As the minutes passed, Jane got worse and worse. It was becoming irrecoverable, like in a dream, and now there was nothing she could do but clutch the armrests on her chair and wait. They would leave soon, all these people, and he would have missed his best chance because of her.
Then, just like that, her father came out in a spotlight, his same hulking walk, and everyone stood clapping. She felt the warm relief on her chest: you couldn’t harm him if you tried.
But there were some other black shoes on his feet.
“Hello. My name is Tom Owens, and I didn’t go to any school to be governor.”
The crowd was suddenly loud, and Jane and Mary popped up cheering, as if they’d been suppressed under lids all this time.
“I believe there are two kinds of human endeavor in this world that have produced great results. One is collective effort, and that’s the way of working I know best. And the other is the individual achievement of poets and artists.”
Jane knew the secret. Her father was going to work around to him at the end. She’d been there when he’d first read about him in the newspaper. Today he was going to say, “One morning I was reading the newspaper with my daughter, and I read a story about a man in a country which has been engaged in a tragic civil war. And this man lived in the oldest city in his country. And at a time when most everybody who possibly could was getting out, this man made no plans to move from his apartment. But every day, around dusk, he walked into one of the main squares of his city and sang for an hour until it was dark, with artillery shells exploding all around him. And he’s here today to sing for us.”
But when it happened, he’d changed his speech and didn’t mention having a daughter at all. And for the first time ever that she knew, he was making a bad speech. All her life, Jane had learned to count on few things from her father, but one of them was charisma; she’d never considered that he could fail to mesmerize. It was an absolute she’d had to live with, and now that it was slipping, she felt frightened of so much.
He was reading from notes, as if he didn’t want to let himself be himself.
There was a quality in people that lived beneath the surface and only sometimes sparkled up, which she could not match with a word. “Terror” was only approximate. But Jane was keen to those glints and shards—which showed themselves not so much in the face as in movement—because she believed she could help. “You shouldn’t worry about that at all, Mom,” she’d whisper, slipping a hand into hers. She had divined this in everyone except Owens. And now, as she watched him speak, it occurred to her that because he didn’t feel it, she felt it for him.
Years before, he’d started out quick and smart with journalists. He said he’d seen his words twisted into helixes he didn’t recognize. So maybe he was trying to rein himself in. This speech, he’d told her, was a personal honor—not just a platform to evangelize for Exodus or run for political office. He’d already given four gubernatorial speeches, and the men who wanted him to run had scheduled a fund-raiser at the Bohemian Club’s Russian River retreat. But he intended to use this podium for none of that. He had aims he could hardly put into the right words, he’d told her.
But he was going on too long; even Jane could tell that. He was talking about education, pointing to an elaborate chart he drew on a blackboard. In secret, she had been going to the Alta public library and studying him. Articles she’d read had accused him of rhetoric, hyperbole, an absence of facts; on the front of a newspaper’s Sunday magazine, someone had called him the ultimate salesman. But Jane knew he wasn’t that. So today he was giving facts and differentials and equations. He kept his own levity about the stupefying idiocy of the system from rising up into words.
Or maybe it wasn’t the journalists. Maybe it was here. Jane knew the places her parents lied. And the one they had in common was college. They both said college didn’t matter, but even when they said the word, they sounded wistful. Maybe he thought this was the one thing better than he was.
Then somebody in the audience went out the back, letting the door slam. The noise rang through the auditorium as Owens continued on about his plan to issue vouchers to every parent of a school-age child. Then, before the echo of the noise finally ended, someone dropped his keys. Jane watched with alarm as heads turned, searching for the sound. People fidgeted in their seats. Then coins dropped somewhere else further back. By now it must have been on purpose. People were dropping money: not all at once, but one at a time, the silvery sound falling from different parts of the audience; as soon as one dimmed and there was only memory ringing in the air, another began. Owens riffled through his pages. She knew he saw the patches of movement, but he had many pages more to go. This had never happened to him before. What he did then was almost preordained. His father, who looked like a sheriff, sat in the front row, perfectly right-angled. Owens read every line on every page.
In the end there was booming applause, but of a nature that seemed too exuberant for even Owens to find flattering. The next day, he would ask Kathleen to cancel all his speaking engagements for the rest of his life. He’d decided it was time to stay home.
Now cameras popped white lights as Jane ran to the lip of the stage and shimmied up. Everyone came: Olivia, Mary, his father and sister, people he knew but she didn’t. Kathleen stood near the curtain, still offstage. Owens picked Jane up. She whispered, “I wish I was wearing a dress.”
“I’ll get you one,” he promised. “You’re old enough now.”
But before they left, he said, “Could I please see Olivia and Jane for a second?”
Now it was going to happen, she could tell, just when she’d almost got away. She followed him, walking with her arms at her sides.
In the dressing room, he said, “Now all three of you are here. One of you took my shoes, and I want to know who did it.”
“Not me,” Jane said first.
Kathleen shook her head, looking grave.
“Well, I tend to believe Kathleen, because she’s the one who thought of spray-painting my running shoes. I started late because we were waiting for them to dry.”
Olivia smiled weirdly, looking at him from the side. “I didn’t hide your shoes, Tom.”
“So nobody put my shoes in this closet? Kathleen found them.”
Jane sat on her hands, bouncing a little.
“Nobody.” He sighed. “Well, I’ve got to get ready for interviews. I guess it’ll have to remain one of life’s little mysteries. Another one.”
“I didn’t do it, Tom,” Olivia blurted, turning so her hair whipped behind her.
Kathleen, in white jeans and white sneakers, stayed in the dressing room, neatening. She seemed to have an instinct for order.
Outside, a journalist had found Mary and followed her, clipboard in hand, to the car. As she bent over to unlock her door, Mary felt the woman staring at her womb. The journalist looked at her frankly, with curiosity and no apparent kindness, as if Mary were a used mine. Mary was sure the journalist was a woman who had never been pregnant. “Jane’s very pretty,” the woman said. “Takes after her father. Does she mind being illegitimate?”
“I beg your pardon?” Mary’s eyes dropped open as if she’d been stunned into pure incomprehension.
“I mean, does that even pertain in this day and age? Does she think of herself as a—I don’t know—a bastard or …”
Mary’s jaw went uneven. She wished Owens would pay for the operation to fix it.
“Get in the car, Jane,” she ordered gruffly, as Jane came up, out of breath from running. “Lock your door.”
They were sealed in the car then, but the journalist stood her ground. “Wait. I mean, we’re on your side. We’re sympathetic to Jane.”
Driving fast, Mary pinched her thigh so it stung. She’d lived in a plain cabin at the wintercamp, with nothing. To them that bare cabin, the dirt and poverty, would be what she was, what she should be.
“Stop it with the lip,” Jane said.
That night, Olivia came to the bun
galow, carrying a bottle of champagne and a huge bouquet of sunflowers. Mary had made corn muffins. They sat on the floor and watched news on all the stations, but his speech didn’t show up anywhere. It was as if it hadn’t happened.
They all felt a little happy. Other places, far away, in the towers where broadcasts were decided, there were worlds where he wasn’t so big.
After the press conference, Kathleen waited in the dressing room with pomegranate juice and his clothes all packed. He wanted to change into jeans for the drive back, and he did right there. Then they made love, for the first time, on the single cot. He asked her if he was only the second man in her life, and she told him he was. She cried a little while it was happening, her voice sounding to him almost unbearably lonely in its smallness and embarrassment. Afterwards, he began to talk about his disappointments in Olivia. She confessed that she too felt misgivings, though maybe it was her own fault; there was some way in which she and her husband didn’t have the kind of talks she’d hoped for when she was a girl, reading books about life. She could have said more and more—the thread, once pulled, ready to unravel—but he stood up sighing and said, “I should really get going.” He kissed her forehead. “Thank you.”
And then he was gone and she was still there, in the university dressing room, with her clothes back on, perfectly straight. All her life, people had appreciated Kathleen’s neatness.
Years later, long after Owens stopped talking about being governor, he would tell his daughter that some redheads have freckles everywhere on their bodies, and he would mention Kathleen’s name to prove that a woman’s hair does not always match her head. Jane asked where Kathleen was now. But by then she had long since left both Genesis and her husband, and Owens hadn’t heard anything from her in years.
Jane never found out if Owens knew she was the one who did it.
Two Rings
It is a little-acknowledged truth that in couples, the person only slightly less virtuous or slightly less flawed loses all credit or blame for that virtue or flaw, eclipsed by the other’s greater valence.
Karen and Huck would have been surprised to learn that Owens thought of Olivia as punctual. The two sat at a table outside Café Pantheon, waiting for her. Olivia, for all her railing about Owens, was often late herself.
“It’s really not our business,” Karen said.
“See, I’d want you guys to tell me. Promise you will if it ever happens.”
“Huck, you’re a devil.”
“Karen, is there something you know about me already?”
“No, Huck. Nothing. But you’re just taking this woman’s word for it.”
“I’m telling you, Jessica wouldn’t lie. She’s a very sweet person, and she was hurt. Even now she says she’s not ready to be with another guy.”
“Sounds like a line to me.”
“I know, I know. But I’d want to be her friend anyway. And she had no idea Olivia even existed. He was talking as if this was some really serious thing. Once, he brought Jane with him, carrying flowers.”
“That’s really …” Karen shook her head as if no word could express her disgust. “So then what happened?”
“After a week or so he freaked out. And she never heard from him again. I don’t know, I think we owe it to Olivia.”
“None of our business, Huck.”
Just then Olivia whizzed by on her bike, calling “hey” over her shoulder.
Karen hissed. “Don’t say anything. Promise you’ll shut up.”
“All right,” Huck said, folding his big hands. He squirmed in his seat. It was painful for Huck to keep secrets, and the Michaelises were a secretive family. Since Gunther, Olivia and Nicholas Michaelis moved in with him and his father, when he was a boy, Huck had become excitable and antsy.
Olivia strode over, wearing the jeans she always wore, cloth Chinese slippers and earrings Owens had given her from the Italian Renaissance. The earrings were clear blue, with filigreed gold workings. Their fragile ornateness was set into relief by Olivia’s long straight hair.
“You smell good,” Huck said.
She shrugged. “Shampoo maybe.”
The two cousins talked, as they always did, about their fathers. Gunther Michaelis had become more reclusive, leaving the hotel only once a week. When Olivia had gone by to clean up on Friday and tried to empty the ashtrays, he’d barked, “Leave that be.” He’d mimicked and scolded, calling her “little nurse.”
Huck shook his head. Otto, his father, a community college professor, whose zeal for petite undergraduates remained undiminished at seventy, was having trouble with his eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do if he can’t drive.” Huck kept his head down and toyed with the salt and pepper shakers. He was a large, thick man, and both his cousins were slender, fine.
“Is something the matter?” Olivia asked.
“No.” He shoved his chair back and offered to get them all coffee. “Three blacks?” Their usuals.
“I’ll have warm milk with honey,” Olivia said.
“Warm milk?”
She put a hand on her stomach. “I might be pregnant.”
Huck sat back down, took a sip of water, choked and had to be hit. Karen slapped him hard on the back.
“I haven’t told Tom yet,” Olivia said. “Just something funny’s going on in there. A little fizz.”
“But you might be, really?”
“Well, yes, Huck, it’s a possibility. I’d like to have a baby someday.”
“Olivia, I’ve got to tell you …” His hand was on her arm already. “Now, this is bad—”
Karen groaned and crossed her arms on the table and rested her head inside them as Huck hurtled into his story. Olivia interrupted, sounding cool and rational, to demand dates and names. Karen, waiting for this to end, felt her own breath wet the top of her arm. She should have known there was no stopping him. Asking Huck to keep a secret was asking him to swallow a piece of metal. Huck had taken Olivia’s hands now, and she was asking if she could meet the woman. Karen couldn’t stand it anymore. She went to get the drinks.
Huck felt a great unburdening, a loosening in his chest.
That night, Jane and Owens waited at the restaurant. “I’m a little worried,” Owens said. “Olivia’s never late.”
When she arrived, Jane was talking and noticed her only because Owens was watching something, rapt. Because he generally appeared last, he rarely beheld the spectacle of Olivia’s entrance. She possessed two striking physical features: her verticality and her hair. She was an absolute blonde, a color so rare it lent the expectation of beauty. Olivia’s mother had had the same hair. Perhaps it was the daily falling “oh” she saw on faces when she turned around that made her appearance painful to her. She’d not lived long enough to go gray.
Olivia slid into her chair, crossing her arms. “I know about Jessica, Tom.”
“Jessica who?” Owens said.
“I don’t see why you had to drag Jane into it. You could carry your own flowers.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do too,” Jane said.
Owens sighed, then stood up enough to reach his keys from his pocket. “Jane, do me a favor. Go out and wait in the car a minute. I need to talk to Olivia alone.”
A table had never looked so sumptuous, light hiding in the folds of the cloth, the earthen pitcher releasing tiny beads of water, a candle flame, its blue stamen and the rich, thick yellow. Ice tinkled, somewhere.
Olivia was reaching slowly under the curtains of her hair, to unlatch the earrings. She laid them on Owens’ bare white plate.
Jane walked in a straight line, hands at her sides.
“Guilt jewels,” was the last thing she heard.
She tried to companion herself with a song, but she couldn’t remember many words. Girls at school knew whole lyrics, the ones with older sisters or brothers.
Keys were unnecessary. The door was open. She locked it, though, from inside. The car was cold. The restaura
nt door opened, closed, but they didn’t come out. On the far corner was an empty phone booth. Quarters lay on the carpeted car floor. She could go and call her mom. Her mom would come. But would they get mad then? Maybe they’d run out any minute, beckoning her to her steaming dinner. She couldn’t decide. She waited, picking at a scab. It was a yellow one, old, too tough to be good. The good ones were thick and black-red.
Owens had no idea that she knew how to drive. He’d never believed her. He thought Mary had driven her here and then gone back, or else got someone to give Jane a ride. Why the truck remained, if Mary had gone back, didn’t seem to intrigue him at all, or the mystery of the driver.
Jane hadn’t had the opportunity to drive again since that night years before. She still wanted to talk about it, but her mother wanted to forget. Mary considered Jane’s voyage the greatest blot on her otherwise clear-souled motherhood. She now told Jane she’d learn to drive at the regular age, like everybody else.
Jane put the keys in the ignition, and the motor caught. Figuring out how to adjust the seat took a long time, but with the push of a button Jane accomplished what her mother had taken months to contrive, with sewn-in telephone books and screwed-on blocks of wood so her legs could reach the gas and clutch and brake. She sat ready then, strapped in, but she couldn’t find the lights. She gave up and decided to go in the dark.
He loved this car. The fear of what he’d do terrified and thrilled her, but as soon as she was out onto the wide dark street, she knew that if anything went wrong she’d just keep driving. The steering wheel felt tight, but a little touch to the gas, and the car sped out. She didn’t know where to go. He would still come back out for her, probably. And he’d see the spot where the car had been.
Then, on the sidewalk, she saw two girls she knew from school, taking fast little steps on both sides of a man who must have been their father. She felt like ducking but sped up instead. It wasn’t like that first day. Now she knew people here.
She coasted back slowly, around the block. The restaurant door was still shut. She parked not where the car had been but on the opposite side of the street, going the other way.