The Whole World Over (30 page)

Dinner was late, so Greenie gave George a hot dog and put him to
bed while McNally quartered heads of iceberg lettuce and smothered
them with blue cheese dressing. A basket of Greenie's whitest bread sat
smack in the center of the table; no flowers here. Nor were there candles,
which would have guttered in the cross breeze created by numerous
fans, the only relief from the heat that had finally breached the
stone walls. By the time Greenie sat down, the conversation was nothing
but cattle: the best way to ship sperm (UPS, over dry ice, the general
favorite); whether calving was safer when induced (higher vet bills but
fewer stillbirths and less time wasted waiting, Claudia argued); whether
the Brits and their idiotic denial of mad cow disease had blown their
beef industry permanently to hell (the farmers over there were downtrodden
wimps and losers, said Ray).

Ray's and Claudia's voices were so strident—with Ray's men joining
in—that Greenie and Other Charlie sat mostly in silence. They'd wound
up on opposite sides and opposite ends of the long table, so all they
could do in their shared exile was exchange their covert amusement
from a distance, especially when Ray and Claudia began to debate the
ideal way to bed a barn with straw once calving season came.

"High, deep, and fresh is best for babies and mamas," said Claudia.

"I see
you
don't clean the barns and haul the manure," said Ray.

"You do?" she shot back.

"We aim to conserve on this ranch. Waste not and all that."

Claudia laughed. She took the last piece of bread from the basket and
wiped the last gravy from her plate. "Oh Ray, cows are never about conservation.
Switch to soybeans and we'll talk conservation." She took a
bite of the bread and stared kindly at Ray as she chewed. "Here's how I
see it. The cow's udder is just like a dinner plate." She gestured at her
own plate, cleaned nearly to a polish. "If it's dirty, the baby's exposed to
more germs. Not good, right? Know what? More straw, less dependence
on antibiotics. Now never mind the public hysteria; which costs more,
straw or drugs?"

Ray listened, sipping his beer.

"And the hauling and spreading, smart guy? More straw makes for
better fertilizer out on the fields and gardens. I rest my case." She finished
her bread with relish. Greenie could see that she was the kind of
woman who ate to her heart's content without a second thought, without
gaining an ounce. She had the body (and the voice) of a warrior
goddess. She seemed impervious even to the warmth of the kitchen, the
only one at the table whose face did not shine.

Greenie caught Other Charlie's eye. They laughed openly, helplessly.

"You eastern slugs just help yourselves to more mashed potatoes,"
said Ray. "Let the cowfolk reign supreme." He waved his fork in the air,
lasso style.

"Don't pretend you know a thing about roping," said Claudia. "I've
seen you out there."

But when the sparklers were lit, the warrior cowgirl had tears in her
eyes, tears of pleasure and surprise. Ray looked happy, with himself and
with her. Other Charlie smiled down the table at Greenie.

"Okay, McNally, douse those things," Ray said after the applause.
"Burn my house down and the vengeance of my ancestral spirits shall
track you like a pack of rabid wolves. The nonendangered kind we're
still allowed to shoot."

After dinner—after Other Charlie made a laughingstock of himself
by asking for herbal tea instead of coffee—Greenie told McNally it was
her turn to wash up. Other Charlie lingered while Greenie loaded the
dishwasher and filled the cake pans with hot soapy water. "Fish and the
law," she said. "Does that make you an ichthyological lawyer?"

Other Charlie groaned. "Oh, fish are the least of it. Right now, I am
having a demolition-derby education in the measurement of dissolved-solids
concentrations and the effects of selenium on migratory waterfowl.
I am up to my neck in eco-legalese."

As Greenie listened to him speak, she recognized his precise enunciation,
something their schoolmates had mimicked, not always meanly,
behind his back. He'd been one of those kids you wanted to mock
but couldn't help admiring. She felt as if her brain were undergoing a palpable
change, a realignment of the present with her distant past, an
unforgetting.

He told her about the dam he was fighting. He told her about the
ways in which the irrigation systems of the Southwest had filled the
rivers with salt, pesticides, and other invisible pollutants; how downstream,
across the border, entire regions of Mexico that were once fertile
now lay fallow and useless.

"You can't borrow water from a river like money from a bank," he
said. "Money that's soiled and crumpled doesn't lose its value. But
water—well, there's no interest you can pay that will restore water to its
original purity."

"So the fish die," said Greenie.

"Yes, but listen, the fish are . . . it's a longer story."

Greenie had turned to oiling McNally's iron skillets. The first wonderfully
chilly night air began to drift through the windows. When
Greenie stopped to close the one right beside her, she saw Other Charlie,
his passionate gestures, reflected in the glass. Except for the roiling of
the dishwasher, the house around them was silent. Greenie realized,
briefly, that she did not know if Claudia had left or stayed. "Tell me the
longer story," she said.

So Other Charlie told her about dams, how they had irrigated but
would ultimately ruin the West. In the desert, he told her, dams sent
water to places where there would have been none—and took water
away
from places where there had been, perhaps, just enough. He told
her how, every summer now, stretches of the Rio Grande went dry for
miles on end, stranding the fish.

"The truth is," he said after a long pause, "I don't really care about the
fish—or I do, I do, but not like the biologists who want to preserve them.
To me, the fish are a wedge. Defending wildlife is a way to defend the
land, foil development, try to make people see the idiocy of what they're
doing to the aquifers, to the rivers, to the whole system of life in this
part of the world. It just wasn't meant to include so many people! It
wasn't meant to grow cotton or grapes, forget about Kentucky bluegrass
and heirloom roses!"

Greenie confessed that she hadn't known what an aquifer was before
she came west. "If you'd asked me to guess, I'd have said a piece of
scuba diving equipment, like the mouthpiece you breathe through."

Other Charlie did not laugh. "Nobody knows these things! Everybody
knows what a Jacuzzi is, what a pulsing-massage showerhead is,
but what do they know about water itself and where it comes from?
Nada. That's what."

"I'm glad you're so passionate," she said.

"Yes! And I shouldn't feel so alone!"

"My mother always said you were a boy prematurely sure of yourself."
Greenie saw his frown deepen. "She meant it as a compliment,
Charlie. She said you were someone to keep an eye on."

"Your mother had a lot of opinions."

"I miss her opinions," said Greenie.

He was quiet for a moment before he said, "They were still pretty
young, weren't they?"

"Yes. And they were just beginning to really enjoy George. My
George."

"Was that your George, running around the house before dinner?"

"Yes." She asked him if he had children.

"I wish I did. I've never been married. Almost, but no. Too much
school, too much moving around."

Loudly, the dishwasher shifted cycles, startling both of them. Other
Charlie looked at his watch and exclaimed at the time. The roads would
be empty, she reminded him. It wasn't her place to offer him a bed, and
Ray had long since disappeared.

Greenie closed the front door behind Other Charlie and waved him
off, glad to have seen him, but again—as she had felt in the kitchen at
the mansion, breaking eggs for the Water Boys' orange soufflé—also
glad to see him go.

WHEN GREENIE AND OTHER CHARLIE
were in high school, Greenie's
mother hired him to cut grass, trim hedges, rake leaves, shovel snow—
all the chores generally done back then by the fathers in Greenie's neighborhood.
George Duquette exempted himself from lawn work to tinker
obsessively with his sailboat. The vessel, its mast removed, its deck protected
by canvas, wintered not in a boatyard but high on a cradle that
dominated the Duquettes' back lawn. It was a fine old wooden boat, a
folkboat sloop, and as Greenie grew older, watching her father stroke,
sand, smooth, varnish, sometimes merely stand back to contemplate the
cetacean curve of its hull, she came to see exactly why boats were and
would always be unquestionably female.

Greenie and Other Charlie weren't friends, not exactly, but they had
friends in common. So in addition to seeing him at school and at parties,
some afternoons she would come home to find him at her kitchen
counter, sweaty and rumpled, eating her mother's homemade cheese
sticks and drinking iced tea. Olivia would prepare dinner while quizzing
Other Charlie about algebra or baseball or what he might know about
changing the washer on her sputtering faucet.

Sometimes it felt to Greenie not as if she had a classmate who worked
around her home to make pocket money—the way Greenie did by babysitting
and passing trays of deviled eggs at cocktail parties—but as if she
went to school with the family handyman. Sometimes she would blush
when she saw him in school, as if he didn't belong there.

The summer before they went away to college, Olivia hired Other
Charlie to paint the house. Greenie was around that summer, working
as a waitress at a steak house. In the mornings, before she went to
work, she would loaf around the house and read, or sunbathe on the
patio. More than once, she would look out a window and see, right
there, Other Charlie's studious, slightly scowling face. They'd wave at
each other and smile, but the windows were closed against the heat, so
they rarely spoke.

One day, waking late, she went into her bathroom and was stunned
to see the small window occupied entirely by a very close view of a
man's naked chest, speckled with white paint. The man's head (and she
knew it must be Other Charlie's, not that of the assistant he'd hired) was
well above the window, and she could tell from the movement of the
muscles that his left arm was reaching, over and over, to paint the triangular
space under the peak of the roof above her. Before she closed the
inner shutters for privacy—she wasn't quite sure whose—she put her
face close to the glass, mesmerized by the long band of hair that ran
down the center of his torso, widening slightly at the navel. It was the
translucent blond of honey. So was the patch of springy hair in the pale
hollow beneath his outstretched arm.

Because she was dating someone else, Greenie became confused when
Other Charlie invaded her dreams with his lean, furry chest and striving
arms. In one dream, he was speckled white not with paint but with
sugar. She was relieved when the house was finished and she no longer
had to confront this alluring yet distant boy in her kitchen, in her waking
views of the world, even walking on the roof above her bed, his
casual steps resonating quietly through her being, commanding her
from a height. Her relief was undermined when Olivia announced that
dear Charlie Oenslager had done such a superb job that he deserved a
vacation. She had invited him to bring a friend and be their guest up in
Maine. "I think he's a darling, don't you?" said Greenie's mother.
Greenie had no choice but to agree.

"
THIS IS YOUR ROOM, AND THIS
, more significantly, is your
door. Any bedlam in which you care to live ends there, and you
close it so that I do not have to share the scenery." Walter swung the
door to and fro, as if demonstrating a revolutionary product. "You may
strew clothing every which way in here, as long as I can't smell it, but no
food. Food attracts roaches. You may not know about roaches in
swanky Corte Madera, but they are repulsive, dirty, and look like creatures
out of Japanese sci-fi movies, a genre I do not care for."

He led Scott to the kitchen. "The fridge. Basically empty because I let
other people feed me. That's why I do what I do! If you prefer to feed
yourself, that's fine. Only please keep an eye on the science projects.
Ditto my caution about those Japanese films. Sponges, by the way, are
in that drawer to the left of the sink. We encourage the use of sponges."
He crossed the room and opened the pantry door. "Because this is New
York, where closets are about as common as Tasmanian devils, you
will find clean sheets and towels up there"—he pointed to a high shelf,
above the jarred spices he never used—"and laundry, by the way, gets
done on the other side of the playground. I'll give you a neighborhood
tour on the way to the restaurant.

"Speaking of the neighborhood—I will say this only once because
your mother would have my hide—but the closest and most varied
source of inexpensive condoms is the chain pharmacy at the end of the
block: go out the front door and turn right. As for nightly visitors, all I
ask is that you remember about the door, about noise, and by the way,
no drugs. Period. Nancy Reagan was right about that.

"And speaking of thin Republican women, your mom asked that I try
to ensure you pierce no further body parts while under my roof nor
deface them with permanent illustrations. I don't see how I could practically
prevent such actions, were you to suspend what I have a hunch is
your generally decent judgment, but if you consider my generosity in
other areas, I'm hoping that may count for something. Sort of like
Mafia protection. Think of me as your personal Don Corleone, without
the hit men."

"Like don't you mean Tony Soprano?" This was the first evidence
that Scott was actually listening. For most of Walter's speech (which he
had rehearsed silently on the bus to Newark Airport), the expression on
Scott's face was disturbingly akin to blank. It did not help that he
arrived wearing a T-shirt which read, in a font you'd expect to see on a
law firm's letterhead,
GRABBER, BOODIE & DEWITT
. (Honestly now, if
you wanted vulgar, you could execute it with far more verve than
that.
)

"So you're with me?" said Walter.

Scott smiled. "All sounds cool to me, Uncle Walt. You're the man."

"You may call me Walter. I think that will go over better at work,
don't you?"

"Hey, it's copa. Whatever suits. Am I supposed to like not be your
nephew?"

"Of course you're my nephew. I can be as nepotistic as I darn well
please. I'm the boss," said Walter. "As you say, I am
the man.
"

Scott sat down on the leather couch—could sitting and sprawling be
a single action?—right next to The Bruce. T.B. had been feigning relaxation;
throughout Walter's tour, his eyes had never left Scott. Scott started
petting him now, and T.B. accepted the affection with wary pleasure.

"You know," said Walter, "if you don't mind, I was thinking you
could also walk this guy a couple of mornings, which would permit me
to get to the gym before work. It much improves my mood." He also
liked the idea of Scott doing the hand-off to surly, gum-snapping Sonya.
The two of them might just have something in common. Now that Scott
was actually in Walter's home—complete with grotty duffel bag, guitar
case covered with holographic stickers, and a gaudy medallion that
looked like something Prince Charles had worn at his Duke of Earl
coronation—Walter did see him as a prototypical teenager. But after
all, this was part of the adventure! Like hosting an ambassador from
one of those brand-new African countries that kept cartographers on
their toes.

"Unpack, have a beer, whatever," said Walter. "And why don't you
call your mom; I put a phone in your room. I'll take you over to the
restaurant in an hour. Hugo's got his hands on the first truly fabulous
corn of the season."

BACK IN EARLY JUNE, WALTER HAD HAD
a moment's hesitation,
wishing he could take back his offer to Scott, when he discovered that
Gordie had moved into a place of his own. Walter found this out from
his trainer at the gym, who was the trainer of every important homosexual
man between Fourteenth and Canal and the only person Walter
knew who seemed to get the dish before Ben overheard it at the bar. The
first few days after hearing this news, he was constantly alert for the
phone, sure that Gordie would call. Walter imagined their reunion in
various locations: perhaps Gordie would summon Walter to his office—
now inconceivable to Walter as a place in which to do business—or perhaps
they would meet somewhere public, at the restaurant or in the
park by the playground, all their mutual longing inflamed by their
inability to act it out there and then. The public scenario was sexier, but
either would be fine, so Walter dressed each morning prepared for
Gordie's summons, choosing clothes that were silky or crisp, fine to the
touch and easy to remove.

After the third or fourth day without a call, Walter told himself Gordie
needed to settle in first. He imagined Gordie unpacking possessions—
not many, because the one who is left is the one who gets to keep the
goodies—and carefully lining up books in a new bookcase, plates in a
new cupboard, shirts in a new closet. Walter tried to dream up the perfect
house gift: maybe an antique Pendleton blanket, to acknowledge
Gordie's nostalgia for his western roots? No, those were passé. A bowl?
Too formulaic, too
passive.

One day Walter went into an ethnic-goods shop run by a fellow
whose eye for beauty made up for his infuriating ennui toward customers.
(With lessons from Walter, or maybe just a good dose of Paxil,
the man could have had a chain of successful shops, a far more sophisticated
version of Pier 1.) There, he found a shirt from India, ivory linen
embroidered, almost invisibly, with elephants and monkeys. It had the
same collarless neckline that Gordie seemed to favor when he didn't
have to wear a tie. Walter wrapped it himself, in orange rice paper tied
with chartreuse ribbon.

This cheerful present sat on Walter's neglected dining table for two
weeks before he realized that Gordie was never going to call. The indifferent
shopkeeper took the shirt back in exchange for a huge black basket
that Walter placed in a corner of his spare room. Scott could use it
for dirty laundry.

One of Walter's waitresses fixed him up with a flutist. Except for mild
middle-age spread, the guy was handsome—and quite enduring in the
sack—but during their third week he confessed to a slight anxiety that
Walter's astrological sign was generally not a good match for his. Would
Walter go to the flutist's astrologer and let her take a look at their
moons and other mitigating factors? "It's on me, of course," said the
flutist.

"I would not," said Walter, though he smiled as he said it. "I do not
think in purple, I'm sorry." They lasted another week, and then the
flutist went on tour. At least the ending was easy. No fuss, no muss.

And then, of course, it happened. In the pharmacy, in the toothpaste
section. Walter was searching for the mint-flavored dental tape he liked
best when the hand touched his shoulder. He jumped, as New Yorkers
will at any unexpected touch in public.

"Oh—I never meant to scare you, I'm sorry! How
are
you?"

Walter knew desperate phony cheer a mile away.

"Gordie," he said smoothly. "I thought you must've moved to
Argentina."

"I'm just so busy now, and I've been spending my weekends out in
Sag Harbor. But I've been wanting to call."

Walter smiled at Gordie and held his gaze but said nothing. He
wanted Gordie to falter.

"You heard I moved to Chelsea. I imagine everyone has."

"Yes, I heard that."

"I've been wanting—needing time alone. For a while."

"Poor Stephen," said Walter.

Gordie frowned. "That sounds odd, coming from you. Don't you
think?"

Walter sighed. "I guess I have to empathize with him at some point,
wouldn't you say?"

Now Gordie looked angry. "Well, I do too, in fact. You don't even
know what went on between us. And actually, we still see each other
and talk. It's not like I don't know what a schmuck I've been, but I still
hope we're going to be friends. It's hard, harder than you can guess."

Walter put a hand on Gordie's shoulder. "You're right. I'm not in
your life anymore, so I'm in no place to judge. We're also in no place to
talk about this. I mean, at the dental floss display?" As he gestured at
the legions of little white boxes suspended in midair, he saw it, the one
he wanted. He took it down.

Gordie said, "Walter, someday I'm going to call you, you know.
It's not like I think it's over between us. But this is not my finest hour,
and I . . ."

"I know," said Walter. "You have to go it alone."

Gordie stared at him, perhaps searching for any hint of sarcasm. In
truth, there was none. Walter did not want to understand—he did not
want Gordie to seem anything other than ignoble, yellow-bellied, glib—
yet understand he did. He wanted to tell Gordie that his heart was still
broken, though that would never be wise, least of all in the CVS, within
reach of a placard on gum disease, complete with graphic photos.

"You know exactly where to find me," he said, and did something
unexpected to both of them. He kissed Gordie on one of his lovely
clean-shaven cheeks. Just one.

Vell and graciously done,
said the spirit of Granna when Walter left
the store by himself and welcomed, for just an instant, the onslaught of
midsummer air. Two days later, Scott arrived.

AT LEAST TO BEGIN WITH
, Scott was elaborately thoughtful. He
seemed to pad through rooms like a cat walking through broken glass;
he closed doors with extreme tact; he left not a single dirty mug or sweatshirt
lying around the apartment. He also took The Bruce on walks far
longer than Walter did. Scott would come back with reports of the
places he'd discovered: Tompkins Square Park, the concrete Picassos off
LaGuardia Place, the building painted with parachuting pigs, the block
where the Hell's Angels parked. T.B. began to seem both more rested
and more alert. His eczema faded.

At the restaurant, Scott was responsible for collecting and tallying
receipts from Ben and for running Hugo's errands. Though Ben and
Hugo already liked their jobs, they liked them better than ever now.
Walter was indeed The Man.

Late at night, Walter would sometimes wake to a muffled wailing.
The first time, it alarmed him so deeply that he crept out into the dark
living room carrying a glass paperweight he kept on his bedside table.
The next few times, he lay awake fighting the urge to get prissy. But then
he became accustomed to the sound of teenage angst in musical form,
accompanied by instruments that sounded like colliding trains. He
would go back to sleep thinking how proud Granna would be. Tolerance,
she'd told him once, was
also
next to godliness. It was like a cleanliness
of temper, she explained. The young Walter wanted to ask her just
how tolerant she thought
God
was, but he kept that to himself, along
with the void where his piety ought to have been.

He could not help seeking parallels between himself as Scott's generous
uncle and Granna as his own kindhearted warrior angel. There was
a pretty significant difference, however. Werner and Tipi might be many
deplorable things, but unlike Walter and Werner's parents, they were
not a pair of drunken, selfish losers deluded by a lethal mix of narcissism
and cultural indignation (okay, perhaps a little war trauma, too).
Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning,
productive citizens—but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had
a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of
those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

Walter and Werner's father, August—ha! as if there'd been a grain of
nobility or summery splendor in the man!—had the bad fortune to fight
in Vietnam (though he did so by choice). This was followed by the more
ambiguous fortune of being shot—clean through the center of his right
palm, so that he did not come close to dying but did require prolonged
therapy to regain the use of his dominant hand. Despite a nearly complete
recovery (the hand ached in cold weather, and the palm did not
flex), he returned home to his wife and children a political cynic and
grade-A drinker. He was predictably unpredictable and around home
too much for everyone's comfort.

Werner, who was five years older than Walter, retained earlier, kinder
memories of their father—he could even recall the bowling alley where
August had kept the long runways polished, the sodapop stocked, the
rental shoes lined up on their shelves like soldiers awaiting deployment—
but Walter had been too young to remember those days. All he could
remember now was the impossibility of knowing whether the dad he
would see at the end of a schoolday would help him with his homework
or complain, in an escalating rant, about the injustice of the world.

When the bowling alley closed, August Kinderman had enlisted, and
his wife and two sons had moved from Boston to the small town in
western Massachusetts where August's mother lived. Granna was still
vigorous, recently widowed, and happy to help with her grandsons.
Walter noticed that she was a little bossy with his mother—he could
remember Granna resetting the table when Rose didn't do it quite her
way and wondering aloud if the younger woman's skirts were just a little
too short—but she treated her grandsons with pure adoration. She
would sing Bing Crosby songs as she washed and pressed their little
shirts for school, as she baked them strudel and kugel ("Oh vould you
like to sving on a star, carry moonbeemps home in a char . . ."). She
papered her kitchen walls with their paintings and crookedly penciled
compositions and let them run freely about until dark to play with other
children down her nice little street of matchbox houses and beds of
striped petunias.