A Regular Guy (30 page)

“When we were young,” Mary added. She alone wasn’t dressed in black. Eli wouldn’t come. She’d tried to keep Jane still during the ceremony, but now she was cartwheeling over the smooth lawn.

“Yeah,” he said. “I wonder how long this’ll stay here.”

“Forever,” Mary said. “It’s a cemetery.”

“Just think a minute. There aren’t any cemeteries in San Francisco anymore. Or new ones in Manhattan. It’ll stay here until the land gets too valuable, then they’ll plow under and start building.” He stood in his best black suit, one pant leg dragging on the grass. “And that’s probably all right. They should stick around for a couple generations, as long as people who remember them are alive, and after that it doesn’t really matter.”

Mary stood with her keys in her hand. Owens hadn’t invited her to whatever was after, but neither had he asked her not to come. “I’m leaving,” she said. “Should I take Jane, or do you want her?”

The cut-glass dish was divided in two: bright-yellow mustard on one side, mayonnaise on the other. “That’s just like her,” Owens said. To Jane’s surprise, he joined the small line around the table and made himself a Swiss cheese sandwich.

She wandered to the den, where pictures of her father from magazines and newspapers covered the walls. A picture of him and a young Chinese man getting a trophy hung next to the trophy itself. On the other side was a citation naming Colleen Owens the Most Valued Employee of Red Owl Grocery.

Owens kept ending up next to his sister, and every time, they hugged sideways. He seemed oddly deferential to many of the people
here, a way Jane had never seen him be. And right now, she missed her mother. Since Christmas, Mary always seemed to fall into a bad mood when Owens took Jane off without her.

Jane followed him down to the basement. “Look at this,” he said, once he noticed her. “This is my dad’s workbench. This was the spot he made for me.” A three-foot rectangle at the end, painted orange.

“What are these?” Jane said, pointing at a bulletin board with forty or fifty small snapshots, each of a different car.

“Oh, those are all the cars he worked on. He used to ask the people if, once he fixed it, he could use it one night to take his wife out. So a lot of Saturday nights they’d drive off in some Cadillac or Lincoln he’d just fixed, all waxed and polished. He’d go to the backyard and clip a rose and put it next to her on the seat. He’s a pretty romantic guy.”

Then Owens moved to a slim bureau of drawers, running his hands over the top. “He made this.”

Jane had to go to the bathroom, so she ran back up. It was locked and she waited, and a minute later, a woman came out.

“You’re Jane, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I remember you. You’re Pony.”

“I thought you were.” The woman’s hand fluttered. “I feel like we’re related somehow.”

“You’re my aunt.”

Pony giggled. “I guess I am, even if we don’t know each other that well.”

Stepping inside the bathroom, Jane gazed into the mirror. People were always telling her she looked like him, so of course he was her father. Pony hadn’t said that, though, and Jane could see why. His sister had the same black eyes and looked much more like him than she did.

Olivia stood in her stocking feet, scraping plates for the dishwasher. She looked out the window at red bush tips and thought: Nora died believing her son was invincible. She would never see him falter or fail. That was true of her own mother too. She’d believed bitterly that all the world’s gems were waiting in a basket for Olivia.

“Shep and I went to high school together,” Owens was explaining to a group at large. “Are you around to just have dinner sometime?”

“Anytime,” Shep said. “We’d love to.” He took out a pen from his shirt pocket and painstakingly wrote out three numbers on a piece of paper. “In fact, we’re having some of the old gang over two weeks from Friday.”

Jane took note of the date, writing it down on her palm the way she’d seen her father do.

Olivia walked with Karen up the path to the small lake where Owens and his friends had swum as boys. They stood at the top and looked down. When they went back, Karen would get in her car and drive home to make Dave dinner.

Olivia again tried to pay her, and Karen again refused. There was love between the two women, but also grit. Karen couldn’t completely forgive her friend for choosing a man who didn’t value her. Their lots in life were different because of one simple enormous thing.

When she went down, Olivia ran zigzag, arms out to the sides, holding her high heels.

Karen walked slowly, with a stick, taking a long time.

They all had their seat belts on when Owens got out of the car and said, “I need to go in and talk to my sister a minute.”

Olivia sighed. She had to think of a gift for Karen, some luxury. In the warm car, she taught Jane how to French braid. They took turns doing each other’s hair while they waited.

“Hon?” Owens said when he came back to the car. “I think we should check in on Pony every week or so. Make sure I do that, okay?”

He had never promised, but now, they understood, he would take care of Pony for the rest of her life.

Owens’ bag was already packed for the red-eye to Washington, D.C. But at home, he took his clothes off and changed into jeans, then burned his old papers and awards in a fire he built outside in a can.

“I never did get paid for that,” Karen Croen would say, later, to other people. But she was glad to have done it, for Olivia and for Nora. Still, he’d hired her without ever paying, and that was the truth, a monument standing somewhere in the world.

What was he like before?

Karen Croen knew. He was the same and always would be.

Matisse

F
or the first time he could remember, Owens planned a summer day in the city without business. There was a traveling exhibit at the art museum he wanted to see. As an afterthought, he asked Noah Kaskie to come along.

Years before, Owens had become rich on paper. The money was in stocks and in a bank, generating interest but still, strictly speaking, on paper. The first purchase he made, long before the house or the cars, after only a gift to his parents, was a painting. He wanted to buy a Matisse. Through Alta’s one museum, he obtained the name of a woman in the city. Wearing black eyeglasses, she led him through numerous galleries.

At the time, Owens was quiet during discussions about art, hampered by a sense of what he hadn’t studied. But he knew what he knew, and he’d always loved Matisse.

The woman, Celeste, spoke to him about investing in the young, the importance of getting in on the ground floor. “Of course, you know about that,” she said.

“You don’t understand,” he told her. “I don’t want to invest. I
don’t even want to collect. I want to buy a Matisse. Just one. That’s all.”

“Okay,” the woman agreed, gamely. “We can work on that.”

For the next year, she sent Polaroids to Auburn of drawings, paper cutouts and paintings in upcoming auctions or vulnerable private collections. Whenever Owens could, he found and studied larger reproductions in books. Finally, he saw the painting: a woman on a balcony. Waiting, but settled too strongly in life to be much changed by whatever it was she was waiting for. He bought it from a family in Cincinnati.

The painting arrived on a bright autumn day. He still drove the old beat-up car that rattled and needed a new muffler. He unpacked the painting alone, loosening the nails from the crate with the claw of a hammer. The crate was better made than most of his furniture.

He hung the picture in the rented house, drilling a hole for a Molly bolt. Celeste told him the frame had been purchased at a flea market by Matisse himself and had been overpainted by the artist.

But this purchase—made from a singular act of love—did not make Owens happy.

The first disaster occurred when a housekeeper cleaned the frame with Lemon Pledge. He ranted all night at his girlfriend at the time, the clarinetist, tormenting her until dawn. Then he paced the empty house until nine o’clock, when Celeste told him what to do. He spent the next hour buying soft toothbrushes. Celeste Federal Expressed some restorative wax.

“Are you insured?” she asked, when Owens insisted on having her home number to spare himself another night of misery.

He wasn’t and could not be, because he lived in an old unlocked house and refused to put in alarms.

After he’d moved into the Copper King’s mansion, he woke up one morning hearing sounds in the living room, raced downstairs and saw it was still there, the house quiet, in long laps of light. As he fell asleep that night, he told Olivia he felt frightened because there was only one.

“It’s more important than we are,” she said. “That’s kind of comforting.”

“Well, it sure is more durable.”

In the end, he could not stand to live with something that would outlast him. It was too much custodial responsibility, he decided. He gave the painting away and did not love it any less for his inability to tend to it; if anything, his respect for it grew. Celeste had assisted with the bequest. And later on, she called him when the Cincinnati family visited California. They were delighted to have their treasure settled into a museum. Friends of theirs had given a dinner party to introduce Owens, and it was there that he’d met Celeste’s daughter, Albertine.

After that, he bought things to enjoy. He bought the first of the beautiful fast cars. Though perfect, it could be replaced. “There is a mold, and the Italians aren’t breaking it,” he liked to say. Eventually, he wanted to buy art again but this time as a collector. He bought photographs and Japanese prints. He didn’t want to own anything there was only one of.

Noah did not find Owens’ invitation to the Matisse show simple. He too had a strange relationship to art. His close sister was a photographer, and at the age of forty, after years of working in a bank, his mother had begun to paint landscapes in the garage. During the early sixties, she had been able to supplement the family income by designing paint-by-numbers kits. It was an unremarked disappointment in Noah’s life that he hadn’t turned out to be “artistic.” He had liked to draw, and his mother often took both her children out sketching. He understood, even as a fourteen-year-old boy, that he didn’t have the energy to sustain two pursuits. It was a calculated choice, and what swung him was that science seemed easier. He figured if he succeeded at whatever he did, he’d have a better chance of getting married. “Hmph,” he said, remembering and feeling cheated. Science wasn’t so easy.

Noah’s work was not going well. The way he saw it, he was now failing with both fish and flies, and he felt reluctant to leave the lab. He was generally nervous. When Rachel came for some of his hair, she told him the immunologist upstairs would have to quit her project because someone at Harvard stole her knockout. Noah’s mutation had
been published for four years now. It was only a matter of time before someone got the gene.

“Some evening maybe,” he told Owens. “We’d have to wait in line to get tickets now. The crowds are huge.” Noah thought that should do it. Owens wouldn’t put up with crowds, unless they’d come to listen to him. And for some illogical reason, Noah could stand missing the show if Owens didn’t go either.

Owens called back an hour later to say that an art dealer friend could get them in on Wednesday at noon, when the museum was closed.

To be with the paintings alone in an empty museum was something Noah had always wanted to do. In his chair, his view blocked by crowds, he hardly ever could see anything. But somehow Owens’ offer put him in a cranky mood. In fact, no gift from Owens ever seemed whole. Was it Owens’ inability to give right, or his own to receive? Or was it only that Owens had so much that all his generosity seemed easy and slight? And should the weight of a gift be judged by the giver or the receiver?

Noah really wanted to be in the museum alone. Then he figured out what it was that bothered him. Noon. Had the art dealer said noon on Wednesday, or was that the time Owens wanted and demanded, without considering Noah’s schedule? Take it or leave it: that was the offer.

Still, Noah didn’t know anyone else who could get him into the museum alone. There was no way he was going to say no. At least he’d drive up in his van by himself.