by Julia Glass
“Oh lord no.”
Greenie opened the liquor cabinet.
“That bottle of Bordeaux, if you please,” said Mary Bliss. “And give me the fuckin’ corkscrew. I am so sorry I can’t clean up my mouth today.”
“We all have those days. Recently, I’ve had a few of my own.” Greenie took the bottle from its rack and opened it herself. It was the last of a case, an exceptional vintage sent by a Frenchman who patronized the Santa Fe Opera. She took a heavy blue Mexican goblet off a high shelf.
Next to Mary Bliss, thought Greenie as she filled the goblet, am I lucky? Am I unlucky? Isn’t she more deserving of love?
Then something occurred to her. “How do you know he’s engaged?”
“He sent me an e-mail this morning. An e-mail, if you please. He’s announcing it from the ranch this evening. Six o’clock news. I plan to have passed out by then. Let the fucking phones ring themselves silly.”
At which the kitchen phone rang.
“I am not here. I am not on this cruel planet today,” said Mary Bliss.
“Darling,” Greenie heard when she picked up the phone.
“Hi,” she said. “Can I call you back?”
“Can I come pick you up?”
“I’ll meet you back at the apartment. In an hour.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Same here,” she said lightly. “But I have a visitor.”
Mary Bliss shook her head. “I’ll go, I’ll go.”
“Stay,” said Greenie to Mary Bliss.
She closed her cookbooks. She listened to the story of how Ray had plucked Mary Bliss from a gaggle of secretaries over at the Capitol. This was early in his campaign for governor, and she had stayed up so many late nights with him that people began to joke about the matching pairs of circles beneath their eyes come morning. “And I began to think, Oh if only.”
Then the movie star had made her entrance. Mary Bliss never minded the actress, mostly because she knew it couldn’t possibly last. All the time he played out his fantasies with “Miss Box Office, Emphasis on Box” was time in which Mary Bliss could reveal to Ray her own genuine charm and compatibility. The longer the actress stayed, in some ways the better.
“Bidin’ my time, is what I was,” said Mary Bliss. “My precious, idiotic time. I even thought I saw him turnin’ toward me these past few months, noticing me in a new way. But it was reflected love, that’s all it was!”
Greenie tried to reassure her that she still had all the time in the world to find a good man and have a family. She could even stay in her fine job and still get over the man. “You’ll get a chance to see what he’s like married, and I doubt it will be anything close to ideal.”
Mary Bliss began to cry again. Greenie tried to embrace her, but she was too miserable for consolation.
“I only wish I’d gone and told him!”
But he knew, Greenie wanted to say—exactly the wrong thing to say. Nor could she tell Mary Bliss that Ray had claimed the marriage to Claudia would be a power marriage—Greenie didn’t believe him anyway—because it would reveal that Ray had confided in Greenie before telling Mary Bliss. Take my husband, a mostly good man I’ve betrayed and wounded. She thought of saying that, too. Because there was nothing, really, to say to Mary Bliss. Ray had led her on by never leading her on. Ray, like most politicians, led the world on simply by throwing his grand flirtatious self in every direction.
Mary Bliss had drunk most of the wine. Now she stood up, carried the bottle to the sink, and poured the rest of it down the drain. “Goodbye to my vintage years,” she said. “Adios. A Dios. To God. Fuck God.” She left the bottle lying on its side in the sink. “I’m going home to watch Cartoon Network. Hope I catch Road Runner, that’s my favorite.” She smiled sadly at Greenie. “Meep meep!”
“I’m driving you,” said Greenie. “No, you’ve got no choice in the matter.” She took Mary Bliss to her office and helped gather up her things. She held her by one arm as they left the house, afraid that the sudden change of temperature, the harsh light, would make her faint. It was so hot that the sky was nearly white, as if the sun had burned away the blue.
Or no, Greenie thought as she drove, the blue was now inside of her. She felt (unreasonably, but never mind) as if she were the one who’d broken Mary Bliss’s heart.
After getting Mary Bliss inside her apartment and turning on the central air, Greenie drove to Charlie’s. She told him she needed a nap before going out on yet another adventure. He lay down beside her, and once they slept, they did not wake till after dark.
MAKING LOVE SO OFTEN, with someone new, reawakened Greenie to the history of her body. They never mentioned that long ago, just once, they had been naked together before. Greenie did not want to reignite Charlie’s resentment of her mother, and she did not want to find herself wishing that if only they had known then what they knew now, perhaps…But to have her body so fondly interrogated—because that’s what Charlie’s attentions felt like sometimes: a series of urgent, adoring questions—did take her back, time and again, to George’s birth.
Objectively, the birth itself had been average; but for Greenie, George’s emergence had felt like an athletic event. This is what a football huddle feels like, she could recall thinking in the midst of nauseating pain; close about her, exuding the smells of toothpaste, cologne, laundry detergent, raw onions, and disinfectant (temporarily obscuring her own smells of sweat, blood, and far less savory excretions), were Alan, the labor nurse, a female intern, and the essential, necessarily heroic Dr. Gilmorrison. (“Call me Dr. G,” he’d once suggested, and that day, perilously short of breath, she had discovered why.) They pressed around her coiled, grunting, pushing body—as if afraid it might suddenly fly away, like a lost balloon—and cheered her on, just as if she were a football player.
Afterward, her body was shockingly flaccid: not just her belly but suddenly her arms and thighs and neck—as if they, too, had been taut with the pregnancy and then, once George was born, rendered idle and spent. Purpose seemed to return to her body, all of it, only when she had mastered nursing. This was as painful as her friends had warned her it would be, but George was a good student and latched on almost too well from the start.
When she fed him during the day, her body felt as if it had been made to ensconce a nursing baby the way a saddle was molded to carry a rider—the crevice between her thighs a perfect seat for George’s bottom, her waist calibrated to support his flexed knees and, later on, his arm as he rhythmically kneaded her back. The remarkable, unexpected thing was not that the baby yearned for the breast but that the breast seemed to literally yearn toward the baby. At night, she’d take him from Alan, or from his cradle, without turning on a light, and she would guide him carefully toward her right breast, the one George liked best. He would appear to search for only a second or two, and then his mouth became a tiny heat-seeking missile. Gasping, she would feel the magnetic draw on every duct, like dozens of reins pulled tight from behind her rib cage. George drank intensely and fell asleep still joined to her breast. She’d insert the tip of her pinkie at the edge of his mouth, and when his head rolled away, milk would spill across his cheek like sugar glaze poured across a rose-colored cake. Her left breast, ignored, would often ache until morning.
She could not indulge memories of that time without including Alan. After the birth, after a lesson at nursing, after George had conked out, she could not decide which urge was stronger: the urge to sleep or to eat. The first won out, but not, Alan would tell her later, before she had muttered to him exactly what she dreamed of eating. By the time she awoke, night had surrendered to a sunny morning. Her room was filled with a brilliant snow-infused light and a startling amount of activity. A nurse was teaching Alan to swaddle George; an orderly was replacing her pitcher of water; the mother behind the adjacent curtain was babbling to her own brand-new child. Pain had invaded Greenie like an army while she slept, pitching camp in the most unexpected places: her wrists, her throat, her thig
hs.
“My baby,” she said, reaching toward Alan. “Drugs,” she said to the nurse.
Alan carried George, uncertain but beaming. Greenie had laughed. “You look like you’re carrying a porcupine,” she said as she took the baby—whose face seemed to twitch and agitate at the sound of her voice. His mouth opened in a plea, the mouth of a baby songbird.
“I brought you something,” said Alan. Then she noticed, on two paper plates on the ugly beige chair where Alan had spent the night, an enormous sandwich and a miniature cake. “Roast beef and coleslaw, that’s what you asked for. And devil’s food.”
For one greedy instant, she forgot her baby. “I’m not supposed to come first anymore, am I?” she said as she wrestled with the task of feeding George, but she found it hard to take her eyes off the sandwich. When she ate it—all of it—and half of the cake, each bite tasted like the answer to a separate prayer.
Late that night, as Alan snored on the foldout chair and George lay cocooned in his Plexiglas box, she took out the greasy carton with the last of her cake and ate it as she marveled at her husband and son. This, she thought, was the true meaning of romance.
Now, by contrast, she could not stop picturing George as he had appeared when she arrived at Diego’s house in the middle of the night, after the police had called. She had made the drive in stunned bewilderment, certain only of the need to get to her son and fold him as close to her as possible. But in the moment just after she found him, sitting on a lawn chair while grown-ups milled about him, agitated, ignoring him, he had looked to Greenie shockingly separate from her, too much his own self.
When he saw her, he did not stand. He did not look upset; he looked confused.
“Honey? Honey, what happened?” she said. “Are you all right?” She knelt before him and tried to pull him out of the chair and into her embrace. In his lap was a wooden mask, a crude likeness of a bird with a long hooked beak. He kept his hands firmly on the mask. As she hugged him, she noticed the animal smell in his hair, just like the inside of Ray’s horse barn.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Diego is okay, too. He’s inside the house. They told me to wait for you here. Mommy, I’m cold. My sweater’s inside.”
Greenie took off her jacket and wrapped it around his shoulders. “What happened?” she asked again, but at this point a police officer approached her. He held a pad and began to reel off a list of questions.
“Wait,” she said. “Can I talk to my son alone?”
Not now, she had been told; someone would talk to her son along with her, to find out just what had happened. But did they want something to drink?
By the time Greenie was alone with George again, not for another two hours, he had fallen asleep in her lap in the back of a police cruiser. Only after she had carried him to her own car and laid him in the backseat did Greenie realize that he was still holding the bird mask. As if it were a soiled object, she carried it quickly to Diego’s house and set it down on the doorstep. All the lights inside were out, and as she returned to her car, the cruiser drove away. She was the last to leave, the last one awake. She looked into the backseat at her sleeping son. She felt the same old instinctive, marrow-deep love, but for the first time she also felt dismay: disappointment, shame, and the fear that she had forgotten to teach her child something essential and might not be given another chance.
WHEN RAY RETURNED FROM THE RANCH ON SUNDAY, Greenie found herself thrown full tilt into work, as if Christmas had vaulted forward to the middle of August. Phones could be heard ringing throughout the mansion all day on Monday, along with the patient voices of Mary Bliss and her assistant repeating again and again, “Would you please hold?”
Ray told Greenie that Claudia would be coming to dinner the following night and that she couldn’t wait to begin discussions about the wedding meal.
“Ray, I think this is beyond me,” said Greenie. “I’m not a caterer.”
“You’ve got McNally to ride shotgun,” he said. “Between the two of you, we’ll have a fandango of a party, I know it. I do.”
“How many people?”
“Claudia wants it small. Maybe two hundred.”
“Two hundred is small?”
“Hey, that’s not even half my best friends.”
Greenie uttered what she hoped was a suicidal-sounding laugh. “Two hundred, five hundred. All the same to me.”
Ray had been eating lunch alone in the dining room, scrolling through e-mail on a laptop. He looked up. “I’d go with five hundred. Claudia claims that would be in poor taste, since she was married before. What do I know?”
“Does that mean no white dress, no veil?”
“Turquoise, she says. I leave the fussy stuff to her. I’ll show up—’specially if you’re cooking. I always show up for your meals, don’t I?” Again, he met her eyes. “We need the people in charge to be people we trust. You’d have to resign your job to say no.”
“Sink or swim.”
“Swim! Swim! Butterfly, breaststroke!” said Ray, his arms undulating to either side of the computer screen. “You’ll get all the help you need. Use your city-girl know-how. Hey, why not import that other city girl, the one you sold your business to? Now let me eat your food in peace.”
Greenie phoned McNally. He told her that Claudia wanted barbecue. “Ribs, jicama slaw, a buttload of peppers, and a gigantic, special, totally unique cake. Quote unquote,” McNally said dryly. “Glad to say that—the ‘totally unique’ part—would be your department.”
“That I can handle. Can I leave the rest to you?”
“Not on your life.”
CHARLIE WAS THRILLED. “Can I be your date? Can you poison just the cake that goes to the state engineer, the reclamation guy, and the director of the BLM? Can I watch them die slowly right there, under the big top?”
“You know, we did get this lecture back in school. ‘How to Poison Absolutely Anybody Absolutely Anywhere Without Getting Caught.’ But I had the flu that day. Sorry. Anyway, I don’t get a date. I’m the hired help. Christ, I’m the boss of the hired help. And on your own, I regret to say, you would probably not make the governor’s top-two-hundred list.”
“Nor his top-one-thousand list.”
“He does like you, Charlie.” She thought of Mary Bliss, wiping her forehead with a dish towel. She thought, too, of how Alan had made a similarly tiresome joke about poisoning Ray the very first time she had cooked for him.
Greenie and Charlie stood in her kitchen, which was stifling, though she had opened the door to the garden and turned on the fan. Charlie frowned on air-conditioning except in the very worst heat. They had come to pick up her mail. She hadn’t been home in three days; she didn’t really live there anymore but held on to the place with the hope that somehow George would return for good. George could never have lived with them in Charlie’s place; even Charlie agreed.
She tossed catalogs on the floor and separated bills from not-bills. Near the bottom of the pile was an envelope from Alan.
Charlie had picked up the catalogs and was telling her that she should write to the companies and get herself removed from their lists, that this was a terrible waste. He stopped when he saw her sitting at the table, motionless.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
“You think it’s legal?”
“I don’t know.” She placed the envelope in the center of the table, by itself.
Charlie set the catalogs on the counter and put his hands on her shoulders.
Still she did not move. “I suppose he’s asking for a divorce.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“No, not that.”
“Would you divorce him, or let him divorce you?” Charlie went to the opposite side of the table and sat down to face her.
“It has to happen, I guess. It’s just…so much more agony.”
Charlie leaned toward her. “Would you take the divorce,” he said, “and then mar
ry me? We could have George live with us here, at least for the school year. I know we could make that happen. I promise you it wouldn’t be ugly.”
Greenie felt as if she had touched an electric fence. “Oh Charlie.”
She tore open the envelope. Inside it, without a note, was another sealed envelope, addressed to her in New York, from one of her cousins in Boston. Except for Christmas cards, she hadn’t been in touch with any of her cousins since shortly after her parents’ funeral. The letter was typed on the cousin’s law-firm letterhead; bitterly, she laughed at the irony.
“Oh,” said Greenie after she finished reading. “Oh my.”
“What?”
“My cousins are wondering if they can buy me out of my share in the house on the island.”
“Is that good news?”
Greenie folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. “I haven’t thought about that house for a long time. I mean, not as part of my future.” She blushed, but Charlie did not appear to share her memory. She sighed. “It seems so far away. Well, it is so far away.”
She realized that she had all but ignored his marriage proposal, shoving it aside for a real-estate proposal. She opened her mouth to turn back the conversation, but Charlie was paging through a clothing catalog. He looked worn out.
IF THE TEMPERATURE GOES ABOVE NINETY-FIVE TODAY , I will marry Charlie. If the phone rings before ten, I will get to have George again. If the butter in the skillet melts before Maria returns from setting the table, Charlie and I will have a baby of our own.
Claudia was easy to work with because she knew exactly what she wanted. She’d been through a wedding before and remembered all the mistakes she had made (“other than saying ‘I do’ to that S.O.B.”).
“A completely grown-up wedding,” she told Greenie. “Except that reporters will be present.” One photographer from each of the New Mexico and Colorado dailies would be allowed to take pictures between the ceremony and the reception. The entire affair would take place on the grounds of the mansion.