The Whole World Over (15 page)

"A seasoned Prince Charming."

"And he's Jewish."

Alan paused. "Which would mean . . . ?"

"Oh, don't be so damned ecumenical, Alan. Jewish men like brainy
women. It's one of those true clichés. And anyway, I got all the Jewish
genes in our family. You got all the white-churchy baggage from Mom."

"Thanks. Like you ever went to a seder."

"As a matter of fact, more than a few." Joya sighed. "We are off the
subject."

"Right. Your incredible catch."

"But that's the thing. There
is
a catch," she said, with a small, bitter
laugh.

"Let me guess. He's . . . a cross-dresser? A drummer? . . . Oh no. He's
a union leader."

"He has
two teenage daughters.
"

"You've met them already?"

"No, but I can tell he's worried about that. I know my vibes. Reading
vibes is my forte. He thinks they'll eat me alive. And if he thinks they
can, they will. They'll sense it, like blood in the water."

"Be a little open-minded, maybe? And Joya: teenage girls have got to
think you're cool because you're sexy but you've got this macho job.
The guy can't see that angle. Besides, their mom's the one who left."

"Oh Alan. Who better than you to know how many different versions
there are of
Rashomon.
And I may not be married, but
you
are not
the father of teenage daughters."

Alan loved her boomerang wit, but he worried about its effect on
men who hadn't had Joya as their protector when they were thirteen,
awkward and gangly, red-faced with alternating bouts of shame, acne,
and hopelessly immature longings. She had been so much more powerful
than any pumped-up big brother, respected for the way she could
throw around words, not threats or physical blows. You could borrow
that aura, just enough of it, even when she wasn't present.

"Go easy," he said. "Be a little dumb. What I mean is, let it unfold
without all your brilliant second-guessing. That gets you in trouble."

She sighed. "I know. I will try to keep a tiny pipsqueak version of you
perched on my shoulder for the rest of the evening—and maybe beyond.
You know, like Rick Moranis in
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid.
Though
shut your eyes later, would you, 'cause this could be the big night." She
sighed again. "Oh God, remember when it wasn't so cautious, when
you got this part over with practically first thing of all? Got to see where
the other person was hairy and bald and scarred and tattooed?"

"Yeah. Do I ever," said Alan. "Thanks for reminding me."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way."

"I know. But on that note, I've got to get to sleep. I have a seven-thirty
tomorrow. Weird how all my remaining patients are at the beginning
and end of the day."

"Means they're productive citizens. Maybe you can even take credit."

"Joya, what don't you have an explanation for?"

"The fuck-up you got yourself in, my dear little brother." She told
him she loved him, loved him anyway, and then they did say good night.

FIVE YEARS BEFORE
, Alan had gone to his fifteenth high school
reunion. He had never been to a reunion of any kind, never intended to
do such a thing, but he'd needed whatever kind of jarring he could get,
because he and Greenie had arrived at precisely that crisis on which he
had so smugly advised perhaps two dozen couples by that time. They
were at Baby Crossroads: Greenie so all-consumingly certain; Alan, if
anything, more doubtful than ever. In a way, Greenie's unclouded enthusiasm
for parenthood made the prospect that much more worrisome.
She seemed, suddenly, more naïve than confident.

But something had to give, and the giving (or giving in) probably had
to be his. So anything he could do that was to any degree out of the ordinary
gave him hope. Small changes tend to precipitate the large, he told
his clients. Of course, what he meant was
relevant
changes. He did not
mean that changing the color of your eyeshadow might change your
attitude toward joint finances (though, really, who knew?).

It was Joya who suggested that he stop acting so superior and go to
the reunion; since she was five years older, she would also be at hers.
Would that give him enough courage? They could stay with their mother
and get extra credit. "You'd never guess, but these things are a hoot,"
said Joya. "And you've got Greenie—she'll be like Debbie Reynolds, the
perfect socializing spouse. You probably won't have to say a word, just
look at everybody's name tag and go, 'Oh wow! Do you look fantastic!'
and Greenie'll do all the schmoozing. The food at
my
fifteenth was surprisingly
good, and I won a weekend in the Poconos by remembering
more teachers' names than anyone else. Of course, I also remembered
which ones had been sleeping around and with
whom.
Too bad I wasn't
so great at memorizing presidents or capitals."

In the end, Greenie did not come, because they'd had their worst fight
yet two nights beforehand. She was barely speaking to him the Friday
morning of the reunion, and he was still too raw to apologize. Screw
her,
he thought as he threw his clothes into a bag and called New Jersey
Transit. This rage and his longing for Joya—who would give him a
rough time but drink him under the table and make him laugh—carried
him in full righteous dudgeon all the way to the rail station parking lot
in Hazlet, where his mother picked him up. In the car, he discovered that
a threatened strike having something to do with the BART had kept
Joya back in San Francisco. "Darling, you'll have a lovely time," said
his mother. And she proceeded to name various neighbors happily greeting
their grown children for the very same occasion. She did not ask
why Greenie wasn't with him. This was the one advantage to having a
mother who lived in constant fear of the unexpected.

In his old bedroom—now a guest room with twin four-poster beds
and a large pastel portrait of his mother as a teenage girl with cocker
spaniel hair—he threw his bag down on one mattress and collapsed on
the other. "Darling?" his mother called up the stairs after an hour had
passed. "Darling, your party starts in half an hour, I think. You can keep
the car as long as you like." Her querulous voice irritated him, if only
because his mother, poor woman, now carried all his projected fury at
both his wife and his sister. Well, screw the lot of 'em, he just
would
have a good time. Without bothering to shower or change into the white
shirt and festive red tie he'd packed at Joya's urging, he went downstairs,
kissed his mother and, as if he were seventeen all over again, took
the keys to her car.

Gyms. Jesus. Why did they hold these affairs in gyms? The
associations—teams you didn't make, games you lost, coaches who bullied
you . . . girls who refused to dance when you finally got up the nerve
to ask—were all horrendous. And the smells; you didn't even have to
conjure those up from the past, since a fresh crop of youthful armpits
had seasoned the space that very afternoon.

Alan made his way to a long table with jugs of budget booze. Because
he had driven so fast, he was one of the first to arrive. He'd glanced at
the waiting array of name tags and spotted several familiar last names,
but often the first names attached were those of siblings to the people
he'd known. The one high school friend with whom he stayed in occasional
touch wouldn't be here; he lived in Texas, and his wife (though
Alan had not told Greenie) was eight months pregnant.

As the men arrived, Alan saw with grim satisfaction that every one of
them wore not just a tie but a jacket. Those jackets would be shed, but
still, here was Alan in a denim shirt that seemed to shout, "Look how
cool and rebellious I am!" A statement Alan the therapist would have
deemed vaguely hostile in a context like this.

Alan's high school was the sort of place that sent just about everyone
safely off to college—to colleges from which they would emerge, also
safely, into lifelong servitude (sometimes happily) as lawyers, dentists,
accountants, and sales reps. To wind up as a shrink; well, Alan might as
well have become a dedicated surfer, traveling the world in search of the
perfect monster wave. I should have worn a
Hawaiian
shirt, he reflected
as he cruised the room with his second gin and tonic.

He roamed from one end of the basketball court to the other, scanning
chests more often than faces since he could not remember too well
what some of these faces might have looked like fifteen years before—
forget how they might have evolved. As he did this, looking up now and
then to exchange a quick rodent grin with yet another stranger, his roving
glance was stalled when he ran into someone wearing what
appeared to be the very same denim shirt that he wore. Before he could
read the name tag on the shirt, he recognized the voice.

"Little
brother,
" said the voice, and a long-forgotten chill shot
through Alan, pleasure and sorrow all at once, from one end of his spine
to the other.

Alan, as Greenie had so accurately assessed him soon after they met,
was a man of cool temper. ("Whatever's the opposite of Latino—that's
you.") But before Greenie knew him, Alan had been a boy, a teenage
boy, with a body as tortured as any other boy's, and it was his body that
remembered the voice.

"So, where is she? Did she wimp out? I bet she did."

"Marion," said Alan, and suddenly he felt the cheap gin quite viscerally:
in his bloodstream, in his brain cells, in his fingertips and pupils.
"Marion!"

She took hold of his right upper arm, just a shade too tightly, the way
she had done when they were kids, a gesture of teasing domination.
"How are you, Alan?"

"I'm fine," he said.

"Not to ignore you—because, God, here you are all grown up and
looking like a wild one, like one who escaped!—but where's Joy? I
meant to call her, but since I saw her at the last one, I just assumed I'd
see her here."

"She's in San Francisco."

Marion laughed. "She lives there? How funny. I'm moving there in a
couple of months. To Berkeley."

It was the same shirt, the exact same shirt—oddly, covering a chest
far less enticing than the one he remembered from the upstairs hallway,
the breasts he could just make out through her nightgown whenever
she'd spent the night in Joya's room. And now Alan was the taller of the
two—though he still felt small beside her, small yet happy. (God, he had
forgotten all about gin.)

Her hair. In high school, Marion had forced her bushy, obstinate hair
into a braid that fell below her waist. Now, it struck Alan, her hair looked
almost identical to his: short, curly, and dark, brindled with gray, standing
up fiercely away from her head. She looked . . . militant, Alan decided.
Was she gay? How odd that would seem. Alan might not remember the
faces of classmates he'd passed in the halls for four years, but how
minutely he could remember trying to listen, often successfully, to the conversations
between his sister and Marion on the other side of his bedroom
wall. He could remember trying to use a terra-cotta flowerpot as an
amplifier, placing its wide mouth against the wall, pressing his ear to the
drainage hole. How many boys had he heard the two girls dissecting like
frogs in science class? How many nights had he gone to bed just a hand's
width from Marion's body, only inches of wall between them, bringing
his agony and fascination to a hard, thrilling crescendo just before sleep?

"So, little brother—
not
-so-little brother—are you married?" She
glanced around and behind him suggestively.

"I am. But my wife couldn't make it. And please stop calling me
that."

"Children? Pull out the pictures."

"No. Not yet anyway."

"Watch out there. We are not as perpetually youthful as so many of
us seem to be assuming."

Marion did not appear to be drinking anything, but she did seem
charged up with mischievous elation. Someone had made the studious
decision to put not just people's names and classes on their paper badges
but their professions as well—or, apparently, whatever they had filled in
on that line of the reunion questionnaire. Marion's name tag identified
her, in some cheerleader's round, girlish script, as
LIFE STUDENT, AD INFINITUM
.
(Alan felt doltishly envious; his read
PSYCHOTHERAPIST/COUPLES COUNSELOR
,
the last word squashed below the other
two, as if cowed into the corner of a room.)

"I like your chosen career," he said.

"I didn't really choose mine, but I do like
yours,
" she said. "What's
your score on the couples?"

Alan rattled the ice in his plastic cup. He laughed nervously. "Score?"

"How many've stayed, how many split?"

"I don't keep track," he said. "Maybe I should."

"People don't ask when they come to see you? Like, who'd hire a broker
without asking how many good investments he'd made?"

"No," he said. "Kind of funny, I guess, now that you make that
analogy. But in theory, I'm not a fixer. I'm a . . . sounding board, a safe
zone, a giver of permission to say whatever you need to say without . . ."
He faltered as he tried to read her expression. Was it mocking?

"Without being tossed in the wood chipper? That's hard work. I'm
serious." She looked at his hands, at the rattling ice. "Let's fix you up
there."

They walked to the bar, where Alan poured himself another metallic-tasting
cocktail and Marion poured herself cranberry juice. Had she
quit her hellion ways? Because
she
had always been the wild one, so if
she was now on the wagon, he had to admire her bravery in coming to
one of these sloshfests.

At the drinks table, Alan was accosted by a classmate he barely
remembered, a guy who claimed they'd been in Boy Scouts and swimming
lessons together. Jim and his wife, Stephanie, ran a small company
that sold prostheses. Alan fought the childish urge to guffaw at their
earnest description of how they'd fallen into this line of work (she'd
been a physical therapist, he an M.B.A. with entrepreneurial yearnings).
Alan examined their limbs as surreptitiously as he could, but all eight
appeared to be quite real. Over their shoulders, he kept an eye on Marion,
who had wandered across the gym and seated herself on the bleachers.
She was reading something.