A Regular Guy (46 page)

A rasp on the pavement, and it was Jane, walking fast. She took her sleeve to wipe his eyes. “What is it, Noah?”

“I’m losing my hair.”

She ran her left hand through it as his mother had, but even his mother had often seemed distracted. “You’ve still got a lot left.” She touched his shins with her shoe. “That’s what you mind, isn’t it? Yours are just smaller.”

“And crooked.”

“My feet are flat,” she said.

“I don’t even want to tell you about my feet.”

She squatted down and held on to the arms of his chair. “You know what? You should let me take a picture of you. I can make you look great.”

“Not with a camera you can’t. My sister tried for years.” Like FDR, he liked no photograph of himself that showed the chair. All the pictures he kept were from the chest up. Certain girls in school had liked him for his face; one had told him he had beautiful tragic eyes. But Michelle did photograph his chairs, all but the first. And he loved those photographs, cherished them. The second chair she’d done in black and white, empty on the pavement with all its nicks and dents. But he was thinking now about that first wheelchair, which was thrown away long ago. I
learned how to love by loving a thing
.

Noah was okay now. He felt like a bird after a ruffled squawk. He sighed. “I got a flat tire and I don’t have a spare. Can you push me down to the bike store?”

“Sure.” Jane pushed him slowly, a little fearful. For all the time she’d known him, he never liked to be pushed, ever. She’d asked him years before, when they first met, and those were the only times he’d sounded mean.

“My problem’s a woman. Do you think a woman could see me as a man?”

“You are a man,” she said.

“I know,” he said, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “How’s your dad?”

“Well, I’m afraid to go in his house, he has it so perfect. The walls are all smooth. And the
floors
. I got a bad splinter and I had to have a tetanus shot.”

“There’s a reason people use polyurethane,” Noah said.

“Yeah, and when I have an apartment, I’m going to use it a lot.” Jane handed him a homemade campaign button:
JANE FOR JUSTICE. PRESIDENT
. Her election was in a week.

She waited in the bike shop while Noah helped the repairman fix his tire. “Where were you going anyway?”

“Oh, I was on my way to the gym. You want to hitch a ride?”

Jane had always loved to ride on the chair, but he hadn’t asked her in years, not since she was a small girl. And she never asked, because
she thought she might have got too heavy. But riding now, she remembered the old sensation: Noah really did have a different life. You’re lower, and you always have the sound of wheels. She closed her eyes, hearing that sound again, as if she were inside a flock of birds and hearing the strenuous work of flying.

His gym was like nothing she had ever seen. She was fifteen years old and frankly embarrassed. A blush rose to her face, and she couldn’t think of what to do with her hands. All over the walls were blowups of big men and women with huge muscles posing in tiny underwear. And that wasn’t the worst part. Men and a few women with muscles like that were actually here, wearing shorts and thong tee shirts, grunting and making horrible noises with machines.

“Do you come here a lot, Noah?” she asked.

“Not for a while. I’ve been working too hard. But it beats physical therapy.”

“Aren’t you scared?” she whispered.

He laughed. “They’re sweethearts,” he said. “Up you go now, so I can exercise.” He rolled to what looked like a torture machine, swung out of his chair, wriggled onto the bench and began to engage with the hanging silver balls in a series of sit-ups.

Noah didn’t see Jane again for two months. One morning in June, he opened the door for the newspaper and there it was, in four-inch type. His first thought was, They didn’t call me.

He felt something like fear growing as he read the article. He couldn’t imagine Owens without an office and a staff—he was a lone man always backed by a chorus. He was Chaplin, Busby Berkeley. He was the only famous person Noah knew.

Before he finished reading, Noah tried to call. Four numbers, and none of them worked. He felt like a stranger. Owens had always been able to slip into the anonymity of the rich or famous, either or both, whenever he wanted to, but this time he’d taken Olivia with him through that wall, into the other, unreachable world. Why this now for Olivia? Her time for peace had never once yet come.

Noah called Jane. He learned that she’d won her school election and that Owens now saw almost no one, so everyone in his life had begun
to see more of one another. Olivia stood by as his nurse, giving reports from the front door of his new house. Only Jane slipped in and out freely. More than a handful of adults checked in with her daily, for information. Not one believed it was fair. He deserved many scoldings from them, but not this, not taking Genesis away. Genesis was what he had been good to. And Jane came to love him as she’d imagined loving the young criminal, with a regular care bent towards protection.

“I tell him, ‘You’ve got to eat, Owens,’ but he won’t, Noah. He’ll only eat asparagus.”

Listening to her, Noah remembered a wager he’d once made with her father. Owens bet she’d get married, have a kid before she was twenty and not go to college. Noah said graduate school, the works. Jane was probably ten at the time. Typical of Owens, he’d bet dinner anywhere in the world, winner’s choice. Noah knew he’d win, though by then Owens would have forgotten and collecting would be out of the question. But as she went on about her father now, Noah thought, She’ll just be a mother, like them all. Her spirit as a child had promised more.

Noah arranged to meet with Jane and Mary after his workout.

When he emerged from the gym, wet and re-dressed, he bought a coffee to take to work. He opened the lid to his cappuccino, blew on it, waiting for the girl he saw every Tuesday. And here she was, in a pink coat today. She had those polio crutches and she swung quickly between them, then sat down with a hard fall, into her car.

Then a woman in a suit passed Noah fast, thighs flashing, and dropped a quarter in his cup. The liquid splashed up, and Noah was so startled that he threw it at her, coffee arching towards her legs, probably staining her stockings.

“Two-dollar-fifty cappuccino,” he yelled.

“You little monk,” she yelled back. Pretty women, he thought, can sometimes just change.

At that moment, he understood something. He had found his gene, which had meant more to him than anything, but he had also failed an unknown child.

Voting

T
he first visitor Owens accepted after his father, who came with a bushel of apples, was Frank. When Olivia walked in from work one day at the end of summer, she heard laughter on the other side of the house: Frank’s high giggle and the lower bell of Owens.

Frank had just knocked on the door. It had never occurred to him that Owens would not let him in. Owens might have admitted others too but everyone else felt hesitant to presume sufficient intimacy. Whether Owens himself cultivated this quality of reserve or his money and fame created its aura without his consent, no one knew for sure.

Although Frank believed that Owens had betrayed him, he had never been able to hate Owens, because they’d grown up together. Owens was foreign-looking too, but his mother had made birthday cupcakes for the class with tiny paper flags attached to toothpicks. Frank had always loved Owens’ mother. Other boys copied the way Owens’ jeans fell to his hips and his hair was disheveled. Frank had looked too neat, as if his mother had zipped the zipper all the way up.

Owens had given Frank his first car and actually taught him to drive. They drove with the windows down and the music blaring—Owens had stapled speakers to the back seats. Owens knew where to pick apples. He had a strange combination of drive and calm, like an old-fashioned man in the movies. Frank was more variable, high-strung. Without doing anything in particular, Frank stayed clean. Once, driving, Owens lifted his eyebrows. “Hey, if it doesn’t work,” he said, looking over at Frank, “we’re having a good time. What have we got to lose?”

“Years,” Frank said, his hand dragging out the window.

“Worst-case scenario, this doesn’t work? They’ll take us back at our jobs.”

“But people are waiting.”

“You’re only young once.”

“They already were. And
they
helped their parents.”

“You don’t owe them that, Frank, even if you think you do. This is a gamble. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be able to pay back big.” They waited a minute, listening to Buddy Holly, who was already dead, on the radio. Owens loved those girl songs. Frank’s sister had also died, five years before, but Owens called up something high and light in him. His face filled, round as a berry.

“Hey, tell you what.” Owens swerved the truck into a field he knew where they could steal peaches easy. “If we fail and have to go back to work, I’ll give you the money you would’ve made in the time we take off.”

Frank didn’t answer. The offer was too generous to be fair, but he wanted it anyway; he needed insurance more than fairness. They never mentioned this conversation again, though both young men considered the promise binding. Even now Frank didn’t doubt that Owens would have kept his word. That was why today he was here.

“Tell me something,” Owens had said on the plane home from their first trip to Asia. “Chinese women are much more beautiful than Japanese, aren’t they?”

Frank blushed. “I can’t say that. I’m Chinese. Some Chinese women are beautiful, some aren’t. Same everywhere.”

“No, seriously.” Owens partitioned the air with his hands—as he had, tall and American, to the men at the corporation; looking at Owens, they’d seen every American millionaire they’d ever watched slide down his own banister in the movies. “I’ve been doing a study. Chinese women are more delicate. Their necks are longer.”

“Maybe taller,” was all Frank would say.

“Your sister was probably really beautiful.”

Frank looked out the window, down at the clouds. “I don’t like to talk about her like that.”

“If she’d lived,” Owens said suddenly, “I bet I would have married her.”

When Owens’ mother became sick, Frank had given blood. Owens had tried too, but his blood type was rare and incompatible.

“I read a lot, I watch movies. I sit in the garden.” Owens raised his eyebrows. “It’s pretty nice.”

He cooked during this period, and he was in a cauliflower stage. For six weeks, he’d made cauliflower every evening. He sent Olivia to the market for the firm white heads. They went through more than thirty a week. Because he never left the house, he had to entrust these orders for basic needs to Olivia and Jane.

For tonight’s dinner, he steamed the cauliflower lightly so that the small pieces became faintly green and transparent. He served it in a large bowl, and they ate sitting outside in the yard.

“Taste how sweet,” he said to Frank, by way of encouragement.

Olivia ate deftly with wooden chopsticks.

“It’s great,” Jane said loudly, making Frank unaccountably sad.

“I’ve got to go,” Frank finally said, rubbing his stomach. “I could use a hamburger.”

They all laughed as if this were uncannily funny, though Frank meant it.

As he walked Frank out, Owens said, “I know I probably did a lot of things wrong. I could’ve been wiser about people.”

Frank mumbled, “We were young.”

Owens hung his hands on the fence. A moon had risen up over the huge live oak. “Believe it or not, we still are.”

The next day, Mary and Jane found Owens in his bed with the shades down, watching a movie at four in the afternoon. They stood waiting for his attention, as he still stared at miniature lovers on the screen. “I need new clothes for school,” Jane finally said.

“And we need a new dishwasher,” Mary added, “and I’d like to see a therapist.”

He finally turned to them. “Is that all you want from me, is my money?”

“No, not
all
,“ Jane said.

He sighed, touching up the volume. “Oh, look at this—she was so great.”