A Regular Guy (49 page)

By now he had his heart set on Louise, but he was willing to admit it didn’t look good. And on his friends’ advice, he’d decided to give her—or them—a deadline. If nothing happened by the new year, he’d forget it. And then, if nothing happened with anyone else, he’d try to make himself feel more for Rachel. She came down to his lab frequently now. Her face, in newly adopted makeup, seemed flush with the pride of discovery.
He
was the discovery, Noah knew, not any gene. She felt she’d spotted him early, understood what he had in him even when he was apparently floundering, and now the world could tell too.

And that was all true. But Rachel was a type of girl who’d always
been drawn to Noah—maternal, laplike. Lonely as he was, he wanted to choose, not be chosen.

Noah splurged, spending the tenure raise he didn’t yet have on a new pair of boots. It was hard to find shoes in his size that were at all stylish. At least they’ll last, he said to himself.

A week before Christmas, Noah had two parties on the same night: one out of obligation, the other for fun. He invited Louise to the better one.

She couldn’t decide what to wear. All her clothes seemed stained or out of fashion. She hadn’t bought anything new since she’d started breeding her flies. She went to the ladies’ room down the hall, took off the final outfit and put on jeans again, with her old heels and a black sweatshirt. She unhooked her earrings and washed her face. She was someone who never felt like herself adorned. It came from growing up in Michigan and hanging up her white blouse every day after school before running outside to play in fields.

“I don’t feel like going,” she told Noah. “I want to do nothing.”

“Come on; it’s Christmas and you’re a Christian. You shouldn’t stay here.”

“I’m sick of Christmas.” She’d decided to stay away from things that pick and harm, like parties where she didn’t meet men or else found assholes.

“You’re in a rut,” Noah’s sister had said. He was always in the lab with Louise, and nothing happened. He half thought of inviting Rachel. When his sister came home, he would tell her everything. She would smooth it all out, with her large hand.

“Not me,” Noah said to Louise. “I’ve got a new scarf and I’m going.”

If Louise had said yes, he told himself, he would have got out of this somehow. He was a chaperon at the annual winter prom for crip teens. They had a rock band, and the kids were dancing in wheelchairs. The whole thing put Noah in mind of bumper cars, but he stayed at the edges of the gym, filling flimsy Coke cups and talking to his old friend Ed, from the agency days. He hadn’t spoken to Ed for ages, but they
were like that. They’d go years without talking, and then they’d have an essential conversation.

Ed pulled a square bottle from behind him in the chair and poured into two paper cups. “This’ll help,” he said.

“So, Ed, tell me about sex,” Noah said. Ed was paralyzed from the chest down, a T-five paraplegic, but he’d been married and divorced. He had a kid.

“What do you want to know?”

Noah swallowed. “That’s my problem. I don’t even know what I should know.”

“When I was in the hospital I was a boy, in a big room with all paraplegics. We were miserable. And then they put one quadriplegic in with us. He was one of the first. There were no quadriplegics until twenty-five, thirty years ago. They died. Sir Ludwig Gartman created an operation. That one man, the quadriplegic, kept all of us happy. He didn’t feel his body at all.”

It was different to be born with a disease than to have a car crash, Noah knew that. He’d never had to relearn the world. He’d never had to adjust to the dimensions of a chair. It grew with him. He could judge a theater aisle instantly. Noah’s disease felt to him natural. Ed was someone whom Noah considered crippled.
That guy is really disabled
, he’d thought on first seeing him, but he wasn’t then, when you knew him.

The kids on the floor were riling up, their arms wild, chairs spinning, doing wheelies, stopping and starting. Noah looked at his watch. He’d been here three hours. He could go now, to the tree-trimming party Jane and Mary were having with Julie and Peter.

“Leaving early?” Ed said.

Noah pushed out a hand for a high-five. “Yeah, bud.”

Ed clasped his hand. Like a lot of paras, he had incredible strength in his hands. But this touch was more of a squeeze, gentle, a search and a question. “This is sex,” he said.

Noah wheeled along the street, looking for a liquor store. It was a cold night, sharp with every breath. He wasn’t sure now that he wanted to go. He’d bought a coat-hanger angel for the Christmas tree, but he
wanted to bring a bottle too. What was the name of that red wine? Well, he’d ask: What could they recommend for under ten? This was the first Christmas party he could remember, besides the elementary school assemblies and office gatherings with cartoned eggnog.

Louise had given him a new red plaid scarf. The wool, when he pulled it up to his mouth, turned wet with a faint rind-edge of cold around the warm.

He had to buy new gloves. He used them up fast; the wheels burned right through. He had certain duties in life, and he’d tended them. He’d found tiny gold earrings, stars for Mary and crescent moons for Jane, and sent them in the mail. He’d woken early to beat the line at the post office. You took numbers now, like in a butcher shop. I’m celebrating Christmas, he’d told himself, waiting his turn. The woman ahead had three stacked boxes releasing a faint cloud of sugar. He liked to think of Jane and Mary opening the brown boxes, not being able to wait, then having the shiny new things to wear. They needed him less now, but he knew Owens would never give the shimmery small luxuries that would make them feel rich for the day.

When he arrived, both the bungalow and Julie’s cottage were brightly lit. Jane was wearing his earrings when she opened the door. The party was here in the cottage, she explained, but she’d take his coat over to the bungalow. Mary’s bed was for coats, and Jane’s room was where they’d put the babies. Noah went with Jane up and down plywood ramps and tossed his coat onto the pile on Mary’s bed.

Back in the cottage, Julie and Mary moved in a frenzy through the kitchen, searching for the nutcracker. Ordinarily frugal, but not tonight, Julie finally sent Peter out for a new one. At this point, if things were lost, they were just buying them; charging, apparently. Looking at Peter, you could see he was the kind of guy who would go and go.

Noah recognized the man in a black-and-white photograph framed on a sideboard. “That’s Niels Carradine. Is he related to somebody here?”

“He’s Julie’s father,” Jane said, as Olivia and Huck joined them. “Isn’t it nice she has all these pictures?”

“Well, I think it’s a little strange,” Olivia said. “They have all these pictures of her father around the house but none of her and Peter.”

Jane wished Owens were here to see how comfortable chairs and sofas made a house.

“Her father’s dead.” Huck shrugged. “She sees Peter every day.”

“Her father was a famous physicist,” Jane added.

“Now, why can’t we live like this,” Mary muttered in the next room, marveling at the vase of flowers.

“Oh, no.” Julie’s voice carried. “We didn’t invite Tim. What do I do now?”

Mary and Julie seemed fonder of each other tonight, gifted with a buoyant humor. They were in this together, and their mutual dependence gave them a sense of invincibility or at least communion. The contours of their individual lives blurred as they opened wine bottles. Bags mounted in the kitchen; an ebullience took hold. They were still cooking, with music on.

When Noah asked if he could help, Mary told him she’d taken Jane riding at a stable in the foothills and that on the bench where the mothers sat she fell into conversation with a woman who knew him.

“I’m trying to think who has a daughter.”

“Oh, no. She was there with her niece.”

Mary looked young to him tonight, her breasts still girl-like in a plain wash-slumped tee shirt, but her mouth was ringed with lines, her chin just beginning to give. He supposed his would, too, soon. The thought of these women, watching their supple-backed, virgin daughters, like beautiful new versions of themselves, just pressing into womanhood, made him feel that he was missing his life.

“Anyway, I invited her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rachel Gottlieb.”

Just then the aunts arrived, carrying small patent-leather purses and wearing hats. The hostesses tended to them, fighting them out of coats and leading them to the good chairs.

“Isn’t it a magnificent tree,” Amber pronounced.

They enlisted Noah to check the lights for the one bad bulb. To have something to do with his hands was a relief. The tree was by the front window, a bowl of clementines on the table. It was harder to enjoy himself, knowing that Louise was agitated, still working.

“Omigod, what about ice!” Julie called. “Who can we call to bring ice?”

Almost every new person brought an ornament and walked over to put it on the tree. Several people said that the coat-hanger angel was lovely, and Noah hoped that someone tall enough would lift it to the top, where there was no star.

Amber explained that when Julie was a girl, they’d given her an antique angel every year, so when she was eighteen and left home she had this gorgeous collection.

Noah hated this kind of party, where everyone was standing. He was stuck in the sit-down corner with the old aunts.

“That’s a spruce, isn’t it?” Ruby said. “We always have a noble fir.”

“I pruned it today,” Peter offered.

“Pruned it? I’ve never heard of anybody pruning a Christmas tree,” Amber said to Noah. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

“No,” he said. “I’m Jewish.”

“Well, I never did either,” Amber said. “Bah. Pruning a spruce.”

Across the room, three beautiful girls stood near a wooden bowl of ornaments. Noah felt like Owens, who’d plan out whole parties but then let other people have the fun. During one of his Genesis parties, they’d talked for an hour outside in the parking lot. He suddenly missed Owens, then turned to the old teachers. “I’m going to get a drink. Can I get you something?” Noah asked, thinking how much harder it was to wheel away from someone than to drift off, walking.

“No, no, we’re just fine,” Ruby said, lifting her eyes to the tree.

Noah shoved a window open, leveraged himself up out of his chair onto the ledge, wind riffling his hair. Drinking again, from the bottle, he was in a crazy mood, full of abandon. Then he saw Julie. He hoped she wouldn’t say anything to him about her friend with the O.I. child. This was his daily guilt. Julie was actually quite pretty, though until now he’d always thought she was too thin. He never would have guessed she was Niels Carradine’s daughter. Niels Carradine was one of the German-Jewish physicists everyone in the generation before Noah envied. Hundreds of guys had become physicists because they
wanted to emulate those men. And Carradine died famously young when an ocean liner went down.

“Congratulations,” Julie said, coming towards him. “I hear your discovery’s going to lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s.”

So she knew about his gene. Noah had always tried to stay away from disease, preferring to study fundamental biology. Even so, it now seemed to come down to disease and cure anyway. But since he’d had some success, he minded less. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and threw his head back. For some reason, he wanted her to see him out of his chair like this, drinking.

“How’s motherhood?” Earlier, she’d been carrying her little girl, dressed as an angel, wings made of cotton balls pasted on cardboard.

“Coco’s great. But I don’t know. I still don’t feel like myself again yet.” She laughed. “It’s only been two years.”

“You look like yourself. Better, even.” She’d definitely gained weight. He offered her the bottle and heard himself laughing. With the back of his knuckles he’d touched her chest. Her skin, between the shirt lapels, was warm.

By the tree, someone had persuaded Ruby to take the pins out of her bun, and the hair fell in a coil down past her waist. She and her sister were trying to convince Jane to go into teaching. “You get your summers, a month for Christmas and a sabbatical every seven years so you can travel.”

“Not the most money,” Amber said, with a firm nod, “but the best life.”

“Every seven years?” Jane said. “I’m going to travel more than that!”

Then she and another girl her age started dancing together in a corner, in their tights, shoes kicked off. They looked silly and happy, no different, really, from the kids in the gym, ramming chairs.
Don’t change!
Noah wanted to call out to them.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Julie. You have a friend whose baby has what I have.” Noah’s hand gestured down at himself.

Julie bent towards him, listening. All of a sudden, the party was still going on around them but they were having a quiet conversation.

“Anyway, she called a long time ago and I never called her back. I’m sorry. I would like to meet the child.”

“I shouldn’t have given her your number without asking you first. I was just … I didn’t know what to say. And I know how hard you’ve been working.”

“No, it wasn’t that. It was me. I’m not big on the crip network.” He laughed his raucous laugh again, but she didn’t smile. “But I’m not proud of it. I’m changing.”

“The girl’s here tonight. Do you want to see her?”

“Yes. And I should talk to her mother later.”

“Follow me.”

Noah left the bottle, now empty, on the ledge and, lowering himself into his chair, rolled after Julie out the back-door ramp, under pines. When they entered the bungalow, Noah noticed animal tracks on the dusty floor. They went through the dim room to Jane’s bedroom, where the nursery was set up. It was dark because the children were sleeping. But soon their eyes adjusted to the orange glow of a night-light. Noah recognized Julie’s daughter, an angel a half hour ago, asleep with her arms above her head.

“There’s the girl,” Julie said.

In a brightly colored plastic fold-up crib, her head turned sideways, the girl slept under a hand-knit blanket. Her breath made a tiny even whistle, like any child’s.