The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (32 page)

BOOK: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

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He turns, blue shirt and jeans; you follow. Nothing changes, nothing is lost.

F
OR WE ARE
the same woman. How could we not make the same choice? My hand trembled slightly as I stood on the stone hearth, lifted the jar over my head, and then—crack!—it shattered in a bright blue bolt of electricity.

I felt it in three brains.

And then it was over. I looked at the broken glass around me. Dorothy, dewitched. Alice, unrabbited. Wendy, never neverlanded.

I understood nothing, Felix
, I thought as I held myself steady against the wall.
But it was a great show
.

S
TANDING IN THAT
room, the room in which I first awakened. The passage back to my world in shards upon the floor. Pale lilac wallpaper, ball and thistle. Gold-framed painting, sooted gaslight back plates, long green heavy drapes pulled nearly closed, and the great oval looking glass before me. I sat back on the bed and looked at that reflected woman, who not long before was a stranger. Long waves of red hair, flushed narrow face, a yellow nightgown over a pregnant belly. The woman I dreamed of becoming?

I heard a sound in the distance.

I turned and almost saw it, on some distant sunset-gold roof: a hammer pounding a wooden stake, not unknown at that hour, but how strange the effect on me. The hammer, and after it the faint sound of another, but this one not from my world. And after that: another. The worlds were echoing, one last time. A workman’s hammer, a wooden bowl, a shutting door—whatever they were, each beat in sequence from its time, almost the way the lost memory of a sound will ring out, unprovoked, from the past when the mind hears its twin in the present. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. I sat and listened to them pounding through my body. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. The universe threaded itself together at that moment. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. And we all sat and listened, sat in that exact position, with that exact sound. Thud . . . thud . . . thud. One last time, the drum was sounding, the drum that no one else could hear. Then it occurred to me: It was no drum. It was my three hearts beating.

And I knew, as the sound faded away and the whip of a carriage outside took its place, the noise of children on the sidewalk, that it would be the last I would ever feel them. The other Gretas. I was once again on my own.

I lay back on the bed and watched the strip of light cast through the drapes onto the floor. Tomorrow there would be a house to run, a maid to order, a husbandless life to lead, a brother to quarrel with and bully. Tomorrow there would be Ruth’s phonograph playing too loudly downstairs. A dress to mend. A job to find. A daughter growing to meet the world I made for her.

But for now there was this: that gold spear of sunlight, glowing with the last of the day. The burnt electric smell of spent enchantments. Ruth’s glass where she left it on the vanity, a little champagne sparkling at the bottom, and Felix’s gloves, which he must already be missing.

“Stay,” I had said, and that is what I had done. I pictured already a daughter in this room, pink as a shrimp, bundled in blankets and warmed by the fire, Ruth bringing elaborate outfits that the child would never wear except for her delight. Felix measuring her height on the landing as she grew. First too tall, then too pale, then from nowhere another girl would arrive: slender and beautiful with long black hair and shining eyes and I would think: It’s Leo. Her father, reaching through time at last. She would meet some man and marry him, wearing Ruth’s diamond brooch, and follow him to England. Felix and I would see her to the boat, and watch as it tore away from its streamers and good-byes. “There she goes,” my brother would say to me, all gray hair and glasses, and I would fall into his arms weeping. I pictured us both, much older, Ruth long dead, in this room when I would ask why he never moved into a flat with a man he had been with for many years, and Felix lighting his pipe by the window and saying, “We promised to stay, didn’t we? We promised, bubs.” And I knew, already, that I would never tell him the strange story of my life.

For is my story really so unusual? To wake each morning as if things had gone differently—the dead come back, the lost returned, the beloved in our arms—is it any more magic than the ordinary madness of hope?

But we do wake, each of us, to find things have gone differently. The love we thought had killed us has not killed us after all, and the dream we had for ourselves has shifted elsewhere, like a planet our starship is set for; we have but to lift our heads and right ourselves, move toward it once again and start the day. We will not get there in our lifetime, and some would say: What’s the point? A journey to stars that none will see but our children’s children? To see the shape of life, is all we answer.

I lay there and watched for a long time as the bar of gold shortened on the floor and dissolved into a glow. The glass, the gloves in shadow now. I pulled the drapes aside and saw, out the window, the setting sun, coldly lighting the world. And there: the first few flakes of snow. Another promise kept. I settled myself into bed and watched the snow begin to fall. Time for sleep. And so, as always: tomorrow.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Endless thanks to Lynn Nesbit; Lee Boudreaux; Walter Donohue; Cullen Stanley; Frances Coady; Michael Chabon; Beatrice Della Monte von Rezzori; Brandon Cleary; Carmiel Banasky; the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, especially Jean Strouse and Alice Hudson; the San Francisco History Center; Chapin’s 1917
Greenwich Village;
Miller’s 1990
Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way;
the Macdowell Colony; the Yaddo Corporation; Santa Maddalena; the Aspen Writer’s Foundation; and the Cattos—but most especially to Daniel Handler, my best reader; and to David Ross, my best companion.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

ANDREW SEAN GREER
is the bestselling author of
The Story of a Marriage
and
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
, which was a
Today
book club selection and received a California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

www.harpercollins.com/andrewseangreer

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

A
LSO BY
A
NDREW
S
EAN
G
REER

Novels

The Story of a Marriage

The Confessions of Max Tivoli

The Path of Minor Planets

Stories

How It Was for Me

C
REDITS

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photograph © by Plainpicture/Hanka Steidle

Frontispiece photography © iStockphoto.com/Andrew Cribb
Map of the West Village by Suet Yee Chong

C
OPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF GRETA WELLS
. Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Sean Greer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-221378-5

EPub Edition JULY 2013 ISBN 9780062213846

13 14 15 16 17
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A
BOUT THE
P
UBLISHER

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

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