A Regular Guy

  “Don’t give me that. Come here, let me show you something.” Owens opened the passenger door of his car and reached in to open the glove compartment. “There must be ninety checks in there. See, I don’t cash them.”

  “Why not?” Jane said, incredulous.

  “Too much time. Not worth all the bookkeeping.”

  Noah laid his check on top of the car. “Well, cash this one.” This whole scene embarrassed him. When he subtracted the amount of the check from his register, he had a hundred seventy dollars left. He would count the money gone, and if the check wasn’t returned in his next statement, he’d give Owens cash.

  Jane opened and closed the glove compartment as Owens drove her home. Among the checks she found five dollar bills and a crumpled piece of paper with “Bob Shepard” written on it, and three phone numbers, one marked office, one marked home, one marked mom’s place.

  “You know, I actually do have a ring,” Owens said. “If you look in the back left corner, under those checks, you’ll see a little box. My mom left it to me in her will. I thought she was buried with it, but a few months ago my dad gave me this and said she wanted me to have it.”

  Jane opened the box and there it was, what they’d been looking for all day. She slipped it on her finger, and it fit.

  “Let’s see. I think that’s nicer than all the ones we saw today.”

  Jane agreed.

  “I’d have to have it made bigger. It’s too small for her.” Jane slid the ring off and replaced it in the box. “Can I have some of those checks?”

  “No, you may not,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re not yours.”

  “They’re yours but you don’t want them.”

  “That’s right. They’re mine but I don’t want them. That doesn’t make them yours.”

  The child at that time was worth more than one million dollars. Eliot Hanson had pointed out the need for arrangements. And of course that made sense, in case something happened to Owens. And so his compromise in the awkward matter of his love, which was at odds with his values, was to leave her money in the material world, on paper, but at the same time to let her think she’d get nothing and would have to work for a living, the way he had.

  “You have so much, but you won’t give anything away even if you don’t need it.”

  He looked at her as if examining an odd, perhaps alien, creature. “I give things away.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, Noah’s van, for example. I bought him that.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jane said, biting at the skin on her knuckle. “What made you?”

  “I was driving along one day—he didn’t see me—and I watched him getting on a bus.”

  Noah came to the conclusion he always eventually arrived at after an episode of envy: the only thing to do was work harder. He decided he didn’t know enough, a conviction he had periodically. This time, it was history. He sent away for a twelve-volume history of the world.

  Noah had attended ordinary public school. His fifth-grade teacher had told everyone in the class to make a taped-together banner showing two centuries of births and deaths and discoveries, connected with dots. Noah was so late with it that the teacher called his mother. She helped him with the time line, pointing with her fingernail on the kitchen table; he remembered her standing there watching while he drew and marked, reading passages aloud from the World Book.

  He turned it in the next day, folded like a fan. The teacher made two students hold the ends of Noah’s time line, saying it was the best one and probably deserved an A, the only A, except that it had been turned in three weeks late. His feeling of glory lasted less than a minute, pride turning to shame. His time line had been marked D in red.

  Now he wanted to paint a time line on a wall in his lab. “I don’t know what was being written in Asia at the time of Shakespeare,” Noah told his graduate students, “or anything about Africa when Darwin sailed in the Beagle. Or during the Russian Revolution, what exactly was happening in Latin America? And what was going on in the rest of the world besides Holland during the seventeenth century? Everything I know is scattershot. So I’m going to draw the basic outline, and I’d like you guys, whenever you learn something, to just mark it down so we can all benefit.”

  “Do you want vaccines and elements?” Louise asked. “That kind of detail?” Louise was now developing mutants that could be neighbors to their mutant. She was also sick and occasionally crying. She and Andy Ruff had broken up for good. She’d moved a sleeping bag, an electric kettle and a suitcase of clothes into the lab.

  Noah started reading his history of the world while they waited for data. He jotted notes, making his students anxious with all those little scraps of incidental knowledge he intended to place on one clear line.

  “After all,” he said, “who ever heard of an uneducated Jew?”

  “You’re not,” Louise said, passing with slides to show him.

  “I know little bits of things, but I don’t have the and-thens.” The only museum in Alta showed Indian pottery and the baby teeth of the founders’ children. And Owens’ Matisse.

  He painted the actual line in the middle of the night, while Louise slept on the couch. He’d bought twenty markers in five different colors. Reds would be political upheavals, revolutions, the deaths of presidents and kings. Blues were cultural events, books, paintings, symphonies. Yellows were scientific advances, and greens were births and deaths of famous people. Purple he’d bought just for Louise, for minor details.

  That night, Owens told Kathleen how depressed he was about the razor and its word of mouth.

  “But people are talking about NT12 that way too,” she claimed. “They really are.”

  He had always had sales. Sales he’d taken for granted, expected, almost scorned. They were shooting for something higher. Now he found himself in the odd position of working day and night, begging for something he’d said and believed he didn’t care about.

  Popularity, gem of carelessness. Perhaps impossible to will back.

  It occurred to Owens that he avoided sharing his doubts with Olivia, for fear of the smile that was an I-told-you-so and an unspoken sympathy for the other side. Kathleen’s enthusiasm was unalloyed. But he didn’t quite believe in it.

  He had known when Genesis was rising; he could feel its ascent within him.

  The only way he knew how to fight was with grim work. Few people could outlast Owens’ will.

  Shoes

  Jane grew up believing her father could have been governor if she hadn’t stolen his shoes.

  There were things about him that only certain people knew. Susan and Stephen knew because they had to replace his dry-cleaned clothes in his closets. His girlfriends knew, and there had been two between Mary and Olivia. Each of these women had been awarded a small house through a lawyer, involving papers they signed after the breakup, promising never to tell his secrets. Both women later married, and Jane liked knowing that deep in the night in their beds in those smaller-than-his houses, his secrets were being whispered, slowly disseminating into the world.

  Girlfriends came, were romanced, and went, each taking with her some stern compensation—property—and a set of the chin, to be carried the rest of her life, when she would be wiser, grimmer, less young.

  But Jane knew his secrets too, and for nothing. One of his peculiarities was the shoe room. His feet were unusually long and quadruple narrow, and his arches rose too high. He usually had his shoes made for him. But if he found a pair that fit, he’d order ten or twenty extra. There was a room full of just the shoe boxes. This was the kind of detail he intended to keep out of the papers, but he told Jane because it was a pleasure to show his overall good sense and economy.

  Jane did what she did before the Berkeley speech because she knew about the shoes.

  The night before, they’d eaten dinner at his dining room table. He’d opened a bottle of wine he hadn’t liked and then another one, whi
ch he said was extremely fine. He let her try a sip.

  “Children in Europe drink wine,” he said, then put his glass down. “This wine is thirty years old. But this table is almost four hundred years old. This table was around during Shakespeare’s lifetime.”

  “Yeah, but Shakespeare wouldn’t have had a table like this,” Jane said. “Shakespeare wasn’t rich.”

  “No, he wasn’t rich. But this wasn’t a rich person’s table. It’s a very simple table, and that’s why I like it. It could’ve been in Shakespeare’s parents’ kitchen.”

  “I guess so. But in Shakespeare’s time there were probably rich people who had tables from somebody else’s kitchen hundreds of years before that, and Shakespeare probably had a table just like the one my mom and I have, that came from the same place everyone else’s did.”

  “You’re right, Jane,” Olivia said.

  Owens lowered his head. “What is this—Jump on Dad Day?” Nobody said anything for a few minutes, then he asked, “Do you know who William Faulkner is?”

  “No.” Jane wished she did. She almost said yes, but then he’d ask who, and she had no idea.

  “He was a very great American author. And he told his daughter, once, probably when she was being a brat, ‘Who remembers Shakespeare’s daughter?’ ”

  “Who says you’re Shakespeare?” Jane said. “Maybe you’re Shakespeare’s father.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “What?” His face opened, perplexed; he truly did not get the joke.

  “Never mind.”

  He told them about vintages then, and the vintage of the year Jane was born was no good or at least not anything special. Nineteen sixty, on the other hand, Olivia’s year, was awesome.

  Then it was morning, and Jane ran downstairs, squeezed oranges and put on oatmeal. But Owens said he was fasting.

  He was driving up to Berkeley himself, in his low-to-the-ground car. She was scheduled to take the bus with everyone else. When Olivia had offered to drive, he said he wanted them on the bus. Olivia hadn’t even slept there. “I can’t afford to have a fight,” he said. “And given our odds, the chances of that happening are pretty good.” The bus would leave the Exodus parking lot at nine sharp. The cooks were going to drive her there.

  “I’m ready,” she said. “I could come with you.”

  “I think I need to be alone this morning.”

  She just wanted to be with him in the car, pushing that lever to make the seat tilt back. She would’ve been quiet and left him alone. She always had.

  The sky this morning was a pale blue, steady as far as you could see, with bulky white clouds. The columns of neat trimmed palms and shaggy sycamores already cast pure navy shadows. He stood outside the house like a traveler, holding his suit bag and his shoes.

  “Good luck today,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking out at the distant mountains. At moments that seemed important, he believed there was something to be learned from nature. He stood there trying to be humble. A plain moth fluttered near his hair.

  “Come up on stage after and find me.”

  In his dressing room, Kathleen poured fresh pomegranate juice. She was tall and ready-handed, and in the last two weeks Owens had found it very hard to keep from comparing her to Olivia.

  Though she was twenty-six, a college graduate and married, Kathleen seemed to him unspeakably innocent. He was pretty sure she’d slept only with the one guy. From the wedding picture on her desk, he guessed there was fondness but no great passion. Her husband had a mustache and the beginnings of a belly, a salesman kind of guy.

  She took his bag and hung the garments up, smoothing the good fabrics with the flat of her hands a little longer than for the clothes, then set the shoes on the closet floor.

  Where was Olivia, he wondered. She could be here this morning with juice.

  The bus hadn’t left at nine sharp. The driver had a list, and quite a few people were not there yet. So the bus waited in the empty parking lot. Exodus was closed for the day, because everyone was going to be in the audience. They’d hired temps to answer phones. Down the road, at Genesis, spangles of light twisted off the tops of cars. For everyone else, it was a plain Wednesday.

  Jane stood on the blacktop, one shoe scratching an itch. It was strange to be out of school at this hour. This was the first day she’d missed since she started. In the mountains, she’d been absent all the time for no reason at all, but down here she wanted her attendance record to be perfect. Still, Owens had told her this was important, and his father and his sister were already on the bus, facing forward.

  Just then, Owens’ father unfolded out of the door. He seemed like a sheriff, very tall, his mouth crossed with lines. He had on an open-collar shirt, like the boys at school wore. All the men up in the mountains had dressed like him, but Jane wasn’t used to that anymore.

  “What do you think about Olivia?” he said.

  “Maybe she decided to drive.”

  “Told me we were leaving at nine and she’d be here. But it’s nine-thirty! I don’t know what to do and neither does the bus driver. Man’s got a job. I don’t blame him.”

  “I could call, I guess.” A pay phone wavered at the end of the lot. The diagonal walk in early heat seemed like wading in clothes through water. Jane understood she could save Olivia, but she didn’t want to. If she did, no one would remember, but if she didn’t, would they count it and blame her? Jane’s fingers punched the numbers. Maybe Olivia was already driving, but Jane knew she wasn’t. Jane could leave her in the warm silence and change the day and ever after.

  “ ‘Lo.” Olivia’s voice curved, hollow with sleep.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Oh, my God. Thank God you called, Jane. Just go on without me. I have to take a shower. I’ll drive up.”

  “Did you get a new dress?” Jane had heard Owens say she’d better buy one.

  “New enough. What are you wearing, Jane?”

  “My uniform.”

  Jane’s mom had a new dress, but not for today. They’d bought it together to cheer her up. It had cost ninety-four dollars. She was meeting Jane there. She had an appointment with her orthodontist this morning, and if she canceled she’d have to wait another six weeks. She was in a hurry to get her teeth straight and on with her life.

  The bus still arrived forty-five minutes early, the way Owens liked his plans to work. And when Olivia raced in through the backstage entrance—her deep smile bordering on apology—he threw his arm around her all the same. He whispered that there were seats saved for family in the first three rows.

  Everyone wanted Jane, and there was a fuss over whom she sat next to. Olivia scootched her hand open and closed and then talked with her chin down, her voice slurring all motherly. And then her grandfather strode over and whispered, “She wants to sit down front, we got a place.”

  One place, Mary noted; he has his nerve. “I think I’ll keep her here by me,” she said. When she was pregnant, he’d told people she was the town pump. And now he wanted her daughter for the front row.

  Jane was the only child here. People nudged to point her out. Now she wanted to hold her mother’s hand because of what she’d done.

  She’d done it fast, and it had come to her like an inspiration. Olivia had waved and asked if she wanted to see Owens. And she’d said yes and not turned back to her mother, who felt looked at without her.

  There was a door and a man in a uniform. For a second, Jane thought of her mother, the two of them standing holding hands before a closed door. But with Olivia, she went right through to the other side. People she’d seen at his office walked around holding clipboards.

  In his dressing room, her father had seemed calm. He was wearing suit pants and a white shirt, no tie or jacket. He hugged Jane without looking at her, then wandered out to the hallway. Jane realized her mother was right about Owens, his faults and his talents: both were true, just outsized. He was like Mount Rushmore, so big.

  But he was to
o big. Jane wanted to be felt, like putting a pin in a huge balloon.

  The room was quiet, except for the noise of Kathleen peeing. Jane’s eyes hit the shoes with their cedar shoe trees. She picked them up and hid them behind some boxes in the closet. Then she went out into the hall, near her father. It seemed maybe nothing had really happened. His hand drifted idly to her hair.

  Kathleen waited at the door of the dressing room, as if she were not allowed out. Her face was all on him, alive. If his head made the slightest turn towards her, everything opened. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose and on her arms. Jane imagined her in a clean kitchen, holding a bowl of cupcake frosting and stirring.

  Owens had told Jane that on a business trip to Washington, D.C., they stayed up until four in the morning, talking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  “Talking about what?” she’d asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he’d said. “About God and what we owe America.” Then he admitted they’d made out, and it was some of the most exciting kissing he’d done in years.

  “But she’s married!”

  “I know. That’s why I’d rather you didn’t tell anybody. I don’t think she’s too happy in her marriage, though.”

  “Who do you love more—Kathleen or Olivia?” He didn’t seem pressed to decide.

  Then it was time for the speech, and nothing happened. Jane believed and didn’t believe it was because of his shoes.

  Waves of tiny noises rippled through the crowd. Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to talk to the men crouching with cameras. Even the balconies were full. “Why do you think they’re late?” she whispered.

  “He’s always late,” Mary said. “He’s always been.”

  “You can tell this is important just from the place.” The ceilings went so high. The seats were wood and rich, soft velvet.

  “They probably just rented it,” Mary said. “But colleges are beautiful. Maybe he’ll have this for you when you get married.”

  Jane knew he wouldn’t. For a wedding he’d want someplace small. Or that cold, bare, rainy mission he liked.