A Regular Guy (13 page)

Jane looked around the cottage, wondering, Just how is ours different? Julie’s cottage seemed rich. Little things matched: a tiny cream pitcher and a bowl of white sugar both had violets painted on. “How did you get your house to be like this?” she asked.

Julie offered to take Jane and her mother to the flea market. When she talked it seemed easy, but it wasn’t easy, or it was easy for her and not for them.

When she got home, Jane asked her mother again to go get her childhood silver.

That Sunday, when Julie knocked on their screen door, they woke up in startled bolts. They dressed in a drill and Julie drove them out of town to what had been the old dump, where now there were rows and rows like streets—a village made of junk.

“It’s still dirty,” Mary whispered to Jane.

They drank coffee out of cardboard cups, and sharp leaves rasped against their ankles. The sky still held night clouds. Trees swayed widely as vendors were setting out their wares.

Julie pulled a bedspread from under a table. Mary and Jane both said it was nice but they didn’t really think so. Later, on Julie’s bed, it became beautiful, though it hadn’t seemed that way there.

They spent thirty dollars on an iron tiered votive candleholder. Mary and Owens agreed that Jane wouldn’t go to church, but sometimes Mary missed the mass. “We’ll fill it with candles and light it up for a party,” Mary declared.

The large candleholder sat all that summer and the next winter in the long grass. After the rains, rust furred on it, and they didn’t return to the flea market.

That evening, they went to Julie’s house while she moved around her new furniture. When you walked inside the cottage there were nice
shapes, clean alleyways, and you felt like sitting down and having a cup of tea. When you stepped into the bungalow, the natural expression was to raise a hand to your face.

“You’re doing it again,” Jane told her mother, coming back home. “Stop it with the lip.” It took concentration not to be distracted when you first came in.

Jane could never tell anymore what her mother wanted. “Why didn’t you come along with me?” she suddenly asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe I thought he’d be happier with you alone. Stop asking that.”

Jane asked a lot, she knew, but she wanted to. Because it was a different answer every time. Tonight’s was entirely new, and Jane wondered if her father was happier. Maybe not. Maybe her mother was disappointed.

Owens traveled out of town a lot, and they never knew when he’d call. They tried to forget about him until he was there. They tried but they never did.

Owens couldn’t believe that Jane was his daughter because they didn’t have the same color hair. Although he understood the fundamental principles of genetics, he’d always assumed that his genes would dominate.

“Do you think she looks like me?” he would occasionally ask a friend or a colleague, extracting a white-bordered photograph of an ordinary child with front teeth in varying states of progression. He never mentioned that the child’s mother had volunteered to give the baby a chromosomal test, accurate within ninety-seven percent, or that in response he’d screamed, “Oh, great! So three percent of the world population—figure about half are women, that’s seventy-five million—could be her father, and I’m one of them.”

This was precisely how he flummoxed Mary. He had the numbers and the dates of things, but underneath it all, in a way she could never prove, as her family had lived for generations never proving, she knew her side was right.

One day, Owens stopped by Noah’s lab. “Hey, Jane said you bought her that coat. That was really nice of you.”

“Well, she picked it out,” Noah said, his long fingers bouncing on the wheel of his chair.

“She
really
likes it. She wears it every day.”

It was a hot morning, and the two men took an outside table at Café Pantheon. Noah loved hot black coffee on a hot day.

Owens looked at him over the rim of his cup. “So do you think she looks like me?”

Noah felt little patience this morning, and he was aware that Owens liked people who didn’t let him get away with anything. “She’s yours, Owens,” he said, “so don’t act like a lout.”

“A lout?” Owens’ face formed a question. “What’s a lout?”

“An asshole.”

“So you really think she looks like me?”

“Not much. Some. But it’s not looks.”

Owens nodded. It would take a while, and then he might begin to believe. Sometimes Noah thought Owens trusted him because of his capacities; other times, it seemed he listened because Noah was stunted and small, no threat.

“So you really think she’s mine?” He seemed to be waiting, as if Noah’s answer mattered greatly. He lost his handsomeness, his face going trapezoidal. Perhaps he’d wanted to love her all along but hadn’t let himself believe she was his.

But why couldn’t he love her, whether or not she was his? Owens himself was raised by a stepmother. “Yes,” Noah said. “And she’s a great kid.”

“I think so too.” Owens now was more at ease. “I got her mom and her this little bungalow.”

“I’d like to meet the mom.”

“Oh, I’ll introduce you.” Owens wasn’t greedy, not with his house, not with his daughter. He was too accustomed to being busy.

“Hey, I have a chance to go back East. Do my time in the capital.” Noah made his voice nonchalant, when in fact he felt tormented.

“What capital?”

“Cold Spring Harbor.” Noah shrugged. “For better or worse, New York’s our capital.”

“Not for long,” Owens said. “I mean, wouldn’t you rather be in a
new culture as it’s rising rather than the ruins? New York’s over, Noah. Look at how many western presidents we’ve had. The center of the country’s here now.”

“Not for science,” Noah said.

“Science follows money. Like everything else.”

“Then how come the people at MIT and Harvard win all the Nobel Prizes?”

“Don’t forget, Linus Pauling went to Oregon State.”

Noah laughed. There was a tensile strength to their friendship, which allowed for and even insisted on a good deal of criticism. Neither was quite right for the other in his original form. He gulped down the rest of his coffee. Having convinced Owens that Jane was his daughter, he understood Owens would forget he had anything to do with it. Today he’d gladly let him pay.

I’m no wanderer, Noah thought as they parted on the bumpy sidewalk.

The east door to his old high school was open, and Noah rolled down the clean corridor. The janitor, Jim Clarke, was a friend of his father’s. His sister had loved geography, he remembered, passing a classroom lined with maps. She’d always wanted to leave. “Michelangelo hands,” she’d said, holding his hands when she finally left. She had stubby fingers. I do have good hands, Noah told himself, checking them on the gritty wheels. My sister is a jar of secrets.

“Noah, my man.” His old chemistry teacher, Mr. Riddle, touched his shoulder. “What can I do for you?”

High school seniors buzzed at lab stations, noticing his arrival. Noah told Mr. Riddle about the fellowship while he took Erlenmeyer flasks out of a cabinet for the students.

“Go,” Mr. Riddle said. “The line’ll be there, whether you’re in it or not.”

In the bleak schoolyard, Noah sat still. Very little moved. Alta was a stationary place, unlike the city of foghorns and regret only twenty miles north. He hadn’t said anything about Jane, her being a reason to stay. She wasn’t his.

From the beginning, Owens could talk to Jane. He was always himself, but Jane felt awkward around him and even the simplest thing seemed hard to say. “I have to excuse myself,” she finally said one afternoon, in his factory, when he’d been telling her how machines resembled the inside of the human body. He didn’t seem to hear.

“I need to pee, Owens,” she said, more loudly.

“Oh, wait. I’ll alert the media,” he said, and that became a refrain between them, his expression of boredom with the endless, additive, sonorous details of childhood.

That afternoon, he took her to buy new sneakers, and she had to call her mother from a pay phone. “Well, they have ones like mine, but instead of three bumps—you know where I mean—they have two bumps.”

Her mother apparently did know what she meant, and they continued a spirited discussion. Owens drifted off to gaze at globes in a store window, concluding that it was a good thing he’d been born male, because he could never in a million years be a mother.

It didn’t occur to Jane to thank him for the sneakers. She was a vivid child, full of life, but lacking in what her tutors called refinements. Her manners struck them as indelicately blunt. She was missing those graces a patient mother instills slowly, stitch by stitch. And Owens never bothered with manners, which he considered to be the frills of civilization and a waste of time. He didn’t notice if she wiped her nose with the back of her hand or expect to be thanked for sneakers.

In the car, Jane talked incessantly about their next-door neighbor, while Owens listened with a small fraction of his attention until a phrase lifted out at him.

“… because we’re poor,” he heard his daughter say.

“You’re not poor,” he said.

“Yes we are. My mom and I are.”

“You and your mom live on the same amount of money as most college professors. I’m sure the woman next door—what’s her name, Julie?—has no more money.”

“She’s a lawyer!” Jane said, as if that proved it.

“At most she makes the same. You might even have more.”

Jane didn’t know how. Every day, Julie went out in suits; they just wore tee shirts and jeans.

“I have this coupon for a free meal,” he said. “It’ll probably pay for more than you and me and your mom. Do you think your neighbor might want to come along?”

Jane raced ahead of him to the bungalow, yelling, “Can we go to dinner with Owens?”

“Sure,” Mary called from the back, where she often sat with the doors open.

“And can Julie come too?”

Mary thumped into the living room and saw Owens standing there, surveying. The house seemed darker and smaller, as if the room no longer had angular corners, but round ones, like the inside of a ball. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, why not?”

“I just don’t, Owens. So if you want to eat with us, that’s fine. But if you want a date, then maybe you should go over and ask her yourself.”

“It was just an idea,” he said, shrugging. “Forget it.”

When Mary and Jane met him in the restaurant, Olivia was there too, and a man who was her cousin. Jane had heard about Olivia before. She’d expected her to come down slowly on a winding staircase, in a long red dress with a slit on the side. But she just sat there in the booth wearing jeans. It was like once in Portland when she saw a movie star on the street—blinking, a little pale, with small bites or a rash on her skin.

Jane had often imagined the time she’d finally meet Olivia. But instead Owens just brought her along, and Jane had the feeling that from now on she’d always be there. And that first night, Jane felt they weren’t even properly introduced, with their real titles. She had no way of knowing this was how Owens presented everyone in his life. Of course, what she really wanted to understand was how he felt about
her
, if he’d told Olivia she was his daughter and her uncertainty was not unfounded. Much as Olivia was there, a girlfriend, though
probably not the
great love
, as if he were still deciding, Jane was only a girl, sort of his daughter but not completely. He seemed to be still deciding that too.

Jane knew Owens’ mother hadn’t held him until he was eight months old. She thought maybe for him love came from being along together,
as
son or daughter, rather than really being it for sure in the first place, the way she and her mom were. But that made her nervous, and she bit her thumbnail. If that was the way he was, why couldn’t she see him every day, then?

Owens showed them all the coupon, which Theo had given him. It had come in the mail addressed to “Resident” and was good for forty dollars any Wednesday before nine, but Theo’s wife didn’t like foreign food.

Things took a turn for the better. He turned his attention on Jane, with everyone looking. On his lap for the first time, Jane assumed the position of a small queen, legs dangling. He said, “Maybe Jane’ll be our country’s first woman president. Let’s say she decides to go to college, then after that maybe she goes to law school like her neighbor—what’s her name—Julie? But say she doesn’t want to practice for a while, she wants to live in the real world. So she decides to work at Genesis for a few years. After a little while, she might even take over and run it for a decade or so. Then, when she’s forty, forty-five, she runs for president.”

Owens looked full and satisfied that night, enclosed by two parenthetical women, with his daughter on his lap. That morning, he’d met with five bald men in suits, who’d offered to plan his campaign for him should he choose to run for governor in three years. He had not said yes, but he had not said no.

“And because of her Persian heritage,” he went on, “she’ll have certain sensitivities to that region.”

“I’ll help homeless people,” Jane said.