A Regular Guy (20 page)

Noah and Louise had discovered that the waiter controlled a great store of ice cream, which he now brought out in stemmed silver goblets. Noah was drinking his third glass of champagne.

“Are you an alcoholic?” Louise asked. Then, without waiting for his answer, she stood up, dropping her napkin. “Oh, I’ve got to go. It’s already eleven. I’ve got to harvest the virgins.” It was her damn flies again. Eight hours after the flies on a cross start to hatch, you had to take out the virgins so they wouldn’t interbreed and spoil the whole batch. Flies were fast. They could go through as many generations in a month as mankind did since history began.

“So it’s settled, then,” Lamb said, her hands on Owens’ hands. “You’ll come for supper.” He followed them into the elevator and through the lobby. He stood a second outside in the fine rain. His inaugural party was still going. Even from here, as he looked up at the arched windows, he could hear music and see dancers’ shadows.

“Your parents weren’t here, were they?” Lamb asked. “And what about Frank?”

He just shook his head. On the way back through the lobby, he ran into his sister, carrying a centerpiece of cut flowers that would be dead tomorrow. “You had a lot,” she said, giggling nervously.

“So who was there at the party?” Jane asked.

“Well, I was there,” Owens said, pulling a pillow from the couch
down under his head. “A whole bunch of people I know. In fact, I’ve got a really cute picture of Olivia.”

“It
is
a good picture,” Mary said. Before the party, Olivia had complained to her about having to buy a new dress. She told Mary she was so nervous and busy right then that she just drove up to the city one morning and spent three hundred dollars on the first suitable thing she could find. She said she’d never spent that much before on anything for herself. “Not even a couch or an appliance.”

“Who else was there?” Jane asked.

“Oh, lots of people. People you don’t know. Remember Albertine Maguire, that friend I told you about? She flew in from Boston.” He smiled a little, looking at the ceiling. “I asked my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Tine. She was there.”

“You did?” Sixth grade was what she would be in now, Jane thought.

“Yeah, and we had a little toast for her and she seemed really happy. She was the first person who taught me how to think. Before that, I really didn’t care about school.”

Mary and Jane made a good audience for Owens. One with an open face, the other with a face held closed, they sat up straight in their chairs, rapt while he spoke from the floor.

“She was trying to get me to do my math. She said, ‘I bet you could be really good at this if you tried.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but why should I?’ And she opened her purse and said, ‘Because I’ll give you five dollars if you get it all right.’ Out of her own money. And so I did it, and that’s when I started to get excited about math.”

“Did she pay you again?”

“By the next time she didn’t have to pay me. I was hooked.”

“She gave you the five dollars,” Jane said. “That’s really good.”

“Were your folks there?” Mary asked, as if calculating something. “At the party, I mean.”

You can really tell when Mary’s thinking, Owens mused. Her face is like an old computer, obvious and clanking.

“Oh, they were away. They went on a trip to Portland to see their relatives.”

This didn’t sound all on the up-and-up to Mary. Portland or no
Portland, Nora wouldn’t miss his thirtieth-birthday party and being his mother there. Mary suspected he’d sent them on a trip and didn’t tell them.

Jane pictured two old people standing with luggage at a brick train station. She’d never even met them. When would she ever get to? She intended to ask him, but she had to do it alone. Her mother was still mad at his parents.

“So,” she said, “what did you do at the party?”

“Well, there was a dinner.”

Mary and Jane looked at each other. They both wanted to know what was the menu.

“And there was champagne and all along people were dancing.”

“Oh, they danced,” Jane said.

“Many people, I would say most people, danced.”

“And did you have a birthday cake?” Jane asked.

“You know, I forgot until you said that, but they did have a cake. I think Olivia and some of the goons at work planned that. It was pretty horrible, though, one of those fluffy gooey cakes. I didn’t actually eat any.”

“Mmm,” Jane said. “That’s the kind of cake I like.” There was a long pause. When she said something he didn’t approve of, he often pretended not to hear. Or else he’d raise his eyebrows and say, “You do? Really?” to give her a chance to improve her answer. But Jane only looked at her mother and then at him. “So how come you didn’t invite us, if so many people were there?”

Mary wouldn’t have asked, but she was waiting too to hear his excuse.

He looked at his child. “You’re not old enough. It was an adult party. It went on late.”

“What about my mom? She’s a grown-up.”

“She had to stay home and take care of you,” was his quick answer.

Jane and her mother looked at each other, and Mary’s mouth went crooked. He’d lied again or something like that, but neither of them said so.

“God, a ballroom. I’ve never seen a ballroom,” Jane said, heaving back on the old sofa.

He grabbed her foot. “I’ll take you to see one sometime.”

Mary fell into activity the way she did when she was mad. She got up, followed the trail of mugs and glasses through the house and took them to the sink to be washed.

“All I’m ever gonna see is empty ballrooms after the party’s over,” Jane said.

As Jane followed her father to the car, she heard the radio switch on in the kitchen. Her mom listened to AM radio, American Top Forty, while she cleaned the house. A lot of the songs Jane knew by heart, the soothing up-and-down hills of ride. She heard her mother’s voice lift to sing along and the shrill tune the pipe made with the water.

She slammed the car door hard from inside. When he turned on music it was classical. She knew classical was better; her mom did too, and whenever they put it on, they tried to pay attention. But tonight Jane didn’t feel like learning anymore. She’d been learning for almost two years now, and she was tired.

Owens drove home, where Olivia might or might not be. They were fighting again. That morning, she was talking about moving out, getting her own place. As it was, she’d set up a room for herself at the opposite end of the house, half a mile away from him. “It’d be great if we walked in and Livia had supper ready,” he said.

Jane could not even imagine that.

With one hand off the wheel, he slid a picture from his wallet. “I could do a lot worse,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m pretty tired.”

“From work?”

“No, from the party. Which kind of amazes me, I have to say. Before in my life, when I’ve been this tired, it’s always been from work.”

Jane thought it was fine to be tired from a party. A party was an accomplishment too.

“Or maybe love.” He fell quiet then, as if into some strange, sad mood.

In the picture Owens had given her, Olivia looked beautiful. Jane mumbled that, thinking there was something tender in the way Olivia gazed up at him.

“And young,” he said. “Sometimes I think, if this doesn’t work out, she’ll probably be the last woman I’ll be with who’s gone out with
only a few guys. And you know, one of the things I respect most about Olivia is she cares about what’s right. When she was thirteen, she just came home one day and said that she’d thought about it and she wasn’t going to eat meat anymore.” He looked at Jane purposefully, as if to say,
You’re not thirteen yet. You still have time
.

Olivia was thirteen when her mother died, Jane remembered. She wanted to ask him, was being vegetarian before or after? But he didn’t like to think about things like that. Also, she had the feeling he wouldn’t know.

And he and Olivia fought even about food. On Tuesday, Olivia had brought home soda for Jane. “That’s what she likes, Owens, and she’s our guest.”

“Next thing you know, people’ll be roasting hogs on a spit in our kitchen.”

“And what if they did, if they’re our friends?”

“I’m not going to roast a pig,” Jane said.

But Jane knew she was as vegetarian as he was, maybe more. He ate fish. Olivia really did it for the earth. She told Jane statistics about how much land it took to feed cows and grow grain, and how many people the grain fed, and what it meant for the rain forest. Jane forgot exactly how it worked, but she believed absolutely it was terrible and true.

Owens teased Olivia about leather shoes, which she wore only half the time.

“I could be a lot better, I know,” she’d said, when he’d toed on her toe, pulled her close, and whispered, “Cowhide.”

She’d gone on, “Let’s really stop buying animal products and start washing out Baggies. I know these people …”

He had this look, like, Oh, God, this wasn’t what I wanted to start. He’d been just teasing. And even though Jane believed Olivia, she liked leather shoes.

But when Owens loped through his door with Jane following, Olivia wasn’t home. The house was dark and empty. He hulked in the kitchen and studied the note from the cooks, as if hoping for something from her. He played the white telephone answering machine, fast-forwarding through all the thank-yous for his party, slowing down to hear Albertine.

“To be perfectly frank, you had
quite
the crowd.”

But nothing from Olivia. “ ‘Fixin’s for burritos in the fridge,’ ” Owens read aloud, from Susan and Stephen’s note. “ ‘Adzuki beans. Completely oil free. (Except the cheese.) There’s also sour cream, if you feel like splurging.’ You’d think they’d notice we never touch the cheese.”

Their temptations didn’t tempt him in the least, apparently. But they did tempt Jane.

He began to take glass bowls out of the refrigerator. White corn kernels, beans, basmati rice, sliced avocados and carrot salad. He grabbed a new package of lavash bread. “Oh, and they made fruit salad too.” He inhaled; he was a vegetarian for
this
—the numb smell of raw food in his kitchen.

Jane really wanted some cheese, but she watched the refrigerator door suck closed. And she wanted to cook it all up in a fry pan the way her mom did and make it warm.

Once, he’d told her his vision of disgust: butter with crumbs and bits of jam on it. Butter under a clear butter dish, soft and shapeless, flecked, smeared. “Just butter. You know, in houses with big families.” But she remembered and thought if she weren’t there, he would have just said families.
Maybe his real disgust is us
.

It was strange: in her mother’s bungalow, Jane always felt beautiful—she was, she knew that. But here, all that fell off like a joke and she was left with her plainness. It wasn’t what they said but the way they forgot her.

Owens and Jane did what he did a lot of times when Olivia wasn’t there: they ate standing in the kitchen and then climbed upstairs for the night. He inhabited his mansion as if it were a one-bedroom apartment. The two rooms he used were furnished with his needs, and the rest was pretty much empty. He meant to watch a movie tonight and narrowed it down to three, letting Jane pick; but when they were on his bed, he put in Olivia’s commercial.

Olivia’s whole family had lived off the royalties from this commercial, which ended with her face when she was only four years old. Jane bit her cheek. She was already so much older and hadn’t done anything yet. Owens had tracked down the tape in the archives of a defunct advertising
agency, kept it by his bed and played it when Olivia wasn’t there. She couldn’t stand to see it.

When Jane and her mom had gone to the flea market with Julie, Jane had spotted a canister with Olivia’s childhood picture on it. She recognized it from the commercial. The man wanted eighteen dollars, even though it didn’t have a lid. Just to say something, Jane had told Owens about the canister, and he kept asking if she knew the name of the person selling it. He wanted it so badly, she’d gone back three times with Julie. When they finally found the stand, the man said he’d sold it a long time ago. The commercial had been popular, he explained; lots of people remembered its telltale whistled song from childhood:
What do you want, when you’ve got to have something, and it’s got to be a lot, and it’s got to be sweet, and you’ve got to have it now?
The commercial showed sailors in sailor suits so dated they were eternal, and a boy and a blond girl skipping on a pier. It played for ten years and then for another five in the third world.

“It’s really
good
,” Owens said, as he always did. And again, he considered his own ad agency’s work; he’d actually brought in the tape of this commercial when he hired them. (They’d listened politely and said it certainly was good for its time.)

That commercial earned Olivia a hundred thousand dollars. A hundred thousand 1960s dollars, he’d pointed out; more like a million now. But it was all long gone, on her mother’s doctor bills. By the time Olivia was a teenager in Alta, she’d stacked pennies in little cardboard tubes to take in to the bank.

Since Jane heard that story, she’d watched the ground as she walked. But so far, she’d found only two pennies.

Looking at Olivia’s four-year-old face, Jane could see why they picked her. The commercial ended with her big in black and white, her hair in sloppy pigtails, pulled back with rubber bands, her front teeth uneven stubs—an open face everyone could feel she once had.

When the phone rang, he caught it on the first ring. It was Olivia, calling from a party.

In his softest, most conspiratorial bedtime voice, he questioned her about the contents of the party, most of whom were from Alta High, where he hadn’t gone. Even now, all these years later, Jane could tell
Olivia was still an Alta girl. It was one of the things she had. It meant a certain ease and dominance on the streets. However late it was on, say, a Saturday night, in the center of town, Owens and his friends still had had the long drive home to Auburn. Alta kids could just walk, picking their way through the dark, fragrant gardens.