The Whole World Over Read online

When it came time to name her business (her business with a little b), she was tempted to use this new name, but it still felt private then, like a love charm she should be careful not to bandy about. With more calculation than sentiment, she decided on Pastries by Miss Duquette. She opened during the craze for all things Creole, zydeco, Margaret Mitchell: to steely New Yorkers, just about anything with a southern flair had the wistful allure of cotillion chiffon, and Greenie liked to think of her surname as calling to mind the pink oleander, mannerly verandahs, and ubiquitous angels of New Orleans (though she had no such personal claim to make, having grown up west of Boston). On the pale green boxes in which she packed her sweets, the name swooped from corner to corner, a flounce of curlicued purple letters trailing wisteria blossoms.

  People who called her for business nearly always asked for Miss Duquette or “the manager” or, if word of mouth had sent them her way, Greenie. On this occasion, she picked up the phone to hear “Would this be Charlotte Duquette?”—her name pronounced “Shallot Dee-oo-kett” by a young woman who sounded as southern as Greenie was not.

  “That’s me,” said Greenie, and she waited to hear how this woman was connected to her parents. Not even the four banks that issued her credit cards knew her as Charlotte.

  “Shallot Dee-oo-kett,” the woman repeated, “will you please hold, then, for the guvna of Nee-oo Maixico?”

  A ratcheting of telephone connections followed, clearing the way for a hearty male voice: “Girl, excuse my informality here, but you make one hell-and-back of a coconut cake.”

  Helplessly, Greenie burst out laughing.

  “Oh, and I see you are prone to easy amusement. I like that in a person, I do.” He laughed briefly, easily amused himself. “Well, this is Ray McCrae, and you are excused if you can’t quite place the name, being as you are from these distant, more sophisticated parts, but as your friend Walter will have told you, I have a proposition, Miss Duquette, based solely on that knockout punch of a cake I sampled yesterday. No, did not sample, Miss Duquette, that would be inaccurate. A fib. Ate—no, ravished—one gigantic slice and scraped the plate clean with my fork. Then ordered a second to go and gobbled the whole thing down in the car. Ate the crumbs right off the seat.”

  “Thank you. I’m flattered.” This had to be a prank, friends from cooking school colluding with Walter, but why not play along?

  “So now, right now as a matter of fact, I’m just about to pull up to your city hall for face time with your powers that be. I’m hoping you won’t mind if Mary Bliss, my assistant here, takes over and does the explaining—but,” said the charming impersonator, “I do hope we’ll meet in person, Miss Duquette. I do.”

  “Well, I do too,” said Greenie, after which she covered the mouthpiece.

  “Miss Deeookett?” The southern belle was back on the line.

  “Yes, that’s me, but could you please explain what’s going on?”

  “That Walter fella didn’t ring you up like he promised, now did he?” the southern belle said pleasantly. She explained to Greenie that there was a job opening in the Santa Fe Governor’s Mansion. House chef. “Now I know this sounds fah-fayetched,” said Mary Bliss, and Greenie could tell that she thought it was more than that, “but it so hayapens that the guvna has a sweet tooth the sahz of Mount Rushmoah, and the sweet spot in that sweet tooth hayapens to be coconut cake. So he has this impulsive notion, see, that you just might like to…audition for the job while he’s here on your turf.”

  Greenie contemplated her bulbous reflection in a steel mixing bowl. She remembered the time one of her more ambitious classmates, now sous-chef at a Park Avenue bistro, had been invited to make a six-course meal for Princess Diana and an unnamed companion. All on the QT, the classmate was told, so she mustn’t discuss the meal with anyone. She had delivered it to the Carlyle only to be met in the lobby by a group of her girlfriends, all wearing rhinestone tiaras and hooting with laughter.

  Greenie would throttle Walter.

  “Miss Duquette? Would you do me a favor and humor us here? I know it may sound outrageous…”

  “Humor you? Oh, in any way I can, just you name it!”

  “Well you know, make him a nice meal while he’s here in town, tell him you’ll consider the offer? We’ll pay you a bundle, whatever you’ll lose in work that day and more. Does this sound a little insane? Probably does.”

  A long pause. The woman was serious. If there was a punch line, it was much too long in coming. Greenie said carefully, “But wait. I’d be moving to Santa Fe. If I got the job.” Except for a week’s vacation with Alan in San Francisco, to visit his sister, she had never been west of Saint Louis. She pictured cartoonish saguaro cactuses, Spanish missions with ruffled terra-cotta roofs, honest-to-goodness cowboys herding honest-to-goodness cows. Wouldn’t George love that.

  “Yes,” said Mary Bliss. “That’s what I mean by insane.”

  “For what it’s worth, you ought to know I’m a Democrat,” said Greenie. Now she recalled why Ray McCrae was in New York. Sherwin had complained about traffic during the previous day’s delivery; apparently—though he didn’t find this out till he was mired at an intersection, standing still through three green lights—a convention of Republican governors had cut off most of the Upper East Side, causing bipartisan gridlock all the way over to Chelsea.

  “Oh Miss Duquette, we know plenty more about you than that, we wouldn’t waste the time on this call without at least a thumbnail daw-see-ay.” Mary Bliss’s tone told Greenie just how much she enjoyed opening people’s government files and spying on the haphazard details of their lives. Greenie was on the verge of telling her where she could stow that thumbnail daw-see-ay when Mary Bliss added lightly, “Besides which we’re equal opportunity employers and love nothin’ so much as a house full of friendly debate.”

  As opposed, thought Greenie, to a house full of unfriendly debate. She could just see Alan’s face if she were to tell him later tonight that she’d turned down this blue moon of an offer. (“You did what? You refused the chance to impress a head of state? Who knows what connections you could’ve made?”)

  “I’ll make the guy a meal. Sure,” Greenie said. “Why not?” How often did she get a break in her routine, a professional lark? She named a price that was three times her usual income for a day’s production—which Tina could, with a little overtime, cover in Greenie’s absence—and asked about the governor’s favorite foods. All right, so she would spare Walter’s life.

  LIKE OTHER BOYS HIS AGE, George loved dinosaurs, poop talk, and reminding his parents about The Rules (no shoes on the furniture, no talking with your mouth full, no saying “Jesus!” not even under your breath and never mind why). He had outgrown his fascination with men working under the city streets and his early, oblivious tolerance of broccoli and peas. When George grew up, he would be an astronaut palaeontologist, digging for fossils on other planets. Pluto, he told his mother this evening, was not a planet anymore.

  “Oh? What is it?” Greenie asked, genuinely curious.

  “It’s make-believe. Like aliens. There is no such things as aliens.”

  “Not that we know of,” said Greenie. Poor Pluto, she thought, now to be accorded the same disdain a teenager held for Santa Claus.

  George frowned at her, as if she’d spoken out of turn. “There’s not! We know there’s not!”

  His vehemence cowed her a little. “Right!” she reassured him. Alan, resolutely truthful, would not have colluded in such simplification, but she had learned that splitting hairs with a four-year-old was counterproductive. And Alan was working late. He had a new couple; such referrals were generally for a limited time, six or ten weeks to steer (if not determine) the fate of a courtship or marriage. The high stakes of this particular work—the work of just a dozen hours—astonished Greenie, though Alan had told her that quite often all he did was guide these couples toward recognizing and voicing decisions they had already made in their hearts. “I don’t have as much power as you might suspect.
At least I hope I don’t.”

  Begrudgingly, George was working his way through the three baby carrots Greenie had exacted as the price of a heart-shaped Linzer cookie (thawed from a freezer stash of VD overrun).

  When she handed him a small plate holding the cookie, he beamed. “A story, a story!”

  She went to his bookcase and ran a finger across the bright narrow spines. “The Sneetches? We haven’t read The Sneetches in a long time.”

  “I am taking a break of Dr. Seuss,” George declared imperiously. George was an articulate child, already a language person, just like his father, but he spoke like a not-quite-fluent foreigner, tenses and prepositions often skewed.

  “How about just a little Dr. Seuss and then something else?”

  “No. I want the dinosaur book with the flaps and the one of the wide-mouth frog and Me and My Amazing Body,” he answered. Alan claimed that George’s confidence in his choices was a trait that came from Greenie, but she believed it was simply a fact of four-year-old life. “I want Me and My Amazing Body after I’ve putted on my pajamas.”

  “Put on my pajamas,” Greenie said.

  George laughed at her. “Not your pajamas.”

  “You’re right. Mine would be way too big, wouldn’t they?”

  Greenie searched for the books he’d named, reluctantly passing her favorites by. The more she read Dr. Seuss, the more brilliant she thought he was. She had become even mildly smitten, the way one customarily felt about a movie star: Andy Garcia or Kevin Costner or, if you were younger, Leonardo DiCaprio. That’s how Greenie felt about the late Ted Geisel. (Twitterpated, her mother would have said.) Horton Hears a Who! was a tale that brought altruistic tears to Greenie’s eyes every time she read it; others, by simple recitation, could dispel almost any anxiety or minor attack of the blues. Tonight, she craved the curative absurdity of “Too Many Daves,” a brief story about a certain Mrs. McCave who had twenty-three sons and foolishly named them all Dave—twenty-four lines of shamelessly silly verse that, Greenie once remarked to Alan, triggered in her brain the release of more serotonin or some other feel-good neurochemical than any dose of Zoloft ever could.

  Nevertheless, she read the dinosaur book (not a story but a patchwork of scientific facts and speculations) while George ate his cookie, retrieving every precious crumb from the table around the plate. Then he stretched his arms out toward her, a wordless request for her lap. She folded her son’s slim, bony form—the nimble body of a mountain goat—into her lap and read him the fable about a frog whose bragging leads to fatal consequences.

  George chose his flying saucer pajamas over the ones with the fire-breathing dragons. Greenie brought him the book he wanted and sat beside him against his pillows. “I will read it,” he told her, and he dove right in, as if the book were a pool, lending great emotion to human anatomy, bones and muscles, organs and veins.

  “‘My blood can’t move through my body all by itself,’” he read with decorum. “‘It needs my heart—a group of strong muscles in my chest—to move it. My heart is like my own little…engaah…’ Mommy, what is e-n-g-i-n-e?”

  “Engine. A machine that makes something run, like in a car.”

  “‘Engine! It pumps blood through my body all the time, even when I’m sleeping! If I put my hand on my chest, I can feel my heart beating.’” Here they stopped, as always, to place George’s hand under his pajama top and slide it around till he felt his heartbeat. Then Greenie let him feel hers.

  “God made a weird thing about lungs,” he said after turning the page, breathing dramatically to make his point.

  “You think lungs are weird?” said Greenie.

  “They blow up like balloons, but they don’t go up to the ceiling. They’re inside you.”

  “Yes. And they’re a lot tougher than balloons.” Even though George had never shown signs of being especially fearful, Greenie worried sometimes that he would develop unnecessary fears by thinking too much—in this case, that his lungs might explode or wither down to nothing.

  Having taught himself to read, George now preferred books to videos. Perhaps because books were involved, he rarely resisted going to bed. In these ways, he was not so typical of boys his age. Greenie also wondered if other little boys marveled so often at the quirky motivations of God when their parents never spoke to them of any god whatsoever. Greenie had long ago discarded her parents’ anemic Protestant rites, the stuff of white clapboard churches plain as any tract house or government office; Alan’s parents, one Jewish and one Christian, had shown no enthusiasm for their inherited faiths, defining the various holidays so loosely that they had become almost secular by attrition.

  “Why did God make liquid?” George asked once, with exasperation, when he spilled his juice. Scolded for the umpteenth time about his boyishly unsanitary manners, he complained, “But if you’re not allowed to lick your hands, why did God invent the words lick your hands?” Why did God invent noises that hurt your ears, shoes that had to be tied, animals that liked to eat other animals? Arguments—why did God invent those?

  Greenie answered his questions without raising doubts about God—though she asked him who had mentioned God and learned that one schoolmate seemed to be the chief missionary. “Ford says God is everything,” George told her one day when she was washing dishes. She shut off the water and turned to face him. “God is in everything?” she asked, to clarify what he’d said. George rolled his eyes and said, “No, Mom, God IS everything. IS everything. Ford says so.” And then he turned his attention to his Buzz Lightyear doll; there was nothing further to discuss. He had merely passed on his latest bit of knowledge, a fact no less certain, and perhaps no less remarkable, than the fact that T. rex had two claws on each foreleg while Allosaurus had three. A four-year-old brain was a cataloging device, an anthology in progress, collecting and retaining its own uniquely preferred scraps of enlightenment and misperception. Greenie would have loved to see an index of George’s brain, exactly what assumptions and generalizations it had thus far made about the world.

  Assumptions and generalizations, facts and rumors: all our lives, they mingle without segregation in most of our minds, thought Greenie. Look, for instance, at what she herself “knew” about Raymond Fleetwing McCrae. She’d skimmed past his name in the newspaper three or four times, in stories about concerns dire to western states, quaint at best to residents of Manhattan or even the rural Northeast (the severe ongoing drought; the civil feud over grazing lands; the summer forest fires that raged across states she’d thought of naively as nothing but sandy, uninflammable desert). She’d read somewhere that his Indian name was phony and so, too, the color of his hair (black as a polished stretch limo). She recalled that, without being a Catholic or a Baptist or even a husband and father, he was unabashedly pro-life. While standing in line at the A&P, she’d seen a headline about his relationship with a divorced Hollywood star renowned for doing nude scenes without a body double.

  That was Ray McCrae, according to the politically indolent brain of Greenie Duquette. And now, thanks to Mary Bliss, she knew that, with the exception of sweet potatoes and snow peas, he liked his vegetables well disguised; that he liked beef and pork, but lamb best of all; that he had an aversion to game, though he was a sharpshooter when elk and antelope season lured him north to Wyoming; that he could not stand, in any context, flavors in the neighborhood of licorice (no aniseed, no fennel, probably no tarragon); that he loved to eat fluffy egg dishes while bragging about his low cholesterol count. No curries, no raw meat or fish, no leafy salads. His soft spots were ice cream, whipped cream, creamy French sauces, nuts, citrus flavors, and yes, yes indeed, coconut cake.

  “And there you have it: the key to that man’s heart—that unmarried man’s heart, just waiting to be plucked,” Greenie’s mother would have said if she had been around to say it. Greenie’s mother had been a fine old-fashioned everyday cook. When Greenie was no older than George, her mother taught her to sauté onions in butter and to melt chocolate in a doub
le boiler. “Two great beginnings to so many magnificent things,” she had said with an air of pride and mystery.

  Alan came in just after George fell asleep; Greenie could hear her son’s little lungs working quietly away behind the bookcase they had constructed to turn his space into a facsimile of a bedroom. The shelves facing out toward the living room were filled with books of Alan’s: books on ego and self, on pleasure and love and libido and marriage. It amused Greenie to think of George, when he slept, with his head just behind this tower of scholarly effort to understand all these lofty yet intimate things.

  From the darkened shoulders of Alan’s coat, from his glittering hair, Greenie could see that the weather hadn’t changed. Nor, from the expression on his face, had his mood.

  Alan seemed perpetually unaware that his emotions were so transparent; Greenie could only guess that he must have another, more enigmatic face for the people who brought their own emotions to him for guidance. She said, “The session go all right? Is this a tough one, make or break?”

  “Baby crossroads,” Alan said succinctly as he hung his coat on the rack by the door to their apartment, bent to untie his hiking boots.

  This was his shorthand for couples sparring over whether or not to become parents. Usually, by the time such a couple reached Alan, the woman had given an ultimatum to the man, his time had expired without a decision, and she was holding out one last chance: a third-party catalyst. Greenie figured this sort of crisis was to her husband what a busted transmission might be to an auto mechanic: either you fixed it, at no small expense but ending up with a car that drove like new (though who could say for how long), or you gave up the car altogether, sent it away for scrap. Alan and Greenie had been through a baby crossroads of their own, arguing and stonewalling through months of Alan’s doubt and resistance. Just as Greenie was about to propose that they seek a third opinion, Alan had suddenly given in. She had been demonstratively grateful, though secretly her reaction had been, in a word, Finally.