Small spaces are easy to share, of course, when two people are newly in love, when every coming together ends, or begins, with sex; when nakedness is a state both savored and taken for granted. It was a marvel to Greenie that Charlie did not seem skittish after Alan left with George. Secretly, she’d feared he would have to flee or at least retreat for a time. She was wrong: it became immediately clear that he wanted to rejoice.
For the first week, he held back because of her sadness at losing George—but then, one evening, Charlie met her at his place with a bottle of expensive champagne and take-out dinner from a four-star restaurant where only Ray could get a table without a month’s notice. Ray was at the ranch, in the culinary care of McNally, so Greenie had spent the day taking inventory in the governor’s pantry, clearing out stale nuts, rancid condiments, cereals and snacks that had lost their appeal. After that, the weekend was hers.
She stood idly at Charlie’s table examining his collection of rocks, creating an imaginary atlas of his life from the places inscribed on their undersides. He must have opened the door with deliberate stealth, then set down his packages silently, for the first thing she heard was a whoop, close behind her, and then she felt herself upended, slung over a shoulder, thrown down on the bed. He stood above her, beaming. “You are mine, you are mine, you are mine,” he said. “Tell me it’s true—no, tell me nothing, Charlie, nothing for now.” He sat beside her and began, slowly, to open her blouse.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “For now.”
After they made love, Charlie got to his feet and began to jump on the bed. He wheeled his arms upward and back, like a child gaining maximum height on a trampoline. His blond hair stood on end when he descended, and though he was fit, his body betrayed its age, every bit of spare flesh jostling haplessly up and down.
“Charlie, you are crazy,” she said. And then something occurred to her. “Did you win? Did you win the appeal? Is that what we’re celebrating?”
He stopped abruptly and looked down on her. She’d stayed on her back, moving to the very edge of the mattress. He said, “I am celebrating you.”
With George, she had lived her life in close concentric circles. Despite her determination to take him on small-boy adventures, they had hardly ever left the city. Now Charlie took her everywhere. He drove her to dams, so she could feel their fearsome, insidious power, a dark hum along her skin, tunneling down to her bones. He drove her to a mesa—a place where she felt consumed by sky—and told her about a plan to drill for oil that would, without question, endanger the water stored up over millions of years beneath their feet. He took her to a desolate place where people stood in line at a pump to retrieve their water in metal drums and haul it home in their trucks and rattletrap cars. “This water is theirs—it comes from a river that should flow where they live—but now, thanks to government shenanigans, it doesn’t, so they have to drive for miles to get it,” Charlie told her. He wanted Greenie to know all the things and places he knew; she had to know them not by hearing stories or by looking at pictures—that wouldn’t bring her close enough—but by seeing them herself. He could not wait to take her to his favorite places in Oregon, Canada, Mexico.
Yet still she felt a nervous kind of unreality, an off-balance footing, to her altered life, to being loved with such inebriated fervor.
Being in love again summoned forth being in love before: with Alan. She remembered their day at the Cloisters, a memory she had not examined in years. Two weeks had remained before their wedding, and Greenie had let herself fall prey to petty material panic. As she called the florist in Massachusetts for a third time to make triple sure they understood that the peonies on the tables had to be white, pure white, she was faintly ashamed—because she knew all too well just how appallingly a woman could behave as her wedding loomed. She had seen brides throw last-minute fits about almond paste that tasted too “almondy,” about piped roses that looked too “crude,” about white icing that did not “precisely” match the shade of a wedding gown. Confronted by such women, she had kept her cool by telling herself that they would never behave so badly under ordinary circumstances, that they would feel embarrassed later. She’d seen a yoga instructor scream herself blue over how much she hated even the suggestion of pink; she had listened to an investment banker whine about Greenie’s “unreasonable” policy of charging more for a five-tiered cake that would serve two hundred guests than she would for a three-tiered cake to serve the very same number.
Alan had walked into the kitchen for a glass of water as she was saying to the florist, “None of those peonies with the red on the petals—Festiva maxima, my mother says they’re called…. No, not those, not those! Your e-mail mentioned freesia, but we asked for stephanotis.” She’d seen Alan set his glass by the sink and fold his arms, smiling at her with deep amusement. After she’d hung up, he said, “Which of us will the media be covering at this event? Will my crooked tie be mocked in the Style section of the Times? Heavens, what if my shoes don’t match my belt?”
“Alan, my mother is involved here.”
“Yes, and she’s taken charge, as only she can do, but this is a day I intend to…well, that I will try my damnedest to enjoy. Will you?”
“Of course, but—”
Very gently, Alan had clamped his hand over her mouth, and then he had replaced his hand, for a tantalizing instant, with his mouth. He said, “Tomorrow is your day off. You will not use it to phone seamstresses or chauffeurs or chair rental agencies or klezmer bands. I am taking you to see something sublime.”
“What’s a klezmer?” she asked.
The shuttle from the Metropolitan Museum had been packed with their fellow cultural aspirants, all tolerant of the torn vinyl upholstery and moldy aroma of a school bus put out to pasture. They had clung to the seats in front of them as the bus wound jarringly up the approach to the monastery; along with the other tourists, they murmured appreciation for its sequestered medieval beauty.
“Eat first, then look,” said Alan, who had packed the perfect picnic according to a man: French bread, Swiss cheese, Greek olives, a tub of hummus, sliced sausage, Granny Smith apples, and a bottle of viscous red wine. There were paper cups and napkins, even a corkscrew, but not the utensils with which to slice the cheese or spread the hummus. (Greenie had brought along molasses cookies.)
In the end, she gave in happily to tearing the loaf and using the foil cutter on the corkscrew for slicing cheese, dragging bread through hummus, spitting olive pits into a napkin. “Your teeth are purple,” said Greenie after she sat back to look at their fairy-tale surroundings.
“Do you still want to marry me?” said Alan.
“I like purple teeth. Purple is my favorite color,” said Greenie.
“I’m serious,” said Alan. “I want to make sure you’re not just caught up in the wedding. That happens, you know. All that fussing distracts from the importance of being sure right down to the wire.”
Greenie had been touched. It wasn’t like him to sound so earnest. “Alan, I will be sure beyond the wire. Way beyond the wire.”
“Thank you.”
“And you?”
“I am never sure about anything,” he said, “and I am sure about this.”
“Does that make you worry?”
Alan nodded. “Good question. It has made me worry, but I’m past that now. I just want all the flowers and the music and the hemlines and your parents’ expressions and the weather and the dancing and the bubbles in the champagne and the—”
Greenie laughed. “Stop!”
“—to be perfect,” he said. “I want all of it to be perfect not because I give a damn but because I want you to see it all as background. I want you looking at me, so you can’t say later that if only your shoes hadn’t been so tight or the clouds so heavy or your snooty Bostonian cousins so late…”
“You didn’t mention the cake,” she said.
“How could the cake not be perfect?” said Alan. “Amazing cake is the one thing I know I c
an count on. For the rest of my life if I get to spend it with you, right?”
When he led her into the cool stone hall where the tapestries hung, Greenie felt the sleepy thrill of the wine as it seeped into her capillaries and made her skin feel effervescent, the perfect degree of tipsy.
She was surprised that Alan had taken her to see something so violent—though the violence in the tapestries, the hunting down and slaying of the unicorn, was so formal and stylized that it nearly resembled a dance. “I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop looking,” she said as they stood before the tapestry that showed the wounded unicorn, pierced by spears and bleeding, being paraded toward a castle. “The colors are exquisite,” she said, almost reluctantly. “But these hunters look like zombies! It’s cruel, really. Don’t you think?”
He led her to the tapestry, the famous one, of the unicorn held captive: fenced and chained but unharmed. “I suppose this is the happy ending,” she said. “As happy as it gets for a unicorn.”
“Some scholars,” said Alan, “believe the tapestries are a narrative of how the bride captures her groom.”
Greenie gave him a skeptical look.
“Really,” he said, grinning.
“Is that why you brought me here?”
Alan laughed. “No. I just read that now, on the wall over there.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the galleries and gardens, holding hands like teenagers on a date.
“Why didn’t you bring me here before?” she asked as they waited for the bus in the parking lot.
“I was saving it for a special occasion.”
“Are you saving other incredible things? I don’t like the idea that you’re holding them back. What if something happened and I never got to see them?”
Alan shook his head and laughed. “Greenie, you don’t need to seize it all now. You’ve got plenty of time.”
“You don’t know that for a fact,” she had teased him back then.
“I’ll take my chances,” he’d said.
And now, here was Charlie, almost tragically the inverse of Alan, cramming as much of what he knew and loved into her life as fast as he possibly could. You would have thought there was a deadline, that they were on a lovers’ scavenger hunt, competing for the prize of perpetual joy. Greenie knew that if they had been in New York, a place where she had saved up her own collection of significant things, he would have expected her to reciprocate. But other than her work—which exerted fewer demands than ever on Greenie, now that it was summer, now that Ray spent as much time on the ranch as he possibly could—she had no deadlines whatsoever; she had, now that George was gone, all the time in the world to waste or spend wisely as she pleased. What to do with all that time, however, was simple, almost humiliatingly simple: lose herself in love. Who would choose to do anything else?
AND THEN THERE WAS RAY. So much had shifted between Greenie and Ray in the past few months that she did not know precisely which changes had come from her and which from him. Their morning companionship, because the provocation and teasing had diminished, became almost peaceful. They were together the same amount of time, but they said less. Without George, Greenie worked any and all hours demanded of her, no longer having to negotiate Consuelo’s needs as well. This made her work suddenly much easier than it had ever been—and now that she had lived and worked here through a round of seasons, she knew the traditions of the house both public and private, the foods and native customs each holiday called for, the hierarchy of Ray’s taste for the many kinds of food she knew how to make. She had been the closet hostess not just of a Santa Fe Christmas Eve (for which she’d filled the mansion with green chili garlands and a promenade of ghostly farolitos), a Mexican Catholic Easter (candies arranged to portray the Virgin of Guadalupe), a Fourth of July (ice cream in colors to match the splendor of fireworks over the valley), and a birthday celebration for Ray (Angus piñatas, persimmon-glazed suckling pig, and coconut cake for thirty friends), but of banquets to celebrate the piñon harvest, the Day of the Dead, and Zozobra.
Ray, too, was in love. This was no secret to most of those around him, though gossip about his ostensibly clandestine courtship passed, within his house, only by way of lingering glances and satisfied smirks. Yet one day Greenie knew, just knew, that he had made up his mind. She knew, too, that six months of tabloid runoff from his out-in-the-open affair with the Hollywood actress had led him to treat his attraction to Claudia like a covert operation, even if it was perfectly proper. Claudia had come to the mansion only twice, for Ray’s birthday and for Christmas Eve. Ray saw her mainly when he was out on the ranch. McNally knew her, and her tastes, far better than Greenie did.
One morning in late July, as Ray polished off a bowl of cold asparagus soup (having stirred in half a cup more of heavy cream), Greenie could no longer stand it—the chitchat to cover their placid détente or, for that matter, the suspense.
“Are you going to marry her?” she asked.
Ray frowned. “Her? What her would that be?”
“Ray.”
“Well, yes, I am,” he said. “On the twentieth of October, that’s what I’ve been thinking.”
As usual, he had trumped her. Keeping her cool, she asked, “So how many people know this?”
“You’d be the first.”
“After Claudia.”
“What did I say? I said you were the first.”
They regarded each other with competitive amusement, like two old friends forgiving each other a foolish rift in their affection.
“Don’t hug me,” he said, seeing her intention. “I’m coming down with a cold. Besides, understand that business is not irrelevant here.”
“You love her. I’ve seen you with her.”
“Love flows through many different contours, just the same as a river,” he said. “It does.”
“The poetry gives you away,” said Greenie.
Ray shook his head. “The only poetry I know is the poetry of popularity polls. Oh sing to me of reelection! A liberated woman—a damn smart independent tall bossy woman—will take me far. I am no fool.”
“If it’s all so calculated, why tell me your intentions?”
“You asked, my girl. And you will be cooking for the guests, so you’d best get cracking.”
Panic washed over Greenie. Later, she realized that it wasn’t the fear of masterminding a wedding but the fear that if she were there, if she were still doing her job on the day of his wedding, three more months would have passed in which she would not be living with her son or even near him. But her response to Ray’s second intentional bombshell was simply a nod.
“Which you will do incognito until I make this fully public. You will.”
“Do you mean incommunicado?” she said.
“Make it a song and, yes, that’s it.” He stood and picked up the hat he had laid on the counter. “You don’t sing anymore. I’ve noticed that.”
“I don’t sing for you,” said Greenie.
“Did you ever?” He laughed briefly, as if to have the final word without speaking.
“Congratulations,” said Greenie.
SHE DECIDED TO TAKE ON A NEW CUISINE, to delve into North African foods, introduce spices that she knew Ray would like, that would marry with the local produce she used for dinners to impress visitors from other parts of the country. She made a harissa with chilis from Mike Chu’s garden and a rich harira with Ray’s beef, stewed with tomatoes, lemons, and heirloom beans from a farm near Chimayo. That weekend she would learn to make warqa, the Moroccan pastry used for bastilla, and jelabi, a fried dough meant to be served with fish. The traditional filling for bastilla was pigeon, but come shooting season, Greenie could use whatever game birds Ray and his cronies brought back from the hunt.
She sat in the cool silence of Ray’s vast kitchen, where she could lay out several books on the counter at once, to read and compare. The books, which were new, had to be weighted open with cutting boards and meat mallets. The antiseptic smell of their
pages made her feel as if she were in a laboratory, back in a classroom at cooking school.
Except for maids changing linens and dusting tables, Greenie knew she might be the only occupant in the house that day. She had just called New York; Alan had handed the phone almost directly to George, who told her he was going to Ford’s for the afternoon. “Ford has a Star Wars game, you know,” he said. “It goes with the new movie. Daddy says we can see the first Star Wars, maybe, but the new one he says is too old for me. Except that the new one happens before the first one, you know.”
What had become of the horses? How quickly his young, supple mind had moved on to other interests. As she listened to him prattle on, Greenie was disturbed to feel a haze of resentment settle over her affection. Did she have to carry the burden of their separation—and its cause—all by herself? And Star Wars? Wasn’t even the original movie too old for George?
As she read about what made warqa distinct from phyllo, Mary Bliss entered the kitchen. “Oh, I am sorry,” she said.
“No reason to be sorry,” said Greenie. “But how come you’re not riding, or having a manicure? How often do you get this kind of time off?”
“These days, more than you’d reckon. Am I botherin’ you?”
“I could use bothering.” She took a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator.
Mary Bliss drank two sips of tea, pretending interest in a diagram of how to cut and fold the warqa, before she burst into tears.
To ask Mary Bliss what was wrong would be dishonest, but she did.
“He is fucking engaged,” she said through her tears.
Greenie looked at her with concern but said nothing.
“You must think me a certifiable loon,” said Mary Bliss.
“No, not at all.” Greenie pulled a paper towel from the dispenser by the sinks and handed it to Mary Bliss.
“I can’t believe I am crying. Lord! All because there’s going to be a fucking first lady in this house.”