The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  “Do you think he wants them?” asked Greenie.

  “I believe so,” said Mary Bliss, standing in Greenie’s kitchen. “I hope so.” She smiled at Greenie, who wasn’t sure how to comment. Sometimes Mary Bliss said things that were almost shockingly forward. Greenie admired this trait, and it made her feel more comfortable when surrounded by politicians who were anything but blunt.

  Greenie’s bed, like George’s, was massive yet soft. In her bedroom, the beams (vigas, Mary Bliss had corrected her gently) were plastered over, so that the ceiling resembled a great white ruffle. Lying awake her first night there, Greenie found herself amused at the notion that the interior of the little house looked as if it had been frosted, as if the hidden walls were made of sponge cake. She thought instantly of Alan, how she’d love to report this curiosity to him (how she would have, so naturally, had he been lying beside her), but she would not call him a second time. As soon as she and George had been left alone by Mary Bliss, she’d called him right away, to say that they had arrived safely.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he’d said, “though safely is a relative term.”

  FIRE MIGHT HAVE CAPTURED THE HEADLINES—government probes, impending lawsuits, calls for emergency supplies—but Ray McCrae knew that a far thornier problem, a problem that would only grow worse as time went on, was water. He tried to talk about it in public as little as possible; talk of water, he told Greenie, was something he delegated whenever he could. But this was a year of exceptional drought, so talk about it he must.

  The Water Boys, as he called them, were a loose and shifting posse of commissioners, lobbyists, and freelance know-it-alls on everything from Navajo water-rights litigation to the sorry future of the aquifer feeding the middle Rio Grande basin. They met every other Thursday for lunch in the dining room of the mansion. The group included the state engineer, members of a drought task force and a water conservation committee, lawyers, ecologists, developers, miners, ranchers, tribal elders, and what Ray called the BLM grunts. (“Big-ass Louts and Morons, but that’s between us, Ms. Duquette.”)

  Greenie did not serve the meals she cooked, but through the swinging doors she heard talk of irrigation, reclamation, river diversion, groundwater mining, snowmelt, shelterbelts, dead pool, Godwater, ditch bosses, cow urine, fishing seasons, growing zones, acid rain, and tribal claims to water that wealthy ranchers took for granted and eastern transplants like Greenie used with abandon to wash their cars, nurture their gardens—and, thought Greenie, blithely rinse sand from leeks down their kitchen sinks. Sometimes the talking turned to shouting. The Water Boys were destined, by virtue of their fanatical and quixotic aims, rarely if ever to find a consensus on anything.

  That day a small pack of Water Boys entered the dining room already in the midst of an argument. “So here’s an idea,” Greenie heard one man say. “We hold a statewide lottery, and the losing third of the population gets to move to northern Wisconsin. Where they can plant roses to their hearts’ content and join the great northern fossil fuel grab. Let’s kiss a few more Saudi asses. At least the water’s ours. We don’t take that project on the Gila, Arizona will.”

  As Greenie’s sous chef, Maria, placed bowls of soup on a silver tray, she rolled her eyes. She picked up a shaker of chili pepper flakes and made a threatening gesture over the soup bowls. “These gentlemen, would they call for water then!”

  Greenie laughed. “No women today?”

  “Oh no. That’s why they so loud so soon. The ladies keep the manners.”

  Maria and Greenie looked up to see Ray leaning into the kitchen. Maria blushed and picked up her tray. Ray held the door for her as she passed through, then let it swing closed. “Greenie,” he said, “I never do this to you last-minute, but any chance of that orange soufflé after lunch? I got fifteen cranky men out there I need to impress. Or placate. Or drug with sugar. Any or all of the above. There’s this redneck dam broker from Albuquerque, stupid enough to turn me into a socialist, and I got me a new fish hugger from out east, courtesy of my favorite senator. I have to drive to Los Alamos in an hour and won’t be back for dinner.”

  “You don’t need reasons,” said Greenie.

  “I do not,” he said, “but I like to be reasonable all the same. And while I’m on my wish list, next weekend—angel food cake?”

  “I thought you wanted pies,” she said, but he was already through the door, changing places again with Maria.

  Greenie laid out plates in two rows and put the steak sandwiches on them. Maria dished out the jicama coleslaw and shoestring yams. This was a staple menu for lunches where pads of paper and small computers would occupy most of the dining room table. On the center island, Greenie began separating eggs. The shell of the thirteenth crumbled, and a shard fell into the bowl of whites. As she reached for a discarded shell and began to fish for the shard, she heard the door to the dining room open. It would be Maria, with the Grand Marnier.

  “Pardon me.”

  When Greenie turned, she saw an unfamiliar man. Except that, as she stared at him, suddenly he wasn’t unfamiliar.

  He held one side of his jacket away from his shirt, as if about to bare his heart. “I was told you might—” He stepped closer. “Charlie?”

  “What are you doing here?” said Greenie.

  “Good God, it is you, Charlie. Way out here!”

  “No, Charlie, it’s Good God you way out here.”

  They should have embraced, but he still held his jacket in that awkward way, while she held her hands in midair, her fingers slippery with egg. She wiped them on her apron as he let go of his jacket.

  “Oh Charlie,” she said after they had hugged, “what are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re a Water Boy.”

  “A water boy?”

  The fish hugger. The fish hugger from out east. She laughed. “You are. You’re here to save those fish.” How long had it been since she had seen someone from high school, never mind someone from that briefly tight clique that had formed in their final, smug year, when they’d pretended to be daring (driving too fast, drinking too much, talking too loudly outside their parents’ bedrooms), when she had gone from Shar to Charlie? Other Charlie, her girlfriends had called this boy. Everything about him—but from so long ago—came flooding back to Greenie.

  “I’m afraid that’s almost accurate,” he said. “But you. Mom told me you were in New York.”

  “I was in New York; you knew that. I was there before I was married.” That’s when she’d seen him last: at her wedding. Afterward, Greenie heard about him from her mother: how he went to law school and joined a corporate practice in Boston. But for the past two years she’d been cut off from hometown news.

  “Well,” she said, “here’s where I am now. Since April.”

  He told her he’d arrived only three weeks before. And then he remembered about her parents. He told her how sorry he was. As they talked, she looked at him carefully, feature by feature. His pale hair was shorter, blanched by age or the sun, and his jaw seemed larger, as if the bone had continued to grow, to jut forward with greater determination. Other Charlie had always been determined. And he must have met with resistance, for his face bore so many new angles and lines. He was thinner. Resolution, she thought. He looked like a man of resolution.

  He wore jeans and laced leather boots, but also this pale linen jacket, an awkwardly urban touch. There was a long brown stain on one lapel.

  “You came in here looking for club soda.”

  “I did,” he said. “But, wow. Look at what I found instead.”

  After she gave him a bottle of soda and a dish towel, she went back to breaking eggs. “How is it fish get defended by lawyers these days?”

  “I was a lawyer. Okay, I still am a lawyer. I just went back to school. I tell people I wanted to do some good. I just wanted to be outside more often. Desks make me antsy. I thought that would change when I grew up, but no. Or else I just haven’t grown up. More likely that.”

  Greenie remembered
a tipsy midnight exploit: an illicitly borrowed canoe with too many passengers, a bottle of Mateus rosé, a paddle fumbled overboard. She remembered Other Charlie diving deep down in the middle of the lake, staying underwater so long that everybody got nervous. When he surfaced, he seemed a football field away. She’d thought of the seals in Maine. Was that when she had begun to notice him apart from the other boys in their group?

  She said, “I’ve been ordered to make a soufflé so you’ll be nicer to one another.” She pointed toward the dining room. “The notion being that civilized food inspires civilized manners. I’m skeptical. You can keep me company, but who’ll be in there defending your helpless clients? What kind of fish are your clients anyway? Are they likely to be on one of my menus?”

  “Silvery minnows. I don’t think so.” He’d made a futile attempt at cleaning the soup off his lapel. The stain was now surrounded by a broad wet patch. He sighed and took off the jacket. “I have another meeting in Albuquerque,” he said, as if to explain why he’d overdressed. He handed her a card. “I go back and forth, but mostly I’m here. Would you call me? I don’t know much of anyone other than lobbyist types. Them I’d rather steer clear of.”

  “I don’t know anyone either,” said Greenie. “Outside this house.”

  “But your husband’s here.”

  “No. He’s back in New York. For now he is.” She said nothing about George; other Charlie would know about George from his mother. “I have a job to do,” she said. “Grating orange zest. Go back out there or you’ll know all my secrets.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that,” he said.

  “I would.” Greenie waved at him, to let him go—to make him go. She needed to concentrate, not on the past but on the present, on whisking and folding and baking and, above all, on serving this dessert. The only tricky thing about a soufflé was its timing.

  SEVEN

  THURSDAY WAS THE ONE MORNING Alan had no appointments, so the phone call at seven-thirty hauled him up from deep in a dream about George, about waking to find George in the apartment, in his own bed, never having left.

  “Oh God, did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

  Alan cleared his throat. “It’s all right. I ought to be up by now.”

  “Oh God.”

  Alan heard weeping. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but who is this?”

  “It’s Stephen, Stephen Campbell. Oh God. I’m going to hang up.”

  “No you’re not,” said Alan. “If you do, I’ll call you right back. Stephen, talk to me.” He waited.

  “He moved out! He—just like that, he actually moved out!”

  “What do you mean? Last time I saw you—”

  “He moved out! He left me this…left me this goddamn note I am staring at here, and he actually just sneaked out in the middle of the night, like some burglar in reverse, took his biggest suitcase and all his meds and he…” Stephen broke down again. “I can’t believe this!”

  Alan sat on the side of his bed. His head was still thick with the dreamed presence of his son. How he ached for George.

  “Stephen, do you want to come over and talk in person? I think it’s a good idea. I have an opening in half an hour.” Opening? More like a chasm.

  “Do I want to come over and talk? No, I want my life back! That’s what I want, for God’s sake!”

  Well join the club, thought Alan. “Can you go into your office a little late today, or call in sick?”

  “I can do whatever I please, I’m the boss!” This came out as a wail of sorrow, not anger or pride; could Alan have held Greenie fast if he had been capable of wailing at her with such passion?

  “Then come,” he said, making it sound as much like an order as he could.

  Half an hour later, a deeply distraught but beautifully dressed Stephen sat on the couch in Alan’s office. He had to pull himself together by one o’clock, he told Alan, because he had an important lunch with two board members of the San Francisco Ballet. “One thing you’ve got to do,” he said, “is help me stop crying. I cannot show up at Lespinasse with the sodden blubbery face of a walrus. You wouldn’t have any cucumbers, would you?”

  “Well, over in my kitchen I think I might have a shriveled tomato. Sorry.” Alan handed him the box of Kleenex, smiling sadly.

  “You’re a shrink, not a salad bar, right?” Stephen attempted a laugh, then blew his nose.

  Alan wondered if it had been wise to let Stephen come over on such short notice, but perhaps the crisis was partly Alan’s fault. It had been a stupid idea to assign those lists, as if the two men were teenage girls thinking about what colleges they should attend. He might have misread Gordie, but he had taken him for a guy who thought in balance sheets.

  When Alan asked what had happened, Stephen explained that they had indeed sat down, the night before, to list the pros and cons of becoming parents. They had done this in silence after a nice dinner. Stephen had made pork loin stuffed with prunes, one of Gordie’s favorite meals. Stephen was optimistic, because Gordie had been relaxed and said he’d had a good day at the office.

  He had brought along both lists, which he now handed to Alan. Alan was dismayed but took them; he shouldn’t be looking at Gordie’s list, or discussing it, in Gordie’s absence, but of course the next thing Stephen said was “Okay, so look at his list, would you?” His eyes were teary and desperate.

  Alan was struck right off by two things. First, by the similarity of the two men’s handwriting. Both of them wrote in a broad cursive with generous masculine loopings. Superficially, the only difference was the left-handed slant of Gordie’s script. Second, Gordie’s list (the two columns studiously scored off with a cross) comprised nearly as many pros as it did cons. Alan was contemplating the pros when Stephen broke in.

  “Look at the last item in the right column, the nays.”

  Alan looked across the divide. Gordie had written there a dozen items, marked off with bullets, each one tersely expressed in just a few words. Last on the list of reasons to forgo children came Issues of fidelity.

  Oh no, thought Alan. What an idiot I’ve been.

  “I was flabbergasted,” said Stephen. “I said, ‘Just what does fidelity have to do with this?’ And maybe it wasn’t a great idea to make a joke, I know, but I said, ‘Well, we’ll probably be too exhausted, in the beginning at least, to be anything other than faithful!’ He didn’t think this was funny at all. He glared at me and said that if anyone should take this whole thing seriously, it was me. So I asked him if he was making a threat, and it just went downhill from there.”

  Stephen bent forward, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. Was he crying again? Alan said, “Fidelity. Wow. Well, you can’t say he hasn’t been thinking hard about this. But that’s something we didn’t really talk about before. The whole monogamy thing. Are you guys on the same page there?”

  “Oh God.” Stephen’s expression, when he uncovered his face, was weary and remorseful. “Oh, well, to be truthful, it was…well it’s gotten more complicated lately. I think.”

  “Complicated how?”

  Stephen told Alan how being monogamous, for him, was essential to their living together, their being a couple from the time they moved in together. Gordie was less insistent, but when they had decided to make their union official, have a ceremony, he had agreed that not “straying” was important to him as well.

  Stephen looked at Alan and sighed. “The truth is, this was always a bigger sacrifice for Gordie, even though we never put it that way, because I’m…well, I like sex fine, don’t get me wrong, but when I’m working like a maniac, which I practically always am, it’s just…not that big a deal. I mean I’m sexual, it’s just…” He sighed, this time very loudly. “Oh, what’s the point? This is over, isn’t it?”

  “Stephen, thirteen years are not erased in twelve hours. Believe me.”

  “Gordie is the most incredibly decisive person I know.”

  “What, he never changes his mind? He never does anything rash?”

 
“His note was so cold.”

  Alan softened his voice. “Did you bring the note?”

  “I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Did he say your relationship is over? That he’s breaking up with you? That he plans to move out?”

  “Not in those words. But it doesn’t matter.”

  On first meeting them, Alan had liked Gordie more than Stephen. When you worked with couples, that’s how it was: at a gut level, you’d almost always prefer one to the other. And your preference rarely changed, which made the work more challenging—but now Alan wondered if there wasn’t a plain-Jane logic to Stephen that would make him an excellent spouse, maybe the better spouse. He was the proverbial Swiss watch: dependable, easy to read, well made through and through, from his psyche to his large, strong hands.

  “I think I should go now,” Stephen said. “I’m wrung out.”

  “Will you call me this evening? Please.”

  “If that’s what you think I should do.”

  “Stephen…what will you do with your day, other than go to that lunch?”

  “I won’t call him, I promise you that. And I will resist the catty urge to pack his belongings in Hefty bags and leave them on the curb.”

  “Good.” Alan stood up. “I don’t think he’s really left. I can’t be sure, but I doubt it.”

  “I hope you’re right. At least, I think I do,” said Stephen. “Though it makes me mad to think he might come back in a week and then think that this…scare will warn me off the whole child issue. Because it won’t.”

  Alan nodded. “I’ll walk you out.” He led Stephen down the dim hall; through the frosted glass on the front door of the building, he could see that someone was seated at the top of the steps. A woman, he could see from the curly sunlit hair, and for a moment he felt an irrational leap of hope, a thrill. How naïve his emotional reflexes, how wishful his battered heart.