A Regular Guy (33 page)

Owens grinned. “He’ll probably want to bring them all back and give ’em jobs.”

“Remember that uncle?” Shep turned from the bookshelf, where he was reaching down another album. “Man, oh, man. Guy’s a loser.”

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Anna said, “our school has two little Owenses this year, in the kindergarten. I think parents are naming their sons after you.”

Jane stood staring at Minna in the dress. “It’s beautiful,” she said to Minna.

Owens whispered in her ear, so close she felt the moistness: “When you get married, I’ll buy you a beautiful dress too.” But she pulled away. Jane had two friends so far in Alta, but they weren’t like this.

Then, thumping back in her nightgown and slippers, a child again, Minna danced with her father, covering the kitchen floor with waltzes and jitterbugs, bumping into cupboards, the stove. Jane grabbed
Owens, who danced in his way, awkward and gawky, but glamorous to his daughter, counting the steps. “Dad, listen. Step-slide-step, step-slide-step, step …” Anna hummed the music under their laughter.

After midnight, the fog came up from the bay, obscuring the Japanese maple, then revealing its ghost form, as thinner rags blew past. The house was the only one still lit. Owens sat in his new low car, feeling for the headlight switch. He’d had the car a few days, but he hadn’t driven it at night yet. And though he’d had three cars just like it, he couldn’t work the switch. Looking at the small street, he remembered a night when Minna ran prancing in a white nightgown down the stairs, younger than Jane was when he first saw her. He hadn’t had Jane near him then; those years were lost, forever. She lay sleeping in the passenger seat, with her feet propped up on the dashboard, and he reached to touch her sleeping head, her jeans-protected knee.

Then the light went out inside, leaving only the porch lamp. It reminded him of instruments being packed in their cases and carried away, when a few minutes earlier, they’d been inside the orchestra, the clanking, jangling, warm aroma of home. The cedar that framed their bay window hadn’t always; Shep had trained it to rise in two spires. And they didn’t even own the house. They rented.

Then Anna stepped onto the porch in a long robe, with a hand on her forehead.

He stood up out of the car. “I can’t get the lights to work.” Why’d I bring it? he thought. The car was black and gleaming, small, extraordinary. He wanted, all of a sudden, something less conspicuous and hoped he’d remember this in the morning.

Then she was beside him, her large feet bare, her hair braid down, whispering buoyantly, “I think I know.” She reached in through the open window, her cheek so close the hairs of his Saturday beard felt her; she found a knob and pulled, illuminating the world. “Mine had the same, our old one,” she said, breathless, then stopped, embarrassed by the comparison. But her dented tin can did have the same latch. “One of those little ironies of life,” she called and was off, a tall swoop archangel, her braid swinging across her back.

And he wondered for a moment, looking into the rearview mirror
at his own face, which looked to him not handsome but goofy. Who are you to be speeding away from all this, off into nothing?

That night, Jane was still small enough that he could carry her to the bungalow and hand her, knees jointed over arm, still sleeping, to her mother.

Parking

O
wens had never declared or claimed his parking spot. “I believe in democracy,” he told Jane. But she could tell he thought he earned it, just by the hours he put in, the late nights and early mornings his car waited there, alone in the autumn moonlight and the cloud-luff sky.

He’d used the parking space in all his years with Genesis. Even when he traveled, it was always left open. Now that he worked most of the day in the Exodus building, he still parked in his spot and sprinted over.

Today, though, his space was taken. Furthermore, it was Rooney, not some stranger who didn’t know. Owens instantly recognized the car, because it was identical to his own. When Rooney had first driven it to work, Owens approved, almost. He’d done some research and concluded that if you wanted a sports car, this was the best. But he now wondered if Rooney’d discovered this for himself, or if he’d just gone in and said he wanted one like Owens’.

Things with Rooney weren’t what they had been. He’d had to have talks with him too many times lately, and in the last month they’d
more or less agreed to disagree. When Owens parked and got out, he saw
G. J. Rooney, President
painted on the curb. Rooney’s car was sealed and locked. Most likely he used the car alarm.

Owens had heard that back East, where Rooney came from, hundreds of CEOs had their parking spots painted with their names, like plaques on auditorium seats, and that sometimes it was even a negotiating point in contracts. But he’d never wanted Genesis to be like that. So far, Owens didn’t have anything named after him, although a week earlier he’d sent away five hundred dollars to a horticultural laboratory that would hybridize a rose named Olivia. He’d ordered fourteen Olivia bushes to plant in his garden. When he told Jane about this, she wished he’d ordered roses named Jane.

People deserve to own what they use, he said. Everyone in the company knew where he parked, and a few hundred people, maybe a thousand, unconsciously glanced at the spot when they entered and exited, to see that Owens was there. Owens stooped down to the curb. The paint was dry and
G. J. Rooney
was the only name there. If he’d put Owens’ name somewhere, Owens probably would’ve railed and had it painted over immediately, but this, in its way, was even worse. He ran up the stairs two at a time, his heart going like something hitting inside a paper bag. From all the hours, he felt more at home here than home.

First generation builds, second enjoys, third destroys
. That triangle jingled. Jane was his second generation. But the way Rooney saw it, Exodus was; and with its expensive fruit juice and the lavish ad campaign, Rooney thought they were enjoying, all right. Rooney was nothing if not prudent.

Through the glass wall, Owens saw him stretching, hands on back hiphandles, teeth clenched. Full suit and tie every day. Owens told him from the beginning this was a place he could wear jeans, though Rooney always got a straight slight smile when he said that.

For a long time, years, Owens had an impermeable protection. He tested the limits, dared fate, told more and more audacious things to reporters, missed appointments, canceled, let his temper flare. And nothing happened. He appeared on more magazine covers. In negotiations, he went for the high fair price and stayed firm; more than once
he’d walked away. His stamina outlasted others’. The stock rose. Genesis had been rising, and so was he. But now, all of a sudden, it seemed he’d turned a corner. The Exodus guys had created something amazing, but no one could use it yet.

Owens sat down in Rooney’s office. “Hey, we need to talk.”

“All right, Tom.” The space between Rooney’s teeth showed not a smile but forbearance of pained anxiety. He reminded Owens of his father’s mother, an old woman who looked out the window and wanted to be left alone. He’d always tried to make her laugh.

Owens scanned the desk, picked up a memo. Rooney stayed standing, hands still on his hips. “What can I do for you?”

“See, the way this is written reminds me of corporate BS,” Owens said, slapping the page down. “Like Detroit, threatening people. Remember:
they
want to be more like
us.
”

“CFO made a study of our one-day-air bills, Tom. They’re forty-five percent over any other company, including the big Swiss boys. Same thing with long distance, prime time
and
international.”

“Okay, so maybe we have to cut back. But there’s a better way to say it. See, this just isn’t what I ever wanted to do. I didn’t want a company where people who do great work have to worry about these little things. I didn’t want people afraid of getting caught. I happen to believe that impairs creative thinking.”

“Tom, we don’t need to be paying for everybody’s Christmas packages flying Federal Express. There is such a thing as a post office!”

“I just think if you start having all these rules, people cheat. The smart people find ways around them. I would.”

“Not everyone’s you, Tom. We’re not monitoring your phones. You can send all the Christmas presents you like, for Christ’s sake. We’re talking about a company of over a thousand people.”

Owens shook his head. “That’s not my point at all. As it happens, I actually don’t give Christmas presents.”

“Tom, let’s talk about next quarter’s budget. I don’t much believe in pyrotechnics.”

They talked for a good half hour, without convincing each other of anything.

“I think I’ve learned in my ten years here that it pays to do things
right,” Owens said, “even if the bill’s higher at the end. You know, you have to spend some to make money.”

“You yourself are proof against that!” Rooney exploded. He then explained what he thought was a reasonable proportion: most capital outlay to Genesis, which was still supporting the whole show.

“You really don’t understand,” Owens almost whispered. “Exodus is awesome. In five years, millions of people all over the world will be relying on our drugs. Rooney, this is what’s going to make our name. And you know I love Genesis.” He walked to the far end of the office and put his hands on the wooden molecular model of their first, best-selling compound, LCSF. “I manufactured it. It makes stem cells, precursor cells. It helps people live after chemo. But NT
12
is a cure.”

The phone rang and Rooney spoke into the speaker. “He’s here, Kathleen. Go ahead.”

“I wanted to remind him they’re expecting him in fifteen minutes at Jane’s school.”

There was a lot more to be said. But so far he and Rooney agreed on exactly nothing. And this was Jane’s first month of school.

Second generation, Owens mumbled, swinging into his convertible, glancing at Rooney’s tight car, barely used and scratchless.

Owens had gone through three of these cars, all the same model and all black. He’d run one into a live oak the week before the public offering, and he’d banged the back of the next right before he’d introduced his rice-and-beans bill in the legislature. Now, every time Owens tried something big, he expected to crack up a car. That put him at a rate of one every three or four years. He planned not to use the new one the month before his Berkeley speech.

Once cracked up, he determined, they were never the same again. The only way to console himself for the damage was to order a new one. To spend money replacing something he already had bothered him, but then he forgot about it. “Just as long as you don’t buy any more date farms,” Eliot said. “Talk to me before you do anything like that.”

He didn’t give up the first car and still drove it a good deal of the
time. He kept one perfect and used the other to park at the airport. By now he’d learned to forgive himself such extravagance and to allow for a certain amount of loss. He understood there were elements of destruction in his personality that he could not expunge.

Second generation
. There were signs everywhere that he was beginning to lose. His luck had turned, but he’d give it a run for its money. Because unlike a lot of people as smart as he was, Owens knew he knew how to work.

A bumper sticker swam up in front of him.
MEDICINE WILL CURE
DEATH AND GOVERNMENT WILL REPEAL TAXES BEFORE TOM
OWENS FAILS
. Somebody on the team had designed yellow letters on black, like a bumblebee. The type was gorgeous. For labels, he’d learned a lot about type.

To make a bad day perfect, Owens had a fight with Mary outside the school.

“I think this is a school for little geniuses,” Mary blurted, tripping on her high heel. At the meeting, the teacher had told them nothing good. Jane was, she said, “a little butterfly,” excessively concerned with her social life.

“Cricket more like,” Mary whispered into her lap, because Jane’s voice veered high and screechy.

Step on a crack
Break your mother’s back
.
Step on a line
Break her spine
.

Mary listened to girls’ incessant chanting, up and down, on the sidewalk, almost at the end of the jump rope years. Now, since she had been in school, boys called at night on the telephone, a gulp in their voice, saying, “Jane there?” Their impudence rendered Mary helpless, not indignant, and she soundlessly whispered, “I’ll get her.”

Her friends, the teacher said, were not the serious students. They were children from troubled homes. Just today she’d discovered a balled pair of stockings and long earrings in Jane’s locker. She handed the contraband over to Mary.

“Like that Madeleine,” Owens added, continuing the conversation outside, “without the last name.” Madeleine had a last name—the way Jane did, from her mother—but she didn’t use it. “And the other one, what’s her name?”

“Johanna.” Mary sighed. She’d never liked her own last name. “I suppose it’s natural. We’re not the most normal family either. I never had friends from good homes.”