Free The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer

time.
    “Hello,” I said, smiling and taking his hand, “so you’re my brother’s lover?”
    Of course I said nothing of the sort! Would you have every banker drop his martini in his lap? The whole of Manhattan would short-circuit. Instead, I took his firm hand limply and said, “So you’re my brother’s lawyer?”
    He said he was, and he had heard a great deal about me. He and Felix exchanged glances several times, like actors who have forgotten whose line comes next.
    They fought over who should pull out my chair—the waiter did it, arriving magically at the right moment, then vanishing—and who should order for us all.
    “I will,” I said. “Felix, you’ll have the pork chop and onions. Alan, you look like a man who likes a rare rib eye, with spinach. I’ll have the same. And martinis,” I said to the waiter, handing him the menu. “Gin for the men, vodka for me.” Oliver Twist? asked the waiter. “Olives,” I said, then sat back and smiled at the small bright room.
    Both men stared at me in astonishment. “Well, a woman has certain talents,” I admitted, arranging my napkin.
    “But how did you know how I liked my steak?”
    “Felix has said so much about you,” I explained, watching Felix and seeing his cheeks redden. “So I feel I know you. You look like a rare-rib-eye man. A man who shaves without a mirror.” A jolt of alarm from Felix; I saw my game had gone too far. Now Alan was looking into his lap.
    “Greta is going to work,” Felix offered, and this time it was my turn to be shocked.
    “Is she?” Alan asked, leaning toward me. “What jobs are they giving women these days?”
    “Oh, let Felix tell you,” I said.
    My brother smiled. “Women are getting all kinds of work. It’s fascinating, really. Greta’s job, you sure you want me to tell?”
    I shrugged. “You’re so much more charming with words.”
    “She’s photographing great buildings, inside and out. In case we go to war, and the Germans bomb New York. So we can rebuild them just the way they were, isn’t that interesting?”
    Alan raised his eyebrows. “You’re like an African griot. You’re preserving our civilization for us.”
    “Hardly,” Felix said. “All photographers think about is light and shadow. They don’t give a damn what the subject is.”
    I grinned. “Sad to say, he’s right. Oh, martinis!”
    My twin brother tapped his hand on the table in time with the piano and looked around the room as if not interested in me or in his wife or anything but some appointment he was missing. It was so odd. It was infuriating, and so like my brother, but not in any of the ways I’d hoped. I had longed for this Felix to be the one, to be more like my brother than the 1918 version (all slogans and Diamond Jim smiles), and yet of course we forget that when the dead come back to life, they come back with all the things we didn’t miss. The bad cooking and the late arrival and the habit of hanging up the phone without saying, “I love you.” They aren’t fixed; they’re just back. And here he was, adolescently pursing his lips as if bored out of his mind. I could have hit him with a dinner roll. Bored? Here we were! The three of us, alive, together! So what if I was the only one who knew the lines, who knew how things should go? At least sit here and stop fidgeting, Felix, I wanted to say.
    But then I saw that Alan was the same. To the unaccustomed eye, they looked like two men bored to death by a chattering woman. Nodding their copper and silver heads, playing with the mixed nuts on the table, gulping down their drinks like medicine (the olives submerging with terror). But I knew. That they were not bored; they were robbers who have hidden their cache somewhere in the room and were giving it all away, not by staring at the spot, but by staring at everything else, eyes roaming the ceiling, the floor, the tabletop. They were giving it all away. Any detective would have found the hiding place instantly, lifted