The Whole World Over (40 page)

"Oh Alan," said Marion, and now her voice was mournful, "I've
always been so fond of you. I don't want to have some . . . awful episode
here."

"Episode! Is that what this is? Like an all-new installment of a
TV show?"

With both hands, Marion clutched the top of the steering wheel.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That wasn't the word I meant."

"What word is there for an agenda like the one you clearly had—to
go to your high school reunion and find a sperm donor?" All at once,
Alan remembered how Joya hadn't shown up at the reunion, how supposedly
there had been a strike to break. Had Joya colluded in this?

Marion stared at him. She looked sad but also determined. "Some
women in my shoes would kick you out of this car, out of their lives
right now."

Alan stared back. "Just answer my question, Marion. Then go ahead
and call the cops if you want."

"My son is five years old," said Marion. "That's a mighty long time
in a little boy's life. Alan, he has nothing to do with you. You don't
know him, he doesn't know you. You have to let this be about him,
not you."

"I want to meet him. Can I meet him?" He hadn't expected to ask this.

"So you can see if he looks like you?"

"Then he is mine."

"He is not yours!" Marion shouted.

"Are his genes—are half of his genes mine? Okay,
from me
?"

Marion laid her forehead on the wheel. "You are obsessed by this,
aren't you?"

"What sort of a heart would I have if I weren't?"

Marion sat up. "I believed my doctors, Alan. They told me exactly
what I told you—whatever it was I told you about not having babies.
And Alan, I was honestly smitten when I saw you after all those years. I
honestly was. Smitten and charmed off my feet. I did not get a hotel
room to lure you or anybody else into a paternity trap. You have to
believe me, Alan. You have to."

She should have been crying, thought Alan, but she wasn't. Or had all
the turbulent experience of Marion's life—which made his look so damn
soft—hardened her enough that emotions like this were chaff?

"Listen," she said. "I had other . . . there was another guy not long
after, an old boyfriend. I had to—"

"Oh please. Don't insult my intelligence."

Marion startled him then by leaning across the emergency brake and
kissing him on the cheek. "Alan, whatever mistakes I may have made, it's
me who has to ask you please.
Please.
My life is complicated enough."

"Well, so is mine," said Alan, but his tone was more resigned than
angry. Now they were holding hands. He could see, from a small clock
attached to the dashboard, that it was six-thirty. "Tell me about your
husband."

"He's older. He has two kids in college," she said slowly. She sighed.
"He's an oncologist. I met him as a patient; he'd been divorced for
years."

Alan's phone, in his breast pocket, trilled its irritating birdsong.
Automatically, he took it from his pocket.

Marion laughed. "You are going to
answer
it?"

Alan stared at the phone. Still, after all these months, only Greenie
had the number. No, that was no longer true; because he was looking
after Treehorn, Fenno McLeod had the number. Alan let it ring out
and stop.

"It could be George," he explained. "Or Greenie."

"George?"

"My son."

"Your son?" Marion squeezed his hand. Now, yes, finally, there was
a hint of tears. "Oh Alan. It's wonderful, isn't it?"

"Yes, Marion, but that's not the point. Or it is the point, the point
being that I have . . . that I fathered, that I—what, sired?—
another
child
besides the one I love like the world I walk on. I would love both of
them that way, wouldn't I? I'm not saying he's 'mine' in the way you
mean, Marion. Of course I'm not! I'm not saying I have rights, I'm not
saying you have to . . ." Alan was gesturing wildly now, sitting forward
in his seat, but he stopped.

"Not saying I have to what, Alan? That part is important."

Alan looked up at Marion's house, where motion had caught his eye.
He saw a face in the front window, dark and distant. A child, his palms
flat against the window above his head. The silhouette of his hands
looked like an elaborate crest, as if the boy were pretending to be a
cockatoo or rooster. It had grown dark while Alan sat in the car with
Marion. Their faces were lit now only by streetlights.

"He's expecting me," Marion said, following Alan's glance. "He
knows my car. In a minute, he may just come running down."

"So I should go."

Marion took Alan's hand again. "At least for now."

"And for later? I'm only here a couple more days."

"I don't know. I'll call you at Joya's tomorrow."

"You need to consult with the big doctor, I suppose."

"I need to
think.
" She dropped his hand. "You like to be contentious,
don't you, Alan? I don't need to tell you that's not a good thing. Do I?"

Alan's eyes burned. "You might have told me. Even if it's true there
was only a . . . possibility."

"And then what? Break up your marriage over a maybe?"

"That would have been my problem."

"And hers."

"Oh, the feminist alliance."

"Alan! Alan, stop it." Marion clamped a hand on his shoulder hard
and tight, the way a mother would, then let go. "I am sorry. What's a
word for sorry to the hundredth power? But I could not have lived with
fucking up your life. I can't now, either! And forgive me, but I thought,
stupidly, that this would stay a secret. From you. Why do you think I've
been avoiding Joy? When I found out I was pregnant, I thought of you
right away. I hoped this baby was yours. Okay? But I wasn't going to
interrupt the plans I already had. I figured I had room for a child, but I
didn't have room for a big domestic, emotional grown-up mess."

Which is exactly what I am in, thought Alan. He hadn't even considered
whether he had "room" for such a thing. "I see what you're saying,"
he said. "But I—"

"Go to Joy's," said Marion. "I will call you tomorrow morning. I
have her number. I promise." She got out of the car and walked around
the front. She waited on the sidewalk until he got out, too. She started
up the stairs to her house. She waved, but not at Alan. The boy peeled
himself off the window and vanished from sight. Jacob.

Jacob.
As Alan walked away, his momentum hastened by the slope of
the street, he heard a familiar sound: a small boy greeting his mother as
she came home from a day at work.
George,
he thought.
Greenie,
he
thought. Same yearnings, new urgency. He pulled his phone out of his
pocket, flipped it open, and watched its face light up in the dark like a
greeting. George was the one who answered, a small cosmic mercy.

Since Treehorn, George often asked if he could speak with her first.
Alan would hold the cordless phone to the dog's ear; if George was lucky,
she might whine a bit or give a cursory bark. Tonight, Alan explained (a
true lie) that he was out, so Treehorn wasn't with him.

"I miss my dog," George said. "When are you coming again?"

"I'll see you at Christmas," Alan reminded him. "That's not so far
away. I can't wait!"

"Me either."

"How's school?"

"I miss Diego," said George. "I miss Diego
and
Treehorn."

"But you're making new friends, right?"

Alan heard George make a complaining noise, a small groan. "Yeah,
but they're not the same."

"No friends are the same," said Alan. "Not the same as each other.
That's what makes having friends so much fun—they're all different.
But maybe you can see Diego outside school sometimes. Maybe on the
weekends."

Alan had met the beloved Diego just before leaving Santa Fe. To his
astonishment, Greenie had never thought of inviting the boy into the
city before then.

Together with George and Treehorn, Alan had picked up Diego on a
Saturday afternoon so that the boy could have dinner with them and
stay overnight. Because he was older than George by a few years, this
was no big deal for him, but it was George's first sleepover, and by
the time they picked up his friend, he had nearly worn himself out with
anticipation, counting hours, counting minutes, selecting the toys they
would play with, wondering if his books would seem too babyish for a
bigger boy.

Alan did not know many eight-year-olds, so he had no real expectations,
yet something struck him about this boy as disproportionately
young and old at once. As they ate dinner together on Greenie's small
verandah, George chattered blithely on at his playmate.

"You know, we got hummingbirds here—see the feeder? It's water in
sugar—I mean sugar in water." He giggled. "Mom makes it. They fly
forever, I think. I don't think they ever stand on their feet. Actually,
maybe they don't
have
feet."

"They have to stand," said Greenie. "They have to sleep."

"Maybe they sleep flying. Horses sleep standing up."

"I'll bet their feet are tucked up neatly into their feathers," said
Greenie. "Do you have hummingbirds out at your place?" she asked
Diego.

Diego shook his head. "We don't have bird feeders," he said. He ate
well, taking seconds on corn and Greenie's tomato salad. He said please
and thank you, put his napkin in his lap. He chewed his food slowly,
almost solemnly, and gazed around the room while others talked, as if
he were memorizing details. After dinner, he asked to be excused. The
boys went into George's room and closed the door. Alan heard George's
voice, not speaking but whinnying.

"What a gentle boy," Greenie had said as she watched Alan wash the
dishes.

Alan looked at her in the window over the sink. "There's something a
little haunted or overly serious about him, don't you think?"

"He only seems that way compared with George's manic enthusiasm.
I didn't realize George was so infatuated." She'd laughed. "I'm glad
Diego likes him back. I don't suppose it will last after George starts
kindergarten next month."

Alan had nearly forgotten that George would be entering kindergarten.
This was a rite of passage—the beginning of "real" school—about which
Alan had once fantasized and worried: how he and Greenie, like other
New York parents, would tour the different public schools downtown,
perch on elfin chairs and listen raptly to teachers who would evangelize
about new ways of spelling and learning to add. Alan had looked forward
to inspecting the collages and crooked compositions in the halls of
these schools, going home and debating with Greenie the merits of one
playground or principal over another.

But in the end, Ray—Ray, the eco-fascist!—had chosen George's
school. He had let George sit on the back of a "real" horse for the first
time. He had enabled George to have a "real" bedroom all his own for
the first time, too. Alan had listened to George's admiration of this surrogate
godfather and managed to hold on to a smile—but now just
hearing Ray McCrae's name could quicken Alan's heartbeat. This spite,
however, he had learned to swallow.

Now, four months later, he knew that he would also have to pick up
the phone and call the contacts Ray had given him back then. He told
himself he would do this after he had finished with Marion.

AS HE MADE HIS WAY FROM THE BART
to Joya's loft, Alan thought
about the patients he'd left behind in New York, some of whose sessions
that week he had canceled or changed. At the moment, he was seeing
just seven people. There was the cellist who couldn't get a job, the woman
who couldn't get pregnant, the man who couldn't get over his wife's having
left him for a younger man, the couple who fought constantly because
they couldn't get out of debt. And there was Stephen, who couldn't get
past his broken heart. Recently, Alan had also started seeing a woman
who claimed that her life was in fine shape (nice apartment, nice husband,
nice grown children); she just wanted to know the meaning of her
tangled colorful dreams. His practice bore out the theory of a cynical
classmate in grad school: that psychotherapy patients were ninety percent
"can't-gets" and ten percent idle rich.

Alan had it fairly easy: no one had a terminal disease, no one was suicidal,
no one had lost a child. He should be able to—as Ray put it so
rudely—wean them all in the next few months.

Alan was deeply enmeshed in these thoughts as he used the key Joya
had given him to open her door. Before he had even climbed the stairs,
he could smell something wonderful cooking.

"Well, well, fucking well," said Joya as he walked in.

"What?"

"It's nearly nine o'clock." She gestured at the table, set with linen
napkins, candlesticks, flowers. She was wearing a pretty dress, and her
bushy dark hair, now in disarray, looked as if it had been stylishly
primped.

Alan closed the door quietly. "Is this a date?" He made the mistake of
laughing.

"I thought you'd been mugged!" she yelled. "We agreed you would
come right back, that I'd make you—" With the hand that wasn't holding
her wineglass, she made an angry sweep toward the kitchen. "Well,
how about some incredibly dessicated leg of lamb?"

"Joy, I'm sorry. I lost track of time. I was walking—thinking."

"For four hours?" She smiled meanly. "You saw her after all. Didn't
you?"

Alan felt as if he were pinned against the door. "As a matter of fact, I
did see her. Briefly."

"Who needs big sister's advice when you're a psychiatric prodigy,
right?"

"I should have called you. I'm sorry."

"Why didn't you just stay in a hotel? Why even tell me you were
coming? Oh, that's right, you're not exactly rolling in dough these
days, are you?" Her consonants were fuzzy, and she leaned dependently
on the island countertop between the kitchen and the dining table, the
open loft.