The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Page 2

  You could already make out my neighborhood heightening its mood in preparation for Halloween. Store windows were filled with silver-painted nude fauns, great glowing puppets, skeletons and witches of every type. Hollowed-out pumpkins lined the gate of Patchin Place; I felt you could lay my head down among them. The streets looked lonely. I looked lonely as I made my way each morning to work, and each evening home to a slighter, darker twilight, my street trading all its colors for blue, while from the west came the bright, streaming lavender sunset on the Hudson. It lit up all the sky, the tall apartment towers black and jagged against it. That is where I lived. In the fall of 1985. How I longed to live in any time but this one. It seemed cursed with sorrow and death.

  How clearly I could hear my brother asking me from the grave, Was this the woman you dreamed of becoming? Was this the woman?

  And then, one day, tapping his pencil on his pad, my dear old Dr. Gilleo: “There is one more thing we can try.”

  THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE was not quite what I expected. Perhaps because it was Halloween, I thought it would look something like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, carved out from the side of a cliff. Instead, it was an ordinary brownstone that shared a courtyard with what I remembered as an old grammar school; now, it had become part of the medical suite, and nurses stood in the courtyard, smoking. I sat for a few minutes in a plaid chair, across from an old lady with a bright green shawl and a knitting bag, and then was told Dr. Cerletti would see me now. The sign on the door: CERLETTI, ELECTROCONVULSIVE THERAPY.

  “Miss Wells, I see here we have informed consent from Dr. Gilleo, is that right?” said a short, bald man with large half-rimmed glasses and a gentle expression.

  “Yes, Doctor.” I looked around the room for the device that would cure me.

  “He did a pretreatment evaluation for us, is that right?”

  “I’ve been depressed,” I told him. “We’ve tried pills. Nothing seems to work.”

  “That is the only reason you would be here, Miss Wells.”

  Dr. Cerletti looked at his clipboard. “Do you mind if I ask a few questions?”

  “Only if I get to ask a few. I’m terrified about electroshock—”

  “We call it electroconvulsive these days. I’m sure Dr. Gilleo went through it all with you. No data suggests any kind of damage to the brain.”

  “Electroconvulsive doesn’t sound much better.”

  He smiled, and the smile on his bland, kind face was reassuring. “Things are very different from what they used to be. For instance, I’m going to give you thiopental, an anesthetic, and a muscle relaxant. It will be much nicer than going to the dentist.”

  “That’s Sodium Pentathol? Will I tell you the truth, Doctor?”

  “Were you planning not to? It doesn’t actually induce truth telling. It just lowers the patient’s resolve.”

  “Sounds like the last thing I need.”

  “For right now, it’s just what you need,” he said, writing something down and frowning. “We’ll do this twice a week except the last, a course of twelve weeks. Twenty-five procedures. We will be finished by February. It will help you make it through a hard time. I understand your brother died recently.”

  “Among other things,” I said, staring out the window and watching the nurses. “Will it change me?” I asked the doctor.

  Dr. Cerletti considered this very carefully. “Not at all, Miss Wells. What has changed you is your depression. What we’re trying to do is bring you back.”

  “Bring me back.”

  He smiled again and took a deep breath. “You can go about your normal life. Tell me if you’re trying to get pregnant.”

  “That’s not likely, Doctor.”

  “ECT is harmless for pregnant women, but it’s something we like to know. You might experience some disorientation afterward. That’s perfectly normal.”

  “What kind of disorientation?”

  “Please lie down. A slight dizziness. Possibly, just possibly, hallucinations. Not knowing where you are, quite who you are for a moment. Some people have auditory hallucinations, bells ringing, that sort of thing.”

  “Wait. That sounds serious.”

  “Lie down, please. It isn’t. Patients say it’s like waking up in a hotel room. At first, you’re not sure where you are. But then you’re yourself again. Lie down, there you go. First the anesthetic. You won’t feel anything electrical at all.”

  The nurse arrived with two syringes—the anesthetic and a muscle relaxant. I lay down on the crackling paper and looked at the constellations in the acoustic ceiling tiles. I closed my eyes. The doctor said that I would feel the first injection, but not the second, and that it would last only a minute while he administered the procedure, which would be one and a half times the seizure threshold for a woman my age. We needed to tip me into a seizure to reset my brain, was how I understood it. Cerletti nattered on about medical history, perhaps to calm me, saying how much better this was than the old days. Long ago, they had used static electricity capacitors, can you believe it? I felt something metal attached to each of my temples, then the cold swab of alcohol on my inner arm, then the awful pinch of a needle going in. I held my breath. Almost immediately an unpleasant smell filled the room—rotting onions—my mind unlatched, and then I found myself elsewhere. Don’t bring me back, I remember thinking: Take me away.

  As for what I felt—later, I would come to think of it as being cut out of the world. The sensation—not unpleasant, but more like the shock of cold limbs immersed in hot water—of the draft being removed from my skin, the crackling paper cot from my back, the air from my lungs, so that I hung for a moment utterly separate from my surroundings. Cut out of the world, as a gingerbread man is cut out of dough. Cut out, and taken who knows where?

  What do you call the time when we are missing? The time, for instance, when we’ve had so much to drink that minutes stutter by with blanks inserted, or whole hours are lost to us—and yet we were there, said and did things, and are held responsible for what occurred? Or even the little lost moment when we awaken to find ourselves partway through a phone conversation, and have to bluff our way through? What is that gap time called? What part of us is functioning? Are we to blame for what we do? And finally: Who are we when we’re not ourselves?

  “There.”

  I opened my eyes. The doctor was smiling down at me, and I noticed a drop of perspiration between his eyebrows. “You may feel a little hangover for the rest of the day.”

  I looked around at the same room, unchanged, just slightly underwater. And then I said something very odd, which made him smile: “Where are the what, Miss Wells?”

  “I’m sorry, I must be coming out of it.”

  “Do you think you can walk home?”

  I told him yes, of course.

  He nodded and said, “I think you’ll notice a shift. We’re trying these procedures back-to-back, so I’ll see you tomorrow and then next week; just set it up with Marcia on your way out.” He smiled at his nurse and, as she left the room, he gave her a little pat on the behind. The nurse, a blond permed creature with blue eye shadow and a sideways nose, brought out my clothes and waited for me to change, a little grin on her face. Perhaps it was from the doctor’s pat. Or perhaps it was from my funny little question, while still under the anesthesia:

  “Doctor, where are all the children?”

  “I SAW SOMETHING,” I told my aunt Ruth later that day. “I mean, when I closed my eyes, when they . . . I thought I was somewhere else.” We sat in my apartment pouring tea; rather, she sat, and I lay in my bed with my hand on my forehead, fighting the “hangover” the doctor had predicted. A small, simple room with one large window to the north and the bed placed beside it, but what had once been my childhood bedroom was now starkly modern: white walls, huge framed prints of my own photographs, red blinds, a plain low bed piled with white pillows. No furniture, no girlish touches at all except one wooden chair draped with the day’s black trousers. A bed, a view. Not so much a ro
om as a statement of purpose.

  “Are you still dizzy?” she asked. She wore steel necklaces and a black cotton dress and, though she was only in her fifties, she dyed her hair stark white, on her private theory that it would make her ageless. “More tea, more tea. You know I hate what they’re doing to you.”

  “Aunt Ruth, this isn’t what I need right now. I need clarity. I’m seeing Alan in an hour.”

  “Well, don’t listen to me,” she said. “You sure you’re up to seeing Alan?”

  “You’re not throwing your Halloween party this year, Ruth?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Of course I’m not. How could I without him?”

  “He’d want you to hold one.”

  “Well, then he shouldn’t have died,” she said briskly. “Don’t tell me it’s not extreme, electric shock.”

  “Electroconvulsive. It’s a last resort. They tell me it’s a seizure to break a pattern in my mind, but I know what it really is. They think I should be someone else. This Greta isn’t working, obviously. She’s worked for over thirty years, but it’s time for an update. Replace all the parts.”

  “Just one part.”

  “Just one part. Just me. I hate it, but I don’t know what else to do. I can’t . . . I can hardly get up in the morning. And yet . . .”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  It came just after the odor of rotting onions, I told her. After the sensation of being cut out of the world—I never felt what I thought of as electricity—I opened my eyes and thought the procedure was over. But I found myself in a different room. Or that’s wrong—it was exactly the same room, but changed. The walls were mint green and not white; where the ECT device had stood there was a larger enameled machine, and a tray with wads of white cotton; a chart on the wall marked the parts of the brain. But the shock was what I saw out the window. Where before was a gravel yard of smoking nurses, now it was a paved square painted with lines and numbers. And full of running, panting, laughing, screaming children.

  “And then I opened my eyes again.”

  “You mean you closed your eyes and opened them again?”

  “I mean, as if I had two sets of eyelids. And I opened the second set. And I saw the children again, this time in knickers and . . . old-fashioned dresses, standing in a line. And then it ended—there was the doctor’s face above me, and I . . .” I began to laugh, and put down my tea. “I asked him, ‘Where are all the children?’ I guess he already thinks I’m crazy anyway. I can’t explain it. It felt exactly as real as the doctor’s office. I heard the noise of traffic outside, through an open window. I could smell fresh paint.”

  “Are you sure? I heard only dogs can smell in dreams.”

  “It wasn’t a dream. He said there would be . . . disorientation, is how he put it.”

  My aunt sat very still and regarded me with the simplicity of someone who is deciding whether to take you either very seriously, or not seriously at all; there is no halfway anymore. From her apartment below came the sound of a bird in its cage, Felix’s old parakeet, warbling away as it always did—singing, my brother claimed, to the birds beyond the window glass and never knowing it could not be heard. It sang and sang as my aunt looked at me; even her ever clattering jewelry was silent for a moment, and in her black, shining, staring eyes I saw a fascination and interest she had not shown in me for months.

  “How could it not be a dream?”

  “Well,” I said, drawing back slightly in my bed. “Well, maybe it was a spark in my brain, somehow, you know, connecting various old memories, my old classroom and old movies, a spark that made them seem real for an instant.”

  “You are sure it wasn’t real?”

  “How could it possibly be real?”

  Her eyes roamed over my face like someone reading a book; I must have been that open and obvious in the hours after my procedure. She picked up the cup and saucer. “There are two kinds of people, I think,” she said, and the bird sang through the pause she placed there. The apostrophe between her eyes deepened, then softened. “There are the ones who wake up in the middle of the night and see a woman in a wedding dress sitting by the window, and they think to themselves, ‘Oh my God, it’s a ghost!’ That’s the first. Someone who feels something real, and believes it is real. And there are the ones who see the phantom and think, ‘I don’t know what I’ve seen, but it’s not a ghost because ghosts don’t exist.’ In my life, I’ve learned those are the two kinds.”

  She took a sip from her teacup, then simply set it on its saucer, smiling. “And nobody is the second kind.”

  “ALAN, YOU SEEM wonderful,” I said before I embraced him. Alan, my brother’s lover until the end, in his forties when they met and now approaching fifty. We had made a date for a quick drink, and though I nearly called to cancel, I found my dizziness clearing. We had not seen each other for months, and before that very little after Felix’s death. It was another sadness in my life, but I think we avoided each other, as criminals avoid the scene of a crime.

  Alan stood a foot above the crowd, dressed in a snap-button cowboy shirt and jeans, a braided belt, an oiled leather coat. I watched as his smile made all the lines in his face come alive. Lines from sunny childhood summers in Iowa, and weekends with Felix and me in the Hamptons. Silver hair cut close, silver stubble on his big chin, with its pale scar from a gardening accident he played off as “mountain lion attack,” and yet—I had to make an adjustment for his illness. Here: a smaller version of the Alan I’d known. A narrower embrace. Felix’s big broad man now had a boy’s figure, and his coat only barely kept me from feeling his ribs. I said nothing but that he looked wonderful.

  “Thank you, Greta.” He smiled, and put his hand on my cheek. “You’ve gone missing.”

  “I’ve had a hard time,” I said. It was one of those old touristy cafes on Bleecker that have never lost their charm for me. We took an uncomfortable wooden booth in the corner, near a rusty Russian samovar, and he removed his coat. The cowboy shirt no longer bulged with his muscles, and, thinner, he somehow also looked younger. Beside us, a young man with a wide, clever face was beginning a house of cards. He had a tourist map beside him, and he looked up and caught my curious gaze. He raised an eyebrow and I turned away.

  “How’s Nathan?” Alan asked, stroking his chin as if feeling for the old scar.

  My sigh had a little laughter in it and I signaled for a coffee. “He left me, Alan. No, it’s all right. Well, it’s not, but it was a while ago, and . . . I’m dealing with it in my own way. It’s too long a story for now. Have you met anyone?” He smiled shyly, that grown man! Sitting with his square jaw and midwestern expression of plain concern, and then that smile! I put my hand on his rough one. “Don’t worry, Alan, Felix was never jealous, and I’d be worried for you if you hadn’t. Though I’d understand that, too.”

  “Nobody, really,” he said, picking up the salt shaker and balancing it on its side. “There’s a guy who wants to take care of me. I don’t want anyone to take care of me.”

  “You never did.”

  “I miss him,” he said solemnly, spinning the salt shaker. I think the truth was, Alan was always much softer than Felix, easier to hurt; his quiet was half contentment and half unspoken suffering. There had been a wife, and children, before Felix. There had been a whole forty years of some other Alan. Perhaps that’s why he had loved my brother; Felix’s greed for life made up for lost time. Alan never loved to dress up, or to dance, but he had loved to watch it play out before him. In his worn jeans, wearing a slight smile.

  “I miss him, too,” I said. I watched Alan spin the shaker on the table, watched it gather light and throw it on the walls like shards of glass. He stopped the shaker with his fist. I said, “You know what I wish? I don’t wish I could get over it. I wish something impossible: I wish it not to have happened.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “I wish it not to have happened. I’ve lost my mind, Alan. They’re giving me ECT.”

  He took
my hand and squeezed it.

  “I had the first procedure today. It’s making me hallucinate.”

  He grimaced. “My drugs do that. It fades. It comes again. I’m so sorry.”

  “Let this guy take care of you, Alan.”

  He took my gaze very seriously, narrowing his eyes, causing those lines around them to deepen, then after a moment he shook his head and let go of my hand. “I’m too old and sick for all that.” He sipped his coffee and shrugged; his hair was haloed in silver. “This young man, he thinks it would be romantic to be there at the end. To be the widow at the funeral. I told him I’ve been that widow. It doesn’t feel like anything at all.”

  “You’re not going to die, Alan.”

  It is a foolish thing to say to anyone, but it was especially foolish at that moment. He raised his eyes from his coffee cup and they were the same cracked green glaze, shining with pain and amusement at me; the dying have a way of looking at the rest of us in this strange way, as if we were the ones merely mortal. From far off, a siren wailed and wailed. A sigh beside us; the house of cards had fallen and lay everywhere.

  “Of course not,” he said with a chuckle. “None of us are.”

  I STAYED UP very late that night, looking through contact sheets of photographs, trying not to think of Alan or especially of Felix. Perhaps I was afraid of my dreams, that my brother would arrive in them again. It was not until four or so in the morning that I found myself in bed, staring at the bland white walls, the photographic prints, the red blinds pulled up to show a midnight Greenwich Village and that constant view: the houses of Patchin Place, the Jefferson Market tower, the garden beside it. The yellow heads of gingko trees decorating everything in between. I wish it not to have happened. I recall closing my eyes and seeing one bright blue star floating there in the darkness, pulsing with light. Any time but this one. How it split in two, and those split, and so on and so on, the throbbing blue stars dividing until they formed a circular cluster of light, and there was a kind of thunder as I fell into it—and that is the last thing I remember.