A Regular Guy (42 page)

The next morning, Olivia sat at the kitchen table eating muesli, her mother’s recipe, with lemon and oats, and fresh fruit chopped into it. Her mother bought good food, Olivia thought with consolation, even when they were poor. She took joy in it. Olivia was reading the newspaper.

“I heard you up,” her father said. Disheveled by sleep, his curly hair stood straight. His face seemed even longer than usual, and his front tooth that was gray, overlapping the other, made him look almost tender. For the thousandth time in her life, Olivia was fooled.

“Sit down,” she said, giving him her chair. “Eat my breakfast.”

He sat and ate obediently.

“I made it like mom,” she said.

The electric clock in this kitchen that had nothing to do with them hummed.

“Go ahead and marry him, then. You’ll be rich, if he’ll have you. Maybe you’re just the one he wants to play with. If he thinks he’s too young for a family.”

Olivia’s mind swept in great arcs for ways he could have known—the pads she’d bled into she’d carefully taken out to the garbage cans behind the building—until she realized with a stop that it was Huck. Of course Huck had told.

“I’ve got something to give you from your mother. It’s nothing like what he can give if he wants you. You don’t have his earrings anymore, I see.”

“They’re at home,” Olivia lied.

More than anything Owens could give, Olivia wanted the earrings her mother had worn every day, or the bracelet she’d saved for special nights. Her usually guarded heart leapt ahead to gratitude, and she fell on his neck, kissing him.

“Get off me and let me eat my breakfast.” That was like him and didn’t bother her.

She sat for a moment on her hands, waiting with the happiness we feel when anticipation is accompanied by certainty. They were opals, both the earrings and the bracelet, its special little chain underneath to make sure something so precious could never be lost. Her mother had been buried with her ring, as Gunther had insisted, so she would always be claimed.

“Here,” he said gruffly, “open your hand. She wanted me to buy this for you before you were even born.” His fingers pushed something into her palm. It was a child’s ring, gold, like the one her mother still wore, with a small opal in its center. “If you ever have a girl,” he said, shrugged once, and then continued eating.

Olivia had a premonition that her brother wouldn’t come to the funeral and that she would have to help him live with that.

But he came now. And then it was inevitable that Huck felt left out, as he always had. Nicholas and Olivia got tired of telling him he was
no intrusion, that they wanted him there, but they began to feel that his constant need for reassurance really was an intrusion.

Their father changed every day, sometimes between morning and evening. One of his last possessions was a pair of pipes, fitted in a latched case, he’d been given by his grandfather when he went to university in Stockholm. One night, he slept with them, guarding them jealously, saying he couldn’t decide yet to whom he’d present them. Nicholas very badly wanted the pipes, but he wasn’t about to say anything. The next morning, the old man asked Olivia to take them away.

“Have you decided who you’d like me to give them to?”

“Throw them out, for all I care. It’s no concern of mine.”

Olivia offered the pipes to Nicholas, but he declined. With a stepchild’s greed, Huck gladly accepted, justifying himself with the idea that he would save them and someday give them to Nick.

That night, there was a rasp on the door. It was Melinda, Nicholas’ high school girlfriend, who’d continued to sleep with his shirt every night long after they broke up, and whom he scorned. She’d evidently heard Nicholas was back in town, and she brought a cobbler she’d baked, with peaches, blueberries and figs, the tin loaf pan warm through the towel. Olivia thanked her, taking it. Her hands were long and white; she’d baked with hope. And Nicholas ate it. They all did, on Gunther Michaelis’ bed, after she left.

The third Sunday, Gunther Michaelis demanded a party. It was a clear summer night, typical of Alta in August, and Olivia and Huck reluctantly turned their thoughts outside the apartment and called the people they knew by rote to be their friends, although they hadn’t seen them or truly thought about them for what seemed like such a long time. Nicholas, in his own mumbled gesture, went to the store and bought a fifty-dollar bottle of brandy.

Karen Croen came with Dave and offered Gunther a massage. He allowed her his shoulders while he sat in the recliner Nicholas and Huck had carried outside. Uncle Otto and Owens busied themselves making a fire. Jane and Mary brought Amber and Ruby, who knew Gunther from the bookstore. Melinda came with two pies, which
Nicholas tasted and complimented, but not within her hearing. Noah came to his father’s garden, for an hour from the lab, where he and Louise were keeping vigil. Gunther had given him an extravagant gift that he still had, and he could recall Olivia’s envy. It was an antique paint-by-numbers set depicting a horse in a field. In those years, her father called Noah “little gnome” and told everyone that he would be an artist. His own children’s lives, he said, were too soft. Noah never completed painting in the little puzzle shapes, but his sister had, and the set gave his mother the idea that she could earn money from painting, even from a small California town. She wrote to the Canadian address on the inside of the thirty-year-old box and found her employment for the next eleven years.

Owens’ father and sister hauled in a bushel basket of apricots. When each person arrived bearing perishable gifts, Olivia felt an unaccountable, immense gratitude. As if what she’d ever done in her life was productive only in luring one more person here to honor him. She counted numbers and felt satisfied with each new friend. They left the door of the apartment open so they could hear the telephone, and three people called.

By the end, forty-five people stood around the fire, singing songs and eating the homemade delicacies, and not one of them, even those who knew Gunther, came because of him.

Owens remained from first to last, making himself useful, Olivia seemed impassive, and he didn’t want to disturb her facade. In her proximity to death, she too seemed to be living on a different plane. But they needed to talk.

He told Mary he’d wished a hundred times in the past weeks that he and Olivia still had the baby. What if Olivia hadn’t been so swift to act on his passing doubt? The next day might have found him given to settlement. He confessed he often caught himself forgetting, swimming in the full daydream.

“A long time after this is over,” he finally whispered to Olivia, “I hope we can go back to where we were and think of fixing up our house and starting a family.”

“But it’s your house,” she said. “It’s not our house.” Her eyes were big, and she stared into the dwindling fire.

He took her hand and pushed on his mother’s ring, which he’d had enlarged.

She wasn’t used to wearing rings. The small, sharp stone hurt the fingers on either side.

The next day, Gunther Michaelis decided it was time. They read poetry about angels and he said goodbye first to Huck, thanking him, in a formal manner, for gracing his broken but beautiful family. “We shall always be indebted to you for your gravity and humor,” he said, “qualities we don’t organically abound in.” Then he called his children to his sides. “I loved you both,” he said quickly, “but forget about me.” They stayed on his bed, each tucked under an arm that stayed warm for a long time after his breathing stopped, until they had cramps and shooting pains in their knees and Olivia’s foot fell asleep.

Then they turned on all the lights in the house and worked in a frenzy. It was the last day of the month, and Gunther had decided he didn’t want them to pay another rent. They had to clean everything out and be ready to give the apartment back by the morning. Huck took the towels and sheets to an all-night laundry. Olivia collected the food in the house and drove it to a shelter, where she left it outside the front door. Ants would almost surely get it by dawn. But it was too late to ring doorbells.

Later, she dallied in the living room. Boxes lined the wall; most everything was done. She’d swept the kitchen and cleaned the outside of the stove. She knew she should call Owens, but didn’t. Why not let him sleep. She didn’t feel like talking. She wasn’t upset but flat, and it seemed to her everything now could easily wait until morning.

In her back pocket, she found a folded-up article he’d given her that listed him as one of America’s top twelve bachelors. He had handed her the article with a gleam of humor and even a shy promise that he was hers now, no longer eligible; but at this moment it annoyed her. Her parents were both dead, and there would be no record, not even an obituary in the Alta
Sentinel
. Owens was a man whose name and picture already belonged to the kind of immortality offered by the printed page. Thousands of words in magazines had been devoted to
him, he already occupied a place in several encyclopedias, and people whose names were printed in books seemed to exist differently in life.

Perhaps that night even Olivia felt a need as intense as that for love or creation, for at least a small fraction of immortality.

She tore into the first box of books. At the bottom she found the red Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary. With trembling fingers, she searched the Biography section in the back. There was only one Owen, and that was Wilfred. She sank down against the hard wall, relieved to find Owens’ name absent. She knew it was the dictionary he considered to be standard.

With that one small consolation, she felt she could now fall asleep.

Election

F
our years earlier, Owens had gone away for a weekend alone. He’d driven eight hours into the mountains and slept in a sleeping bag all night. He’d said he was going to figure out what would be harder than what he’d already done. He wasn’t shooting for what they said about him anymore, he told Jane; he’d slipped free of that and was doing this for himself. He said he just wanted to keep interested. And up there, he’d decided to run for governor. He’d announced his intention to the men who promised to organize his campaign.

But the four years had not proceeded as Owens planned. And Jane understood that it was one thing not to care what “they” said about you when it was adulation; it was another altogether to ignore daily newspaper columns cataloguing your failures.

So now, as Owens drove to the hotel where he and his advisers would decide over breakfast whether to announce his candidacy, Jane interpreted his silence as dejection. He left his new house fully intending to say no; he told her that. A lot had apparently changed since his first heady days of conference calls, when the five men broke in on each
other like a team of acrobats pyramiding. Things with Rooney had gone badly. And Rooney worked. Every day, Owens said, he felt Rooney’s activity like the unpleasant buzz of a persistent, elusive fly. Olivia wasn’t the same either, but Jane didn’t know how that figured in.

Still, before he dropped her off at school, he described rooms he’d seen on a private tour of the White House, as if they might live there one day. Jane knew that to his way of thinking there was no contradiction between this and his current abstention. He didn’t vote because right now, he said, there wasn’t anyone really good to vote for. If and when there was, he would.

Jane understood his dread. No one likes to tell people who believe in you that you’re quitting. He hadn’t talked to the five men for a while, except the one guy who’d told him to marry Olivia. “She’s ready,” that guy had said. “Don’t let her get away.” Owens only smiled. He thought the guy had a crush on her.

Owens had the sort of imagination that precluded lapses of reality. Jane suspected it would be hard for him to imagine a love affair with a woman who’d been married before or had another man’s child. And when he stopped at her school and she got out of the car, Jane understood that after this morning the White House would be harder to conjure.

He entered the hotel ready to resist their entreaties and promise that a time would come later for public life. He’d never considered himself a businessman, really. What he thought he was had been less clear, and different on different days: some days a scientist, others a teacher, most days more of an artist.

“I remember when you were a poet,” Mary had said the night before. “I liked you best then.”

“Maybe I still am a poet, but I’m just expressing myself in different ways.”

“Poets write poetry,” Jane had yelled from the bathroom, where she was fastening a brown bow to her hair.

He’d always told people he wasn’t a businessman. It’s easier to teach science nerds about business, he’d said, than it is to teach businessmen our philosophy. Now, walking through the opulent hallway to the
Conference room, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be a businessman and a good one.

The five men were sitting, but he remained upright. “I think I probably owe you guys an apology,” he started. “Because I’m going to have to say no this time around.” And as he enumerated his binding responsibilities, they broke in and finished his sentences for him.
Of course
Genesis needed him now. “First things first.” “Family time.” “Too long a commute to Sacramento.” They urged him to sit down.