The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
Read The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Online
Authors: Andrew Sean Greer
Tags: #Past Lives, #Time Travel, #Fiction
| The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells | |
| Greer, Andrew Sean | |
| Tags: | Past Lives, Time Travel, Fiction |
1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the breakup with her longtime lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in different eras.
During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and alternate lives in 1918, where she is a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, which transforms her into a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.
APS
EDICATION
For my mothers, grandmothers, and all the women in my life
ONTENTS
Part Two: November to December
TO
NOVEMBER
CTOBER
30, 1985
T
HE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS ONCE TO EACH OF US
.
For me, it was near Halloween in 1985, at my home in Patchin Place. Even New Yorkers find it hard to spot: a little alley west of Sixth Avenue where the city tilts drunkenly into an eighteenth-century pattern, allowing for such fanciful moments as West Fourth crossing West Eighth and Waverly Place crossing itself. There is West Twelfth and Little West Twelfth. There is Greenwich Street and Greenwich Avenue, the last of which takes a diagonal route along the old Indian trail. If any ghosts still walk there, carrying their corn, no one sees them, or perhaps they are unrecognizable among the freaks and tourists out at all hours, drunk and laughing by my doorstep. They say the tourists are ruining everything. They say they have always said that.
But I will tell you: Stand on West Tenth where it meets Sixth Avenue, in the turreted shadow of the old Jefferson Market Courthouse with its tall tower. Turn until you see a set of iron gates, so easy to miss, peer through the bars and there: no more than half a city block, lined with thin maples, dead-ending half a dozen doorways down, nothing glamorous, just a little broken alley of brick three-story apartment buildings, built long ago to house the Basque waiters at the Brevoort, and there at the end, on the right, just past the last tree, our door. Scrape your shoes on the old shoe brush embedded in the concrete. Walk through the green front door, and you might turn left to knock on my aunt Ruth’s apartment, or walk upstairs and knock on mine. And at the turn of the staircase, you might stop and read the heights of two children, mine in red grease pencil and, high above in blue, that of my twin brother, Felix.
Patchin Place. The gates locked and painted black. The houses crouched in solitude. The ivy growing, torn down, growing again; the stones cracked and weedy; not even a borough president would look left on his hurrying way to dinner. Who would ever guess? Behind the gates, the doors, the ivy. Where only a child would look. As you know: That is how magic works. It takes the least likely of us, without foreshadowing, at the hour of its own choosing. It makes a thimblerig of time. And this is exactly how, one Thursday morning, I woke up in another world.
L
ET ME START
nine months before it happened, in January, when I was out with Felix to walk Alan’s dog. We had locked the green door behind us, and were making our way past the ice-covered gates of Patchin Place while the dog, Lady, sniffed each barren patch of dirt. Cold, cold, cold. The wool collars of our coats were pulled up and we shared Felix’s scarf, wound once around each of our necks, connecting us, my hand in his pocket and his in mine. He was my twin, but not my double, so while he shared my flushed cheeks and bent nose, my red hair and pale complexion, my squinting blue eyes—“fox faced,” our aunt Ruth called us—he was taller, greater somehow. I had to steady Felix on the ice, but he insisted on going out that night without his cane; it was one of his good nights. I still found him so ridiculous in his new mustache. So thin in his new overcoat. It was our thirty-first birthday.
I said, “It was such a lovely party.”
Everywhere the shivering hush of a New York winter: the glimpses of high apartments, the shimmer of the frozen streets, the muted glow of restaurants late at night, pyramids of snow at corners hiding trash and coins and keys. The sound of our steps on the sidewalk.
“I was thinking,” he said. “After I die, I want you to have a birthday party where everyone comes dressed as me.” Always thinking of a party. I remember him as bossy and self-righteously moral as a child, the kind who assigned himself as “fire captain” and forced the rest of the family through ridiculous drills. After our parents’ death, however, and especially after he escaped our shared scrawny adolescence, all that ice melted at once—he became almost a convert to the side of fire itself. He grew restless if a day had no great event in store; he planned many of them himself, and would throw anyone a party if it meant drinks and costumes. Our aunt Ruth approved.