Authors: Mona Simpson
The young man behind the desk, politely relieved, spoke only to Huck.
Mary took the raincoat out of the bag to try it on again. While most people’s concern went to Jane, Huck had always felt a particular sympathy for Mary. She tied the belt and turned around. The coat didn’t flatter her; its color tinged her complexion green, and she looked shapeless.
Huck scratched his head. Jane, dressed by Mary, had always looked very snappy, so why couldn’t she pick the right things for herself? He immediately pitied her predicament.
“Oh, Mary,” he burst out, spotting a yellow slicker hanging on display. “Why don’t you try that one? The color’s so nice. Let me find it in your size.”
The yellow coat looked a hundred times better. Her complexion returned. The coat latched with metal buckles, but somehow you could sense Mary’s delicacy inside it.
“You like it?” Mary said, then sighed. “Oh, this one’s not on sale.”
“I’ll buy it for you,” Huck said, his arms shooting out in exuberance, forgetting for the moment that—given what Olivia told him—Mary lived on more money than he and all the other teachers he knew.
The salesman confirmed the superiority of the coat and began the paperwork of exchange. They settled that Huck would pay the difference.
Mary decided to wear the coat, and she liked it better every time they passed a mirror. Huck felt delighted to see her sneaking looks. He didn’t think of her as someone who looked in mirrors. On the escalator going down, she began to tell him about her grievance with Olivia, not just Owens, for leaving Jane in the car.
“Oh, Mary, don’t be mad at her for that. That was a terrible night, and it was all my fault. See, I’d told her about an affair Owens had had that she didn’t know about, and it was the same day she thought she might be pregnant.” The minute Huck said that, his hand on Mary’s shoulder, he remembered he’d promised not to tell anyone. Oh, well, he quickly allowed, that had been the lesser secret. The other he would never tell.
But Mary pounced on the information. “She’s having a
baby?
”
“Mary, I really shouldn’t have told you. It’s a secret, kind of, so don’t say anything. I just didn’t want you to be mad at her.”
“But I’m glad I know. I should know. If he has another child, that’ll affect Jane.”
“Please, Mary, promise you won’t say anything.” He turned around backwards on the escalator, hands out, beseeching.
“I have to go, Huck.” She ran out at the bottom of the escalator. The pain returned, her sacrifice. And she’d given away hers for him.
When Huck arrived at the bungalow, Jane was already sobbing on the floor. Mary was in her room with the door closed. He tried to talk to Jane, but she just hid her face in her arms, and thinking a woman might be able to help, he called Olivia. She sighed, not even sounding surprised, and said she’d be right over. And then there was nothing to do but pace and wait. Suddenly, Mary emerged from her doorway, looking blank and angry.
“Surely—oh, please don’t cry…. Mary, it’s not what you think.”
She ignored him and sat down by Jane. Huck had rarely felt so helpless. He offered to take them all for ice cream, and no one even answered his suggestion.
Then Olivia came, and Huck stood back. Jane was still on the floor, with Olivia kneeling in front of her, saying, “A lot of times, I’m jealous of you. Because you’re blood.”
Olivia drove up to the old Copper King’s mansion and waited for Owens in bed. Now she had to tell him. He’d always been bothered by her lack of virginity. He counted back the number of men who’d “been” with her. When he’d asked about her ex-boyfriends, his mouth went a certain way. She lied a little. He thought there were four.
Olivia needed a moment of stillness to remember she hadn’t done anything wrong. It had been her youth, and the men she’d slept with she’d loved or thought she loved. Owens’ idea of goodness was so fragile it could be corrupted by something as natural as breeze.
It’s a small thing I do, she thought, not even nurse, but he really did save lives. Owens was always trying to get her to admit the enormity of it. And though Olivia would’ve liked them to be even, he had done that one great thing.
To say that Olivia was a nurse’s aide was true and missed the point. She was not like Owens. For Olivia, there was such a thing as a job. She made decent money and had for some years now. She believed this marked her as an adult, distinct from, say, Mary, who enchanted her as a watercolor might.
Olivia told Owens when he came in and knelt on the futon. He suggested they take sweatshirts and get in the car and drive. There were things she knew in him that no one else knew. She slept in the back seat while he drove, but when he stopped at Buck Meadows, she got up and helped pitch the tent, and they laughed all night. They woke up early, drenched from the damp ground and aching.
“I was thinking we should go away,” he said. “Live on the banks of the Ganges and think about God all day.”
“Don’t ever forget you were like this,” she begged, taking his hand.
Then she gulped. “Why don’t you give it all away? I promise you won’t be sorry.”
“I don’t think I can. I mean, who am I going to give it to?”
“The poor.”
“Which poor? It’s not enough to go around. So the question is, are you just going to be cavalier about it or are you going to really do your homework? It’s like business. You want the most bang for your buck.”
“Okay. So do your homework, then.”
“My homework would take years, though. I don’t know anything about charities. Most of what I know is what you and everybody else know, and that’s that they don’t work very well or the world wouldn’t be what it is. I always figured the best thing to do is just park it someplace and then take ten years and decide.”
“It’ll never be just us, will it?”
He took her chin and turned it to the sky. That was Wednesday.
On Saturday, they went to the city to look in stores for ancient carpets and tables like the ones Franciscan brothers had used. Before and after work, Owens drove to the new house. Nights, they slept in the Copper King’s mansion, Olivia tucked under his arm, watching silvery miniatures of Ingrid Bergman falling in love.
It was hard for Owens to believe that a woman like Bergman was not alive and young, somewhere. When he read in a magazine on Monday that she had a daughter attending graduate school in New York City, he idly dialed the number of some advertising men he knew in Manhattan, who offered to make inquiries. He was listed in that same magazine as one of America’s twelve most eligible bachelors. Kathleen had brought it in. He carried it around with him and on Tuesday presented it to Olivia as a kind of gift.
That afternoon, Owens had a reaction akin to waking up. The man from the jewelry store left two messages about stones transferred from a large safe in Texas. Every hour now, he felt pressure from Rooney. He had no time to plan a wedding, and that was exactly the kind of thing Olivia couldn’t do right. He’d thought of the chapel Saint Francis built in Assisi, or, right here, Alta’s first church. In the middle pencil
tray of his desk drawer at work, he kept the slender ring that had been his mother’s.
He needed two quarters, maybe three. Tomorrow he had to fire his chief crystallographer, which was going to be hard because Theo had been with him since the beginning. But Exodus had to come first.
That night he confessed to Olivia. “A lot of people are depending on me. They’ve got families. And for us, too, maybe we should get our house in order and then, in a year or so … I don’t know, I’ve just been getting kind of sick whenever I think of it.”
He made all his claims on behalf of others. It wouldn’t be fair to them. He was always a we, even without her. And her needs were only for herself.
On Friday, Olivia went to the doctor’s office and had an abortion. She told Owens that night, after it was done. When he understood what had happened, he began a long, slow sinking, nothing at all like the freedom he’d imagined, the freedom he thought he’d had before.
Olivia and Owens would never fully understand the end of that mutual week-long dream, because Gunther Michaelis got sick again four days later. This time was the real time, according to his doctor; the tumor was most likely inoperable, and in a typical storm of perversity the old man had refused all treatment and was simply preparing himself to die. Olivia’s brother, in New Orleans, spent the day making and canceling plane reservations, deliberating and then apologizing too long.
For the first time ever, Olivia asked Owens for money, and he gave it to her with relief. She moved Gunther Michaelis out of his hotel, into a furnished two-bedroom apartment, where she and Huck camped out, to accompany him in his final days. The dinette looked out on the public garden Noah’s father had made.
Olivia cooked for them all. Every night, she made her father meat, because he liked it. They pooled their finances and every supper became a feast, with roasts and chops, potatoes, a dessert. The main thing Olivia ate during this time was rice. She’d boil a pot of white rice and eat it with cinnamon-sugar and milk, the way her mother had fixed it.
Owens visited, but he was clearly a stranger in this apartment, where the floors were strewn with flannel shirts and books he’d never heard of. Olivia’s father had never liked Owens and made no effort to hide it. “When did I ever say I liked you?” he asked, the third night there, and then looked blankly up at him like an owl.
Her father’s illness was a marathon Olivia had nothing to compare to. Huck had written a master’s thesis and that, like this, had been a period when time ceased to be marked by the conventions of weeks and hours but moved rather by internal measure, broken only with the repeated interruptions of meals and sleep. Olivia and Huck went through work by rote, watching the clock. Neither of them had a job that matched the intensity of life in the apartment, where everything was rented.
Gunther had few possessions. He’d lived for years in a small room with a kitchenette in the Presidente Hotel. But he now made an elaborate ritual of distributing what remained.
Otto Lark drove up the fifth night in his rickety convertible. The two men laughed and drank in the bedroom, speaking the faraway language their children never learned. As men, their lives had been as different as two lives that started from the same point could be. At twenty they had both been handsome, at least as they remembered themselves, and full of expectation. Otto loved literature and hoped to be a poet, and Gunther intended to paint; neither became what he loved. Otto spent years chasing the fleeting happiness he had known in his youth, with flat-chested women in his classes every semester. Gunther loved direly and only once. His wife had stolen his ability to paint when she’d stunned him with her greater talent. After she took her life, there had been nothing left to give him pleasure. But the two men sang songs from their youth, and before he went, Otto danced around the small living room with Olivia.
“I promised him you’d come over to eat once a week,” Otto said. “Because I’ll be the only one you have. Your mother was such a woman. He never got over her.”
“She’s a lot like her mother, don’t you think, Dad?” Huck said.
Otto looked at Olivia sharply, as if for the first time. “I don’t see it.”
Olivia’s brother, Nicholas, was always far. For three years now, he’d lived away from their family and not come home. For him especially, Olivia thought, their father was dying too soon. His father’s decline had snatched away Nicholas’ anger and left him mute. In only one year, Olivia thought, he could have come back as a man, with something of his own.
Near the end, Olivia had thanked Nora for letting her come, because she’d never had a chance to nurse her own mother. Nora had told her she would love her whatever she did and to go out and try to find a nice life for herself, one where she felt comfortable. The last time Olivia saw her was a cool, sunny day, and Nora wanted to sit outside. Olivia helped her sit down on the cement step, slipping a blanket under her loose buttocks. A watery wind bent the long grasses.
“He’s my son,” Nora had said, “but if he’s not good to you, you go find somebody who is, who makes you feel real nice. Because you’re a good girl, a good, good girl.”
The first Sunday Owens came to the apartment, he found Olivia roasting prime rib. He drove to the bungalow, where Mary gave him leftovers.
“How’s Olivia?” she asked.
“Well, you know her dad’s sick.”
“But she’s not sick at all?”
“Oh, no, she’s fine.”
“God, I was so sick. I threw up almost every day.”
Owens looked at her sternly. “You know we’re not having the baby.”
“No,” Jane said.
“How would we know?” Mary asked, her eyes closing.
“I thought I told you,” he said.
Jane pushed up in a jerk. She ran to her room and slammed the door.
“Why are we always the last to know? Doesn’t your own daughter matter?”
“Leave me alone,” Jane shouted through the door. She could hear the siss of shoe soles on the sidewalk. I am the one child, she thought,
out of three who could have been. She remembered the long-ago picture of the man she thought was her father. She was almost as old now as him.
That night, Gunther Michaelis called Olivia and Huck to his bedroom and made his request, breaking into wicked fits of laughter. He relished outwitting the young doctor. His plan was to die when he wanted to die, not to wait one minute longer. “I’ve got the pills,” he announced with glee, sweeping the plastic canister from under his pillow and brandishing it before their astonished faces. “I stole them.”
Of course this was not all. He wanted them to help. Olivia and Huck tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. His only interest at this late moment seemed to be in thwarting the doctor, fixed in his mind as a stand-in for the forces arrayed against him. One night, he repeated, they were to help him. Not yet, but soon. They would read the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, they would tell each other the burdens of their souls, then they would say goodbye and “put me to sleep,” he said. “I want Nicholas here too.”
And so Olivia and Huck and later Nicholas entered into another secret, a secret greater than any they’d known so far. Also, what they planned to do was at this time illegal in the state of California and punishable by law.