The Whole World Over (69 page)

Greenie jumped at the sound of Ray's voice. She had not expected to
see him that morning.

"Didn't mean to scare the pants off you, girl."

"Oh Ray, look at
you.
"

"Well, no, look at that. Hot dog, Ms. Duquette. Hot dog, and jump
up singin'!" He gazed with awe at his wedding cake. She had just finished
piping the flowers onto its upper tiers. Ray leaned in and held up a
finger as if to run it through the icing.

Greenie slapped his hand. "Don't you dare."

"My mama always let me steal a taste of birthday icing before my
party," he said. "She'd let me lick the beaters too."

"I am not your mama," said Greenie. "Sorry."

"Be sorry for much more than that," said Ray.

Greenie stared at him, just to stop the teasing. "Can I say, in all seriousness,
that I will miss you?"

"In all seriousness," said Ray, "I will miss you too." He clicked
together the long shiny toes of his black cowboy boots, as if in fact he
could not bear to have anything be purely serious. "Others will as well."

"I know."

"McNally won't say it, but he wants you on speed-dial."

"The feeling's mutual." She glanced at her cake: It was her Mona
Lisa. Fully assembled on the cart, it stood as tall as Ray. The air conditioner
was turned high, to keep the cake cool until Walter arrived. He
would help her move it into one of the large refrigerators and then,
before the guests arrived, out to the tent.

"Can I ask you something?" Greenie said.

"Ask away."

"Did you give Charlie his win?"

"Greenie, judges decide these things, not me. If I could've given the
man and his doggone fish a break, just to avoid a buttload of red tape
and spleen, believe you me, I would have."

"But didn't you appoint that judge?"

Ray pointed a finger at Greenie. "I don't mess with judicial matters. I
make my opinions known—I broadcast 'em far and wide, I do!—but
judges make up their own minds."

She nodded.

"Oenslager's in Sacramento now. The man is in high demand wherever
the people are thirsty."

"Or wasteful," said Greenie.

"This is not a morning on which to argue. Bad luck," said Ray. As he
had done once before, he surprised her by kissing her, quickly, on the
mouth. "That's for good luck."

"You already have it, Ray."

"I meant for you," he said. Then he left, looking glossier and more
handsome than he had ever looked, even in his tabloid days. During the
festivities, under the tent, he passed close by her once, squeezing her
shoulder and winking, but Greenie did not see Ray again that day outside
the context of a crowd. After he'd gone, she wondered if she would
ever see him again.

ONCE MCNALLY AND THE RANCH HANDS
have driven away, Walter
and Greenie start cleaning the kitchen. Greenie has sent Maria and the
others home. They worked hard enough, and she must finish packing up
the belongings she will take with her when she leaves for good.

She pulls from a shelf certain rare spices and sugars that her successor
is unlikely to use. Insulating the jars with softbound books and sheafs of
cooking notes, she packs them in a carton that came to this kitchen
holding boxes of Italian pasta. She examines the fanciful designs on a
container of sugar imported from Turkey, a favorite finish for the surface
of cookies: bearclaws, butter wafers. The large, faceted granules
glitter like bluish rhinestones; children always choose those cookies
first. She wonders if she will be able to get this sugar anymore, if borders
will tighten so austerely that she will lose some of her most precious,
treasured ingredients: the best dried lavender and mascarpone, pomegranate
molasses. But in the scheme of things, does it matter?

She comes upon her collection of vinegars, which she uses to brighten
the character of certain cakes, to hold the line between sweet and cloying.
She takes down a spicy vinegar she bought at a nearby farm; inside
the bottle, purple peppers, like sleeping bats, hang from the surface of
the liquid. Greenie used it in a dark chocolate ice cream and a molasses
pie. She will have to leave it behind.

Walter scrubs the counters—no mean task, for McNally's barbecue
sauce has dried in spatters and spills, nearly everywhere, like a sugary
version of superglue. Walter works away at the mess with a wiry pad,
still singing. He's carried the boom box back inside, and from Greenie's
neglected Broadway tapes he's chosen
Camelot.
At the moment, Robert
Goulet is doing his best to convince the world he's Lancelot, not a
lounge singer from Vegas.

Exaggerating the stuffy diction, Walter croons loudly, about cleaving
dragons and resisting the ways of the flesh. He has Greenie in stitches by
the time he cries out, "
C'est moi, C'EST MOI!
The
angels
have chose,
to fight their battles below—" He stops short, finally succumbing to
laughter himself.

"Egad." Walter lets Robert Goulet finish alone. "You know, I think
neurologists have it all wrong, the sectors of the brain." Facing Greenie,
he cups his hands over his forehead. "This part here—and it's pretty
large—is taken up with schlocky song lyrics, the ones you desperately
wish you could lose, like Captain and Tenille, disco Bee Gees. Todd
Rundgren,
for Pete's sake." He groans. "Now this part?" He spreads a
hand across the left side of his head. "This is where you've got—stored
archivally—the worst family arguments you ever had to witness or be a
part of. And this other side"—his right hand mirrors his left—"is a
grand little warehouse of all the most embarrassing sexual encounters
you've ever had to endure. In Panavision and Technicolor."

Greenie is almost always grateful for Walter's zany, tempering humor,
but today he is antic with pleasure. "Walter," she says, "if ever I saw a
man in love,
c'est vous.
"

"Is that what ails me?" He leans down to work at the knobs on the
stove, which are badly encrusted, though it's obvious that his main
intention is to hide his blushing face.

Greenie knows—and Walter knows she knows—that he and Fenno
have become nearly inseparable over the past month. Even when they
are working, Walter says, they go back and forth between the bookshop
and the restaurant (Fenno for meals, Walter during the lulls between).
She knows—because he's told her, marveled at it more than once—how
the two men came together in the midst of Walter's panic over his
nephew, how Walter now realizes that Fenno had been looking his way
for months, perhaps longer. ("My neighbor! Right there under my
snooty, vainglorious nose!") Walter jokes that it took a hit of Valium,
mixed with mortification and grief, to slow him down enough to return
the looking. "He's one of those guys," said Walter, "who's practically
incapable of making the first move—not just in love; in anything! Normally,
that would drive me berserk. My guess is that somebody up there
is telling me to chill."

Hanging about with a bookish man (whose restaurant nickname,
courtesy of Ben, evolved from Bonny to Britannica) has led Walter back
to Shakespeare. He's even begun to memorize a few soliloquies. "Please
keep reminding me it's just for
fun,
" he's told Greenie. "If you ever catch
me planning a cabaret, it's your job to shoot me."

Walter takes a break from the stove. Claiming he's had enough of
knights in shining armor, he picks through the tapes stacked loosely on
an open shelf, takes out
Camelot
and clicks in another.

"So what did he do with himself today?" asks Greenie.

"He told me his plan was just to 'faff about the town.' Don't you love
that? After today, you and I certainly deserve a bit of faffing about!"

Heartily, she agrees. Over the past month, Greenie and Walter have
spoken to each other so often, borne so much upheaval and change, for
better and worse, that they have become the most effortlessly intimate
friends.

"Maybe I shouldn't ask this," she says, "but whatever happened to
that nice lawyer, Gordie?"

"Nice? Well." Walter groans as the overture to
My Fair Lady
begins.
"I'm trying to get to the no-hard-feelings stage—which should be easy
now, right? But get this: Gordie is a friend of Fenno's. They don't see a
lot of each other, thank heaven, but ages ago they had a friend in common,
a very close friend, who died of AIDS. Which means that it's a
sentimental
connection, the kind that lasteth forever." He presses his hands
together in mock prayer. "Lessons in humility abound. . . . Though
apparently, I am not alone. According to my trainer, Gordie's been trying
to go back to his old relationship. Where he should have stayed put
in the first place! But his ex is onto something entirely new. A
baby.
So
Gordie's in purgatory. That is, until he gets distracted again." Walter
laughs derisively.

Politely, Greenie laughs too. She didn't mean to open a wound.

They work in tandem now, comfortably silent. Walter hums along
when Julie Andrews sings "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?"

Both Walter and Greenie knew people who died on September 11.
From the cooking world, Greenie knew three corporate chefs trapped in
the towers; Walter knew a flight attendant on one of the planes, though
he learned of the man's death only a week ago. But they share the good
fortune of having lost no one they love dearly—or not to death, thinks
Greenie.

She has heard Walter tell the tale of how he was certain for many
hours that his nephew had taken the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania:
how Scott—"typical lame-brain testosterone slave!"—overslept that
morning at his girlfriend's apartment and so did not bother to go to the
airport as planned; how, once it got through his blithe young skull that
the whole world was watching, he called his mother in California but
not his uncle right there in New York. Greenie pointed out that Walter
had evicted Scott; why should he have called? "Because family is family!"
Walter snapped. "Honestly now, did he think I wished he'd go down in
flames?" Only when Walter found the courage to call his brother did he
find out that Scott was alive, stuck in Brooklyn with the girlfriend on
whom Walter still liked to blame Scott's every bit of thoughtless behavior.
The Bruce was stranded right along with them. ("Did she call to
reassure me? I rest my case.")

Almost as soon as they'd heard about the first plane, Walter, Hugo,
and Ben had gone down the street to the bookshop in search of a television;
Fenno had no TV, but they wound up lingering there, for the company.
"That's where I heard about the flight from Newark—and went
ballistic," Walter confessed. Greenie doesn't have the details straight on
all the comings and goings on Bank Street that day, but she does know
how Fenno showed up at the restaurant much later, just to check on
Walter, and found him collapsed in hysteria, exhausted with abject
humiliation and grateful relief after speaking with Werner, the older
brother who, once again, knew more and had known it first. "As if
pride had a place in
anything
that day!" Walter said when he told his
tale to Greenie. Only when Fenno urged him to lock up the restaurant
did Walter realize that Ben and Hugo should go home—and that they
would not go until he did.

Once they had said good-bye to the other men, Fenno convinced Walter,
firmly and gently, that he shouldn't be alone. They went up to
Fenno's apartment, where they ate scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes,
drank Scotch, and watched a romantic old black-and-white movie
called
I Know Where I'm Going.

"The eggs were overcooked, I loathe Scotch, and the movie was like
this bizarre dream sequence with everybody trilling away in brogue on
some craggy quaint island," Walter said, "but I couldn't begin to imagine
going home, especially without T.B." He told Greenie that he and
Fenno had spent virtually the entire evening in silence ("Can you imagine
me
silent for more than about three seconds?"), talking now and
then only about the most insignificant things—food, Fenno's parrot,
the pictures of his family that stood about on shelves—until partway
through the movie.

"I think I might have dozed off," said Walter, "and when I came to, it
was in the middle of this weird dramatic scene where a wedding dress
flies off a boat in a storm and gets sucked down into a whirlpool—don't
ask!—and Fenno's looking at me, smiling, and he doesn't look away. I
said something nervous and stupid about what a terrible, terrible day it
was, how I couldn't remember a worse day in my whole life, and do you
know what he said?

"He stopped smiling, and he said he agreed with me, it was an
unimaginably terrible day, but . . . 'But as I sit here beside you, 'tis a day
I wouldn't trade for any other, not a one.' That's exactly what he said, in
that beautiful Old World voice of his. And I couldn't say a thing more,
and we watched the rest of the movie, and then we went to bed." Walter
did not bother to fight back tears when he told this bit to Greenie, but
then, embarrassed, he laughed and said, "You should see this movie,
though. It's totally wacky and totally old-fashioned but wonderful. Wonderful."
Walter is so happy these days that "wonderful" is a judgment
he passes on all manner of things several times an hour.

Greenie has never heard of this movie, but
I Know Where I'm Going
could have been the title of her bygone life. She is aware that she remains
a deeply fortunate woman, but her inner certainty, the logic of that former
self, is gone. Fate, or responsibility—or maybe Ford's ubiquitous
God—has caught up with Greenie at last.

George is fine, almost irritatingly fine. He is matter-of-fact when he
talks about that day—"the day those men crashed the towers with their
planes"—and asks questions about it as if he is a child researching a
school report on a war that took place long before he was born, but
Greenie knows she will never look at her son's future the same way
again. For the first time, she imagines him as a soldier going to war. She
can even fear that he might
choose
to fight. She still feels the urge
toward a second child, but how do you bear the anxiety of sending
two
children out into a world with so many new (or newly discovered) perils?
Of course, hasn't it been this way for most mothers in most places at
most times? Such silent debate exhausts her.