A Regular Guy (2 page)

“Never mind,” she said, turning back, face parallel to the ground. She’d found it beautiful, the moonlight on hundreds of half-cracked-out windowpanes.

But he truly was only curious.

He made various thwarted efforts to erect his own monuments. All his life, he was impressed with architects and listened with his head cocked a certain way when they were talking, but each of their collaborations failed because the men he hired fell short of his standards and he did not have the time to direct the projects himself.

He bought a tower once, and he bought an orchard. He also owned a cave in Italy. Usually, he demanded that no statements involving money enter his sphere at all, but because of an odd carelessness of the accountant, Jane had seen a credit card bill on his dressertop. “Grotta,” it said, and then converted a phenomenal amount of lire into eighteen thousand American dollars.

When she asked him about it, his face changed, his lips self-happy, remembering. “That’s where Olivia and I made love one time. We fell asleep on this little haystack right outside the cave. And then while she was asleep, I hid her dress.”

All of these purchases took place when he was living in a drafty upstairs
wing of rooms with a roof that leaked and floors that bloomed fungus and an outside terrace where weeds grew up, cracking the tiles. A colony of bees made their home in a corner of the dining room.

He was not—as she had long hoped—a man inclined to ordinary dwelling.

What Existed, Far Away
,
While He Never Wondered

I
t would take Jane years to reconcile her father with the man she’d grown up imagining, on the strange dark slide into sleep. One long-ago morning, she’d gone with her mother to a post office in a small Sierran town and seen a picture of a very young man, wanted for armed robbery. He appeared delicate and misunderstood in the grainy photograph, fugitive as an angel.

Her mother found her staring forlornly at that picture among the sad gallery. Jane was still a young child, but her face assumed an expression of concealment. For years afterwards, Jane would stare at certain men on streets and try to follow them. Her mother, Mary, would nod sadly and say no, he doesn’t look like Owens at all, because it was the criminal’s young face.

Mary wanted to correct the error, but she’d burned every photograph she had of Tom Owens.

Jane was born in Gray Star, a settlement in remote southeastern Oregon, where her cries were lost in miles and miles of orchards, stilled by a constant, omniscient rain. One of the people who lived in the communal
house drove to town to wire Mary’s message to Owens. Eight days later, she’d heard nothing. Staring out at the endless gray, she wrote a letter to her mother and told her she’d named the baby Jane, the name she’d once given her only doll.

They’d moved many times in the decade since, always because of a man. First there was the one who repaired string instruments and lived with nine cats. He gave Mary a guitar and made a high chair, where he allowed Jane to eat with her hands. Then, for a long time, there was the man who constantly traveled, following the greatest band on earth; he left them a truck, after he’d only begun to teach Mary how to play chords. Then came their months in Seattle, with the man who almost eclipsed Owens because he was beautiful, although he wanted to see them only weekends and said goodbye every Sunday by noon. Though he professed little aptitude for children, he taught Jane to read, because he couldn’t stand the garbled language of toddlers and wanted to rush her to the age of conversation. It was this man who first showed them Owens’ picture in the newspaper. With the small photograph, composed of dots, Mary tried to prove to Jane that her father was not the thief whose face she’d memorized from a post office wall.

In the article, Owens said he was the father of no children.

The city man’s weekends shrunk. He started to come on Saturday morning, still leaving punctually before Sunday lunch. When his visits began at midnight, they moved again. But by then Tom Owens seemed to them the most famous man in the world.

They moved to a place with natural hot springs, where they tried to learn to sit and not think. There, in a mud whirlpool, Jane told a group of children her father was rich.

“And I’m heir to the crown of Curaçao,” a boy replied. Actually, it wasn’t unusual for the children Jane met in communes and ashrams to claim lineage so distant it would be impossible, ever, to trace, while they lived in trailers and trucks, on bare mattresses. She once befriended a family of Hungarian royalty whose only proof was a rare hereditary disease called porphyria. They had never been to school and their mother taught them out of a book of Elizabethan plays and a video of the movie they watched over and over again in their van.

Finally, a woman called Bixter led them to a mountain town, where they lived in a wooden cabin at a camp once operated, during the warm months, by the park service. Most nights, the men built a bonfire and the women cooked, everyone watching the weather, sniffing for the hidden pith of bread that meant snow in the sky.

Jane understood that no place they had ever lived was where they were from. Auburn was the name of that place, and although she’d never seen it, she knew it from her mother’s stories. She drew the one wide Main Street blue with yellow lanterns and ended it in a pink square, where there was a newspaper-and-tobacco shop and a movie palace. She rimmed the town with stunted peach groves and palms full of dates, and set houses in every direction, each with its own yard and fruit-bearing tree. At night, she imagined the town sighing as the sky turned pink, then slowly dark. Jane had seen only one picture, on an old postcard they’d found in a dusty drugstore, showing horses and carriages instead of cars.

Unlike most towns, Auburn had been started by one person who’d had an idea. He had stopped not because the place was beautiful or different. In fact, it so exactly resembled land he’d already covered that only the collapse of his young wife made him stop. She had been called Auburn for the color of her hair, which had grown dark years before. Once she was buried there, he would never leave. Others in his party, however, noticed the kindness of the evening, a faint sweet smell emanating from white flowers in the dark. The man envisioned a clean town, no saloons, where ordinary people could grow their living. Over the next decades, more immigrants arrived, wealthy New Englanders from the long sail around the Horn, midwesterners in covered wagons, off the overland route, and eventually the patient citizens came on Pullman coaches, with modest expectations for the smell of fruit trees wafting through their afternoon rest. By then, Auburn had become an apricot town.

The founder’s daughter declared a swap meet every month, where people brought things found or no longer wanted and gave them to anyone who craved. A weekly clemency was instituted to encourage criminals’ remorse and the return of the stolen to its owners.

Over the years, the swap meet had grown into a dump. Mary sometimes
ached, missing the soft blurry start and end to the days in Auburn, the scent of wild rosemary and sudden mint rising from patches of refuse. When she was a child, the farthest she’d imagined going was San Francisco, the City of Clouds, which was no doubt still beautiful and corrupt. Now, though, when she felt far away, it was the homely valley town she remembered.

But when Jane asked if they’d return, she replied, “That cow town? What do you want to go there for?”

Mary di Natali had grown up on an old road in the part of town where overland settlers had built small brick houses like what they’d left, matchboxes on big yards with ancient trees, and lived for generations without the suspense of weather. People kept chicken coops or tied goats to trees. Mary never knew her father, but she had read his forty-three letters, which in small penmanship complained of a ship’s damp cold and relished an imagined future, when he would again be a baker of bread and live his life in front of fire.

Mary’s mother supported herself with her husband’s small bakery. In later years she became famous as far away as Fresno for her wedding cakes that gave a mysterious happiness, caused by a secret ingredient only Mary knew was wildflowers, broken into the batter.

Although she’d never been there, Jane felt she would recognize the dead-end road near the train tracks, where prim brides of all ages stood in line. As a girl, her mother played in white ruffled dresses, with a bow in her hair. These came from the dimestore or Browns’ catalogue, the same as other children’s, but Jane’s grandmother favored the less durable styles.

Mary had never fit in. But in the places Jane had already lived, she’d fallen in with the pack. In the camp, she was a leader, calling out games and rules. Her clothes, like the others’, were muddy colors from being collectively washed. When Jane heard her mother’s stories, she wanted that white dress with the white bow.

“Can’t you write to her and ask if I can have it?”

Mary sighed. “Someday we’ll go back. I don’t want you wearing dresses anyway.” This was an idea she’d heard once from a man and kept because her own childhood dresses had no pockets and she
couldn’t collect things except in her skirt, and then her underpants showed.

“By the time we go back, they won’t fit anymore.”

“I’m sure she saved a few. Like the communion dress. That she’ll have.”

Jane’s grandmother had delivered eighteen intricate cakes with small beans in their pale-bellied centers so Mary could have her first communion with a silk dress and her own wedding veil, cut down. Wax orange blossoms held the lace on her head.

“You look just like a little bride,” Phil the milkman had whispered.

It was windy that day and Mary felt so light from fasting, having eaten only paper-thin wafers, that when the old nun led them up a hill by a rope that had hoops for their hands, she believed it was to keep them tethered, to prevent them, in their white dresses, from billowing away.

“Why don’t I get to have a first communion?” Jane asked.

“Because the Pope’s a liar,” her mother said.

Jane’s grandmother silently conducted two hundred and eighty-four weddings in Auburn. She baked the brides’ cakes, wired mortified bees and pressed butterflies into attendants’ bouquets and took the festal photographs. She’d thought about her own daughter’s wedding since the day Mary was born and every year, on her birthday, presented her with a silver knife, fork or spoon to contribute to an eventual nuptial set. When Mary announced that she was moving out to live with Owens, her mother immediately disowned her. She had never liked Owens—not then or later, when he appeared on the covers of magazines—because he didn’t know decent manners.

By then, Mary had become slovenly and lank-haired, a disgrace to her mother, who tried to maintain the standards of a Frenchwoman in Auburn, wearing a permanent bun so no one could have the slightest apprehension of finding a strand of hair in his cake.

“She
says
she’s from France,” Mary heard them say, behind her mother’s back, “but we all know she’s a Belgian.”

She was Belgian and the dumpman’s daughter.

Owens and Mary lived together one summer. In September, he went to Harvard. Mary sent him a twelve-inch nasturtium chiffon cake in the mail and received no letter of thanks.

By Christmas, when Owens returned, he renounced all food but rice and beans and the smallest increment of green vegetables. He rented a cheap house near Auburn’s only highway, splitting it with Mary and his friend Frank.

In the house that shook with the rumble of trucks, this was a period of giggling love, repeated chases that ended with her caught on the soft bed, and pancakes for dinner at midnight. But at her job at the dimestore cash register, Mary sometimes cried because she and Owens hadn’t known each other as children. Owens had roamed the family junkyard with his father, looking for car parts. Once, they tore a fender off a wreck for a Caddy his father was working on, and that day, Owens told Mary, he saw a little girl in a white dress and a white bow, walking in a path through the debris.