A Regular Guy (21 page)

That, he told Jane, was why he wanted her to live in Alta. But then why wouldn’t he let her go to school?

“Is Karen there?” Owens said. “Could Karen give you a ride?”

Jane tapped him on the shoulder. “I can drive,” she said.

He listened for a while, then shook his head. “I’ll call Noah and he’ll go over.” Then he hung up. Owens lived twenty miles away in the woods, and Noah was probably within ten minutes of the party.

“He’ll be sleeping,” Jane said.

“Noah’s a hip guy; lemme just call.”

With Noah, Owens assumed a drowsy voice to imply that he was in bed. And it turned out Noah was too.

“Hey, you wanna do me a big favor? Olivia’s in Alta at a party. With Alta High people. I thought you might have been there.” Owens’ voice lowered. “I think she’s been drinking.” He was like a father from long ago in a movie, who put his hand on your shoulder, telling you something hard. “Could you maybe go and pick her up?”

After Noah answered him, Owens’ voice continued its soft drowse. “Well, what I’d really like you to do is pick her up and bring her here.” He paused. “Oh, thanks a lot.”

Jane could tell he meant it, but she’d heard him that way at his office too, when Owens made sure the other guys would work for another five hours while he went out to eat. She wished she could tell Noah, No, don’t, stay in bed, but she wanted to see him too. It was late and she wanted to go home now. She thought when he came she’d run down and ask him for a ride.

“You should go to sleep,” Owens told her.

Her futon was in the next room, and she pulled the down quilt over her, with her clothes still on. It was cold.

On the other side of the wall, Owens waited on clean sheets like a bride. Wind russed the trees. He was always pleased when something he arranged was in motion. He was waiting in a state of excitement, no
longer even for Olivia, but for something large and momentous. A hawk flew from the native oak away into the mountains, a darker blot on darkness. Then he slid in the commercial again.

“What are you doing up?” Olivia said, pushing the hair back on Jane’s head.

“I wanted to see Noah.”

Olivia kissed them both in a hurry and ran upstairs to the bedroom, tripping.

Jane had the ring in her pocket. She had given it once already to Owens, right after she arrived, the day he came to pick her up. “What’s this?” he’d said. “It’s to prove I’m me,” she told him. “You gave it to my mom once in a cherry pie.” He looked at her blankly. “I did? Really? So why’re you giving it back?” He left it on his dressertop, in an ashtray. She’d never seen him even look at it, and so tonight she took it. She wanted to give it to Noah, but all of a sudden she felt paralyzed. “Can you drive me home?” she blurted. She didn’t know how to tell him.

“Did Owens say it was all right?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“It’s not a good idea, Jane. We don’t even know if your mom’s home. It’s her one night off, and she might have a date.”

That gave her a bad feeling, the bungalow empty and dark.

Jane bounded back upstairs after watching Noah’s van drive away. She knocked on their bedroom door to say good night again.

“You know, I never asked you,” she said. “What did you get for your birthday?”

“Guy from work gave me a peacock. Maybe tomorrow morning we can find him. I think he might have flown away already.” He shrugged. “Where are all your presents?”

Olivia had a strange smile. “He left most of them at the hotel.”

“You did? Can I have them?” She pictured a tile floor in the hotel, and a huge pile of presents wrapped with long ribbons.

“No, Jane, you can’t,” he said. “And it’s time to go to bed.”

“Do you know if my mom’s at home?”

“I don’t know, Jane. But it’s late. Time for bed.”

The ring hadn’t worked. Maybe the canister would have. All this
time, her mother had wanted to get into his world, which still seemed marked off with an invisible chalk line. She thought Jane was the magic word, the key. But Jane knew there was a further secret.

Going to sleep, she pretended she had gotten him the canister. She could have; she had the money in her box. She could have unwrapped the damp, soft bills and bought it. Maybe it was the present he would have kept.

Owens recognized the wine collapse of Olivia’s body and the dryness in her mouth. Tonight she was floppy and sharp at the same time. She wanted to sit up straight and talk. And it was a loud, bright night outside, with a veined moon. The final proof of what different vegetarians they were was her drinking. He couldn’t believe he was in love with a woman who drank and smoked.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered in her ear.

“In high school, when people complimented my appearance, I thought they were making fun of me.”

“Why, Olivia?”

“My father was always very critical of us. Someone would say I was pretty, and he’d say, ‘She’s got too much hair on her arms.’ Because he was an artist, maybe, he was always fussing with us, fixing us.”

She had only one picture of her parents: a woodblock her mother had made, both of them young and straight-haired.

“Turn that off,” she said suddenly, pointing. He’d fallen asleep with her four-year-old face frozen on the screen.

Olivia’s great tragedy was her childhood. Her mother, as a girl in Sweden, cried herself to sleep every night in a green-and-ivory bed shaped like a boat. She had pimples and a round face. At fourteen, she vowed to herself and God from her small painted bed that if she ever had daughters who weren’t beautiful, she would drown them at birth. She believed, at fourteen, in the mercy of this.

She had grown up to marry a long-faced, gray-toothed artist who believed she was beautiful. Perhaps he was the only person who had ever found her so, and she was, when she was able, grateful. Owens had studied her picture and saw little resemblance between the woman and Olivia, except the hair. But Olivia’s father loved the slope of his
wife’s shoulders down from her neck. “This,” he’d once said, running his knuckle-back down her spine, “is my favorite part of you.” Olivia’s mother had told her many times. “Can you imagine? A back.” And Olivia, from the moment she could walk, was in her mother’s eyes a rare beauty. “She is ordinary,” her father insisted.

And eleven years later, her mother killed herself. Her father lived alone in the hotel where she’d died, in a room smelling of cigars and old laundry. Olivia sometimes saw him lurking in Mitch’s bookstore. He always seemed startled to see her, then he slumped in disappointment. It was because of her hair. She had her mother’s hair.

“I got some pictures of us today, from the party. We look like we’re really in love.”

Her body turned sharp in his arms. She never liked pictures of herself. “We still need to talk about the party.”

“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s just forget the party and go back to being us.”

Her head stilled for a moment. She closed her eyes, rolling in the ship-safety of drunkenness.

Her silk thing from the party hung in the closet; he could see it beyond the open door. It wavered a little in the night breeze.

He thought of something Noah Kaskie once told him: right now he was thirty and he wanted to live.

Mrs. Em Tine, six years retired and fifteen widowed, still woke on a school schedule. So she got up and started her day. She watered plants, paid the bills when there were any, and continued her correspondences. She exchanged letters regularly with two sisters she’d taught with in Auburn.

“
Save a dance for me,” he whispered in my ear. That was after the toast. He’d come and made me stand up and they all clapped. But he was busy, I suppose, with the young ones, and we didn’t get our dance. That was too bad
.

Mrs. Tine didn’t write that she’d seen him necking with two different girls. She would have liked a chance to fox-trot, and to ask him which girl he liked the best. She had her own favorite—the thinner
one, in the pink dress. She seemed more like Mrs. Tine’s own daughters. The other one was just too beautiful.

She had taken the bus home yesterday. She didn’t live in the valley anymore; it had become too expensive after Walter died. The night of the party, she’d stayed in that hotel. The two sisters had offered her a room in Alta, but they went to bed early and she didn’t want to have to leave before all the others did. She’d asked the desk to be sure and deliver her present. He can always use another vase, even if they have one, she thought. Now she just hoped he got it. She expected she’d get a note in the mail any day now.

I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. But guess what I did that night? I got myself a massage. Me! They had a card by the phone saying you could order a massage all night long and they send a person up. They ask you too if you have a preference, woman or man. And I said, definitely it would have to be a woman. She was a young girl, only twenty-five or twenty-six, but was she ever strong. It felt so good. All the way home on the bus, I just felt different
.

And then the next morning, I was in the lobby and I ran into Hanson, the lawyer I told you about who found me and invited me and all, and he said, what was I doing there? And I told him the last bus left at nine so I’d stayed. And I said, wasn’t it ever a nice hotel? But he said, no, he hadn’t stayed, he’d just driven up to make sure everything was settled. I guess he’d arranged a lot of the party, and then when I went to check out, they told me my room and the massage and everything was all paid for. They wouldn’t let me give them another cent. So I thought that was nice
.

The European Way

O
wens liked to drive his car, and that is where he came up against civilization. They took away his license once, he told Jane, so he had to ride his bike to work for a month. And he often ran out of gas. Now this was somebody else’s fault; ever since he’d had money he hired people to manage the material side of life, including filling up the car, but they sometimes screwed up. Before, when he’d shared a car with Frank, he admitted, it frequently ran out of gas.

Tonight the fuel needle was wavering below the quarter-tank mark. Susan and Stephen, his housekeepers, had gone to Bangkok and also planned to travel in Burma and the Philippines. Owens hadn’t really thought about it until then, on the highway, and he didn’t like the idea very much. He thought he could probably get to the city on a quarter tank. He tapped the dashboard. He knew his car pretty well. He thought it’d be close but he could do it.

There were people who didn’t live like this, he realized, people who would certainly stop and fill up the tank, but those people wouldn’t leave for a dinner in the city ten minutes before they were supposed to
be there. It was a forty-minute drive, a half hour speeding. Those people wouldn’t speed either.

He sighed. You could live like that. You could leave early, with plenty of time for gas and accidents and bathroom stops, but pretty soon that’s what your day was: bathroom stops.

He knew a guy like that. Todd. He worked at home and couldn’t concentrate until everything in his house was organized. He’d do the laundry, fold it and put it all away. He’d never sit down before three or four o’clock. He lived in a very neat house. Owens had to fire him, and eventually he’d got out of the business altogether. Probably for the best. He was talking about going back to school, to be a nurse. Owens gave him the advice he’d have given anybody: Figure out, if you were going to die in a year, what you would want to have done most. Make that one thing the first thing you do every day and leave the rest for later. Which in Owens’ case was probably never. And if the rest never got done, he could live with it.

Later, Jane sighed, listening to her father talk like this. She knew she was part of the rest.

The thing about Genesis, it could take all he had. For a long time now, Owens had allowed himself one other thing in each day, and that was love or some idea of it. But when he found himself leaving work, he gave it, as if in appeasement, five minutes, ten minutes more. It was almost impossible to leave before dark. The office building was like a communal house, the refrigerator full of whatever the guys liked and Owens’ juices, stereos were rigged into the walls. It felt good to be one of the gang staying late. When he left, he knew he was probably missing something better than what he was going to.

That was one reason he was chronically late. He also canceled. Owens’ eyes for life were bigger than his stomach.

Tonight he was meeting Lita. In the middle of his birthday party, he’d suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to invite her. She was in Berkeley now, studying photography.

He’d met Lita when she was a schoolgirl living with her parents. She was sixteen, curly-haired, coming home every day on a dented school
bus. One day when Owens came to see her father, she was raking leaves in her plaid school uniform, and he’d stopped to pick up chestnuts from the ground.

She had been a virgin and had some virginal ways. The three adults sat in triangular chairs drinking coffee, while she played on the floor, making towers with her little sister’s blocks and then toppling them. Another afternoon, he caught her perfecting the outfit for a clothespin doll, and often he saw her bouncing a small brown ball.