The Whole World Over (11 page)

The sharp sound of barking drew Greenie's attention beyond the window
by the table, into the garden behind a brownstone that belonged to
a neighbor they had seen for years but never met. The neighbor's small
dog clamored at the sliding glass door. Unable to meet Alan's gaze of
wounded surprise, Greenie focused on the dog, a terrier of some sort,
watched him jump at the glass, each of his yips a briefly visible outburst
of air.

"You are very angry." Alan's voice was quiet and solemn.

Duh,
she thought, the rude little expletive that George had recently
picked up and Greenie was trying to expunge from his proud, precious
repertoire of slang.
Can we talk about that?
also crossed her mind, the
next thing she'd have heard from Alan if he had been her therapist, not
her husband. She wished the dog would shut up.

"Oh Greenie, why are we always fighting?" He sounded sad, even
penitent.

"You're the shrink. You tell me." She turned back to look at him. He
was bent over his lap, looking between his legs at the floor. Instead of
his face, she saw the cowlick of dark brown, barely graying hair that
George, riding aloft on his father's shoulders one day last week, had
pressed with a finger. "Look!" he'd said, giggling. "Daddy's hair is the
color for dirt!" Alan had muttered absentmindedly, "That's me. Mr.
Dirt."

Outside, the glass door slid open for the terrier, slid shut behind him.
It looked like a magic act, as if the door had opened by itself, for the
owner was obscured behind a reflection of brick walls and barren trees.
In the exaggerated silence, Greenie felt forced to speak. "Is this really
news to you?"

Alan looked up. "Yes and no. I didn't know you were
this
angry."

"Well, now you do," said Greenie.
And now I do.

Alan looked at his watch and gave her a pleading look. "I'm so sorry,
this is very bad timing, but I'm afraid I have a phone session now."

"Maybe that's what we need—a prearranged session."

"Greenie, don't be sarcastic. That's not like you."

"I'm not. Being sarcastic. I mean, by the time we're together, without
George, without conflicting schedules, we're . . . dead on our feet." Or
you are, she thought. "Look, I'm doing this thing because I agreed to.
I'll be over at the kitchen this evening, and I'll try to be back by nine,
and we can talk then, okay?"

"Okay," said Alan. "Okay then."

"Kiss George for me," she said. "Tell him I'll walk him to school in
the morning and pick him up in the afternoon. I have to be at Governor
McCrae's—at the environmental fascist's hotel—at seven tomorrow
evening."

"Okay," said Alan. He stood, looking as if he might like to touch
Greenie, but she turned away and carried her mug to the sink. She was
ashamed of her outburst, but it had been necessary, hadn't it? Alan
retreated to his office, and Greenie left to shop. That night, when she
came back at a quarter to ten, she found Alan asleep next to George in
the bedroom. They were turned toward each other, both snoring, the
boy's head against the man's chest.
Oh Say Can You Say?
was splayed
open beneath her husband's hip, several pages bent double. So much for
the break of Dr. Seuss.

HAVING JUST FINISHED THE MAIN COURSE
, his plate stark naked,
Ray McCrae appeared to be talking loudly to himself, though in fact he
was having an impassioned conversation on one of those telephonic earpieces.
As Greenie cleared the dishes, he was facing his high-priced view
and waving both arms about, as if he might persuade the trees spread
out below him to burst into passionate song. "It's a frigging weed! A
weed, Archie! What gives? You know, look, I got no quarrels with the
redwood huggers and the give-it-all-back-to-the-wolves city folk buttin'
their coastal noses into our business, that's par for the democratic
course, but Archie, there's wildlife and then there's . . . weeds! Even my
cows won't touch 'em!" As Greenie arranged the biscuits in a crescent
flanking the cheese, there was a long silence, and then the governor let
out a theatrically exasperated sigh. "Bundled up with welfare-to-work?
Oh now that was demonic, pure sly-dog tactics. How'd we let that one
slip past, Archie? Who snoozed through that one, huh? Just tell me who.
You do."

Greenie realized the conversation was over only when he turned
around, looked straight at her, and said, "Do you have any idea what
kind of devilish mayhem can break loose in a state full of cattle when a
plain old weed—I mean the thing doesn't even
flower
or
smell nice
—
gets promoted from 'threatened' to 'endangered' in the EPA's fancy-ass
lexicon?"

"I can imagine," she said as she set the cheese plate on the table and
refilled his beer glass. (When she'd told him she knew next to nothing
about wine, he'd made a dismissive gesture and said, "Wine's for
the likes of Ralph Nader, people who like stuff designed to get picky
about.")

"With all due respect, young woman, you cannot," said the governor.
"This is the stuff of my worst nightmares, stuff that can whup you
upside the head when you're happily trimming your toenails. Stuff you
think of as footnotes, but don't be fooled! You easterners picture New
Mexico as a land of Pueblo Indians and fancy turquoise trinkets, like I
run one big exotic Disney World pawnshop, a few exits off Route Sixty-six.
But let me tell you: when the going gets tough, it's the men with the
cattle who open up their big fat rawhide wallets. If the Archduke Ferdinand's
assassination could set off World War One, well, the canonization
of a scruffy plant that some kind of owl needs to scour its gullet
could boot me clear out of a job and a mansion. I kid you not. Troublemakers
come through the backyard, that's what my dad used to say.

"But speaking of gullets!" This one-sided conversation was his first
acknowledgment of her presence since he'd sat down to the soup. Now,
giving her his full, robust attention, he said, "Greenie, you are a sorceress.
Those oysters Rockefeller and tuna ballyhoo I turned down at the
fish place? Canned stew compared to this meal."

"Thank you. I'm flattered." You had to wonder if there was anything
of substance behind this man's relentless bluster, yet Greenie found that
she was beginning to like both the man and the bluster. Despite her
exhaustion, she was sorry that she would have to leave soon, probably
never to see him again.

"Pull up a chair," he said. "You have any dinner yourself?"

"I had a sandwich late this afternoon. I'm fine."

"Sit, girl!" he said. "That's an order from a card-carrying chauvinist
who just may be your future boss." He stood, pulled up another chair,
held it out till she sat down, and went to the kitchen. He came back with
a plate bearing two slices of lamb and a sliver of polenta, the only food
remaining from the previous courses. "Is it me or is it your dainty eastern
portions?" he said when he set the plate down before her.

"A little of both."

"I do like leftovers. Have to dock you half a star for that." Abruptly,
he called out, "Mary Bliss! Hold off the calls a half hour, would you?
And bring us another glass from the bar.

"If you work for me, especially in my kitchen, you got to like me at
least a little. Vice-a versa I'm already sure of," he said as he filled the
second glass with beer. She accepted it, even though she was one of
those Ralph Nader folk, a lover of wine. "Not that we'll sit down for
meals together, not much. But you'll see what I mean. And of course, I
need to say, you won't be playing waitress. There's plenty of staff for the
fetch-and-carry. Nice people, too."

Before she could ask if he was offering her the job outright, he asked
about George, her George; and if the bachelor was bored by the subject
of four-year-old ways and means, then the politician trumped that boredom
with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

After hearing about George's talent for reading, he said, "When I
was little, my favorite books were just about anything to do with the
sea. Pirate books, to be sure, and that Jules Verne book
Fifty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea
—Captain Nemo and the giant squid. But even
books on seashells, sea birds, sailors' knots, books about sea battles—
Spanish Armada, you name it. I was just
dyin'
to get a glimpse of
the sea."

"I grew up taking the sea for granted," said Greenie. "I can't imagine
living too far from the ocean."

When he gave her a scolding look, she realized what she'd implied.

"We may not have the sea out west, but we have ourselves a glorious
ocean of sky, Ms. Duquette." He drank the last of his beer. "So, as you
may have guessed, I joined the navy. Just before Vietnam, as both my
fans and foes like to point out. You can look at it any way you want—
bravery, cowardice, dumb luck—but I joined up without a whit of politics
in mind. Needed to get away from home, like any normal guy, and
wanted to see the sea. What's that Gene Kelly song?"

" 'We Saw the Sea.' I think the singer's Fred Astaire," said Greenie,
though she knew for certain he was. She sang the chorus, her voice quavering
only a little.

"The woman cooks . . . and knows her old movies, too. She does!"

"Her sappy old movies," said Greenie. "Or the music. But you were
saying . . . about the navy."

"Yes. I landed in the Mediterranean. A little later, a lot less luck, I'd
have drawn the China Sea instead." He licked a bit of cheese off a
thumbnail. "But now—but now, dessert! What I've been hankering for
all day. Bring it on, Ms. Duquette."

Greenie carried in the cakes, both at once, on a tray with a foxhunting
scene she had found in the bar. The sherbet was in a paper carton
nestled in a bowl of ice.

"My God in heaven, girl," he said when she put the tray down on the
table before him. Addictive or simply relentless, the man's enthusiasm
never seemed to quit. She was reminded, fondly, of George.

The governor did not converse much this time as he ate; he might
have been contemplating the flavors she'd assembled or brooding about
the accursed weed. Greenie excused herself to sort things out in the
kitchen. Mary Bliss had insisted she leave the dishes for the hotel staff,
so Greenie rinsed out only the items she had brought with her.

When she returned to the living room, Ray McCrae was standing at
the window, looking at the citified forest below. The branches of the
trees were gloved in glistening ice, so deceptively beautiful. From her
childhood, Greenie could remember the sound of limbs cracking off in
the middle of a winter night, the ice too much for the trees to bear; in the
frigid, hollow darkness, the echoes carried like gunshots.

Something fell from the sky yet again; up here, at this privileged altitude,
the something was snow, but farther down, at street level, it was
probably sleet. Oh what would it be like, she yearned, to escape this city,
this dreary precipitation, these slippery sidewalks—escape the anxieties
of how to get along with an angry husband, how to afford a home
where her son would have a real room, how to get this son into a school
that wasn't motley, crowded, and overrun with irate, pushy parents?
Such anxieties—the kind that linger—had only recently begun to afflict
her. For most of her life until now—even for her first year or two as a
mother, at least until her parents were killed—Greenie had been someone
whom other people admired for the ease with which she made decisions,
the way she faced the world straight on, with little confusion or
doubt.

She was startled when the governor spoke. She could see his face
only as mirrored in the window. "Out where I live, the elements don't
spare us, Ms. Duquette, but they're not so underhanded. Snow is snow.
Rain's rain. And boy oh howdy, is heat ever heat. I'd call it a man's
meteorology—off the record, because that would be sexist, right?" Turning
around, he smiled at her in a different way. It was a prolonged, complicitous
look, as if they had a secret to share. He held out his right
hand. "Greenie, you've made me a happy man tonight. Mary Bliss will
call tomorrow. I have a feeling you might be hard to pry loose from this
place, but we have our ways. We do."

He walked her to the door and took her coat from the closet.
"George is out front with the car; he'll drive you home."

Greenie thanked him, and she thanked Mary Bliss, and then she was
alone in the hallway, and then in the elevator with its lion-footed bench
and gilt-framed mirror (in which she avoided her own eyes), and then
in the lobby, where a solitary bellboy snoozed on his feet by a luggage
trolley. Across a prairie of carpet printed with red acanthus leaves,
she could see the polished revolving door that led to Fifth Avenue and,
beyond it, a black town car. Perversely, or just because she felt too tired
to make small talk with a stranger (she hadn't been raised with hired
help and did not know how to ignore anyone politely), she turned left,
toward the side door that led to the cross street.

The dreary precipitation had ceased, and the air was milder than she
had expected. She fastened her coat beneath her chin, pulled up the
hood, and started downtown on foot. Though it was late—nearly one,
she was stunned to learn when she looked at her watch—there were several
people out on the avenue, many alone, many talking on cell phones.
Greenie disliked these phones, which she saw as security objects for people
who were afraid to be alone with their thoughts, afraid of real independence.
You'd walk along the street and hear isolated snatches of
gratuitous chat: "I'm heading down Perry now, and I'll be in the subway
in five minutes, though I have to buy tokens. . . ." At the grocery store,
in the produce aisle: "Yeah, the broccoli looks kinda yellow today, so I
don't know . . . asparagus? Only wait, it's pretty overpriced, so how
about artichokes? Yeah, not too bad, they're sort of in season, aren't
they?" As if such decisions could no longer be made in private, at a visceral
layer of the brain, while you dreamed, deeper down, about far
more complex, significant matters. When she'd told Alan her theory, he
agreed: "Internal conversations are the hardest ones; they include the
voices we wish we could drown out rather than discipline."