on me, his lips in a smile. “Do you feel . . . ?” he asked. I said I felt wonderful. “Could we . . . ?” he asked, pushing my gown up with one hand and spreading his fingers. I kissed him and smiled and said yes.

And afterward, when he rose to go to the bathroom and I lay back in bed, prickling with pleasure, I thought of how I would awaken the next day in my world, six procedures complete. What waited for me there? No brother, no lover, no husband. I had not been able to fix that world, but I had been brought here, perhaps, to fix this one. Hearing the familiar sound of Nathan yawning and sighing from the other room. There was so little time. Already the Japanese were encoding messages, making plans, and I would lose him, too . . .