A Regular Guy (25 page)

She raced upstairs to where Owens lived. There, alone in his bathroom, she opened a cupboard and discovered a warehouse. There were duplicates and triplicates of things, more, still in boxes. She counted fifteen identical full bottles of a shampoo she’d never heard of, geranium, with the price tags still on, thirteen dollars. Then there were
soaps and toothpaste, twenty stacked. He had ten toothbrushes never opened. “It was always here,” she said to herself again and again, as if her mother’s life and hers had been a cruel game, an obstacle course set by an unkind laughing god that made their suffering not noble but embarrassing. It was always here, what they’d wanted and gone without. She would never completely forgive herself for not pushing that heavy door open the first day and coming inside.

She didn’t know until she found the treasure that she’d been on a hunt. She ended up in the storage room downstairs, where she’d been once before, with her mother. Posters, plaques, magazines, boxes and boxes of Genesis mementos, were scattered around among old skis and a parked motorcycle. Mary had told Owens he should file the stuff for posterity, not that she and Jane kept such good track of their own lives. Owens had looked up. He’d been digging pictures out of piles for more than an hour. “It’s probably better if all this gets destroyed in a fire or something. You shouldn’t live with this stuff.” He was sometimes wise about himself. But what he said was better than he was.

She sat down and read about him; there were letters from presidents and photographs with kings, but she was looking for something else. And there it was, amidst his papers and an architectural model of Katsura on the cluttered Ping-Pong table: the pictures her mother had sent.
Jane, first grade, age six
. On one her mom had handwritten,
So maybe we haven’t done such a bad job after all
. Jane fingered through the room until she’d seen all the evidence of herself, and then she fell fast asleep on the floor.

The phone woke her. Before they lived in Alta, they’d leave messages for him that bore no relation to answers, like letters in bottles thrown to the sea. They always spoke to secretaries or into his machine. Jane now understood there were phones he answered all along, but they had never had the right number.

The number they always had still worked: it belonged to the white answering machine in the kitchen. But he’d explained: too many people knew it. So he let the machine answer, and every week or so he played the messages. He got new numbers, gave them to three or five people, used them until they too became cluttered, but for some reason
he kept the old ones too. Perhaps out of some sense of the miraculous in his character, he wanted to be able to be found. He wanted someone—not them, obviously—to reach him.

Jane wondered, as she touched the machine where they’d left all their hopeful complaining messages for so many years, who the person was he was waiting for, the one he would have called back. She played the button: whoever called had left no message.

Jane tried to make sense of the ramshackle kitchen in order to prepare dinner, but she couldn’t find basic things like milk. Then Owens walked in, saying, “Hey, I thought we could call your friend—what’s her name, Julie?—and maybe go skating.”

Jane called her, hoping she’d say no. But she sounded happy to be asked.

“What about Peter?” Jane asked.

She laughed. “I’m too old to go steady.”

Before long, she came through the kitchen door, carrying a pair of old-fashioned roller skates. Owens had bought Rollerblades for himself and Jane several months before.

Roller-skating was in fact the last thing Julie felt like doing. She still had on a suit from work, and her ankles had always been wobbly, but she was curious about Owens. Tonight, up close, he seemed both smaller and more handsome than he had at his party. This made her fingers fumble with her laces.

Owens led the way, and to Julie’s surprise he wasn’t a very good skater. His long arms flailed as he turned and yelled, “There’s some downhill here, but after that it’s flat for miles.”

Julie’s legs spread wider and wider as she sped down. At the bottom, Owens grabbed her and spun her until they both slowed. Julie felt a wet patch on her neck. Had he kissed her? She twirled around once more, as if she could catch sight of a ghost, then looked ahead as Jane bombed down like a skier.

They emerged in old Alta, where the quiet streets were empty and smooth.

Owens yanked a handful of plant from someone’s yard and held it near Julie. “Lavender,” he said, as if it were a gift.

I like him, she thought, with a feeling of alarm.

Sprinklers raked back and forth over the lawns, and night blooms opened their fragrance; here they entered a room of jasmine, then a scarf of oregano passed over their faces. Julie’s ankles tilted in, and she wondered how much longer this would go on. But it was easier here, on the flat. She’d already decided she couldn’t skate all the way back. Maybe he could pick her up in the car. Far away, the bells of the old church began their evening call.

They passed a park, where a Little League game moved slowly on the lighted diamond. Owens twirled to a stop, his arms above his head in an unintentional parody of figure skating, and Julie slowed by grabbing the wire fence, burning her fingers. Children’s uniforms glowed bright in the dusk. “This is nice,” Owens said. He seemed to be waiting for her to talk. This was a date that was overdue, and she felt nervous and excited. “So what is it exactly that you do all day?” he asked. Perhaps for him it was an ordinary evening and he was bored.

She laughed amiably. “Well, I’m a litigator in a small firm that does everything from white-collar crime to antitrust—”

He looked at her intently. “Do you love being a lawyer? Would you say it’s a
passion?
”

He said the word so carefully it made her want to laugh. This, Julie understood, was her chance: he was waiting for her to prove she was interesting. But she detested making speeches about herself. Most of her life, she’d conducted herself in a quiet, diligent way that encouraged others to speak on her behalf. Her grades in elementary school, the names of her college and law school,
her record
, and, even now, working where she worked—that was enough for most people. But Owens didn’t seem to recognize her credentials, so she smiled and fumbled on. “Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a passion. I don’t consider it an art or a vocation, but it
is
exciting. And trial work is very … dramatic. Years of somebody’s life are at stake. So I don’t know if I’ll do it forever, but for now I like it a lot.”

Just then Jane swung back, colliding into him, huffing. “This girl I know from the park? Mona? She’s up there getting her ears pierced at Woolworth’s tonight for a dollar. Only a dollar! And her parents say she can wear studs to school.” She used every opportunity she could to say the word
school
.

“Well, she’s pretty lucky to have those parents. ’Cause you’re stuck with us, and you’re going to have to wait.”

“For school too or just to get my ears pierced?”

“Ears pierced,” he said quietly. The neighborhood was falling into darkness now, and a concentration of birds called from the trees above. They skated toward the center of town, Owens detouring briefly to a bank parking lot, where the blacktop was smooth.

I really, really like him
, Julie said to herself, with an excitement that was not unlike fear.
Maybe this is what it is
. She thought of the small bird Eli had placed in her hand; she’d felt its heartbeat, racing in terror, through its whole body. That was how she was now. And she knew that what she’d said about herself didn’t sound very good. Had it been the talent portion of the Miss America Contest, she’d have been knocked out of the finals.
If you’re going to have a job, you might as well sound enthusiastic about it
. That was something her aunt Amber would say. But her job, she thought to herself in a harsh inner argument, was mostly a foil, much as accomplishments in music or handiwork “finished” a young woman a century ago. These were the years before family—which Julie fully expected to be the great work and devotion of her life. But it would be impossible for a woman of Julie’s time and background not to have a career in her twenties. To wait overtly for a proposal, with a flimsy job or no work at all, would have made her seem undesirable or even desperate. So young women entered law or medical or business school, only to someday drop those hard-won skills and titles once they became, not wives, but mothers. Julie had no doubt that this was true. This is how we—in our time—meet our husbands, on the way to something else. Her only mistake was letting the edges and incongruity show. The problem was that she found it all mildly funny, and Julie knew this meant she was ready to quit.

“We used to live here,” Jane said as they passed their first apartment in Alta, but no one stopped or said anything.

She just skated by the garage apartment, with its huge wire aviary, where Eli lived, without telling. Then she wanted to go into the post office: the tiled floors were the best surface for skates.

“You hurry up,” Owens said. “We’ll wait outside.”

As he said that, Julie knew, all of a sudden, that he would kiss her.

The high-ceilinged long pavilion echoed every time Jane’s wheels passed over a tile bump. The barred windows were closed for the night, but the chandeliers were on and the doors open, in case residents came to open their own boxes or to slip mail into slots in the wall. Jane slowed, as she did every time, at the gallery of criminals. He wasn’t there, of course. She’d long ago stopped associating that narrow face with Owens, but she still looked for the young man in the picture, who every year came closer to her own age.

Together again, they skated down the main street, past the stores and little restaurants. Julie felt a warmth in her chest as she looked over at him. He smiled and shrugged. Kissing him had been so easy, as if it was something she’d always known how to do.

“Noah!” Jane shrieked. They’d almost passed, but Jane sensed him there. The world always seemed toy when she ran into someone by chance. For so many years of her life, no matter how much they’d thought of him, Owens had never materialized.

“Here you are,” Owens said, putting a hand on Noah’s shoulder.

Noah and Louise had been talking for the first time about romance, a subject that made Noah excited and happy. After chatting for half an hour about drosophila, Louise had told him about Andy Ruff, who seemed to be dumping her. This is my chance, Noah thought, and that’s all anybody gets. The last thing he wanted now was company, but Owens was straddling a chair. He signaled the waitress, then ordered four large orange juices to start with. Noah, who’d intended to pay for Louise’s dinner, winced.

“So how’s science?” Owens asked after introducing Julie.

“I don’t know; we haven’t seen too much of it lately.”

“You’re a scientist too?” Jane said to Louise. “But don’t you work for him in his lab?”

“Jane,” Julie said.

Louise launched into a detailed explanation of the hierarchy in science, explaining precisely how far behind Noah she was.

Noah looked around the humming room. I’m in love with Louise, he thought, but that’s no problem yet.

“But just ’cause you’re younger,” Jane said. “Not ’cause you’re a woman.”

This introduced another long disquisition, because in fact Louise was not younger.

“She won’t admit it,” Noah interjected, “but she’s better than me.”

Owens was less than fascinated with the problems of women in science, and he began a second conversation with Noah, about his cooks. “We haven’t said so explicitly, but I think this’ll be a chance for us all to reevaluate if we want to keep working together.”

“I think they want to stay working with you,” Jane said, popping up from her conversation and then returning to it. Jane often talked to Susan and Stephen in the kitchen when Owens was late.

Noah was seething. First Owens barged into his quiet supper with Louise, and now he was trying to engage the whole table in a discussion of his small domestic problem. It was as if Noah had brought up the subject of lab storage and told them all about his weeklong struggle to decide whether to buy neat metal cabinets or just scavenge cardboard boxes from liquor stores.

“And the few of them there were worked in their husbands’ labs,” Louise added.

“How long are they gone for?” Julie asked idly. She was following both conversations, finding little to add to either. No one answered her, and as she watched Owens talking animatedly with his friend, she suddenly understood he hadn’t really liked her. She could almost hear him telling Jane, “She’s not that pretty.” Fine. For all his success, he didn’t seem particularly nice. He could have found something polite to say about her measly job, which she didn’t care about so much anyway, she realized, as she listened to this woman go on and on about biology.

Julie actually liked Louise, her intense narrow shoulders and exotic face. Once in a while, a woman like her would come along, who, having become something, would wish to stay it, probably even as a wife and mother. But not me, Julie thought. Maybe if I were a designer or an illustrator. But not a lawyer. And I’m glad she’s not my mother. It’s a shame, Julie thought, and not for the first time, that all the people who really wanted traditional marriages couldn’t just raise their hands.

“I think Kaskie here’s a really great scientist,” Owens said.

“Me too,” Jane chimed in.

Noah smiled. It was Owens’ nature to believe that any artist he liked was a great artist and that Kaskie himself was a genius in science, when what, really, were the chances of that for any of them? Just this once, it didn’t matter to Noah whether he was or wasn’t one of the elect. Within his small circle of friendship, in this soft winter evening air, he was honored, his efforts acknowledged. Louise laughed next to him. He felt a lessening of pressure, the happiness of reprieve. “Tell it to the cells,” Noah said, and laughed.

Eventually, the moment he’d been dreading for the past hour arrived: the bill came. Noah had intended to take Louise to supper, and of course he didn’t mind buying a sandwich for Jane. The friend—Julie—had considerately ordered only a hot chocolate. The question was, what about Owens, who’d had a total of six large orange juices and two dinners, each of which he’d picked at? Noah knew, as the waitress was writing, that Owens would probably offer to pay. But if Noah let him, he wouldn’t be taking Louise out. And Owens himself probably deserved to be treated once in a while, even if he never understood how unusual it was to order six large orange juices.