The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  Alan stared at her. She had hoped he would hear the implications. She wanted to tell him that aside from anything else, they were parents. They were the parents of George Glazier, a boy nearly six years old, inquisitive, loving, optimistic, and—whether or not he’d outgrow it—a little secretive. They were parents, and for the time being that’s all they were.

  “Are you staying with me?” he said. He added quickly, “Upstairs?”

  She told him she was, if he didn’t mind. They brushed their teeth together at the kitchen sink, using the last of the water in the kettle. It was still warm and a little salty. Greenie went up first, while Alan went to the outhouse.

  She turned on the battery-powered lamp. The wet clothes she had shed lay in a heap beside the window. She hung them on hooks; next day, if the forecast was correct, she would lay them on rocks to dry in the sun. Quickly, she climbed into her parents’ old bed. Alan had made it up with two splayed sleeping bags, their puffy linings patterned with fishermen and leaping trout.

  She’d made a last call to Charlie that morning, from a phone booth in a town just south of New Hampshire. She had stopped the car when she knew that he would be awake but still at home. He’d greeted her with wary surprise. Where was she? Was everything all right?

  “I’m in Massachusetts,” she’d said.

  “Our home state.” He spoke warmly but without enthusiasm.

  “I didn’t really sleep last night.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  From the phone booth, Greenie had watched two women herd several small children across the street. A crossing guard held up traffic.

  “Are you still there? Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Greenie told him then that she was not all right. She told him that she loved him, that she couldn’t believe she was going to tell him what she had to tell him. She did not insult him by saying she had no choice (she did) or by repeating over and over how much she loved him (oh God, she did, repeating it endlessly inside her head). She did tell him that by spending the previous night in New York, among Alan’s and George’s things, she had been confronted by just how much she would lose—and how much she would risk never knowing.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he said, and then he was silent a long time. Greenie let him think—or compose himself. At last he said slowly, “You know, when you e-mailed me before you left, you told me you were going home. Home. That’s the word you used.”

  Greenie sobbed. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Yes, you did.” His tone was almost forgiving. “I always thought this would happen, if you want to know the truth. I don’t mean that vindictively.”

  Greenie was about to protest—what kind of an I-told-you-so was this?—when she realized how stupid and selfish it would be; like Owl when he tried to be upstairs and downstairs at the very same time. “Can I see you when I come back? Because I’ll be back. I don’t know for how long, but I will.”

  Charlie had sighed, then sighed again. “Oh Charlie, I don’t know,” he said. “But if we don’t see each other soon, we’ll see each other later. If life doesn’t throw us together again, we’ll figure out something. Something different.” Halfheartedly, he laughed. “Yeah. Different. Because you know what’s so obvious now, Charlie? That you’re not Charlie. Not the long-lost soul mate I thought I’d found.”

  While she struggled not to tell him he was wrong, he said, “That’s not the slightest bit your fault, Greenie.”

  “Can I write to you?” she asked. “Please?”

  Firmly, he said, “No. Not now.”

  After hanging up, she’d stood in the phone booth and cried into her hands until the crossing guard caught sight of her and motioned concern. Greenie had run to her car and driven on through the rain to the marina.

  When she was in high school, a couple whom Greenie’s parents knew had split apart, the husband leaving the wife for another woman. A few months later, he returned. When Greenie had remarked that the wife must be happy to have him back, Olivia had raised her eyebrows and said, “Yes and no.” A marriage that survived an affair, she said, was like a fine china cup whose handle had snapped off. You could glue it back on, but you would always see the place where it had broken, and you would never be completely confident that, as you held it in your hand, it would not break again in that very same spot.

  Now, in her parents’ bed, waiting for Alan, Greenie felt herself fill with rage, not just at her mother but at herself, for taking at face value so many judgments Olivia had made. What, then, would Greenie and Alan’s marriage look like if it “survived”? A porcelain sugar bowl, both handles snapped off and glued back on? Was something broken and then salvaged automatically devalued? What if it became more precious because you saw how fragile it was?

  Like Greenie, Alan had dressed for bed in two layers of clothing. When he joined her—without hesitation, because the air was so frigid—she asked him about Saga. Whispering, he told Greenie about Saga’s accident and about her family. He said, “She’s someone who went through a terrible, sudden loss of self and doesn’t realize how much she’s recovered. And now this.”

  “Are you taking her as a patient?”

  “No,” he said. “Or I wouldn’t be telling you this. But I’m going to help her. She has other friends too, in the city. She’s not helpless.”

  Wind trespassed loudly on the silence. Windows rattled in their frames.

  “You remember that old cliché, ordinary unhappiness?” said Alan. Greenie said she did. “Well, Saga needs to understand that she’s nearly achieved ordinary forgetfulness. Not quite, probably never, but almost. It’s like she’s come to idealize memory itself. She thinks the rest of us walk around remembering everything we ever did or saw or said.”

  Because they were whispering so softly, and because the room was so cold, they pressed against each other, side to side. “It’s amazing what people get through—or get over,” Greenie said, and then there was nothing more to say. They had no further ways of reasonably delaying their arrival at each other.

  Alan asked if he could look at Greenie’s hands.

  “My hands?” She pulled them out from under the sleeping bag. Alan took them and held them toward the light from the lamp, turning them.

  “Ouch,” she said when he twisted one of her wrists too far.

  “That’s new.” He pointed to a thin welt across the back of her right hand.

  “Thanksgiving pies,” she said. “Twelve. Six flavors.”

  “Impressive. And this?” A patch of scar tissue on the center knuckle of a pinkie.

  “I’ve had that since school. It shows up when I get a lot of sun.”

  A chef’s hands were like a map, a history of culinary mishaps, scattered with scars from slashes, punctures, burns, run-ins with cheese graters, meat cleavers, grills on open fires. Greenie bore no scars from cuts—she had always been good with knives—but she had a collection of tiny burn marks, some white, others pink; a plum-colored lozenge on her inner left wrist. After Alan finished his examination, he turned off the lamp.

  “You’re still wearing your ring,” he said.

  She couldn’t answer. Even in the panic of departure, she had remembered to bring it with her. She had put it on when she left New York for Maine. If Alan had looked closely at her finger, uniformly brown beneath the ring, he would have known that she had not worn it all summer.

  He sighed: such a familiar, freighted sound. “Greenie, I don’t know what we’re doing here, really, but George and I have to return to the city in a few days. At the latest. You can stay—but we’re going back. My life is there, and it’s very busy now. George’s school is back in session.”

  Her throat felt as if it had shut completely; how was it that she could still breathe?

  “So that’s up to you,” he said. “Well, obviously.” He waited. He sighed again. “There’s a lot I have to tell you, a lot I’ve decided.”

  She managed to say, “Same here.”
r />   “I guess I need to know how much time there is to tell it in.”

  “A great deal of time, I think.”

  “A ‘great deal’? You ‘think’? Greenie, if you came all this way, dragged me all the way here just to separate one more time—”

  “What I meant was, I hope.” She said, carefully so that she would not have to repeat herself, daring to elevate her voice from a whisper, “You’d let me stay, wouldn’t you? I mean, go back with you and George?”

  Through a window, bright light entered the room. Greenie knew the sound of a cabin cruiser, loud and guttural. This was its headlight, which passed away before the puttering of the motor.

  “Are you coming back to George or to me?” he asked.

  “The truth,” she said, “is that to me, right now, you are inseparable. I want you both. I can’t think of you apart right now. Or myself apart from you.” She laid a hand on his chest, so that he knew she meant him.

  THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING, Greenie arrived at the mansion before six. McNally was to arrive at seven, Walter at eight.

  “Well, this half is calm. It is.”

  Greenie jumped at the sound of Ray’s voice. She had not expected to see him that morning.

  “Didn’t mean to scare the pants off you, girl.”

  “Oh Ray, look at you.”

  “Well, no, look at that. Hot dog, Ms. Duquette. Hot dog, and jump up singin’!” He gazed with awe at his wedding cake. She had just finished piping the flowers onto its upper tiers. Ray leaned in and held up a finger as if to run it through the icing.

  Greenie slapped his hand. “Don’t you dare.”

  “My mama always let me steal a taste of birthday icing before my party,” he said. “She’d let me lick the beaters too.”

  “I am not your mama,” said Greenie. “Sorry.”

  “Be sorry for much more than that,” said Ray.

  Greenie stared at him, just to stop the teasing. “Can I say, in all seriousness, that I will miss you?”

  “In all seriousness,” said Ray, “I will miss you too.” He clicked together the long shiny toes of his black cowboy boots, as if in fact he could not bear to have anything be purely serious. “Others will as well.”

  “I know.”

  “McNally won’t say it, but he wants you on speed-dial.”

  “The feeling’s mutual.” She glanced at her cake: It was her Mona Lisa. Fully assembled on the cart, it stood as tall as Ray. The air conditioner was turned high, to keep the cake cool until Walter arrived. He would help her move it into one of the large refrigerators and then, before the guests arrived, out to the tent.

  “Can I ask you something?” Greenie said.

  “Ask away.”

  “Did you give Charlie his win?”

  “Greenie, judges decide these things, not me. If I could’ve given the man and his doggone fish a break, just to avoid a buttload of red tape and spleen, believe you me, I would have.”

  “But didn’t you appoint that judge?”

  Ray pointed a finger at Greenie. “I don’t mess with judicial matters. I make my opinions known—I broadcast ’em far and wide, I do!—but judges make up their own minds.”

  She nodded.

  “Oenslager’s in Sacramento now. The man is in high demand wherever the people are thirsty.”

  “Or wasteful,” said Greenie.

  “This is not a morning on which to argue. Bad luck,” said Ray. As he had done once before, he surprised her by kissing her, quickly, on the mouth. “That’s for good luck.”

  “You already have it, Ray.”

  “I meant for you,” he said. Then he left, looking glossier and more handsome than he had ever looked, even in his tabloid days. During the festivities, under the tent, he passed close by her once, squeezing her shoulder and winking, but Greenie did not see Ray again that day outside the context of a crowd. After he’d gone, she wondered if she would ever see him again.

  ONCE MCNALLY AND THE RANCH HANDS have driven away, Walter and Greenie start cleaning the kitchen. Greenie has sent Maria and the others home. They worked hard enough, and she must finish packing up the belongings she will take with her when she leaves for good.

  She pulls from a shelf certain rare spices and sugars that her successor is unlikely to use. Insulating the jars with softbound books and sheafs of cooking notes, she packs them in a carton that came to this kitchen holding boxes of Italian pasta. She examines the fanciful designs on a container of sugar imported from Turkey, a favorite finish for the surface of cookies: bearclaws, butter wafers. The large, faceted granules glitter like bluish rhinestones; children always choose those cookies first. She wonders if she will be able to get this sugar anymore, if borders will tighten so austerely that she will lose some of her most precious, treasured ingredients: the best dried lavender and mascarpone, pomegranate molasses. But in the scheme of things, does it matter?

  She comes upon her collection of vinegars, which she uses to brighten the character of certain cakes, to hold the line between sweet and cloying. She takes down a spicy vinegar she bought at a nearby farm; inside the bottle, purple peppers, like sleeping bats, hang from the surface of the liquid. Greenie used it in a dark chocolate ice cream and a molasses pie. She will have to leave it behind.

  Walter scrubs the counters—no mean task, for McNally’s barbecue sauce has dried in spatters and spills, nearly everywhere, like a sugary version of superglue. Walter works away at the mess with a wiry pad, still singing. He’s carried the boom box back inside, and from Greenie’s neglected Broadway tapes he’s chosen Camelot. At the moment, Robert Goulet is doing his best to convince the world he’s Lancelot, not a lounge singer from Vegas.

  Exaggerating the stuffy diction, Walter croons loudly, about cleaving dragons and resisting the ways of the flesh. He has Greenie in stitches by the time he cries out, “C’est moi, C’EST MOI! The angels have chose, to fight their battles below—” He stops short, finally succumbing to laughter himself.

  “Egad.” Walter lets Robert Goulet finish alone. “You know, I think neurologists have it all wrong, the sectors of the brain.” Facing Greenie, he cups his hands over his forehead. “This part here—and it’s pretty large—is taken up with schlocky song lyrics, the ones you desperately wish you could lose, like Captain and Tenille, disco Bee Gees. Todd Rundgren, for Pete’s sake.” He groans. “Now this part?” He spreads a hand across the left side of his head. “This is where you’ve got—stored archivally—the worst family arguments you ever had to witness or be a part of. And this other side”—his right hand mirrors his left—“is a grand little warehouse of all the most embarrassing sexual encounters you’ve ever had to endure. In Panavision and Technicolor.”

  Greenie is almost always grateful for Walter’s zany, tempering humor, but today he is antic with pleasure. “Walter,” she says, “if ever I saw a man in love, c’est vous.”

  “Is that what ails me?” He leans down to work at the knobs on the stove, which are badly encrusted, though it’s obvious that his main intention is to hide his blushing face.

  Greenie knows—and Walter knows she knows—that he and Fenno have become nearly inseparable over the past month. Even when they are working, Walter says, they go back and forth between the bookshop and the restaurant (Fenno for meals, Walter during the lulls between). She knows—because he’s told her, marveled at it more than once—how the two men came together in the midst of Walter’s panic over his nephew, how Walter now realizes that Fenno had been looking his way for months, perhaps longer. (“My neighbor! Right there under my snooty, vainglorious nose!”) Walter jokes that it took a hit of Valium, mixed with mortification and grief, to slow him down enough to return the looking. “He’s one of those guys,” said Walter, “who’s practically incapable of making the first move—not just in love; in anything! Normally, that would drive me berserk. My guess is that somebody up there is telling me to chill.”

  Hanging about with a bookish man (whose restaurant nickname, courtesy of Ben, evolv
ed from Bonny to Britannica) has led Walter back to Shakespeare. He’s even begun to memorize a few soliloquies. “Please keep reminding me it’s just for fun,” he’s told Greenie. “If you ever catch me planning a cabaret, it’s your job to shoot me.”

  Walter takes a break from the stove. Claiming he’s had enough of knights in shining armor, he picks through the tapes stacked loosely on an open shelf, takes out Camelot and clicks in another.

  “So what did he do with himself today?” asks Greenie.

  “He told me his plan was just to ‘faff about the town.’ Don’t you love that? After today, you and I certainly deserve a bit of faffing about!”

  Heartily, she agrees. Over the past month, Greenie and Walter have spoken to each other so often, borne so much upheaval and change, for better and worse, that they have become the most effortlessly intimate friends.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t ask this,” she says, “but whatever happened to that nice lawyer, Gordie?”

  “Nice? Well.” Walter groans as the overture to My Fair Lady begins. “I’m trying to get to the no-hard-feelings stage—which should be easy now, right? But get this: Gordie is a friend of Fenno’s. They don’t see a lot of each other, thank heaven, but ages ago they had a friend in common, a very close friend, who died of AIDS. Which means that it’s a sentimental connection, the kind that lasteth forever.” He presses his hands together in mock prayer. “Lessons in humility abound…. Though apparently, I am not alone. According to my trainer, Gordie’s been trying to go back to his old relationship. Where he should have stayed put in the first place! But his ex is onto something entirely new. A baby. So Gordie’s in purgatory. That is, until he gets distracted again.” Walter laughs derisively.

  Politely, Greenie laughs too. She didn’t mean to open a wound.

  They work in tandem now, comfortably silent. Walter hums along when Julie Andrews sings “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”

  Both Walter and Greenie knew people who died on September 11. From the cooking world, Greenie knew three corporate chefs trapped in the towers; Walter knew a flight attendant on one of the planes, though he learned of the man’s death only a week ago. But they share the good fortune of having lost no one they love dearly—or not to death, thinks Greenie.