The Whole World Over (4 page)

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.

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 held 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.

"Ben, tell me what you think: do we need these newfangled vodkas,
these Martha Stewarty concoctions with verbena, rosemary, hooey like
that? Have you
seen
those giant billboards all over creation?"

Ben shook his head. "Hooey. Like you say." He was loading the dishwasher
and did not look up. With those dark curls and that heavy gold
hoop distending an earlobe, the man resembled a pirate. Give him an
eyepatch, a parrot, a treasure map, and
le voilà!
Resolutely, Walter did
not focus on the arms, the shoulders, that perfect parcel of a derriere
(speaking of treasure). He had taken home many a prime derriere from
this bar, Walter had, but here was one line he did not cross: hot for an
employee.

But hot—hot was not the problem anymore. Not that hot had ever,
really, been a
problem.
Oh for the days of such an uncomplicated itch.
Walter remembered the very apex of those days, five and a half years
back, when he had been thrilled and amused to realize what a cornucopia
he'd made for himself. It was just after the restaurant had hit its
stride, the first summer Sunday of sleeves rolled high, of crisp new
shorts, the first stretches of smooth skin made brown by the sun, not by
some phony, viperous purple lamp. (No inauthentic tans for Walter.)
Solicitously cruising the dining room and the patio out front—cruising
legitimized!—Walter had had a revelation: running a restaurant gave
you a free look at the local wares. And here in particular—well, the men
who relished eating this way were the men Walter relished himself.
None of those chalky, bare-boned boys who ate at macrobiotic cafés,
places that smelled of soy sauce, sawdust, and low-rent pot. Those
places were for people who planned to live forever, paying the price of
pinched exuberance in everything they ate, read, and probably even
dreamed. Yoga, yogi, yogurt: all to be avoided like . . . like sock garters,
beer from Milwaukee, and flat-bottomed ice cream cones made of packing
foam.

How he wished that unrequited hot were the problem. No, the problem
was love. Walter had fallen . . . no, had
somersaulted
into love—
a tender yet lunatic devotion to
this
man, this man and no other, ad
infinitum. It did not matter that this was what he'd always craved (who
didn't?). He'd felt safer, however, when the craving was generic, when it
was simple, bland loneliness late at night, a predictable given, and not
this desperate, specific yearning. But he had not hunted it out! It had
fallen quite rudely upon him, a piano let go by a busted pulley ten stories
above the street where he happened to be standing. No one knew,
no one
would
know—of that he'd been determined—for he had suspected
he could wait it out, just let it fade, however slowly.

Well, he had suspected wrong. He had now turned the corner from
suffering to scheming, and nothing good, he suspected, could come of it.
But, once again, he could be suspecting wrong.

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE
: that was what got him in trouble. As he
had watched the men around him—friends, customers, neighbors—
dropping not like flies (what a trivializing expression) but like soldiers
in World War I (the far too numerous deaths all senseless, gruesome,
way too early, so painful to witness that even remembering the lives preceding
these deaths became unbearable), he had seen up close the messy
complications that arose when they'd made no formal will. Lovers disenfranchised,
pets put to sleep, objects of sentiment smashed or sold in
acts of contentious revenge. In short, pandemonium.

Walter hated pandemonium. Take, for example, his closet. Open it
and you would see an array of modest garments (yes, the occasional silk
this or that, the one pair of cashmere trousers bought in a wave of
despondence and now mostly shunned by association), but it was an
array so orderly you'd have guessed the wearer of these garments to be a
Swiss sanitation engineer or a microbiologist with the CDC who dabbled
in butterfly collecting. The walls of the closet were lined in cedar,
sachets of dried rosebuds suspended above to obfuscate the scent. (The
drawback to cedar was that it made you smell like a Colorado forest—
unfortunate shades of John Denver.)

Walter cared not for costly rugs or antiques—his furniture was new,
sharp, and sleek—and he loved his dog too much to care about hairs on
the sofa. Walter wasn't anal (make that
compulsive
), but when he left
home each day, he walked out into the world looking as much like a
model as he could. Not a fashion model—though he
was
tall and strong,
he did have that—but a role model, a model of . . . well, of propriety and
seemliness, his Lutheran grandmother would have said. She, not his
slovenly, self-destructive parents, had been his example and personal
muse, and he tried to live by her principles—most of them. Like her
quite correct loathing of street vernacular: "the language of stevedores
and ruffians." Not a
damn
or a
Christ
would escape Walter's lips, and
certainly not what Granna had called the Carnal Words—though in
certain exceptional contexts, he did not mind hearing such words from
other men's lips.

In Walter's kitchen, the one bit of decor that clashed with his marble
counters and leather-saddled stools was a trio of samplers Granna had
stitched:

Pleasant hours fly fast.

Ask favors neither of the tides nor of the wind.

I will live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.
This one was his favorite. It depicted a cross-stitched house with a red
roof, a stream of blue
x
's drifting like motherly kisses from the chimney,
a pink-and-green rosebush like a polka-dotted golf ball, and, in the foreground,
a large black angular Scottie. Did the sentiment come from the
dog? You had to laugh freely at that.

One night the previous fall, after coming home late, Walter stood in
his kitchen, drank too much bourbon, and dolefully contemplated the
samplers—as objects, not as wisdoms. Naturally, they made him think
of the past—which he had been doing already that night, grieving over
what he hoped, yet again, would be the last early death of a good friend:
Michael B, who'd waitered with him (on roller skates!) nearly twenty
years ago at a big touristy restaurant across from Lincoln Center. Walter
had gone directly from the memorial service to work that evening, thus
having to endure not only seven extra hours of his funeral suit but
thoughtless remarks from regulars such as "My but aren't
we
looking
spiffy" and even—this from a rich young twerp straighter than a Mormon
Eagle Scout—"Yo, did someone die?" Of all the friends who
became sick, Michael B had been the one to hang on longest, so that
finally no one took his hospital sojourns too seriously, not even Michael
B himself. "He's in again," someone would say, making a brisk round of
calls. And then everybody would visit, but they'd no longer visit with
great bouquets of lilies to hide their fearful expressions. No, they'd
make the visits a bit of a party now. They came in twos and threes, bringing
phallus-shaped cakes, obscene magic tricks, balloons with foofy
children's TV stars: Blue, Barney, that purple Teletubby who'd been
outed by some clearly closeted televangelisto. Resilience incarnate, that
was Michael B.