“George, do you like enchiladas and burritos?” he said.
“Yes! The cheese kind,” said George. “With the not-spicy salsa. With the chips, but not the purple ones. I don’t like the purple ones. I like guacamole, but not if it has chunks or the red stuff in it.”
“All right then. I read about a restaurant that’s on an old farm. Maybe we could go there for lunch. I’m getting hungry. Are you?”
“Yes!” said George. “I think we went to that farm with Charlie.”
Alan was glad, for a change, that child-safety regulations required George to ride behind him. “Have you been to lots of places with Charlie?”
“Not lots, Daddy. Look, I see a llama! They have llama farms out here! Do you believe it?”
“It’s very different from New York, that’s for sure,” said Alan.
“Mrs. Rodrigo says llamas are from South America. A different America.”
Let the evening come quickly, thought Alan. Let everything be decided so that I can talk to my son about how his life is going to change. Again.
“But you know what?” said Alan. “You know where your Nana lives, in New Jersey? There’s even a llama farm near there! We could go see it next time we visit her. She misses you, too.”
“I’d like to see Nana. I miss Nana. She gave me the Legos at Christmas when we went there. And the book of giants.”
“You’ll see her soon,” said Alan, feeling in this assurance a nugget of pure relief. He had told his mother as little as possible over the past year; she did not know about Marion, and she certainly did not know about any of this new mess. He had told Joya, mainly so she’d know how to reach him.
At the restaurant, they were waited on by an older woman who was so friendly that Alan wondered if she had mistaken them for customers she’d met before. She lavished tactile affection on George and winked at Alan. Over a body like a compact mountain range, she wore a Mexican apron striped yellow, pink, and green. Out of her silvery bun protruded an artificial rose. She introduced herself by pointing to the rose and announcing, “I am Rosalita.” She bent toward George and said, “Smaller people have permission to call me Rosa.”
When Alan turned down her offer of beer or tequila, she poured lemonade into two green glasses.
“There are actually bubbles inside the glass of the glass!” George exclaimed. “And why are there limes if it’s lemonade?”
Rosalita put her pitcher down on the table and touched George’s nose. “Observant boy.” She said to Alan, “Watch out for this one. He will slip secrets from under your feet like a magician slips a cloth from under dishes.”
That’s just what I’m afraid of, thought Alan.
He was grateful for the starchy food, rice and beans and delicious puffy rolls that Rosalita called sopaipillas. (Had Greenie learned how to make these for His Royal Fucking Highness in the mansion?) He ate half a roast chicken with a rust-colored pumpkinseed sauce. Except for one large happy family, they were the only customers. Rosalita kept an eye on them from beside the kitchen door, where she sat in a lawn chair and spoke on a cell phone, laughing often.
“Where are you driving to?” she asked as she cleared their plates.
“Not really to anywhere,” said Alan. “Just around. Seeing things. My son loves the animals on the ranches.”
“Well then,” she said to George, “we have chickens and goats out back. There are baby goats you can pet, if you don’t mind having your sleeves nibbled. We sell goat cheese that is very, very good.”
“I know about the nibbling. Actually, I’ve petted goats before.”
“Ah. Also, we have a very big white rooster. When he crows, he scares away the coyotes, he is so loud. A bear could not sleep through his crowing.”
George said that he would like to see the rooster. “Can you pet the rooster, too, or does he peck?”
This bland conversation soothed Alan, and as Rosalita told George a tale about how the rooster had routed a pack of dogs that menaced the goats, he took in her physical particulars—smooth reddish skin, thick solid arms and neck, enormous breasts beneath the voluptuously colored apron—and it struck him full force that he might, not long in the future, accept into his life a woman other than, probably quite different from Greenie. For so long, Greenie had been the only woman he looked at so closely, the woman he considered his human home.
Rosalita seemed to be appraising him as well. “If you will not have tequila, you will have chocolate.”
She returned to the table with two shallow bowls of chocolate pudding. Onto George’s, she spooned whipped cream; onto Alan’s, she poured a small amount of dark liqueur. “Stir,” she ordered, twirling a finger in the air.
Before they went out back to meet the celebrated rooster, Alan told her that he hadn’t had such a delicious meal in ages. “You needed that, a good meal,” she said. She pointed at her own chest. “I see such things.”
Though he knew it might spoil before they returned to Greenie’s, Alan bought a cake of goat cheese, wrapped in one large shiny green leaf.
THE HORSE PROVED RESILIENT, its leg completely salvageable. Thank heaven it wasn’t a racehorse, Greenie observed, to Alan’s irritation. The owners of the ranch had installed a video security system and planned to put more elaborate fastenings on the stalls in the barn.
Within two days, the threat of a lawsuit vaporized. Alan was never sure what happened, but he imagined that Ray was involved. Ray could probably vaporize anything—even Alan himself, if Greenie had asked. But this was conjecture, since she was the one who handled the phone calls, all conversations about the horses, the accident, the awkwardness with Diego’s family.
Except in his role as a father, Alan’s presence seemed immaterial to the crisis at hand. Finally, there were no more reasons to prolong the torture of his stay. On his third unhappy evening in Greenie’s place—whose native charms were now nothing more than a reminder that she had become an alien being—he called her in the governor’s kitchen and asked when she would return.
“I told you: probably nine, maybe sooner.”
“Sooner would be better,” he said.
“Is George upset I can’t put him to bed tonight?”
“No.”
Dishes. Laughter. Unintelligible conversation. The roar of a blender.
“We need to sit down and talk as soon as George is asleep. Not too late. I’m leaving day after tomorrow. I need tomorrow to talk with George.”
Over the blender, someone called Greenie’s name. The blender stopped. She called back, “The soup bowls are to the left, above the butter plates! For the salad, I want those blue glass plates. Yes. Those.” Where wasn’t she in charge?
She was back at eight-thirty. George was still awake, though his lights were out. She went into his room to kiss him good night. Alan waited at the kitchen table.
When she came in, she sat down across from him. She forced a smile, but it was unmistakably wary. “So, should I have a lawyer present?”
“This won’t be easy,” said Alan, “so let’s not be sarcastic.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Listen, Greenie, if I thought I had any kind of moral footing, I’d try to get you back. It’s you I’d take on the plane day after tomorrow. You as well as George.” Did he actually utter the words moral footing? Christ.
Greenie whispered, “Please don’t take George. I know it seems like the right thing to do, but it’s not.”
“I know it’s not the right thing for you, Greenie. I’m not doing this to punish you. That’s the first thing you have to know.”
“And what’s the second? The third? Listen to you, Alan. Who needs a lawyer with you here? You’re cold enough for a whole boardroom of lawyers!”
“I’m not cold. I’m holding myself together,” he said. “That’s the truth, Greenie. You’ve always been good at that, holding yourself together. You are Iron Woman. I’m not saying it won’t be hard—”
“What about George’s school? You ca
n’t just take him out like that.”
“I can enroll him at P.S. 41. You know that, Greenie. He can miss a couple weeks of kindergarten.”
“His friends…”
“You mean, Diego?” Alan stared sadly and pointedly at Greenie. “Do you see how, in a way, this will be easier for George? I’m not saying I’ll act as if this never happened. I’ll keep a very close eye on him—”
“Like you’re sure I didn’t.”
On the plane from New York, Alan had wondered if he would take any pleasure in this moment, if he would feel as if he were finally the one in control. But now he saw that his hands, on the table before him, were shaking. He stood, walked around the table, and knelt next to Greenie. He would have sat if there had been a chair beside her, but there wasn’t.
“Don’t put George in the position of choosing. Because that’s the alternative.” Alan tried to put his arm around Greenie, but she kept her back firmly against her chair. Her head hung down so that he could not see her face. It was obscured by her beautiful hair.
Greenie turned to him with a gasp. He recoiled, sure that she intended to hit him, but she threw her arms around him and held him tight. He was pinned to her sideways, his shoulder uncomfortably wedged between her breasts, but he made no attempt to move. He said nothing as she cried.
When she let him go, she said, “Just promise me you won’t go to court. Promise me that.”
“I promise.” To Alan’s surprise, Joya had already pushed him to find a good lawyer. She was someone who lived and breathed the air of the legal troposphere, but he had assumed she would not be so quick to abandon her sympathy with Greenie.
They sat quietly at the table for a few minutes. Alan listened for sounds of the outside world but heard none: no crickets, no wild animals, no cars, not even water in the ditch out front, now apathetically dry and sprouting weeds.
ALAN’S READING LIGHT WAS ON, and when he sat back, its beam shot past him directly onto George, who slept beneath a thin blue blanket on the two seats between Alan and the window. He felt a profound, protective relief in this island of light. The pilot had announced that he would have to take a circuitous route to the north, to skirt a thunderstorm building over the center of the country, but Alan did not mind the delay.
This time he wrote to Marion about what he remembered from their common childhood. The more he wrote, the more memories he felt erupting in his mind. Like fireworks, they filled a vast dark space with color and excitement—while illuminating face after face with a supernatural clarity. What he needed to show Marion, or simply to remind her, was that they had known each other for years, even if those years were now long in the past. They were not two strangers who’d fallen idly, drunkenly in bed. He was the boy who had—prehistorically, perhaps, but it was history all the same—fallen in love with her. She was the best friend of the big sister, the girl who’d had the grace to humor him just enough, to never quite break his heart. He mentioned Jacob only in passing, their meeting in Berkeley not at all. I’m going to confess to a fantasy, he wrote at the end. I like to imagine that we could go on knowing each other, or know each other all over again, even if we hardly ever meet. What do you think?
Alan folded the letter in thirds and tucked it into a safe pocket of his shoulder bag. He sat back and laid his right hand on George’s hip; ink stained his thumb and middle finger. Outside, he watched the unmistakable brilliance of Chicago rise above the wing of the plane, its shimmering sprawl clipped into a crescent embracing the lake. From here on, he would try to sleep. He might even, for the first time in days, sleep well.
EIGHTEEN
QUITE UNLIKE HERSELF, Greenie became superstitious. If Mike Chu passed the side window an even number of times, Charlie would stay; odd, he would leave her. If she found fewer than three blue eggs among the first dozen she opened from the organic farm that delivered on Mondays (the pullet eggs she used for omelettes and fritattas, charmingly varied in size and color), Alan would try to take George away for good. If Ray showed up for breakfast even seconds before the hour, some unknown terrible thing was sure to befall her and soon; just seconds after the hour and she would be safe. Not long ago, she would have been surprised by this change in her nature, baffled and dismayed, but nothing much surprised her anymore.
When she was alone with Ray, she felt sheepish—though after his initial sermon on her infidelity, he’d never reaffirmed his disapproval. Never again did he try to convince her that Charlie was a mistake. He went so far as to ask if she needed a good New York lawyer to win back George. “No,” she told him. “George is where he belongs for now.” Ray nodded and said nothing further.
She no longer had the guts to partake in the political sparring matches Ray seemed to relish. Sometimes she professed to agree with him when she didn’t. She rarely played Broadway songs before he arrived; she did not want him to catch her in the middle of “I Feel Pretty” or “Shall We Dance?” Even alone, she did not feel she deserved to bask in the orchestral ardor of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the sprightly wit of Cole Porter. It seemed improper to mime such happiness, such coy satisfaction. Now she worked in silence; even Billie Holiday was much too superficial.
When she was not with Charlie, she was miserable—not just because he was elsewhere but because the tides of conscience and motherhood rushed to fill the void. You could not lay waste to a heart without suffering your punishment.
When she was with Charlie, Greenie was incurably happy. They spent every night together. Even when he went to Albuquerque, he would drive back, no matter how late, and wake her in his bed. Greenie’s place was larger and prettier, but they did not stay there. By virtue of his absence, George was much too present. She had shipped most of his books and toys and clothes to New York, keeping a few for his next visit. She was to see him in New York in September; she wanted to go earlier, but Alan was still too wounded.
So now it was Greenie who called George every day, often morning as well as evening. Almost as soon as he arrived in New York, he seemed to find his place, the rhythm of his old life made new. After one week, he told her that Treehorn had slept beside his bed. He was over the moon. “And Dad bought a bigger bowl for Sunny. Sunny might get bigger, like the bowl, my dad said.”
“Really?” said Greenie, fighting her selfish sorrow at George’s pride when he said “my” dad.
“Some fish do that, you know. If where they live gets bigger, they get bigger too. We’ll see, says Dad. The new bowl is called an acclarion. I want to measure Sunny, but he won’t stay still for my ruler. Dad got me a ruler with a Spiderman that leaps when you twist it! I’ve learned about inches in my school! We measured our bedrooms, you know. Mine’s is six feet in one way and eight feet in the other. We drew pictures of the rooms. I drew Treehorn on my bed, even though Dad says she shouldn’t sleep up there.”
Greenie noticed that he now said “you know” where he once said “actually.”
“Do you have friends in your new school yet?”
“Mommy, Ford! Do you remember Ford from my old school? Ford’s in my class!”
Yes, Greenie remembered Ford: Ford the Evangelist. God-Is-Everything Ford. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I am so glad.” Ford, Alan told her later, was just one of several kids in the class whom George had known in nursery school. He was doing fine, Alan reassured Greenie, though she could tell from his guarded tone that he knew this good news might also make her feel useless, forlorn, even guilty that taking George with her in the first place had set him on the wrong track.
She tried not to tell George too often that she missed him. Once every few days, she allowed herself to voice that blaring truth. In her house, she kept the door to his bedroom closed so that she would not be tempted to wander in, lie on his bed, hold one of his dinosaurs, and weep. The toy horses, all but the two he’d insisted he take on the plane, she had thrown in the garbage. She told George that their legs would probably break in the mail, that it would be better to give them to another child in Santa Fe who m
ight enjoy them. She believed this was the only outright lie she had told him. But lies and truth overlapped so relentlessly now; that’s how it was when you left a marriage, no matter how high the ground you took. How calmly could you look at broken vows, at certainty unraveled? Shortly before their wedding, Alan had taken her to the Cloisters to see the Unicorn Tapestries; later, she came to envision her marriage as a shining blue tapestry hung on a wall, proudly, for all to see. Now it lay on the floor in heaps of tangled thread: bright flashes of memory among the knotty strands of gray and faded browns.
Not that she was in mourning. She loved the foursquare Boy Scout spotlessness of Charlie’s life—of his apartment, his mission, his very soul. He did not seem to be one of those men who had never married because he feared other people’s disorder. The orderly life he led, inside and out, was one he did not feel compelled to force on others. Greenie’s sneakers and sweaters, tossed off in exhaustion when she let herself in, stayed where they were without comment; dustings of flour she might leave on his counter after making a piecrust sometimes lingered until she wiped them away the next morning. (Alan had loved her breakfast pastries best; Charlie craved her pies. He liked them true-blue American, folded roundabout in a blanket of pastry so that when you cut through it, out rushed the captive soft flesh of peaches, apricots, rhubarb, berries. His favorite was a pie she made with Anjou pears and blackberries, the bottom lined with frangipane. If she made a pie, any pie, he would eat a large piece at every meal, three meals a day, until it was gone. “Oh, encore,” he would say when he’d swallowed the final crumbs. And she would make another.)
Charlie was pleased that he could live contentedly in so small a space—Greenie knew this without hearing him say so—and he seemed to be happier still that they could share it, if only at night and on snatches of weekend, in a way that kept them so physically close. “I would never want to share a house with you,” he said. “You could get too far away from me.”