A Regular Guy (8 page)

But that’s what makes you so cute, he mused. They never would be. For me they often wait, and this isn’t the unmixed blessing you think, Pretty Hair.

The men filed in eagerly, as if instantly awakened to feed.

He’d woken before dawn in the dilapidated mansion, breeze from a broken window cooling his night-sweat skin. Downstairs, he banged on oatmeal. He’d started eating oatmeal every morning with maple syrup. By now he thought of this as his idea. Then he put on the new suit he felt old in. Guys from the bank had told him where to buy it. Slowly he was gleaning names for things. At first the prices shocked him. But he wasn’t going to dress like this every day. He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom. Out on his terrace, where dandelions cracked tile, gummy on his feet, the moon hung over the sharp edges of the mountains. Insubstantial clouds traced by. Being up early felt good; it reminded him of just coming home from the night shift.

Last night, he’d made sure to get gas.
When you need something absolutely, do it yourself:
his father had taught him that without words. Owens was the only one on the wide road. He could drive fast well. This was a small and daily satisfaction.

He was the first person in the office. He stood in the conference room, at the long window, drinking fresh carrot juice from a carton. It was easy to be patient waiting for light. As his life became easy and cluttered with luck, he thought more about before. Frank would be here today. They had to be at their phones when the stock market opened on the other side of the country. Someday that would change. New York was old and breaking; this would be the center, eventually, soon. Civilization on earth was always organized around oceans.
Once it had been the Aegean, then the Mediterranean, and then, for a long time, the Atlantic. But the Pacific epoch had begun. He had decided to stay put, and now it was all coming here to him. Many times in his life already, Tom Owens thought that he’d moved the very capital of America from East to West, because he couldn’t bear to leave home. He’d tried once, at Harvard. He hadn’t liked it much.

So they’d moved the center to where they lived and remade business in the jeans and tee shirts he’d always worn. “Oh, well, why not the West,” Frank once said.

Owens liked being the first one up. Being awake at a time he usually slept made things feel important. The parking lot in the dark looked black and clean, like the playing board of a game.

Money people from the city would be coming down soon. It’d been an uncharacteristic decision to hire the white-shoe firm, but each group was enamored of the other. Especially
them
. Owens had already received six résumés from their ranks.

Light began softly, furring the far hill, and the sky separated, streaked. How far it would go, he couldn’t tell yet. For once, he wanted to keep still.

He could see their excitement, bringing him his news; it was pushing their faces into odd shapes. This made him serene.

Many times throughout the day, Owens thought in a detached way about his future and contemplated taking a wife. Though he didn’t know who she would be, he imagined her face cool and smooth. He hoped too that she would be a person of talent and accomplishment, an idealistic doctor maybe, or a poet. There would be things she understood, gracious vistas, that he didn’t pay enough attention to, and he would follow her slender form down clean corridors. He was almost certain she was no one he knew now. For as long as he could remember, there had been a thread of futility in his feelings for Olivia, which lent their time together an air of poignance or even tragedy.

He thought of Mary di Natali, whom he could hardly remember really knowing. Some people—Frank, for one—believed he should feel some kind of attachment, because she loved him before. She certainly felt that this should be the case.

On a pad of paper, Owens wrote:
For the Next 100 Years
. He wanted Genesis to be self-sustaining into the next century and he wanted the freedom to leave it. He made a note to call the Trappist monastery to book a company retreat.

Years ago, when he’d first gone East, he’d felt the enchantment of Washington. He didn’t want to be running a business all his life, the daily totals landing on his desk. He imagined living in Italy for a year. Or maybe in a cabin, high in the Sierra Nevada.

They kept coming to him, their faces stranger and stranger shapes, stretched. Looking at him for reaction, they were amazed to see the detachment in his eyes. Each new number fell. Nothing really surprised him, but finally, at the end of the day, the six goons he’d started with burst into his office, locking the door, and then Frank rolled on the carpet, pulling on Owens’ sock, crying and giggling—
can you believe it, we did it, you did, can you believe what you did!
—and it was their imperfect faces, the irregular diamonds, the same but red-rumpled, that finally stirred him to smile.

“Politics are for a moment, an equation is for eternity.” This quote was taped to Noah’s word processor, under a fortune that said,
You need an extraordinary amount of sleep
.

Since his conversation with Owens, Noah had not slept. He felt nagged in a slight persistent way, like the pull of wrong-fitting clothes. Before, his daily life had not involved many choices, and Noah functioned well that way. He’d come from a modestly passionate family, full of jagged skids and desperate apology, whose greatest legacy to him was the permanent extraction of his capacity for boredom. During his parents’ noisy youth, he and his sister had often ended up on his grandfather’s alfalfa farm, where they were given chicken and mashed potatoes every night for supper. In Noah, the repetition only instilled a craving for that very same meal. For his sister it was absolutely the opposite.

But since Owens’ offer, Noah found himself wondering just how good a scientist he really was. Sunday night, he’d ridden around Alta, on the wide-sidewalked streets where department chairmen lived or the guys who’d started companies. He had the spare time. A lot of
what he did every day was think. At the lab, it was easy to forget these houses and the people living in them, who were not much older than he was. Scientists and grad students and postdocs all shared a snobbery about the ones who left. But now he wondered how deep that prejudice really was, how ideological. Maybe the Owenses of the world were this century’s Niels Bohrs or Galileos. Didn’t Pasteur discover microbes while consulting for the French wine industry?

But the chairman of Noah’s department, who lived the conference life of accountable pleasures, did his real work years ago. He still regaled the incoming grad students with forty-year-old phage lore.

The treed streets were quiet; vehicles of family life lay strewn on lawns: the fallen bike, the triangular device recently invented so women could jog and push along their babies. Noah had never ruled out such pleasures for himself. Pleasure—well, life, he supposed—was going to come later, as reward. The only time he hadn’t lived like that was with the girl who’d ridden on his chair in college. During those rare weeks, his ambition had evaporated. She’d stepped out of nowhere, perhaps too early in his life. He would have done anything to keep her.

Most of the lots in Alta had remained the same size since the time of the founders, but in the last decade some of the original houses had been torn down to build bigger ones, as the valley had grown affluent. Even though Noah grew up here, now he couldn’t afford it. He lived in Auburn, the next town west. Noah liked the smaller houses, the old wood and adobe. He had no idea of prices, but if he went to work for Genesis, he could buy one. Two, even. He could buy his parents a house. They could enter this tranquillity. His parents had always rented. For twenty years, they’d been afraid of the landlord, even though his father had probably put a thousand dollars into the ground. His father still worked at the job he’d always hated: insurance.

Doubts nagged Noah at the lab too. The same tasks that had contained ample excitement a week earlier changed under the weight of their price. Making this library, of the embryo at six hours old, had cost him a million dollars. And was it something so special, that only
he could do? Well, no. This wasn’t. Louise could map out genes better than anyone he knew. But what was, exactly? What specifically was it that needed his alleged talent?

Noah segregated his day into what was creative, requiring thought and choice and even imagination, and what was just benchwork. A year before or a year later, Noah would have pronounced such a separation impossible; his mind seemed to require the calm performance of precise manual tasks to generate ideas, as if they were born out of the beginnings of boredom. But after Owens’ offer, this wisdom, which he had previously expounded to a generation of students, seemed only justification for a mediocre, gutless life.

By Noah’s age, Watson had already discovered the double helix and a handful of Noah’s friends had mapped their own proteins. A lot of this was luck—Noah’s gene didn’t seem to live near any useful markers—but he still couldn’t help but suspect that it was partly his own fault. He started too many things at once. In this same building, there were steady drudges, content to work for thirty years on one problem, like the structure of a complex molecule, atom by atom. Then there were what Noah called hit-and-run scientists, considered generally more imaginative but of dubious character, who jumped onto the newest compounds and then quickly tired of them, like Louise’s boyfriend in the dirty black jeans, who’d just quit viruses for the nervous systems of fruit flies. Noah was neither. His early work on zebra fish had seemed brash and promising when he’d published his short article in
Cell
, but now his production seemed slow, one step forward, two steps back. Then again, Watson had pretty much retired from science; he’d been the administrator of Cold Spring Harbor as long as Noah could remember. He probably decided when to replace the awnings and reroll the tennis courts, then had to eat dinner with somebody he could get to pay for it.

Noah made the decision over and over again, but he couldn’t seem to close it. Finally, his circling agitation settled on the girl. Perhaps with the money he’d be what she needed. She’d been poor and in college had worked in the dorm cafeteria. Although he hadn’t talked to
her in more than six years, he’d always kept track of her phone number. He finally called her at dusk, as if on a dare, though he hadn’t thought out, yet, how to word it.

A woman answered. Although his impulse was to hang up, Noah swallowed and left a message. The woman gave no hint that she recognized his name.

Noah moved around the lab, housekeeping for a good hour, and she didn’t call back. Samples were labeled, the microscope lens was cleaned and the fish were fed. He sat down at his desk to begin a grant application. But he couldn’t concentrate.

He called Owens at work, something he rarely did, figuring someone else would answer. When it was Owens, Noah blundered, “You feel like a movie?”

“Oh, I’d love to do that, but things here are crazy for, I don’t know, probably a week. I’ve had reporters all day. Hey, did you hear about our offering? It went through the roof. And you know how I told you we’re moving to another building. So I’m packing up.”

“Have you found somebody for that spot you wanted me for?”

“Yeah, we got this guy whose wife didn’t want to move from Massachusetts. We flew them both out and Theo took them shopping for a house.”

“So I guess I blew my chance to be a mogul.”

“But you did the right thing. That’s why I didn’t push you harder. I was telling Olivia about it, and she’d read some article about a woman who won the Nobel Prize. I guess for thirty-five years, she stuck by her corn. So that’s what we said: Kaskie’s got to stick with his fish.”

“Barbara McClintock,” Noah mouthed. He had to hold himself still.

“We’ve got a really great team for Exodus, and I think we’ll make something pretty amazing, but I won’t be here forever. You’ll be discovering the cure for cancer, probably, and I’ll be in Washington, raising the cigarette tax to a dollar a pack. If that cut down smokers by ten percent, say, we’d save forty thousand lives a year. Then I’d do the same thing for alcohol.”

Noah mentioned, in a choked voice, that these ideas might not be popular.

“Oh, I know. And I’ve got a lot more of those. Like, it’s pretty clear we spend too much on the elderly. Can’t you see getting up there and just saying, ‘Let ’em gum it.’ ”

“Call,” was all Noah managed to say.

Noah set water to boil for coffee, then made the rounds. He’d always liked the lab at night, after everyone hired went home. Different music came on and his students seemed closer to each other.

Once he’d set them all going, he sat at his desk with his grant application. He’d done the rote parts over the last two months; tonight he started to write his budget proposal. He was direct, unapologetic, vigorous. He stated the lab’s claims and asked directly for further support. When he was finished he looked up, and an hour had passed.

It was after midnight then and he was hungry. He turned off his lamp. Only Louise, who made him uncomfortable even now, still stood at her bench, working. She was wearing her black clothes, and her earrings hung longer than her hair. She was odd but vastly valuable. Perhaps she’d sensed his reaction to her and minded it, yet decided to go about her work for her own sake and only incidentally his. In a moment of hope, he asked if she’d like to go get a burrito. She shook her head. “I’m going to stay and finish.”

He wheeled to the old burrito place and sat relishing the ancient solace of tortilla, rice and beans. “Working-class food,” his mother called it.

At two o’clock, the phone woke him.

“It’s me,” the girl said. After six years,
me
. “Is everything okay?”

“I wanted to ask you a question. But it doesn’t really matter anymore. I wanted to ask you if it would’ve made a difference if I had more money. If I worked for a company and we could buy a house, would you ever want to try again?”