A Regular Guy

  Then a woman in a suit passed Noah fast, thighs flashing, and dropped a quarter in his cup. The liquid splashed up, and Noah was so startled that he threw it at her, coffee arching towards her legs, probably staining her stockings.

  “Two-dollar-fifty cappuccino,” he yelled.

  “You little monk,” she yelled back. Pretty women, he thought, can sometimes just change.

  At that moment, he understood something. He had found his gene, which had meant more to him than anything, but he had also failed an unknown child.

  Voting

  The first visitor Owens accepted after his father, who came with a bushel of apples, was Frank. When Olivia walked in from work one day at the end of summer, she heard laughter on the other side of the house: Frank’s high giggle and the lower bell of Owens.

  Frank had just knocked on the door. It had never occurred to him that Owens would not let him in. Owens might have admitted others too but everyone else felt hesitant to presume sufficient intimacy. Whether Owens himself cultivated this quality of reserve or his money and fame created its aura without his consent, no one knew for sure.

  Although Frank believed that Owens had betrayed him, he had never been able to hate Owens, because they’d grown up together. Owens was foreign-looking too, but his mother had made birthday cupcakes for the class with tiny paper flags attached to toothpicks. Frank had always loved Owens’ mother. Other boys copied the way Owens’ jeans fell to his hips and his hair was disheveled. Frank had looked too neat, as if his mother had zipped the zipper all the way up.

  Owens had given Frank his first car and actually taught him to drive. They drove with the windows down and the music blaring—Owens had stapled speakers to the back seats. Owens knew where to pick apples. He had a strange combination of drive and calm, like an old-fashioned man in the movies. Frank was more variable, high-strung. Without doing anything in particular, Frank stayed clean. Once, driving, Owens lifted his eyebrows. “Hey, if it doesn’t work,” he said, looking over at Frank, “we’re having a good time. What have we got to lose?”

  “Years,” Frank said, his hand dragging out the window.

  “Worst-case scenario, this doesn’t work? They’ll take us back at our jobs.”

  “But people are waiting.”

  “You’re only young once.”

  “They already were. And they helped their parents.”

  “You don’t owe them that, Frank, even if you think you do. This is a gamble. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to pay back big.” They waited a minute, listening to Buddy Holly, who was already dead, on the radio. Owens loved those girl songs. Frank’s sister had also died, five years before, but Owens called up something high and light in him. His face filled, round as a berry.

  “Hey, tell you what.” Owens swerved the truck into a field he knew where they could steal peaches easy. “If we fail and have to go back to work, I’ll give you the money you would’ve made in the time we take off.”

  Frank didn’t answer. The offer was too generous to be fair, but he wanted it anyway; he needed insurance more than fairness. They never mentioned this conversation again, though both young men considered the promise binding. Even now Frank didn’t doubt that Owens would have kept his word. That was why today he was here.

  “Tell me something,” Owens had said on the plane home from their first trip to Asia. “Chinese women are much more beautiful than Japanese, aren’t they?”

  Frank blushed. “I can’t say that. I’m Chinese. Some Chinese women are beautiful, some aren’t. Same everywhere.”

  “No, seriously.” Owens partitioned the air with his hands—as he had, tall and American, to the men at the corporation; looking at Owens, they’d seen every American millionaire they’d ever watched slide down his own banister in the movies. “I’ve been doing a study. Chinese women are more delicate. Their necks are longer.”

  “Maybe taller,” was all Frank would say.

  “Your sister was probably really beautiful.”

  Frank looked out the window, down at the clouds. “I don’t like to talk about her like that.”

  “If she’d lived,” Owens said suddenly, “I bet I would have married her.”

  When Owens’ mother became sick, Frank had given blood. Owens had tried too, but his blood type was rare and incompatible.

  “I read a lot, I watch movies. I sit in the garden.” Owens raised his eyebrows. “It’s pretty nice.”

  He cooked during this period, and he was in a cauliflower stage. For six weeks, he’d made cauliflower every evening. He sent Olivia to the market for the firm white heads. They went through more than thirty a week. Because he never left the house, he had to entrust these orders for basic needs to Olivia and Jane.

  For tonight’s dinner, he steamed the cauliflower lightly so that the small pieces became faintly green and transparent. He served it in a large bowl, and they ate sitting outside in the yard.

  “Taste how sweet,” he said to Frank, by way of encouragement.

  Olivia ate deftly with wooden chopsticks.

  “It’s great,” Jane said loudly, making Frank unaccountably sad.

  “I’ve got to go,” Frank finally said, rubbing his stomach. “I could use a hamburger.”

  They all laughed as if this were uncannily funny, though Frank meant it.

  As he walked Frank out, Owens said, “I know I probably did a lot of things wrong. I could’ve been wiser about people.”

  Frank mumbled, “We were young.”

  Owens hung his hands on the fence. A moon had risen up over the huge live oak. “Believe it or not, we still are.”

  The next day, Mary and Jane found Owens in his bed with the shades down, watching a movie at four in the afternoon. They stood waiting for his attention, as he still stared at miniature lovers on the screen. “I need new clothes for school,” Jane finally said.

  “And we need a new dishwasher,” Mary added, “and I’d like to see a therapist.”

  He finally turned to them. “Is that all you want from me, is my money?”

  “No, not all,“ Jane said.

  He sighed, touching up the volume. “Oh, look at this—she was so great.”

  They hadn’t come only to ask for money. They had other problems too, the worst kind, because they were problems between themselves. Though the old habit of asking him for money provoked his exhausted response, at least this was a dismissal they were used to, and was often followed by his relenting. The few times they’d asked for his help with a more ineffable, recondite problem, he had done something frightening. He made it disappear, but only for him.

  Tiny violins played, and the beautiful actress reappeared in a new dress on Owens’ TV.

  Jane’s jeans were clean and pressed, and she was wearing lip gloss. She didn’t like the way Owens lay around all afternoon. Despite the cauliflower, he was getting fat. He didn’t shave anymore either. “You promised I could get a dress,” she said. “I want a dress and highlights.” She enjoyed having both parents look at her.

  “Maybe we’ll shave your head,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to do when I start going bald. I already shaved my head once, and people said it looked rather nice. So maybe we’ll just be a shaved-headed family.”

  Mary’s hands clasped. Was he including her? For a moment, she wanted to shave her head too. She lifted her daughter’s hair up off her neck, where she had two moles. When Jane was a baby, Mary had often traced those moles, thinking that a man who loved her would know them as her markings. “She’s got a beautiful-shaped head,” Mary said.

  Owens didn’t answer.

  “Jane is an unusually good-looking child. You know that, don’t you?”

  Owens gave a crooked half-smile. “I don’t think that’s particularly important. And anyway, Mary, she’s not you.”

  Olivia entered the house, banging a door, and they could hear the whirring of her bicycle wheels.

  “How did you get the floors to stop having splinters?” Mary asked.

&nbsp
; “They had to be sanded by hand,” Olivia said.

  “I thought they were already.”

  “No,” Olivia said, head down. “I mean between each board.”

  Mary laughed softly. At least Olivia knew to be embarrassed. Somebody’s father spent days on his knees, sanding the cracks with a nail file. Of course, he was probably well paid. Mary walked through the house as if it were a museum and they were paying guests. Fireplaces in many rooms waited, the grates clean and unused.

  There were small sharp moments that stayed with Mary and made her want to wince and stop remembering: Owens’ long, flat hand on her head when he was telling her no—that meant something she felt but couldn’t say. The hours before Jane was born, when she looked out the hospital window and saw a landscape so clear. The night she’d given him her virginity—and they both knew that was what it was, her gift to him, so much so that he’d asked if she was sure. Other people, she understood, did not save these shards; they felt the cut and denied them, breaking the truth to fit their stories.

  He doesn’t love you, her friend Bixter told her, no matter what he says. Mary let both truths fight each other until she buckled. She buckled and then she sent Jane away.

  Walking home, they had another fight. Jane was going to have a party and invite her whole class. The question was where. For the first time, she thought she might have a choice.

  “Go to his house, then!” Mary shouted. “I hope your friends like cauliflower!”

  Owens had once said, “She’ll come to me in the end.” And Mary had been counting. Sometimes she realized she’d had her time to love her daughter, to touch her, and now it was over. She’d had that time and she missed it, Mommymommymommy always ringing unfinished in her ears.

  Jane did want the party at Owens’ house. She could tell that other kids, and their parents too, were curious about his investment in her.

  When Mary had left her alone in the playpen for the first time, Jane cried before her mother reached the door, but Mary went through it. She waited on the other side until she heard quiet, and then she left. She got used to it, and being away began to seem normal, each day a little longer or farther. She didn’t worry, when she had to run to the drugstore or even out to see a friend for an hour, although Jane’s round face seemed to look at her strangely when she came back. But it was like money in a meter: if you didn’t get a ticket, you were all right.

  Mary thought it was probably something all mothers did. She prided herself on safety, checking the stove knobs and locking the door twice. Once, though, in the mountain camp, the women were showing their breasts, comparing their shape after childbirth, and Mary told about leaving Jane alone, just trying to be a part of things, and they all looked at her as if she was dangerous.

  By the time they reached the bungalow, they had to call him. Owens stood listening, holding the telephone six inches away. Since Jane’s arrival in Alta, he’d occasionally imagined that she would someday want to live with him. He’d even talked to Olivia about it, and they’d had a little fight. He’d said he would come home for dinner every night. “For her you’d do that,” Olivia said. “But what about for me all these years?” She understood that of course children come first, but she never had when she was a child. Who would ever make up for that now? She was always afraid of seeming selfish. “I’d have to change my life,” he’d concluded then, “but I can do it.” And now his life had changed. He was always home for dinner.

  While Jane walked over, Olivia dug pillows and a down comforter out of the closet, Owens trailing behind. “Maybe I’ll start a school,” he said. “Right here in the yard.”

  Jane walked in at the back door, carrying her school clothes tied in a bandanna on the end of a stick. Olivia hauled a lamp downstairs, and it was already late by the time her makeshift bed was ready.

  Jane talked excitedly. “And so she didn’t want me to have—”

  “Did you bring your schoolbooks?” Owens asked.

  Olivia would have liked to make Ovaltine, the warm drink she remembered from nights in her childhood, and then sit up talking at the end of Jane’s bed.

  “I’m not speaking to her, even if—”

  “You have to talk to her. She’s your mom. And it’s time for us all to be in bed.” They followed his order, feeling both deprived of something rare and wonderful, and safe.

  The next morning, Owens was awakened by footsteps. Mary rushed in, flushed, and searched the empty rooms. Jane jumped into her arms and there they stood, the mother holding the eighty-five-pound child, when Owens and Olivia ran in.

  “She’s my daughter and I want her,” Mary said, with both apology and accusation in her voice.

  Owens did a double take, gaping at them in his underwear. He felt ashamed of his plans the night before. He’d actually stayed up another three hours, revising his curriculum. He didn’t dare let himself love her completely, because Mary could always take her away.

  After school a few weeks later, Jane found her father in the garage, occupying himself with his woodwork. He made simple, symmetrical birdhouses out of birch. Seven were already complete, on the floor.

  “When I was about your age,” he said, “I began to figure things out about myself.”

  She stood watching him work the lathe. “You studied magic, I remember.”

  “Yeah, I did. I wanted to bring things back to life. But that didn’t really work. It was mostly card tricks, so I quit.”

  “Did you ever learn to do anything great before you quit?”

  “Well, once I made a horse disappear.” He looked intently at the wood.

  “How did you do that?” she asked quietly, as if she were sneaking up on a bird.

  His face broke into a shaking giggle, then he turned to tickle her.

  “Are you really giving away your cars?” she asked, when she could talk again.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I have one, then?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “That’s kind of a long story.”

  “I have time,” she said. And for the first time since she’d known him, so did he.

  Although he didn’t leave the house, Owens kept up with the world by reading newspapers. In many ways, he felt better informed than he ever had been. With his daughter, he discovered the pleasures of general conversation. Of course, reading daily about his own crisis—by now relegated to small items in the business section—had made him briefly skeptical of the press. But while he plainly saw that the reporting about himself was false, and knew these same journalists covered other stories, he somehow found it difficult to remember that the news he was reading might be distorted or even untrue, just as it’s easy for most people to happily trade gossip though they become frantic and horrified to discover rumors about themselves.

  Tonight would be the last of the season’s cauliflower, Owens thought, then he started to explain the history of the Ford Motor Company to his daughter. He had a working knowledge of the industries that had built the country and of the men who made those industries. He understood Ford’s passion for order and why he wanted all cars to be black. Owens too liked a symmetrical world. He patiently explained why uniformity helped the middle-class buyer. “If it’s all one color, then parts can be mass produced and interchanged!” he exclaimed in the dim garage, tools from his father hanging on the walls.

  “But people want car colors they like,” Jane said. “Didn’t he think of that?”

  Ford’s downfall, he explained, was to impose his superior vision on the people. Indeed, she was right: Americans wanted color, and that’s how the General Motors Corporation was born.

  “But you still haven’t said why I can’t have one, if you’re giving them away.”

  “You’re fifteen. You can’t even get your license till next year.”

  “You could save one for me.”

  “Most teenage fatalities are from kids cracking up cars.”

  “But I wouldn’t. I’m careful.”

&nbsp
; He shook his head. “Anyway, Ford didn’t even see that Hitler was crazy. I don’t know how he could fall for that.”

  “I can see how,” Jane piped up. “The teacher said he made the trains run on time. That’s the same as making everybody have black cars when they want other colors.”

  Owens disagreed: trains could run on time, he believed, without cruelty or repression. He argued eloquently, but he’d already decided to call Eliot Hanson to change the order for the new car he planned to surprise Olivia with, from black to deep green. Privately, he believed his daughter was living on a higher moral plane. Owens understood that he’d made mistakes and was now in the long rest-of-his-life, living with them.

  “Maybe time will tell,” he mused, “and we were all just wrong.”

  Jane heard him express sentiments like this frequently, now that he had time to think. She wasn’t sure it was the best thing for him.

  Jane was in the kitchen that day when Owens played his messages back. The white answering machine and its attendant number had somehow been moved from the Copper King’s mansion to the new house on Mayberry Drive. One person who certainly wasn’t reluctant to call was Albertine Maguire, who had just flown in for a week’s vacation. She clearly expected her presence to delight people; besides, she had the socialite’s instinct to speak directly to a friend who’d been in the news. That impulse would have made Owens shudder, had he known, but in fact there was nothing malicious in Albertine’s intentions. She gladly would’ve heard, and then repeated thirty times, his version of what had happened. That others should not speak of his tragedy at all, as he wished, was to Albertine a ridiculous impossibility. But they had kissed once on a dance floor, and it would have been equally unthinkable for her to believe anything but what was most kind.

  “I’d like to meet her,” Jane said, after Albertine’s long message was finished.

  “Be my guest.”