WHEN WALTER WAS THE FIRST ONE IN, he’d switch on the lights to find the place just as he’d left it the night before—three rows of tables like children waiting to be dressed, chairs above, floor below, long bar beckoning from deep in the shadows—and The Bruce would shove past him to bolt for the kitchen, where he knew his master would find him a treat. Following his dog, Walter would think, I’m here for life: always a moment of deep pleasure, always interrupted by barking. “Patience!” Walter would shout at The Bruce, though fondly.
Today, he found a note from Hugo on the butcher block saying that he was out at the meat market. Veal Oscar? Hugo had written. “Oh goody,” said Walter as he went to the nearest Hobart to see what Hugo had set aside for T.B. Sometimes it was a bone, sometimes a handful of giblets.
Once The Bruce was contentedly, boorishly gobbling down leftover bacon, Walter went to the desk in his tiny back closet of an office and ripped the previous day off the calendar. And kaboom! Here was March, the sneaky month. “In like a lion, out like Richard Gere will never be,” he muttered happily, and then something less entertaining occurred to him: Werner’s birthday. Obserf all your family’s special occasions, even venn you’d rather not.
He sat down and looked at his watch: just after six in California. Rising early was a Granna virtue that Werner did happen to honor, though it had to do with something like markets in Tokyo or Lagos, some sort of globalized money voodoo, not with emulating his wool-spinning, log-splitting forebears. Werner liked to brag about still seeing stars in the sky when he got up. He went running at dawn and ate some gargantuan but überhealthy breakfast, laced with brewer’s yeast or seaweed, before the rest of his family had even begun to stir.
Werner picked up on the second ring.
“Happy birthday, brother dear.”
“Well. Hey. Is this the annual reminder from the bureau of ‘Don’t forget you’re aging’?”
“Hey yourself. This is someone thinking of you nearly halfway around the world. Not so long ago, that wasn’t even possible.”
“Thank you,” Werner said (attempting warmth, to give him credit).
“So? News?”
“It’s sixty-five degrees already today, and the jasmine’s in full bloom. I can smell it right here through the open window. We’ve had a spectacular week—and out at Tahoe they’re still skiing.”
You couldn’t avoid it: every conversation with his brother began with a prelude that Walter called The Weather According to Werner. You could practically time it: two full minutes, at least, just to remind you that northern California was Shangri-ladeeda. Walter held the receiver out to The Bruce and let him lick it as Werner gave a full report on windsurfing conditions.
Walter reclaimed the phone in time to hear Werner say, “Eating your breakfast?”
“Eggs and ham,” Walter lied.
“My omelets are whites-only now, and even turkey bacon’s off limits. It’s the sulfites that’ll get you.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll outlive me even if you don’t give up the cocktails,” Walter said. “How’s Scott?” He added quickly, “And Candace?”
“Candy—God, she’s dating, Walter. My baby is…Jesus, I don’t even want to think about it. But the guy she’s going out with owns a tie or two, I’ll give him that. Has a good handshake and looks you square in the eye. Tipi says I’ve been muttering in my sleep again; little wonder there!”
“And Scott?”
Werner groaned. “Scott—get this. Scott now has this notion of not going to college next fall, of—he says—taking a year off. Which I’m horrified to say his mother’s fallen for hook, line, and sinker. My buddy Rourke—remember Rourke? You met him on the tennis court last year? My buddy Rourke already put in some muscle for the kid at Stanford. And for what? So Scott can say no thanks and go start a rock band with the losers who won’t get in anywhere? Please. He gave me this speech about how college is a waste of money if you don’t know what you want to ‘do’ with your life.”
“That makes sense, don’t you think?” Walter massaged the folds of skin below T.B.’s jaw.
“Did I know what I wanted to ‘do with my life’ back then? Did you? Please. For Christ sake, all I had in mind when I was seventeen was finding the best weed, crankin’ up the Stones, and screwing every blonde in sight! I did okay on my grades, took a little of everything—but a major? That was a babe with breasts the size of volleyballs. A master’s? That was a golf tournament. And look at me. I did more than fine.”
Your bank account’s done more than fine, thought Walter. Your broker’s done more than fine. As will your wife’s plastic surgeon a few years from now.
“College is about structure,” Werner continued, “about not doing other stuff you’d live—or wouldn’t live—to regret.”
“Oh, I don’t think a little music would ever be regrettable. Or life-threatening.”
Werner laughed. “Music? Man, are you ever not the parent of a teenage boy. I’m more sympathetic with our parents than I ever thought I’d be.”
“As if they paid enough attention even to disapprove. We could’ve joined the Symbionese Liberation Army and they’d have thought it was Boy Scouts.” Not to mention that they had been dead for most of Walter’s teenage years.
He had to let The Bruce lick the receiver again while Werner gave the you-couldn’t-possibly-imagine speech about being a father, but he wrestled it back when he heard, “The kid’s even threatened to go east and work for you. Will that win me a little sympathy?”
Walter looked at the picture of Scott he kept on his desk: the poor boy had a large red zit on his chin, and his hair looked primeval in its lanky filth, but how happy he looked as he hugged his big shiny black guitar. Joy like the top of a Ferris wheel lit up that boy’s face.
“I’d take him in with open arms, as a matter of fact.”
This earned Walter a rather satisfactory silence.
“You would, huh?” Devilish chuckle.
“I would, and huh to you.” Would he? But poor Scott; in Walter’s mind, he was at the head of the class for domestic refugee status. If spiritual growth could be stunted, he had just the parents to do the job.
Now Werner laughed a long yuk-yuk sort of laugh. “Walter,” he said to his wife, who had just come into the room and asked for caller ID. “He says he’ll take Scott off our hands. What do you think?”
“Hi, Walter!” Tipi called out in her best wifely falsetto. “Watch out for that brother of yours, he’s a sly one!”
Staring at Scott’s picture, Walter thought, Why the heck not? Suddenly, he thought it made spectacular sense for everyone involved.
“I could use an apprentice,” he said. “I could take him in July, after school ends. I promise I’d put him to work. And tell him I mean work.”
“Walt, man, you have got to be pulling my leg.”
“What—now the rock band looks good?”
“You don’t know what you’re proposing.”
“So what if I don’t? So what if it’s a full-blown disaster? Like you wouldn’t take him back? Like you think he’ll return to you co-rup-ted?” Walter waited for more laughter. None. “I want you to propose it to Scott and see what he thinks. Or I’ll call him myself, tonight, while you and Tipi paint the town and she helps you blow out that battalion of candles.”
Rarity of rarities, Werner was speechless. Which gave the man greater pause: facing his age or turning his grown son over to his homosexual brother? “Hello? Have we fallen into the San Andreas Fault?” said Walter. He wondered if Werner could hear his grin.
WALTER BUCKLED ON THE LITTLE PLAID COAT he had just purchased at the dog boutique on Bleecker. The Bruce looked suspicious and vaguely offended, and Walter understood completely, but the vet had suggested that T.B.’s sensitive skin be well protected from the cold whenever possible.
“I know, I know,” soothed Walter as T.B. tried to wriggle free of the garment by rubbing against the doorjamb. “Believe me, sweetheart, this was the most masculine o
ption.” The jacket had a Sherlockian air—perhaps the skirting on the shoulders, suggesting fogbound London alleys. As compensation, Walter had bought T.B. a new, more intimidating collar: wide black leather with silver studs. Briefly, Walter wished he had a dog who didn’t have to dress—a rugged dog, like that bookshop collie. He’d always laughed at the booties and raincoats on Upper East Side poodles. But truth be told, perhaps The Bruce was more like Walter himself: finicky about his surroundings, a sensitive kind of guy who loved his comforts just so and would rather be celibate than live in the woods.
Walter felt almost completely happy for the first time in ages, and when the two of them left the building to make their way through the gently meandering snowflakes—glinting overhead in the beams of the streetlamps, green in the traffic light, then vanishing like kisses on the well-traveled pavement—T.B. seemed to forget his troubles, too. What was it about snow: was it the silence, the perfect whiteness, the lovely paradox of icy and soft all at once? If the sight of falling snow didn’t give you the itch to run out and play, there was a void where your soul ought to be.
They crossed Hudson Street and entered the small park beside the playground, where towering linden trees grew in straight rows, formal as a parading platoon. Both park and playground were deserted, and once they were under the trees, Walter let The Bruce off his leash so he could browse along unfettered, explore and reciprocate the scents left behind on numerous vertical objects. An inch of snow had managed to settle undisturbed on the bricks, so that Walter could feel and hear that pioneering crunch beneath his boots. The air was almost warm, pleasant though disappointing, since it meant that the snow would vanish by morning. But for now, here it was, just as plainly elegant as it would look in the country, as it had looked on Granna’s lawn in Massachusetts every winter of Walter’s youth.
This must be like finding out you’re pregnant, he thought with secretive delight. Expecting—yes, he was now expecting. And just the night before, he hadn’t had an inkling. He was pleased with his generosity and his spontaneity, as well as with the concrete thrill that he and T.B. would soon have a roommate; or, in Victorian terms, a “ward.”
More responsibility, that’s what I’ve been craving, thought Walter. And needing. He did not, after all, need a lover. Not now. (Let Gordie spin his amorous wheels in the muck of married life.) His calling Werner at just the right time had clearly been the hand of Granna. He looked up, though he thought heaven a pretty outlandish idea, and said, “Danke Schoen!”
Snow struck him full in the face, and he stopped to prolong the sensation. T.B. shook himself, blinking and sneezing, then grunted at Walter as if to ask why they were stalled in their habitual journey.
Walter looked back and saw their steps in the snow, crisscrossing, interlacing, like two strands of yarn woven close in a blanket. He looked over at the playground, locked and empty and yearningly white, from the slides to the seats of the faintly swaying swings. The sandbox was a drift of fluorescent blue.
With elaborate affection, he brushed the snow off T.B.’s face and head and his absurd diminutive trenchcoat. As they turned onto Bank Street, he clipped the leash back onto the collar. Midway down the block of dignified houses and trees, light from an open doorway stenciled the sidewalk ahead. A man was sweeping a path to the sidewalk; a cloud of fine dry snow rose before him like a sparkling explosion of glass.
“Evening,” said McLeod as Walter passed.
“Picture postcard, isn’t it?” Walter replied.
“Why, yes, long as you’re staying put.”
“Which I hope there’ll be plenty of people doing in front of my fireplaces tonight!” Walter knew he should stop and make further conversation—over McLeod’s shoulder, he saw no customers in the shop—but he continued toward the restaurant, savoring solitude for a change. He was glad to be a sentimentalist, unashamed of the homeliest pleasures. Walter would teach Scott to love all these things just the way he did, to take not a bit of beauty or tenderness for granted.
THREE
“SNOW ON A WOMAN’S SHOULDERS—now that’s a sight I find just about fatally romantic, I do!” These were the first words out of Ray McCrae’s large, lovely mouth when he opened the door to his hotel suite. Greenie was stunned. She had assumed that some third-tier assistant would greet her and take her straight to the kitchen.
“Miss Duquette,” he said simply then, as if her name by itself were praise. He took the two shopping bags from her hands. He called out loudly, “Chop chop, Mary Bliss! Our hifalutin chef’s arrived!”
He turned back to Greenie. “Miss Duquette—or, pardon me, Ms. Duquette—can I offer you a drink?”
“No, no, I’m here to work. And I’m Greenie,” she said, trying to reclaim herself. It wasn’t that he impressed her as a celebrity but, rather, that he was so shockingly handsome. He looked nothing like the few thirdhand images she must have skimmed over in the New York Times. They would not have shown the vibrant shine to his nutmeg-colored skin, nor that his eyes were the green of shaded ferns. Nor would they have shown the tall, dependable shape of the man, cutting a silhouette from the air immutable as a standing stone.
When she shrugged off her backpack, the governor took that as well, while deftly removing her heavy coat. Mary Bliss came in from the next room—and she, too, surprised Greenie: hardly the delicate blonde Greenie had imagined from her honeyed voice but a woman as physically impressive as her boss, with big, friendly features and a jubilant halo of dark brown hair. Both she and Ray McCrae wore cowboy boots, and Greenie wondered briefly if the tourist board of New Mexico required that its civil servants wear them—along with a string tie like the governor’s, fastened at his throat with a corpulent turquoise bear.
“Hey,” said Mary Bliss, holding out a hand. “Let me get you settled.”
“Settle this woman in a chair for a minute,” said the governor, and Greenie found herself steered toward an armchair by the window. She could hardly take her eyes off the view, a high vista of Central Park through falling snow.
Ray McCrae sat on a couch facing her, leaning forward, legs apart. “So, Queenie, you got a family, am I right?”
“Greenie,” she said quietly. What was she doing here?
A phone rang in another room, but the governor paid no heed. “Well, I have to say I do like Queenie,” he said. “But Greenie it is.”
“I have a family, yes.” She thought of the dossier. “My husband and my son.”
The governor nodded. “Your son is four. Starting kindergarten soon.”
“Next fall.” She wished he would let her get to work.
“We have some fine schools in Santa Fe, I just want to assure you of that. And your husband’s a shrink, right? Well, Greenie, we got ourselves plenty of kooks, if I may speak freely, rich kooks and not-so-rich kooks. Garden-variety neurotics, substance abusers, identity-crisis abusers, wife beaters, impotent lawyers, depressed unemployed craftspersons, you name it.” He must have misread her discomfort because he said, “I’m not long on political correctness, Greenie. Forgive me.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that I haven’t even cooked for you, Mr. McCrae, and I do have a business here and I—”
“One thing at a time, absolutely. We’ll see what you have up your sleeve and go from there. But I get hunches.” He tapped the center of his forehead. “I got one female trait, and that’s my intuition. It’s how I know I never need fret about runnin’ for the White House, so I can misbehave my butt off. Within reason. It’s how I know I ain’t met Miss Right so far, though I’ve been around the hacienda a few times and back. I have.” He gave her a wide, charming smile and stood. “And here’s the etiquette: you can call me Mr. Governor or, and I far prefer it, Ray. Call me Ray, would you, Greenie?
“Mary Bliss! Mary Bliss, where’s George got to? Give him the cattle prod, would you?” Greenie started at the sound of her son’s name. This George, it turned out, was Ray McCrae’s driver.
“Excuse me for headin’ o
ut on you here, but I have a meeting, a dinner meeting at some swanky fish restaurant, where I will abstain from the eats as I expect even swankier food from you, Ms. Duquette—or maybe less swanky but superior. I am unimpressed by swanky.” He took his coat from Mary Bliss. “Back in an hour and a half, that suit?”
“Does that suit you?” said Greenie.
“Suits me only if it suits you,” he said, and then his cell phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. He walked out of the suite laughing and talking.
“Doesn’t he have bodyguards?” Greenie asked Mary Bliss.
“The men in black are next door. A weird crew. Probably listening to your whole conversation on some big ear attached to the wall…. Sure you don’t want a drink? Ray would hate my treating you like a maid. He hates my treating his maids like maids.”
Greenie followed Mary Bliss into the compact kitchen. “He sounds a little too much like the perfect boss.”
Mary Bliss laughed. “Oh honey. Cranky or arrogant, no, hardly ever, but demanding? He works us right down to the quick of our pinkie toenails.”
Greenie worked that hard already. But wait. Was she considering the job? Hadn’t she thought of this as little more than a lark?
On the kitchen counter, all the equipment she’d asked for stood in a row beside the handwritten list she’d sent to Mary Bliss. From the shopping bags, she took two dozen plastic containers, components of a meal showier than any she had cooked since she was in school. What did Ray McCrae define as “swanky”? she wondered with apprehension.
She felt a surge of panic, but it was followed by the same greedy calm she felt whenever she knew she was just about to perfect a new cupcake, cookie, or tart. How satisfying, all the colors and textures and tastes laid out before her, a palette of pigments before a painter. No one else confronting this array of ingredients (some common, others fancy; some raw, others mingled, blended, simmered, and spiced; some minced or sliced, still others puréed) would have done with them quite what she planned to do.