{"product_id":"the-whole-world-over-isbn-9781400075768","title":"The Whole World Over","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of \u003ci\u003eThree Junes\u003c\/i\u003e comes the story of Greenie Duquette, who lavishes most of her passionate energy on her Greenwich Village bakery and her young son—until she makes an impulsive decision that will change the course of several lives around her.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGreenie's husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. At Walter’s restaurant, the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie’s coconut cake and decides to woo her away to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts—heading west without her husband. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Gorgeous. . . . delicious, delightful, and deeply satisfying.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Times-Picayune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Her second novel is even finer than her first. . . . Glass offers unobtrusive yet resounding insights into the paradoxes of families, the necessary solace of friendship and the volatility of intimate relationships gay and straight. Her social commentary is at once mischievous and trenchant.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Enormously appealing and inventive . . . sure to solidify Julia Glass’ reputation as one of America's most talented younger novelists.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A generous, tentacled, ensemble novel. . . . [Glass] is deft at the quick portraiture and character shorthand that this novelistic approach requires.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Glass pins down these lives with verve, precision, and depth.... A wise book, with breadth as well as depth.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJULIA GLASS\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the best-selling \u003ci\u003eThree Junes, \u003c\/i\u003ewinner of the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction; her previous novels include, most recently, \u003ci\u003eAnd the Dark Sacred Night\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Widower's Tale\u003c\/i\u003e. A teacher of fiction and a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Glass lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.\u003c\/p\u003eChapter 1:  A  Piece  of Cake The call came on the twenty-ninth of february: the one day in four years  when, according to antiquated custom, women may openly choose their  partners without shame. As Greenie checked her e-mail at work that  morning, a small pink box popped up on the screen: Carpe diem, ladies!  Scotland, according to her cheery, avuncular service provider, passed a  law in 1288 that if a man refused a woman’s proposal on this day, he must  pay a fine: anything from a kiss to money that would buy her a silk dress  or a fancy pair of gloves.    If I weren’t hitched already, thought Greenie, I would gladly take  rejection in exchange for a lovely silk dress. Oh for the quiet, sumptuous  ease of a silk dress; oh for the weather in which to wear it!    Yet again it was sleeting. Greenie felt as if it had been sleeting for a  week. The sidewalks of Bank Street, tricky enough in their skewed  antiquity, were now glazed with ice, so that walking George to school had  become a chore of matronly scolding and pleading: “Walk, honey. Please  walk. What did I say, did I say WALK?” Like most four-year-old boys,  George left his house like a pebble from a slingshot, careening off parked  cars, brownstone gates, fences placed to protect young trees (apparently  not just from urinating dogs), and pedestrians prickly from too little  coffee or too much workaday dread.    Greenie was just shaking off the ill effects of what she called VD  whiplash: VD as in Valentine’s Day, an occasion that filled her with  necessary inspiration as January waned, yet left her in its wake—if  business was good—vowing she would never, ever again bake anything shaped  like a heart or a cherub or put so much as a drop of carmine dye in a bowl  of buttercream icing.    As if to confirm her fleeting disenchantment with all that stood for  romantic love, she and Alan had had another of the fruitless, bitter   face-offs Greenie could never seem to avoid—and which, in their small  apartment, she feared would awaken and worry George. This one had kept her  up till two in the morning. She hadn’t bothered to go to bed, since  Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche,  scones, cinnamon rolls, and—Tuesdays only—a coffee cake rich with  cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet  that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief  invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla,  and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life).    Dead on her feet by ten in the morning, she had forgotten the telephone  message she’d played back the evening before: “Greenie dear, I believe  you’ll be getting a call from a VIP tomorrow; I won’t say who and I won’t  say why, but I want it on the record that it was I who told him what a  genius you are. Though I’ve just now realized that he may spirit you away!  Idiot me, what was I thinking! So call me, you have to promise you’ll call  me the minute you hear from the guy. Bya!” Pure Walter: irritating,  affectionate, magnanimous, coy. “Vee Aye Pee,” he intoned breathlessly, as  if she were about to get a call from the Pope. More likely some upstate  apple grower who’d tasted her pie and was trolling for recipes to include  in one of those springbound charity cookbooks that made their way quickly  to yard sales and thrift shops. Or maybe this: the Director of Cheesecake  from Junior’s had tasted hers—a thousandfold superior to theirs—and wanted  to give her a better-paid but deadly monotonous job in some big seedy  kitchen down in Brooklyn. What, in Walter’s cozy world, constituted a VIP?    Walter was the owner and gadabout host (not the chef; he couldn’t have  washed a head of lettuce to save his life) of a retro-American tavern that  served high-cholesterol, high-on-the-food-chain meals with patriarchal  hubris. Aptly if immodestly named, Walter’s Place felt like a living room  turned pub. On the ground floor of a brownstone down the street from  Greenie’s apartment, it featured two fireplaces, blue-checked tablecloths,  a fashionably weary velvet sofa, and (Board of Health be damned) a roving  bulldog named The Bruce. (As in Robert the Bruce? Greenie had wondered but  never asked; more likely the dog was named after some fetching young porn  star, object of Walter’s cheerfully futile longing. He’d never been too  explicit about such longings, but he made allusions.) Greenie wasn’t wild  about the Eisenhower-era foods with which Walter indulged his  customers—indulgence, she felt, was the province of dessert—but she had  been pleased when she won the account. Over the past few years, she had  come to think of Walter as an ally more than a client.    Except for the coconut cake (filled with Meyer lemon curd and glazed with  brown sugar), most of the desserts she made for Walter were not her best  or most original, but they were exemplars of their kind: portly,  solid-citizen desserts, puddings of rice, bread, and noodles—sweets that  the Pilgrims and other humble immigrants who had scraped together their  prototypes would have bartered in a Mayflower minute for Greenie’s  blood-orange mousse, pear ice cream, or tiny white-chocolate éclairs.  Walter had also commissioned a deep-dish apple pie, a strawberry marble  cheesecake, and a layer cake he asked her to create exclusively for him.  “Everybody expects one of those, you know, death-by-chocolate things on a  menu like mine, but what I want is massacre by chocolate, execution by  chocolate—firing squad by chocolate!” he told her.    So that very night, after tucking George in bed, Greenie had returned to  the kitchen where she made her living, in a basement two blocks from her  home, and stayed up till morning to birth a four-layer cake so dense and  muscular that even Walter, who could have benched a Shetland pony, dared  not lift it with a single hand. It was the sort of dessert that appalled  Greenie on principle, but it also embodied a kind of uberprosperity, a  transgressive joy, flaunting the potential heft of butter, that Protean  substance as wondrous and essential to a pastry chef as fire had been to  early man.    Walter christened the cake Apocalypse Now; Greenie held her tongue. By  itself, this creation doubled the amount of cocoa she ordered from her  supplier every month. After it was on his menu for a week, Walter bet her  a lobster dinner that before a year was out, Gourmet would request the  recipe, putting both of them on a wider culinary map. If that came to  pass, Greenie would surrender to the vagaries of fleeting fame, but right  now the business ran as smoothly as she could have hoped. She had a  diligent assistant and an intern who shopped, cleaned up, made deliveries,  and showed up on time. The amount of work they all shared felt just right  to Greenie; she could not have taken an order for one more tiny éclair  without enlarging the enterprise to a degree where she feared she would  begin to lose control. Alan said that what she really feared was honestly  growing up, taking her lifelong ambition and molding it into a Business  with a capital B. Greenie resented his condescension; if Business with a  capital B was the goal of growing up, what was he doing as a private  psychotherapist working out of a back-door bedroom that should have  belonged to George, who slept in an alcove off their living room meant for  a dining room table? Which brought up the subject of George: was Alan  unhappy that Greenie’s work, on its present scale, allowed her to spend  more time with their son than a Business with a capital B would have done?    “Delegation,” said Alan. “It’s called delegation.”    This was the sort of bickering that passed too often now between them, and  if Greenie blamed Alan for starting these quarrels, she blamed herself for  plunging into the fray. Stubbornly, she refused to back down for the sake  of greater domestic harmony or to address the underlying dilemma. The  overlying dilemma, that much was clear. Through the past year, as Greenie  began to turn away clients, Alan was losing them. His schedule had  dwindled to half time, and the extra hours it gave him with George did not  seem to console him.    Alan, two years away from forty, had reached what Greenie privately  conceived of as the Peggy Lee stage in life: Is That All There Is? Greenie  did not know what to do about this. She would have attacked the problem  head on if the sufferer had been one of her girlfriends, but Alan was a  man, chronically resentful of direction. When he was with friends, his  argumentative nature was his strength, a way of challenging the world and  its complacencies, but in private—alone with Greenie—he fell prey to  defensiveness and nocturnal nihilism. She had known this before they  married, but she had assumed this aspect of his psyche would burn off,  under the solar exposure of day-to-day affection, like cognac set aflame  in a skillet. Next year they would be married ten years, and it had not.    In their first years together, she had loved the wakefulness they shared  late at night. After sex, Alan did not tumble into a callow sleep, the way  most men claimed they could not resist doing. Like Greenie, he would be  alert for another half hour or more. They would talk about their days,  their dreams (both sleeping and waking), their notions on the fate of  mankind. When it came to worldly matters, the voice of doubt would be  Alan’s—mourning or raging that genocide would never end, that presidents  would never be moral, that children would always be abducted by men who  would never be caught—but he was invariably passionate, and back then,  Greenie saw hope in that passion. He loved Greenie expressively,  eloquently, in a way she felt she had never been loved.    When they had been sleeping together—or not-sleeping together—nearly every  night for a month, she asked, “Why do you suppose we’re like this? Why  can’t we just go to sleep, like the rest of the exhausted people around  us?” They were lying in Alan’s bed, in the never-quite-dark of a city  night.    He said, “Me, I think too much. Not a good thing.”    “Why? Why is that not good?”    “It wears down your soul. It’s like grinding your spiritual teeth,” he  said. “Dreaming is the healthy alternative. Even nightmares once in a  while. Sometimes a nightmare is like a strong wind sweeping through a  house.”    Greenie had noticed early on that first thing every morning, often before  getting out of bed, Alan wrote his dreams in a leather book the size of a  wallet. “What about me?” she said. “Do I think too much?”    “Not you.” He pulled her closer against his side. “With you, I can only  imagine that some part of your waking soul just can’t bear to see another  magnificent day in the life of Greenie Duquette come to an end.”    “That’s very poetic,” said Greenie, “but it’s malarkey.”    “When I’m with you,” he said, “I love not getting to sleep.” He kissed her  and kissed her, and then they did fall asleep. The next day, on the phone  with her mother, she said she’d met an incredible man, that she had fallen  in love. Her mother teased her that it wasn’t the first time, and Greenie  said yes, this was true, but she had a hunch it would be   the last.    Consistent with all the evolutions and revolutions of married life, their  wakeful late-night musings came to an end when they had George. In those  early months, starved of sleep, their thinking selves would plummet toward  oblivion once they lay down. But Alan still slept so lightly that he was  nearly always the first to rise and comfort George when he cried. By the  time Greenie stumbled to consciousness, there was her baby, in his  father’s arms, being soothed until she was ready   to nurse. Alan’s only complaint was that waking up so often and so  urgently made it hard for him to remember his dreams. Along with   so many other habits once taken for granted, the little book went by the  wayside. Now Greenie wondered if Alan had needed it more than she  understood.    Greenie could not point to a specific moment when Alan’s sober but  passionate view of the world might have tipped into a hardened pessimism,  and she reminded herself that he was still a loving, patient father—but  what if that pessimism was genetic? Could it lie dormant in George?    When the loaves and cakes she had baked sat cooling on racks, Greenie  filled the larger sink with all the loaf pans and whisks, cups and spoons  and mixing bowls. Sherwin would show up later to wash them, but Greenie  wiped down the counters herself, several times a day. She had made this  place—an old boiler room in the basement of a nondescript tenement  building—into her private kingdom. Around the perimeter, the walls and  cupboards were white, the countertops made of smooth, anonymous steel, but  the linoleum tiles that Alan had helped her lay on the floor were gladiola  red. The only windows ran along the ceiling at sidewalk level: wide yet  narrow, like gunports in a bunker. Sometimes, organizing bills or  tinkering with recipes, Greenie sat on a stool at the butcher-block island  and watched the ankles passing by these windows. Now and then a dog  pressed its face between the bars against the glass, spotted her and  wagged its tail. Greenie would smile and wave before the dog was yanked  along on its way. She came to recognize the neighborhood regulars: the  aging black Lab with the heavily salted muzzle, the twin pugs with their  Tammy Faye mascara, the Irish setter who marked the windows with his  wayward tongue. Sometimes dog faces were the only ones she saw for hours.  Even toddlers were visible only up to the hems of their shorts or jackets.  Walter was the one person who would lean down, knock on a pane, and give  her an upside-down grin, The Bruce right there beside him.    She would know that spring had arrived when green crept into her  rabbit’s-eye view, as the small plots of earth around the trees in front  of the building filled with hardy weeds or the floral attempts of  residents longing in vain for gardens of their own. (The dogs were no help  there.)    Just below the windows, Greenie had hung her copper and stainless-steel  bowls, in pairs. It was a minor joke she still enjoyed: displayed this  way, they looked like pairs of great armored breasts, the warrior bosoms  of Amazons, of Athena, Brunhilde, and Joan of Arc. Count me in! Greenie  told herself while inspecting her private battalion. 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