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

the one I remembered. To feel the other so broken. Mine, and yet not mine. To touch my face and have my fingers come away with peach foundation, and to put on a string of pearls and find my hands caught in the masses of hair I had not worn since I was a girl. The sharp face I had seen in every mirror: blurred, softened like the rest of me. What another person would have made of the body we were born with.
    “Greta?” came Nathan’s voice from the door, and I was confronted with a new, spectacular tableau. Of course, I thought to myself, why didn’t I expect this?
    There, framed by the white-painted wood, I saw Nathan holding a little boy of about three or four who koala-clung to him. He had small green eyes and sleek waves of brown hair. “Felix,” he was saying to the child. “Hush now. Look, Fee. Your mommy’s here.” Then he set the boy on the floor and, sailor hat falling behind, my son ran joyfully toward me.
    I HAD NEVER considered children. No, that’s not true. I had considered them as people consider moving to a foreign country; they know it would change them forever, but it is a change they never see. We had talked about it, Nathan and I, throughout our relationship. Even at the very beginning, we had a way of checking in with each other. “I just want to see,” he would ask after half a bottle of wine, “how you’re feeling about children? Any change?” And, smiling at his long bearded face, pulled tight in concern, as if by a drawstring, I would say I hadn’t thought about them at all in the time since he’d last asked. “How about you?” I’d counter, leaning back in the couch and hugging a child-cushion, waiting to see if his question were really a statement, but he always shook his head and answered, “No, no change yet.” A pause, then a smile from both of us.
    So it was a shock, of course, after he had left me, when I heard he and Anna were trying to get pregnant. All of our semiannual examinations, in which we probed each other for a sign of that disease, the little tumor of desire, and he had always said that he felt nothing, that he loved our life and did not wish to trade it for another, those nights finishing the bottle and toasting our barren home. It was untrue, or at least partially untrue. Nathan had wanted a child after all. He had simply never wanted one with me.
    H E CAME TO me, the little boy, on tiny sheep-white socks. He threw himself into my arms, and I was overcome by the softness of him, the scent of sour milk and jam, the slight crackle of his ironed green romper, embroidered in a wigwam pattern across the front, with its stiff white collar and sleeves so that he was Pilgrim and Indian all in one. He embraced me as completely as his small arms could handle, then wriggled in a playacting of joy. “Careful of Mommy’s arm!” When Daddy said he was already late for work, but that Mrs. Green was here to help Mommy, his face looked as if he had been slapped; a freak thunderstorm of tears commenced; Nathan looked to me and I understood that I was to take over now. He had been the good husband for long enough, and carried this extra burden, but I understood that the parenting belonged to this Mrs. Green and to me. I felt this world attaching itself to me, merging me with the Greta who had lived in it so long. I held him in my arms, that little squirming stranger. My son.
    “I’ll be back a little later than usual,” Nathan told me, though he needn’t have said that because I had no idea what it might mean. A kiss on my brow and one on Felix’s, then it was on with his hat and trench coat (military hat and coat, doctor’s insignia), and out the door. I watched his departure with a shiver of regret, for I knew something he did not: that in my world, he did not love me anymore.
    For our first game as mother and son, we played hide-and-seek. “Go hide!” I told Felix, and off he went in a flash as if he knew precisely where was best. This was my chance to examine how