The Whole World Over (53 page)

Greenie turned to him with a gasp. He recoiled, sure that she
intended to hit him, but she threw her arms around him and held him
tight. He was pinned to her sideways, his shoulder uncomfortably
wedged between her breasts, but he made no attempt to move. He said
nothing as she cried.

When she let him go, she said, "Just promise me you won't go to
court. Promise me that."

"I promise." To Alan's surprise, Joya had already pushed him to find
a good lawyer. She was someone who lived and breathed the air of the
legal troposphere, but he had assumed she would not be so quick to
abandon her sympathy with Greenie.

They sat quietly at the table for a few minutes. Alan listened for
sounds of the outside world but heard none: no crickets, no wild animals,
no cars, not even water in the ditch out front, now apathetically
dry and sprouting weeds.

ALAN'S READING LIGHT WAS ON
, and when he sat back, its beam
shot past him directly onto George, who slept beneath a thin blue blanket
on the two seats between Alan and the window. He felt a profound,
protective relief in this island of light. The pilot had announced that he
would have to take a circuitous route to the north, to skirt a thunderstorm
building over the center of the country, but Alan did not mind the
delay.

This time he wrote to Marion about what he remembered from their
common childhood. The more he wrote, the more memories he felt
erupting in his mind. Like fireworks, they filled a vast dark space with
color and excitement—while illuminating face after face with a supernatural
clarity. What he needed to show Marion, or simply to remind
her, was that they had known each other for years, even if those years
were now long in the past. They were not two strangers who'd fallen
idly, drunkenly in bed. He was the boy who had—prehistorically, perhaps,
but it was history all the same—fallen in love with her. She was the
best friend of the big sister, the girl who'd had the grace to humor him
just enough, to never quite break his heart. He mentioned Jacob only in
passing, their meeting in Berkeley not at all.
I'm going to confess to a
fantasy,
he wrote at the end.
I like to imagine that we could go on knowing
each other, or know each other all over again, even if we hardly ever
meet. What do you think?

Alan folded the letter in thirds and tucked it into a safe pocket of his
shoulder bag. He sat back and laid his right hand on George's hip; ink
stained his thumb and middle finger. Outside, he watched the unmistakable
brilliance of Chicago rise above the wing of the plane, its shimmering
sprawl clipped into a crescent embracing the lake. From here on, he
would try to sleep. He might even, for the first time in days, sleep well.

QUITE UNLIKE HERSELF
, Greenie became superstitious. If Mike
Chu passed the side window an even number of times, Charlie
would stay; odd, he would leave her. If she found fewer than three blue
eggs among the first dozen she opened from the organic farm that delivered
on Mondays (the pullet eggs she used for omelettes and fritattas,
charmingly varied in size and color), Alan would try to take George
away for good. If Ray showed up for breakfast even seconds before the
hour, some unknown terrible thing was sure to befall her and soon; just
seconds after the hour and she would be safe. Not long ago, she would
have been surprised by this change in her nature, baffled and dismayed,
but nothing much surprised her anymore.

When she was alone with Ray, she felt sheepish—though after his initial
sermon on her infidelity, he'd never reaffirmed his disapproval.
Never again did he try to convince her that Charlie was a mistake. He
went so far as to ask if she needed a good New York lawyer to win back
George. "No," she told him. "George is where he belongs for now."
Ray nodded and said nothing further.

She no longer had the guts to partake in the political sparring matches
Ray seemed to relish. Sometimes she professed to agree with him when
she didn't. She rarely played Broadway songs before he arrived; she did
not want him to catch her in the middle of "I Feel Pretty" or "Shall We
Dance?" Even alone, she did not feel she deserved to bask in the orchestral
ardor of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the sprightly wit of Cole
Porter. It seemed improper to mime such happiness, such coy satisfaction.
Now she worked in silence; even Billie Holiday was much too
superficial.

When she was not with Charlie, she was miserable—not just because
he was elsewhere but because the tides of conscience and motherhood
rushed to fill the void. You could not lay waste to a heart without suffering
your punishment.

When she was with Charlie, Greenie was incurably happy. They spent
every night together. Even when he went to Albuquerque, he would drive
back, no matter how late, and wake her in his bed. Greenie's place was
larger and prettier, but they did not stay there. By virtue of his absence,
George was much too present. She had shipped most of his books and
toys and clothes to New York, keeping a few for his next visit. She was
to see him in New York in September; she wanted to go earlier, but Alan
was still too wounded.

So now it was Greenie who called George every day, often morning as
well as evening. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he seemed to
find his place, the rhythm of his old life made new. After one week, he
told her that Treehorn had slept beside his bed. He was over the moon.
"And Dad bought a bigger bowl for Sunny. Sunny might get bigger, like
the bowl, my dad said."

"Really?" said Greenie, fighting her selfish sorrow at George's pride
when he said "my" dad.

"Some fish do that, you know. If where they live gets bigger, they get
bigger too. We'll see, says Dad. The new bowl is called an acclarion. I
want to measure Sunny, but he won't stay still for my ruler. Dad got me
a ruler with a Spiderman that leaps when you twist it! I've learned about
inches in my school! We measured our bedrooms, you know. Mine's is
six feet in one way and eight feet in the other. We drew pictures of the
rooms. I drew Treehorn on my bed, even though Dad says she shouldn't
sleep up there."

Greenie noticed that he now said "you know" where he once said
"actually."

"Do you have friends in your new school yet?"

"Mommy, Ford! Do you remember Ford from my old school? Ford's
in my class!"

Yes, Greenie remembered Ford: Ford the Evangelist. God-Is-Everything
Ford. "That's amazing," she said. "I am so glad." Ford, Alan
told her later, was just one of several kids in the class whom George had
known in nursery school. He was doing fine, Alan reassured Greenie,
though she could tell from his guarded tone that he knew this good
news might also make her feel useless, forlorn, even guilty that taking
George with her in the first place had set him on the wrong track.

She tried not to tell George too often that she missed him. Once every
few days, she allowed herself to voice that blaring truth. In her house,
she kept the door to his bedroom closed so that she would not be
tempted to wander in, lie on his bed, hold one of his dinosaurs, and
weep. The toy horses, all but the two he'd insisted he take on the plane,
she had thrown in the garbage. She told George that their legs would
probably break in the mail, that it would be better to give them to
another child in Santa Fe who might enjoy them. She believed this was
the only outright lie she had told him. But lies and truth overlapped so
relentlessly now; that's how it was when you left a marriage, no matter
how high the ground you took. How calmly could you look at broken
vows, at certainty unraveled? Shortly before their wedding, Alan had
taken her to the Cloisters to see the Unicorn Tapestries; later, she came
to envision her marriage as a shining blue tapestry hung on a wall,
proudly, for all to see. Now it lay on the floor in heaps of tangled thread:
bright flashes of memory among the knotty strands of gray and faded
browns.

Not that she was in mourning. She loved the foursquare Boy Scout
spotlessness of Charlie's life—of his apartment, his mission, his very
soul. He did not seem to be one of those men who had never married
because he feared other people's disorder. The orderly life he led, inside
and out, was one he did not feel compelled to force on others. Greenie's
sneakers and sweaters, tossed off in exhaustion when she let herself in,
stayed where they were without comment; dustings of flour she might
leave on his counter after making a piecrust sometimes lingered until she
wiped them away the next morning. (Alan had loved her breakfast pastries
best; Charlie craved her pies. He liked them true-blue American,
folded roundabout in a blanket of pastry so that when you cut through
it, out rushed the captive soft flesh of peaches, apricots, rhubarb, berries.
His favorite was a pie she made with Anjou pears and blackberries, the
bottom lined with frangipane. If she made a pie, any pie, he would eat a
large piece at every meal, three meals a day, until it was gone. "Oh,
encore," he would say when he'd swallowed the final crumbs. And she
would make another.)

Charlie was pleased that he could live contentedly in so small a
space—Greenie knew this without hearing him say so—and he seemed
to be happier still that they could share it, if only at night and on
snatches of weekend, in a way that kept them so physically close. "I
would never want to share a house with you," he said. "You could get
too far away from me."

Small spaces are easy to share, of course, when two people are newly
in love, when every coming together ends, or begins, with sex; when
nakedness is a state both savored and taken for granted. It was a marvel
to Greenie that Charlie did not seem skittish after Alan left with
George. Secretly, she'd feared he would have to flee or at least retreat for
a time. She was wrong: it became immediately clear that he wanted to
rejoice.

For the first week, he held back because of her sadness at losing
George—but then, one evening, Charlie met her at his place with a bottle
of expensive champagne and take-out dinner from a four-star restaurant
where only Ray could get a table without a month's notice. Ray was at
the ranch, in the culinary care of McNally, so Greenie had spent the day
taking inventory in the governor's pantry, clearing out stale nuts, rancid
condiments, cereals and snacks that had lost their appeal. After that, the
weekend was hers.

She stood idly at Charlie's table examining his collection of rocks,
creating an imaginary atlas of his life from the places inscribed on their
undersides. He must have opened the door with deliberate stealth, then
set down his packages silently, for the first thing she heard was a whoop,
close behind her, and then she felt herself upended, slung over a shoulder,
thrown down on the bed. He stood above her, beaming. "You are
mine, you are mine, you are
mine,
" he said. "Tell me it's true—no, tell
me nothing, Charlie, nothing for now." He sat beside her and began,
slowly, to open her blouse.

"Nothing," she whispered. "For now."

After they made love, Charlie got to his feet and began to jump on the
bed. He wheeled his arms upward and back, like a child gaining maximum
height on a trampoline. His blond hair stood on end when he
descended, and though he was fit, his body betrayed its age, every bit of
spare flesh jostling haplessly up and down.

"Charlie, you are crazy," she said. And then something occurred
to her. "Did you win? Did you win the appeal? Is that what we're
celebrating?"

He stopped abruptly and looked down on her. She'd stayed on her
back, moving to the very edge of the mattress. He said, "I am celebrating
you."

With George, she had lived her life in close concentric circles. Despite
her determination to take him on small-boy adventures, they had hardly
ever left the city. Now Charlie took her everywhere. He drove her to
dams, so she could feel their fearsome, insidious power, a dark hum
along her skin, tunneling down to her bones. He drove her to a mesa—a
place where she felt consumed by sky—and told her about a plan to drill
for oil that would, without question, endanger the water stored up over
millions of years beneath their feet. He took her to a desolate place
where people stood in line at a pump to retrieve their water in metal
drums and haul it home in their trucks and rattletrap cars. "This water
is theirs—it comes from a river that should flow where they live—
but now, thanks to government shenanigans, it doesn't, so they have to
drive for miles to get it," Charlie told her. He wanted Greenie to know
all the things and places he knew; she had to know them not by hearing
stories or by looking at pictures—that wouldn't bring her close enough—
but by seeing them herself. He could not wait to take her to his favorite
places in Oregon, Canada, Mexico.

Yet still she felt a nervous kind of unreality, an off-balance footing, to
her altered life, to being loved with such inebriated fervor.

Being in love again summoned forth being in love before: with Alan.
She remembered their day at the Cloisters, a memory she had not examined
in years. Two weeks had remained before their wedding, and
Greenie had let herself fall prey to petty material panic. As she called
the florist in Massachusetts for a third time to make
triple
sure they
understood that the peonies on the tables had to be white,
pure
white,
she was faintly ashamed—because she knew all too well just how
appallingly a woman could behave as her wedding loomed. She had
seen brides throw last-minute fits about almond paste that tasted too
"almondy," about piped roses that looked too "crude," about white
icing that did not "precisely" match the shade of a wedding gown. Confronted
by such women, she had kept her cool by telling herself that they
would never behave so badly under ordinary circumstances, that they
would feel embarrassed later. She'd seen a yoga instructor scream herself
blue over how much she hated even the suggestion of pink; she had
listened to an investment banker whine about Greenie's "unreasonable"
policy of charging more for a five-tiered cake that would serve two hundred
guests than she would for a three-tiered cake to serve the very same
number.

Alan had walked into the kitchen for a glass of water as she was saying
to the florist, "None of those peonies with the red on the petals—
Festiva maxima, my mother says they're called. . . . No, not those,
not
those! Your e-mail mentioned freesia, but we asked for stephanotis."
She'd seen Alan set his glass by the sink and fold his arms, smiling at her
with deep amusement. After she'd hung up, he said, "Which of us will
the media be covering at this event? Will my crooked tie be mocked in
the Style section of the
Times
? Heavens, what if my shoes don't match
my belt?"

"Alan, my mother is involved here."

"Yes, and she's taken charge, as only she can do, but this is a day I
intend to . . . well, that I will try my damnedest to enjoy. Will you?"

"Of course, but—"

Very gently, Alan had clamped his hand over her mouth, and then he
had replaced his hand, for a tantalizing instant, with his mouth. He said,
"Tomorrow is your day off. You will not use it to phone seamstresses or
chauffeurs or chair rental agencies or klezmer bands. I am taking you to
see something sublime."

"What's a klezmer?" she asked.

The shuttle from the Metropolitan Museum had been packed with
their fellow cultural aspirants, all tolerant of the torn vinyl upholstery
and moldy aroma of a school bus put out to pasture. They had clung to
the seats in front of them as the bus wound jarringly up the approach to
the monastery; along with the other tourists, they murmured appreciation
for its sequestered medieval beauty.

"Eat first, then look," said Alan, who had packed the perfect picnic
according to a man: French bread, Swiss cheese, Greek olives, a tub of
hummus, sliced sausage, Granny Smith apples, and a bottle of viscous
red wine. There were paper cups and napkins, even a corkscrew, but
not the utensils with which to slice the cheese or spread the hummus.
(Greenie had brought along molasses cookies.)

In the end, she gave in happily to tearing the loaf and using the foil
cutter on the corkscrew for slicing cheese, dragging bread through
hummus, spitting olive pits into a napkin. "Your teeth are purple," said
Greenie after she sat back to look at their fairy-tale surroundings.

"Do you still want to marry me?" said Alan.

"I like purple teeth. Purple is my favorite color," said Greenie.