The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (9 page)

“Felix has said so much about you,” I explained, watching Felix and seeing his cheeks redden. “So I feel I know you. You look like a rare-rib-eye man. A man who shaves without a mirror.” A jolt of alarm from Felix; I saw my game had gone too far. Now Alan was looking into his lap.

“Greta is going to work,” Felix offered, and this time it was my turn to be shocked.

“Is she?” Alan asked, leaning toward me. “What jobs are they giving women these days?”

“Oh, let Felix tell you,” I said.

My brother smiled. “Women are getting all kinds of work. It’s fascinating, really. Greta’s job, you sure you want me to tell?”

I shrugged. “You’re so much more charming with words.”

“She’s photographing great buildings, inside and out. In case we go to war, and the Germans bomb New York. So we can rebuild them just the way they were, isn’t that interesting?”

Alan raised his eyebrows. “You’re like an African griot. You’re preserving our civilization for us.”

“Hardly,” Felix said. “All photographers think about is light and shadow. They don’t give a damn what the subject is.”

I grinned. “Sad to say, he’s right. Oh, martinis!”

My twin brother tapped his hand on the table in time with the piano and looked around the room as if not interested in me or in his wife or anything but some appointment he was missing. It was so odd. It was infuriating, and so like my brother, but not in any of the ways I’d hoped. I had longed for this Felix to be the one, to be more like my brother than the 1918 version (all slogans and Diamond Jim smiles), and yet of course we forget that when the dead come back to life, they come back with all the things we didn’t miss. The bad cooking and the late arrival and the habit of hanging up the phone without saying, “I love you.” They aren’t fixed; they’re just back. And here he was, adolescently pursing his lips as if bored out of his mind. I could have hit him with a dinner roll. Bored? Here we were! The three of us, alive, together! So what if I was the only one who knew the lines, who knew how things should go? At least sit here and stop fidgeting, Felix, I wanted to say.

But then I saw that Alan was the same. To the unaccustomed eye, they looked like two men bored to death by a chattering woman. Nodding their copper and silver heads, playing with the mixed nuts on the table, gulping down their drinks like medicine (the olives submerging with terror). But I knew. That they were not bored; they were robbers who have hidden their cache somewhere in the room and were giving it all away, not by staring at the spot, but by staring at everything else, eyes roaming the ceiling, the floor, the tabletop. They were giving it all away. Any detective would have found the hiding place instantly, lifted up the floorboard, pulled out the diamonds and said, Here! You fools! I could see it in these nervous men, tapping and fiddling with rings and topics of conversation and forks and knives. Not even brushing against each other. I had gotten it all wrong. If you had silenced the clatter of dishes and silver, the noise and hubbub of a crowd two drinks into lunch, the sounds of the street and the kitchen, you would have heard the water ice clinking on the table from how their hearts pounded away. How simple: They were two men in love.

“Where is the food?” Felix asked, looking into his drink and finding nothing left. “I’m starved, aren’t you?” He looked up with a halfhearted smile, his cheeks flushed with color.

Men in love. I wanted to reach across the table and thrust their hands together. But of course I could not do it; I could not even let on that I knew.

“Oh, they want us to get good and drunk,” I said.

“Then I’m ready!” Alan said gamely.

So it had already begun. I was prepared to meet the man, a lover of a later time, who, like tropical plants that never bloom out of their climate, would be no more than a platonic friend my brother yearned for. But here, it was so obvious! They needed no prompting. For they were already lovers.

“Alan, tell me again how you two met.”

He looked at me very professionally. “Well, let me remember, it was at a party, right?”

“I think it was one of Ingrid’s playwrights,” my brother broke in, leaning back in his chair and glancing out the window. “He had an opening, of course we missed the show, I think it was all Irish ghosts and family drama, but the party was in a rich lady’s place up on Park Avenue. The elevator man wouldn’t let you in unless you could name the hostess and the playwright, thank God Ingrid was there, I didn’t know either!”

“It was Amanda Gilbert, I handled her divorce,” Alan informed us. “Baffling crowd. There was no one to talk to but your brother.”

“Either longhairs, lesbians, or bagatelle matrons.”

How did it work? Did they each take long lunches and meet in a hotel known for such things? Did they go on working weekends to the country, have late-night drinks with clients? What were the lies they told their wives or girlfriends or secretaries? What were the lies they told themselves?

“Oh, now I remember!” Alan said, laughing inwardly. “One old lady in feathers yelled at a waiter for bringing her lime instead of lemon, and I saw this young man turn to her and say . . . Oh, what was it?”

Felix pretended he didn’t know and picked at a Brazil nut.

“You remember!” Alan insisted, appealing to me. “He turned to her and said, ‘Madam, when you were a little girl, is this the woman you dreamed of becoming?’ I knew I had to meet him.”

And then they looked at each other at last and laughed. Anyone could have told then; they nearly touched each other at the memory, but withdrew their hands to their drinks instead. Surely their eyes had locked at that party and each had seen, in that moment, the “tell” they must have learned over the years, the flash of interest that part of the mind understands completely for one brilliant instant—then silences with a bullet like a witness who will say too much, so that it is forgotten and one can walk over and introduce oneself to the young red-haired man flushed with drink, with no more guile than a lawyer with a possible client, producing clever conversation and a business card. No one watching would have noticed except a wary wife, and I wonder if Ingrid had been across the room, seeing every move as a spy sees a briefcase handed over at a train station. For their eyes must have revealed it all. Never leaving each other’s gaze. It didn’t matter what they said. Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.

“I am so glad to meet you, Alan,” I said. “You seem like best friends already.”

They didn’t know what to say to that, and luckily at that moment the food arrived. They smiled at their plates as if they read there a great fortune.

It was only afterward, as Felix and I were waiting for taxis (Alan had already left, down the block), that I got up the nerve to say, “Alan seems wonderful.”

Felix smiled warmly and said, “I thought you would like him.” The porter opened the taxi door and we stood there for a moment on the brink of speaking. Starlings or somethings were whirling overhead. A screech of tires, and a woman in a bright green shawl jumped back, shouting, causing a scene, but we did not look there. We looked at each other, lips open. How to say it? Phrases were whirling in our minds, like the starlings or swallows or somethings, possible ways to say it.
I want you to know
was one way to begin. Or:
I understand everything
. We looked at each other. The woman shouted, the cabbie shouted. “Felix . . .”

“Later,” he said, and slipped into the cab. Slam, whistle from the doorman, and he was off again down Fifth Avenue. Of all the ridiculous things, tears came to my eyes and I turned away. He was alive here, carelessly, effortlessly alive, with all the petty troubles and worries that the living have. A wife, a child, a lover; such troubles. But there he went, again. And the feeling came, again. He did not know, not him or Nathan or little Fee, that my prolonged stay here had ended; the procedure was mere hours away. Today: the taxi leaving. Tomorrow: home. It was a little death, each time, I would come to feel. Less like a traveler than a mayfly, living for a day, a week, then gone. Reincarnated as myself, again, struggling at the screen door, again. Two procedures: over. Twenty-three to go.

I
SOON DISCOVERED
how the procedure in this world differed from the others. I came home and found my son engaged in some Swedish game of Green’s, in which he was made to hide behind the sofa while she knitted on the couch. I was too much a novice mother to protest, and Green’s raised eyebrow (her knitting, like the weaving of a spider, never ceased) silenced me. Fee’s head popped up—a puppet show—and he rolled his eyes and grinned mechanically before running from his counting place and embracing my knees. “Momma, Mrs. Green told me a story about a ghost, a woman who used to live here, did you know about that? Did you know she darns socks in the hall at night? Can I stay up tonight and watch her, Momma? Can I?” Knit and purl went the old girl’s web, that eyebrow still on high, and who was I to argue? Perhaps the ghost she meant was just a shimmer of myself, slipping between the worlds in sleep.

“Mommy needs a nap, darling. I’ll be out later to take you to the park.”

“Not now! I’ve been inside all day!”

“Just a little while. I need to change.”

“Madam,” came Mrs. Green’s voice and I turned, my hat dangling from my hand. Her eyes seemed to be encoding something. What could it possibly be? “Perhaps you forgot,” she said gently. “The doctor is in the bedroom. He has been waiting, and the nurse is here as well.”

“I see.” I stood there for a moment feeling the weight of my hat in my hand, the coarse weave of its cloth, the irritating little feathers that stroked my dress with an audible sound. My gaze went all over the room, like a bird in search of a window. Yet there was nothing to do but go into that bedroom, nothing to say but what I said. “Thank you, Mrs. Green.”

I wondered what on earth she made of this madwoman walking the halls.

They were there waiting for me, and their conversation broke off immediately as I entered the room with as much dignity as I could muster. Bald Dr. Cerletti smiled professionally as he nodded; he was in a navy suit and silver glasses, his demeanor somehow diminished from his contemporary self. “Mrs. Michelson, here you are.” He did not wear a doctor’s white coat, nor did the nurse (the same girl, her hair a different blond from a different bottle) wear a uniform. They were in civilian dress; I later found this was a courtesy to my husband, as was this house visit for a procedure typically done in the hospital. I looked around and saw the sunlamp had been rolled across the room and was beside my bed, which had been unmade to just a sheet. The machine was plugged into the wall.

“Would you lie down, please, Mrs. Michelson?”

A commotion started on the street—a soldier’s fight, it sounded like—so the nurse closed the window and drew the curtains, dimming the room except for a bright vertical bar of gold that shone between the drapes and cast its duplicate on the wall across from me. I removed my shoes and dress, placing the hat on the vanity where the birds seemed to watch me from its brim. In my slip, I lay down on the sheet and took a deep breath.

“We’re trying a little more today. You shouldn’t notice any difference. Now lie back and relax. Same as always.” The nurse rubbed gel on my skin, just on the right side. The doctor took two metal disks and put them against my temple.

“Wait. I’m not ready.”

“Relax. It will be over in a moment, you’ll feel so much better. No more daydreams.”

“Wait.”

But he did not wait. The nurse sat beside me on the bed and there was something gentler about her in this form, more pitying and kind, a sad daughter at a deathbed, as she placed the cotton wand in my mouth and held my free hand tightly. She squeezed twice, as if to comfort me, but I realized it was a signal to the doctor, for on the second I felt the charge going through me—briefer than in the other worlds, but moving like a wave within my mind. I moaned audibly and hoped my son never heard these cries, these unmotherly sounds coming from the bedroom; what did Mrs. Green say they were? Was this the ghost she spoke of? Would he remember them, or just the story she made up about them? I felt my face tighten into an animal’s snarl and I was shifting. Something like a wire moved through my veins until I was all metal, bending for them, and then the blue fantastic vision filled the room, a web of light, and I wept to see my thoughts blow off, in groups, like dandelion seeds. I watched them float off and away. There was my son. And my husband. And, of all surprising things, there was the young man Leo. Off and away. What was so wrong with daydreams?