The Whole World Over (55 page)

Greenie tried to reassure her that she still had all the time in the world
to find a good man and have a family. She could even stay in her fine job
and still get over the man. "You'll get a chance to see what he's like married,
and I doubt it will be anything close to ideal."

Mary Bliss began to cry again. Greenie tried to embrace her, but she
was too miserable for consolation.

"I only wish I'd gone and told him!"

But he knew,
Greenie wanted to say—exactly the wrong thing to
say. Nor could she tell Mary Bliss that Ray had claimed the marriage
to Claudia would be a power marriage—Greenie didn't believe him
anyway—because it would reveal that Ray had confided in Greenie
before telling Mary Bliss.
Take my husband, a mostly good man I've
betrayed and wounded.
She thought of saying that, too. Because there
was nothing, really, to say to Mary Bliss. Ray had led her on by never
leading her on. Ray, like most politicians, led the world on simply by
throwing his grand flirtatious self in every direction.

Mary Bliss had drunk most of the wine. Now she stood up, carried
the bottle to the sink, and poured the rest of it down the drain. "Goodbye
to my vintage years," she said. "Adios. A Dios. To God. Fuck God."
She left the bottle lying on its side in the sink. "I'm going home to watch
Cartoon Network. Hope I catch
Road Runner,
that's my favorite." She
smiled sadly at Greenie. "
Meep meep!
"

"I'm driving you," said Greenie. "No, you've got no choice in the
matter." She took Mary Bliss to her office and helped gather up her
things. She held her by one arm as they left the house, afraid that the
sudden change of temperature, the harsh light, would make her faint. It
was so hot that the sky was nearly white, as if the sun had burned away
the blue.

Or no, Greenie thought as she drove, the blue was now inside of her.
She felt (unreasonably, but never mind) as if she were the one who'd
broken Mary Bliss's heart.

After getting Mary Bliss inside her apartment and turning on the central
air, Greenie drove to Charlie's. She told him she needed a nap before
going out on yet another adventure. He lay down beside her, and once
they slept, they did not wake till after dark.

MAKING LOVE SO OFTEN
, with someone new, reawakened Greenie to
the history of her body. They never mentioned that long ago, just once,
they had been naked together before. Greenie did not want to reignite
Charlie's resentment of her mother, and she did not want to find herself
wishing that if only they had known then what they knew now, perhaps
. . . But to have her body so fondly interrogated—because that's
what Charlie's attentions felt like sometimes: a series of urgent, adoring
questions—did take her back, time and again, to George's birth.

Objectively, the birth itself had been average; but for Greenie,
George's emergence had felt like an athletic event.
This is what a football
huddle feels like,
she could recall thinking in the midst of nauseating
pain; close about her, exuding the smells of toothpaste, cologne,
laundry detergent, raw onions, and disinfectant (temporarily obscuring
her own smells of sweat, blood, and far less savory excretions), were
Alan, the labor nurse, a female intern, and the essential, necessarily
heroic Dr. Gilmorrison. ("Call me Dr. G," he'd once suggested, and that
day, perilously short of breath, she had discovered why.) They pressed
around her coiled, grunting, pushing body—as if afraid it might suddenly
fly away, like a lost balloon—and cheered her on, just as if she
were
a football player.

Afterward, her body was shockingly flaccid: not just her belly but
suddenly her arms and thighs and neck—as if they, too, had been taut
with the pregnancy and then, once George was born, rendered idle and
spent. Purpose seemed to return to her body, all of it, only when she had
mastered nursing. This was as painful as her friends had warned her it
would be, but George was a good student and latched on almost too
well from the start.

When she fed him during the day, her body felt as if it had been made
to ensconce a nursing baby the way a saddle was molded to carry a
rider—the crevice between her thighs a perfect seat for George's bottom,
her waist calibrated to support his flexed knees and, later on, his arm as
he rhythmically kneaded her back. The remarkable, unexpected thing
was not that the baby yearned for the breast but that the breast seemed
to literally yearn toward the baby. At night, she'd take him from Alan,
or from his cradle, without turning on a light, and she would guide him
carefully toward her right breast, the one George liked best. He would
appear to search for only a second or two, and then his mouth became a
tiny heat-seeking missile. Gasping, she would feel the magnetic draw on
every duct, like dozens of reins pulled tight from behind her rib cage.
George drank intensely and fell asleep still joined to her breast. She'd
insert the tip of her pinkie at the edge of his mouth, and when his head
rolled away, milk would spill across his cheek like sugar glaze poured
across a rose-colored cake. Her left breast, ignored, would often ache
until morning.

She could not indulge memories of that time without including Alan.
After the birth, after a lesson at nursing, after George had conked out,
she could not decide which urge was stronger: the urge to sleep or to eat.
The first won out, but not, Alan would tell her later, before she had muttered
to him exactly what she dreamed of eating. By the time she awoke,
night had surrendered to a sunny morning. Her room was filled with a
brilliant snow-infused light and a startling amount of activity. A nurse
was teaching Alan to swaddle George; an orderly was replacing her
pitcher of water; the mother behind the adjacent curtain was babbling
to her own brand-new child. Pain had invaded Greenie like an army
while she slept, pitching camp in the most unexpected places: her wrists,
her throat, her thighs.

"My baby," she said, reaching toward Alan. "Drugs," she said to the
nurse.

Alan carried George, uncertain but beaming. Greenie had laughed.
"You look like you're carrying a porcupine," she said as she took the
baby—whose face seemed to twitch and agitate at the sound of her voice.
His mouth opened in a plea, the mouth of a baby songbird.

"I brought you something," said Alan. Then she noticed, on two
paper plates on the ugly beige chair where Alan had spent the night, an
enormous sandwich and a miniature cake. "Roast beef and coleslaw,
that's what you asked for. And devil's food."

For one greedy instant, she forgot her baby. "I'm not supposed to
come first anymore, am I?" she said as she wrestled with the task of
feeding George, but she found it hard to take her eyes off the sandwich.
When she ate it—all of it—and half of the cake, each bite tasted like the
answer to a separate prayer.

Late that night, as Alan snored on the foldout chair and George lay
cocooned in his Plexiglas box, she took out the greasy carton with the
last of her cake and ate it as she marveled at her husband and son. This,
she thought, was the true meaning of romance.

Now, by contrast, she could not stop picturing George as he had
appeared when she arrived at Diego's house in the middle of the night,
after the police had called. She had made the drive in stunned bewilderment,
certain only of the need to get to her son and fold him as close to
her as possible. But in the moment just after she found him, sitting on a
lawn chair while grown-ups milled about him, agitated, ignoring him,
he had looked to Greenie shockingly separate from her, too much his
own self.

When he saw her, he did not stand. He did not look upset; he looked
confused.

"Honey? Honey, what happened?" she said. "Are you all right?" She
knelt before him and tried to pull him out of the chair and into her
embrace. In his lap was a wooden mask, a crude likeness of a bird with a
long hooked beak. He kept his hands firmly on the mask. As she hugged
him, she noticed the animal smell in his hair, just like the inside of Ray's
horse barn.

"I'm okay," he said. "Diego is okay, too. He's inside the house. They
told me to wait for you here. Mommy, I'm cold. My sweater's inside."
Greenie took off her jacket and wrapped it around his shoulders.

"What happened?" she asked again, but at this point a police officer
approached her. He held a pad and began to reel off a list of questions.

"Wait," she said. "Can I talk to my son alone?"

Not now, she had been told; someone would talk to her son along
with her, to find out just what had happened. But did they want something
to drink?

By the time Greenie was alone with George again, not for another
two hours, he had fallen asleep in her lap in the back of a police cruiser.
Only after she had carried him to her own car and laid him in the backseat
did Greenie realize that he was still holding the bird mask. As if it
were a soiled object, she carried it quickly to Diego's house and set it
down on the doorstep. All the lights inside were out, and as she returned
to her car, the cruiser drove away. She was the last to leave, the last one
awake. She looked into the backseat at her sleeping son. She felt the
same old instinctive, marrow-deep love, but for the first time she also
felt dismay: disappointment, shame, and the fear that she had forgotten
to teach her child something essential and might not be given another
chance.

WHEN RAY RETURNED FROM THE RANCH ON SUNDAY
, Greenie
found herself thrown full tilt into work, as if Christmas had vaulted forward
to the middle of August. Phones could be heard ringing throughout
the mansion all day on Monday, along with the patient voices of
Mary Bliss and her assistant repeating again and again, "Would you
please hold?"

Ray told Greenie that Claudia would be coming to dinner the following
night and that she couldn't wait to begin discussions about the wedding
meal.

"Ray, I think this is beyond me," said Greenie. "I'm not a caterer."

"You've got McNally to ride shotgun," he said. "Between the two of
you, we'll have a fandango of a party, I know it. I do."

"How many people?"

"Claudia wants it small. Maybe two hundred."

"Two hundred is small?"

"Hey, that's not even half my best friends."

Greenie uttered what she hoped was a suicidal-sounding laugh. "Two
hundred, five hundred. All the same to me."

Ray had been eating lunch alone in the dining room, scrolling through
e-mail on a laptop. He looked up. "I'd go with five hundred. Claudia
claims that would be in poor taste, since she was married before. What
do I know?"

"Does that mean no white dress, no veil?"

"Turquoise, she says. I leave the fussy stuff to her. I'll show up—
'specially if you're cooking. I always show up for your meals, don't I?"
Again, he met her eyes. "We need the people in charge to be people we
trust. You'd have to resign your job to say no."

"Sink or swim."

"Swim! Swim! Butterfly, breaststroke!" said Ray, his arms undulating
to either side of the computer screen. "You'll get all the help you need.
Use your city-girl know-how. Hey, why not import that other city girl,
the one you sold your business to? Now let me eat your food in peace."

Greenie phoned McNally. He told her that Claudia wanted barbecue.
"Ribs, jicama slaw, a buttload of peppers, and a gigantic, special, totally
unique cake. Quote unquote," McNally said dryly. "Glad to say
that
—
the 'totally unique' part—would be your department."

"
That
I can handle. Can I leave the rest to you?"

"Not on your life."

CHARLIE WAS THRILLED
. "Can I be your date? Can you poison just
the cake that goes to the state engineer, the reclamation guy, and the
director of the BLM? Can I watch them die slowly right there, under the
big top?"

"You know, we did get this lecture back in school. 'How to Poison
Absolutely Anybody Absolutely Anywhere Without Getting Caught.'
But I had the flu that day. Sorry. Anyway, I don't get a date. I'm the hired
help. Christ, I'm the
boss
of the hired help. And on your own, I regret to
say, you would probably not make the governor's top-two-hundred
list."

"Nor his top-one-thousand list."

"He does like you, Charlie." She thought of Mary Bliss, wiping her
forehead with a dish towel. She thought, too, of how Alan had made a
similarly tiresome joke about poisoning Ray the very first time she had
cooked for him.

Greenie and Charlie stood in her kitchen, which was stifling, though
she had opened the door to the garden and turned on the fan. Charlie
frowned on air-conditioning except in the very worst heat. They had
come to pick up her mail. She hadn't been home in three days; she didn't
really live there anymore but held on to the place with the hope that
somehow George would return for good. George could never have lived
with them in Charlie's place; even Charlie agreed.

She tossed catalogs on the floor and separated bills from not-bills.
Near the bottom of the pile was an envelope from Alan.

Charlie had picked up the catalogs and was telling her that she should
write to the companies and get herself removed from their lists, that this
was a terrible waste. He stopped when he saw her sitting at the table,
motionless.

"What is it?"

"I don't know," she said. "I don't want to know."

"You think it's legal?"

"I don't know." She placed the envelope in the center of the table, by
itself.

Charlie set the catalogs on the counter and put his hands on her
shoulders.

Still she did not move. "I suppose he's asking for a divorce."

"Is that what you're afraid of?"

"No, not that."

"Would you divorce him, or let him divorce you?" Charlie went to
the opposite side of the table and sat down to face her.