A Regular Guy (50 page)

All of a sudden, Noah felt sick. “Excuse me,” he said, rolling back quickly. He moved his chair down the hall to the room where the coats were piled, just to sit still. He shoved the window up so a blast of sharp air came in. He wanted it to stop his reeling. Then Julie came in and sat on the bed. She touched his wrist. “Are you okay? Should I get you some water?”

“I’m a little wasted,” he said.

His arms strong, he swung, landed, wriggled, then they were on the bed together amidst the piled coats.

He was lying on a coat and could feel a button poking him in the back, but his head was still revolving, and before he could twist and move the coat, it was happening—what he’d wanted so long and
thought about countless times, but now too soon. “My husband’s over there.” Julie sat up, pushing her soft suede boots off with the fork of her toes. “I’ll shut the door.”

She crossed the room, then returned. He rubbed her heaving back in circles. She turned up in a yawn, knelt over him, her patterned legs on either side, and she was kissing him, and it was not what he’d imagined, but rougher, her tongue sandpaper like a cat’s, and he worried about not knowing how. He tried to do what she did back. She was unbuttoning him, murmuring, and her hand moved on his buckle in the strange gray light.

“Does this hurt?” she whispered.

Her patterned tights bunched at her ankles, an accordioned mural, and he wanted to tell her to wait, he was going too fast. But he felt numb and his body flew ahead, complying without him; it was too late to master himself. Suddenly, a baby cried in the next room, and Julie stiffened. Her head tipped, still. “It’s not mine,” she said. He saw her leg, where the thigh joined, and it was like the pictures he’d seen all his life, and a noise leapt out of his chest, a long pulled rickety chain.

He felt bruised, sensitive. She arched her head back, beautiful, so he could see her neck. They were still on top of the coats. A piece of her hair was in his mouth. The baby was screaming now.

“I’d better go,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and lifted her legs, one at a time, toes pointing, to pull up her tights.

“Wait,” he said.

She put a finger to his lips. “Shhh. Thank you.” Then she kissed his forehead, and after she left he felt a weight there, like a coin.

What he’d wanted to say was that she had to help him down. Now he’d have to slide or wait for someone to come in. Once, he was left out on a blanket in the sun, grass pricking through the thin wool and the low world buzzing around him. That was his first memory of being stopped. He also waited in hallways, in rooms. People said, “Just wait here, I’ll be right back.” He was stationary. But he hadn’t lived that way. He was an early crawler.

He tossed his clothes down to the floor first, then slid off slowly, hanging on to the little white tassels on the edge of the bedspread. When he came out of the room, Rachel was walking towards him,
dressed up, her mouth dark with lipstick. She knew something was wrong, because she looked down when he said hello. He felt moved by her trying to look pretty; and sorry: Rachel was just arriving, and he was leaving.

Rolling down the sidewalk, he thought of the world outside that was never Christmas. On Main Street the homeless shuffled with their cups; the hospital at the end was always open and every night the same. Louise was probably fierce in a fit of calculation, mad because she hadn’t gone and now the party was over.

Years from now, he thought, Julie would listen for his name. They would be part of a secret network of kindness, watching for each other in silent ways. She knew, wild as he’d been on the windowsill with the long green bottle, that he was losing his virginity to her on top of the coats. She had been with him as if she were unwrapping a package.

He went not home but to the lab. Louise was still there, sternly working. She pretended not to notice when he came in.

“We’ve got to talk,” he said.

“About what?”

“You know what.”

And they began. It took a long time, and then, from the lab door, which he’d locked, came an insistent knocking. Louise stood up to see. “Leave it,” Noah ordered. “Who is that?”

“Never mind.”

“I know anyway.” And then she sighed, and like a dutiful child raised up her arms and pulled off her tee shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

“You’re just doing this because of Rachel. What do you really want?”

“Enough, I think.”

He was afraid to ask more.

She was also frightened. “I don’t want to lie. I mean, this isn’t like it was with Andy. But it’s some things that wasn’t. It’s different.”

“That’s good enough for me. But you need to decide if it’ll be enough for you.”

She awkwardly bent down to kiss him, there at the drosophila station, cradling her bare, cold breasts in her arms.

“What would you want if you could have one thing?” she asked.

“For years, like I told you, all I wanted was to walk. It wouldn’t be that anymore.”

“What is it now?”

“Same as you. To be a scientist.”

But that was a lie, too, an old truth that had stopped being true only a few hours earlier. Julie’s act of curiosity and charity, a proof of her own wildness and the variety of life, had brought back a linked train of a thousand memories. Noah loved to be touched. All he wanted now was Louise and love.

Later, Rachel slipped a long, painstaking letter under the lab door. Louise, as she left at dawn, marked the white envelope with her high heel.

To the Moon

“O
rdinary civilians will be going to the moon in our lifetime,” Owens said, standing on the back porch, looking up at the night sky. “They’ve actually got a list at NASA, and I’m on it. I had the chance to sign up a few years ago. I put down myself and my wife.”

“And who will that be?” Jane asked.

He shrugged. “You can probably come along.”

“No, thanks. I’ll be in college.”

Who would get to be his wife was the eternal question of Jane’s childhood. Spanning the years, it had yielded a good deal of pleasure, as she and her mother pondered why and why not Olivia. To both of them, it had seemed like a long talent search.

Sometimes it seemed an unfair trick of life that Mary wasn’t eligible even to try. Only now, as she sat below her father on the porch, did it seem the slightest bit unnatural that her mother had entered those discussions with so much fervor.

Ever since Olivia had been pregnant, Jane had believed Owens would have more children. Every day when he didn’t was a day she
wouldn’t have had to worry as much as she did. She understood that when the bad news came, she would feel the sorrowing relief of a long rain. It was so much work to keep track of the inevitability, every day counting the not yet. She felt afraid of Olivia, her towering—maybe she would be the new mother. But Jane was even more afraid of someone she didn’t know.

That night, Mary was sitting in a Western Civilization class at Grass Valley Community College. The teacher was finishing a long explanation Mary had already lost the gist of. She’d wait until he started another one, and then she’d concentrate from the beginning.

So many times, it seemed to Mary, she’d been outside this door, quietly thinking she deserved to get in but receiving no answer. Now an answer had come: a typed yes from Eliot Hanson, as easy as a letter, ordinary, a transaction that stopped nothing in the world. So why, now, did she feel small?

Her leg seemed white under the standard metal desk, her skirt flimsy. The lights in this room were the kind that hurt your eyes. Students slouched and fidgeted in the chairs around her. There was no college momentum, she thought, no program here.

She went back to daydreaming about the tent. A friend of Julie’s had hired her to plan a two-year-old’s birthday party. She would rent farm animals, a small goat, an old horse and chickens from the road where she grew up. She’d paint a small green circus tent with flowers.

Eliot Hanson, who hadn’t seen Owens for almost a year, still devoted a great deal of thought to his client’s life. Owens did not confide in him; in fact, he tried not to have to talk to him at all, so Eliot had to glean what he could from the bills he paid and the purchases he arranged. With a kind, paternal interest, he tried to reconstruct the currents of event and affection from this trail of receipts.

This morning, he’d closed his office door and sat with Owens’ December folder, then written a large check pertaining to Olivia. Owens had ordered her a car. “Her Bug’s in and out of the shop all the time,
and I think one of these days it’s gonna just die.” He’d first wanted black, then he’d called to change it to forest green. This was the first expenditure of any kind that Eliot had linked to Olivia.

But Eliot had managed money long enough to understand that large expenditures could as easily signal an end as a beginning. His predecessor, Kellogg Hooper, had given him the advice: “Before people divorce, they do one of two things. They either buy a house or have a child.”

Eliot’s wife, Hazel, said it wouldn’t be Olivia. She was too guileless, Hazel thought, and lacked the sophistication to run a romance its full course. Romance, like most other feelings, was something Owens wanted to be entirely natural. But as any older woman and some men could have told him, romance cannot survive in nature on its own.

Mary di Natali had made an appointment to come in. To have all possible information on the table, Eliot put in a call to Owens’ travel agent, to ask about the South Pacific. “Has he decided if Jane’s going? Three tickets. A-OK.”

Since Owens left Genesis, his bills had shot up. Though they were well within the range of what he could comfortably afford, Eliot nevertheless read them as a warning sign. It was pretty clear Owens needed something to do all day. The South Pacific was another example.

In an interview Eliot had read a few years before, Owens talked about going back to school. But it was hard to picture him sitting at a small desk, listening to a lecture with nineteen-year-olds. He needed a job, but who would hire him? His only experience was being boss. Maybe he’d reconsider public office, but Eliot wasn’t going to encourage that. “Good money after bad” was another phrase popular with Kellogg Hooper, who’d accompanied the words with a sour downturning of the mouth.

No, it won’t be Olivia, Eliot decided. His quiet conclusion had nothing to do with his wife’s assessment, which seemed to derive from the way Olivia dressed. Eliot remembered Hazel’s glance when the top of Olivia’s tee shirt left two inches bare above the crenulated band of her jeans. Hazel was a bit of a prude. From Eliot’s point of
view, it was timing. Owens couldn’t possibly get married when he had nothing to do all day.

And if Olivia wouldn’t be permanent, who would be?

Jane would, and the child had to be protected. Jane’s mother was a more complicated consideration, but that was why he looked forward to meeting her. He’d heard a great deal about her but wanted to make a determination for himself.

At ten o’clock, his secretary announced that Mary di Natali was there, with a Julie Carradine. Eliot frowned. She’d said nothing about bringing anyone along; moreover, Eliot hadn’t mentioned this meeting to Owens. But there was no time to think. The two women walked in and took seats on the other side of his desk.

“I’m Julie Carradine,” one said, extending her hand. She explained that she and Mary were friends and neighbors. “I was a lawyer until a few years ago”—she laughed—“and now I have the hardest job I’ve ever had, and that’s a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.”

Wary as Eliot was of meeting with Mary’s lawyer, he instinctively trusted Julie. She had a simple manner he appreciated, and the bearing of someone whose duties in life had never yet risen to the level of her capacity. Perhaps nothing had called her passions or temper into her work, so she remained graciously calm. Just now she was explaining the precariousness of Mary’s position, her concern for Jane’s college education. Owens, she pointed out with a sharing smile, didn’t like to talk about the future. While Julie spoke, Mary’s face hung like a dour mask. Mary, it seemed, could not laugh about Owens.

“I understand perfectly why you’d want to know Owens’ intentions for Jane’s future,” Eliot said.

One edge of Mary’s lip lifted, and the eye on that side squinted.

The fact was that Jane’s college and graduate school expenses were already secured and accounted for, though Eliot wasn’t at liberty to reveal these arrangements. It was a complicated fiscal instrument involving Owens’ will. Once, when Eliot suggested a standard trust fund for Jane, Owens had looked at him aghast. “It would detune her life,” he’d said. Apparently, Owens’ conviction that Jane should know nothing of her future inheritance, so as not to taint her middle-class freshness, had the additional benefit of causing Mary consternation.
Eliot had somehow to set Mary’s mind at ease without disclosing any confidential particulars. After a few vaguely consolatory remarks left Mary’s face hanging blank and suspicious as before, he turned instinctively to Julie.

“Let me put it this way. I have a daughter too, and I know just how you’re feeling. And to be honest, I’d have the same concern if I thought there was any chance that Jane’s future was threatened. But let me put your mind at ease. Whatever he says or will not say, Owens is going to do right by Jane.”