by Julia Glass
She said good-bye, and Alan realized he had said almost nothing. No lies, no excuses, no confessions, no explanations. No further declarations of love. But he was fairly certain that Joya had told her nothing incriminating about his visit. Still, Greenie had been speaking so loudly, with so many people around her, that he could read nothing into her voice. He hung up the phone. Immediately, it rang. Stunned, Alan grabbed it up. “There appears to be a receiver off the hook,” declared a prissy robotic voice. “Please hang up and try your call again.”
Gordie. Alan had left Gordie hanging until, quite reasonably, he had hung up. Alan struck the wall twice with the receiver. A shallow dent in the Sheetrock mocked his petty rage. The dent was shaped like a smile.
More than anything, he wanted to go out, to pace the city from end to end—perhaps to show up in person at Joya’s office. He realized he had no idea where her office was, but if he ransacked another drawer or two, he’d find out. Where else in his sister’s life did he need to meddle?
Hadn’t Marion said she would call in the morning? It was well past morning. Why shouldn’t he call her? Alan got his address book and called the number he had never used before. A man answered.
“Can I please speak to Marion?” he said without greeting.
“Marion’s not here just now,” the man said. “Who’s calling?”
“Alan Glazier.” He felt naked, stripped to his pale and quivering flesh.
“Hello, Alan. I’m Lewis.” The man’s voice was warm. It was, without doubt, the voice of a doctor. Did they teach you this voice in medical school, or if you happened to grow up with a voice like this, did someone steer you toward becoming a doctor?
Alan said nothing.
“I’m Marion’s husband. I have to tell you that Marion’s taken our son to visit friends for a long weekend. She needs to think a lot more about your request to meet Jacob.”
“You mean, she’s protecting you.”
“No,” said the calm, kind, enveloping voice of Lewis. “We talked about you last night, and I told her this is entirely up to her. As it should be.”
“But if it were up to you, you’d tell her never to speak to me again.”
Lewis sighed. “No, not at all. I have two children who are more or less estranged from me because of their mother. When it comes to family matters, I don’t make judgments, and I certainly don’t give advice. I could never do what you do.”
“You couldn’t begin to know what I do,” said Alan. Alan wondered why he was even talking to this man. He wondered why he was acting so juvenile. No, that part he couldn’t honestly wonder about. His belligerent pride was part of what had landed him here in the first place. Don’t fool yourself, he thought, you’ve earned every bit of this trouble and humiliation, fair and square.
Briefly, Alan thought again of all those prizes he’d won as a child. Never once had they, or his fine high grades, made him feel secure. He had always suspected that once he reached the end of his glowing school career, some sort of comeuppance would be awaiting him, patiently, like a robber hiding behind a bush at the end of a finely gardened promenade.
“Alan?” Lewis said. “Alan, are you still there?”
“Yes,” said Alan. “Yes. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m sorry. I know you must be pretty angry,” said Lewis. “She isn’t doing this to be cruel. It’s just so—well, obviously it’s complicated. You haven’t done anything wrong. She wanted me to tell you that. She felt terrible not calling you, but she was afraid that if she spoke to you, you’d change her mind. And she needs to think things through with as little pressure as possible.”
“Oh.” Trumped yet again by the wisdom and kindness of Marcus Welby, M.D.
“You know, this will sound presumptuous, but I have a feeling that one day we’ll meet. Marion says we have a lot in common.”
What was Alan to do now, thank the man for his generosity? Ask what he was doing home on a Friday—whether he, too, was low on patients?
“She promises she’ll be in touch,” said Lewis. His tone was more apologetic than reassuring, the tone he would use to tell a patient that while, yes, they’d caught the cancer early, there would still be evil medicine to take.
She promised she would CALL! Alan wanted to shout. She promised…But had she promised anything else? Oh, promises. As durable and easy to define as jellyfish bobbing up and down in the waves.
“Thank you, Lewis,” he said, forcing himself to say the name. “Would it be inane to ask you to tell her I called?”
Lewis, bless him, did not laugh. “I knew you’d call—I mean, I would have called, too. So of course, of course I’ll tell her.”
Alan sighed, his chronic trademark sigh. “So that’s it then,” he said. He thanked Marion’s husband again. In unison, the two men said good-bye.
“That’s it then,” Alan repeated, breezily, to the voracious sitcom actress, to Joya’s view of industrial San Francisco. And hey now, as it turned out, there was plenty of time to see a few sights in this handsome city! Where had Alan put that guidebook he’d bought from Fenno McLeod? Had he even remembered to bring it with him?
THIRTEEN
REMARKABLY, ALAN WAS WAITING FOR THEM at the mouth of the tunnel leading from the plane. “I pleaded,” he said, “and they took pity on me.” He put down a large shopping bag and held each of them tightly a long time, first George and then Greenie.
“Am I ever glad to see you!” he said to George. He tapped his watch. “We have to catch up on this Christmas business. I got us a tree, and Santa came, even though he knew you weren’t here yet. And how about some of Nana’s fruitcake?”
“Yuck, Dad,” said George. “You know I hate that. We all hate that!”
“All right then, no cake but your mom’s.” Alan glanced fondly at Greenie.
“Where’s Treehorn?”
“She had to wait at home,” said Alan. George made a face but did not complain.
Greenie stood deliberately back from the reunion of father and son. For once, she was content to be a witness. She had been awake for nearly four days straight, making roasts and cookies, pâtés, English puddings (Yorkshire and plum), half a dozen bûches de Noël. Ray might instruct his staff to surround the mansion with a thousand flickering farolitos, but he was a sucker for all the Dickensian trappings.
She followed Alan and George down the escalator to Baggage Claim. The airport was close to vacant; they had a bank of plastic seats to themselves. As Alan talked to George of gifts and food and snow and sleds, Greenie watched the blades of the carousel turn in a gleaming oval, awaiting the onslaught of trunks, duffels, skis, and alpine backpacks. Just like her: waiting to see what sensations would hit as she reentered her old life, or what remained of that life.
She was glad that she had already run the gauntlet of Christmas entertaining on someone else’s behalf. She had become a placid, willing vessel of Ray’s private nostalgia and public benevolence, an all-consuming project that had left her mind both spent and purged. Just as fortunately, she’d had precious little time in recent weeks to think about, let alone see, Charlie. Perhaps, she thought (or wished), I won’t even miss him. After all, she reasoned, they were just friends. While you, she thought as she watched Alan lean toward their son (looking so pleased, his love so hungry and sated all at once), you are my husband, you are my husband of ten years. This meant, she also reasoned, that Alan would always be to some degree transparent: not invisible but impossible to see, the way you can’t see great portions of your own body except in photographs or elaborately positioned mirrors. Wasn’t a husband, after a while, just another part of you, a part you were destined never to see without unflattering distortions?
She watched Alan touch his son on the nose and then, having captured his attention, reach into the shopping bag. “And now…” He pulled out a large present and gave it to George. Repeating the motion, he held out another to Greenie.
George said, “Dad, this is rapted in the newspaper!”
“Well, okay, so maybe I forgot to buy real wrapping paper. Some details I’ve had to fudge. But look, I managed real ribbon.”
“Yes,” acknowledged George. He shook his present, sniffed it, and examined its underside. “Can I open it now?”
“That’s the idea, guy.”
After Alan helped loosen the ribbon, George tore off the paper in one dramatic gesture. “What is it!” he exclaimed, staring at a plain cardboard box. He shook it from side to side till the bottom fell out, leaving the lid in his hands. Holding the lid above his head, as if he mustn’t let go of it, he looked down. “It’s a…it’s a…” Finally he dropped the lid, sat on the floor, and rummaged in the box.
“Oh my goodness, a cowboy suit,” said Greenie, her first words since getting off the plane.
George looked from the box to his father. His expression was neutral, almost pensive.
“Let’s see!” said Greenie.
Carefully, George held up a black suede vest. Tassels sprouted from shiny round grommets along the bottom.
Greenie reached over and felt the material. “This is the real thing.” She picked up the shirt from below; it, too, was black, with white piping and pearl snaps. Across the chest, a graceful linear drawing in reds and blues, galloped a crowd of horses. “George, look at this.”
George dropped the vest and turned his attention to the shirt.
“A herd of mustangs!” said Greenie.
“Maybe,” said George. “Or maybe Chingo Teak ponies. They’re wild ones, too.” He looked at his father. “You know, Dad, cowboys don’t really wear their clothes like this.”
“Yes, they do,” said Greenie, “when they’re dressed up. I see them at Ray’s house all the time. You should see how fancy some of their outfits are.”
In the same box, under a pair of black jeans, cocooned in tissue paper printed with horseshoes, sat a small gray Stetson hat—identical to one that Ray wore—and beneath it the requisite boots.
“Oh Alan.” Greenie was both touched and worried, because like so many extravagant gifts that parents dream will answer their children’s most fervent longings, this one seemed to be falling flat—not entirely, as George continued to examine the shirt with fascination, turning it around to verify that (yes) the horses galloped full circle around the wearer, but his reaction seemed to be one of ingenuous caution or even skepticism.
“Open yours,” Alan said to Greenie.
“Later. Look, here come the suitcases.”
“No, now,” he said. “Really.”
“Here,” Greenie said to George, “you’re so good at tearing off the paper, why don’t you help me?”
Inside Greenie’s box was another pair of cowboy boots. Hers were red, with cutouts shaped like soaring swallows, cameos of blue against ivory leather. The swallows made her think of Ray’s ranch, where swallows built nests in the rafters, yet also of Maine, where sometimes you’d see them careening and flitting, like stunt pilots, over the water. The boots, so beautiful, embarrassed her. Inexplicably, she felt herself recoil at the perfection of Alan’s present. Was she too exhausted for gratitude?
“What do you think? Honestly. Will you wear them?” said Alan. “Because I can return them. I don’t want to see them gathering dust.”
Behind him, Greenie caught sight of the one suitcase she had packed for both herself and George, toppling through the chute. “How did you know my size, Alan? Men never know their women’s shoe size.”
He frowned briefly. “The shoes you left in our closet. I’d like to say I know all your physical dimensions by heart, but that would be a lie.”
And we never lie to each other, do we? thought Greenie. “Alan, I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “I’m going to put them on right now.”
As they walked from the terminal to the parking garage, people who passed her would look down and smile. “Look! Bluebirds of happiness!” said an older man to a little girl at his side. “Merry Christmas,” he said to Greenie.
“Same to you,” she answered.
“Do mine have bluebirds?” asked George, whose cowboy outfit, repacked, was now under Alan’s arm.
Alan said, “Yours have lasso designs stitched right into the leather.”
George was silent for a moment. He clasped Alan’s hand, the one that also carried the suitcase. “I don’t like lassos,” he said softly. “They’re mean.”
Greenie could see that he had struggled not to make this complaint, but honest declarations held powerful sway for children. She said, “Did you know that lassos can be used to rescue animals? If a calf or a foal gets caught in a river and can’t swim, a cowboy can lasso it and pull it back to shore.”
“Oh,” said George. “I didn’t know that.”
As Alan unlocked the car he’d borrowed from a friend, he said, “Before I forget, Walter told me that if you don’t call him by tomorrow morning, he’ll never forgive you.”
Walter. For days now—some of the busiest days of her life—Greenie had forgotten that Alan would not be the only person to see on this trip. She’d known there would be Tina and Sherwin; that was business. Tina wanted to buy Greenie out, and Greenie had agreed. (Walter had told her that he knew a lawyer who’d do the deal without fleecing them.) But there were also the friends to whom she’d sent brief, hasty e-mails, assuring them that she couldn’t wait to get together when she came back for Christmas. Now, all she wanted to do was climb beneath a pile of blankets and sleep. “Are we invited to parties?” she said. “I think I’m a little partied out.”
“The Christmas parties you missed,” he said dryly. “But New Year’s, yes, same as always.” He named an old friend of his from the institute, one with a pair of twins the same age as George. They had an annual New Year’s Day buffet: borscht, ham, and black-eyed peas. Greenie and Alan had been to eight or ten of these parties, each one nearly identical to the last. Just as dependably, all the children went home with indelible beet stains on their brand-new holiday outfits and came down with whatever virus one of the other children had passed around with the carrot sticks and hummus.
To be back in New York was thrilling and enervating, familiar and strange. Nothing had changed, yet suddenly there were too many people, there was too little sky, and the damp air was a visceral affront. The weather wasn’t much different from the weather she’d left behind here nine months before, as if in her absence the climate hadn’t bothered to change. Only Greenie had changed.
GEORGE WAS NOW THOROUGHLY obsessed with horses. He neglected his miniature railroad and had abandoned his dinosaurs to concentrate on a collection of lifelike model horses he’d started when Diego gave him two duplicates: a bay gelding, head down to graze, and a trotting Appaloosa mare with a billowing mane of pearl-colored plastic. In six months, Greenie had added four more to the collection, Ray two, and Mary Bliss the one that Greenie liked best: a roan pony with a bridle and western saddle. The leather was tooled with looping vines, the fastenings a good imitation of antique silver. But George had promptly removed the saddle and bridle; riding was not the point of his horseplay.
“Wild, wild, you are wild, the Connemara king of wild!” he proclaimed in a joyful, breathless murmur as he galloped the pony along a bookcase, past the long-forgotten Sneetches and an all too pedantically human Harold; past Mr. and Mrs. Mallard in distant, irrelevant Boston; past Frog and Toad, whose genteel voices had not been heard for months.
On one visit to the library after school—Consuelo took him twice a week—George had apparently asked the librarian for “bigger, betterer” books on horses; so now, nearly every time, Consuelo would read aloud to him from a large dusty reference book called The Golden Equine Encyclopedia.
When Greenie returned from work, George would tell her something new he had learned. “The Hackney has a very short tail and it steppens very high,” he might say, demonstrating with raised forearms. Or “Did you know there are horses who don’t live here, in the United States? The Suffolk punch lives in England. The Tendon Sea Walking
Horse lives by the Tendon Sea. The grass is blue by the Tendon Sea.” Greenie was surprised how many kinds of horses she had never heard of. She knew a little, but nowhere near as much as George, so she did not tell him that the Tendon Sea Walking Horse came from and was named for Tennessee or that Kentucky was the bluegrass state or that fancy show horses like the Lippizan stallions were trained on a lunge line, not a lunch line.
His favorite storybook was called Bronco Busters. In it, three crude, swaggering migrant cowboys failed to break the spirit of a young black horse. Every night, a small boy would visit the horse in its corral. Gradually, through music, food, and quiet musings about their future together, he won the animal’s trust. At the end, after the insolent cowboys drove off in their sinister pickup, the boy freed the horse, climbed up on his back, and rode him away toward the mountains.
George had made two friends in his kindergarten class—a boy named Sven and a girl named Hope—but when they came over, they had very little interest in the horses. Sven liked the dinosaurs, though mostly he wanted to browse again and again through the Pokémon trading cards he brought along, displayed in a binder of plastic sleeves (which gave Sven, in Greenie’s eyes, the unsavory air of a traveling salesman). Hope liked putting on the plastic masks that Greenie had bought for George after he’d shown so much interest in the Hopi mask at the Governor’s Mansion. But his friendship with the enigmatic Diego was still the one he treasured most. Greenie’s schedule did not permit her to do much of the driving to and from Diego’s house; about once every two weeks, Consuelo drove George out to Tesuque at three (when Diego got home from school) and brought him home by six. This was easier for Diego’s mother, who had other children to look after and, according to Consuelo, no car of her own. George would return from these visits energetic and open, dispensing tales about the hand-fed squirrel on the roof, the goats that liked to stand in the sun on top of their shed, and, above all, the horses that grazed the fields of the neighboring ranch. He had learned to identify all of them by coloring and most of them by name. (“Carumba! What do you think about that name, Mom?” he would say proudly. Or “My favoritest one today is Fengali. Fengali has the longest tail of everyone. It’s black.”)