A Regular Guy (43 page)

No, he thought, in point of fact the capital wasn’t far. He could drive it in three hours. Or he could get a private plane: a small gray one with rounded wings against the pale-blue Central Valley sky. As a boy he’d loved
Sky King
, a TV show about a rancher who flew his own plane.

“Time’s not ripe,” said the one who’d told him to marry Olivia.

That was it, Owens understood. They didn’t want him now.

“Perfectly all right. Give you two time to put your house in order. Maybe have yourself a wedding. Baby or two.”

For no reason at all, Owens picked up a doughnut and examined it. He hadn’t eaten a doughnut in maybe twenty years. He bit into the soft, powdered-sugar bag and his teeth cringed at the chemical jelly.

When he pulled into the Genesis parking lot, the whole place was overrun by workmen. A kid with a whistle and an orange vest, with no shirt underneath, pointed him to the detour. Owens thought of just bumping over the embankment and driving on down to the E Building, but first he wanted to know what they were doing. Probably some routine retarring, but he hadn’t noticed any cracks. He opened the window. “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Hello, Mr. Owens,” the kid said. “Painting. It’ll all be done by tomorrow.”

“Painting what?

“Lines for parking spaces. We got a chart with everybody’s name on it.”

Owens waited in his car for the worst, drumming his long fingers on the dash. The kid was running to get the chart.

He sat after he’d found his own name and slot, studying the pattern.
His stall was as far as it could possibly be from the main building, in a lot marked K. It would be a long walk just to the E Building. To get to Genesis, he could gather at a hub where a jitney shuttled back and forth every seven minutes during morning and evening hours.

“You always wanted to be treated like the masses. So I put you in a lot with two hundred people. What’s the problem? Now you want to start living like an executive?” That’s what Rooney would say. Instead of bumping over the divider and demanding to see Rooney, he backed up quietly and drove to the E Building, aware that this decision was a retreat.

“I just feel like playing hooky,” he said to Olivia later on the phone. All day he’d had the tempting urge. He sat with his feet up, fretted a piece of string, thinking of the new house. Today they were repairing the deck. It had been very hard to match the old wood. Owens tried to track down the people whose house it had been, but they’d taken off for a trip around the world, and a month of faxes had not yet turned them up. And then yesterday Mary and one of her weird friends came by, and Amber said she remembered when the house was built. Owens asked if she knew what made the wood that nice color. She said, “Of course I do. They used beeswax, is what they used.” He tried heating beeswax in a kitchen pot—and sure enough, it worked. Mary felt so excited she’d been able to give him something.

“I hope when it’s done,” he whispered into the phone, “you’ll move there with me.” Olivia was quiet these days, always smiling as if she knew some bad truth behind and at the bottom of it all. She’d moved back to the place she hated and spent hours after work roaming through the crumbling mansion. Owens had long since fired Susan and Stephen, but now that they were gone she’d stopped cleaning.

The five men in suits, he’d decided, were only five men. Besides, he’d seen them in grass skirts and muumuus at the Bohemian Club. He could run; not now maybe, but someday. Who needed so-called professionals? They were all Rooneys, watching the weather. He’d never lived his life the straight way, so why should he trust them now?

“I’d rather teach our guys about politics,” he explained to Olivia, “than try to make politicians honest.”

For a long time now, she’d realized that when he thought his own thoughts, he was practicing for saying them in public.

Olivia, Mary and Jane met Owens in the new house at five o’clock that afternoon to see the finished floors. The hand planing had taken eight months to complete, and Owens made them all take off their shoes. “See, we’ll have a little rack built to put shoes on when you come in.”

“Will you get slippers to offer people, like in Japan?” Olivia asked.

“No, they can just stay in their socks. Or walk barefoot. Oil from feet is what’s really good for floors.”

As she untied her laces, Mary felt again she shouldn’t be here. Late-afternoon light seemed thrown from buckets into the beautiful, empty rooms.

Owens squatted to glide his hands on the planks. “Feel this.” He grabbed Jane’s ankle. “Hey, maybe by the time I run for something, you’ll be old enough to vote for me.”

“Yeah, but how do you know I will?” She ran in her socks, slid. She did it again, then screamed. “Ouch!”

Jane had the first splinter.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Owens said, frowning. “But I suppose we’re not going to be running through here.”

He patiently explained everything they’d done, every architectural decision, while Mary massaged her daughter’s foot. That splinter would have to come out.

It was “we” again, Olivia thought, listening to him, he and God knows who else. In one place, “they” had raised the overhang of a door to make it symmetrical with another door.

Mary’s hands jammed in her pockets as her head curled down. She was thinking how the bungalow could be better, but it couldn’t; it was too full of junk, and it didn’t get light like this, never. Then, as she followed into the next room, a cry jumped out of her. She too had a splinter.

“Oh, this is seriously not good,” Owens said. “I’ve got to get them back here.”

She glared at him for not asking how her foot was or Jane’s. All he cared about was his damn floors.

But what he read in her blank stare was incomprehension. She probably did too many drugs in the mountains, he was thinking.

Upstairs, it happened to Olivia. “Whoops!” she said. “Join the club.” Then she sat down and pulled her sock off, holding her foot in her hand.

Owens bent over her where she sat cross-legged. “Aw, let me kiss it. Are you okay? Really?” he said in a baby voice, while Mary and Jane just stood staring.

“I’m fine,” Olivia said. “But I don’t know about your floors.”

Then they took turns, one at a time, in the large tiled bathroom, where Owens worked under a bare light with a needle, removing the splinters from each foot.

He sang, “We’re here in the middle of winter, and each woman in my life has a splinter.”

Owens had said so many times she would be the first female president that Jane decided to run for president of her freshman class. She understood, as he never truly had, that elections were popularity contests.

One afternoon, in the midst of her campaign, Jane visited Julie and the baby. Julie’s maternity leave had just run out, and she’d decided to take the year off to be with Coco. The baby let Jane pick her up and clutched her shoulder with tiny hands.

Julie ran to get the Halloween costumes. She’d already bought outfits for this year and next, although the baby was not yet walking. This year’s was a bumblebee made of yellow and black felt, with silk silver wings stretched over coat hangers. Next year’s was a tinfoil robot. “Some mother must have made these by hand for her children. Peter’s great-aunt took me to this incredible shop.”

“But what about the other children? That’s the only thing I wonder.”

“What other children?”

“The children, I mean, not Coco, who don’t have a great mom like you who finds them the best Halloween costumes.”

“You can have a perfectly happy childhood without homemade Halloween costumes. Coco doesn’t know the difference. This is for me, really, and for Peter.”

“Oh, I know that. I never had great Halloween costumes either. One year, I was night, and I just rubbed myself all over with coals. And after we moved here we went to the dimestore and bought the ones in packages. Once, I was a fairy princess, all icy blue and glittery. But I mean, what if you stay home and do everything for Coco, like my mom did for me? What about all the other people you might have helped?”

“I had to think about that a lot,” Julie said. “And you may decide differently, but I figure there are plenty of people who can do my job. I think I can make more of a difference raising one or two children—”

“See, I bet there’s something I could do that would help everyone, whether they had a lucky start and good parents or not.”

“Maybe you can.”

“I know.” Jane pulled her feet up under her on the sofa. She did think there was something like that she could do, but she didn’t know what.

“I thought that when I was your age too. I remember in college I wanted to have a baby, but there were lots of things I thought I’d do first. Like win the Nobel Prize and get a Rhodes Scholarship and write a novel and, oh, solve hunger in New York City.” She was laughing, a kind, hulling laugh. “And each year that goes by, you cross off one. Okay, well, maybe not the Nobel Prize. And the next year, maybe not a Rhodes Scholarship. You finally think, Well, I
can
have a baby.”

“Yeah,” Jane said, fingering her teacup.

Julie reverberated her lips against the baby’s belly. “And it’s not that you can’t work. Most women do now. I’m lucky not to have to. You might just find you don’t want to, that it’s not the most important thing anymore. And being a mom—it’s the hardest job I ever had.” She understood that Jane was judging her harshly: everyone knows teenagers are the world’s absolutists. Julie would have judged herself as harshly ten years earlier, or even five. But most of adult life, though quite enjoyable and full of rich satisfactions, would’ve sounded unbearable to her then. Not long ago, she’d had a wonderful conversation with Mary, and they’d decided that every girl imagines she’ll be rich by the time she’s the age they were now. What was impossible in advance was to fully account for pleasure. If she’d known in college
that she would marry a man who didn’t read treatises or swoon all night, she would have cried out words like “compromise” and “settling.” But Peter was dear to her. She loved the happiness that leapt over his face, and she smarted when he felt slighted, then contrived to find ways to comfort him.

And Jane was lucky. Jane was bright and, like herself, beautiful. Coco might not have those endowments. Who knew what she would become? She might need more.

Jane idly patted the baby’s warm back. She was promising herself not to forget what she wanted now.

Julie stood up to take back her daughter. She planned to move them into the kitchen and start on Peter’s supper while they talked. Despite her allowance of understanding, it was unpleasant to watch a child, particularly this one, with her advantages, vowing ardently not to become you.

Julie hoped Jane would lose her election. She was becoming too much like her father.

“Politics’d be worse,” Owens said to Kathleen. “Railroads and airports. Beaches. Highways.”

“Libraries are cutting their hours,” Kathleen added.

“Yeah, the libraries are all broke.” The chronic problem that plagued Owens now was one he’d never in his adult life suffered—how to pay the bill. The operating costs of Exodus represented the first bill he’d ever encountered that he couldn’t easily pay with his own money.

It was late at night, and he sat at his desk answering E-mail. Ten minutes before, he’d picked up the phone and called the marketing manager. Under everything he said and inside silence was the bad fact: Exodus, good as it was, was running out of money.

Rooney had completed his parking stalls. He’d assigned administrators—who traveled and were never there anyway—the wall that abutted the main building, where Owens’ car had always rested like a ship’s mascot.

“It’s pretty clear to me now,” he said, “they’re trying to get rid of me.”

Even Kathleen didn’t disagree.

Owens hadn’t once taken the jitney. He walked. Kathleen believed he’d decided not to let Rooney win over trivia. “To care too much about something stolen is to care about ownership at all,” he’d once said. He wouldn’t let these small intended indignities matter, she thought; he would keep his mind on what was important, on what was great.

Lately, he’d taken to getting in his car after midnight and moving it to his old spot, empty then, abandoned on all sides.

OWENS OUT! the headlines said, in forty-eight-point type, taking up a fifth of the page.

Julie, up at six with Coco, was the first to see. She allowed herself to read the article in full leisure, savoring a cup of coffee with sugar and real cream. She wanted to ask Mary over for tea, to talk about it, but she would wait. Mary didn’t always read the papers, and Julie didn’t want to be the one to tell her.

Jane found out at school. “Your dad got fired,” a boy said.

“I was just there where he works last week.” Or was it two weeks, even three?

“That’s what today’s paper said. On the front page.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” she had to say.

That evening, Mary and Jane drove out to buy the newspaper. They read the story carefully, but afterwards they still didn’t know what it meant. “He’s still got a job there,” Mary said tentatively. “Here it says he does, but it sounds like there’s somebody over him, so he’s not the boss. That’s just not like him.”

They wondered if it was the man who said he could make Owens marry Olivia, if that man would now be his boss.

They called Owens that night, their heads touching, mouths close to the phone, but his machine was on and he didn’t return their message. They called all the other numbers and still got nowhere, which made them feel back where they’d started.

Kathleen found him hunched over his desk, scanning prints by a famous photographer he’d hired to document Exodus from its beginning.
And with the exception of one retreat, when the famous photographer canceled and Owens hired Kaskie’s sister at the last minute, most of the landmarks were represented here in silvery black and white. When they came to Michelle Kaskie’s pictures, he said, “Her bill was so low, I pinned it on the bulletin board.” But her photographs were oddly apt. They weren’t as polished as the others, and people hadn’t liked the pictures of themselves—maybe, Kathleen thought, because they looked so exactly like them.