Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  She let go of his wrists. She said quietly, “Sometimes, you know, I wonder if what we do need is another child.”

  Alan’s body, against hers, responded with a jolt of surprise. “Wow. Talk about something we shouldn’t be discussing now.”

  “Why not now? How old are we, Alan? Is there much more time, if any? Maybe this would make all the difference in the world.”

  “That’s what you said about moving out here.”

  Greenie sat up. “And I was wrong? You sound sure of that.”

  “Well, we’re not living together, and I’m not living with George, and those facts hardly amount to what I would call a positive difference in the world. My world, at least. If my world counts.”

  “This afternoon, in that church, you told me you thought this place was amazing!”

  “There’s amazing and there’s practical,” said Alan. “And there’s also not feeling coerced.”

  “Tell me you never coerce anyone in your work.”

  “I never do. I persuade, and I elicit, and I guide.”

  “Well saintly, superior you.” She meant this half in jest, but in the dark it did not come across that way.

  Alan, who was also sitting up by now, turned to her and sighed. “Oh Greenie…do you need to hear that I love you? I do, I’ve never stopped.” He pressed his hands against his eyes. He lay down. “Let’s go to sleep. Let’s have a civilized breakfast. George and I have to get an early start.” He pulled her close, her back to his chest. He kissed her neck.

  “I like that,” she said.

  “I do too,” he said. “I’ve missed it.”

  They made up in their usual physical ways, and in others. Quite unlike himself, Alan fell asleep right away.

  When Greenie woke up, George was still asleep, but she could smell breakfast. From the kitchen doorway, she watched Alan remove bread from the oven and tenderly fold it into a napkin. When he saw her, he said, “I’m sorry about last night, that I got so belligerent,” but this was all the intimate conversation they were allowed until he returned three days later—and by then everything had changed. The everything was private, invisible to everyone but Greenie. She could only have described the sensation as that of a large glass vessel cracking deep inside her, releasing a flood of something dark yet delicious, viscous and warm, through all her arteries and veins.

  For their “guy weekend,” Alan drove George and Treehorn south and then west, out Route 66 to see Acoma and Chaco Canyon. They would stay in a corny old-style hotel in Gallup where the rooms were named after movie stars who’d camped there when westerns were filmed in the real West. Mary Bliss had arranged for them to stay there with Treehorn. “I think we’re in the Gene Autry suite,” Alan told Greenie. “Dale Evans was taken.”

  The night after she saw them off, Greenie’s doorbell rang at eight o’clock. She was home, reading Marcella Hazan. Ray was in Taos for dinner.

  She had not seen much of Other Charlie since the weekend on the ranch. For the second time, she answered the door to be startled by his face, this time behind a handful of daisies. “Is this too rude? I saw your lights on.”

  “And you happened to be in the neighborhood. With flowers.”

  “I always carry flowers. Just in case.”

  She took the flowers and told him to come in.

  “I should have called, shouldn’t I?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Greenie held the flowers with their heads toward the floor, as her mother had taught her when she was small. She looked at Other Charlie’s face and recognized a nervous habit from long ago: he set and worked his lower jaw so that the muscles beneath his ears stood out like small marbles. She had always seen this look of consternation as the look of a boy playing at being a man. Endearingly, it seemed no different now that he had become a man.

  She said, “You worry too much, Charlie.” He followed her to the kitchen. She pulled a glass pitcher off a shelf and filled it with water, consciously—because here was the ultimate Water Boy—not turning on the tap until it was right above the mouth of the pitcher.

  Other Charlie sat quietly at the table while Greenie trimmed the flowers. He said abruptly, “Charlie, I still can’t believe it’s you, here.”

  “It’s me,” she said, “I’m here, and you can call me Greenie.”

  “No. No, I don’t believe I can. It’s not…you. The you I know. Or remember.”

  “I’m probably not the me you remember.” Greenie felt the insincerity of the teasing, the way it was meant to cover their genuine astonishment, their mutual excitement at stumbling onto someone so familiar—almost familial—in a place where they were both happily occupied but out of place. Fish out of water, she might have joked. But wanting to lighten rather than deepen the moment, she laughed and said, “My mother always put two aspirin in the water. Viagra for flowers!” She set the pitcher on the table.

  “Charlie,” said Other Charlie, his tone almost urgent, “please stop talking about your mother. I’ve hated your mother for so long. I’m sorry. No, no I’m not, as a matter of fact. I’m not sorry.”

  Greenie turned away. She laid the cutting board and the knife in the sink. Speechless with anger, it took her a moment to turn around and sit at the table. “Is that what you dropped by to tell me?”

  “I make it a policy never to dwell on the past, but seeing you? I keep on remembering that weekend, the time she invited me up to your place in Maine. No, her place; that was clear.”

  Greenie sat still, hands in her lap. “Yes. That was ages ago. Eons.”

  “Do you know what happened that weekend?”

  Greenie had no idea why he was torturing her. In return, she was blunt. “We slept together, and you went off to college and didn’t call me. That was pretty cruel, wouldn’t you say? But youth is—what’s that word?”

  “Callow. Which I never was. Many stupid, thoughtless things, but never that.”

  “So. Do you need me to forgive you?”

  “It’s not me you’d have to forgive.” His jawbone worked incessantly, a piece of machinery fixed inside his scowling face. “Do you know how much I wanted you the whole summer I was painting your goddamn house?”

  “I guess not.” She thought of his naked chest framed in her bathroom window. She laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Now that you mention it, none of this is funny. I don’t know what my mother has to do with it, Charlie. Especially now. My poor mother is dead.”

  “I don’t care if your poor mother is back among us in the body of the Dalai Lama,” said Other Charlie. “Do you know how much she was out to undermine you when she was alive? She was so smart, Charlie, so clever with her little comments that it took me years to figure it out, how she chipped away at you, made you seem so, I don’t know…impossible.” His voice turned mincing and learned. “‘My daughter, you know, is quite particular about people.’ ‘Charlotte has her eye on about five boys this year.’ ‘She’s going to make a fine challenge of a wife one day, that girl of mine.’”

  “Oh, I heard her say those things. That was just her way of…” Her way of what? thought Greenie. She remembered when her mother had said to Alan, “Creativity and brains compensate for quite a lot. Just ask my husband.”

  “Her way of making sure you didn’t get the things you deserved.”

  “But I have,” said Greenie. “I have more than I deserve. If there’s such a thing in life as deserving. Which there isn’t.”

  “Like a husband who’s nowhere in sight?” said Other Charlie.

  Greenie might have told him that Alan was just around the corner, that things between them looked fine, that they were working out logistics…but she was mute. She realized that she had never mentioned Alan’s visit to Other Charlie. She might have asked him to join them for dinner one night.

  She realized that he would stare at her now until she answered him. “What happened back then can’t matter that much now, can it?” she said.

  “Yes it can.” His hand
s were pressed flat on the table, as if he might leap to his feet. “Or it can now that I see you again. I don’t mean I’ve thought about it much all these years, but when I have, I’ve felt such fury, such—”

  “Let me get you a drink,” said Greenie.

  “I don’t need one.”

  “I do.” Greenie took a bottle of red wine off the windowsill. Alan had bought it: fancy, Ralph Nader stuff, bottled the year of their wedding. She took her time opening it. Night had fallen, swift as a curtain on a stage, and Greenie saw herself in the window, her face dim beside the bright explosion of daisies. She could not help remembering how much she had cried after Other Charlie’s abrupt disappearance that summer. Her mother had come upon her once and had magically seemed to know. “Boys will be boys, even big boys,” she’d said. “My dear Charlotte, a city boy—a city man—will be much better for you. Just wait till you get to New York.” So it had seemed, later on, as if her mother were a prophet.

  She set two glasses of wine on the table. When she did not sit, Charlie stood.

  Greenie folded her arms. “So what did my mother tell you that weekend?”

  “A lot of crap. That you had a boyfriend. That I wasn’t the first guy you’d flirted with too much. That I was too good for you. You didn’t have a boyfriend, though, did you? Later I figured it out.”

  “That you were too good for me!” Greenie recalled her longing. Then she recalled her mother’s insistence, years later, that Charlie be included among the guests at her wedding. The thought of his presence even then had pained her, but his parents had been invited because they were longtime neighbors; how petty and rude to leave him out, her mother had said. “Jesus,” said Greenie.

  “It’s not like I’ve wanted you all these years, not like you’re the reason I…” He looked down into his wine.

  Haven’t married? thought Greenie. She couldn’t stand what she was hearing, but she needed to hear it. All of whatever it was he wanted to say.

  He laughed. “Man oh man. I did not come here tonight to say these things! Hey—where’s your son? Already asleep? I thought I might get to see him, really meet him this time. That was part of why I dropped by.”

  “You mean the flowers were for him?” Greenie smiled. She finished off her wine, felt it rush through and brighten her body. “He’s away for a few days. He’ll be back on Sunday.” If he asks where or with whom, I will tell him, she thought.

  He said, “I’m sorry. How did we have this conversation anyway?”

  “Charlie,” said Greenie, “you are just as intense as ever. Some things never change.”

  He drained his glass and set it down. Empty-handed, speechless, he stood right next to her.

  “I really am married, Charlie,” she said. “I really am.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it,” he said. “At the last minute, I skipped your wedding. Did you notice? Bet you didn’t even notice.”

  “I wondered where you were.” This was a lie; after wishing she didn’t have to invite him, she hadn’t noticed his absence—not till weeks later, when she had gone through the proofs of the wedding pictures. He had been to her mother’s engagement party but not to the wedding.

  “Since you’re alone, let’s go into town,” he said. “Let’s walk and look at the stars. We didn’t have stars like this in Massachusetts, did we?”

  “Sometimes we did,” said Greenie. “Let me grab a sweater.”

  Other Charlie smiled. “You always had to argue; I remember that about you. Even about the little things. But everyone liked you too much to care.”

  “I thought you were the argumentative one,” she said as they left the house, “the one who always had to be right.”

  As they made their way toward town, Greenie resolved not to think about (or mention) her mother. Other Charlie seemed less tense. Perhaps he was relieved to have said his piece.

  Greenie pointed them toward the bar of a sophisticated restaurant on Palace Avenue, one where she was likely to see state officials she knew, if only to greet in a quick impersonal fashion.

  They stood and talked till they could sit and talk. They talked about the years between her wedding day and the day that ended with the two of them sitting right there, wanting the bar never to empty and close, wanting not to be alone together yet not to part until they had filled in all the missing space between them. When Greenie told him the story about the implausible way in which she had landed her job wih Ray, she had to tell Other Charlie about Alan’s resistance. He was quick to defend the other man’s caution as necessary, probably even wise. At first, Greenie was annoyed, but then she realized how generous Other Charlie’s reaction was. He might be, like Greenie, a creature of impulse and passion, but he was the more empathic one. That was when she ought to have told him about Alan’s visit, but how would this look when she had neglected to mention the visit hours ago?

  Other Charlie walked her home, along the sinuous route of the acequia, under the willows and cottonwoods and aspens fortunate to grow along its banks, under leaves that rustled more crisply than eastern leaves. As they walked through the gap in the wall that led into Greenie’s tiny garden, he said, “Wait. I have something for you.”

  Other Charlie owned a car but bicycled everywhere he could, even to meetings at the mansion. In the governor’s parking lot, his bike looked especially comic alongside the town cars and Hummers. Now, in the dark, he fumbled with bungee cords that fastened a package to his bike rack.

  The package was so heavy that Greenie nearly dropped it. When she took off the newspaper, she burst out laughing.

  “A brick?”

  “It’s to put in your toilet tank.” He blushed. “Okay, I know how geeky it is. It’s nothing personal; I always have three or four in the trunk of my car, and tonight I just thought…I get obsessed about these things. I’ve learned to go with it. I sleep better.”

  “So you just happened to cruise by my house on your bicycle with daisies and a brick.” Greenie clasped the brick to her chest. “Well, that’s nothing if not charming. Sort of.”

  “Sort of charming,” he said. “That’s a whole lot better than obnoxious, which is something else I can be.”

  They said good night while they were laughing. Once she was inside, Greenie raised the brick to her face. It smelled like any other brick, like a flowerpot, like soil. She went to the bathroom and opened the back of her toilet. Careful not to jar the flushing widgets, she maneuvered the brick down into the tank. She waited till the ripples settled to close it again.

  ALAN DROVE UP TO THE HOUSE two nights later, after midnight. Greenie had begun to worry, even to wonder, in her wildly distracted state of mind, whether Alan would do something as rash as kidnap their son and head for Mexico. She felt acutely ashamed when she saw the car. Treehorn jumped out first, avidly patrolling the borders of the yard.

  Alan carried George, fast asleep, straight to his room. Without a word, Greenie pulled back George’s bedspread and removed his sandals. On his little feet, the pattern of the straps was outlined precisely in red dust. She turned on the fan, then bent to kiss his grubby cheeks.

  Alan told Greenie that George had been fairly quiet for much of the trip. The heat and all the driving had made him sleepy, though he had enjoyed running freely around the ruins of Chaco Canyon. “He does love this dog,” Alan said.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Oh yes. But I promised him he could tell you about the dance on the mesa and the bison heads in the hotel.”

  A band of rosy skin lay across Alan’s nose, from one cheek to the other. Greenie was glad to see him look so alive, so out in the world.

  “I brought you something,” he said.

  She lifted the lid of a white box. It contained a turquoise necklace: a string of rough beads, pitted like moons, in various shades of green. She held the coiled necklace in her palm. “It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Is it old?” She fastened it behind her neck before she realized that he had hoped to perform this intima
te task.

  “Yes, but it’s not pawn,” said Alan. “I couldn’t get over all those pawnshops filled with all that exquisite jewelry. It gave me the creeps.”

  “I’ve heard about that. Even saddles turned in to get money for booze. That’s what they say. It’s all for booze. Even those beautiful patterned blankets.”

  He touched the beads where they lay against her throat. “I didn’t like the idea of some forsaken heirloom around your neck.”

  But isn’t that what all antiques are? thought Greenie as she looked at her reflection in the bedroom mirror. Isn’t it all discarded, abandoned, whether by choice or compulsion? She had recently noticed that her red hair was fading in the sun. She wasn’t outdoors a great deal, but she had lived here now for two seasons and the climate was making its mark.

  The next day, Consuelo took George to Diego’s house for the day. Greenie and Alan went to the fine arts museum. Everywhere they walked, Alan kept an arm across Greenie’s shoulders. They did not separate, as couples often do, to look about at their individual paces. They saw Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and squash-blossom necklaces so heavy and battered they reminded Greenie of armor. They saw real armor, the armor of Spanish conquistadores. They saw blankets, baskets, and rugs that filled rooms with a geometric frenzy. They saw Madonnas appealing to heaven from beneath so many layers of aging varnish that they looked as if they were literally drowning in sorrow.

  So many beautiful, solemn things to hold the eye and anchor the mind, yet Greenie could think of nothing but Other Charlie—or, more exactly, speak to no one else inside her head. She told him about the weeping Virgin surrounded by butterflies, about the seven-course dinner she would be making for the attorney general of California at the end of the week, about George’s new passion for masks. She told him every detail she remembered of lying down with him in the soft yet prickly needles carpeting the woods behind Circe (how the needles had stuck to their bodies like iron filings to a magnet, how she had pulled those needles from her clothing and hair, her bedsheets, for days after he had left the island). She told him what it was like to start her business, what it was like to fire up her oven long before dawn on a frigid New York morning, what it was like to give birth, what it was like to get married in front of all those people she’d known forever, what it was like to have slowly forgotten him since then, let him slip into the sea behind her sailing ship, sink out of sight so that she believed him blessedly lost till here he was, having washed up on shore right before her eyes. All these things she chattered about to Other Charlie inside her head, sometimes even while Alan, the real man beside her, was talking.