The Whole World Over (25 page)

After a few sessions of silent listening, then a few of devil's advocate
quibbling, Alan's therapist, Jerry, had to agree: from any angle—but certainly
from the angle Alan had, lying on a couch—this girl was a catch.
For as long as Alan could remember, his mother had been chronically if
never dramatically depressed, and his father had apparently chosen to
coddle her yet also to ignore her despair—a paradox obvious to Alan
and Joya surprisingly early on. It was not a colorful despair, of tempers
and sobbing and accusations, but a blue resignation, a despair of drawn
shades, slippers worn at dinner, laundry left out on the line for days.

By the time he was off at college, safely removed from the prevailing
winds of hometown rumor, Alan found himself wishing that his mother
would do Something Big—not suicidal but crazy, like burn furniture on
the lawn or have a weeping fit in the grocery store—something that
would force his father not just to see the depth of her sadness but to act
on it properly. But nothing like that ever happened, and then Alan's
father died of a heart attack after mowing the lawn in the August sun,
leaving Alan's mother well provided for. And even this did not change
her weary but tolerant demeanor, her habit of always saying she was
perfectly fine when she knew you knew she wasn't. She did not partake
in arguments of any kind.

But Greenie, oh Greenie knew how to argue. And after an argument,
she did not sulk. If she was anxious or sad or angry, she said so. If
he
was anxious or sad or angry, she called him on it—not always with the
greatest of tact; but clarity, he could remember thinking, is not obliged
to be tactful.

After they came to the place in their new life where they began to
spend idle evenings together after dinners at each other's apartments—
Alan almost always reading, Greenie paging through cookbooks and
taking notes or watching something funny on TV—she said, out of a
long silence, "Do you know how much you sigh?" Alan looked up from
his book; she was smiling.

"I sigh?"

"Oh, quite a lot sometimes."

"Huh." And then he heard himself sigh, and they laughed.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't be," she said. "I just wondered if you knew."

"It's something I'd better attend to, considering what I do," said
Alan. "I can't believe no one's mentioned it before."

"Maybe it's just because you're in this very intense time of your life,"
she offered. "Or maybe it's just me who's noticed. My mother's like
that; she notices things that other people don't. Sometimes that's good,
and sometimes it isn't."

Alan set down his book. He realized something. "You've never talked
about your mother." He, meanwhile, had told Greenie plenty about his.

"Oh," said Greenie, "my mother is wonderful. I'm very lucky. You'll
meet her, and you'll see for yourself."

Two months later, when they had been seeing each other for almost
exactly half a year, Greenie invited him up to Maine, to the "camp"
where she had spent part of every summer since she was born. She
laughed when Alan asked, trying not to hide his dread, if they would be
staying in tents. The last camping Alan had done was in Boy Scouts, in a
state park somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike (he could remember
the all-night whoosh of the not-so-distant traffic, along with the whine
of the mosquitoes). Greenie explained that there would be no electricity,
no plumbing—yes, you did have to use an outhouse—but there were
walls and a roof and screens, batteries for lamps, bug spray, an oven and
a stove on a generator, and real, quite comfortable beds with sheets and
pillows. Here, she leaned into his ear and whispered, "Though the walls
are thin, I should warn you."

They drove a rented car to a boatyard, where they were met by
Greenie's father, the George after whom they would one day name their
son. Greenie had said he would pick them up in a "whaler"; Alan imagined
some sort of schoonerlike craft, a scaled-down version of the
Pequot.
So the noisy, gleaming white boat that turned out to be their
conveyance unnerved him a little—as did the tenacious handshake and
gaze of the original George. "Alan Glazier!" he exclaimed when he
turned from his daughter's embrace. "My girl is crazy about you—that
because you're a shrink? Ha ha!"

Before Alan could grope for a clever reply, Greenie's father had
grabbed up their duffel bags and thrown them into the boat. Alan had
barely seated himself before the man called out, "Time and tide!" and
revved up the motor.

Swiftly, without seeming to notice the rise and smack of the boat as it
bounced from wave to wave, he guided them through a cluster of tiny
rock-rimmed islands—many of them occupied, even monopolized, by
toylike houses that appeared far too trusting of the elements. All the
while, shouting over the roar of the engine, he delivered a tour guide's
monologue, pointing broadly to left and right. Alan tried not to look
nervous, clinging as discreetly as possible to the bench on which he was
sitting. Greenie stood next to her father, leaning over the windshield, her
face lifted gratefully into the wind and the stinging spray of cold ocean
water.

"String of Pearls!" shouted George Duquette as they passed an island
with an ornately trimmed cottage and an oriental bridge leading to a
second, even tinier island with a guesthouse not much larger than a toolshed.
"Island bought by a sea captain back in the days of the China
trade! Present for his wife! Rumor was, she told her friends she'd
rather've gotten a string of pearls, ha ha! . . . That one over yonder—
Tetcheval, shaped like the head of a horse! Off to port, Little Oslo! Now
there's a pile of new money—the first with juice wired straight from the
mainland! Tacked on a third story and put in a pair of those compost
toilets! Ask me, more trouble than they're worth! Don't know what
you're doing, they stink to high heaven!" Every few minutes, Greenie
looked back at Alan and smiled.

The island they were fast approaching was a good deal larger than
these little knobs of land, and it was covered nearly end to end with
thick pine forest, the trees so uniform in height that the island looked as
if it were sporting a mammoth crewcut. "Circe's dead ahead!" George
called out, pointing at a trio of weathered cabins, a long gray pier reaching
toward them like a beckoning arm. "Charlotte, stand by!"

Greenie's true name startled Alan as much as the oddly Odyssean
reference—but not nearly so much as the sudden swerve of the boat
when George cut the motor and steered them sharply to the side just
before they would have struck the pier and literally lost their heads. (Or
so it looked to Alan.) Just as quickly, Greenie vaulted from the side of
the boat to the pier, a long rope in one hand. Now she bent over the
edge, performing some sort of cat's cradle with her father, lashing the
boat in place. Alan's ears still buzzed from the din of the motor. His legs
felt gelatinous. "Here," said Greenie, who must have read his expression.
"Grab my hand." She pulled him to the dock. Already, George had
seized their bags and strode ahead, sure-legged, up a wooden gangway
laid across a sloping apron of smooth gray rock.

"My God, does he drive like that on land?" Alan said as he accepted
her help, without which he was sure he would have keeled over into the
water.

"He likes speed, all right," said Greenie. "It's sort of funny, because
everybody sees him as the absentminded professor. I think behind the
wheel is where he tries to prove them all wrong. My dad, the Italian
roadster in disguise." After Scotland, this remark would come back to
Alan, but he never mentioned it to Greenie.

There on the dock, regaining his balance, Alan remembered that
these cabins were the shared property of Greenie's mother, two uncles, a
great-aunt, and several cousins. "Oh, we are so far from rich," Greenie
had said when Alan reacted to her mention of a house in Maine. "They
sort of used to be, I think—Mom's great-grandparents—and she has the
manners to go with money. But now if any of us are, rich I mean, it's a
matter of who they married. Mom married a professor. An
English
professor.
In the age of easy tenure, thank God." Greenie explained that
their part of Smith's Rock (the name of the island itself) was a "compound,"
though hardly Kennebunkport or the Kennedys' Hyannis. It
had been named by Greenie's classics-loving great-great-grandfather,
who had tried but failed to rename the island Ithaka. The arrangements
of who stayed where and when had grown complicated now that there
were so many cousins, but Greenie's parents still took the same cabin for
the same three weeks every July.

From way ahead, George called back, "Get your fellow a bunk, get
him a drink—or, hey now, reverse that sequence!—then help him get his
bearings. Your mom's on her constitutional, hoping to find a few berries
as well. Never a single bird, that woman, never a single bird!"

"I feel like such an oaf," said Alan, trying not to cling to Greenie as
he searched for his equilibrium. He glared back across the water, which
looked perplexingly calm.

Greenie put her arms around him and kissed him on the neck.
"Between sailors and oafs, I choose oafs. We're on land now, and no
one'll force you back on the water until we have to go. Did that drink
sound like a good idea or not?"

So there was a martini—something he hadn't tasted since college—
and there was wine, and there was a dinner most remarkable for a meal
produced at a "camp": smoked mussels (gathered and smoked right
there on the island, he learned), ratatouille, a salad with pears and blue
cheese, and a three-layer chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries,
all of it made by Greenie's mother, who would not accept a bit of
help. But all that came later. First and foremost, there was Greenie's
mother and the entrance she made.

As instructed, Greenie assigned him a bunk, of the genuine boyhood
variety, in a spartan creaky-floored room with pine plank walls that
looked like they were crawling with eyes. Not that the room was creepy;
far from it. The largest of two windows looked toward the mainland, a
view many tourists would have shelled out hundreds of bucks to enjoy.
Glad to be alone for a time, Alan set his martini on the small plain
dresser and circled the room, touching everything, opening everything,
from the three paperback books on the side table to the closet and the
drawers.
Atlas Shrugged, Kon-Tiki,
and
Is Paris Burning?
were speckled
and swollen from years of damp. The closet, too shallow for hangers,
was simply a cupboard with hooks. And most of the dresser drawers,
which squeaked loudly, were empty. The top drawer held a bar of Dove
soap, a flashlight, a bottle of aspirin, and a pair of ruffled tiebacks to
phantom curtains (both bedroom windows were naked, perhaps to
make the most of their views).

He heard children's voices nearby; leaning out the side window, he
saw another house through a row of pines. He could make out a
screened porch, where a family was already sitting down to dinner. A
bed of coals smoked in the small yard, and Alan smelled steak. He was
ravenous.

Following orders, he put on his swimming trunks and went downstairs.
Here was Greenie, by a window, looking through binoculars at
the smaller islands and the harbor from which they had come. Her
father sat at the table, a picnic table with fixed benches, polishing a
number of small brass objects that looked to Alan like parts of an
antique harness. Greenie's room was down here—right next to her parents'
room, which Alan realized was directly below his. He couldn't help
wondering if this was on purpose.

There was still no sign of the mother.

"Out! Let's go before the bugs arrive," said Greenie. She handed Alan
a towel. In the cooler air of the late afternoon, he felt pleasantly chilly as
he followed her along a dirt path through a prickly green thicket blooming
with pink and white flowers. The path wound away from the
houses, around several curves of rocky shore, to a patch of dark pebbled
sand.

Greenie threw her towel on a rock and sprinted into the water. "Oohoo!"
she exclaimed, and "Yowza!" But she did not pause until she was
treading water, up to her neck, looking back at Alan.

Alan clutched his towel. "Here comes the dare to the city-slicker
oaf."

"It's worth it, believe me!" she called out.

"I don't like the arctic quaver in your voice."

"Just make a run for it," said Greenie. "That's my motto in life."

"Well, mine is 'Always test the waters.' " Which he did, with his toes,
and was instantly sorry. "No," he said. "Definitely no."

"Suit yourself, city boy." She dove under, the soles of her feet the last
of her to vanish. He watched her surface a remarkable distance away,
then swim, gracefully and languidly, around another bend of the shore.
He began to clamber along the rocks, to follow her, when he was
stopped short by a voice.

"Hello, young man—though you're not exactly young by the standards
of my day."

The most striking thing about the woman standing behind him, at the
foot of the path, was the bathing suit she wore. It looked as if it was
made of white satin, reflecting sharply the last bright sun of the day. An
oddly mixed fashion statement, it was cut low on top but draped down
into a modest skirt, reaching nearly to the middle of the woman's thighs.
The woman herself was tall and athletically slim, and though she was
clearly on the far side of fifty (only the looseness of the skin on her limbs
showed her age), her hair was a convincing shade of auburn. It was the
hair that made him certain.

"Mrs. Duquette. You surprised me."

"Well, thank you. I like surprising people," she said. She did not
move to shake his hand but bent to place her folded towel carefully on a
rock, away from the damp sand. She looked him up and down with
ambiguous pleasure. "You haven't been in."