Going to sleep, she pretended she had gotten him the canister. She could have; she had the money in her box. She could have unwrapped the damp, soft bills and bought it. Maybe it was the present he would have kept.
Owens recognized the wine collapse of Olivia’s body and the dryness in her mouth. Tonight she was floppy and sharp at the same time. She wanted to sit up straight and talk. And it was a loud, bright night outside, with a veined moon. The final proof of what different vegetarians they were was her drinking. He couldn’t believe he was in love with a woman who drank and smoked.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered in her ear.
“In high school, when people complimented my appearance, I thought they were making fun of me.”
“Why, Olivia?”
“My father was always very critical of us. Someone would say I was pretty, and he’d say, ‘She’s got too much hair on her arms.’ Because he was an artist, maybe, he was always fussing with us, fixing us.”
She had only one picture of her parents: a woodblock her mother had made, both of them young and straight-haired.
“Turn that off,” she said suddenly, pointing. He’d fallen asleep with her four-year-old face frozen on the screen.
Olivia’s great tragedy was her childhood. Her mother, as a girl in Sweden, cried herself to sleep every night in a green-and-ivory bed shaped like a boat. She had pimples and a round face. At fourteen, she vowed to herself and God from her small painted bed that if she ever had daughters who weren’t beautiful, she would drown them at birth. She believed, at fourteen, in the mercy of this.
She had grown up to marry a long-faced, gray-toothed artist who believed she was beautiful. Perhaps he was the only person who had ever found her so, and she was, when she was able, grateful. Owens had studied her picture and saw little resemblance between the woman and Olivia, except the hair. But Olivia’s father loved the slope of his wife’s shoulders down from her neck. “This,” he’d once said, running his knuckle-back down her spine, “is my favorite part of you.” Olivia’s mother had told her many times. “Can you imagine? A back.” And Olivia, from the moment she could walk, was in her mother’s eyes a rare beauty. “She is ordinary,” her father insisted.
And eleven years later, her mother killed herself. Her father lived alone in the hotel where she’d died, in a room smelling of cigars and old laundry. Olivia sometimes saw him lurking in Mitch’s bookstore. He always seemed startled to see her, then he slumped in disappointment. It was because of her hair. She had her mother’s hair.
“I got some pictures of us today, from the party. We look like we’re really in love.”
Her body turned sharp in his arms. She never liked pictures of herself. “We still need to talk about the party.”
“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s just forget the party and go back to being us.”
Her head stilled for a moment. She closed her eyes, rolling in the ship-safety of drunkenness.
Her silk thing from the party hung in the closet; he could see it beyond the open door. It wavered a little in the night breeze.
He thought of something Noah Kaskie once told him: right now he was thirty and he wanted to live.
Mrs. Em Tine, six years retired and fifteen widowed, still woke on a school schedule. So she got up and started her day. She watered plants, paid the bills when there were any, and continued her correspondences. She exchanged letters regularly with two sisters she’d taught with in Auburn.
“Save a dance for me,” he whispered in my ear. That was after the toast. He’d come and made me stand up and they all clapped. But he was busy, I suppose, with the young ones, and we didn’t get our dance. That was too bad.
Mrs. Tine didn’t write that she’d seen him necking with two different girls. She would have liked a chance to fox-trot, and to ask him which girl he liked the best. She had her own favorite—the thinner one, in the pink dress. She seemed more like Mrs. Tine’s own daughters. The other one was just too beautiful.
She had taken the bus home yesterday. She didn’t live in the valley anymore; it had become too expensive after Walter died. The night of the party, she’d stayed in that hotel. The two sisters had offered her a room in Alta, but they went to bed early and she didn’t want to have to leave before all the others did. She’d asked the desk to be sure and deliver her present. He can always use another vase, even if they have one, she thought. Now she just hoped he got it. She expected she’d get a note in the mail any day now.
I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. But guess what I did that night? I got myself a massage. Me! They had a card by the phone saying you could order a massage all night long and they send a person up. They ask you too if you have a preference, woman or man. And I said, definitely it would have to be a woman. She was a young girl, only twenty-five or twenty-six, but was she ever strong. It felt so good. All the way home on the bus, I just felt different.
And then the next morning, I was in the lobby and I ran into Hanson, the lawyer I told you about who found me and invited me and all, and he said, what was I doing there? And I told him the last bus left at nine so I’d stayed. And I said, wasn’t it ever a nice hotel? But he said, no, he hadn’t stayed, he’d just driven up to make sure everything was settled. I guess he’d arranged a lot of the party, and then when I went to check out, they told me my room and the massage and everything was all paid for. They wouldn’t let me give them another cent. So I thought that was nice.
The European Way
Owens liked to drive his car, and that is where he came up against civilization. They took away his license once, he told Jane, so he had to ride his bike to work for a month. And he often ran out of gas. Now this was somebody else’s fault; ever since he’d had money he hired people to manage the material side of life, including filling up the car, but they sometimes screwed up. Before, when he’d shared a car with Frank, he admitted, it frequently ran out of gas.
Tonight the fuel needle was wavering below the quarter-tank mark. Susan and Stephen, his housekeepers, had gone to Bangkok and also planned to travel in Burma and the Philippines. Owens hadn’t really thought about it until then, on the highway, and he didn’t like the idea very much. He thought he could probably get to the city on a quarter tank. He tapped the dashboard. He knew his car pretty well. He thought it’d be close but he could do it.
There were people who didn’t live like this, he realized, people who would certainly stop and fill up the tank, but those people wouldn’t leave for a dinner in the city ten minutes before they were supposed to be there. It was a forty-minute drive, a half hour speeding. Those people wouldn’t speed either.
He sighed. You could live like that. You could leave early, with plenty of time for gas and accidents and bathroom stops, but pretty soon that’s what your day was: bathroom stops.
He knew a guy like that. Todd. He worked at home and couldn’t concentrate until everything in his house was organized. He’d do the laundry, fold it and put it all away. He’d never sit down before three or four o’clock. He lived in a very neat house. Owens had to fire him, and eventually he’d got out of the business altogether. Probably for the best. He was talking about going back to school, to be a nurse. Owens gave him the advice he’d have given anybody: Figure out, if you were going to die in a year, what you would want to have done most. Make that one thing the first thing you do every day and leave the rest for later. Which in Owens’ case was probably never. And if the rest never got done, he could live with it.
Later, Jane sighed, listening to her father talk like this. She knew she was part of the rest.
The thing about Genesis, it could take all he had. For a long time now, Owens had allowed himself one other thing in each day, and that was love or some idea of it. But when he found himself leaving work, he gave it, as if in appeasement, five minutes, ten minutes more. It was almost impossible to leave before dark. The office building was like a communal house, the refrigerator full of whatever the guys liked and Owe
ns’ juices, stereos were rigged into the walls. It felt good to be one of the gang staying late. When he left, he knew he was probably missing something better than what he was going to.
That was one reason he was chronically late. He also canceled. Owens’ eyes for life were bigger than his stomach.
Tonight he was meeting Lita. In the middle of his birthday party, he’d suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to invite her. She was in Berkeley now, studying photography.
He’d met Lita when she was a schoolgirl living with her parents. She was sixteen, curly-haired, coming home every day on a dented school bus. One day when Owens came to see her father, she was raking leaves in her plaid school uniform, and he’d stopped to pick up chestnuts from the ground.
She had been a virgin and had some virginal ways. The three adults sat in triangular chairs drinking coffee, while she played on the floor, making towers with her little sister’s blocks and then toppling them. Another afternoon, he caught her perfecting the outfit for a clothespin doll, and often he saw her bouncing a small brown ball.
But in her room, in the afternoon, she let him undress her on her own bed and lay there trembling, plump and expectant. She was rounder than he’d anticipated, her skin not smooth but marked with childhood cuts and bruises.
He began slowly, his own breath sucked in, a staticky blanket of air between his fingers and her nipples, but by the time he entered her, she was around him, tight and beating, her blood’s noise ringing in his ears. Her chin puckered like a dry apricot, and she wailed something babyish and willful. Afterwards, he’d sat dressed, while she washed the blood from her belly in her bathroom. Sadness overtook him in this small, soft room full of dolls and paper cutouts. He wished he could restore her to her former girlishness, and when he said goodbye, he cupped her chin with a nostalgia.
But the next day, he discovered his damages sealed over by the night. She was the same again, buoyant as her dog, who leapt up against his thighs. Her playfulness returned entirely, and he came back every day, still ambitious to leave his mark.
They’d meet in the late afternoon, before her parents came home and expected her to set the table for supper. He returned to work a little after five, quieted, peaceful in the body, ready for a long night of toil and discovery. Sometimes, eating a sandwich at his desk at nine o’clock, tinkering over questions of science and business, he would look at the dark sky and remember that she was moving through her parents’ house in knee socks, sliding on the thick wood planks, perhaps lying on her belly, doing her homework. A requiem would be playing on the stereo as her father read scientific journals, drinking his transparent grappa. At ten o’clock she would be asleep, in her small bed in the room that smelled of chalk.
No one ever knew. They had never attended a party together or had dinner with anyone except her parents, whom he’d always admired. Her father was a satisfied man. “I don’t own the land,” he used to say. “God owns the land and I’m just holding the lease.” He had been part of the war effort that first purified and manufactured penicillin, “the most temperamental mold I ever knew.” He called himself a prospector, panning not for gold but for microbes from the dirt. At that time, his company paid half the airfare of family vacations and handed out vials for samples. His name was on eighty-four patents, and he himself had been responsible for five best-selling drugs. And Lita was always there, coming home from school, her hair smelling of apples already on the ground.
Once, Owens had asked him, “Do you think I’ll ever discover a drug?”
He’d closed his eyes and mused. “I think you’ll discover something important when you’re very young. But nothing you do after that will ever live up.” In the last year, Owens had often considered this harsh prophecy.
He felt weakness in the gas pedal. Oops, very little left. There was no exit or gas station as far as he could see. He pumped gently, coaxing the car up the hill, then coasting down. He slid into the right lane, alive to every moment, still moving in the now slowed race with other cars. The commute became beautiful, cars small and rich-colored under the deep-blue sky, their headlights lanterns, until his power was gone and he could flap the accelerator panel loosely. He banked on the gravel, got out and crossed his arms. I’ll forget this in a year, he promised himself, walking.
The gas station turned out not to be far, a mile and a half or maybe two. He called the restaurant from the pay phone on the lot. “Guess where I am?” he shouted. “I ran out of gas!” He heard sympathy on the other end of the line. Not Olivia; Olivia would not have been kind. “We all have to put gas in our cars, Owens,” she’d said the last time. “Why is it so much harder for you?”
An old man stood by a truck, with a tall, pointed can of gas. Everything was battered: the truck, the chipped and peeling can. It felt good to let the man drive, the can banging in the back. As they neared the place where he’d stopped, Owens wished it weren’t a sports car. But the man stood impassive, gassing the tank. Owens opened his wallet. “Don’t you want to go back to the station and fill ‘er up? This won’t last you long.” Cold wind, thick with fog, buffed Owens’ neck. Gravel by the side of the road poked his soles. He felt rough and alive, and now he did have time.
When he walked into the soft world of the restaurant, Lita was returning from the rest room and swiveled involuntarily from being watched. He had to smile. She had her hair up in a bun and wore high heels, but she was still round at the middle.
Arms long over the table, he ordered for them both. Then he asked, genuinely curious, what she was doing with her life.
She answered him plainly, and as she described her classes, her semester in Paris, all she’d done in the two years since he’d seen her, he felt himself at a loss. He was so much older, but he’d missed all this; it was something he had not had. His eyes tightened and he was thinking he’d done what he had done because it was great, even crucial, and anyway, he’d been too poor to go to Paris. But it probably looked to Lita as if he was judging her, and she said, “You don’t really respect me, do you, Owens?”
“Of course I do, Lita. A great deal.”
“You know what I am for you?” she said. “I’m your mistress.”
Then it was his turn to take offense. After he’d protested, claiming injury and showing it in his hard eyes, she slowed down to explain, taking his long hand in her round ones. “No, really. Listen to me. I just meant it as a matter of fact. We’re not in each other’s daily lives. And you come to me for sex and—”
“Not just for that, Lita—”
“For romance. I think day-to-day life changes love. It can’t stay high, if you know what I mean. Little frictions develop. Do you ever notice the way people married a long time don’t believe each other?”
“What do you mean?”
“If she says, You get more seasick in the cabin than on deck, he’ll say, No, it’s the opposite, and she’ll say that whatever he thinks, it’s a matter of proved fact. And unless there’s a third person, they’ll never get anywhere. If anyone in the world told my father a war just broke out he’d believe it, unless it was my mother. Then he’d say, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ ”
“I suppose I know what you mean, yes.”
“Or even understanding. I could always listen to your problems and you could to mine, because it didn’t cost us. I think that’s why affairs work in a way marriages can’t. My father listened to his mistress when she spilled coffee on her baby so bad he’ll have burn marks all his life, and he cried with her—with true deep sympathy, no hate in it. But her husband could only half listen to her, knowing it’s his child.”
“Your father had a mistress?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. I never knew that.”
“For a long time.”
“I always remember your parents together. But your dad’s European. I guess there’s a long tradition of that in Europe.”
She laughed. “Try everywhere in the world.”
She politely asked him about business.
Who knows, he told her. NT12 was pretty amazing, but they were waiting on FDA. They had it but they were still having trouble making enough of it cheaply. And the rest of the company was getting pretty bureaucratic. Even Rooney, the guy he’d hired, was going corporate on him. “So we’ll see,” he said.
“You can do it,” she claimed.
“I don’t know. Did it once. We’ll see if I can do it again.”
He walked her to a battered Toyota—he’d never noticed her car before—and kissed her on the forehead, a father’s kiss. Later, he told Jane he was thinking of buying Lita a new car.
It was Jane’s Tuesday. After dinner, they took a walk down a dirt road. Split-rail fences lined a neighbor’s horse pasture. Jane bent down to pick rotting apples out of the long grass and weeds to feed the horses. She was trying to find a good way to ask him about school. It was almost September again, and another year.
Owens asked her not to tell anyone about his dinner with Lita but said that he could trust her because she was blood.
A horse’s soft black lips accepted her offering. “How old was she again when you were together?”
“She was pretty young. Sixteen.”
Jane was almost twelve. “Was she in school?”
“She was in high school.”
Jane was keeping track of Owens’ girlfriends. “Does she know that I exist?” This was the same question she always asked.
Owens had to think for a minute. Lita had never heard about Jane. “You lived far away then,” he said.
“Where were you when we lived in Larkspur?” she’d asked before, her eyebrows an accusation, or: “What about when we were in Mariposa?” They had lived, she and her mother, in thirteen places, and she wanted answers for them all.
The answer that always came to him was, “I was young. I was in my days.”
A horse reared up and cantered across the field. She sighed. “Everyone gets to go to school but me.”