Read The Whole World Over for Free Online Page B

two of them would laugh uncontrollably.
    Not a guest remained, and it was barely eleven-fifteen. Beastly outside,
it wasn't the sort of night on which people lingered. Recently, the
climate had not been conducive to profit. Frigid temperatures kept
customers coming, longing to toast their backsides at Walter's faux-Colonial
fires in authentic Colonial hearths—but freezing rain kept even
the upscale cruisers at home, marooned on cable. The Bruce had positioned
his own backside close to the fire by the door. He was curled up
so tight that he resembled a small beige ottoman. Oh to be a dog.
    Walter fished in his pocket and pulled it out: Gordie's business card.
He did not need to look at the numbers (work, home, cell—all those
self-important area codes) to know them by heart, but he liked running
a finger across the blue figures, raised like Braille. He had done the call-and-hang-up
thing (the cell phone, not the home) just once. He would
never do it again. He would not be a Glenn Close stalker. He put the
card away and sighed, as if the extra air would clear out his heart. Changez la subject! he scolded himself.
    "Ben, tell me what you think: do we need these newfangled vodkas,
these Martha Stewarty concoctions with verbena, rosemary, hooey like
that? Have you seen those giant billboards all over creation?"
    Ben shook his head. "Hooey. Like you say." He was loading the dishwasher
and did not look up. With those dark curls and that heavy gold
hoop distending an earlobe, the man resembled a pirate. Give him an
eyepatch, a parrot, a treasure map, and le voilà! Resolutely, Walter did
not focus on the arms, the shoulders, that perfect parcel of a derriere
(speaking of treasure). He had taken home many a prime derriere from
this bar, Walter had, but here was one line he did not cross: hot for an
employee.
    But hot—hot was not the problem anymore. Not that hot had ever,
really, been a problem. Oh for the days of such an uncomplicated itch.
Walter remembered the very apex of those days, five and a half years
back, when he had been thrilled and amused to realize what a cornucopia
he'd made for himself. It was just after the restaurant had hit its
stride, the first summer Sunday of sleeves rolled high, of crisp new
shorts, the first stretches of smooth skin made brown by the sun, not by
some phony, viperous purple lamp. (No inauthentic tans for Walter.)
Solicitously cruising the dining room and the patio out front—cruising
legitimized!—Walter had had a revelation: running a restaurant gave
you a free look at the local wares. And here in particular—well, the men
who relished eating this way were the men Walter relished himself.
None of those chalky, bare-boned boys who ate at macrobiotic cafés,
places that smelled of soy sauce, sawdust, and low-rent pot. Those
places were for people who planned to live forever, paying the price of
pinched exuberance in everything they ate, read, and probably even
dreamed. Yoga, yogi, yogurt: all to be avoided like . . . like sock garters,
beer from Milwaukee, and flat-bottomed ice cream cones made of packing
foam.
    How he wished that unrequited hot were the problem. No, the problem
was love. Walter had fallen . . . no, had somersaulted into love—
a tender yet lunatic devotion to this man, this man and no other, ad
infinitum. It did not matter that this was what he'd always craved (who
didn't?). He'd felt safer, however, when the craving was generic, when it
was simple, bland loneliness late at night, a predictable given, and not
this desperate, specific yearning. But he had not hunted it out! It had
fallen quite rudely upon him, a piano let go by a busted pulley ten stories
above the street where he happened to be standing. No one knew,
no one would know—of that he'd been determined—for he had suspected
he could wait it out, just let it fade, however slowly.
    Well, he had suspected wrong. He had now turned the corner from
suffering to scheming, and nothing good, he suspected, could come