The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  “Told who what?” he said, but only to buy time. He put the plates on the counter beside the sink.

  “Greenie. About Marion. She called tonight. Asked what I was up to.”

  Alan decided that to say nothing was the only, the least foolish, alternative. Joya looked at him steadily. She wants me to break down, he thought. This is her way of breaking down. Say nothing, he told himself. He sat once again at the table, across from his sister. He took a sip of water.

  “She was talking, like she sometimes does, about what a sourpuss you’ve been the past couple of years. How she thinks you’re in this huge depression and she doesn’t know what to do. She goes out of her mind trying to figure out what she did.”

  Like she’s done nothing! Alan wanted to say.

  “Are you with me here, little brother?”

  “Right across the table, just like when we were kids.” His voice shook.

  She poured them both more water from a pitcher. As she filled Alan’s glass, her hand wobbled. A thin pool spread smoothly across the table. She did not move to wipe it up.

  “She was pretty upset tonight. She—”

  “Did you tell her or didn’t you? Joya, she doesn’t even know I’m here.”

  “I’m always thinking of telling her. The words pass through my brain every time she calls, you know? Tonight I was so pissed at you, I just might’ve actually said something. Or not.” She shrugged.

  Alan saw what he thought was a flicker of pleasure in Joya’s drunken expression. “Good night,” he said quietly. “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m too upset. I will talk to you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be gone early and back late.”

  “I will talk to you whenever.” Without waiting for a reply, he walked to the extra bedroom—thank God she did well enough to have two bedrooms—and closed the door after himself. Immediately, he turned on the small clock radio and adjusted it to a jazz station, keeping the volume low. If Joya was going to rant or cry, he did not want to hear her. He sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled his phone from his shirt pocket and punched in Greenie’s number.

  There was George, on the answering machine. “Greenie,” he said to the beep, “I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I want us in the same state, the same home, the same bed. I love you. I don’t know what else to say. I’ll keep on calling. Whatever else you might think, it doesn’t matter. I love you.”

  He heard the toilet in the other bathroom flush. He turned out the light and curled up on his side, on top of the bedspread. He sat up only to take off his shoes, then lay down again. He meant to wait a while, then try Greenie again, but he fell asleep quickly. He dreamed he went back to New York to find out that he was married to Saga. He’d been married to her all along! It was comforting, and it was disturbing. She was warm and loving, and they had Treehorn, every bit as wonderful as a child, but whenever Alan tried to have sex with Saga—and he wanted to, he couldn’t wait, it felt like the first time even though it wasn’t—something would interrupt them. A phone call, a visitor, the need to eat a meal…She doesn’t want to have babies, he found himself thinking. She doesn’t want to be a mother because she has the dog. The dog is enough for her. And this made him terribly sad.

  JOYA WAS NEVER THE STAR STUDENT. That was Alan. In the public school they attended, there were prizes: a prize from fourth grade on for every subject; awards for every major sport; awards for citizenship (the social kiss of death). Alan hated the prizes because at one point or another he won them all, and every single year he suffered the consequences. In eighth grade, he hit the jackpot. He won the art prize, the English prize, a volleyball prize, a tiny silver-plated bowl for the best short story (the teachers were the ones who submitted their students’ stories), and a citizenship award. According to a rumor tauntingly pressed on him in the locker room after gym the next day, he would have won the French prize, too, if the teachers hadn’t felt they had to draw the line somewhere. “Parlez-vous suck-up?” said one of the all-around jocks, making a lewd kissing noise.

  Alan became very good at the impassive, hear-no-evil response to such taunting, and sometimes now he wondered if all that practice at refusing provocation had helped him in his work as a therapist. Had he even been steered toward that work by learning to establish a wall of a certain kind?

  Alan’s mother was never happier than when he raked in the prizes, an occasion that became one of yearly anticipation, so that by junior high Alan noticed his mother’s mood begin to ascend in the middle of May, culminating in his favorite dessert—a big chocolate Duncan Hines cake—on the night after the awards assembly. At some point during the annual Alanfest, Mrs. Glazier would turn to her daughter and say something like “We are so proud of you, too, dear. After seeing those sculptured heads you made last fall, I was sure you’d have the art award sewn right up, but the judges are probably the sort who don’t understand modern sculpture.”

  “Why would they?” Alan’s father might have joked. “They’re teachers of algebra and typing. Lord, the janitor’s probably in on it, too. Equal opportunity and all that.”

  “What I mean to say is, Joya has talents aplenty that have very little to do with grades and prizes,” their mother would say.

  When the parents weren’t looking, Alan could count on Joya to make a hideous face at him, a face that said, “Retard!” or “Pathetic loser nerd!” or to stick out her tongue when her mouth was filled with masticated devil’s food cake. Again, Alan was impassive. Without comment, he allowed his sister to ignore him, or lock him out of the bathroom for ages, or “accidentally” leave her wet towel on his bed. (“I was just in there looking for my brush. Did you steal it?”) The cold front never lasted more than a day or two.

  Joya got into trouble now and then, generally with Marion, but it wasn’t the sort of trouble to involve the police. The two girls made crank calls (“Mr. Woo, is that your rickshaw double-parked outside the IHOP?”), reset clocks, and tucked smelly cheese in more than one mailbox. At their best, Alan and Joya gossiped about teachers and traded the rumors they’d heard about each other’s friends, but their academic disparity—they never spoke about that.

  Alan had always assumed that Joya simply didn’t care, but when he awoke early the next morning in her spare room, he lay in bed wondering if he had underestimated her resentment of all the things that had come so much more easily to him. How clearly he could now imagine her saying, in her deep, gutsy voice, “Why is it you get everything: the prizes, the good spouse, the child, the clients looking up to you like a surrogate dad, not the surrogate principal or cop!” Though she would never dream of saying such a thing.

  He heard her showering, making coffee, then leaving almost right away. He was too exhausted to go out and confront her, and it would have been selfish. She did not have time for this kind of turmoil.

  Ten minutes after Alan heard the apartment door close, he got up and checked his cell phone. There had been no calls. When he ventured out toward the kitchen, he found that Joya had left the after-dinner mess perfectly intact. The smell of charred meat was oppressive. The plates sat next to each other on the counter, littered with lamb fat and gristle; on Joya’s, the mound of potatoes, crusted and yellow, had never been touched. Across one end of the wooden dining table, a pale maplike stain marked the place where no one had wiped up the water she had spilled. Their napkins lay on the floor, next to the butterfly clip that had fallen from her hair. As he picked up the glittering ornament, Alan felt shame at the effort she’d made. Even her brother, it seemed, could not reciprocate her love.

  He opened the three large front windows. The sky was an assertive blue, the sunlight strong. It illuminated, too brightly, the ambitious grin of a sitcom actress on a billboard across the street. Alan groaned and sat on the couch. He glanced at the wall phone. If it were to ring, whose voice on the other end would he dread least? This was a sad state of affairs. If my patients could see me now, he thought, would they flee in disgusted pity? Or would his example g
ive them courage, the comforting sense that if he—Dr. Alan Glazier, Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, family man—could screw up so completely, well surely they were not after all so pathetic themselves.

  The patient with the traitorous wife: now he would definitely have fired Alan. The cellist, facing so much disappointment in the world and its commercial, art-spurning nature, would probably have forgiven him. Recently, Alan had read about a debate in the real-estate world over something called owner disclosure. Must home owners disclose the results of any and all tests they performed on things like termite infestation and radon levels? Wouldn’t it be fair if such a law governed psychotherapists, forced them to confess histories of divorce, infidelity, substance abuse, even chronic impatience with children or addiction to boring, formulaic cop shows on TV?

  He called Joya’s office number and spoke to her voice mail. “I don’t know what happened last night,” he said, “I mean how it got so out of control, but I’m sorry I made you angry. I shouldn’t have been so thoughtless about the time. But I’m totally confused about what you told me, the part about Greenie, and I need to talk to you, Joy. Would you find a minute to call me? Are you speaking to me? You’d better be.”

  He called Greenie’s number. Consuelo answered. “Hello Mister Alan, a good day to you!” she said gaily. “She has taken Mister George to the kitchen this morning, then school! She will teach his class to make biscuits! I will tell her you call! It is important?”

  “Yes,” said Alan. “Tell her to call my cell phone. I am not at home today.”

  “Yes!” echoed Consuelo with warm conviction. Someone did not regard him as the world’s biggest jerk.

  Alan had a number for Greenie at the governor’s kitchen, but she had given it to him mainly for emergencies. Was this an emergency? Good question, thought Alan sardonically—but if Joya had told her about Marion, to call her there now would be calamitous, no matter how urgent his feelings.

  When had Marion said she would call?

  He would wash the dishes and clean the kitchen. If Marion had not called by then, he would clean the oven. If she had not called by then, he would take a bath. In a bath, unlike a shower, he could hear Joya’s phone ring. If she did not call by the time he got out of the bath, he would check his own machine for messages back in New York.

  He threw away the leftover, spoiled food. He filled the sink with soapy water and put the dishes in to soak. Under the sink, he found a sticky old bottle of furniture oil. He would try to restore the surface of the table.

  Alan opened the dishwasher; it was full of clean dishes.

  “Oh God.” He sighed.

  The proper places for plates, bowls, mugs, and glasses were easy to find. The silverware drawer was the first one he tried, the one he would have chosen for this purpose. Logical Joya. (Why had no one married logical, clever, admirably independent Joya, Joya with the killer legs? If she were not his sister, would he have married Joya?)

  The incidental pieces—the spatula, whisk, and long knives—were harder to place. The third drawer he opened was stuffed with take-out menus and other papers; immediately, right on top, he saw a pamphlet about a “resource and support group” for single women who wanted to adopt a child. He lifted it daintily, as if it might mask an explosive device, and saw an envelope with the return address of a missionary service in India. Jumbled in alongside it were the business cards of two adoption lawyers and a social worker.

  Why, before the previous night’s disastrous conversation, hadn’t he suspected that Joya would pursue this way of becoming a mother? Stephen was beginning to talk about adoption, too—though it would be much harder for him. No doubt there were support groups for single men who wanted to adopt—and whip-smart adoption lawyers who worked with tenacious idealism to help their gay clients—but Alan’s job came before all that. So how could he have been spending the past two months probing the ins and outs of this monumental choice with a man who had been a total stranger just one year ago yet never have had a clue that his own sister was going through the very same struggle?

  “Somebody shoot me,” he muttered into the drawer before closing it.

  The next one, of course, held all the wooden spoons, potato peelers, ladles, and knives in two spotless plastic bins. He put away the utensils he still held in his left hand and returned to the dishwasher. By ten-thirty he had it loaded. Only the roasting pan still lurked in the sink, filled with soapy water. He would wait to start the dishwasher because that noise, too, might drown out Marion’s call. The oven, as it turned out, was self-cleaning; there would be no penance involving arms caked with the brown crud of baking and broiling, of splattering fat.

  NOW IT WAS ONE IN THE AFTERNOON. Alan had dressed. Joya’s kitchen phone had taken on a decidedly contemptuous air.

  He called Fenno McLeod back in New York. It was while walking Treehorn one evening that Alan had resolved to make this trip; on their way home, as if to cement that resolve, he had stopped in at his favorite bookshop to buy a travel guide. Providing for the dog during his absence was a detail that hadn’t occurred to him yet. In a rare stroke of luck—dumb luck, the only kind Alan deserved these days—Fenno had offered advice on which guide to buy and then, quite offhandedly, had offered to look after Treehorn. Now, Alan could hardly believe he’d imposed this task on a virtual stranger—even if McLeod was known about the neighborhood as someone who clearly loved dogs.

  “Your lassie’s asleep in the garden,” the Scotsman told Alan over the phone. “Tuckered out from a long gallivanting run along the piers with Emily. Doesn’t seem too mournful about your absence, I must tell you.”

  “I’m so grateful,” said Alan. Though who was Emily? Another assistant?

  “Not to worry,” said McLeod. “You’ll just have to buy more books now, won’t you?”

  “I will,” Alan said. “Absolutely I will.” Everyone he knew and loved, he thought as he hung up the phone, would get books for Christmas that year.

  He called his machine. There were three messages: his mother checking in about Christmas ideas for George’s gifts; Jerry wanting to catch up, wondering if he and Greenie were free for dinner some night; and Gordon Unsworth.

  Gordon. Gordie. Gordie of Stephen and Gordie. Alan smiled grimly as he listened to the message a second time. “…I know you’re seeing Stephen now, alone, but I was hoping I could just talk with you about…things.” He left three phone numbers.

  “Things!” Alan exclaimed to his sister’s cool, indifferent loft, to the actress on the billboard, her manufactured smile no longer in the sun. Now her teeth looked gray, even predatory. “Things!”

  He hunted below the sink for a scouring pad. He found one. As he scrubbed mercilessly at the roasting pan, he spoke to it. “Hello there, Gordie. You’d like to talk about things? What things would those be? Broken things? Unfinished things? Things you own? Things you regret? Please, I’m a thing specialist here! Talk to your heart’s content about things. Oh, the shame and the glory of THINGS!”

  At 1:32, according to the digital clock on the microwave oven, Alan laid the pan—probably cleaner than it had been since it was purchased—facedown on a towel. He dried his sore hands and punched Gordie’s office number into the phone. To his surprise, Gordie answered.

  “Alan Glazier returning your call.”

  He heard a long, grateful sigh. “Oh thank you. I thought you might not call back. I’d have completely understood.”

  “I always return calls,” Alan said, trying not to sound cold. “Tell me what’s up with you.”

  “What’s up with me is I’m—I was going to say I’m miserable, but that’s not it. I’m…baffled. I sort of can’t believe I took the drastic step I did.”

  Alan let the silence stretch for two or three seconds. “You mean, leaving Stephen the way you did.”

  “Yeah. Like an ass. A royal ass.”

  Like a pig, thought Alan. Like a selfish, frightened, faithless pig. Wouldn’t it be funny if Joya had a device that tape-re
corded all her calls? It was entirely plausible, since she was in a profession that might attract threats.

  “Do you want to see someone and talk, Gordie? Because I have a commitment to Stephen now. I could ask how he feels if I see you once or twice—or I could just refer you to someone else.”

  “I understand,” said Gordie. “Could you do that? Ask him if I could just tell you what’s going on with me?” Alan heard the disruptive click of call-waiting. “Because he doesn’t return my calls anymore. I mean not that I’ve called him more than a—”

  “Gordie? Gordie, I’m sorry, but I have to put you on hold. Can you hang on a minute?”

  “Of course,” said the repentant Gordie, and Alan switched to the alternate line. He heard a woman speak his name, but the din in the background nearly engulfed her voice. Was it Marion or Joya? “Hello? Hello?” he said, as if he wasn’t sure they had any connection at all.

  “Alan, it’s me. It’s a bad day, but I have a breathing space right now. I’ve left you three messages on your cell phone…. Maria, no, he said to use that tureen with the antler on top. It was a gift from one of these guys.” Greenie laughed. “I know, it’s revolting and tacky. Warm it slowly so it doesn’t crack when we pour in the soup…. Alan? I’m completely stressed out. We’re feeding governors from two other states, and this morning I made biscuits with George’s class. They came out of the oven looking like a field of little meteorites.”

  “Greenie?” Alan pressed his free hand against his chest. “Did you get my message last night?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “And I happened to talk to Joya last night, too; she told me you were there! Alan, what’s going on? Why would you go all the way out there? Is everything okay with Joya? I’m kind of worried about her.”

  There was a loud clattering noise on Greenie’s end. He heard her groan. “Oh no, oh—can we glue it back on? Can somebody go find Bill and get a hold of some Krazy Glue? We can heat the thing up, put in the soup, then glue the antler back on. Wait a sec. Oh don’t—Alan, I have to go, but we have to talk. I don’t know what’s going on—there or here. I won’t be back till late tonight. Call George at least.”