The Whole World Over (5 page)

And then, a triumph, it turned out that he had hung on long enough
to get the magic pills, the protease inhibitors. "Inhibitions, bring 'em
on!" Michael B had cheered, raucous with relief, when the drugs began
to do their thing and, for the first time in years, his body began to fill
out, his skin regaining a modest glow. His appetite returned full force,
and he loved to drop by Walter's Place for lunch, eat an oozing meaty
Reuben and a butterscotch sundae.

But then something backfired. His liver didn't like the drugs or his
T cells tanked; Walter hadn't really listened to the details that Michael B
so urgently explained. Walter had gone to the hospital, as always, and
this time, standing mortified beneath a genital piñata, unable to look at
the table where someone had blithely placed an orange lava lamp, he had
known that this was the last time in for Michael B. "Almighty fuck," he
had said when he walked out of the room (H. E. double hockeysticks to
Granna's silver rule). Within a week, Michael B was in a casket winging
toward the heartland. Though he had told various friends to please take
various items from his marvelous collections of party clothes and snuff
bottles and Japanese fans, his parents had simply shown up like a band
of deaf-mutes with a U-Haul and, faster than you could strike a set on
Broadway, taken the whole production away to Ohio. Good-bye to all
that in the blink of a Bible Belt eye. And his rent-stabilized apartment,
the one he'd promised to pass on to Gwen? Gone with the wind (that is,
after renovation, onto the open market at five times the price).

You could remember without artifacts; how pathetically superficial if
you couldn't! But Walter realized that, blessed though he was to have
escaped this plague, he might not escape a car crash or an embolism or,
heaven forfend, an
actual
piano from above. He was not without assets
and treasures, not without friends and other worthy potential heirs. He
had, for instance, a nephew in California, and though he did not know
Scott well, the boy seemed a good enough egg. At seventeen, he played
baseball and GameBoy, but he also wrote poetry, strummed a guitar,
and treated Walter like a person, even a likable person, not the Strip-o-Gram
Guy Who Came for Dinner.

Walter saw Scott only once or twice a year because his family lived
just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco (like Paris, but with
your own language and no Turkish toilets). Last visit, Scott had invited
Walter to a "poetry jam" at a Berkeley bookstore rank with patchouli
and bohemian dust. Walter had sneezing fits but enjoyed himself
immensely among the young pierced peers of Scott (who had wisely,
discreetly—on his uncle's advice—pierced nothing more than a single
ear). Afterward, Walter took Scott to Chez Panisse, along with a willowy
girlfriend who weighed about as much as a dish towel and whose
"thing" was turning Emily Dickinson's poems into "soft rap." Walter
had a hard time not laughing at her earnest countercultural spiel when
surely her parents owned twin Volvo wagons and a hot tub the size of
his living room. But she and Scott made Walter feel weightlessly young,
even fleetingly, unprecedentedly
cool.
After telling the teenagers numerous
tales about running a restaurant (and here they were at the sine qua
non of modern eateries), Scott smiled at him in that adolescently catlike
fashion and said, "Dude, your life so rules." Well, perhaps it
did.
Walter
was charmed.

Unfortunately, you could have the rest of that family: Scott's sister,
the snooty little cheerleader (though maybe she'd straighten out yet);
Walter's supercilious brother, Werner, Prozac poster boy; and Tipi, the
anorexic, mosquitoey much-younger wife (though at least his original
wife).

No, Walter realized in his bourbon funk after Michael B's sorry sendoff,
no by golly NO; he would not want
them
to inherit so much as a
shoelace. The samplers brought the worst of Walter's brother to mind
when he recalled seeing Werner toss these and other mementos of
Granna into a trash can (to be salvaged by Walter).

No: he would not give Werner a second chance to fling such treasures
aside—or, worse, to spend Walter's greener assets on predictable follies
like that ghastly "gaming hall" he'd added to his already monstrous
house or the RV he planned to buy for his
very
early retirement.

So then, "Which one?" Walter had asked Ben the following night,
freed from his funeral suit but held in the vise of a colossal hangover.
They were standing at the bar, spying on a table by the front fireplace.
"The one in the sweater or the stuffy blue shirt?"

"Stuffy," Ben answered with his customary bluntness.

The couple in question were a pair who had been coming to Walter's
Place several times a year since it opened. About Walter's age, they
looked rich, fit, obscenely well educated and, most irritating of all, perfectly
matched. They'd been together for who knew how long, and
every time they ate here, they
talked.
When Walter passed their table,
he'd eavesdrop; what could they possibly talk about together with such
perpetual enthusiasm? Well, they talked about theater, opera, ballet, and
they gossiped with connubial glee—about people Walter didn't know, of
course, but sometimes about famous people involved in those sequined
cultury things. (So they were connected too.) Never had he overheard
them discussing illness or death, topics far too common at so many
other tables.

Walter could already look back on this horrific era with what he
believed to be an uncanny clarity for someone so deep in its shroudlike
folds. He could see these recent years as a timeline: how at first no one
spoke about It (or not out loud), then how everyone spoke about It but
not in terms of who had It, then how suddenly everyone knew, almost
by osmosis, who had It and who didn't (and who might). Who was
on the Quilt, who died fighting, who found God, who went back to
Boise or Billings or hopped a final plane, first-class, to the finest hotel
on Maui.

A particularly vile social phenomenon was the kind of couple who,
when the topic came up, leaned just a little closer, forming a personal
tepee, their unified expression this pious, phony guilt-trip look that
said,
Please don't hate us because we happen to be monogamous!
Or
celibate. Sometimes that was the dirty secret. Couples stuck in lustless
unions, maybe because of real estate, because no one would budge from
the deal-of-the-century rent-controlled apartment, and then, presto, their
prison became a refuge. Sexless but safe. Oh now, SAFE. What a loaded,
political, euphemistic, convoluted word that one had become.

Walter was one of the inexplicably blessed—footloose but healthy—
so when he felt resentful toward these couples, it wasn't for their smug
vitality. No, he envied them something else entirely: the no longer having
to try so hard, no longer having to cruise with that creeping, escalating
doubt, sliding down that laundry chute toward the puddled, sunless
cellar of age. If he were entirely honest with himself, he'd admit that he
longed, more than just about anything else, to be part of that club, the
men who stood on the High Ground, snug and dry in the cozy, bread-scented
kitchen.

Up There is precisely where he saw this couple at the table by the fire-place,
but he could hardly despise them for their altitude, could he? He
always greeted them warmly, and he knew their first names, but he had
not known their professions. Now it turned out that Stuffy (Gordie) was
a lawyer
and
a financial advisor—who, according to Ben, had become a
fiscal priest of sorts, specializing in legal last rites for those who'd faced
up to their imminent end. But even as a generalist, he was the best in the
business, said Ben.

The next day had been one of those crisp September days that fill
your lungs with virtue and resolve. Resisting superstition, Walter looked
Stuffy up in the phone book and made an appointment.

THE WRETCHED SUN
. Blame, to begin with, the wretched autumn sun,
coming in that window and catching the maple highlights in the man's
youthful hair, herofying his jawline and gilding the curvature of a hip
just as Walter stepped into his office.

"Oh hello! Why
hello,
" Gordie effused. "You're
that
Walter. I should
have put two and two together! We love your place—and if I had my
way, we'd come a lot more often, but Stephen's always trying some new
kind of diet. We were there last week! I'm practically addicted to your
beef bourguignon."

Walter thanked him. "The beef bourguignon is Hugo's, not mine. I
started a restaurant because I'm a hopeless cook but love to be fed." He
told Gordie it was the bartender who'd recommended him—and they
joked about that to break the ice. Walter had expected to feel unnerved
at this meeting, but not in this way; somehow, all at once, Stuffy seemed
outlandishly charming (yes, his flattery helped), and that day he wore
something nicer, softer, less prepossessing: mossy old corduroys and a
loose copper-colored shirt (you could be sure the price had been more
like platinum).

Gordie sat at his desk; Walter capsized in a fat green sofa.

"Where's your famous dog?" asked Gordie.

"At home," said Walter. "About pets and children, you should never
presume acceptance."

"I love dogs!" Gordie protested. "We'd have one ourselves if our
schedules weren't so insane. . . . You're lucky you can bring one to
work."

"Actually, I'm lucky I haven't been closed. I'm waiting for the hygiene
police to stop by and tell me I'm not exactly in Paris. Alas."

They looked at each other pleasantly, through a narrow shaft of silence.
(Our first silence, Walter reflected later on. Most people noted first fights
as a landmark; Walter thought first silences far more memorable.)

Gordie asked if he'd brought his financial information; Walter placed
his folders on the desk. As Gordie began to page through tax returns
and bank statements, Walter felt almost naked. This
was
a thorny business.
He jumped slightly when Gordie pointed past him and said,
"There's coffee, tea, and, speaking of Paris, some great French cookies.
That's my vice—really expensive cookies."

"If you don't mind my saying so, that's a pathetic vice," said Walter.

Gordie's laugh was one of professional nicety (Walter knew that
laugh quite well; a lesson in humility, this). "Perhaps I should amend
that to say it's the only vice I'll confess to my clients."

"Ah. Say no more."

Second of all, blame that wretched Scotsman from the bookstore.
(Now
there
was a bona fide Stuffy—though Ben had christened that one
Bonny, short for Bonny Prince Charlie.) When the phone rang, Gordie
answered. On the speaker thing, before Gordie picked up the receiver,
Walter heard enough to recognize Fenno McLeod's distinctive voice.

"God it's been ages, how are you?" said Gordie. "I'm sorry we
haven't been in to say hi, we've just—well, we were in Turin and Venice
for all of July, the Berkshires in August, and now—maybe it's just me,
but the fall is still like back-to-school: too much homework, playing
catch-up at the gym, that feeling like you're about to start getting
graded again. I'm with a client, but what's up? I'd love to call back and
hear about your summer." He mimed to Walter that he would be off in a
minute and swiveled his chair to face the one vast window, which
looked out into the branches shading Union Square. Gusts of wind were
beginning to strip away the turning leaves.

Gordie let out a cry of dismay. "Oh no. I'm so sorry. I am so sorry to
hear that, Fenno." More silence. "I always thought he was like this . . .
old soul in the corner there, such a reassuring presence. You must miss
him so much."

Walter deduced that McLeod's dog had died. Walter wasn't much of a
reader these days, though he still knew his plays, so he rarely entered
McLeod's place, but the man's dog was as much "the bookshop dog" as
Walter's was "the restaurant dog"—half a block apart. Like The Bruce,
Rodgie was a local personality on Bank Street, the two dogs longtime
acquaintances through frequent sidewalk encounters. Whatever Walter
might think of his owner, Rodgie was one of the few male dogs with
whom The Bruce did not feel compelled to stage that tiresome growling
face-off. While the two dogs had made their olfactory small talk (small
sniff, could you call it that?), Walter and Fenno had exchanged more or
less the same pointless information, updated: current climate, volume of
business, the relentless rise in real estate prices; yada yada
nada.
Dog
people in New York loved to brag about how their pets made them
important connections, but no one ever mentioned how much tedious
obligatory chitchat came with the package.

After Gordie said good-bye, at first he did not turn around. Perhaps
something down on the street had captured his attention. But when he
faced Walter again, he was wiping his eyes with a sleeve. "I apologize,"
he said, with a small self-conscious laugh. "Excuse my emotions, I'm a
bit of a sap, but a very nice dog I've known for ages died. . . . I should be
glad it's you I have here, shouldn't I?" Gordie pulled a tissue from a box
on his desk.

"It's not a bit sappy. Sometimes I'm sure I'd be lost without The
Bruce," Walter said automatically. "He gets me up every morning. I
know that."

With deliberate gravity, Gordie turned his attention back to Walter's
papers. "So—I'm sorry—remind me about your objectives?"

"Well, it's not as if I'm dying or anything like that." Now it was Walter's
turn to feel awkward. "Oh dear. I didn't mean to sound so glib."

"I'm aware of my reputation," said Gordie. "The fiscal undertaker,
that's what I'm called, even to my face. Sad but true. One client joked
that he's hung a sign by the checkout desk at his doctor's office:
RESERVE YOUR PLOT AND CALL GORDIE UNSWORTH
."