The Whole World Over (41 page)

When Alan put his arms around her, she pushed her face into his
shoulder and started to cry. A rhinestone hairclip shaped like a butterfly
tumbled across Alan's arm and onto the floor.

"Let's eat something," he murmured. "We should both eat something."
On the stove, he saw a covered casserole and a pan of broiled
cherry tomatoes, deflated and singed, in a pool of oil. When he began to
steer Joya around the island, she punched him in the chest. "Ass," she
said. "Men. Jesus."

"You mean pig. I am a thoughtless male pig," he said. Still holding
her against his side, he opened a cupboard and took down two plates.
The casserole held mashed potatoes. "Oh Joy, what a fantastic meal."
He guided her gently toward a stool. He opened the oven, took the mitts
from a nearby hook, and pulled out the roasting pan. He needn't have
bothered with the mitts; the oven had clearly been off for a while. The
lamb, posed on its rack, looked like a giant shriveled mushroom. Below
the rack were limp snakelike forms. The scent hit him: fennel. "Oh
Joya." She had remembered how much he loved fennel, a food that
Greenie never cooked.

He turned a burner on under the tomatoes. He began carving the
lamb. "Look, Joy," he said, pointing with the knife. "Still a little pink."

"Well, well. I'll be a monkey's uncle. I'll be the man from uncle."

"Come on," said Alan. He went to the table and held out a chair; she
sat. He lit the candles with the starter for the gas burners. He shook out
her napkin and laid it tenderly in her lap.

As soon as he had put down their plates, she said, "The thing is, little
brother, Marion was always my friend, not yours! Who are you to barge
in and ravish her like that? Get her pregnant—if that's what you did—
and go on about your life? Then run to
me
for help when you figure out
you've fucked up so royally. You know, Alan—you know, I don't really
care what you do to your relationships, but this one was mine."

"I know," said Alan. "Eat, Joy. Eat first, then talk."

Joya ate, but she would not meet Alan's eyes. Suddenly she looked up
and said, "You know,
speaking
of talking, Greenie calls."

"What do you mean?"

"Calls to talk to me. Every couple of weeks. Or so."

Alan focused on Joya's tone. It was either neutral or very, very angry.

"She really thinks I should adopt." Joya had reached over to the
nearby counter and picked up the wand for lighting the stove. She
flicked it on and pointed the small flame at Alan. "What do you think?"

"Is that what you want? Have you thought about it?"

"Have I
thought
about it? What, you think I live in medieval Estonia?"

Alan felt incredibly drained. In New York, it was past one a.m. "Foreign
adoptions are tricky. You have to be careful about a lot of things,"
he said slowly. "George has a classmate who was adopted from Russia,
and she's sweet, but she's in several kinds of therapy, and the parents are
worried that—"

Joya's laugh was clearly intended to cut him off. For pure drama, she
tossed her unkempt hair. "Careful! 'Be careful'! Look who's telling
me
to be careful!"

No more apologies. "Joya, I am so tired. Can we talk about this
tomorrow? It's a very, very serious thing you're considering. If it's what
you want, I would so love to help you out. I would—"

"You," said Joy, her voice stern. "You need all the help you can get,
never mind me."

"Let's go to bed." Alan picked up their plates.

"So I might have told her." Joya was staring at him, and only now
was it obvious, the quiet depth of her rage.

"Told who what?" he said, but only to buy time. He put the plates on
the counter beside the sink.

"Greenie. About Marion. She called tonight. Asked what I was up to."

Alan decided that to say nothing was the only, the least foolish, alternative.
Joya looked at him steadily. She wants me to break down, he
thought. This is
her
way of breaking down. Say nothing, he told himself.
He sat once again at the table, across from his sister. He took a sip of
water.

"She was talking, like she sometimes does, about what a sourpuss
you've been the past couple of years. How she thinks you're in this huge
depression and she doesn't know what to do. She goes out of her mind
trying to figure out what
she
did."

Like she's done nothing!
Alan wanted to say.

"Are you with me here, little brother?"

"Right across the table, just like when we were kids." His voice
shook.

She poured them both more water from a pitcher. As she filled Alan's
glass, her hand wobbled. A thin pool spread smoothly across the table.
She did not move to wipe it up.

"She was pretty upset tonight. She—"

"Did you tell her or didn't you? Joya, she doesn't even know I'm
here.
"

"I'm always thinking of telling her. The words pass through my brain
every time she calls, you know? Tonight I was so pissed at you, I just
might've actually said something. Or not." She shrugged.

Alan saw what he thought was a flicker of pleasure in Joya's drunken
expression. "Good night," he said quietly. "I can't talk to you right now.
I'm too upset. I will talk to you tomorrow."

"I'll be gone early and back late."

"I will talk to you whenever." Without waiting for a reply, he walked
to the extra bedroom—thank God she did well enough to have two
bedrooms—and closed the door after himself. Immediately, he turned
on the small clock radio and adjusted it to a jazz station, keeping the
volume low. If Joya was going to rant or cry, he did not want to hear her.
He sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled his phone from his shirt pocket
and punched in Greenie's number.

There was George, on the answering machine. "Greenie," he said to
the beep, "I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I want us in the
same state, the same home, the same bed. I love you. I don't know what
else to say. I'll keep on calling. Whatever else you might think, it doesn't
matter. I love you."

He heard the toilet in the other bathroom flush. He turned out the
light and curled up on his side, on top of the bedspread. He sat up only
to take off his shoes, then lay down again. He meant to wait a while,
then try Greenie again, but he fell asleep quickly. He dreamed he went
back to New York to find out that he was married to Saga. He'd been
married to her all along! It was comforting, and it was disturbing. She
was warm and loving, and they had Treehorn, every bit as wonderful as
a child, but whenever Alan tried to have sex with Saga—and he wanted
to, he couldn't wait, it felt like the first time even though it wasn't—
something would interrupt them. A phone call, a visitor, the need to eat
a meal . . . She doesn't want to have babies, he found himself thinking.
She doesn't want to be a mother because she has the dog. The dog is
enough for her. And this made him terribly sad.

JOYA WAS NEVER THE STAR STUDENT
. That was Alan. In the public
school they attended, there were prizes: a prize from fourth grade on for
every subject; awards for every major sport; awards for citizenship (the
social kiss of death). Alan hated the prizes because at one point or
another he won them all, and every single year he suffered the consequences.
In eighth grade, he hit the jackpot. He won the art prize, the
English prize, a volleyball prize, a tiny silver-plated bowl for the best
short story (the teachers were the ones who submitted their students'
stories), and a citizenship award. According to a rumor tauntingly
pressed on him in the locker room after gym the next day, he would
have won the French prize, too, if the teachers hadn't felt they had to
draw the line somewhere. "Parlez-vous suck-up?" said one of the all-around
jocks, making a lewd kissing noise.

Alan became very good at the impassive, hear-no-evil response to such
taunting, and sometimes now he wondered if all that practice at refusing
provocation had helped him in his work as a therapist. Had he even been
steered toward that work by learning to establish a wall of a certain kind?

Alan's mother was never happier than when he raked in the prizes,
an occasion that became one of yearly anticipation, so that by junior
high Alan noticed his mother's mood begin to ascend in the middle of
May, culminating in his favorite dessert—a big chocolate Duncan Hines
cake—on the night after the awards assembly. At some point during the
annual Alanfest, Mrs. Glazier would turn to her daughter and say something
like "We are so proud of you, too, dear. After seeing those sculptured
heads you made last fall, I was sure you'd have the art award sewn
right up, but the judges are probably the sort who don't
understand
modern sculpture."

"Why would they?" Alan's father might have joked. "They're teachers
of algebra and typing. Lord, the janitor's probably in on it, too.
Equal opportunity and all that."

"What I mean to say is, Joya has talents aplenty that have very little
to do with grades and prizes," their mother would say.

When the parents weren't looking, Alan could count on Joya to make
a hideous face at him, a face that said, "Retard!" or "Pathetic loser
nerd!" or to stick out her tongue when her mouth was filled with masticated
devil's food cake. Again, Alan was impassive. Without comment,
he allowed his sister to ignore him, or lock him out of the bathroom for
ages, or "accidentally" leave her wet towel on his bed. ("I was just in
there looking for my brush. Did you steal it?") The cold front never
lasted more than a day or two.

Joya got into trouble now and then, generally with Marion, but it
wasn't the sort of trouble to involve the police. The two girls made
crank calls ("Mr. Woo, is that your rickshaw double-parked outside the
IHOP?"), reset clocks, and tucked smelly cheese in more than one mailbox.
At their best, Alan and Joya gossiped about teachers and traded the
rumors they'd heard about each other's friends, but their academic
disparity—they never spoke about that.

Alan had always assumed that Joya simply didn't care, but when he
awoke early the next morning in her spare room, he lay in bed wondering
if he had underestimated her resentment of all the things that had
come so much more easily to him. How clearly he could now imagine
her saying, in her deep, gutsy voice, "Why is it you get everything: the
prizes, the good spouse, the child, the clients looking up to you like a
surrogate dad, not the surrogate principal or cop!" Though she would
never dream of saying such a thing.

He heard her showering, making coffee, then leaving almost right
away. He was too exhausted to go out and confront her, and it would
have been selfish. She did not have time for this kind of turmoil.

Ten minutes after Alan heard the apartment door close, he got up and
checked his cell phone. There had been no calls. When he ventured out
toward the kitchen, he found that Joya had left the after-dinner mess
perfectly intact. The smell of charred meat was oppressive. The plates
sat next to each other on the counter, littered with lamb fat and gristle;
on Joya's, the mound of potatoes, crusted and yellow, had never been
touched. Across one end of the wooden dining table, a pale maplike
stain marked the place where no one had wiped up the water she had
spilled. Their napkins lay on the floor, next to the butterfly clip that had
fallen from her hair. As he picked up the glittering ornament, Alan felt
shame at the effort she'd made. Even her brother, it seemed, could not
reciprocate her love.

He opened the three large front windows. The sky was an assertive
blue, the sunlight strong. It illuminated, too brightly, the ambitious grin
of a sitcom actress on a billboard across the street. Alan groaned and sat
on the couch. He glanced at the wall phone. If it were to ring, whose
voice on the other end would he dread least? This was a sad state of
affairs. If my patients could see me now, he thought, would they flee in
disgusted pity? Or would his example give them courage, the comforting
sense that if
he
—Dr. Alan Glazier, Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa, summa
cum laude, family man—could screw up so completely, well surely they
were not after all so pathetic themselves.

The patient with the traitorous wife: now he would definitely have
fired Alan. The cellist, facing so much disappointment in the world and
its commercial, art-spurning nature, would probably have forgiven him.
Recently, Alan had read about a debate in the real-estate world over
something called owner disclosure. Must home owners disclose the
results of any and all tests they performed on things like termite infestation
and radon levels? Wouldn't it be fair if such a law governed psychotherapists,
forced them to confess histories of divorce, infidelity,
substance abuse, even chronic impatience with children or addiction to
boring, formulaic cop shows on TV?

He called Joya's office number and spoke to her voice mail. "I don't
know what happened last night," he said, "I mean how it got so out of
control, but I'm sorry I made you angry. I shouldn't have been so
thoughtless about the time. But I'm totally confused about what you
told me, the part about Greenie, and I need to talk to you, Joy. Would
you find a minute to call me? Are you speaking to me? You'd better be."

He called Greenie's number. Consuelo answered. "Hello Mister Alan,
a good day to you!" she said gaily. "She has taken Mister George to the
kitchen this morning, then school! She will teach his class to make biscuits!
I will tell her you call! It is important?"

"Yes," said Alan. "Tell her to call my cell phone. I am not at home
today."

"Yes!" echoed Consuelo with warm conviction.
Someone
did not
regard him as the world's biggest jerk.

Alan had a number for Greenie at the governor's kitchen, but she had
given it to him mainly for emergencies. Was this an emergency? Good
question, thought Alan sardonically—but if Joya had told her about
Marion, to call her there now would be calamitous, no matter how
urgent his feelings.