A Regular Guy (51 page)

Julie glanced at Mary. “Well, good, that’s reassuring,” she said calmly. “Of course, anything we could do by way of written guarantees would be helpful.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be possible, and it’s not necessary. You really don’t have to worry about the money for Jane’s education going anywhere. I can promise you that personally.”

“All right,” Julie Carradine said. “That’s good enough for us.”

Mary, whose mouth had been closed for some time as if worrying the pit of something, suddenly lifted her head. “But it’s not only about Owens and Jane. There’s a lot that’s Owens and Mary too.” She looked hunted, cornered. “He’s paying for my college, but it would take years to get a degree, and degrees in art don’t mean anything anyway. What’s needed is help with my business. If I could buy tents and start painting them.”

Julie explained that Mary had planned three children’s parties: she’d painted the tents and brought the animals, baked cakes and made the favors. “There’s solid business in that,” Julie said, then smiled. “I know I’m going to hire you.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Eliot said slowly. “We could talk to Owens and explain the relative merits of starting a business versus going back to school. Or we could do something easier. Right now you’re sending me the tuition bills and I’m paying them directly. Instead of that, I could just figure out the cost of a semester, counting tuition and fees and books, and send you a check.”

“That sounds best,” Julie said. “You don’t even have to involve him.”

Mary mumbled, “He could do a lot more to help me keep her.”

Eliot saw from Julie Carradine’s bent neck and scratching glances at the floor that she too felt startled.

“Tell me what you mean,” he said gently.

Looking from one to the other, as someone unsure which to distrust more, Mary spoke in a rambling, plaintive voice for almost ten minutes. What emerged most vividly was a fury with Owens for not sharing his fruit.

“Does he want the good fruit, the cherries and big strawberries, just for himself, or does he want his daughter to have it too? Because I can’t afford it on what he gives me.”

Of course, what Mary was saying wasn’t literally true. Eliot wrote the checks. Surely she could afford fruit.

“She’s over there half the time already. Pretty soon she’ll always want to be there. I can’t keep up. I don’t even know the names of half his fruit.”

“Well, maybe this isn’t a matter for Eliot,” Julie said softly. Mary recoiled.

“That’s right,” Eliot said. “There we get into the realm, I’m afraid, of personality, and what you and Tom decide between yourselves. I think we can all agree it would be nice if he’d send Jane home with a basket of peaches or whatever it is he’s got there. But that’s the kind of thing we just have to leave up to him.”

The two women stood, Mary still shaking her head, and Eliot encouraged them to call again if any problems arose concerning Jane. He had determined for himself that Mary di Natali was not a conniver, as Owens had suggested. She was a flustered woman who needed shelter. Jane, Eliot had sensed a long time back, was a gift Owens would someday fully recognize. And as a father, Eliot understood in a deep way that you couldn’t look after the interests of a child without considering her mother.

Since losing Genesis, Owens had become a believer in vacations. And this particular trip over the holidays held the advantage of avoiding family, to which neither he nor Olivia truly belonged.

Air on the island felt easy on their arms, and as they stepped down
from the plane, an adipose native woman presented them with orchid leis. Due to her lingering status as a child, Jane received many more gifts besides. First, a man behind the tiki stand wove her a hat made of long grass. On a dive, Olivia—seeming even more opulent underwater, her hair fanning out three feet—picked up a perfect shell and put it in Jane’s hand. Later, Jane joined a group of very young native girls, who were learning the constructive art of grass-skirt-making. Women in muumuus tied white string between palm trunks and set the girls to work, leaf by leaf. It turned out you tied the pampas leaves like men’s neckties. Jane felt patient to learn on both accounts, for a grass skirt now and because a man’s tie would be a cute accessory to her wardrobe at home. Owens had so many ties he didn’t wear anymore.

The days bagged, lacking definition, and it seemed one could live a whole life without accomplishing anything or even minding. The listing hours in the rope hammock, the suck of the ocean, still and gurgling, and clean-bellied afternoons spent swimming lulled them into a false state of summer. In the dining room at breakfast time, birds flew in freely off the pearled sea. Jane watched for progress on the twin clock of her skin and hair. About this, as everything else, Owens had peculiar theories. “The sun is good for human beings. You don’t need sunblock. We’re not meant to be inside buildings.”

“It’s bad for you, Owens,” Jane said. “Doctors proved it.”

“It causes cancer,” Olivia added.

He remained calm and quizzical when no one took his advice, and after he’d burned himself beet red he reluctantly began wearing shirts and rubbing in the reviled lotion he still claimed not to believe in. “I think people burn because we’re not outside enough. Our bodies aren’t used to it.”

Once, in high school, he almost froze to death in Yosemite, Jane’s mother had told her. He always wanted to be part of nature, but the feeling didn’t seem to be reciprocal.

Jane learned to make her fingers precise and useful in the long dipping boredom of afternoon, for no purpose other than distraction. She and Olivia spent hours braiding each other’s hair into hundreds of tiny braids, then floating and letting it dry into a soft halo.

They watched Owens swimming into the waves like a long, awkward bird.

There was only one girl Jane’s age, who wore a gold ankle bracelet. Jane stared at her when she thought the girl wouldn’t notice, in the outside shower. Jane studied the way her thighs squared off at the top; maybe that was the way thighs were supposed to be. And there was a cute boy who sailed the sunset cruise boat. When she could, Jane followed him aimlessly, just for something to do.

Early one morning, she hiked to the cove where they kept the upturned rowboats. Sometimes she saw him out rowing at this still, calm time of the day. Turning the corner, she saw parts of legs—the girl and him on the sand. The girl’s nipples looked different; where Jane’s were tiny and pink, she had brown circles. Jane kept thinking she hadn’t really seen. She walked in the other direction, stiff and conscious of how her butt looked from the back. Hours later, they were in the water, the girl’s hair flattened against her head like a dark bathing cap, her two hands on the bobbing shelf of his shoulders.

When Owens and Olivia debated a helicopter ride to a volcano, Owens said, “And Jane hasn’t had her life’s fulfillment yet,” and she tried to keep her cheek from ticking. Now this other girl was having hers.

When they left the island, a hula dancer presented each of them with a double-shell necklace, the kind Jane’d had the patience to string only long enough for an ankle bracelet. Olivia gave Jane her necklace, so Jane had two. As they boarded the plane in the tiny airport, Jane marveled that the kids had all the presents, not the adults. She supposed this was because a lot of the parents here were rich like Owens and the kids already understood that they might never be able to afford a life like this on their own and so they were saving souvenirs.

Owens had already told her she would not inherit. She sighed; he was always offering her his life, but not to keep. She even knew what he’d say if she said that: Life isn’t to keep, he’d say, and raise his eyebrows.

Olivia’s black Volkswagen finally died, so she was riding her bike to the hospital and back.

On Saturday, Owens picked up the new car and persuaded her to accept it. He showed her the various features, shining in the strong, late-morning light. When he demonstrated how the convertible top went down, she smiled.

“This is real progress,” he said to Jane, having for so long convinced himself that Olivia was not only immune to but actually repelled by money. Jane knew better. As they explored the new car, his voice fast and excited, Jane heard him laugh and realized it was the first time in almost a year.

He and Olivia were talking about a baby shower. Karen Croen was pregnant and she knew from the amniocentesis that the baby was a girl. She and Dave promised to name her Olivia Rose. They’d told Olivia when she came home from the South Pacific, and this seemed to give her unaccountable joy.

Jane could tell Owens found it poignant, her pleasure in this, because he truly couldn’t understand himself why any such thing would make her happy. He’d already stood godfather to five children, but he’d made it to the christening only once. That was for Shep and Lamb’s girl, Minna.

“Minna graduated from high school last spring,” he said. “I got a little card inviting us to a party. But that was when Exodus was falling apart.”

“Where’s she going to college?”

He didn’t know, and Jane wondered whether her parents had the money to send her where she really wanted to go or to the best place she got in. Once, long ago, he’d meant to tell them that money shouldn’t be a consideration, that Minna should choose whatever school she wanted and he would help. But now the decision was already made, acceptances filed, and a life started.

“Did you ever give gifts to your godchildren?”

“No.”

“Not even Minna?”

He shrugged.

“Do you write them letters?”

“Yeah, I know. Their parents are probably thinking they made a big mistake.”

Or else, Jane thought, they hoped some obscure advantage would come to their kids later on, as she and her mom always had. But Shep and Lamb didn’t seem to expect anything.

Olivia had already wrapped two presents for the baby. In addition to the tiny ring that was supposed to have been given to her as a child, she’d found a wreath for the baby’s head, made of dried bud roses.

“I think you’re doing it the right way,” Jane said.

“I do too,” Owens said, “but I couldn’t have done it. There were too many ceremonies, too many babies, people I didn’t really know.”

“So you should have said no to those people and just been really good to the one who mattered.”

“You mean Minna.”

Jane hadn’t meant Minna. She had meant herself.

“When Frank and I were just starting out, we went to a sperm bank a couple times, because they paid us. And once, a woman who worked there said to me, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you have eleven kids.’ ” He sighed. “I wish now I hadn’t done that.”

This was about as close as he came, Jane figured, to apologizing.

“What made you change your mind about Jane?” Olivia asked, reading in bed, wearing a tee shirt and underwear. He moved around the room, still dressed.

“What do you mean?” It is a difficult circumstance to live with someone who doesn’t believe in your goodness, and Owens had endured that irritation for some time now. He’d made adjustments to it, as to a physical pain.

“Well, when she came to Alta, you said you were going to be nice but you didn’t think she was yours. And now you obviously do. So what happened?”

“Livia, when she came here I didn’t know her. And Mary can be pretty loopy.”

“I sometimes wonder, what if Jane had had problems?”

They had reached a strange plane in their relationship. They each said things they knew to be wrong and couldn’t stop themselves, thinking, I can’t help it. Neither of them doubted for long that they would
break up, but neither knew when one of them would feel the strength.

Owens left the room. It was dusk, still early enough for bike rides outside, families walking.

She followed. Olivia had long felt herself to be on an investigative journey, as if there were some evidence yet to be found that would determine conclusively whether he was better or worse than she feared. What she went over, again and again, was his change towards Jane. She needed to know why he loved her. “I think we should talk about this. It matters if we ever have children.”

He didn’t answer, only lowered his head to his arms. For some reason, he remembered the day Mary told him she was pregnant. He’d never told her that they would stay together. The weird thing was, she just went away. And the problem seemed gone. But then it would bob up at stray moments, and years later he finally understood: this would never go away.

That was how he felt now about Olivia. He doubted they could ever make it better anymore, but she existed in him like a permanent thread-line pain.

One evening in April, Olivia ran the twenty-one-day-old convertible into a copper beech. She was lucky, so lucky, to be fine. The tree was over a hundred years old.

They became careful with each other, then matter-of-fact. A few days later, she flew to Asia. He called her there, in the middle of the night. “I really cared about you. I want you to know that.”

Every day, they broke up again, on different continents, over the phone.

There are things you know about a man you don’t know you know until they’re useless, Olivia understood in Singapore. How far he swings his arms when he walks. Olivia looked for him, from behind, in a crowd. She always saw one small part of him and then felt disappointed.

Eliot Hanson arranged for a check to be sent to Olivia. Owens had vacillated wildly over the amount. He’d decided on twenty-five thousand,
finally, as a kind of token. Eliot was particularly sad, for no reason, as he sealed the envelope. He himself had married into money.

He felt a certain vicarious victory when the check was returned, by certified mail, a few days later. He took it upon himself to visit Olivia, to urge her to accept this or some larger form of compensation. She refused to discuss it, merely shook her head and shut the door.

Three Regrets