The Whole World Over
Page 25
“You are one step ahead of me all the way,” Ray said as he followed her into his own house. “You are.”
Once Ray took Claudia out to the barns, Greenie, McNally, and the two Georges had the house to themselves all afternoon. Outside, it was over ninety degrees, so Greenie had insisted that George stay in. He whined in protest, but Tall said he’d teach him a new game. They sat in the living room, drinking lemonade under a fan, shouting “Spit!” and slapping cards on a table. Small George squealed with abandon.
The maid had closed all the windows and drawn the upstairs curtains; the thick walls of the hacienda would hold the cool night air for a few hours still. Greenie worked in front of the kitchen windows that faced the barns, where cattle and people had stirred up a pall of sunstruck dust. Through it, she could make out Claudia and Ray sitting on a bale of hay in a narrow strip of shade against a wall, eating the sandwiches McNally had made before Greenie even came downstairs that morning. The most audible voice was Ray’s, typically clamorous, whether it sounded ornery or joyful.
McNally had no copper bowls, so Greenie rubbed vinegar and salt on the surface of a deep ceramic basin. Angel food cake required perfect egg whites, stiff and lofty. After she had finished the beating, she paused to watch McNally coil two layers of bacon around several filets of beef and thought of Walter, with whom she now spoke at least twice a month. She imagined him working here in her place. Walter would like McNally; vice versa might be a different story. Not that the two would ever, in a million years, come face-to-face.
McNally looked up when he heard Ray shouting his name. He opened the window. “Set an extra place!” yelled Ray.
“Roger and out!” McNally yelled back. He slammed the window. Greenie started laughing.
“What?” said McNally, smiling at her over his shoulder.
“It’s just so…hilariously male around here. Even this buyer—this Cloudia—what’s her story?”
“Hoo boy,” said McNally. “He don’t know it, but that man’s met his high noon. Ray went to school with her big brother. She goes off to get some fancy-ass eastern degree, works in Washington as a lawyer, marries another shiny-butt lawyer, gets divorced, finally comes to her senses and hightails it back out here. She called Ray a couple months back and said she’s got herself a ranch up across by Telluride. And is that woman a pair-a legs or what!”
“That woman can literally look down on Ray,” said Greenie. “He’d never go for that.”
“Who knows what that man would go for! His time’s come, that is all I can say. Nearly all of us, our time comes. Pairing up, same as death. Difference is, you need to be smart enough to see it.” McNally tapped the spot between his crinkled eyes. He placed the filets in two iron skillets. Over them he poured most of a bottle of brandy.
“What about your time, McNally? When was your time?”
He turned to her with a look of amusement. “Oh my time? Well, I ain’t so smart. I figure it came and went in a big bright whoosh, like a wildfire gunnin’ through, but likely I was passed out cold and missed it. Can’t even tell you her name, that’s how dense I am. But that’s why I’m a ranch cook, not a governor. The dense part.” He put the brandy bottle to his lips to drink the few swallows left in the bottom. He winked at Greenie. “Hey, Small!” he bellowed, and George came running through the door, faster than he would have come for Greenie.
As McNally ignited the filets and rolled the skillet to spread the flame, the front-door knocker sounded. Greenie could hear the vacuum cleaner on the second floor and knew the maid wouldn’t answer, so she wiped her hands and went to the door herself. Back in the kitchen, she heard Small George exclaim in amazement.
She opened the door to Other Charlie. They both laughed.
“I’m stalking you,” he said, kissing her cheek. He walked past her and stood in the living room, gazing around. “I’ve been granted a private audience to plead my case. Will I get another great meal in the bargain?”
“You will,” said Greenie. “You’d be the extra place we’ve been ordered to set.”
He followed her to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. She pointed him toward the barns. Through the window, Greenie watched him shake hands with Ray. They walked around one of the buildings, out of sight.
The angel food cake that Ray had requested was to be a birthday cake. The birthday was Claudia’s, Ray told Greenie that afternoon, clearly pretending that this had just occurred to him. “How ’bout with some kind of berry sauce?”
“That’s her favorite cake?” said Greenie.
“I have no idea what the woman’s favorite cake is. Everybody likes angel food, right?”
“Maybe,” said Greenie suggestively.
Ray gave her a testy look. “I got cows to sell here.”
“How many candles?” goaded Greenie.
Ray considered this. “Don’t know as we have birthday candles on hand,” he said. “But you get McNally to fork over some sparklers from his personal munitions. And how about pink frosting? The feminine touch.” He walked out the door before she could tell him that Claudia did not look like a woman who needed or even wanted the feminine touch.
Dinner was late, so Greenie gave George a hot dog and put him to bed while McNally quartered heads of iceberg lettuce and smothered them with blue cheese dressing. A basket of Greenie’s whitest bread sat smack in the center of the table; no flowers here. Nor were there candles, which would have guttered in the cross breeze created by numerous fans, the only relief from the heat that had finally breached the stone walls. By the time Greenie sat down, the conversation was nothing but cattle: the best way to ship sperm (UPS, over dry ice, the general favorite); whether calving was safer when induced (higher vet bills but fewer stillbirths and less time wasted waiting, Claudia argued); whether the Brits and their idiotic denial of mad cow disease had blown their beef industry permanently to hell (the farmers over there were downtrodden wimps and losers, said Ray).
Ray’s and Claudia’s voices were so strident—with Ray’s men joining in—that Greenie and Other Charlie sat mostly in silence. They’d wound up on opposite sides and opposite ends of the long table, so all they could do in their shared exile was exchange their covert amusement from a distance, especially when Ray and Claudia began to debate the ideal way to bed a barn with straw once calving season came.
“High, deep, and fresh is best for babies and mamas,” said Claudia.
“I see you don’t clean the barns and haul the manure,” said Ray.
“You do?” she shot back.
“We aim to conserve on this ranch. Waste not and all that.”
Claudia laughed. She took the last piece of bread from the basket and wiped the last gravy from her plate. “Oh Ray, cows are never about conservation. Switch to soybeans and we’ll talk conservation.” She took a bite of the bread and stared kindly at Ray as she chewed. “Here’s how I see it. The cow’s udder is just like a dinner plate.” She gestured at her own plate, cleaned nearly to a polish. “If it’s dirty, the baby’s exposed to more germs. Not good, right? Know what? More straw, less dependence on antibiotics. Now never mind the public hysteria; which costs more, straw or drugs?”
Ray listened, sipping his beer.
“And the hauling and spreading, smart guy? More straw makes for better fertilizer out on the fields and gardens. I rest my case.” She finished her bread with relish. Greenie could see that she was the kind of woman who ate to her heart’s content without a second thought, without gaining an ounce. She had the body (and the voice) of a warrior goddess. She seemed impervious even to the warmth of the kitchen, the only one at the table whose face did not shine.
Greenie caught Other Charlie’s eye. They laughed openly, helplessly.
“You eastern slugs just help yourselves to more mashed potatoes,” said Ray. “Let the cowfolk reign supreme.” He waved his fork in the air, lasso style.
“Don’t pretend you know a thing about roping,” said Claudia. “I’ve seen you out there.”
“Okay, McNally, douse those things,” Ray said after the applause. “Burn my house down and the vengeance of my ancestral spirits shall track you like a pack of rabid wolves. The nonendangered kind we’re still allowed to shoot.”
After dinner—after Other Charlie made a laughingstock of himself by asking for herbal tea instead of coffee—Greenie told McNally it was her turn to wash up. Other Charlie lingered while Greenie loaded the dishwasher and filled the cake pans with hot soapy water. “Fish and the law,” she said. “Does that make you an ichthyological lawyer?”
Other Charlie groaned. “Oh, fish are the least of it. Right now, I am having a demolition-derby education in the measurement of dissolved-solids concentrations and the effects of selenium on migratory waterfowl. I am up to my neck in eco-legalese.”
As Greenie listened to him speak, she recognized his precise enunciation, something their schoolmates had mimicked, not always meanly, behind his back. He’d been one of those kids you wanted to mock but couldn’t help admiring. She felt as if her brain were undergoing a palpable change, a realignment of the present with her distant past, an unforgetting.
He told her about the dam he was fighting. He told her about the ways in which the irrigation systems of the Southwest had filled the rivers with salt, pesticides, and other invisible pollutants; how downstream, across the border, entire regions of Mexico that were once fertile now lay fallow and useless.
“You can’t borrow water from a river like money from a bank,” he said. “Money that’s soiled and crumpled doesn’t lose its value. But water—well, there’s no interest you can pay that will restore water to its original purity.”
“So the fish die,” said Greenie.
“Yes, but listen, the fish are…it’s a longer story.”
Greenie had turned to oiling McNally’s iron skillets. The first wonderfully chilly night air began to drift through the windows. When Greenie stopped to close the one right beside her, she saw Other Charlie, his passionate gestures, reflected in the glass. Except for the roiling of the dishwasher, the house around them was silent. Greenie realized, briefly, that she did not know if Claudia had left or stayed. “Tell me the longer story,” she said.
So Other Charlie told her about dams, how they had irrigated but would ultimately ruin the West. In the desert, he told her, dams sent water to places where there would have been none—and took water away from places where there had been, perhaps, just enough. He told her how, every summer now, stretches of the Rio Grande went dry for miles on end, stranding the fish.
“The truth is,” he said after a long pause, “I don’t really care about the fish—or I do, I do, but not like the biologists who want to preserve them. To me, the fish are a wedge. Defending wildlife is a way to defend the land, foil development, try to make people see the idiocy of what they’re doing to the aquifers, to the rivers, to the whole system of life in this part of the world. It just wasn’t meant to include so many people! It wasn’t meant to grow cotton or grapes, forget about Kentucky bluegrass and heirloom roses!”
Greenie confessed that she hadn’t known what an aquifer was before she came west. “If you’d asked me to guess, I’d have said a piece of scuba diving equipment, like the mouthpiece you breathe through.”
Other Charlie did not laugh. “Nobody knows these things! Everybody knows what a Jacuzzi is, what a pulsing-massage showerhead is, but what do they know about water itself and where it comes from? Nada. That’s what.”
“I’m glad you’re so passionate,” she said.
“Yes! And I shouldn’t feel so alone!”
“My mother always said you were a boy prematurely sure of yourself.” Greenie saw his frown deepen. “She meant it as a compliment, Charlie. She said you were someone to keep an eye on.”
“Your mother had a lot of opinions.”
“I miss her opinions,” said Greenie.
He was quiet for a moment before he said, “They were still pretty young, weren’t they?”
“Yes. And they were just beginning to really enjoy George. My George.”
“Was that your George, running around the house before dinner?”
“Yes.” She asked him if he had children.
“I wish I did. I’ve never been married. Almost, but no. Too much school, too much moving around.”
Loudly, the dishwasher shifted cycles, startling both of them. Other Charlie looked at his watch and exclaimed at the time. The roads would be empty, she reminded him. It wasn’t her place to offer him a bed, and Ray had long since disappeared.
Greenie closed the front door behind Other Charlie and waved him off, glad to have seen him, but again—as she had felt in the kitchen at the mansion, breaking eggs for the Water Boys’ orange soufflé—also glad to see him go.
WHEN GREENIE AND OTHER CHARLIE were in high school, Greenie’s mother hired him to cut grass, trim hedges, rake leaves, shovel snow—all the chores generally done back then by the fathers in Greenie’s neighborhood. George Duquette exempted himself from lawn work to tinker obsessively with his sailboat. The vessel, its mast removed, its deck protected by canvas, wintered not in a boatyard but high on a cradle that dominated the Duquettes’ back lawn. It was a fine old wooden boat, a folkboat sloop, and as Greenie grew older, watching her father stroke, sand, smooth, varnish, sometimes merely stand back to contemplate the cetacean curve of its hull, she came to see exactly why boats were and would always be unquestionably female.
Greenie and Other Charlie weren’t friends, not exactly, but they had friends in common. So in addition to seeing him at school and at parties, some afternoons she would come home to find him at her kitchen counter, sweaty and rumpled, eating her mother’s homemade cheese sticks and drinking iced tea. Olivia would prepare dinner while quizzing Other Charlie about algebra or baseball or what he might know about changing the washer on her sputtering faucet.
Sometimes it felt to Greenie not as if she had a classmate who worked around her home to make pocket money—the way Greenie did by babysitting and passing trays of deviled eggs at cocktail parties—but as if she went to school with the family handyman. Sometimes she would blush when she saw him in school, as if he didn’t belong there.
The summer before they went away to college, Olivia hired Other Charlie to paint the house. Greenie was around that summer, working as a waitress at a steak house. In the mornings, before she went to work, she would loaf around the house and read, or sunbathe on the patio. More than once, she would look out a window and see, right there, Other Charlie’s studious, slightly scowling face. They’d wave at each other and smile, but the windows were closed against the heat, so they rarely spoke.
One day, waking late, she went into her bathroom and was stunned to see the small window occupied entirely by a very close view of a man’s naked chest, speckled with white paint. The man’s head (and she knew it must be Other Charlie’s, not that of the assistant he’d hired) was well above the window, and she could tell from the movement of the muscles that his left arm was reaching, over and over, to paint the triangular space under the peak of the roof above her. Before she closed the inner shutters for privacy—she wasn’t quite sure whose—she put her face close to the glass, mesmerized by the long band of hair that ran down the center of his torso, widening slightly at the navel. It was the translucent blond of honey. So was the patch of springy hair in the pale hollow beneath his outstretched arm.
Because she was dating someone else, Greenie became confused when Other Charlie invaded her dreams with his lean, furry chest and striving arms. In one dream, he was speckled white not with paint but with sugar. She was relieved when the house was finished and she no longer had to confront this alluring yet distant boy in her kitchen, in her waking views of the world, even walking on the roof above her bed, his casual steps reson
ating quietly through her being, commanding her from a height. Her relief was undermined when Olivia announced that dear Charlie Oenslager had done such a superb job that he deserved a vacation. She had invited him to bring a friend and be their guest up in Maine. “I think he’s a darling, don’t you?” said Greenie’s mother. Greenie had no choice but to agree.
NINE
“THIS IS YOUR ROOM, AND THIS, more significantly, is your door. Any bedlam in which you care to live ends there, and you close it so that I do not have to share the scenery.” Walter swung the door to and fro, as if demonstrating a revolutionary product. “You may strew clothing every which way in here, as long as I can’t smell it, but no food. Food attracts roaches. You may not know about roaches in swanky Corte Madera, but they are repulsive, dirty, and look like creatures out of Japanese sci-fi movies, a genre I do not care for.”
He led Scott to the kitchen. “The fridge. Basically empty because I let other people feed me. That’s why I do what I do! If you prefer to feed yourself, that’s fine. Only please keep an eye on the science projects. Ditto my caution about those Japanese films. Sponges, by the way, are in that drawer to the left of the sink. We encourage the use of sponges.” He crossed the room and opened the pantry door. “Because this is New York, where closets are about as common as Tasmanian devils, you will find clean sheets and towels up there”—he pointed to a high shelf, above the jarred spices he never used—“and laundry, by the way, gets done on the other side of the playground. I’ll give you a neighborhood tour on the way to the restaurant.
“Speaking of the neighborhood—I will say this only once because your mother would have my hide—but the closest and most varied source of inexpensive condoms is the chain pharmacy at the end of the block: go out the front door and turn right. As for nightly visitors, all I ask is that you remember about the door, about noise, and by the way, no drugs. Period. Nancy Reagan was right about that.
“And speaking of thin Republican women, your mom asked that I try to ensure you pierce no further body parts while under my roof nor deface them with permanent illustrations. I don’t see how I could practically prevent such actions, were you to suspend what I have a hunch is your generally decent judgment, but if you consider my generosity in other areas, I’m hoping that may count for something. Sort of like Mafia protection. Think of me as your personal Don Corleone, without the hit men.”