The Whole World Over (6 page)

Walter rushed on: "So it's just—well, I suppose it does have a lot to
do with everyone dying around me. Not everyone—you know what I
mean. Good grief, I can't believe how rattled I am by all this. The point
is, it's ridiculous, isn't it, to reach your forties and not have a will?
Worse than not flossing your teeth."

"I know parents with children in college who've never gotten around
to a will. It's a surprisingly hard thing to do." Gordie spoke earnestly,
without condescension. His eyes still glittered. Walter had underestimated
Stuffy's depth of feeling. Not the first time Walter got an F in
character sleuthing.

So he relaxed. He explained to Gordie how the restaurant had done
quite well these past few years, how he'd done nothing more creative
with the surplus than dump it in a money market account with old-lady
interest rates—and how, most important, he wanted to make sure that,
should the accidental piano fall, his gas-guzzling Republican brother
wouldn't walk off with the profits.

Gordie held up a folder. "This tells me everything about the business?"

"Yes."

"No partners, silent or talking?"

Walter hated this part. "Extremely silent now. I bought him out when
he got sick. Four years ago."

Gordie's expression was one they had both seen too often: a look of
dread, of pain, of a question you weren't sure you should ask yet had to.
How many times could you have this same ghoulish,
plus ça change
conversation?

Walter rescued him. "Two years more, he made it that long. He took
the money and went to Key West. Had a devoted lover. Not me." To
hear himself speak of this tragedy so telegrammatically was depressing,
but such shorthand had become a necessity in his world.

Gordie (who surely understood this shorthand better than anyone)
said he was sorry, after which they observed the Respectful Moment of
Silence.

"All right." Gordie paged back and forth, back and forth. "Debts?"

"None." In reply to Gordie's admiring glance, Walter said, "I can't
pretend to be a wizard with money. But my grandmother was, and she
left me just enough so I could cut up all that hateful plastic."

Gordie's smile was sly. "So I guess you'll be paying me in more than a
lifetime supply of beef bourguignon."

Please let this be flirting, Walter thought.

Walter told Gordie about his nephew, his desire to leave a small gift
to an animal charity, his fantasies for retirement. Walter had never been
in therapy, but he imagined it must be quite a bit like this. At moments,
he felt like a child talking about an imaginary friend. (Honestly now,
who
was
this fellow daring to say that he dreamed of an old age on
Cape Cod, a little house on the dunes? Dream on, buster!) But Gordie
listened keenly, asked straightforward questions, never mocking. When
Walter had finished reciting his fantasy life, Gordie began to explain
about trusts and executors and mutual funds and things that Walter had
always thought the province of movie stars,
Mayflower
descendants,
and neighbors who monopolized four-story brownstones.

"To put it simply," said Gordie, "you can't just leave a three-star
restaurant in New York City to a teenage boy who lives three thousand
miles away. Or you can, but you might as well be leaving him an elephant
or, for that matter, a circus. You see what I mean."

Walter laughed. " 'Hey dudes, guess what? My queer uncle in New
York City just left me an elephant! Like, awesome!' " He pictured the
look on Werner's face. He wished he
did
have an elephant he could leave
to Scott.

"Not that you plan to go tomorrow—unless of course your piano
phobia comes to fruition."

"Or the proverbial plane goes down."

"There's that too," said Gordie. "It happens."

"Oh, enough of the gallows; I begin to worry about my precious
karma—just in case there's such a thing."

By now, Gordie had rearranged Walter's affairs into a tidy, prioritized
stack. He stood and gave Walter a few pamphlets and a handwritten list
of concerns to review before calling to make another appointment.

"Homework!" Walter exclaimed. He hadn't realized he'd get to
return so easily. "I guess it
is
like back-to-school, isn't it?" Too late, he
saw that this was a reference to the conversation with Fenno McLeod,
not with him.

Gordie didn't seem to notice. He stood by the window. "Have you
seen my view? I have to show it off or it's not worth the rent."

Walter joined him. It was Friday, so the farmers' market was in full
autumnal swing, a sea of potted chrysanthemums and bushel after
bushel of apples, pears, Fauvist gourds, and pumpkins with erotically
fanciful stems. On one table stood galvinized buckets of the year's final
roses; on another, skeins of yarn in muted, soulful purples and reds.
Walter loved this part of the season—and not just because it was the
time of year his restaurant flourished, when people felt the first yearnings
to sit by a fire, to eat stew and bread pudding and meatloaf, drink
cider and toddies and cocoa. He loved the season's transient intensity, its
gaudy colors and tempestuous skies. It felt, to Walter, a lot like loving
Shakespeare (which he always would, even if he'd memorized his last
soliloquy several years ago now).

"Do you shop there?" said Gordie. "I hear all the best neighborhood
restaurants order from farmers."

"Hugo gets pheasants and squab from someone down there—corn
and heirloom tomatoes in the summer. I leave all that to him, and just as
well. Last spring he bought
fiddlehead ferns.
Well, I walked into the
kitchen and shrieked. I thought I was looking at a bowl of dead caterpillars,
that's how much I know!"

"Look—are those dervishes?" Gordie pointed down at a performance,
three dancers in red skirts pirouetting on a stretch of open asphalt.

From the side, Walter stole a concentrated look at Gordie's face; it
was so . . . kind. All its lines, still subtle, seemed to bookmark the places
expressive of joy.
Greet the morning early and with joy:
Granna had
embroidered that wisdom on a cushion. Walter leaned against it in bed
when he watched the nightly news—never mind that, given the choice,
he'd always rather sleep late.

He edged slowly closer to Gordie, till he sensed their sleeves just
touching. Close enough to tell that Gordie did not wear cologne. Walter
hated phony scents as much as he hated phony tans.

Gordie turned away from the window and reached out to shake Walter's
hand. "I like this—having really met you. It makes the city feel nice
and small," he said. "Stephen makes fun of me, but I'm someone who
misses
that part of living in the boonies."

"Well, you're in the minority there, dude—as my nephew would
say—but you may be the wise one among us." If he'd been honest, Walter
would have agreed with Gordie, but he decided it wasn't the note to
end on, not this time. The calculations had begun.

When he left, he walked slowly, half dizzy, his brain buzzing like a
hive, through the farmers' market. The dancers had vanished. He examined
the flowers and the yarns and the pumpkins up close, as if to make
sure they weren't all part of a heady dream. At one point, he looked up,
just a furtive glance, to locate Gordie's window, to see if he was being
watched. He was stunned to see eight or nine stories of windows just
like Gordie's and could not remember which floor he'd been on. Up
there, looking down, he'd felt as if the two of them were remote and
alone, in a tower.

WHILE WALTER DYED HIS HAIR
at the bathroom sink, The Bruce sat
on the mat and watched. Funny how a dog could look puzzled (or angry
or elated or grieving or guilty—all the same shades of emotion a person's
face could reveal). This was only the third time Walter had done it,
so he was still nervous about the results. His hair remained thick and
basically blond, but a few months ago he'd noticed that the color was
looking a little dusty alongside his ears. He'd just turned forty-four, so
this seemed fair—but still.

He was surprised how much he liked this new task, how the tinted
water swirling down the drain made him feel as if he were purging
himself—washing something away, not covering something up. He only
hoped that, sometime in the future, he would recognize the point when
the lines on his face began to mock his hair, shriek at the vain deceit.
You should age with dignity, not denial: Granna had not said or stitched
this, but she might have. Before she died, her face had been nothing but
folds and creases; to Walter, it looked like the topographical map of
some mystical place, like a terraced mountain in Tibet.

He assessed his newly gilded hair in the mirror. So far, so good. Perhaps
the dregs of winter, however dreary, wouldn't be so lonely after all.

"Now your turn," he said to The Bruce. The dog trotted briskly back
to the bedroom, vaulting his stocky frame up onto the bed. Walter sat
beside him and took the soft brush and the currycomb out of his nightstand.
Like so many purebreds, The Bruce had a few chronic maladies;
the worst was his eczema, for which Walter had creams and shampoos
and special grooming utensils. Probably because he itched a good deal
of the time, the poor dog loved all this close attention. "Does that feel
good, lovey?" Walter crooned as he pushed the currycomb through
T.B.'s short coat. The hair was a uniform grayish beige, but his skin
resembled the hide of a pinto pony, pinkish white with patches of black.
As Walter brushed him, the dog grunted vaguely—a canine purr—and
drooled onto the towel Walter had placed beneath his head.

Walter had adopted T.B. as an older puppy. The shelter volunteer
who helped him make his choice was a girl around Scott's age who wore
lipstick the color of pot roast. (Was there nothing attractive left to be
cool? Had fashion tripped into a black hole, or was Walter just too old?)
"People hate dogs that drool, they think it's gross," she said as they
looked into the cage, "but he's way cute. Looks a lot like Bruce Willis, if
you ask me."

This had amused Walter greatly. "Well, if you ask me, Bruce Willis is
anything but cute, and I doubt he'd be flattered. Man
or
dog."

Every Tuesday and every other Saturday, a misanthropic young
woman named Sonya came by to borrow T.B., taking him to a nursing
home in the Bronx, where he let the oldsters coddle him for hours.
Sonya had that hackneyed Morticia Addams look, powdery skin and
shoe-black hair, and smelled like stale cumin. When he attempted small
talk, just about the only thing Walter got out of her was that she worked
for some off-the-grid animal welfare group called—valiantly, he did not
laugh—The True Protectors. Shades of Flash Gordon.

Walter went along for the first visit, just to make sure this theoretically
Samaritan act was on the up-and-up. One of his regular customers
had suggested this enterprise, pointing out that T.B. was perfectly suited
because he was so well socialized. Walter, who'd been feeling guilty that
he did not "give back," was happy to make T.B. his proxy.

Thus did Walter—after a silent ride with the unpleasantly perfumed
Sonya, for whom gum snapping was evidently preferable to speech—
find himself one balmy weekend on a narrow balcony in Riverdale,
overlooking the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge, telling a pair of proud grandmas
about his own Granna, playing gin rummy for pocket change,
drinking sherry that tasted like stagnant Pepsi, and allowing himself to
be quite absurdly flirted with. After that, he sent The Bruce back there
alone. It pleased Walter to think of T.B. conducting his own private
social life in a separate borough.

Tuesdays, Sonya arrived at seven, Saturdays at ten. She would pick
up The Bruce and return him almost without a word to Walter, but if he
looked out his front window after she took the dog downstairs, he'd see
her nattering sweetly away as she settled him in the back of her van.
That was one very odd girl.

Saturday was the only day Walter wasn't the first one in at work. He
loved arriving to the smell of eggs and pancake batter and, this time of
year, two newly laid fires. Today he surveyed the brunch reservations
and snipped the dead flowers off the cyclamen plants inside the front
window. At eleven he unlocked the door; the first customer to walk
through it was Bonny.

"Greetings, neighbor," said Walter. "What brings you to Casa Cholesterol?
Dating a gaucho?" The first time Fenno McLeod had come
into the restaurant, along with an older woman, they'd looked at the
menu and joked that some witty individual they'd known would have
given this nickname to Walter's Place. Walter felt briefly offended—but
it was accurate, was it not? Heart Attack Central, an otherwise benevolent
reviewer had called it, but Walter liked Bonny's version better.

"Dates are for after dark," said McLeod. "Most days I eat fruit for
breakfast, but I'm in the mood for eggs Benedict."

"Consistency is the hobgoblin of people who never get laid," said
Walter.

McLeod gave him a stiff smile. Oh gosh, thought Walter, I
forgot
about that Conan Doyle walking stick stuck up your bottom. Not a bad
bottom, though, if one were to steal a glimpse.

They did the requisite weather dance—Wasn't March always a letdown,
a tease? Those poor little crocuses, hoodwinked again! Well yes,
jolly so, but the
Ewe Kay;
well, there it would be bloody cold and
twice
as damp—and then McLeod laid a book on the table. How anyone
could read while eating (even the newspaper) was a mystery to Walter. It
was always an awkward mess: dabs of grease on the pages, a crick in
your neck.

The two waiters were busy in back, so Walter brought out the
wooden box of tea bags himself. Brits rarely drank coffee. None of that
when-in-Rome stuff for imperial them. McLeod chose Lapsang souchong
as Walter wondered if seeing this man would always, now,
remind him of Gordie, of the way Walter had fallen for Gordie's sentimental
reaction to the death of a dog. He wished Granna had stitched a
sampler to warn him against such emotional triggers.
Lovers of animals
doth not make the very best lovers of men.
Too wordy.
Beware ye the
tears of easy sentiment.
Better.
Falleth not for married men.
Far more to
the point. And blameth not the poor departed bookshop dog.