A Regular Guy

  Frank’s grandfather left too. He was the second Wu to come to California and had lived all his life in a Chinatown residence hotel. His father had laid ties on the Central Pacific Railroad.

  “No, Frank, listen to me. He didn’t have any use for ours either.”

  The refrigerator began to hum again, covering their voices. When Frank came to say goodbye, he shook Olivia’s hand.

  “We’d love to see you sometime,” she said. “Just sit across a table and have some supper.”

  “That Frank gave me blood,” Nora said an hour later, while Olivia sat at the kitchen table, giving her a manicure.

  Olivia had never had her own mother to herself like this.

  Olivia wasn’t the first girl to come to Nora’s kitchen, bearing flowers stemmed in wet paper towel and tinfoil, carrying a washed-out jar, wanting to know about Owens. It had started already when he was in high school. At seventeen, Mary di Natali had come as a girl goes to a mother superior, asking to be let in.

  Other girls arrived too over the years. Nora didn’t mind much. Each of them was polite, acknowledging Nora’s position. It was these girls, she knew, who remembered her birthday and coaxed him to behave like a son. Every one of them nudged his generosity. Nora appreciated those girls. But she understood that Olivia was the last. She hoped, for this reason, he’d marry her. Olivia would be the last to know his mother.

  On a day that felt like the culmination of a long job together, Nora told Olivia and Karen the story of the chicken.

  Owens had had a chicken.

  “I don’t know anymore how he got it,” she said. “I s’pose somebody gave it to him around Easter, and this one just didn’t die. It started out a baby chick and grew up into a chicken.”

  “Them next door had coops,” Arthur added. He was at home, ready to put in his two cents. “The older boy sold eggs on the paper route.”

  “And everywhere Owens went,” his wife continued, “that chicken went too. That chicken loved him. They were together probably a year, he and that chicken. At night, the chicken slept next to his bed. And when he went around the neighborhood, he shoved that chicken in an old yellow coffee can and stuck it on his wagon.”

  Arthur laughed, or coughed. “That was the year we put in them sliding glass doors.”

  Nora looked up at him. “And was that ever a lot of work. But they didn’t have screens, so we were always telling Tommy to close the door behind him. You know, the bugs got in. And one day I was in the kitchen and I saw him going out the back door, that chicken following behind his legs, and he closed the door and cut the head right off his chicken. I ran and scooped it up in my apron because I was so afraid of him seeing at that age. But he kept on walking into the yard. He never turned back and looked, and he never asked about that chicken again.”

  “Never once asked,” Arthur added.

  Arthur and Olivia were drinking coffee that day. Nora couldn’t stand the taste anymore; no matter what they did, it was bitter to her. But she still loved the smell.

  The three of them sat for a long time looking out the sliding glass doors. A spring wind blew iris heads and papery poppies.

  Nora whispered, “Besides Pony, you’re the nicest girl I know.”

  Olivia felt a grin growing on her face: the happiness that makes everything want to end. Nora liked her better than Karen.

  Finally, bracing herself, Olivia asked Nora if she thought Owens loved her.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said, turning around, his lips tight and eyes alive. Olivia had believed the two things at once for so long that she recognized a clear truth: what that meant, not to know—but then Nora touched her arm. “He does; I can tell. A mother knows.”

  Jane sat at the little desk and then lay on the small bed. It was a boy’s bed, decorated with cowboys. I wish we could take it home, she thought. A bedroom set was one of the things she’d never had.

  Olivia had brought her along, but only as a helper. She hadn’t told Nora who she was. Earlier, Jane had heated Karen’s oil, and now she sat in his old bedroom, folding the laundry, making the socks into balls. But she wanted to be with them, to look at her grandmother. I’d tell her myself, she thought, just whisper it. Really, Jane was afraid to tell. She wanted her grandmother to take her hand and say, “I know you. I know who you are.”

  When she finished the laundry, she snuck out into the hall. Arthur and Nora were putting the dry dishes away in the kitchen.

  “What are you doing,” Arthur said, “telling her what you don’t even believe yourself?”

  Nora sighed. “Give him the benefit.”

  Olivia stepped out of the bathroom and ran up to Jane in the hall. “I almost forgot about you.”

  When Nora thanked Olivia for bringing her little helper, she didn’t really look at Jane. And Jane knew that was her one chance. In bed that night, she wondered if his real mother would have recognized her.

  Once, Karen made a silly hopeful mistake. They’d gone out to a movie—Karen, Dave, Olivia, Owens, Noah, Huck and some other people they knew then. And in the gravel parking lot, Owens had thrown his head back and laughed at a joke Karen made. His hand accidentally touched her arm, and she felt rough prickles. Even though Owens was with Olivia and she was with Dave, Karen felt he’d noticed her and esteemed her.

  Of course, she had interpreted too much. Only a woman unused to love would rely on such small gestures, having no experience of the persistence of seduction, its unmistakable character. But Olivia was new to Owens and he was generous with love, giving off parts of it, like sparks from a torch. One of those burns fell on Karen.

  After the movie, they’d all gone out for ice cream. The group clustered in chairs at the front of the small parlor, then Karen slipped outside with the key to the bathroom in the alley. From there, she overheard laughter in the parking lot.

  “But she seems really old.”

  Karen felt, with horror, that Owens was talking about her. She pressed against the dark wall and waited for the terror to unwind.

  “No she doesn’t. We’re the same age; she’s two months younger,” Olivia answered. “She’s pretty, I think.”

  “Really? I don’t think she’s at all attractive.”

  Karen stiffened, going back into the noisy shop. She could not let them see that she knew. She still needed a bathroom.

  Early on a hot Sunday morning, Owens was packing. He poured his shampoo into one of the small plastic bottles made for hikers. He had the perfect garment bag—so thin it held only one suit. He packed shoes, socks, underwear, three new white shirts, still folded in their plastic, and four ties. At the top, he put his CD player and headphones. He would fly in jeans.

  Then the phone rang, and it was over.

  His father’s voice was low and slow. “About nine-thirty, nine-thirty-five,” he said. “You go ahead and tell Olivia. I’ve got to call Pony.”

  The first call he made was not to Olivia but to his secretary, Kathleen, who was out running, her husband said. She needed to call the White House and cancel.

  He’d been wearing a tee shirt, but now he changed because he didn’t know what would be necessary. On the winding road, two girls on horseback blocked the way. He waited for them to steer the animals across. One of the girls reined the huge beast harshly; its astonishing head tried to rove and circle, skimming the sky. It was an ordinary, glittering, California summer day, light falling through the trees. The girls’ bare legs were white and thin, draped over horses.

  You died on a day that was for no one else different. Girls woke up and pulled on shorts to ride.

  He thought of Hirohito’s funeral, the thousands of umbrellas. Churchill’s. You had to hope for a day commensurate, or maybe not. Maybe it was best that those who grieve grieve alone—or not grieve but go on with their lives so the faint trace would rise up unbidden through their years like the scent of long-fallen apples.

  Boys ran and then slammed into the lake, at the end of the day when there was wind, the sun a last twist o
n the surface. In the water were pockets of warm you found and lost again. When they climbed out, they wore only tee shirts and it was cold down the hill, his jaw and teeth chattering. Running, he tore at leaves to slow him. Trees on the hills where they lived were not old then. Handelman had planted them.

  A hundred times she’d waited inside the kitchen door and, after his streak of cold collided into her open wingspan, cocooned him in towel.

  Every day and every night he knew her. The way on the bottoms of her shoes it was lighter for her five toes and heel, like an animal’s footprint. A dry rag always hung over the sink spout.

  “Last educational degree?” the young woman requested.

  “What does it matter?” Owens said.

  “We need it for the certificate.”

  “She finished high school.” Arthur said this as an accomplishment; he himself hadn’t. “And then she took college courses from time to time, at night.” He opened a folder in which he’d brought her diploma, encased in tissue and cardboard.

  Owens thought of his stacks of magazines, plaques, commendations, and vowed to go home and throw it all out.

  Then the woman led him and his father to a vast room where they displayed the caskets. They were extremely ugly, Owens noticed. Several seemed to be made of brushed metal. The wooden ones were polished, with satin interiors. And they were all incredibly expensive. Owens stopped before a particularly egregious example. “Why would people buy something like this?”

  The young woman shrugged. This unnatural patience seemed to be part of her job. “A lot of people choose them,” she said, “for the hardware.”

  His father stood before each one, holding his hands together, as the woman explained the special features. He finally settled on the least bad box, made of pine. It was also the least expensive.

  “Don’t you think we should just go home,” Owens asked, “and make one ourselves?”

  “We can buy this for her,” his father said, and Owens let him pay.

  Silvery olives and low fruit trees hummed in the distance. “You see this,” Owens said. “Auburn was all like this once.”

  “When we were young,” Mary added. She alone wasn’t dressed in black. Eli wouldn’t come. She’d tried to keep Jane still during the ceremony, but now she was cartwheeling over the smooth lawn.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I wonder how long this’ll stay here.”

  “Forever,” Mary said. “It’s a cemetery.”

  “Just think a minute. There aren’t any cemeteries in San Francisco anymore. Or new ones in Manhattan. It’ll stay here until the land gets too valuable, then they’ll plow under and start building.” He stood in his best black suit, one pant leg dragging on the grass. “And that’s probably all right. They should stick around for a couple generations, as long as people who remember them are alive, and after that it doesn’t really matter.”

  Mary stood with her keys in her hand. Owens hadn’t invited her to whatever was after, but neither had he asked her not to come. “I’m leaving,” she said. “Should I take Jane, or do you want her?”

  The cut-glass dish was divided in two: bright-yellow mustard on one side, mayonnaise on the other. “That’s just like her,” Owens said. To Jane’s surprise, he joined the small line around the table and made himself a Swiss cheese sandwich.

  She wandered to the den, where pictures of her father from magazines and newspapers covered the walls. A picture of him and a young Chinese man getting a trophy hung next to the trophy itself. On the other side was a citation naming Colleen Owens the Most Valued Employee of Red Owl Grocery.

  Owens kept ending up next to his sister, and every time, they hugged sideways. He seemed oddly deferential to many of the people here, a way Jane had never seen him be. And right now, she missed her mother. Since Christmas, Mary always seemed to fall into a bad mood when Owens took Jane off without her.

  Jane followed him down to the basement. “Look at this,” he said, once he noticed her. “This is my dad’s workbench. This was the spot he made for me.” A three-foot rectangle at the end, painted orange.

  “What are these?” Jane said, pointing at a bulletin board with forty or fifty small snapshots, each of a different car.

  “Oh, those are all the cars he worked on. He used to ask the people if, once he fixed it, he could use it one night to take his wife out. So a lot of Saturday nights they’d drive off in some Cadillac or Lincoln he’d just fixed, all waxed and polished. He’d go to the backyard and clip a rose and put it next to her on the seat. He’s a pretty romantic guy.”

  Then Owens moved to a slim bureau of drawers, running his hands over the top. “He made this.”

  Jane had to go to the bathroom, so she ran back up. It was locked and she waited, and a minute later, a woman came out.

  “You’re Jane, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I remember you. You’re Pony.”

  “I thought you were.” The woman’s hand fluttered. “I feel like we’re related somehow.”

  “You’re my aunt.”

  Pony giggled. “I guess I am, even if we don’t know each other that well.”

  Stepping inside the bathroom, Jane gazed into the mirror. People were always telling her she looked like him, so of course he was her father. Pony hadn’t said that, though, and Jane could see why. His sister had the same black eyes and looked much more like him than she did.

  Olivia stood in her stocking feet, scraping plates for the dishwasher. She looked out the window at red bush tips and thought: Nora died believing her son was invincible. She would never see him falter or fail. That was true of her own mother too. She’d believed bitterly that all the world’s gems were waiting in a basket for Olivia.

  “Shep and I went to high school together,” Owens was explaining to a group at large. “Are you around to just have dinner sometime?”

  “Anytime,” Shep said. “We’d love to.” He took out a pen from his shirt pocket and painstakingly wrote out three numbers on a piece of paper. “In fact, we’re having some of the old gang over two weeks from Friday.”

  Jane took note of the date, writing it down on her palm the way she’d seen her father do.

  Olivia walked with Karen up the path to the small lake where Owens and his friends had swum as boys. They stood at the top and looked down. When they went back, Karen would get in her car and drive home to make Dave dinner.

  Olivia again tried to pay her, and Karen again refused. There was love between the two women, but also grit. Karen couldn’t completely forgive her friend for choosing a man who didn’t value her. Their lots in life were different because of one simple enormous thing.

  When she went down, Olivia ran zigzag, arms out to the sides, holding her high heels.

  Karen walked slowly, with a stick, taking a long time.

  They all had their seat belts on when Owens got out of the car and said, “I need to go in and talk to my sister a minute.”

  Olivia sighed. She had to think of a gift for Karen, some luxury. In the warm car, she taught Jane how to French braid. They took turns doing each other’s hair while they waited.

  “Hon?” Owens said when he came back to the car. “I think we should check in on Pony every week or so. Make sure I do that, okay?”

  He had never promised, but now, they understood, he would take care of Pony for the rest of her life.

  Owens’ bag was already packed for the red-eye to Washington, D.C. But at home, he took his clothes off and changed into jeans, then burned his old papers and awards in a fire he built outside in a can.

  “I never did get paid for that,” Karen Croen would say, later, to other people. But she was glad to have done it, for Olivia and for Nora. Still, he’d hired her without ever paying, and that was the truth, a monument standing somewhere in the world.

  What was he like before?

  Karen Croen knew. He was the same and always would be.

  Matisse

  For the first time he could remember, Owens planned a summer day in the city
without business. There was a traveling exhibit at the art museum he wanted to see. As an afterthought, he asked Noah Kaskie to come along.

  Years before, Owens had become rich on paper. The money was in stocks and in a bank, generating interest but still, strictly speaking, on paper. The first purchase he made, long before the house or the cars, after only a gift to his parents, was a painting. He wanted to buy a Matisse. Through Alta’s one museum, he obtained the name of a woman in the city. Wearing black eyeglasses, she led him through numerous galleries.

  At the time, Owens was quiet during discussions about art, hampered by a sense of what he hadn’t studied. But he knew what he knew, and he’d always loved Matisse.

  The woman, Celeste, spoke to him about investing in the young, the importance of getting in on the ground floor. “Of course, you know about that,” she said.

  “You don’t understand,” he told her. “I don’t want to invest. I don’t even want to collect. I want to buy a Matisse. Just one. That’s all.”

  “Okay,” the woman agreed, gamely. “We can work on that.”

  For the next year, she sent Polaroids to Auburn of drawings, paper cutouts and paintings in upcoming auctions or vulnerable private collections. Whenever Owens could, he found and studied larger reproductions in books. Finally, he saw the painting: a woman on a balcony. Waiting, but settled too strongly in life to be much changed by whatever it was she was waiting for. He bought it from a family in Cincinnati.