A Regular Guy

  “Fat chance.”

  “I know. But that’s probably what we should do. So, kid, you want to get your stuff and I’ll take you home with me? I’m really tired. I talked to your mom, and she’s—”

  “You talked to my mom?” Jane stared at him.

  “Yes, I talked to your mom. She’s coming down in a week or so and we can figure out where you two want to live. But tonight I’ll take you home and maybe we’ll watch a movie. And then this weekend I’ve got to go to Europe. So I’ll probably take you with me. Have you ever seen the Eiffel Tower?”

  “No. But when did you talk to my mom, though?”

  “Maybe an hour ago. Would you like to see the Eiffel Tower?”

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly calm. She assimilated the idea that he could make the terrible fall, as just a small part of his day. She looked at Noah, bashful and ashamed. She wasn’t lying—it had been that way. But now this was more true, the relation of day to a dream.

  In five minutes they were gone, Jane strapped into the low passenger seat of his small car, her few belongings in the back. Noah still hadn’t shown her the velvet coat. He’d taken it out of the bag several times that week, while she was sleeping. He’d wondered if the woman would give him the money back or just a store credit. When he was budgeting for her to stay, he’d thought they couldn’t afford frivolities like velvet coats. But tonight he’d tucked it in the bottom of the brown paper bag she’d come with. Jane’s fingers opened and closed Owens’ glove compartment, which was stashed with five-dollar bills. The car fired up and then sped off into the night.

  Noah sat in his doorway. Then, left with his future, he felt the depression come on again, a way he’d forgotten. Before, every time Noah had relinquished something expensive he’d wanted, he’d felt a great relief afterwards, as if he’d narrowly missed a disaster. But tonight no relief came. This was an altogether new dimension to money: sometimes you could regret not spending. He stayed in the doorway, the envelopes from the drawer on his lap. One envelope was thick, one thinner. Why should Owens have everything, just because he already did? Owens didn’t deserve her, he wouldn’t know how to cherish a child. Noah had often envied Owens’ love, but now he didn’t feel strong enough for sex. He was tired. Fog lingered on his forehead; he could feel his curls tightening. I could take care of a child, he thought. I would have shaped my days around her. And I had things to teach.

  What would Owens give? He had slept with a woman, then tried to get her to go away. And that was what made men fathers and men in this world.

  He sat there for a long time, looking out at the sky. Now he was free to go anywhere and didn’t want to. He rubbed the paper of the envelopes, still sealed. Out at the end of the lawn, the van was still there and it was his.

  In the House of Women

  Jane’s mother was never the same to her after the long night drive. She patiently answered Jane’s questions, but for Jane some mystery adhered.

  Mary shrugged. “I guess it seemed like a good idea for the three of us to be together.”

  By now Jane knew the exact story, how Owens called the sheriff forty miles away to jeep up to the cabin. Bixter drove her to the airport, a bucket of bait sloshing against her legs through new nylons. An envelope with Mary’s name on it was waiting at the counter, and she was the only passenger on the plane. The one stewardess kept refilling her hot water.

  Owens took them out to dinner her first night in Auburn, to a square room where they tasted sushi for the first time.

  “Inside food,” Jane said, as it lay on her tongue, like another tongue.

  He suggested that Mary get a part-time job, in a pet store or at the library, even her mother’s old bakery, someplace Jane would enjoy visiting.

  In Paris, Owens had taken Jane for a haircut. It was the first time her hair had ever been cut. Insect wings and parts of leaves had fallen into the French beauty shop’s basin. Owens handed Mary a little bottle labeled Kwell and told her to shampoo Jane’s hair twice a week.

  Mary sighed. “Well, maybe you can control her now.”

  In the mountains, Jane had done what she wanted. She cracked open nuts with her teeth and on the school bus sucked the white soft end of a weed. She ate and slept by her own clock. Mary had never been stern enough to establish a bedtime. They had an old shower, but Jane didn’t allow water on her head. The only thing Jane remembered of Seattle was the old deep tub below a window. It murmured and sang as the water ran.

  Owens lifted Jane’s arm, to show Mary the scars. “What are these?” he asked.

  “Well, there were squirrels in that cabin,” Mary said.

  He stared at her, keen and still.

  The flat apartment building stood perpendicular to the street, and theirs was the last door. It looked like a motel. Owens explained that each month a man named Eliot would bring them three hundred dollars. They felt hidden, as if he wanted to keep them his secret.

  Jane asked her mother everything except what she really wanted to know, which was: Why didn’t you keep me with you? Or, if you were sick and going to die, then what made you better? Instead she watched her mother’s positions, the way she sat or bent over, the hang of her neck, a wilt of clothes off her shoulders.

  It was the rainy season and they stayed inside, waiting for they didn’t know what. Mary liked to sit in the dim rooms without turning on the lights. She made tea again and again with the same bag, so that by the end of the day she seemed to drink cup after cup of only water. Jane finally understood that her mother was afraid to go out. “He wants us to wait,” she explained. “Besides, we’re resting.”

  For Mary, this was a time when they were one, she was we, she and Jane and sometimes Owens. She felt a calming happiness almost indistinguishable from fatigue when the three of them were together, as if a huge burden she’d been carrying for a decade had been lifted and forgiven and she could finally rest.

  But Jane grew bored. Somewhere she had learned the gestures of impatience. Her toe and heel tapped. For the first time, she listened to her mother and judged.

  “Were you going to die?” she finally asked.

  She sighed. “I just wanted to lie down. I was so tired.”

  “Just from me?”

  “You were a lot.”

  After two weeks, Jane demanded knives and forks and in the long afternoons practiced setting imaginary tables on the floor. That first night Owens had taken them out, Jane began studying other children. In the small apartment, she practiced their voices. For hours in front of the cracked bathroom mirror, she tried to inspire her hair to imitate. Now she wanted to master cutlery and asked her mother to go get her childhood birthday silver.

  “Learn chopsticks,” her mother said.

  And finally, when the rain stopped, Jane insisted on being taken to school.

  This occasioned calls to Owens and another dinner, at which he offered her a tutor. “Schools are like prisons,” he said. “They teach you to be like everybody else.” Owens wanted to keep her safe, until he had time to decide what was best.

  “You’ll have all kinds of opportunities I won’t,” Mary whispered, not to instill guilt, but marveling. At the same time, she didn’t want her daughter to go out into full rooms, not yet.

  “You two both went,” Jane reasoned, “and I should get to go too.”

  Jane had discovered the school in a small pink stucco building. She climbed up on an eaves pipe and listened from a window as the children sang their multiplication tables. At lunchtime, Jane saw them eating with knives and forks. She disciplined herself not to crack nuts with her teeth anymore.

  Mary met two old women in a park, picking persimmons off the public trees. Years earlier, she’d met Bixter this way, in a park in Portland, filling her pail with daffodils. These women’s names were Amber and Ruby, and they turned out to be retired schoolteachers.

  The teachers lived in an old white wooden house, which was like Christmas inside: polished and perfect. Jars of preserves hoarded light on the
table.

  All at once, the first time she saw it, Jane wanted to live there. Sometimes she wanted a thing so much, she couldn’t fathom why, if she stared and complimented, the person wouldn’t give it to her.

  “Would you be willing to tutor?” Mary asked.

  “Could we live here?” Jane blurted.

  “Jane,” Mary said with a giggle, but she looked up for an answer too.

  Ruby set her teacup down quickly, trembling the saucer. Amber tugged at the gloves on her lap. They excused themselves to the kitchen to confer.

  Jane and Mary sat waiting, looking around the full room. The teachers smelled dry, like chalkboard erasers and the insides of school closets. They were nothing like Bixter. It turned out their grandfather had been a minister from the American Home Missionary Society and had come from Massachusetts on a year-long boat ride around Cape Horn. He had planted those persimmon trees. Mary sighed. “It’s a great big house and they’re probably always fixing something on that stove.”

  The teachers walked back in briskly and said they’d telephoned the niece whom they’d raised and there was a bungalow for rent right next door to her cottage.

  “You young people would have more fun there,” Amber said.

  Mary looked down. She hadn’t known they had a niece.

  “We go to bed so early,” Ruby added.

  Jane left a message for Owens, saying they’d found two tutors and could they move.

  Though he agreed to cover the rent, he gave them no budget for furniture. Mary liked the bungalow best the first moment, when she saw it empty, before they carried their junk in. They owned six boxes of things but no furniture.

  When Owens came to visit, he said, “I grew up in a house a lot like this.”

  Just then, Jane saw the woman out the window again, who was probably her, the niece. One night, they’d seen her silhouette as she stood on a ladder, hanging a chandelier. Today she was carrying a big bench up the lawn, wearing neat beige clothes like in a catalogue. The woman had her hair up, tied with a scarf, and she didn’t wear her oldest thing like they did for moving furniture. Unless that was her oldest thing.

  “Should we offer her some lemonade?” Mary asked.

  Jane wished she and her mom had the cottage. It was just cuter. But Mary’s favorite part of the bungalow was the lemon tree in the front yard. Mary loved citrus. The teachers had already been invited to pick, and they’d left a Mason jar of marmalade on the porch. Jane shimmied up the tree to the first limb and shook the branch. Mary stooped below, gathering the lemons in a paper bag.

  Owens stayed inside, lying on the floor, enjoying the lace of breeze on his arms.

  Together, Mary and Jane squeezed the lemons and stirred in turbinado sugar, but just when it was finished and Mary stepped out with a brimming glassful, the pretty lady streaked from her door, carrying a purse.

  From the window, Jane watched them talk. After a minute, the woman folded into her small car, without the lemonade.

  “It’s her,” Mary said, when she came back. “But she seemed a little cold.”

  Jane brought Owens the glass of lemonade meant for their neighbor and set it on the floor. “You didn’t even see her!” she said.

  “Was she pretty?” he asked, barely lifting his head.

  “Very pretty.”

  When Owens left, he said, “Enjoy the house,” in a way that somehow reminded them it was his and not theirs. It was a word he said in the mild imperative, as if he vaguely understood the faculty for enjoyment was one he truly did not possess. Enjoy, he said to his employees, with a merry expression like that of a man toasting, when he left them to work on his life’s love as he strode out to the tedium of luxury, silvery laughter, dinners. He often said Enjoy, as if he truly couldn’t, and when people did, he watched them with faraway reverence, never begrudging, but looking on quizzically with an abstract smile.

  The next morning, Jane walked over to give the pretty lady a banana bread they’d baked. Light bounced and splashed against the white walls of her kitchen, and violin music came from a radio. Julie stood making tea in a teapot. She served Jane cornflakes in a china bowl with a heavy silver spoon that pinched into Jane’s third finger; she tried to remember again how you were supposed to hold spoons. For the rest of her life, she would feel self-conscious when people watched her eat.

  Jane looked around the cottage, wondering, Just how is ours different? Julie’s cottage seemed rich. Little things matched: a tiny cream pitcher and a bowl of white sugar both had violets painted on. “How did you get your house to be like this?” she asked.

  Julie offered to take Jane and her mother to the flea market. When she talked it seemed easy, but it wasn’t easy, or it was easy for her and not for them.

  When she got home, Jane asked her mother again to go get her childhood silver.

  That Sunday, when Julie knocked on their screen door, they woke up in startled bolts. They dressed in a drill and Julie drove them out of town to what had been the old dump, where now there were rows and rows like streets—a village made of junk.

  “It’s still dirty,” Mary whispered to Jane.

  They drank coffee out of cardboard cups, and sharp leaves rasped against their ankles. The sky still held night clouds. Trees swayed widely as vendors were setting out their wares.

  Julie pulled a bedspread from under a table. Mary and Jane both said it was nice but they didn’t really think so. Later, on Julie’s bed, it became beautiful, though it hadn’t seemed that way there.

  They spent thirty dollars on an iron tiered votive candleholder. Mary and Owens agreed that Jane wouldn’t go to church, but sometimes Mary missed the mass. “We’ll fill it with candles and light it up for a party,” Mary declared.

  The large candleholder sat all that summer and the next winter in the long grass. After the rains, rust furred on it, and they didn’t return to the flea market.

  That evening, they went to Julie’s house while she moved around her new furniture. When you walked inside the cottage there were nice shapes, clean alleyways, and you felt like sitting down and having a cup of tea. When you stepped into the bungalow, the natural expression was to raise a hand to your face.

  “You’re doing it again,” Jane told her mother, coming back home. “Stop it with the lip.” It took concentration not to be distracted when you first came in.

  Jane could never tell anymore what her mother wanted. “Why didn’t you come along with me?” she suddenly asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I thought he’d be happier with you alone. Stop asking that.”

  Jane asked a lot, she knew, but she wanted to. Because it was a different answer every time. Tonight’s was entirely new, and Jane wondered if her father was happier. Maybe not. Maybe her mother was disappointed.

  Owens traveled out of town a lot, and they never knew when he’d call. They tried to forget about him until he was there. They tried but they never did.

  Owens couldn’t believe that Jane was his daughter because they didn’t have the same color hair. Although he understood the fundamental principles of genetics, he’d always assumed that his genes would dominate.

  “Do you think she looks like me?” he would occasionally ask a friend or a colleague, extracting a white-bordered photograph of an ordinary child with front teeth in varying states of progression. He never mentioned that the child’s mother had volunteered to give the baby a chromosomal test, accurate within ninety-seven percent, or that in response he’d screamed, “Oh, great! So three percent of the world population—figure about half are women, that’s seventy-five million—could be her father, and I’m one of them.”

  This was precisely how he flummoxed Mary. He had the numbers and the dates of things, but underneath it all, in a way she could never prove, as her family had lived for generations never proving, she knew her side was right.

  One day, Owens stopped by Noah’s lab. “Hey, Jane said you bought her that coat. That was really nice of you.”

  “Well, she pi
cked it out,” Noah said, his long fingers bouncing on the wheel of his chair.

  “She really likes it. She wears it every day.”

  It was a hot morning, and the two men took an outside table at Café Pantheon. Noah loved hot black coffee on a hot day.

  Owens looked at him over the rim of his cup. “So do you think she looks like me?”

  Noah felt little patience this morning, and he was aware that Owens liked people who didn’t let him get away with anything. “She’s yours, Owens,” he said, “so don’t act like a lout.”

  “A lout?” Owens’ face formed a question. “What’s a lout?”

  “An asshole.”

  “So you really think she looks like me?”

  “Not much. Some. But it’s not looks.”

  Owens nodded. It would take a while, and then he might begin to believe. Sometimes Noah thought Owens trusted him because of his capacities; other times, it seemed he listened because Noah was stunted and small, no threat.

  “So you really think she’s mine?” He seemed to be waiting, as if Noah’s answer mattered greatly. He lost his handsomeness, his face going trapezoidal. Perhaps he’d wanted to love her all along but hadn’t let himself believe she was his.

  But why couldn’t he love her, whether or not she was his? Owens himself was raised by a stepmother. “Yes,” Noah said. “And she’s a great kid.”

  “I think so too.” Owens now was more at ease. “I got her mom and her this little bungalow.”

  “I’d like to meet the mom.”

  “Oh, I’ll introduce you.” Owens wasn’t greedy, not with his house, not with his daughter. He was too accustomed to being busy.

  “Hey, I have a chance to go back East. Do my time in the capital.” Noah made his voice nonchalant, when in fact he felt tormented.

  “What capital?”

  “Cold Spring Harbor.” Noah shrugged. “For better or worse, New York’s our capital.”