The Whole World Over (9 page)

Staring at Scott's picture, Walter thought,
Why the heck not?
Suddenly,
he thought it made spectacular sense for everyone involved.

"I could use an apprentice," he said. "I could take him in July, after
school ends. I promise I'd put him to work. And tell him I mean
work.
"

"Walt, man, you have got to be pulling my leg."

"What—now the rock band looks good?"

"You don't know what you're proposing."

"So what if I don't? So what if it's a full-blown disaster? Like you
wouldn't take him back? Like you think he'll return to you
co-rup-ted
?"
Walter waited for more laughter. None. "I want you to propose it to
Scott and see what he thinks. Or I'll call him myself, tonight, while you
and Tipi paint the town and she helps you blow out that battalion of
candles."

Rarity of rarities, Werner was speechless. Which gave the man greater
pause: facing his age or turning his grown son over to his homosexual
brother? "Hello? Have we fallen into the San Andreas Fault?" said Walter.
He wondered if Werner could hear his grin.

WALTER BUCKLED ON THE LITTLE PLAID COAT
he had just purchased
at the dog boutique on Bleecker. The Bruce looked suspicious
and vaguely offended, and Walter understood completely, but the vet
had suggested that T.B.'s sensitive skin be well protected from the cold
whenever possible.

"I know, I know," soothed Walter as T.B. tried to wriggle free of
the garment by rubbing against the doorjamb. "Believe me, sweetheart,
this was the most masculine option." The jacket had a Sherlockian air—
perhaps the skirting on the shoulders, suggesting fogbound London
alleys. As compensation, Walter had bought T.B. a new, more intimidating
collar: wide black leather with silver studs. Briefly, Walter wished he
had a dog who didn't have to dress—a rugged dog, like that bookshop
collie. He'd always laughed at the booties and raincoats on Upper East
Side poodles. But truth be told, perhaps The Bruce was more like Walter
himself: finicky about his surroundings, a sensitive kind of guy who
loved his comforts just so and would rather be celibate than live in the
woods.

Walter felt almost completely happy for the first time in ages, and
when the two of them left the building to make their way through
the gently meandering snowflakes—glinting overhead in the beams of
the streetlamps, green in the traffic light, then vanishing like kisses
on the well-traveled pavement—T.B. seemed to forget his troubles, too.
What was it about snow: was it the silence, the perfect whiteness, the
lovely paradox of icy and soft all at once? If the sight of falling snow
didn't give you the itch to run out and play, there was a void where your
soul ought to be.

They crossed Hudson Street and entered the small park beside the
playground, where towering linden trees grew in straight rows, formal
as a parading platoon. Both park and playground were deserted, and
once they were under the trees, Walter let The Bruce off his leash so he
could browse along unfettered, explore and reciprocate the scents left
behind on numerous vertical objects. An inch of snow had managed to
settle undisturbed on the bricks, so that Walter could feel and hear that
pioneering crunch beneath his boots. The air was almost warm, pleasant
though disappointing, since it meant that the snow would vanish by
morning. But for now, here it was, just as plainly elegant as it would
look in the country, as it had looked on Granna's lawn in Massachusetts
every winter of Walter's youth.

This must be like finding out you're pregnant, he thought with secretive
delight. Expecting—yes, he was now
expecting.
And just the night
before, he hadn't had an inkling. He was pleased with his generosity and
his spontaneity, as well as with the concrete thrill that he and T.B. would
soon have a roommate; or, in Victorian terms, a "ward."

More responsibility, that's what I've been craving, thought Walter.
And needing. He did not, after all, need a lover. Not now. (Let Gordie
spin his amorous wheels in the muck of married life.) His calling Werner
at just the right time had clearly been the hand of Granna. He looked up,
though he thought heaven a pretty outlandish idea, and said,
"Danke
Schoen!"

Snow struck him full in the face, and he stopped to prolong the sensation.
T.B. shook himself, blinking and sneezing, then grunted at Walter
as if to ask why they were stalled in their habitual journey.

Walter looked back and saw their steps in the snow, crisscrossing,
interlacing, like two strands of yarn woven close in a blanket. He looked
over at the playground, locked and empty and yearningly white, from
the slides to the seats of the faintly swaying swings. The sandbox was a
drift of fluorescent blue.

With elaborate affection, he brushed the snow off T.B.'s face and
head and his absurd diminutive trenchcoat. As they turned onto Bank
Street, he clipped the leash back onto the collar. Midway down the
block of dignified houses and trees, light from an open doorway stenciled
the sidewalk ahead. A man was sweeping a path to the sidewalk;
a cloud of fine dry snow rose before him like a sparkling explosion
of glass.

"Evening," said McLeod as Walter passed.

"Picture postcard, isn't it?" Walter replied.

"Why, yes, long as you're staying put."

"Which I hope there'll be plenty of people doing in front of my
fireplaces tonight!" Walter knew he should stop and make further
conversation—over McLeod's shoulder, he saw no customers in the
shop—but he continued toward the restaurant, savoring solitude for a
change. He was glad to be a sentimentalist, unashamed of the homeliest
pleasures. Walter would teach Scott to love all these things just the way
he did, to take not a bit of beauty or tenderness for granted.

"
SNOW ON A WOMAN'S SHOULDERS
—now that's a sight I find
just about fatally romantic, I do!" These were the first words out
of Ray McCrae's large, lovely mouth when he opened the door to his
hotel suite. Greenie was stunned. She had assumed that some third-tier
assistant would greet her and take her straight to the kitchen.

"Miss Duquette," he said simply then, as if her name by itself were
praise. He took the two shopping bags from her hands. He called out
loudly, "Chop chop, Mary Bliss! Our hifalutin chef's arrived!"

He turned back to Greenie. "Miss Duquette—or, pardon me,
Ms.
Duquette—can I offer you a drink?"

"No, no, I'm here to work. And I'm Greenie," she said, trying to
reclaim herself. It wasn't that he impressed her as a celebrity but, rather,
that he was so shockingly handsome. He looked nothing like the few
thirdhand images she must have skimmed over in the
New York Times.
They would not have shown the vibrant shine to his nutmeg-colored
skin, nor that his eyes were the green of shaded ferns. Nor would they
have shown the tall, dependable shape of the man, cutting a silhouette
from the air immutable as a standing stone.

When she shrugged off her backpack, the governor took that as well,
while deftly removing her heavy coat. Mary Bliss came in from the next
room—and she, too, surprised Greenie: hardly the delicate blonde
Greenie had imagined from her honeyed voice but a woman as physically
impressive as her boss, with big, friendly features and a jubilant
halo of dark brown hair. Both she and Ray McCrae wore cowboy boots,
and Greenie wondered briefly if the tourist board of New Mexico
required that its civil servants wear them—along with a string tie like
the governor's, fastened at his throat with a corpulent turquoise bear.

"Hey," said Mary Bliss, holding out a hand. "Let me get you settled."

"Settle this woman in a chair for a minute," said the governor, and
Greenie found herself steered toward an armchair by the window. She
could hardly take her eyes off the view, a high vista of Central Park
through falling snow.

Ray McCrae sat on a couch facing her, leaning forward, legs apart.
"So, Queenie, you got a family, am I right?"

"Greenie," she said quietly. What was she doing here?

A phone rang in another room, but the governor paid no heed. "Well,
I have to say I do like Queenie," he said. "But Greenie it is."

"I have a family, yes." She thought of the dossier. "My husband and
my son."

The governor nodded. "Your son is four. Starting kindergarten soon."

"Next fall." She wished he would let her get to work.

"We have some fine schools in Santa Fe, I just want to assure you of
that. And your husband's a shrink, right? Well, Greenie, we got ourselves
plenty of kooks, if I may speak freely, rich kooks and not-so-rich kooks.
Garden-variety neurotics, substance abusers, identity-crisis abusers, wife
beaters, impotent lawyers, depressed unemployed craftspersons, you
name it." He must have misread her discomfort because he said, "I'm
not long on political correctness, Greenie. Forgive me."

"It's not that," she said. "It's just that I haven't even cooked for you,
Mr. McCrae, and I do have a business here and I—"

"One thing at a time, absolutely. We'll see what you have up your
sleeve and go from there. But I get hunches." He tapped the center of his
forehead. "I got one female trait, and that's my intuition. It's how I
know I never need fret about runnin' for the White House, so I can misbehave
my butt off. Within reason. It's how I know I ain't met Miss
Right so far, though I've been around the hacienda a few times and
back. I have." He gave her a wide, charming smile and stood. "And
here's the etiquette: you can call me Mr. Governor or, and I far prefer it,
Ray. Call me Ray, would you, Greenie?

"Mary Bliss! Mary Bliss, where's George got to? Give him the cattle
prod, would you?" Greenie started at the sound of her son's name. This
George, it turned out, was Ray McCrae's driver.

"Excuse me for headin' out on you here, but I have a meeting, a dinner
meeting at some swanky fish restaurant, where I will abstain from
the eats as I expect even swankier food from you, Ms. Duquette—or
maybe less swanky but superior. I am unimpressed by swanky." He took
his coat from Mary Bliss. "Back in an hour and a half, that suit?"

"Does that suit you?" said Greenie.

"Suits me only if it suits you," he said, and then his cell phone rang
and he pulled it out of his pocket. He walked out of the suite laughing
and talking.

"Doesn't he have bodyguards?" Greenie asked Mary Bliss.

"The men in black are next door. A weird crew. Probably listening to
your whole conversation on some big ear attached to the wall. . . . Sure
you don't want a drink? Ray would hate my treating you like a maid.
He hates my treating his
maids
like maids."

Greenie followed Mary Bliss into the compact kitchen. "He sounds a
little too much like the perfect boss."

Mary Bliss laughed. "Oh honey. Cranky or arrogant, no, hardly ever,
but demanding? He works us right down to the quick of our pinkie
toenails."

Greenie worked that hard already. But wait. Was she considering the
job? Hadn't she thought of this as little more than a lark?

On the kitchen counter, all the equipment she'd asked for stood in a
row beside the handwritten list she'd sent to Mary Bliss. From the shopping
bags, she took two dozen plastic containers, components of a meal
showier than any she had cooked since she was in school. What did Ray
McCrae define as "swanky"? she wondered with apprehension.

She felt a surge of panic, but it was followed by the same greedy calm
she felt whenever she knew she was just about to perfect a new cupcake,
cookie, or tart. How satisfying, all the colors and textures and tastes
laid out before her, a palette of pigments before a painter. No one else
confronting this array of ingredients (some common, others fancy; some
raw, others mingled, blended, simmered, and spiced; some minced or
sliced, still others puréed) would have done with them quite what she
planned to do.

She opened the refrigerator and lifted the lids of the two green boxes
delivered that afternoon by Tina. She needn't have checked on how their
contents had made the trip—Tina never failed her—but Greenie wanted
the reassurance of their solid perfection, a reminder of why she was here.

"Have to confess I had a peek myself." Mary Bliss stood in the doorway.
"I've got a bad old sweet tooth too."

"There's plenty to go around," said Greenie.

"He does have a whale of an appetite. Just warnin' you, in case you
decide to join us. Triple the recipe—that's sort of a motto I have when it
comes to makin' Ray happy, and I'm not just talking foodwise. Though,
mind you, triple's what you get in return if he likes the job you do."

Greenie put on her apron. "The two of you talk as if there's something
I don't know, as if I'm about to be plucked off the ground by the
hand of fate—I just haven't noticed the shadow over my head."

Mary Bliss laughed. "Something like that. But please excuse me."
She let the door swing shut behind her, summoned by another ringing
phone.

Greenie placed her own rack on the roasting pan Mary Bliss had
found. She poured the soup into a heavy pot and spooned the chutneys
into two tiny dishes—intended for butter, but they would do. She
unwrapped the cakes of cheese: Vermont feta and Humboldt Fog, a goat
cheese from California striped with ash. She laid paper oak leaves on a
china plate and put the cheeses there to soften. She filled a steel tray
with the pale, pulpy liquid she would stir into an ice to cleanse the
gubernatorial palate. She placed it in the freezer.

"Do fancy food," Mary Bliss had said when Greenie asked what sort
of a meal she should make. "Fancy but not pretentious, know what I
mean?" So Greenie fantasized that she was cooking for dignitaries from
abroad, showing off wholesome American plenty—and showing off to
Ray McCrae that she could hold her own with more indigenous chefs.
She felt pride along with a familiar unease. The opulence of the meal—
counting ingredients, she stopped at sixty-three—was shameful in a
way, but this was a fact of modern life at its most inequitable. When
you made only desserts—when what you squandered, if anything, was
chocolate, not corn (you wouldn't think about the flour)—you could
fool yourself into believing that your professional dealings were in fantasy
and art, removing you from the workaday morality of food, of
excess here and hunger there.

Whether because of her personality or the lessons learned by her generation,
Greenie's mother had been a thrifty woman. She had washed
out plastic Baggies and polished her windows with yesterday's news.
Beside her kitchen sink she'd kept a basin for all remotely edible waste,
from tea bags and onion skins to leftover rice on the verge of fermenting
and the fat trimmed from a roast. Every night before going to bed,
Greenie had carried the basin across their backyard and dumped it over
a stone wall into a plot of forest owned by the town. And every morning,
were you to have checked, you'd have found not a single trace of
what had been discarded (what, in most households back then, was pulverized
in a sink disposal and swept away, sight unseen, as sewage). "I
can't feed the orphans of Southeast Asia, but I can feed the wildlife,"
Greenie's mother had boasted.

Living in the city, Greenie often wished for that basin, for its prudent
circling of the food chain—but here, what would you feed if you tossed
your leftovers into the night? Rats and roaches? Though, really, could
you convince yourself they were much different from foxes, rabbits, and
owls? Were their souls any smaller? Earnest little George would have
argued their case.

Not long after George turned two, Greenie's parents took an anniversary
trip to England and Scotland. As her father drove them along a
coastal cliff in the Highlands, along a mere ribbon of road with a
famously grand view, he missed a curve, sending their rental car to the
rocks far below. This was what the chief inspector of the small Scottish
town told Greenie in an awkwardly tinny phone conversation (the day
after she had been notified, confusingly, by the chief of police in the
town where she had grown up). "We warn the tourists how treacherous
the roads are hereabouts," said the Scottish chief inspector mournfully,
"but there's no other way to see these views without taking a little risk.
I'm sorry as can be, miss, but I hope you don't find it disrespectful if I
say, 'twasn't a bad way to go."

She clung to the odd false comfort in the chief inspector's lyrical
r
's,
in the quaint, pretty way he pronounced "tourist":
teeyoorist.
"Ther-abouts,"
perhaps the people were exceptionally courteous and charming,
by American standards at least, their cobbled hamlets genteel and
safe. But in America, the roads would have been safer, too. Along an
American road of the kind this man described, there would have been
heavy concrete barriers, like the ones placed around embassies to thwart
car bombs, because an accident of this type would have set off a chain of
lawsuits. The barriers would have marred the view, but never mind. If
anyone was to blame, Greenie knew it was her father. Behind the wheel,
Professor Duquette had been affably devil-may-care, casual with speed.
Everyone made mistakes, thought Greenie, but why did his have to be
fatal?

There would be an inquest, the policeman was quick to tell her, but
that was a formality. Would she be coming over? She could hear through
his well-mannered tone that he hoped she would not. Some bereaved
children would have been impatient to catch the next plane, to see the
exact spot where their parents' lives had ended, to ask futile questions,
perhaps to see the bodies if time allowed; but Greenie found the
prospect of such futile scenarios deeply depressing—especially as they
would have to take place in a corner of the world renowned for its
beauty. She chose, with guilty relief, to make the "arrangements" long-distance.
She took a bus to Massachusetts and, along with the funeral
director from her parents' town, went into Boston to claim the caskets
and see that they were taken safely home—if the graveyard a mile from
their house could be called "home."

Throughout the transactions and the filling out of forms, Greenie felt
as if she were drugged, separated from her grief by a gauzy scrim, a
tissue of incredulity. One of her Boston cousins had insisted on driving
her and helping her accomplish the formalities. Greenie, in turn, had
insisted that Alan stay in New York with George, at least until the day
before the funeral.

After the caskets were unloaded at the funeral home and she had
filled out yet more forms, Greenie asked the cousin to leave her—
alone—at her parents' house. She had her own set of keys, and she knew
where they kept the keys to their cars. It was a hot, sunny evening in
early June, and when she let herself in, the rooms were unbearably close,
the air thick as wool. She went about unlocking and opening windows,
turning on the ceiling fans her mother had had installed the year
before (no air-conditioning; what a wanton luxury!). She tried to glide
blindly from room to room, focusing on none of the familiar things
around her.

And then she went—as she had always done when she arrived home,
ever since their move to this house when she was five—to the kitchen.
Her mother's kitchen was a minor utopia, camellia white from ceiling to
floor, smooth and clean and free of clutter. There was nothing on the
counter by the window but the quavering cutwork of shadows cast by
the leaves of the maple tree out back.

Without thinking, Greenie went to the refrigerator—for ice, she told
herself, though she had not yet bothered to take a glass from the cupboard.
It was a large refrigerator, its double doors neatly quilted with
notices and lists, each held down with a magnet bearing a silly motto or
advertising local commerce.
IF I WERE ORGANIZED, I'D BE DANGEROUS
held down the schedule of seasonal events at the Museum of Fine
Arts. Her mother had circled an upcoming lecture on the portraits of
John Singer Sargent. A handwritten list of twelve friends (a planned dinner
party? people to thank?) lay pinned beneath a flat red cow emblazoned
in white
ANGELO'S FINE CUTS
—
EUROPEAN VIANDS
—
GAME IN SEASON
.
And the schedule for her father's academic year, the year
just ended, was clamped down by a magnetized business card from the
family dentist. (The man who filled all of Greenie's cavities had seemed
so ancient when she was small; how could he not have retired by now?)