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

up the floorboard, pulled out the diamonds and said, Here! You fools! I could see it in these nervous men, tapping and fiddling with rings and topics of conversation and forks and knives. Not even brushing against each other. I had gotten it all wrong. If you had silenced the clatter of dishes and silver, the noise and hubbub of a crowd two drinks into lunch, the sounds of the street and the kitchen, you would have heard the water ice clinking on the table from how their hearts pounded away. How simple: They were two men in love.
    “Where is the food?” Felix asked, looking into his drink and finding nothing left. “I’m starved, aren’t you?” He looked up with a halfhearted smile, his cheeks flushed with color.
    Men in love. I wanted to reach across the table and thrust their hands together. But of course I could not do it; I could not even let on that I knew.
    “Oh, they want us to get good and drunk,” I said.
    “Then I’m ready!” Alan said gamely.
    So it had already begun. I was prepared to meet the man, a lover of a later time, who, like tropical plants that never bloom out of their climate, would be no more than a platonic friend my brother yearned for. But here, it was so obvious! They needed no prompting. For they were already lovers.
    “Alan, tell me again how you two met.”
    He looked at me very professionally. “Well, let me remember, it was at a party, right?”
    “I think it was one of Ingrid’s playwrights,” my brother broke in, leaning back in his chair and glancing out the window. “He had an opening, of course we missed the show, I think it was all Irish ghosts and family drama, but the party was in a rich lady’s place up on Park Avenue. The elevator man wouldn’t let you in unless you could name the hostess and the playwright, thank God Ingrid was there, I didn’t know either!”
    “It was Amanda Gilbert, I handled her divorce,” Alan informed us. “Baffling crowd. There was no one to talk to but your brother.”
    “Either longhairs, lesbians, or bagatelle matrons.”
    How did it work? Did they each take long lunches and meet in a hotel known for such things? Did they go on working weekends to the country, have late-night drinks with clients? What were the lies they told their wives or girlfriends or secretaries? What were the lies they told themselves?
    “Oh, now I remember!” Alan said, laughing inwardly. “One old lady in feathers yelled at a waiter for bringing her lime instead of lemon, and I saw this young man turn to her and say . . . Oh, what was it?”
    Felix pretended he didn’t know and picked at a Brazil nut.
    “You remember!” Alan insisted, appealing to me. “He turned to her and said, ‘Madam, when you were a little girl, is this the woman you dreamed of becoming?’ I knew I had to meet him.”
    And then they looked at each other at last and laughed. Anyone could have told then; they nearly touched each other at the memory, but withdrew their hands to their drinks instead. Surely their eyes had locked at that party and each had seen, in that moment, the “tell” they must have learned over the years, the flash of interest that part of the mind understands completely for one brilliant instant—then silences with a bullet like a witness who will say too much, so that it is forgotten and one can walk over and introduce oneself to the young red-haired man flushed with drink, with no more guile than a lawyer with a possible client, producing clever conversation and a business card. No one watching would have noticed except a wary wife, and I wonder if Ingrid had been across the room, seeing every move as a spy sees a briefcase handed over at a train station. For their eyes must have revealed it all. Never leaving each other’s gaze. It didn’t matter what they said. Surely words are just the background music when passion pounces on a soul.
    “I am so glad to meet you, Alan,” I said. “You seem like best friends already.”
    They didn’t know what to