A Regular Guy (18 page)

“You’re just too young,” her mother said. “Kids shouldn’t think about these things.”

“You know, Ingrid Bergman never wore makeup,” Owens said. “Or Sophia Loren. Isabella Rossellini doesn’t wear makeup, or just the slightest bit. And Olivia doesn’t wear any at all. Yeah, the most beautiful women in the world don’t wear makeup.”

Kicking a pebble out of her sandal, Mary hated him. Without thinking, she rubbed at her eyes, which had a buff of dark-green shadow and itched. Besides, wasn’t that Rossellini woman in the ads for some cosmetic?

“Well, I’m not even the most beautiful girl on our street, okay?” Jane sputtered as they entered Juan’s Burritos. “And I think I look better in makeup.”

“One of the things I really respect about Olivia is she doesn’t care about her looks. She could go up to the city, you know, buy herself some good clothes, and she could probably end up in the south of France on some yacht.” Owens raised his eyebrows, considering Olivia’s prospects, then turned back to his menu.

Mary was thinking that Olivia didn’t need city clothes. Her boyfriend was wealthier than most of those playboys in France. She was doing pretty well right here, with her jeans.

Just then, Olivia strode in, looking taller than usual. Her hair
brushed her elbows, a living entity. She didn’t even say hello, just stood looking at Owens as if nobody else were there.

“What did I do now?” he said.

“You didn’t even call. I told Huck I couldn’t eat with him because I wanted to wait to hear from you first. And you don’t even think to include me. That’s not what people who are involved do, Tom. That’s not how people live together.”

“I’m taking my daughter for a burrito because she was hungry.”

Mary looked down at the table. What was she, a baby-sitter? No one counted her.

“I was not,” Jane mumbled. “
You
were hungry.”

“But you didn’t think to call and see what my plans were.” Olivia shook her hair and walked out. A minute later, he went out after her.

“I’m still hungry,” Jane announced.

Mary and Jane sluffed up to the counter to order. They were paying anyway. Now that he was gone, Jane ordered beef. Mary sighed. “I think I’m going to stop eating red meat and see how I feel.”

“Don’t expect me to, just because you do,” Jane said. “I like hamburgers.”

By now Jane understood that Olivia was the most beautiful woman in Alta. She was famous, locally, as Noah was for being in a wheelchair. People she’d never met said “Hi, Olivia” when they passed, and she always said hullo back.

And she was even more beautiful than that. When he visited New York or Washington or Tokyo, Owens told Jane, he was invited to dinners with important people, men and, occasionally, a woman or two, who had accomplished something. He admired these women, he said, and Jane asked why he didn’t fall in love with any of them, then. And he said they were generally too old to fall in love with. Once, though, in Paris, a perky millionairess his own age had asked for his hotel room number. “So why didn’t you fall in love with
her?
” Jane asked.

Not answering, he explained that most of the women he met at these events were along only as accompaniments. Though as a rule
they were more put together and done up, none of them was ever more beautiful than Olivia. Still, her accomplishments were of the passive variety, a matter of what she’d not done but easily could have. She probably could be on a yacht or some Greek island. She could definitely at least be in San Francisco, buying a new dress every day. But he only rarely gave her credit, from what Jane could tell. In his book, there were two kinds of people: those who do and those who don’t.

Other people gave Olivia more credit than Owens did, Jane noticed, but that happened in couples a lot. In a town the size of Alta, it was pretty easy to be known for your hair and height. It seemed almost an accident, Olivia still being here. How many girls in America have the looks to be models and never try?

In the ledger of life, there was more than one method of calculation, Jane was figuring out. Whether you counted every success and ignored the failures, or subtracted the failures from the successes, made a difference. Olivia, like Jane’s mom, was cautious: more afraid to do something wrong than not to do anything. Jane noticed that men talked about making a name for themselves and women worried about protecting their good name, as if women had only the one value they were born with and had to keep from tarnishing, while men were given blank slates, on which they could prove their worth. Jane didn’t like thinking this. She already had bad grades from the mountain town school on her record. She wondered where the record was stored, if there was a place she could break into and burn it. She wanted to start out new here, blank at the little pink school. This time, she would make her record be perfect.

Olivia had her bike, so Owens couldn’t catch up running. Half an hour later, he slanted across the lawn, yelling, “I just want you to be proud of me! That’s why I do all this!”

“I’m
always
proud of you,” she called, and he glimpsed her through the doorway. “But I’m not proud because you’re on the news.”

Owens lay down on the bare floor of his living room, and in a little while Olivia came in and sat beside him. He liked it here, with his head in her lap.

“I feel like I have a responsibility,” he said softly.

“To whom?”

He shrugged. “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we go out on the motorcycle?”

Then they were zooming through the hills, unsettling the natural calm. He took the back roads and ended up in Auburn, on his parents’ street. He cut off the engine in the fragrant dark and they leaned against the bike, their feet on the wet lawn.

“See,” he said, “sometimes a small life seems good to me. All these little houses.”

“Who do you think is expecting you to do such great things?”

“Not them, that’s for sure,” he said, looking up to his parents’ house, where all the lights inside were off.

Somehow for Mary it had all come down to fruit. Owens apparently bought Philippine mangoes and yellow blush cherries from Mount Shasta. He had fresh Medjool dates flown in from Indio, still on the branch. He bought the best berries, oversized, in season or out.

“I mean, wouldn’t you think he’d want his daughter to eat the same as he does?”

All this made Julie uneasy. Julie was the person Mary railed to about Owens, but it seemed to her that Mary was hiding behind her daughter, as one would behind a mask. It was simpler to fight for the rights of a small person than to say,
I want those big strawberries for myself
. And Mary forgot she was talking to someone who ate the average Chiquita banana from the A & P for lunch and didn’t feel deprived. But then Mary whipped her own cream as if it mattered, which Julie understood, on account of her not working. Even in their close friendship, the two women maintained a delicate system of balances.

“And how dare he mention the most beautiful women in the world and include Olivia but not Jane’s own mother? How must that make Jane
feel?
” Mary asked, even though Jane was sitting right there with them.

It was as if she were afraid to say
me
. “I’d be offended,” Julie said, “even if Jane wasn’t along.”

“Especially if he’s counting people, not movie stars,” Jane added.

Then Eli slouched in the back door, cupping a small bird in his hand. They all gathered around as he fed it with an eyedropper.

Mary stuttered with embarrassment, introducing Eli to Julie. Mary and Huck went out with Julie and Peter every weekend, but Eli still came most nights, after his band practice. He had to go home every morning to take care of his birds: baby quails he traded at the pet store for bird food, or baby mourning doves he released into the general sky. Peter and Julie were always telling her what a great guy Huck was. “Really, oh,” Mary would answer.

Huck came wearing a sweater, his hair down wet from a shower, every Saturday night. “How’re ya doin’,” he’d say when Jane answered the door. “Fine,” she always told him, and then he looked around the room as if he didn’t know what else to ask, even though he was a teacher. He seemed relieved when her mom came in, and he rubbed his palms on the front of his pants. Mary liked it because she felt she was learning things on their dates. He was teaching her to play tennis, for example. And with Huck, her mother said, paying for things was never a problem. She’d leave the house with hardly any money.

Eli was bending over the bird, intent. He placed the soft, breathing ball into Julie’s tentative hands. Mary looked to her friend shyly, as if to ask,
Now do you see?
He came to Mary like a boy with a broken kite for her to mend.

Julie sighed and excused herself, putting the bird into Mary’s palm. Mary had agreed a hundred times that she should break up with Eli. I have to, she always said, I know I have to. And Julie had wanted to discuss the invitation she’d received that morning to Owens’ birthday party. The truth was she wanted to go.

Dying Young

O
n a hilltop, in a ballroom, Owens was throwing a thirtieth-birthday party for himself, Noah told Jane and Mary. Like many people, they had reason to be amused. Owens had frequently declared he would not live to see thirty.

“How do you know?” Noah had asked him, three years earlier.

“I just know,” he’d said, tapping his breast pocket, “I know it right here.”

Noah’d teased him. “Well, that rules out being president.”

“Bet he didn’t like that,” Jane said.

His somberness had seemed almost touching to Noah that day, but then Owens added, “A lot of the best people die young. And a lot more should’ve. Like if I were Bob Dylan, I’d rather have died while I was still in love with Joan Baez, you know, and she was still beautiful.”

“But he’s not Dylan,” Mary said, “and when he’s thirty, he won’t want to be dead either.”

“And she is too still beautiful,” Jane insisted. “We saw her, Noah. At the nursery. She was buying geraniums. Red ones.”

And Mary was right: at the time of the party, they heard no more about the best people dying young.

Noah Kaskie wanted a date for the party. He wished his sister were around. He’d long known the advantages of having a pretty sister, and with her it would be fun. But she was in the Peace Corps now, in Togo, Africa, building latrines.

“Yup, the big three-oh,” Owens said, slapping a hand on what was beginning to become a belly.

Noah and he were sitting at the Café Pantheon. A woman was reading at a table near them, a glass of wine in her left hand and a cup of coffee by her right. Though she was small, there was nothing girlish about her. She seemed entirely adult, alternating beverages, a pencil behind her right ear. Despite this activity, there was a neatness to her, as if her bookbag, by the leg of her chair, contained many compartments. Noah recognized her first by her trademark earrings, longer than her hair. He had never seen that before Louise. It seemed to defy everything he had absorbed from years of listening to his mother and sister: big earrings went with long hair, studs with short. This earring hung long and slender, a good inch below her white hair.

“That’s my postdoc over there,” he whispered. This was the first time he’d seen her outside the lab, and he’d noticed, not her beauty (he found her odd-looking), but her earring. And her self-administration.

“Why are we whispering,” Owens whispered back. “Hey, have you ever thought of asking her out?”

“No, not really.” Noah hadn’t until just this minute. “And I can’t. It’d be wrong.”

“I bet she’d really like you,” Owens said. “I’ve got an idea. You could go over and ask her if she’d like to come to my birthday party. That’s not a date. It’s a party.”

She was biting her nails, as she often did in the lab. She somehow made this look intelligent, a purposeful woman’s anxiety honed down to a delicate activity.

After Owens left, Noah did wheel over and invite Louise to the party, knowing full well she wouldn’t go. So he was stunned when she
said yes—a result that mildly thrilled but did not altogether please him.

He didn’t have tenure. You couldn’t
date
people in your lab. That was not only improper but probably illegal. For another thing, Rachel, the crystallographer from upstairs, had picked up the invitation from his desk and toyed with it. “Black tie,” she’d said. “Sounds kind of fun.” Kaskie most definitely did not own a tuxedo. The one suit Kaskie did own was dark, and several friends had suggested he could “probably get away with it.” Or, Rachel explained seriously, he could rent evening clothes. But
Owens
in a tuxedo? He had never seen his friend in anything but jeans.

Olivia and Owens moved together in the twilight room. He stood at the dresser, picking out socks. The black garment bag with his tuxedo hung on the closet door. This reminded him of his parents dressing to go out on a Saturday night—the impending dread of the baby-sitter, hurried happy tension in the house while it was still light outside. His parents would drive away in the car his father most recently fixed, a long rose from the garden on the seat.