Then they turned on all the lights in the house and worked in a frenzy. It was the last day of the month, and Gunther had decided he didn’t want them to pay another rent. They had to clean everything out and be ready to give the apartment back by the morning. Huck took the towels and sheets to an all-night laundry. Olivia collected the food in the house and drove it to a shelter, where she left it outside the front door. Ants would almost surely get it by dawn. But it was too late to ring doorbells.
Later, she dallied in the living room. Boxes lined the wall; most everything was done. She’d swept the kitchen and cleaned the outside of the stove. She knew she should call Owens, but didn’t. Why not let him sleep. She didn’t feel like talking. She wasn’t upset but flat, and it seemed to her everything now could easily wait until morning.
In her back pocket, she found a folded-up article he’d given her that listed him as one of America’s top twelve bachelors. He had handed her the article with a gleam of humor and even a shy promise that he was hers now, no longer eligible; but at this moment it annoyed her. Her parents were both dead, and there would be no record, not even an obituary in the Alta Sentinel. Owens was a man whose name and picture already belonged to the kind of immortality offered by the printed page. Thousands of words in magazines had been devoted to him, he already occupied a place in several encyclopedias, and people whose names were printed in books seemed to exist differently in life.
Perhaps that night even Olivia felt a need as intense as that for love or creation, for at least a small fraction of immortality.
She tore into the first box of books. At the bottom she found the red Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary. With trembling fingers, she searched the Biography section in the back. There was only one Owen, and that was Wilfred. She sank down against the hard wall, relieved to find Owens’ name absent. She knew it was the dictionary he considered to be standard.
With that one small consolation, she felt she could now fall asleep.
Election
Four years earlier, Owens had gone away for a weekend alone. He’d driven eight hours into the mountains and slept in a sleeping bag all night. He’d said he was going to figure out what would be harder than what he’d already done. He wasn’t shooting for what they said about him anymore, he told Jane; he’d slipped free of that and was doing this for himself. He said he just wanted to keep interested. And up there, he’d decided to run for governor. He’d announced his intention to the men who promised to organize his campaign.
But the four years had not proceeded as Owens planned. And Jane understood that it was one thing not to care what “they” said about you when it was adulation; it was another altogether to ignore daily newspaper columns cataloguing your failures.
So now, as Owens drove to the hotel where he and his advisers would decide over breakfast whether to announce his candidacy, Jane interpreted his silence as dejection. He left his new house fully intending to say no; he told her that. A lot had apparently changed since his first heady days of conference calls, when the five men broke in on each other like a team of acrobats pyramiding. Things with Rooney had gone badly. And Rooney worked. Every day, Owens said, he felt Rooney’s activity like the unpleasant buzz of a persistent, elusive fly. Olivia wasn’t the same either, but Jane didn’t know how that figured in.
Still, before he dropped her off at school, he described rooms he’d seen on a private tour of the White House, as if they might live there one day. Jane knew that to his way of thinking there was no contradiction between this and his current abstention. He didn’t vote because right now, he said, there wasn’t anyone really good to vote for. If and when there was, he would.
Jane understood his dread. No one likes to tell people who believe in you that you’re quitting. He hadn’t talked to the five men for a while, except the one guy who’d told him to marry Olivia. “She’s ready,” that guy had said. “Don’t let her get away.” Owens only smiled. He thought the guy had a crush on her.
Owens had the sort of imagination that precluded lapses of reality. Jane suspected it would be hard for him to imagine a love affair with a woman who’d been married before or had another man’s child. And when he stopped at her school and she got out of the car, Jane understood that after this morning the White House would be harder to conjure.
He entered the hotel ready to resist their entreaties and promise that a time would come later for public life. He’d never considered himself a businessman, really. What he thought he was had been less clear, and different on different days: some days a scientist, others a teacher, most days more of an artist.
“I remember when you were a poet,” Mary had said the night before. “I liked you best then.”
“Maybe I still am a poet, but I’m just expressing myself in different ways.”
“Poets write poetry,” Jane had yelled from the bathroom, where she was fastening a brown bow to her hair.
He’d always told people he wasn’t a businessman. It’s easier to teach science nerds about business, he’d said, than it is to teach businessmen our philosophy. Now, walking through the opulent hallway to the Conference room, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be a businessman and a good one.
The five men were sitting, but he remained upright. “I think I probably owe you guys an apology,” he started. “Because I’m going to have to say no this time around.” And as he enumerated his binding responsibilities, they broke in and finished his sentences for him. Of course Genesis needed him now. “First things first.” “Family time.” “Too long a commute to Sacramento.” They urged him to sit down.
No, he thought, in point of fact the capital wasn’t far. He could drive it in three hours. Or he could get a private plane: a small gray one with rounded wings against the pale-blue Central Valley sky. As a boy he’d loved Sky King, a TV show about a rancher who flew his own plane.
“Time’s not ripe,” said the one who’d told him to marry Olivia.
That was it, Owens understood. They didn’t want him now.
“Perfectly all right. Give you two time to put your house in order. Maybe have yourself a wedding. Baby or two.”
For no reason at all, Owens picked up a doughnut and examined it. He hadn’t eaten a doughnut in maybe twenty years. He bit into the soft, powdered-sugar bag and his teeth cringed at the chemical jelly.
When he pulled into the Genesis parking lot, the whole place was overrun by workmen. A kid with a whistle and an orange vest, with no shirt underneath, pointed him to the detour. Owens thought of just bumping over the embankment and driving on down to the E Building, but first he wanted to know what they were doing. Probably some routine retarring, but he hadn’t noticed any cracks. He opened the window. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Hello, Mr. Owens,” the kid said. “Painting. It’ll all be done by tomorrow.”
“Painting what?
“Lines for parking spaces. We got a chart with everybody’s name on it.”
Owens waited in his car for the worst, drumming his long fingers on the dash. The kid was running to get the chart.
He sat after he’d found his own name and slot, studying the pattern. His stall was as far as it could possibly be from the main building, in a lot marked K. It would be a long walk just to the E Building. To get to Genesis, he could gather at a hub where a jitney shuttled back and forth every seven minutes during morning and evening hours.
“You always wanted to be treated like the masses. So I put you in a lot with two hundred people. What’s the problem? Now you want to start living like an executive?” That’s what Rooney would say. Instead of bumping over the divider and demanding to see Rooney, he backed up quietly and drove to the E Building, aware that this decision was a retreat.
“I just feel like playing hooky,” he said to Olivia later on the phone. All day he’d had the tempting urge. He sat with his feet up, fretted a piece of string, thinking of the new house. Today they were repairing the deck. It had been very hard to match the old wood. Owens
tried to track down the people whose house it had been, but they’d taken off for a trip around the world, and a month of faxes had not yet turned them up. And then yesterday Mary and one of her weird friends came by, and Amber said she remembered when the house was built. Owens asked if she knew what made the wood that nice color. She said, “Of course I do. They used beeswax, is what they used.” He tried heating beeswax in a kitchen pot—and sure enough, it worked. Mary felt so excited she’d been able to give him something.
“I hope when it’s done,” he whispered into the phone, “you’ll move there with me.” Olivia was quiet these days, always smiling as if she knew some bad truth behind and at the bottom of it all. She’d moved back to the place she hated and spent hours after work roaming through the crumbling mansion. Owens had long since fired Susan and Stephen, but now that they were gone she’d stopped cleaning.
The five men in suits, he’d decided, were only five men. Besides, he’d seen them in grass skirts and muumuus at the Bohemian Club. He could run; not now maybe, but someday. Who needed so-called professionals? They were all Rooneys, watching the weather. He’d never lived his life the straight way, so why should he trust them now?
“I’d rather teach our guys about politics,” he explained to Olivia, “than try to make politicians honest.”
For a long time now, she’d realized that when he thought his own thoughts, he was practicing for saying them in public.
Olivia, Mary and Jane met Owens in the new house at five o’clock that afternoon to see the finished floors. The hand planing had taken eight months to complete, and Owens made them all take off their shoes. “See, we’ll have a little rack built to put shoes on when you come in.”
“Will you get slippers to offer people, like in Japan?” Olivia asked.
“No, they can just stay in their socks. Or walk barefoot. Oil from feet is what’s really good for floors.”
As she untied her laces, Mary felt again she shouldn’t be here. Late-afternoon light seemed thrown from buckets into the beautiful, empty rooms.
Owens squatted to glide his hands on the planks. “Feel this.” He grabbed Jane’s ankle. “Hey, maybe by the time I run for something, you’ll be old enough to vote for me.”
“Yeah, but how do you know I will?” She ran in her socks, slid. She did it again, then screamed. “Ouch!”
Jane had the first splinter.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Owens said, frowning. “But I suppose we’re not going to be running through here.”
He patiently explained everything they’d done, every architectural decision, while Mary massaged her daughter’s foot. That splinter would have to come out.
It was “we” again, Olivia thought, listening to him, he and God knows who else. In one place, “they” had raised the overhang of a door to make it symmetrical with another door.
Mary’s hands jammed in her pockets as her head curled down. She was thinking how the bungalow could be better, but it couldn’t; it was too full of junk, and it didn’t get light like this, never. Then, as she followed into the next room, a cry jumped out of her. She too had a splinter.
“Oh, this is seriously not good,” Owens said. “I’ve got to get them back here.”
She glared at him for not asking how her foot was or Jane’s. All he cared about was his damn floors.
But what he read in her blank stare was incomprehension. She probably did too many drugs in the mountains, he was thinking.
Upstairs, it happened to Olivia. “Whoops!” she said. “Join the club.” Then she sat down and pulled her sock off, holding her foot in her hand.
Owens bent over her where she sat cross-legged. “Aw, let me kiss it. Are you okay? Really?” he said in a baby voice, while Mary and Jane just stood staring.
“I’m fine,” Olivia said. “But I don’t know about your floors.”
Then they took turns, one at a time, in the large tiled bathroom, where Owens worked under a bare light with a needle, removing the splinters from each foot.
He sang, “We’re here in the middle of winter, and each woman in my life has a splinter.”
Owens had said so many times she would be the first female president that Jane decided to run for president of her freshman class. She understood, as he never truly had, that elections were popularity contests.
One afternoon, in the midst of her campaign, Jane visited Julie and the baby. Julie’s maternity leave had just run out, and she’d decided to take the year off to be with Coco. The baby let Jane pick her up and clutched her shoulder with tiny hands.
Julie ran to get the Halloween costumes. She’d already bought outfits for this year and next, although the baby was not yet walking. This year’s was a bumblebee made of yellow and black felt, with silk silver wings stretched over coat hangers. Next year’s was a tinfoil robot. “Some mother must have made these by hand for her children. Peter’s great-aunt took me to this incredible shop.”
“But what about the other children? That’s the only thing I wonder.”
“What other children?”
“The children, I mean, not Coco, who don’t have a great mom like you who finds them the best Halloween costumes.”
“You can have a perfectly happy childhood without homemade Halloween costumes. Coco doesn’t know the difference. This is for me, really, and for Peter.”
“Oh, I know that. I never had great Halloween costumes either. One year, I was night, and I just rubbed myself all over with coals. And after we moved here we went to the dimestore and bought the ones in packages. Once, I was a fairy princess, all icy blue and glittery. But I mean, what if you stay home and do everything for Coco, like my mom did for me? What about all the other people you might have helped?”
“I had to think about that a lot,” Julie said. “And you may decide differently, but I figure there are plenty of people who can do my job. I think I can make more of a difference raising one or two children—”
“See, I bet there’s something I could do that would help everyone, whether they had a lucky start and good parents or not.”
“Maybe you can.”
“I know.” Jane pulled her feet up under her on the sofa. She did think there was something like that she could do, but she didn’t know what.
“I thought that when I was your age too. I remember in college I wanted to have a baby, but there were lots of things I thought I’d do first. Like win the Nobel Prize and get a Rhodes Scholarship and write a novel and, oh, solve hunger in New York City.” She was laughing, a kind, hulling laugh. “And each year that goes by, you cross off one. Okay, well, maybe not the Nobel Prize. And the next year, maybe not a Rhodes Scholarship. You finally think, Well, I can have a baby.”
“Yeah,” Jane said, fingering her teacup.
Julie reverberated her lips against the baby’s belly. “And it’s not that you can’t work. Most women do now. I’m lucky not to have to. You might just find you don’t want to, that it’s not the most important thing anymore. And being a mom—it’s the hardest job I ever had.” She understood that Jane was judging her harshly: everyone knows teenagers are the world’s absolutists. Julie would have judged herself as harshly ten years earlier, or even five. But most of adult life, though quite enjoyable and full of rich satisfactions, would’ve sounded unbearable to her then. Not long ago, she’d had a wonderful conversation with Mary, and they’d decided that every girl imagines she’ll be rich by the time she’s the age they were now. What was impossible in advance was to fully account for pleasure. If she’d known in college that she would marry a man who didn’t read treatises or swoon all night, she would have cried out words like “compromise” and “settling.” But Peter was dear to her. She loved the happiness that leapt over his face, and she smarted when he felt slighted, then contrived to find ways to comfort him.
And Jane was lucky. Jane was bright and, like herself, beautiful. Coco might not have those endowments. Who knew what she would become? She might need more.
Jane idly patted th
e baby’s warm back. She was promising herself not to forget what she wanted now.
Julie stood up to take back her daughter. She planned to move them into the kitchen and start on Peter’s supper while they talked. Despite her allowance of understanding, it was unpleasant to watch a child, particularly this one, with her advantages, vowing ardently not to become you.
Julie hoped Jane would lose her election. She was becoming too much like her father.
“Politics’d be worse,” Owens said to Kathleen. “Railroads and airports. Beaches. Highways.”
“Libraries are cutting their hours,” Kathleen added.
“Yeah, the libraries are all broke.” The chronic problem that plagued Owens now was one he’d never in his adult life suffered—how to pay the bill. The operating costs of Exodus represented the first bill he’d ever encountered that he couldn’t easily pay with his own money.
It was late at night, and he sat at his desk answering E-mail. Ten minutes before, he’d picked up the phone and called the marketing manager. Under everything he said and inside silence was the bad fact: Exodus, good as it was, was running out of money.
Rooney had completed his parking stalls. He’d assigned administrators—who traveled and were never there anyway—the wall that abutted the main building, where Owens’ car had always rested like a ship’s mascot.
“It’s pretty clear to me now,” he said, “they’re trying to get rid of me.”
Even Kathleen didn’t disagree.