A Regular Guy (22 page)

But in her room, in the afternoon, she let him undress her on her own bed and lay there trembling, plump and expectant. She was rounder than he’d anticipated, her skin not smooth but marked with childhood cuts and bruises.

He began slowly, his own breath sucked in, a staticky blanket of air between his fingers and her nipples, but by the time he entered her, she was around him, tight and beating, her blood’s noise ringing in his ears. Her chin puckered like a dry apricot, and she wailed something babyish and willful. Afterwards, he’d sat dressed, while she washed the blood from her belly in her bathroom. Sadness overtook him in this small, soft room full of dolls and paper cutouts. He wished he could restore her to her former girlishness, and when he said goodbye, he cupped her chin with a nostalgia.

But the next day, he discovered his damages sealed over by the night. She was the same again, buoyant as her dog, who leapt up against his thighs. Her playfulness returned entirely, and he came back every day, still ambitious to leave his mark.

They’d meet in the late afternoon, before her parents came home and expected her to set the table for supper. He returned to work a little after five, quieted, peaceful in the body, ready for a long night of toil and discovery. Sometimes, eating a sandwich at his desk at nine o’clock, tinkering over questions of science and business, he would look at the dark sky and remember that she was moving through her parents’ house in knee socks, sliding on the thick wood planks, perhaps lying on her belly, doing her homework. A requiem would be playing on the stereo as her father read scientific journals, drinking his transparent grappa. At ten o’clock she would be asleep, in her small bed in the room that smelled of chalk.

No one ever knew. They had never attended a party together or had dinner with anyone except her parents, whom he’d always admired. Her father was a satisfied man. “I don’t own the land,” he used to say. “God owns the land and I’m just holding the lease.” He had been part of the war effort that first purified and manufactured penicillin, “the most temperamental mold I ever knew.” He called himself a prospector, panning not for gold but for microbes from the dirt. At that time, his company paid half the airfare of family vacations and handed out vials for samples. His name was on eighty-four patents, and he himself had been responsible for five best-selling drugs. And Lita was always there, coming home from school, her hair smelling of apples already on the ground.

Once, Owens had asked him, “Do you think I’ll ever discover a drug?”

He’d closed his eyes and mused. “I think you’ll discover something important when you’re very young. But nothing you do after that will ever live up.” In the last year, Owens had often considered this harsh prophecy.

He felt weakness in the gas pedal. Oops, very little left. There was no exit or gas station as far as he could see. He pumped gently, coaxing the car up the hill, then coasting down. He slid into the right lane, alive to every moment, still moving in the now slowed race with other cars. The commute became beautiful, cars small and rich-colored under the deep-blue sky, their headlights lanterns, until his power was gone and he could flap the accelerator panel loosely. He banked on the gravel, got out and crossed his arms. I’ll forget this in a year, he promised himself, walking.

The gas station turned out not to be far, a mile and a half or maybe two. He called the restaurant from the pay phone on the lot. “Guess where I am?” he shouted. “I ran out of gas!” He heard sympathy on the other end of the line. Not Olivia; Olivia would not have been kind. “We all have to put gas in our cars, Owens,” she’d said the last time. “Why is it so much harder for you?”

An old man stood by a truck, with a tall, pointed can of gas. Everything was battered: the truck, the chipped and peeling can. It felt good
to let the man drive, the can banging in the back. As they neared the place where he’d stopped, Owens wished it weren’t a sports car. But the man stood impassive, gassing the tank. Owens opened his wallet. “Don’t you want to go back to the station and fill ‘er up? This won’t last you long.” Cold wind, thick with fog, buffed Owens’ neck. Gravel by the side of the road poked his soles. He felt rough and alive, and now he did have time.

When he walked into the soft world of the restaurant, Lita was returning from the rest room and swiveled involuntarily from being watched. He had to smile. She had her hair up in a bun and wore high heels, but she was still round at the middle.

Arms long over the table, he ordered for them both. Then he asked, genuinely curious, what she was doing with her life.

She answered him plainly, and as she described her classes, her semester in Paris, all she’d done in the two years since he’d seen her, he felt himself at a loss. He was so much older, but he’d missed all this; it was something he had not had. His eyes tightened and he was thinking he’d done what he had done because it was great, even crucial, and anyway, he’d been too poor to go to Paris. But it probably looked to Lita as if he was judging her, and she said, “You don’t really respect me, do you, Owens?”

“Of course I do, Lita. A great deal.”

“You know what I am for you?” she said. “I’m your mistress.”

Then it was his turn to take offense. After he’d protested, claiming injury and showing it in his hard eyes, she slowed down to explain, taking his long hand in her round ones. “No, really. Listen to me. I just meant it as a matter of fact. We’re not in each other’s daily lives. And you come to me for sex and—”

“Not just for that, Lita—”

“For romance. I think day-to-day life changes love. It can’t stay high, if you know what I mean. Little frictions develop. Do you ever notice the way people married a long time don’t believe each other?”

“What do you mean?”

“If she says, You get more seasick in the cabin than on deck, he’ll say, No, it’s the opposite, and she’ll say that whatever he thinks, it’s a matter of proved fact. And unless there’s a third person, they’ll never
get anywhere. If anyone in the world told my father a war just broke out he’d believe it, unless it was my mother. Then he’d say, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ ”

“I suppose I know what you mean, yes.”

“Or even understanding. I could always listen to your problems and you could to mine, because it didn’t cost us. I think that’s why affairs work in a way marriages can’t. My father listened to his mistress when she spilled coffee on her baby so bad he’ll have burn marks all his life, and he cried with her—with true deep sympathy, no hate in it. But her husband could only half listen to her, knowing it’s his child.”

“Your father had a mistress?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. I never knew that.”

“For a long time.”

“I always remember your parents together. But your dad’s European. I guess there’s a long tradition of that in Europe.”

She laughed. “Try everywhere in the world.”

She politely asked him about business. Who knows, he told her. NT
12
was pretty amazing, but they were waiting on FDA. They had it but they were still having trouble making enough of it cheaply. And the rest of the company was getting pretty bureaucratic. Even Rooney, the guy he’d hired, was going corporate on him. “So we’ll see,” he said.

“You can do it,” she claimed.

“I don’t know. Did it once. We’ll see if I can do it again.”

He walked her to a battered Toyota—he’d never noticed her car before—and kissed her on the forehead, a father’s kiss. Later, he told Jane he was thinking of buying Lita a new car.

It was Jane’s Tuesday. After dinner, they took a walk down a dirt road. Split-rail fences lined a neighbor’s horse pasture. Jane bent down to pick rotting apples out of the long grass and weeds to feed the horses. She was trying to find a good way to ask him about school. It was almost September again, and another year.

Owens asked her not to tell anyone about his dinner with Lita but said that he could trust her because she was blood.

A horse’s soft black lips accepted her offering. “How old was she again when you were together?”

“She was pretty young. Sixteen.”

Jane was almost twelve. “Was she in school?”

“She was in high school.”

Jane was keeping track of Owens’ girlfriends. “Does she know that I exist?” This was the same question she always asked.

Owens had to think for a minute. Lita had never heard about Jane. “You lived far away then,” he said.

“Where were you when we lived in Larkspur?” she’d asked before, her eyebrows an accusation, or: “What about when we were in Mariposa?” They had lived, she and her mother, in thirteen places, and she wanted answers for them all.

The answer that always came to him was, “I was young. I was in my days.”

A horse reared up and cantered across the field. She sighed. “Everyone gets to go to school but me.”

“You’ll go to high school too,” he said. “So don’t worry.”

She looked up at his calmness. This was the first time he’d said that. “Oh, good.”

They stood watching the horse and the mountains beyond. “It’s really nice here.” His profile tilted, as he breathed in. Then he shrugged, an apology in movement. “It was a love affair. Family didn’t come into it.”

At least now he’d said she was family.

The Hard Way

N
oah worked underground, at a desk with a window at street level, and seeing legs all day had made him a connoisseur. He liked smaller legs, refinement. And those men’s lace-up shoes women wore now with just bare legs were cute. The one thing Noah couldn’t stand on a woman was cowboy boots.

He recognized Mary and Jane as they passed above, Jane’s small hurrying steps to catch up, her mother’s good legs, unshaved and unproud, slamming into downtrodden sandals. Jane’s sneakers somehow stayed white and her turned-down socks perfectly even. He wondered where they were going, then Jane hurried into the lab, balancing a tall cake.

He was so happy somebody had remembered his birthday besides his family. And everyone in the lab, including Louise, would see. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” he teased, then realized from her face that he’d said exactly the wrong thing.

“I don’t go to school, Noah. I want to go, but they won’t let me.”

“I meant the good tutors. I hear you’re halfway through
Middlemarch
with them.”

Jane stamped her foot. “But I don’t like
Middlemarch
. All I get to
do is old. The old math. Old reading.” As Jane set the tall cake on a counter, Mary whispered, “Is this an okay time?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’re just sitting around doing what we always do.”

“So this is a lab.” Jane tentatively walked towards a shelf of beakers, all containing transparent liquids. In addition to the standard laboratory benches, Noah’s lab included a fish room and, now, the fly alcove.

Just then, Olivia rushed in and handed him a wrapped book. “This is from Huck too. He’s in class.”

Mary bent over the cake, inserting candles. Men and women younger than she was slowly neared, awkward with their hands free, unhinged from equipment. The lab people were waiting, looking at her, and she hadn’t thought to bring forks. She didn’t even have a match to light her candles.

“Can I borrow a light?” she said. A young woman with white hair lit one of her candles on a Bunsen burner, and Mary used it to light the others.

“Make a wish, Noah,” Jane commanded. “A big one.”

“Wonder what
he’s
wishing for?” a lab woman said. Everyone laughed, as if they knew his wish.

“What?” Jane said.

“Results,” the white-haired woman mouthed to her.

They sang “Happy Birthday” and he blew out all the candles. The woman with white hair handed around rough brown paper towels, and everyone stood eating the cake. It didn’t seem much like a party, because people didn’t know what to say to each other. Several of them asked Jane what grade she was in.

“I’d be in seventh,” she mumbled, and that seemed to satisfy them.

For a while everyone was silent, eating the delicious cake. Mary and Jane and Noah each had two pieces. After the scientists finished, they went back to their benches and started working again.

“Noah.” Jane touched his shoulder. “I want to tell you something.”

Watching her daughter standing next to Noah’s chair, whispering in his ear, Mary felt, as she often did, that she shouldn’t be here. She had a vague suspicion that Noah tolerated her only to get to Jane. And while Jane had chattered happily as they baked, she didn’t think about
the cake one second before, not like Mary, pushing a metal grocery cart at ten at night to buy baking soda, and shaking the wildflowers dry. Sliced, the cake was beautiful, lapidary, flecked with confetti color.

Jane was asking Noah to talk to her father about school. It was as if she understood that he’d helped Owens over some crucial hurdle with her before, a hurdle Owens himself no longer remembered and certainly hadn’t told her about. “Just try, okay?” she whispered. “I have a present for you. But don’t tell my mom.” She pressed the ring into his hand. “Look at it later.”

Olivia stood reading the bulletin board, where Noah hung copies of articles from recent journals. “Noah, you never went to that place in New York, did you?”