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guy is profoundly heterosexual. You
don't get to be governor of a landlocked state if you've so much as air-kissed
the cheeks of a Frenchman. Except for maybe Vermont."
    "Lovey, you can buy off the tabloids," said Walter. "And you may be
married, but in my opinion, that intellectual sleepwalker you call a husband
could use a wake-up call. A wake-up smack. "
    "Alan loves me—"
    "In his own way!" trilled Walter. When she failed to laugh, he apologized.
"I know he's a great guy, it's just that I also know he thinks I'm a
lightweight. Which I can't quite deny." Deftly, he changed the subject to
pie. What did Greenie think of grasshopper pie? Or no, perhaps key
lime; they'd drop the lemon meringue. "Could you do it with tequila so
there'd be a little buzz?" he asked. "The doldrums approacheth. The
Idolatries of March!"
    "I don't make desserts that get people sloshed," she said.
    "Oh you righteous Bostonian you."
    On they talked, Greenie lying back on the couch—as if they were in
bed together, she realized the second time she yawned. They talked for
half an hour, Walter stopping now and then to speak with a waiter or
cook.
    She looked in on George, the last thing she did every night, after turning
out the lights. His left leg hung over the guardrail. She lifted it carefully
and placed it back on the bed. She slipped Truffle Man, his favorite
bear, in the bend of a small elbow but stopped short of pulling the blanket
over his back. Like his father, George shrugged off the covers in his
sleep, summer and winter alike. He slept with a sheen of sweat on his
smooth, pale hair, as if his brain were exerting itself in the manufacture
of complex, beautiful dreams.
    In her own room, in the dark, she took off her clothes and slipped
into bed beside Alan. Though he did not seem to wake, he turned
toward her and wrapped his arms around her from behind, just as he
had in the living room an hour before. Then he exhaled noisily over her
shoulder, half snoring, as if he'd been holding his breath till she arrived.

TWO
    WALTER LOVED IT WHEN A FRIEND CALLED just as the final
guests were leaving. It helped him past the brief chill when the
restaurant fell silent for a sliver of an instant, for the first time in five or
six hours: the tide-turning moment when the clamor changed over from
chatter and laughter to clinkings, slammings, and mechanical growlings,
the sounds of the nightly overhaul. The restaurant was like a ship,
Walter mused (though he wouldn't know a ship from a Pogo stick). He
could imagine the sailors (delectable sailors) tightening screws and riggings,
swabbing decks, polishing bollards (what in the world was a bollard?),
scraping barnacles loudly from the hull. Each night, Walter felt
this transition as the tiniest slump—but a slump nonetheless.
    That night he carried the phone to and fro as he battened down the
culinary hatches, prolonging the conversation until Greenie exclaimed,
"Walter, look what time it is! I'll be a wreck tomorrow."
    "A magnificent wreck," said Walter. "Like the wreck of the Hesperus —was that a glorious wreck? The raft of the Medusa ? No boring
old Titanic you."
    "Walter, good night."
    "A wreck with a brilliant transcontinental future."
    "Walter."
    "Greenie." Walter sighed. "Well then, nighty noodles," he said, the
way Greenie said good night to her son. He'd never been to her apartment,
and he'd met her little boy just a few times, when they'd come to
the restaurant for dinner; but one night, on the phone with Walter, she'd
interrupted the conversation as her husband was putting the boy to bed.
Walter had heard all the kisses, the endearments, the knocking-about of
the phone caused by hugging. Oh the daily embrace, the urge toward
sweet dreams: things one should not take for granted.
    "Nighty noodles yourself," she answered now. After she hung up, he
whispered, "Dreamy doodles," the reply he'd heard from the boy in the
background that time.
    Walter felt protective toward Greenie, and it wasn't just that