A Regular Guy

  He had no idea that Jane would take him literally. But she called and made arrangements to meet the next day at four o’clock, in the tea salon of the Palace Hotel.

  Jane had already calculated the years Albertine had occupied her father’s life. “Did you ever know I existed?” she asked this woman she had never seen before.

  They were in a room with white tablecloths and flowers on every table. Jane wore her first pair of high heels and her mother’s stockings on legs she did not yet shave. She appreciated the water glasses clinking with ice, the smell of bread roaming from the kitchen.

  “Believe it or not, I think I saw a picture of you once, when you were younger.”

  Jane bit her lip, remembering her mother in line at the post office, sending Owens her report cards, curls of her hair and those little cutout pictures. Jane’s first grade.

  “But I didn’t know who you were.”

  “Oh. Not that I was his daughter.”

  Albertine had long since sealed Owens away in the crowded chamber of memory she reserved for her own haphazard youth. She was taking these things out carefully, trying to give the girl what she could. She liked Jane’s frank tenderness, in which there was something of Owens too. Maybe she’d been wrong about him, then. Albertine had been crushed more than once, and had a deepened, broken smile. But Owens was someone who had pursued her across the continent with full gallantry. She’d never had the misfortune of falling in love with him.

  She tried to decide whether to tell. Albertine noticed—as she sipped her tea and Jane dunked cube after cube of sugar into her own, not with the small silver tongs but with her fingers—that the girl bit her nails. Until three years earlier, Albertine had done the same thing. Then she’d quit, and just this week she’d treated herself to a French manicure, knowing her mother would lift up her hands to check when she came home.

  Two men had tricked their way into her heart, Albertine told Jane, but her father had been kind and foolish, pursuing her with ingenuity. Albertine had wanted to be a journalist. Since then she had worked several jobs and was now trying to become a writer. “And so your father, impressive as he is, wasn’t really in my sphere. I was more enamored with the young novelists. Who, believe me, are bad news anyway.”

  “You weren’t in love with him?” Jane’s face opened. This was the first time in her life she’d encountered the possibility of Owens’ rejection.

  “Once upon a time he was in my room and we were in bed together.” Albertine looked up in alarm. She’d never spoken to anyone about being in bed with his or her father.

  Jane felt embarrassed too.

  “Something terrible happened to me a long time ago. Well, I can tell you. I was raped by a boss—a much older man. I’d told Owens about that, and the next morning he said he was sick, and it was like I’d never told him. I’m sure now he doesn’t even remember.”

  “Oh, he’s like that. He forgets.”

  There. Now Albertine had told this girl what she’d once given her father rashly and then had the good fortune to take back. She forgave him. Her confidence had been in error, and they stood now where they always should have been.

  Jane sputtered. “I just can’t believe you were never in love with him.”

  “I just wasn’t.”

  “Well, you better not tell him. Because he thinks you were. Desperately.”

  Their two heads fell close together, as they laughed in a way that seemed hysterical and exhilarating.

  When they walked out, Jane remembered this was the same hotel where Owens had left all his birthday presents—vases, clothes, a live peacock. Jane wondered if the presents were still here somewhere, their ribbons dusty, the peacock in a pen in back.

  When Albertine asked Jane if she’d ever met Noah Kaskie, Jane said they were very good friends. “You know him too?”

  “No, but I sat next to him at your father’s party. And just the other week, I read about his discovery in the paper.”

  Jane stared at Albertine as if through an open door, where she was discovering new and unsuspected life in alleys behind what she’d always known. Today she was first considering that a woman might not love her father. And that same woman deemed Noah famous.

  When Jane came home, her mother was lying on the floor, having tea with Bixter, who’d come in on the Greyhound bus. Her one eye went off to the left and the other other stayed still, always.

  Jane was weighing this life in the bungalow against his. For the first time, she knew she could live with Owens, and this ticked in her like a small, safe bomb. She either noticed things more at home or they bothered her more. Bixter offered to read her palm, and Jane said no, thank you, she had homework.

  Her mother followed her into her room. “She took care of you when you were a little girl, and now you don’t have time for an old lady to read your fortune?”

  Home was home. Jane sighed, then returned to the living room and stuck out her arm. It seemed darker in the house now than it was outside. A candle wobbled in a dish.

  “You have healing,” the woman said. “It’s undeniable.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It’s just a fact. You could be a prophet.”

  “Uh-uh, I don’t think so.” Jane had known too many mystics before she was ten years old. It didn’t strike her as a very secure life. “I want to be a politician,” she declared. Still, without knowing it, she saved the folding mysteries from her childhood, like faint flowers inside unreadable books she would later take out and try to smell.

  Bixter wanted to see the desert, so they left in the car at dawn and drove for hours. Eli drove, Jane routing them on the map, and suspected misturns all the while. She and Bixter sat in the back and did the hand song:

  The spades say tulips together,

  twilight forever,

  bring back my love again.

  What is the sto-o-o-ory

  of all the flow-ow-ow-owers?

  They tell my sto-o-o-ory—

  my story of love from me to you.

  Although neither Bixter nor Jane had yet experienced it, love formed the majority of their interest. Years earlier, they’d camped in the Mariposa Mines and read letters scrawled on the cave walls by the forty-niners. Was it worth it? someone had written.

  They parked the car deep in the desert next to mud flats, and the next day they wore no clothes. No one else was around, no life for miles; they were absolutely alone. “What would happen if robbers came and attacked us?” Jane said. “We couldn’t call the police, that’s for sure.”

  “Never call police,” Bixter muttered, in mud up to her shoulders.

  They sat under stars in the warm springs. Mary and Eli turned on the car’s headlights and radio, then put on clothes and danced in the high beams, tripping on the uneven earth. Sitting cross-legged in the warm mud, Jane wondered if her mother knew a happiness in love Jane would never find because she was so different from her mother.

  Eli hummed along with the music, and Mary’s long dress frilled at the ankles. Jane thought of Eli’s birds and her mother’s homemade cookies. She picked a scab from the outside of her knee and touched the smooth place underneath.

  She couldn’t move to Owens’ house, though. This disorganized life, with extra people around, was her life too. But she wanted something. Then she hit on it: she wanted to have his name. Mary wouldn’t mind. She’d never liked her own name.

  A month later, at the ceremony, Owens lit candles. He’d sent for a form at the County Clerk’s Office and had a special wooden pen for them to sign with.

  “Your declaration of dependence,” he said, lips diamonded, eyebrows raised.

  The next evening, Jane ran through the house to Owens’ bed, where he was watching a movie. “You really have to help my mom. She left this note. I think she’s getting on the train.”

  The note said: I’m going north to find Bixter. You don’t need me anymore.

  “We better go find her, then.”

  He walked wit
h her to the gate and, for the first time in months, stepped outside. He smiled to see his town, the same one-story roofs the height of the trees. It was a lambent, early-autumn evening. He drove them down the slow, leafy streets, looking for a walker.

  “There she is,” he said. “I’m glad to see her.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe I should get out. I’ll follow, but maybe she’d listen to you more.”

  Jane drove the car, opening the window to her mother. “Hey, want a ride?”

  Mary walked on resolutely, with old shoes and a tight ponytail, her fists clenched. The light seemed dusty and bright, the houses fake. Time beat in blood pulses. “Oh. No.” Her mouth winced, then more walking—to the train, Jane figured.

  “Mom. Come on.” Jane had to drive slowly. Owens’ car was big and heavy, and she was being extra careful.

  “You’re fine. Look at you. You’re in good here. That’s for sure.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “I guess it is. I just always thought we’d be together. But you don’t need me now.”

  “Please stop so we can talk.”

  “Do me one favor. Leave me be, Jane.”

  Her mother walked firmly, a crumpled brown paper bag in her hand. Jane sat in the car and watched as, minutes later, her father sprinted and overtook her mother, touching her shoulder. There was still sumac down by the railroad tracks from summer. They stood together for a while, her head down, one foot pawing the ground, and then he brought her back to where Jane had stopped the car.

  Now her mother was laughing, hands in her pockets, and he said they’d all go to dinner. Some long fight seemed over.

  Now that he’s seen me like this, Mary thought, it’s really done. The next day was the election. Jane told Owens at dinner that Alta’s per capita voting record was one of the lowest in the state, as if this were somehow his fault. He’d thought of running for governor but lived in a town that hardly voted. He didn’t vote himself. “I just might this time,” he said.

  His polling place was a YMCA, and Owens was the first person of the day to cast a ballot. The machines were old and enormous, with mechanisms little more complicated than an abacus or a rudimentary can opener.

  “Now what?” he asked, sticking his head out of the curtains.

  “Pull the lever back again if you want it to register, mister.”

  He liked the grind of the lever and the small tick of registration, like a coin dropping into a large empty jar.

  Now, what makes him come out and vote? Owens wondered, as a man limped up in a walker. There seemed to be several gardeners, one of whom actually carried a hoe. A fat woman had her hair in pink foam curlers. Owens was amazed at the variety of humanity that took time from their day to perform this minute act that couldn’t in any direct way benefit them. He wanted to glean from this tattered parade how it was they came to believe. By the end of an hour, he still couldn’t understand even the scornful radicals, waiting to pencil in an unknown name, but he walked out with tears in his eyes.

  He wandered through the quiet morning streets, not wanting to go home. Then he needed a bathroom. He was passing the Alta church, thinking there must be one in there, but a service was in progress. He thought of Kaskie’s lab, a place he’d always liked, and when he got to the building, he took the stairs two at a time. Suddenly, he was alone in a large bathroom, where he banged open the stalls, finding none of the toilets clean. Kids. He took paper towels from over the sinks and set to work cleaning a toilet seat carefully, folding the paper over it as his own mother had taught him and Pony to do, then he wondered if anyone had demonstrated this to Jane. He shrugged, trusting that Mary probably had. Overall, she was a pretty good mother. He had been lucky. So lucky. He stepped out, then turned back to flush not only his own but all the others. He left the bathroom roaring like a waterfall.

  It had been almost a year since Owens visited the lab. Noah’s time line, filled with entries, had grown to twelve feet.

  “Hey, pal,” Noah said, not sure what to expect. Owens had grown a beard and was wearing a flannel shirt. “You want to go take a drive and see the trees?”

  Owens nodded, and Noah grabbed his jacket from a peg on the way out. He poked his head into Louise’s station, to tell her he was leaving.

  “You know what I like?” Owens said. “Those trees you see on all the boulevards in Paris. What are those?”

  “Horse chestnuts, I think.”

  “They’re very beautiful,” Owens said. “Did you know it takes an olive tree thirty years to bear fruit?”

  “That’s why agriculture is always associated with peace.” Noah took out his keys and unlocked the van. “After the—what was it?—the Peloponnesian War, the farms were ruined and people had to go to the cities. Cultivation takes patience. Hey, I discovered one good thing about call waiting today.” The two friends shared an animosity for telephone innovation. “I was having an interminable conversation, this guy going on and on, and then my phone beeped.”

  Owens’ attention lifted. “We should make you a little tool that’ll replicate the noise, so you can just push a button and it shoots through the line.”

  Kaskie gulped air. Owens was still Owens.

  In the park, fog was blowing off, and the sky was shot with sun. Owens stretched out of the van slowly, as if just emerging from a long convalescence. It was a weekday morning. In the midst of bikers, girl runners, kids on blades and bursts of athletic color, Owens spotted a bride. She stood stiffly in a dress with a full lace veil, holding a bouquet. Around her, kids in light clothes zoomed on skateboards. A small party surrounded the incongruous bride.

  “Filipinos, I guess,” Noah said. “They’re speaking Tagalog.”

  Owens decided that he was like the Filipino bride, having what was most important to him in public, so apparent as to be foolish to the hundreds who risked nothing but only played the better part of the soft day. Looking at the red-leafed trees, he considered what to do. “I’m going to sell all my Genesis stock tomorrow,” he finally said. “I think the value’ll rise, but to stand by rooting for them would be too conflicted a life. I’ll sell all but a dollar’s worth, so I can still get the annual report.” A smile flickered under his lips. It would cost them between seven and eight dollars to produce and mail him that report.

  The two men stood admiring a Japanese maple. “That must be what—seventy years old?” Owens said. “You can’t buy a Japanese maple that old.”

  You probably could, Noah thought, but he was glad his friend didn’t know that.

  A boy on a skateboard skidded to a stop. “Are you Tom Owens?”

  Owens smiled quizzically. “Why?”

  “Because if you are—oh, man, you saved me. What you did is incredible.”

  Owens grabbed the boy’s hand. He asked his name and age, then told him where he lived and said that if he ever had any problems to just come up and knock on his door.

  OWENS OUT! he remembered, as he did a hundred times a day. “It must’ve been really tough for Jane,” he said, “all the kids and teachers at school seeing.” And she having to walk the still-straight line.

  When the election results came in, later that night, the candidate whom Owens’ five advisers had supported lost, and he wondered, for a moment, if he could have won.

  A year after Owens sold out, Genesis stock soared, because of NT12. He’d been right all along. Only late.

  Two Parties

  Noah attacked history, on his time line, in much the same way he’d searched for his gene—catholically, generously, going at the problem from as many angles as he could think of. He realized it would be hard to describe his approach as elegant. In the late fall and early winter, he took on another project in this manner, and that was love.

  By now he had his heart set on Louise, but he was willing to admit it didn’t look good. And on his friends’ advice, he’d decided to give her—or them—a deadline. If nothing happened by the new year, he’d forget it. And then, i
f nothing happened with anyone else, he’d try to make himself feel more for Rachel. She came down to his lab frequently now. Her face, in newly adopted makeup, seemed flush with the pride of discovery. He was the discovery, Noah knew, not any gene. She felt she’d spotted him early, understood what he had in him even when he was apparently floundering, and now the world could tell too.

  And that was all true. But Rachel was a type of girl who’d always been drawn to Noah—maternal, laplike. Lonely as he was, he wanted to choose, not be chosen.

  Noah splurged, spending the tenure raise he didn’t yet have on a new pair of boots. It was hard to find shoes in his size that were at all stylish. At least they’ll last, he said to himself.

  A week before Christmas, Noah had two parties on the same night: one out of obligation, the other for fun. He invited Louise to the better one.

  She couldn’t decide what to wear. All her clothes seemed stained or out of fashion. She hadn’t bought anything new since she’d started breeding her flies. She went to the ladies’ room down the hall, took off the final outfit and put on jeans again, with her old heels and a black sweatshirt. She unhooked her earrings and washed her face. She was someone who never felt like herself adorned. It came from growing up in Michigan and hanging up her white blouse every day after school before running outside to play in fields.

  “I don’t feel like going,” she told Noah. “I want to do nothing.”

  “Come on; it’s Christmas and you’re a Christian. You shouldn’t stay here.”

  “I’m sick of Christmas.” She’d decided to stay away from things that pick and harm, like parties where she didn’t meet men or else found assholes.

  “You’re in a rut,” Noah’s sister had said. He was always in the lab with Louise, and nothing happened. He half thought of inviting Rachel. When his sister came home, he would tell her everything. She would smooth it all out, with her large hand.

  “Not me,” Noah said to Louise. “I’ve got a new scarf and I’m going.”

  If Louise had said yes, he told himself, he would have got out of this somehow. He was a chaperon at the annual winter prom for crip teens. They had a rock band, and the kids were dancing in wheelchairs. The whole thing put Noah in mind of bumper cars, but he stayed at the edges of the gym, filling flimsy Coke cups and talking to his old friend Ed, from the agency days. He hadn’t spoken to Ed for ages, but they were like that. They’d go years without talking, and then they’d have an essential conversation.