The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  Greenie would have found George’s fixation funnier than she did if she had not felt equally yet shamefully enthralled by something other than horses. Greenie’s obsession was Charlie, and it was not a matter of pretend. In October, before the parade of holidays began, Greenie had met Charlie in town two or three times for lunch, but he had not dropped by her house again and never asked to see her at night. Nor did he mention her mother again. He spoke much more often now of his visions and ideals, what he readily called his “crusades,” than he did of the past. With relief and regret, Greenie wondered if Charlie was backing away. When she began to wonder if his motives might be noble or cowardly, Stop! she warned herself. It simply did not, could not matter.

  NO CHRISTMAS DAY HAD EVER FELT SO EPICALLY LONG. To catch their flight, she’d had to get herself and George ready to leave Santa Fe by four in the morning. Tall George had picked them up in the fading dark and driven them to Albuquerque, but while Small went back to sleep, Greenie had stayed awake and talked with grown-up George. She had never spent time alone with her son’s name-mate and occasional playmate, though she had learned secondhand that he grew up in Harlem, was a Yankees fan, and liked to Rollerblade.

  “How’d you end up working for Ray?” she asked.

  Predictably, he laughed. “Long story short? I was stuck on this girl who says, Hey, let’s hitch to L.A.! Like we’re in some Robert Redford movie.” He laughed. “Like who’s gonna pick up a couple of black teenagers, man. Clueless, man. But somehow we end up here. We get a ride for two whole days in the back of a pickup with this Indian dude. We make it here and I figure, hey, don’t push our luck. I get a job delivering groceries, which gets me driving a truck, which gets me driving an airport cab, which gets me driving a limo at night for extra money, which gets me, well sort of, to this place.”

  “‘Well sort of’?” said Greenie. “Sounds like a logical progression to me.”

  “Yeah, well, on the surface like.” Tall shook his head. “But see, Ray puts the eye on someone and, wham, before you know it, you in his collection.” He caught Greenie’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “Guvna sees, Guvna wants. Guvna, man, he conquers. Not in a bad way, I’m not saying that. But it goes, like, deeper than you’d think. Big Daddy stuff. He hired me, see, because he saw me hangin’ out on my blades with a crowd near the Plaza. What he saw, why me, who knows? He needs a driver, so I get tapped by some dude who works for a law firm near where I hang out. He knows my name, he knows it all. A weird thing. Weird but good. Stroke. Of. Luck.” With each of those three words he tapped the steering wheel with his right hand. She noticed that he wore a wide silver band on his pinkie.

  “So you know how he found me then,” she said.

  “Something about your singing’s what I heard.”

  “My singing!” Greenie laughed loudly, and Small George stirred against her. She stroked his hair.

  “Yeah, and some ballbustin’ cake.”

  “The cake, yes. But what did you hear about singing?”

  “Mary B. says you start the day with goofy singing. Well, she can spin a tale, that girl.”

  Greenie leaned forward. “George, is it just me, or is it obvious to everyone that Mary Bliss is mad for Ray?”

  “That girl,” he said again. “She be in for a serious bruising. Not like he’s led her on. She ought to know.”

  The car slowed, curving away from the highway, toward the airport. At the curb, Tall took their suitcase from the trunk. For the first time, Greenie looked at his face and saw that he was younger than she would have guessed, twenty-five at most. What sort of a life would he be leading now if Ray had not pulled him off the street? Or would he have been in school, on his way to becoming a teacher or a lawyer? What did it mean that Ray seemed to choose people rather than let them come to him, plucked them like fruit, ripe or not, from a vine? When Greenie reached into her purse, Tall George looked wounded. “I ain’t no Red Cap,” he said, but he gave her a forgiving smile. He turned to his small, sleepy friend and held out his hands. “What do I need, my man Small?”

  Greenie saw her son smile and shake off his crankiness, then go through the ritual of slapping hands and gyrating bodies.

  “Bon voyage,” said Tall. “Know what that means?”

  Small shook his head.

  “Means come back soon, amigo.” He winked at Greenie.

  Small George giggled. “Okay, amigo.”

  Hours later—though days later was how it felt—after a slow crawl through the Holland Tunnel; after the joyful reunions of George with Treehorn and then with his seemingly immortal goldfish; after the opening of presents; after the eating of stuffed Cornish game hens and vegetable salads that Alan had insisted on buying from a gourmet market and that she had found blessedly delicious; after second helpings of a pear-almond tart sent by Tina in a Ms. Duquette pastry box that brought tears to Greenie’s eyes; after George had inspected every decoration on the tree and every nook of his old home and then, in a moment when neither of his parents were looking, fallen asleep on the floor under the coffee table, nestled against his dog; after Alan had tenderly changed him into pajamas and tucked him, utterly unwaking, into his bed, which now looked so tiny; after phone calls from Alan’s mother and Walter and Consuelo had been left for the machine to answer—after all this, Greenie and Alan collapsed side by side, alone together for the first time in four months, on the couch they had bought together just before their marriage.

  At first, they looked not at each other but at the enveloping mayhem—crumpled paper, empty boxes, a ransacked half-empty suitcase, a table covered with leftover food and wine, candles melted to puddles of wax—and laughed. Delicately, lips pulled back from her teeth, Treehorn was nibbling at the wild rice strewn on the rug under George’s place. She looked up, regarding them with alarm and then curiosity.

  Staring at the table, Alan groaned. “Flowers. I knew there was something I forgot.” When he started to get up, Greenie said, “Don’t touch a bit of it. Don’t you dare. We’ll deal with it all tomorrow.”

  For a moment, they turned their nervous attention to the tree. By mistake, Alan had replaced some burned-out bulbs with blinkers. They kept up a syncopated rhythm, casting onto the ceiling a mute display of fireworks.

  She knew she ought to thank him for working so hard on everything—the tree, the meal, the presents—but Greenie wanted Alan to speak first. And yet, as she looked around the room at the things she’d expected to see and the things she’d forgotten about, she heard herself say, “Where’s my chair?”

  “Your chair?”

  “My big pink chair. The one I rescued from execution by garbage truck.”

  “I moved it. To make room for the tree. It’s in the bedroom.”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  “I covered it,” said Alan. “Okay, I covered it about two minutes after you left. I can’t stand the color. As you know.”

  Greenie nodded. “But not permanently.”

  Alan rolled his eyes. “No, Greenie, not permanently. With an old bedspread of mine.”

  “That denim thing?” said Greenie. “Blue. What is it with men and blue? Why is blue so boring, so safe?”

  “Maybe because it’s a color that isn’t intrusive. Because the sky is blue.”

  “Yes. And always there.” The important thing about the sky, she remembered from Margaret Wise Brown, is that it is always there. But Alan, who hadn’t read to George much at all in the past year, wouldn’t know the allusion. One of the unexpected difficulties of their separation was that when Greenie made passing remarks about her everyday life, often she would have to explain them to Alan. Because he wasn’t always there.

  They still hadn’t touched. Were they shy? Were they intimidated? Or were they, deep down in the compressed molten core of their selves, still angry, even justifiably angry? Let go, thought Greenie.

  She turned to Alan, pulling her knees up a
nd resting them against his thigh. “Would you tell me about your visit to Joya? You never really explained that. Did she have a breakdown of some kind? I worry about her, you know.”

  “Joya’s okay,” Alan said firmly.

  “Well, she would be okay, that’s the kind of person she is. But last time I talked to her, she was so…fed up. She was so depleted about this baby thing. She said she wished she could have that part of her brain cut out, whatever part holds that bourgeois cuckoo clock—that’s what she called it! Funny even when she’s furious. She wishes she could love her life as it is, with her—Alan!”

  Alan had let out a great, full-throated sigh. He said, “I don’t think Joya is what we should be talking about, do you?”

  Treehorn jumped up on the couch, on the other side of Alan, and laid her long jaw on his opposite thigh. She gazed at Greenie as if to remind her (the renegade wife) that Alan was the one who deserved an ally.

  “Greenie, there’s something I have to tell you right now that’s terrible, that’s confusing, or it is to me, that’s…”

  “That’s what? What is it?”

  Alan stared at the tree. “I’m so afraid you’ll leave me when I tell you.”

  Don’t you feel I’ve left you already? Didn’t you say that months ago? Greenie thought. But she waited, listening, feeling the excess food, the second slice of pie, sitting too high in her chest. “Just tell me. You’re a worrier, Alan. Things are rarely as bad as you think they’ll be.” She put her hand on his leg. Treehorn shoved her nose against Greenie’s hand.

  “Okay,” said Alan fiercely. “That time I went to my high school reunion, way before George, when we were fighting all the time—at the last minute you refused to go, do you remember that?—I ran into a girl I’d known, Joya’s best friend, and I—”

  “You slept with her.”

  Alan started to speak, but Greenie interrupted again; she had no patience for a confession of something so stale. Now was the problem: right this very minute. “That was how many years ago? That was ages ago. God, why are you telling me now? Alan, I don’t need to know this.” She turned to look at him. “Or is this because you’re seeing Jerry again? I hope you’re seeing Jerry again. If Jerry thought you ought to come clean with me—”

  “Greenie, I’m not seeing Jerry. There’s more than just this.”

  “You mean other women? Other reunions?” Greenie could no longer look at her husband’s face, which seemed to grow darker, more miserable, by the minute. Everywhere else she looked, clutter abounded: a toppled pile of picture books (Alan had given them both so many books!), a tousled knot of ribbon and tissue paper, a sweater, a card, a plaid scarf, a box of chocolates…“God, Alan, are you having an affair? Some would say I deserve that, don’t I?” She laughed.

  “Greenie!” he shouted. She jerked away from him, stunned. Treehorn dropped to the floor, looking up at Alan in fear. He reached a hand down to pet her. “Shh, it’s okay, girl.” To Greenie, he said, “Listen to me, please! Stop thinking so damn fast, galloping ahead of me like you always do.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  “I am not having an affair. There is no one—lamentably, maybe—no one but you. There was one woman, one night, it was stupid, it was petty. I’ll be mortified to the end of time. But it’s more complicated. There are complications.”

  “Complications?” She thought of cancer and AIDS. The wife died from complications of infidelity.

  “I might be the father—accidentally, Greenie—the father of another child.”

  Greenie remembered telling Alan that she was pregnant. She’d said it the way so many adoring wives do: I have some incredible news for you. You’re going to be a father. Perversely, she felt for an instant as if she were hearing good news, as if somehow he might be telling her that now he was pregnant, that this other child was their next child. Just as perversely, she smiled. “But Alan,” she said, and then she drew in her breath, as if to take back the affection with which she had spoken his name.

  Alan began to cry. Greenie stared at him. At first he just kept repeating how sorry he was, and then a torrent of words came out of her normally nontorrential husband, her husband who spoke in carefully chosen, intelligent phrases, even when expressing profound emotions. He was saying, over and over in a litany of careless repetition, that he had no idea what to say, he had been a terrible coward not to tell her before, he had not seen this woman in all those years till he went to San Francisco, he had only wanted to know for sure, he needed just to know, he had no intention of leaving Greenie and George, he loved George—“and you, you,” he added too hastily—more than anything on earth. He wanted them together more than ever, he hoped she could forgive him, maybe not now, maybe not for a while; he would sleep in his office or go to a hotel that very night if she needed to be alone, he would—

  “Did you meet the child?” she asked sharply. She wanted him to stop talking, to stop blubbering. He stopped. He wiped his face. She had never seen his face like this: so strangely, unkindly softened; streaked with red, his eyes swollen. “No,” he said. “But I tried to. Just to see him.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know. It was just a…need. I wanted an answer from…the mother. I wanted to know. That’s all.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That’s all’? Like, if you’d seen the child, met the child…” Greenie gasped. “Is it a boy? Another boy?”

  Alan nodded. “He’s a little older than George.”

  More than once, George had asked Greenie if he could have a big brother. She had told him that maybe one day he could have a little brother, but never a big brother. “You would always be the oldest,” she said. “You would always be the first. If Daddy and I ever have other babies, and we might or we might not, you will always be our very first baby. Very first babies are very special. Forever and always, they came before all the rest. No one can ever change that.”

  Now she said, “George has an older brother.”

  “Honestly, Greenie, I don’t know. That’s not how I think of it. That’s not the part that matters.”

  “No?” She didn’t mean it sarcastically, though she could tell Alan heard it that way. She focused on the facts, and the conversation took on the sound of an interview. She found out that the woman was married to a wealthy doctor, so at least child support might not be an issue (though Greenie kept this thought to herself). She found out that Joya, out of sheer anger, had claimed she told Greenie about the child, that this explained Alan’s message of love on the answering machine; he had been desperate, not drunk. She found out that the boy was named Jacob. Jacob’s ladder. Jacob’s pillow. Her mind—tired beyond the bounds of sanity—looped about with the new names Greenie must fold into her consciousness of family.

  “Alan,” she said suddenly. “I have to sleep now.”

  He stopped talking. He looked at her with such abject grief that she had to close her eyes. She felt him move closer, to sit against her, his right arm around her shoulders. It was their first true physical contact since the airport, nearly twelve hours before. It rippled through her body like a chill. “This is just too much for someone as tired as I am right now,” she said. “I’m too tired to be angry. I’m too tired to be hurt. I’m too tired to…think.”

  He said, “I understand completely,” and he asked if she wanted him not to sleep in their bed. She told him of course not—of course they should sleep together. Whatever they figured out from the next day forward, they would figure it out together, she assured him. As she lay down in the clean sheets he had stretched across their mattress, she felt bruised but calm. She also knew, with an unavoidable ruthlessness, that she was now the one in control. This was both ominous and soothing. She said one more thing before she fell asleep. “Alan, I know it’s still a week away, but can we skip the New Year’s party?”

  “Absolutely.” He, too, sounded calm. They knew they would have a superficial reprieve for the day to follow; George, refueled by the th
rill of new possessions, would not sleep late, never mind the change in time zone. In just a few hours, he would burst through the bedroom door and leap on their bodies, begging for pancakes, begging for someone to play his new games, solve his new puzzles, sit down and listen to him read all those brand-new books.

  TWO MORNINGS AFTER CHRISTMAS, Greenie met Tina at Walter’s Place, where a lawyer helped them complete and sign the transfer of Greenie’s old pastry business. Walter had opened the restaurant just for them, but his chef was there as well, and Walter instructed him to cook a large, indulgent breakfast, the kind that Ray loved to eat when he was out on the ranch. Greenie thought of Ray with unexpected longing. She missed him, the way you might miss a tall strong tree that anchored the view from your living room window.

  Trying to concentrate on the papers laid before her in fans and paper-clipped sheafs, Greenie felt as if she gave not a hoot about the future of the business she’d infused almost literally with her own sweat, the kitchen she had fashioned precisely to her habits and tastes, the green boxes with their delicate veils of blossoms. She felt the urge to push all the papers toward Tina and say, “Take it all, under any conditions, take it all out of my sight—and here, take all the years that go along with it. Pack it all up and take it away.”

  As if in a dream, here was this kind, patient, handsome man, a friend of Walter’s named Gordie, explaining each and every clause yet one more time. Now and then, Tina looked intently at Greenie, as if to check for a change of heart. Greenie’s weariness and lack of appetite must have appeared like reluctance. After the papers were signed, Tina embraced Greenie and asked if she’d come to the kitchen later that week for a celebratory lunch.