As his five advisers predicted, this provoked a real controversy, during which three hundred holsteins were led into Genesis’ parking lot by angry farmers and bellowed under the conference room’s panoramic window.
“I just don’t think cow’s milk is very good for us,” Owens shouted down, sticking his head out, over the sea of cattle and newspaper photographers. “We’re not calves!”
And as he explained later, it wasn’t the publicity that bothered him, the holsteins, or the three-inch headlines saying LET THEM EAT BEANS! He figured what was right was more important than what was popular and that popularity came at the end, not at the beginning, of honest work. But when he’d started visiting local schools, it occurred to him that there were problems greater than lunch. What seemed to him to work best was Huck’s eighth-grade laboratory classroom, where children sprawled freely on carpeted floors and the teacher came over to supervise, one by one.
Owens believed his first priority, after Genesis, was public education. But he despaired of the cost of changing thousands of schools, already entrenched in miniature military regimes; he didn’t have enough time, or even money. So he hired Henrik Henderson, who’d written the book that Huck’s eighth-grade experiment was based on, to develop a pilot program. Within the year, Owens hoped, school principals up and down the state would be angling for subsidies to abolish order in the classrooms, free the wooden school desks from their regimental rows and scatter them in happier constellations.
He had hired a New York advertising firm to come up with a slogan to explain himself to the papers. He’d answered the questions himself too many times. No, I’m not running for any thing. I’m a businessman. I work for a company called Genesis, in Auburn, California, and I’m also a citizen. A concerned citizen. The copywriters used his own words to produce a slogan, and his public service announcements began: “I don’t have any degrees in education, I didn’t finish college myself, but I’ve got eyes and they work and here’s what I see.”
“How many of you drive Ford Tauruses?” he asked the crowd. “You can’t buy a car like that in the Soviet Union. Well, I’m asking you, where is the school that’s the equivalent of the Ford Taurus? And the answer is, it doesn’t exist because that car is the product of competition, and right now teachers’ unions have a monopoly.”
The teachers, whose salaries and vacations were negotiated by the union, began to stir. Teachers, in general, Jane noticed, were very well behaved.
Afterwards, a man who looked Mexican held out a wrinkled brown bag. “I wanted to show you,” he said, extracting a book, itself enclosed in wax paper. It was a dictionary, in Spanish, with thousands of English words scribbled in pencil. “This was how my father taught himself English. It took him nine years to really know it.”
Owens sat for the next twenty minutes, studying the English words written in soft, blurry pencil on the frail pages, translucent and flaking like insect wings.
“Well, you guys don’t agree on anything,” Jane said, sprawled on a large hotel bed. As Owens changed to jeans, turning into himself again, he’d asked her what she thought of the young woman in the parka. “Besides, if you’re so interested in schools, how come I can’t go?”
“I want to get one working right first. But in about a year, you should be able to go.” He sighed. “There’s some journalist coming here. Oh, so tell me about your friend Julie. Is she really great?”
“I think so. She’s really good at making—I don’t know—occasions. If you have a talk with her, you feel like you’ve almost had a tea ceremony.”
“Would you say she’s neater than Olivia or not as neat?”
“I don’t know. I can’t compare.”
“But if you had to, would you say she’s as beautiful as Olivia, more beautiful than Olivia, or not as beautiful?”
“Maybe as beautiful.”
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow.
“What do you enjoy?” the journalist asked. She had a pointed face and a very small body. More young than pretty, Owens decided. On the phone, she’d had an eager quality that reminded him of Albertine.
Jane sat in the corner at the desk, skimming the Gideons Bible. Their conversation all pertained to business and was dull. She kept thinking of what he’d said about being a college dropout. She didn’t want to be that.
“I like doing things well. I like doing the things I have to do in my life well.” At that moment, he was thinking of the small plastic bottles he’d bought with Jane from a mountaineering shop, to pack their Dr. Bronner’s soap and conditioner in—it was a point of pride for him to pack neatly—but he talked only about scientific applications, how with the information known now the world could already be changed. Jane listened for a minute and then her attention waned. She was thinking, I would know my answer: wind cuffing her neck softly, like it did this morning in the early sun with the top down on their rental car.
“So you’re not trying to discover the secret of life?” the journalist asked.
“The secret of life? The secret of life’s already been found.”
“Don’t you worry about being too lucky?” She mentioned the king whose touch turned everything to gold. “Do you sometimes think the gods might be out to get you?”
Thinking of the five-dollar bills, he said, “Well, maybe that’s where my girlfriend comes in,” and then laughed.
“Is it true that you have political aspirations?”
“I like my job a lot. I can’t think of any other job that would make me want to leave it.”
“Really? You wouldn’t, in a few years, say, consider running for governor? Or something bigger?”
Owens smiled enigmatically. Then the journalist glanced at Jane and asked whether he would encourage young people to follow his example in having children out of wedlock.
“Just to be clear,” he said, basketing his hands, “I’m not running for anything. And if I ever do, it won’t be for canonization. I’d run for some office that’s been held by men who might’ve done a great job for this country or a poor job but, without exception, men who’ve made mistakes. Whether they’ve acknowledged them or not. And I acknowledge my mistakes.”
“Oh, great,” Jane said when the avid young woman left. “It’ll be on the six o’clock news that I’m a mistake.”
The women in his life were not happy with Owens.
He was on television, answering a reporter’s questions in a Martinez apple orchard that had once been owned by John Muir. In the bungalow, Jane and Mary were perched together on the old love seat Julie had lent them, while Owens lay on the floor watching, his face as blankly studious as if it were any other news. Every day now, the California Dairy Council published full-page attacks on him in the newspaper.
What was it exactly that Owens did? Jane often wondered and tried to figure out. Well, he started a company, he and Frank Wu together. They manufactured LCSF and that turned out to be really important. But why? Owens didn’t even discover it. She asked Noah once what was the big deal and he said it was because they’d figured out how to put the protein into bacteria. They used to get insulin from pigs, he said, but people had immune reactions. They got human growth hormone—what they gave dwarfs—from cadavers, but it wasn’t safe to isolate proteins that way. That’s how Balanchine died, Noah said.
Most people knew only that Owens and Frank had started out in his parents’ basement and ended up being millionaires. But sometimes Owens talked about changing the world. And they did, I guess, Jane thought; but doesn’t everything, then, in a way? Like what Noah told her, which she’d never known: that broccoli hadn’t existed, someone made it. Now millions of people, probably even in China, ate broccoli. That made a difference. And in the wintercamp she’d met the great-great-grandchildren of the man who’d invented the zipper lock. Peter’s family was connected with Ex-Lax. Somebody invented paper towels and the toilet and self-defrosting freezers—which would be a miracle to her and her mom since they’d waited too long and now the freezer was so
lid ice. But all those people weren’t on television. They weren’t famous.
When the news turned to weather, Owens suggested they go to the burrito place. It was still light out, and as they walked, Jane’s parents ganged up on her about makeup.
“You’re just too young,” her mother said. “Kids shouldn’t think about these things.”
“You know, Ingrid Bergman never wore makeup,” Owens said. “Or Sophia Loren. Isabella Rossellini doesn’t wear makeup, or just the slightest bit. And Olivia doesn’t wear any at all. Yeah, the most beautiful women in the world don’t wear makeup.”
Kicking a pebble out of her sandal, Mary hated him. Without thinking, she rubbed at her eyes, which had a buff of dark-green shadow and itched. Besides, wasn’t that Rossellini woman in the ads for some cosmetic?
“Well, I’m not even the most beautiful girl on our street, okay?” Jane sputtered as they entered Juan’s Burritos. “And I think I look better in makeup.”
“One of the things I really respect about Olivia is she doesn’t care about her looks. She could go up to the city, you know, buy herself some good clothes, and she could probably end up in the south of France on some yacht.” Owens raised his eyebrows, considering Olivia’s prospects, then turned back to his menu.
Mary was thinking that Olivia didn’t need city clothes. Her boyfriend was wealthier than most of those playboys in France. She was doing pretty well right here, with her jeans.
Just then, Olivia strode in, looking taller than usual. Her hair brushed her elbows, a living entity. She didn’t even say hello, just stood looking at Owens as if nobody else were there.
“What did I do now?” he said.
“You didn’t even call. I told Huck I couldn’t eat with him because I wanted to wait to hear from you first. And you don’t even think to include me. That’s not what people who are involved do, Tom. That’s not how people live together.”
“I’m taking my daughter for a burrito because she was hungry.”
Mary looked down at the table. What was she, a baby-sitter? No one counted her.
“I was not,” Jane mumbled. “You were hungry.”
“But you didn’t think to call and see what my plans were.” Olivia shook her hair and walked out. A minute later, he went out after her.
“I’m still hungry,” Jane announced.
Mary and Jane sluffed up to the counter to order. They were paying anyway. Now that he was gone, Jane ordered beef. Mary sighed. “I think I’m going to stop eating red meat and see how I feel.”
“Don’t expect me to, just because you do,” Jane said. “I like hamburgers.”
By now Jane understood that Olivia was the most beautiful woman in Alta. She was famous, locally, as Noah was for being in a wheelchair. People she’d never met said “Hi, Olivia” when they passed, and she always said hullo back.
And she was even more beautiful than that. When he visited New York or Washington or Tokyo, Owens told Jane, he was invited to dinners with important people, men and, occasionally, a woman or two, who had accomplished something. He admired these women, he said, and Jane asked why he didn’t fall in love with any of them, then. And he said they were generally too old to fall in love with. Once, though, in Paris, a perky millionairess his own age had asked for his hotel room number. “So why didn’t you fall in love with her?” Jane asked.
Not answering, he explained that most of the women he met at these events were along only as accompaniments. Though as a rule they were more put together and done up, none of them was ever more beautiful than Olivia. Still, her accomplishments were of the passive variety, a matter of what she’d not done but easily could have. She probably could be on a yacht or some Greek island. She could definitely at least be in San Francisco, buying a new dress every day. But he only rarely gave her credit, from what Jane could tell. In his book, there were two kinds of people: those who do and those who don’t.
Other people gave Olivia more credit than Owens did, Jane noticed, but that happened in couples a lot. In a town the size of Alta, it was pretty easy to be known for your hair and height. It seemed almost an accident, Olivia still being here. How many girls in America have the looks to be models and never try?
In the ledger of life, there was more than one method of calculation, Jane was figuring out. Whether you counted every success and ignored the failures, or subtracted the failures from the successes, made a difference. Olivia, like Jane’s mom, was cautious: more afraid to do something wrong than not to do anything. Jane noticed that men talked about making a name for themselves and women worried about protecting their good name, as if women had only the one value they were born with and had to keep from tarnishing, while men were given blank slates, on which they could prove their worth. Jane didn’t like thinking this. She already had bad grades from the mountain town school on her record. She wondered where the record was stored, if there was a place she could break into and burn it. She wanted to start out new here, blank at the little pink school. This time, she would make her record be perfect.
Olivia had her bike, so Owens couldn’t catch up running. Half an hour later, he slanted across the lawn, yelling, “I just want you to be proud of me! That’s why I do all this!”
“I’m always proud of you,” she called, and he glimpsed her through the doorway. “But I’m not proud because you’re on the news.”
Owens lay down on the bare floor of his living room, and in a little while Olivia came in and sat beside him. He liked it here, with his head in her lap.
“I feel like I have a responsibility,” he said softly.
“To whom?”
He shrugged. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we go out on the motorcycle?”
Then they were zooming through the hills, unsettling the natural calm. He took the back roads and ended up in Auburn, on his parents’ street. He cut off the engine in the fragrant dark and they leaned against the bike, their feet on the wet lawn.
“See,” he said, “sometimes a small life seems good to me. All these little houses.”
“Who do you think is expecting you to do such great things?”
“Not them, that’s for sure,” he said, looking up to his parents’ house, where all the lights inside were off.
Somehow for Mary it had all come down to fruit. Owens apparently bought Philippine mangoes and yellow blush cherries from Mount Shasta. He had fresh Medjool dates flown in from Indio, still on the branch. He bought the best berries, oversized, in season or out.
“I mean, wouldn’t you think he’d want his daughter to eat the same as he does?”
All this made Julie uneasy. Julie was the person Mary railed to about Owens, but it seemed to her that Mary was hiding behind her daughter, as one would behind a mask. It was simpler to fight for the rights of a small person than to say, I want those big strawberries for myself. And Mary forgot she was talking to someone who ate the average Chiquita banana from the A & P for lunch and didn’t feel deprived. But then Mary whipped her own cream as if it mattered, which Julie understood, on account of her not working. Even in their close friendship, the two women maintained a delicate system of balances.
“And how dare he mention the most beautiful women in the world and include Olivia but not Jane’s own mother? How must that make Jane feel?” Mary asked, even though Jane was sitting right there with them.
It was as if she were afraid to say me. “I’d be offended,” Julie said, “even if Jane wasn’t along.”
“Especially if he’s counting people, not movie stars,” Jane added.
Then Eli slouched in the back door, cupping a small bird in his hand. They all gathered around as he fed it with an eyedropper.
Mary stuttered with embarrassment, introducing Eli to Julie. Mary and Huck went out with Julie and Peter every weekend, but Eli still came most nights, after his band practice. He had to go home every morning to take care of his birds: baby quails he traded at the pet store for bird food, or baby mourning doves he released into the general sky. Pet
er and Julie were always telling her what a great guy Huck was. “Really, oh,” Mary would answer.
Huck came wearing a sweater, his hair down wet from a shower, every Saturday night. “How’re ya doin’,” he’d say when Jane answered the door. “Fine,” she always told him, and then he looked around the room as if he didn’t know what else to ask, even though he was a teacher. He seemed relieved when her mom came in, and he rubbed his palms on the front of his pants. Mary liked it because she felt she was learning things on their dates. He was teaching her to play tennis, for example. And with Huck, her mother said, paying for things was never a problem. She’d leave the house with hardly any money.
Eli was bending over the bird, intent. He placed the soft, breathing ball into Julie’s tentative hands. Mary looked to her friend shyly, as if to ask, Now do you see? He came to Mary like a boy with a broken kite for her to mend.
Julie sighed and excused herself, putting the bird into Mary’s palm. Mary had agreed a hundred times that she should break up with Eli. I have to, she always said, I know I have to. And Julie had wanted to discuss the invitation she’d received that morning to Owens’ birthday party. The truth was she wanted to go.
Dying Young
On a hilltop, in a ballroom, Owens was throwing a thirtieth-birthday party for himself, Noah told Jane and Mary. Like many people, they had reason to be amused. Owens had frequently declared he would not live to see thirty.