Whole World Over Read online

  Alan sat beside Greenie and set a hand briefly on her leg. “But here’s a twist,” he said. “It’s two men.”

  “Oh my,” said Greenie.

  “‘Oh my’ is right. I’ve never had to think out the conflict in quite these terms. And it does make a difference.” He laid his head against the back of the couch. Greenie waited for him to say more, but he simply closed his eyes. She felt her modest hopes—for a lively conversation, for the company of a man with his vigor renewed, for a glimpse of her husband’s warmly sardonic old smile—plummet in a familiar, tiresome way.

  “George is reading just incredibly,” she said at last, knowing it would be a mistake to push Alan further on any subject related to his work.

  “That’s great,” he said quietly. “Though you have to wonder how much is memorization.”

  “Sometimes—sometimes yes. But this evening he read the directions on the box of spaghetti while I was making his dinner. That’s not memorization.”

  “Great, that’s great.” Alan was always worn out after the sessions he had to hold at night to accommodate working couples, but Greenie was irritated all the same.

  “Could you maybe have just a little knee-jerk pride in your son’s talents? I’m not saying he’s a genius; he’s just a good reader—an amazing reader, as a matter of fact! Other boys his age aren’t reading yet at all,” she said.

  Alan raised his head and looked at her as if he were peering through fog. “Comparisons are odious, Greenie. And did I say I wasn’t proud?”

  “No…” She might have told him that comparisons were the basis of science, the soul of metaphor.

  “I’m sorry. The point is, I don’t worry about George. Not a bit. George is terrific. Of course I’m proud of George. I’m worried about other things.”

  Greenie hesitated, then said quietly, “I know you’re concerned about money—”

  “Money? Oh, you name it!” Alan laughed. “Everything but my prostate gland! Hey, physically I’m in terrific shape!” He flexed his arms, braced his fists against his chest.

  “Alan, I know I’ve said it before and it pisses you off, but you really should call Jerry…”

  “Jerry does not, as you seem to believe, hold the key to the inner meanings of the cosmos or the source of all joy or even the divine secret to finding a real two-bedroom apartment in New York City without selling your nubile sisters into the white-slave trade,” said Alan. Jerry was the analyst Alan had seen during and beyond the years he was training at the institute. Alan had stopped seeing him years ago, though sometimes they met for a friendly drink or exchanged referrals. Greenie wondered what Jerry would have made of Alan’s remark about his prostate gland. It was true that the one place their life seemed as happy as ever was in their bed, but sometimes Greenie suspected that Alan used sex these days as the sole form of conciliation between them—which only served to create an insidious distance in her head whenever he made love to her in the wake of a disagreement.

  Greenie started toward the kitchen. “Let me get you something to eat.”

  “That’s okay; I’m not hungry.”

  She laughed. “I can’t even do that—feed you!”

  Alan stood up to join her. He held her from behind. “Greenie, Greenie, about Jerry, it’s just…you know. Been there, done that. Done that exhaustively, inside out, to the sun and back again. That’s not what I need right now.”

  “What do you need? I want to know, even if it isn’t something I can give.”

  “Space,” he said sharply. “Sorry if that sounds too California. Peace. A break from the interrogation.” He squeezed her tight, her back against his long, slender ribcage, before he let her go and walked into the kitchen. Greenie saw him glance at the upper shelf that held the bottles of liquor. He sighed and turned to the sink, filled a glass with water and drank it down.

  He crossed the room again and went behind the bookcase to look at his sleeping son. Greenie resisted the temptation to follow. Space he’d asked for, so space he would get. For now.

  When he emerged, he told her he needed to sleep. His next session would be at eight the following morning: tedious timing, since after that he would be free for two hours. Later, however, he could pick up George from his nursery school and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with him.

  That would give Greenie extra time to cook for Guvna McCrae. She had agreed to serve him dinner the evening after next. As she cleaned the kitchen, she realized that she had yet to tell Alan about the phone call, but by the time she walked into their bedroom, he was already asleep. A sleep posture—could that be passed on through genes? Because George, when he slept, was a perfect miniature of Alan: on his back, mouth wideopen, left arm (always the left) thrown up over his head, right arm along his side, legs spread in an attitude that looked in the man almost wanton but in the boy simply trusting, ignorant of threats to his dreams or to the eagerly growing cells of his wiry limbs.

  After closing the bedroom door and pacing a small circle of frustration, Greenie sat on the couch, beside the table that held the photographs of their eleven years together so far: Greenie in Maine (wet hair, black swimsuit, too many freckles), squinting into the low, rosy sun, Alan the photographer’s shadow draped on the rock beside her. The two of them at a dinner party all dressed up, exchanging a glance that said, Oh here we are and aren’t we lucky! Greenie in white, hair wound with freesia, being kissed by Alan the groom. Greenie on this very couch six years ago, opening presents on her thirtieth birthday. Alan and his sister flanking their small, perplexed-looking mother. Then a copiously pregnant Greenie laughing, raising an arm in vain to ward off the camera. All these images soundly upstaged by George, George, and more George: tiny and rumpled by the pressure of birth, Greenie’s lips on his cheek; casting up at Alan one of his very first smiles; cradled between his parents on the carousel in Central Park (a snapshot taken by a stranger); holding a toy backhoe in the playground sandbox; petting his grandmother’s cat; up on his father’s shoulders beneath a maple tree sunstruck with autumn.

  Greenie wanted the history to continue, to go on and on, all of them together in recombinant images, in ones and twos and threes, stepping out sometimes with other people but always belonging together. And she wanted there to be a fourth, though any fool would know that now was not the time to talk or even think about that.

  They lived on the parlor floor of a small apartment building that was wedged in a row of brick houses. It was a rear apartment, quiet but also cavelike. Greenie had brightened the place with pattern and color: calla lily curtains from the 1950s; a great pink armchair; two oil landscapes of southern France, hayfields under summer skies, which she had persuaded her mother to give her. “Premature inheritance,” Greenie had joked—a joke that had come back to haunt her.

  “You want to live with that color? Are you serious?” Alan had said when he first saw the armchair, which Greenie had paid two boys to lug in off the street. But he’d laughed and told her that maybe pink was just what his life had been lacking—though mainly, he said, all his life had ever lacked was her. It was a lap-sitting chair, a chair made for romance. “If I were a decorator,” Alan had said, “I would name this color concupiscent rose.” Greenie loved the remarkable words that came from her husband’s mouth in the most unlikely moments. (“Smart is more important than rich,” her mother once said. “Trust me on that.”)

  Rain clamored against the windows. Greenie picked up the phone. At eleven o’clock on a cold, rainy weeknight, Walter would be as close to relaxed as he ever came, relinquishing control to bartender, chef, and busboys.

  “So, who put you up to this?” she said.

  There was only the briefest beat before she heard his machine-gun laugh. “Sweetheart, this was among the most selfless gestures I have ever made.”

  “Oh, wait. You mean you meant to give me your winning lotto ticket?”

  “Listen, you. Today, the Governor’s Mansion in Santa Fe—I mean, who wouldn’t kill to live there for a
while?—tomorrow the White House. Or how about Air Force One? I’ve heard there’s a chef just for Air Force One!”

  “To tackle your assumptions in order: One, you mean, what queen of your acquaintance wouldn’t kill to live in Santa Fe, which is only about nine thousand miles from the nearest ocean, and you know how much I need the ocean. Two, I am one of the people who would kill never to live anywhere near Washington, D.C. And three, you might not know this, Walter, but I am not fond of flying.”

  “Well, aren’t we grateful for the leg up.”

  Over the sound of clattering dishes, they burst into collaborative laughter.

  “The unbelievable thing,” said Greenie, “is that I am actually going through with trying out for this hypothetical job. I’ve got to be out of my mind.”

  “Wait till you meet this guy. I mean the size of his personality. Though, come to think of it, maybe you’ll be able to verify rumors as to the size of his something else.”

  “Walter!” Greenie pulled her knees up, gratefully scandalized. “Walter, I’m a married woman, and what would you stand to gain? From what I’ve seen in the tabloids, the guy is profoundly heterosexual. You don’t get to be governor of a landlocked state if you’ve so much as air-kissed the cheeks of a Frenchman. Except for maybe Vermont.”

  “Lovey, you can buy off the tabloids,” said Walter. “And you may be married, but in my opinion, that intellectual sleepwalker you call a husband could use a wake-up call. A wake-up smack.”

  “Alan loves me—”

  “In his own way!” trilled Walter. When she failed to laugh, he apologized. “I know he’s a great guy, it’s just that I also know he thinks I’m a lightweight. Which I can’t quite deny.” Deftly, he changed the subject to pie. What did Greenie think of grasshopper pie? Or no, perhaps key lime; they’d drop the lemon meringue. “Could you do it with tequila so there’d be a little buzz?” he asked. “The doldrums approacheth. The Idolatries of March!”

  “I don’t make desserts that get people sloshed,” she said.

  “Oh you righteous Bostonian you.”

  On they talked, Greenie lying back on the couch—as if they were in bed together, she realized the second time she yawned. They talked for half an hour, Walter stopping now and then to speak with a waiter or cook.

  She looked in on George, the last thing she did every night, after turning out the lights. His left leg hung over the guardrail. She lifted it carefully and placed it back on the bed. She slipped Truffle Man, his favorite bear, in the bend of a small elbow but stopped short of pulling the blanket over his back. Like his father, George shrugged off the covers in his sleep, summer and winter alike. He slept with a sheen of sweat on his smooth, pale hair, as if his brain were exerting itself in the manufacture of complex, beautiful dreams.

  In her own room, in the dark, she took off her clothes and slipped into bed beside Alan. Though he did not seem to wake, he turned toward her and wrapped his arms around her from behind, just as he had in the living room an hour before. Then he exhaled noisily over her shoulder, half snoring, as if he’d been holding his breath till she arrived.

  TWO

  WALTER LOVED IT WHEN A FRIEND CALLED just as the final guests were leaving. It helped him past the brief chill when the restaurant fell silent for a sliver of an instant, for the first time in five or six hours: the tide-turning moment when the clamor changed over from chatter and laughter to clinkings, slammings, and mechanical growlings, the sounds of the nightly overhaul. The restaurant was like a ship, Walter mused (though he wouldn’t know a ship from a Pogo stick). He could imagine the sailors (delectable sailors) tightening screws and riggings, swabbing decks, polishing bollards (what in the world was a bollard?), scraping barnacles loudly from the hull. Each night, Walter felt this transition as the tiniest slump—but a slump nonetheless.

  That night he carried the phone to and fro as he battened down the culinary hatches, prolonging the conversation until Greenie exclaimed, “Walter, look what time it is! I’ll be a wreck tomorrow.”

  “A magnificent wreck,” said Walter. “Like the wreck of the Hesperus—was that a glorious wreck? The raft of the Medusa? No boring old Titanic you.”

  “Walter, good night.”

  “A wreck with a brilliant transcontinental future.”

  “Walter.”

  “Greenie.” Walter sighed. “Well then, nighty noodles,” he said, the way Greenie said good night to her son. He’d never been to her apartment, and he’d met her little boy just a few times, when they’d come to the restaurant for dinner; but one night, on the phone with Walter, she’d interrupted the conversation as her husband was putting the boy to bed. Walter had heard all the kisses, the endearments, the knocking-about of the phone caused by hugging. Oh the daily embrace, the urge toward sweet dreams: things one should not take for granted.

  “Nighty noodles yourself,” she answered now. After she hung up, he whispered, “Dreamy doodles,” the reply he’d heard from the boy in the background that time.

  Walter felt protective toward Greenie, and it wasn’t just that he liked her company as well as her cakes. Perhaps a shade melodramatically, he thought of her as an orphan; two years ago, not long after they met, her parents had died in a ghastly accident, plummeting off a cliff while on vacation. When she told him the news, so unnecessarily stoic, so contrite about the missing cheesecakes and Boston cream pies, he’d confided that his parents, too, were in a fatal crash. Walter was thirteen, but even though he’d been so much younger than Greenie, in other ways the accident had been less tragic, for Walter’s parents had driven themselves just about literally, willfully, to their deaths.

  But really now, did this perfectly successful, obviously confident woman need anyone’s protection? Of course not. The one thing that did surprise Walter about Greenie—and worry him a little—was the husband, whom he’d met the few times they came to the restaurant as ordinary customers. On the surface, Alan was more than suitable: fine-looking and shamelessly brainy in that Ivy-nerdy way, if a drab, very hetero dresser (oh, those cuffed and pleated khakis). Tall and dark, of course, made up for so many shortcomings. But as for suitability of sentiment, Walter had his doubts. The hint of discord was the affection that the man lavished on his son…and did not appear to lavish on his wife. Walter saw the small caresses, the gestures of love and reassurance Greenie gave to Alan—unreciprocated, all of it.

  So Walter, no pussyfooting, asked outright. About a year before, alone with Greenie in her kitchen, he said, “Now that husband of yours, does he treat you like the queen you are?”

  She’d laughed and said, “You mean, the kind with the crown and the corgis? Or the kind with size-thirteen high heels?”

  “I’m asking you a serious question,” he said brightly.

  She blushed and all at once, to Walter’s alarmed satisfaction, looked miserable. She said, “The simple serious answer is no. Not recently. But that’s the nature of marriage, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Lovey, you tell me.”

  “Walter, there are hills and valleys, you know? Or maybe you’re lucky not to.”

  So he had pried, and he had tried to be an ear, but in the end, what had he accomplished? Could he challenge the ingrate to a duel? Show up in the guy’s office and have a man-to-queer talk? Imagine the oblivious khaki-wearer caught in those headlights.

  After hearing Greenie’s concerns about money, about how this husband of hers was losing patients (significant pun?), Walter had concluded that either the man was losing his knack or he hadn’t had much of a knack to begin with. After all, this was New York City, playground of the rich and narcissistically needy, of the overly pampered whining id. (Whenever Walter saw that ubiquitous sign on the door of a club, VALID ID REQUIRED, he’d think, Oh yes indeedy.) Who could want for psychic fodder in a place like this?

  “Want a look?” The bartender pushed a pile of credit card slips toward Walter.

  Walter pushed them back. “Tomorrow. And tomorrow…”

  Ben he
ld up a single, admonishing finger. “Shakespeare got his last call an hour ago.”

  “Cloak?”

  “Wearing the very item.”

  “I missed him?” said Walter. “Please tell me he’s applying to law school by now. Sam Waterston’s got nothing on that guy.”

  Organically, over time, Walter and Ben had developed a shorthand for their favorite and least favorite regulars, especially at the bar. Out-of-work actors were, for Walter, the worst. The poor devils made him shudder, since there but for the grace—the maliciously arbitrary grace—of God went his truly. Cloak and Dagger personified the two ends of that humiliating spectrum: one of them certain that his turn at Hamlet was just around the corner, the other one bitter and paranoid. (According to Dagger, Spielberg, the Weinsteins, and Tom Hanks ruled a second evil empire.) When the two showed up together—especially if Cloak wore his eponymous Zorro-esque cape—Walter had to avoid looking Ben in the eye. If he did, the two of them would laugh uncontrollably.

  Not a guest remained, and it was barely eleven-fifteen. Beastly outside, it wasn’t the sort of night on which people lingered. Recently, the climate had not been conducive to profit. Frigid temperatures kept customers coming, longing to toast their backsides at Walter’s faux-Colonial fires in authentic Colonial hearths—but freezing rain kept even the upscale cruisers at home, marooned on cable. The Bruce had positioned his own backside close to the fire by the door. He was curled up so tight that he resembled a small beige ottoman. Oh to be a dog.

  Walter fished in his pocket and pulled it out: Gordie’s business card. He did not need to look at the numbers (work, home, cell—all those self-important area codes) to know them by heart, but he liked running a finger across the blue figures, raised like Braille. He had done the call-and-hang-up thing (the cell phone, not the home) just once. He would never do it again. He would not be a Glenn Close stalker. He put the card away and sighed, as if the extra air would clear out his heart. Changez la subject! he scolded himself.