A Regular Guy (37 page)

Stalling, Noah picked up the small instrument. “Feels good in the hand.” With old razors, he’d habitually nicked himself.

“Yeah, their stock shot way up.” Owens sighed. “And it should; it’s a good product.” This was true word of mouth—an idea Owens had never thought about while his first product was selling wildly and had learned to monitor only this second time around.

If worst came to worst, he could pay for the ads himself. But that wouldn’t look good if it got out. Maybe Rooney was right. Maybe you couldn’t buy word of mouth. Yet he didn’t doubt the worth of Exodus, and these oppositions disturbed him. He rubbed his eyebrows. “But you like the place?” he asked.

After a thorough tour, Noah felt satisfied that Owens didn’t own a house he could love. For that he was both grateful and relieved, and more ebullient praising it than he could’ve been if he’d found it truly beautiful. “It’s making me think I should move,” he said finally. “Owens, look. I made marks on your new floor, and I’m sorry. What can I do?”

“Oh, I don’t care about that, Noah.”

“Yes you do. You paid a lot of money to get it right. Let me fix it.”

Owens shrugged. “You get it as beautiful as you can, and then you live in it. This counts as living in it. I’ll mop up later. Let’s take a walk.”

Ribbons of jasmine seemed to float among the woodsmoke. They kept walking, each believing that whatever was wrong with their lives, it was never this place. They might be random specks of matter, but in this they were fortunate—they were born to a place that would never grow old, that voyage could not daunt or diminish.

“Do you think everyone feels this way about where they grew up?” Noah asked.

“Yeah, a little,” Owens said. “But this is different. It really is better here.”

The place had its own grandeur, the dark mountains like a proud woman with her shoulders thrown back. It was more than their love for it.

As they entered town, Kaskie felt in his pocket and fingered the worn bills. This time, he could treat. “Should we stop for a coffee?”

Owens patted his stomach. “I’m getting a little fat. Let’s look in there instead.”

Kaskie reluctantly crossed the street and entered the bike store. Owens bought a new kind of roller skate and Kaskie allowed himself to be talked into a set of wide off-road wheels. Just when Kaskie had a twenty in his pocket, Owens had done it again. Kaskie had to borrow cash.

Jane was sitting on the curb when they returned, eating her own scab. “I forgot my key to my mom’s,” she announced, “and it’s locked.” While they were walking, she’d picked out the room she wanted in the new house: the one next to Owens’. She’d tried it, lying down on the bare floor.

“I’ll drive you there and we’ll find a way to break in.”

Before they left, Noah wrote out a check to Owens for the wheels.

“Don’t give me that. Come here, let me show you something.” Owens opened the passenger door of his car and reached in to open the glove compartment. “There must be ninety checks in there. See, I don’t cash them.”

“Why not?” Jane said, incredulous.

“Too much time. Not worth all the bookkeeping.”

Noah laid his check on top of the car. “Well, cash this one.” This whole scene embarrassed him. When he subtracted the amount of the check from his register, he had a hundred seventy dollars left. He would count the money gone, and if the check wasn’t returned in his next statement, he’d give Owens cash.

Jane opened and closed the glove compartment as Owens drove her home. Among the checks she found five dollar bills and a crumpled piece of paper with “Bob Shepard” written on it, and three phone numbers, one marked
office
, one marked
home
, one marked
mom’s place
.

“You know, I actually do have a ring,” Owens said. “If you look in the back left corner, under those checks, you’ll see a little box. My mom left it to me in her will. I thought she was buried with it, but a few months ago my dad gave me this and said she wanted me to have it.”

Jane opened the box and there it was, what they’d been looking for all day. She slipped it on her finger, and it fit.

“Let’s see. I think that’s nicer than all the ones we saw today.”

Jane agreed.

“I’d have to have it made bigger. It’s too small for her.” Jane slid the ring off and replaced it in the box. “Can I have some of those checks?”

“No, you may not,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because they’re not yours.”

“They’re yours but you don’t want them.”

“That’s right. They’re mine but I don’t want them. That doesn’t make them yours.”

The child at that time was worth more than one million dollars. Eliot Hanson had pointed out the need for arrangements. And of course that made sense, in case something happened to Owens. And so his compromise in the awkward matter of his love, which was at odds with his values, was to leave her money in the material world, on paper, but at the same time to let her think she’d get nothing and would have to work for a living, the way he had.

“You have so much, but you won’t give anything away even if you don’t need it.”

He looked at her as if examining an odd, perhaps alien, creature. “I give things away.”

“Like what?”

“Well, Noah’s van, for example. I bought him that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jane said, biting at the skin on her knuckle. “What made you?”

“I was driving along one day—he didn’t see me—and I watched him getting on a bus.”

Noah came to the conclusion he always eventually arrived at after an episode of envy: the only thing to do was work harder. He decided he didn’t know enough, a conviction he had periodically. This time, it was history. He sent away for a twelve-volume history of the world.

Noah had attended ordinary public school. His fifth-grade teacher had told everyone in the class to make a taped-together banner showing two centuries of births and deaths and discoveries, connected with dots. Noah was so late with it that the teacher called his mother. She helped him with the time line, pointing with her fingernail on the
kitchen table; he remembered her standing there watching while he drew and marked, reading passages aloud from the
World Book
.

He turned it in the next day, folded like a fan. The teacher made two students hold the ends of Noah’s time line, saying it was the best one and probably deserved an A, the only A, except that it had been turned in three weeks late. His feeling of glory lasted less than a minute, pride turning to shame. His time line had been marked D in red.

Now he wanted to paint a time line on a wall in his lab. “I don’t know what was being written in Asia at the time of Shakespeare,” Noah told his graduate students, “or anything about Africa when Darwin sailed in the
Beagle
. Or during the Russian Revolution, what exactly was happening in Latin America? And what was going on in the rest of the world besides Holland during the seventeenth century? Everything I know is scattershot. So I’m going to draw the basic outline, and I’d like you guys, whenever you learn something, to just mark it down so we can all benefit.”

“Do you want vaccines and elements?” Louise asked. “That kind of detail?” Louise was now developing mutants that could be neighbors to their mutant. She was also sick and occasionally crying. She and Andy Ruff had broken up for good. She’d moved a sleeping bag, an electric kettle and a suitcase of clothes into the lab.

Noah started reading his history of the world while they waited for data. He jotted notes, making his students anxious with all those little scraps of incidental knowledge he intended to place on one clear line.

“After all,” he said, “who ever heard of an uneducated Jew?”

“You’re not,” Louise said, passing with slides to show him.

“I know little bits of things, but I don’t have the and-thens.” The only museum in Alta showed Indian pottery and the baby teeth of the founders’ children. And Owens’ Matisse.

He painted the actual line in the middle of the night, while Louise slept on the couch. He’d bought twenty markers in five different colors. Reds would be political upheavals, revolutions, the deaths of presidents and kings. Blues were cultural events, books, paintings, symphonies. Yellows were scientific advances, and greens were births and deaths of famous people. Purple he’d bought just for Louise, for minor details.

That night, Owens told Kathleen how depressed he was about the razor and its word of mouth.

“But people are talking about NT
12
that way too,” she claimed. “They really are.”

He had always had sales. Sales he’d taken for granted, expected, almost scorned. They were shooting for something higher. Now he found himself in the odd position of working day and night, begging for something he’d said and believed he didn’t care about.

Popularity, gem of carelessness. Perhaps impossible to will back.

It occurred to Owens that he avoided sharing his doubts with Olivia, for fear of the smile that was an I-told-you-so and an unspoken sympathy for the other side. Kathleen’s enthusiasm was unalloyed. But he didn’t quite believe in it.

He had known when Genesis was rising; he could feel its ascent within him.

The only way he knew how to fight was with grim work. Few people could outlast Owens’ will.

Shoes

J
ane grew up believing her father could have been governor if she hadn’t stolen his shoes.

There were things about him that only certain people knew. Susan and Stephen knew because they had to replace his dry-cleaned clothes in his closets. His girlfriends knew, and there had been two between Mary and Olivia. Each of these women had been awarded a small house through a lawyer, involving papers they signed after the breakup, promising never to tell his secrets. Both women later married, and Jane liked knowing that deep in the night in their beds in those smaller-than-his houses, his secrets were being whispered, slowly disseminating into the world.

Girlfriends came, were romanced, and went, each taking with her some stern compensation—property—and a set of the chin, to be carried the rest of her life, when she would be wiser, grimmer, less young.

But Jane knew his secrets too, and for nothing. One of his peculiarities was the shoe room. His feet were unusually long and quadruple narrow, and his arches rose too high. He usually had his shoes made for him. But if he found a pair that fit, he’d order ten or
twenty extra. There was a room full of just the shoe boxes. This was the kind of detail he intended to keep out of the papers, but he told Jane because it was a pleasure to show his overall good sense and economy.

Jane did what she did before the Berkeley speech because she knew about the shoes.

The night before, they’d eaten dinner at his dining room table. He’d opened a bottle of wine he hadn’t liked and then another one, which he said was extremely fine. He let her try a sip.

“Children in Europe drink wine,” he said, then put his glass down. “This wine is thirty years old. But this table is almost four hundred years old. This table was around during Shakespeare’s lifetime.”

“Yeah, but Shakespeare wouldn’t have had a table like this,” Jane said. “Shakespeare wasn’t rich.”

“No, he wasn’t rich. But this wasn’t a rich person’s table. It’s a very simple table, and that’s why I like it. It could’ve been in Shakespeare’s parents’ kitchen.”

“I guess so. But in Shakespeare’s time there were probably rich people who had tables from somebody else’s kitchen hundreds of years before that, and Shakespeare probably had a table just like the one my mom and I have, that came from the same place everyone else’s did.”

“You’re right, Jane,” Olivia said.

Owens lowered his head. “What is this—Jump on Dad Day?” Nobody said anything for a few minutes, then he asked, “Do you know who William Faulkner is?”

“No.” Jane wished she did. She almost said yes, but then he’d ask who, and she had no idea.

“He was a very great American author. And he told his daughter, once, probably when she was being a brat, ‘Who remembers Shakespeare’s daughter?’ ”

“Who says you’re Shakespeare?” Jane said. “Maybe you’re Shakespeare’s father.”