The Whole World Over (3 page)

George chose his flying saucer pajamas over the ones with the fire-breathing
dragons. Greenie brought him the book he wanted and sat
beside him against his pillows. "
I
will read it," he told her, and he dove
right in, as if the book were a pool, lending great emotion to human
anatomy, bones and muscles, organs and veins.

" 'My blood can't move through my body all by itself,' " he read with
decorum. " 'It needs my heart—a group of strong muscles in my chest—
to move it. My heart is like my own little . . . engaah . . .' Mommy, what
is e-n-g-i-n-e?"

"Engine. A machine that makes something run, like in a car."

" 'Engine! It pumps blood through my body all the time, even when
I'm sleeping! If I put my hand on my chest, I can feel my heart beating.' "
Here they stopped, as always, to place George's hand under his pajama
top and slide it around till he felt his heartbeat. Then Greenie let him
feel hers.

"God made a weird thing about lungs," he said after turning the
page, breathing dramatically to make his point.

"You think lungs are weird?" said Greenie.

"They blow up like balloons, but they don't go up to the ceiling.
They're inside you."

"Yes. And they're a lot tougher than balloons." Even though George
had never shown signs of being especially fearful, Greenie worried sometimes
that he would develop unnecessary fears by thinking too much—in
this case, that his lungs might explode or wither down to nothing.

Having taught himself to read, George now preferred books to
videos. Perhaps because books were involved, he rarely resisted going
to bed. In these ways, he was not so typical of boys his age. Greenie also
wondered if other little boys marveled so often at the quirky motivations
of God when their parents never spoke to them of any god whatsoever.
Greenie had long ago discarded her parents' anemic Protestant
rites, the stuff of white clapboard churches plain as any tract house or
government office; Alan's parents, one Jewish and one Christian, had
shown no enthusiasm for their inherited faiths, defining the various holidays
so loosely that they had become almost secular by attrition.

"Why did God make liquid?" George asked once, with exasperation,
when he spilled his juice. Scolded for the umpteenth time about his boyishly
unsanitary manners, he complained, "But if you're not allowed to
lick your hands, why did God invent the words
lick your hands
?" Why
did God invent noises that hurt your ears, shoes that had to be tied,
animals that liked to eat other animals? Arguments—why did God
invent
those
?

Greenie answered his questions without raising doubts about God—
though she asked him who had mentioned God and learned that one
schoolmate seemed to be the chief missionary. "Ford says God is everything,"
George told her one day when she was washing dishes. She shut
off the water and turned to face him. "God is
in
everything?" she asked,
to clarify what he'd said. George rolled his eyes and said, "No, Mom,
God IS everything. IS everything. Ford says so." And then he turned his
attention to his Buzz Lightyear doll; there was nothing further to discuss.
He had merely passed on his latest bit of knowledge, a fact no less
certain, and perhaps no less remarkable, than the fact that T. rex had
two claws on each foreleg while Allosaurus had three. A four-year-old
brain was a cataloging device, an anthology in progress, collecting and
retaining its own uniquely preferred scraps of enlightenment and misperception.
Greenie would have loved to see an index of George's brain,
exactly what assumptions and generalizations it had thus far made
about the world.

Assumptions and generalizations, facts and rumors: all our lives, they
mingle without segregation in most of our minds, thought Greenie.
Look, for instance, at what she herself "knew" about Raymond Fleet-wing
McCrae. She'd skimmed past his name in the newspaper three or
four times, in stories about concerns dire to western states, quaint at
best to residents of Manhattan or even the rural Northeast (the severe
ongoing drought; the civil feud over grazing lands; the summer forest
fires that raged across states she'd thought of naively as nothing but
sandy, uninflammable desert). She'd read somewhere that his Indian
name was phony and so, too, the color of his hair (black as a polished
stretch limo). She recalled that, without being a Catholic or a Baptist or
even a husband and father, he was unabashedly pro-life. While standing
in line at the A&P, she'd seen a headline about his relationship with a
divorced Hollywood star renowned for doing nude scenes without a
body double.

That was Ray McCrae, according to the politically indolent brain of
Greenie Duquette. And now, thanks to Mary Bliss, she knew that, with
the exception of sweet potatoes and snow peas, he liked his vegetables
well disguised; that he liked beef and pork, but lamb best of all; that he
had an aversion to game, though he was a sharpshooter when elk and
antelope season lured him north to Wyoming; that he could not stand,
in any context, flavors in the neighborhood of licorice (no aniseed, no
fennel, probably no tarragon); that he loved to eat fluffy egg dishes
while bragging about his low cholesterol count. No curries, no raw
meat or fish, no leafy salads. His soft spots were ice cream, whipped
cream, creamy French sauces, nuts, citrus flavors, and yes, yes indeed,
coconut cake.

"And there you have it: the key to that man's heart—that
unmarried
man's heart, just
waiting
to be plucked," Greenie's mother would have
said if she had been around to say it. Greenie's mother had been a fine
old-fashioned everyday cook. When Greenie was no older than George,
her mother taught her to sauté onions in butter and to melt chocolate in
a double boiler. "Two great beginnings to so many magnificent things,"
she had said with an air of pride and mystery.

Alan came in just after George fell asleep; Greenie could hear her
son's little lungs working quietly away behind the bookcase they had
constructed to turn his space into a facsimile of a bedroom. The shelves
facing out toward the living room were filled with books of Alan's:
books on ego and self, on pleasure and love and libido and marriage. It
amused Greenie to think of George, when he slept, with his head just
behind this tower of scholarly effort to understand all these lofty yet
intimate things.

From the darkened shoulders of Alan's coat, from his glittering hair,
Greenie could see that the weather hadn't changed. Nor, from the
expression on his face, had his mood.

Alan seemed perpetually unaware that his emotions were so transparent;
Greenie could only guess that he must have another, more enigmatic
face for the people who brought their own emotions to him for guidance.
She said, "The session go all right? Is this a tough one, make or
break?"

"Baby crossroads," Alan said succinctly as he hung his coat on the
rack by the door to their apartment, bent to untie his hiking boots.

This was his shorthand for couples sparring over whether or not to
become parents. Usually, by the time such a couple reached Alan, the
woman had given an ultimatum to the man, his time had expired without
a decision, and she was holding out one last chance: a third-party
catalyst. Greenie figured this sort of crisis was to her husband what a
busted transmission might be to an auto mechanic: either you fixed it, at
no small expense but ending up with a car that drove like new (though
who could say for how long), or you gave up the car altogether, sent it
away for scrap. Alan and Greenie had been through a baby crossroads
of their own, arguing and stonewalling through months of Alan's doubt
and resistance. Just as Greenie was about to propose that they seek a
third opinion, Alan had suddenly given in. She had been demonstratively
grateful, though secretly her reaction had been, in a word,
Finally.

Alan sat beside Greenie and set a hand briefly on her leg. "But here's
a twist," he said. "It's two men."

"Oh my," said Greenie.

" 'Oh my' is right. I've never had to think out the conflict in quite
these terms. And it does make a difference." He laid his head against the
back of the couch. Greenie waited for him to say more, but he simply
closed his eyes. She felt her modest hopes—for a lively conversation, for
the company of a man with his vigor renewed, for a glimpse of her husband's
warmly sardonic old smile—plummet in a familiar, tiresome way.

"George is reading just incredibly," she said at last, knowing it would
be a mistake to push Alan further on any subject related to his work.

"That's great," he said quietly. "Though you have to wonder how
much is memorization."

"Sometimes—sometimes yes. But this evening he read the directions
on the box of spaghetti while I was making his dinner. That's not
memorization."

"Great, that's great." Alan was always worn out after the sessions he
had to hold at night to accommodate working couples, but Greenie was
irritated all the same.

"Could you maybe have just a little knee-jerk pride in your son's talents?
I'm not saying he's a genius; he's just a good reader—an amazing
reader, as a matter of fact! Other boys his age aren't reading yet at all,"
she said.

Alan raised his head and looked at her as if he were peering through
fog. "Comparisons are odious, Greenie. And did I say I wasn't proud?"

"No . . ." She might have told him that comparisons were the basis of
science, the soul of metaphor.

"I'm sorry. The point is, I don't worry about George. Not a bit.
George is terrific. Of course I'm proud of George. I'm worried about
other things."

Greenie hesitated, then said quietly, "I know you're concerned about
money—"

"Money? Oh, you name it!" Alan laughed. "Everything but my
prostate gland! Hey, physically I'm in terrific shape!" He flexed his
arms, braced his fists against his chest.

"Alan, I know I've said it before and it pisses you off, but you really
should call Jerry . . ."

"Jerry does not, as you seem to believe, hold the key to the inner
meanings of the cosmos or the source of all joy or even the divine secret
to finding a
real
two-bedroom apartment in New York City without
selling your nubile sisters into the white-slave trade," said Alan. Jerry
was the analyst Alan had seen during and beyond the years he was training
at the institute. Alan had stopped seeing him years ago, though
sometimes they met for a friendly drink or exchanged referrals. Greenie
wondered what Jerry would have made of Alan's remark about his
prostate gland. It was true that the one place their life seemed as happy
as ever was in their bed, but sometimes Greenie suspected that Alan
used sex these days as the sole form of conciliation between them—
which only served to create an insidious distance in her head whenever
he made love to her in the wake of a disagreement.

Greenie started toward the kitchen. "Let me get you something
to eat."

"That's okay; I'm not hungry."

She laughed. "I can't even do that—feed you!"

Alan stood up to join her. He held her from behind. "Greenie,
Greenie, about Jerry, it's just . . . you know. Been there, done that. Done
that exhaustively, inside out, to the sun and back again. That's not what
I need right now."

"What
do
you need? I want to know, even if it isn't something I
can give."

"Space," he said sharply. "Sorry if that sounds too California. Peace.
A break from the interrogation." He squeezed her tight, her back
against his long, slender ribcage, before he let her go and walked into
the kitchen. Greenie saw him glance at the upper shelf that held the bottles
of liquor. He sighed and turned to the sink, filled a glass with water
and drank it down.

He crossed the room again and went behind the bookcase to look at
his sleeping son. Greenie resisted the temptation to follow. Space he'd
asked for, so space he would get. For now.

When he emerged, he told her he needed to sleep. His next session
would be at eight the following morning: tedious timing, since after that
he would be free for two hours. Later, however, he could pick up George
from his nursery school and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening
with him.

That would give Greenie extra time to cook for Guvna McCrae. She
had agreed to serve him dinner the evening after next. As she cleaned the
kitchen, she realized that she had yet to tell Alan about the phone call,
but by the time she walked into their bedroom, he was already asleep. A
sleep posture—could that be passed on through genes? Because George,
when he slept, was a perfect miniature of Alan: on his back, mouth wide
open, left arm (always the left) thrown up over his head, right arm along
his side, legs spread in an attitude that looked in the man almost wanton
but in the boy simply trusting, ignorant of threats to his dreams or to the
eagerly growing cells of his wiry limbs.

After closing the bedroom door and pacing a small circle of frustration,
Greenie sat on the couch, beside the table that held the photographs
of their eleven years together so far: Greenie in Maine (wet hair,
black swimsuit, too many freckles), squinting into the low, rosy sun,
Alan the photographer's shadow draped on the rock beside her. The two
of them at a dinner party all dressed up, exchanging a glance that said,
Oh here we are and aren't we lucky!
Greenie in white, hair wound with
freesia, being kissed by Alan the groom. Greenie on this very couch six
years ago, opening presents on her thirtieth birthday. Alan and his sister
flanking their small, perplexed-looking mother. Then a copiously pregnant
Greenie laughing, raising an arm in vain to ward off the camera. All
these images soundly upstaged by George, George, and more George:
tiny and rumpled by the pressure of birth, Greenie's lips on his cheek;
casting up at Alan one of his very first smiles; cradled between his parents
on the carousel in Central Park (a snapshot taken by a stranger);
holding a toy backhoe in the playground sandbox; petting his grandmother's
cat; up on his father's shoulders beneath a maple tree sunstruck
with autumn.