The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer Read Free Book Online Page A

crisp starch of his shirt, and the faint leathery grease of whatever was in his hair, but underneath it all I recognized the scent of my old lover. And it was awful, awful to be brought back so thoroughly, nearly as awful as what he next said, breathing into my ear: “Just remember I love you.”
    I had not ever thought that I would cry in front of him again. Not after what he had put me through in my world. There is the thing you hope for and then, beyond it, like a prize kept locked and out of reach behind the counter, there is the thing you dare not hope for. To win it without expectation, without warning and—worst of all—without earning it in any way, is for the world to become a magical place. One in which prayers are not answered, and wrongs are not righted, nor anything kept in balance, but punishments and rewards are given at random, as if by a drunk or insane king. Which is to say: a hurtful place to live. I had to look away so he would not see my absurd tears.
    “Your brother has been by, but Mrs. Green was strict, and our Felix—”
    “Can I see Felix?” I interrupted.
    He laughed. “Well, he’s right outside, waiting for you! He’s asking for you constantly.”
    So he was alive. And what would my brother be like this time? As headstrong and foolish as ever, emotionally overwrought over some new love or another, whatever form that might take in this strange world? Surely times had changed enough since the last time I saw him. There would be no ridiculous fiancée in Washington, no coded look there in his eyes. Surely this time my Felix would be himself, and if that were so—I swore to myself—then I would never close my eyes again, never leave this land that I had traveled to.
    “Send him in! Send him in!” I shouted.
    “At least you remember him . You know, yesterday,” Nathan said, a little mischievously, “you thought you were from the past. Or something like that.”
    “Aren’t we all from the past?” I said, smiling. “Did I say what it was like?”
    “No, but I guess you thought it wasn’t anything like this!” He laughed. “But now you’re back. Really, you feel up to seeing him? We didn’t want to wake you.”
    “Yes,” I told him. “Of course, I’m longing to.”
    This seemed to thrill Nathan. His long, still shockingly beardless face bent in a smile beneath his glasses and vanished into the hall, talking to someone there. The door gleamed in a square of white varnish.
    Left alone, I looked around the room with the sensitive eyes of a detective inspecting a murder scene, looking for clues to this world. It was fairly tidy for a sickroom, though a pair of laddered stockings had been snake-shed onto the vanity beside a bottle of nail polish. On a nearby roll-up secretary lay a pile of envelopes, stationery, and a marbled fountain pen. Gold dust floated everywhere. I tried to take it all in anew. A strange metal machine sat in the corner, something like a sunlamp. That was when I caught sight of my triptych reflection in the vanity’s hinged mirrors.
    It was not me there. The one I had grown so used to seeing, in my own cracked mirror in that other-room-like-this-one: tall and short haired, hips too wide in jeans, breasts too small in blouses, misshapen and flawed, sometimes better, sometimes worse. It was me, of course. Except this woman was beautiful. Her red hair was brushed high in the front and curled in thick waves on the sides, so carefully and artfully done I could not imagine how she achieved it. And below this, somehow enhanced by the nightgown I wore, was a body flowing in cream satin like a dressmaker’s form, despite the heavy cast. Never had I looked like this. I touched myself with my free hand, unbelieving. For it had not occurred to me that I did not merely shift into another self. I shifted into another body.
    So this, too, was something I would learn to adjust to: the strange sensation of a body not my own. To lift an arm and find it smoother, paler than