A Regular Guy (9 page)

“Oh, Noey, we didn’t break up over that. And that’s not you. You’re a scientist.”

“I could be happy with other things, I think. A family.”

“You’ll get that, Noah. And be a scientist. It scares me you’d even think of giving it up. It’s what you love.”

“No it isn’t.” He laughed a bitter laugh he later regretted.

“You don’t even realize it now, but it is. And it’s going to work out for you.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t even understand biology.”

“But I know you, though.”

She was doing it again. Noah felt wrapped in his life, with happiness possible, even likely.

“And you know, Noah, I’ve been with someone for a pretty long time now.”

Waves of recrimination poured over him after he hung up. He shouldn’t have called.

Years later, when Noah defended Owens beyond what his friends deemed reasonable, he was repaying him for this night. He and the girl from college had each given Noah his offered life back to his hands, with a value they recognized when he couldn’t.

Okay, science, he thought the next morning, rolling to work. But if this is going to be it, then I better do a lot better.

An opened crate of French champagne lay amidst sealed boxes. Every few hours, Owens’ secretary marched through, waving a new faxed clipping, and everyone gathered around the table to read what they already knew about their good fortune. Owens meant for all of this to stop. It was a problem they’d never had the first go-round: when no one’s ever heard of you, you don’t waste time basking in afterglow.

Eliot Hanson, the moneyman Owens had hired years earlier, picked his way through the confettied hallways, his thumbs stretching out suspenders. When Owens and Frank started Genesis, they had no formal agreement and didn’t need one. But eventually, when the company grew, Owens had hired Eliot, whose strategic tip in the second year—switching operating capital into marks and yen—had allowed them to double the manufacturing budget. Owens smiled when Eliot stepped into his office. Every time Owens saw him, Eliot surprised him. Today
it was the suspenders. He seemed to Owens a type, like a nerd in high school he’d never particularly thought about at all but who, he was now pleased to discover, genuinely liked his life.

Eliot smiled back. “I enjoy the atmosphere around here.”

“Yeah,” Owens said. “I think we’re going to come up with something really great. Eliot, you’ve been a lawyer how long?”

“Let’s see, I passed the bar in ’67, when you were probably still in Little League. So twenty years.” Of Eliot’s six clients, Owens was the youngest and also the most unsettled. Eliot maintained that he kept his practice small in order to devote himself assiduously to the particulars of each financial portfolio, but he liked to think of himself as doing more for his clients than that.

“And you’ve probably seen a lot of strange problems in that time,” Owens said. “I know with doctors there’s a pledge of confidentiality. Do lawyers have something like that?”

“Absolutely. There’s no Hippocratic oath, but there are very definite codes of client confidentiality that come into play, especially in criminal cases.”

“Well, I have a little … I don’t know if you’d call it a problem. It’s definitely not criminal.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear that. That I don’t do anymore.”

Owens looked at Eliot quizzically. For all Owens’ brilliance, Eliot remembered, he was surprisingly slow to get a joke.

“But it’s a matter that would require total confidentiality.”

Eliot lifted his right hand. “Absolutely.”

“Well, as you may or may not know, my biological mother died when I was born,” Owens began, his fingertips gently touching those of the other hand. “My father married my mother when I was eight months old. They’d known each other before. They went to the same high school. But I called you this morning because—and I know this doesn’t exactly make sense—I’d like to have a picture of my biological mother. I always thought it was a little strange that nobody in her family ever met me. But if my parents ever found out I was doing this, I think they’d be pretty upset.”

“I understand. Now, what do you know about her?”

Owens had learned a few stray facts from his father. “I guess she
was this rich girl. She went to the private academy outside Auburn. My dad was the grounds guy there. That’s how they met.” Her father had been something exotic. His father remembered it being Jewish, but sometimes he thought it was Arab. “From over in that part of the world anyway,” Nora always said in the end. They thought that was probably where he got his looks.

“I have my birth certificate. You know, it’s a strange thing. I’ve had that one piece of paper since high school. Sometimes I’ll lose it for a month or a year, but I always know I’ll eventually find it again.” He opened the top drawer of his new desk. “And here it is.”

They stood staring at the document, which meant so much and said so little.

Boy Owens
, it said. “I guess with her so sick, they didn’t have time to name me.”

“Do you have a copy of this?”

“Nope. Never made one.” Owens gave it to Eliot. “You take it. I’ll get it from you again sometime.”

When he was younger, Eliot had thought about going back to school in another field. He’d considered the ministry, but meeting Hazel had effectively sapped his desire for religious life. Occasionally, he’d thought of psychology, but he had long ago adjusted his vision to the confines of his work. And by now he was firmly convinced that he could do more good from where he sat as a financial manager than he ever could in forty-five-minute sessions behind a couch. He believed that a man’s money and his relationship to it ran to the core of his life, and he attempted, through gentle manipulation of fiscal portfolios, to act as both doctor and priest, and to improve not only the value of his clients’ net worth but also the quality of their years on the earth and perhaps even the condition of their souls. Though a conservative man by nature, he was given to flights of feeling. He tried to protect his clients’ money, yet sometimes also to spend it, to adjust the balance of power and happiness in their lives. Owens was a young man Eliot Hanson worried over, on several accounts. In an extremely quick calculation, Eliot decided that Owens was a youth particularly devoid of maternal imprints. Whether a latter-day history would help him was of course less than certain, but in any event, Eliot couldn’t see how it
would hurt. He vowed to himself now that he would find out about Owens’ mother, whatever it took.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said, standing.

“Um, you know, I’ll pay you for this myself,” Owens whispered, fingertips in jeans pockets, “Not through Genesis.”

“Don’t worry,” Eliot mumbled, also embarrassed by the introduction of money to this rare intimate conversation.

Owens immediately sat back down and busied himself with papers from his in box. He opened one stray envelope, typewritten with his name and address, and found only a worn five-dollar bill inside. He shook the envelope, with a bas-relief of his name on its interior, an actual hole made by the period of “Mr.” What’s this? he wondered, turning the empty envelope over and finding no return address. Then he thought he’d maybe lent it to somebody. This warmed him: the commonness of having a small loan repaid. He slid up to get his wallet from his back pocket, slipped the bill inside and patted it with satisfaction.

The recent statement Eliot Hanson left, chronicling a bond transfer that resulted in a profit to Owens of over a million times this amount, elicited no such response.

Van Castle

O
wens began receiving envelopes with no return address and no letter inside: only five-dollar bills. Some seemed new, others came creased like very old, hardworking hands. One evening, he collected a pile and absentmindedly distributed them in the cubbyholes that served as mailboxes. But like something thrown away that keeps bobbing back, he found a new batch in his next morning’s mail. “What is this, some kind of joke?”

By now he realized the error of his original explanation. The memory of that mistaken satisfaction had an unpleasant aftertaste.

Then he buzzed his secretary, Kathleen, the answer to all questions, and she told him that Kaskie’s van had come in. “Do you want to pick it up yourself?”

“Nah, I think it’d be nice if he went to get it,” Owens said. “Did we pay for that already? Better call Eliot.”

For as long as Owens could remember, he’d seen Noah Kaskie around Alta, but it was years before he learned his name. There weren’t many
wheelchairs when Owens was growing up, and this kid had long blond ringlets.

And everyone in Alta passed the public garden, where a man worked every Saturday and Sunday; his son, with the wheelchair parked by the gate, crawled around on the ground, digging. People brought their seedlings, clippings, bare-root roses and fruit trees, or dropped coins into a tin can attached to the fence. Owens heard that the father experimented with hybrids in his garage and made new flowers. He was the first man in Santa Clara County to create a pink-fruited orange and a persimmon with no bite.

Owens wished he knew them. He and his father often drove into Alta and walked past the garden Saturday mornings, but he stayed close to his father’s long legs. The kid crawling on the ground was an Alta kid. He yelled up easily at other people. Owens thought he’d heard that the kid was an artist, but a few years later the Alta
Sentinel
ran a picture of Noah in his wheelchair: “Winner of Elks Science Scholarship.” So the kid turned out to be a scientist; Owens thought that fit even better. By then, Owens had met an industrial organic chemist, who traveled the world with petri dishes in his back pocket to pick up stray samples of dirt to screen for microbes. A thin, frowning man, he paced his small living room every night and danced with his young daughters to requiems.

The evening Owens finally met Noah Kaskie, they talked for an hour. Perhaps it was inevitable that they meet and when they did, it happened to be on a hilltop. Neither man appeared anywhere in Alta anonymously; each was always preceded by his reputation. Worth millions, that guy who started Genesis. The one in the wheelchair, he’s some kind of genius. Neither man’s name came up in conversation without a lowered voice, and to their faces, people strenuously avoided the topics most attached to them in their absence. For each man, there was the hope that no one really noticed and the endless suspicion that everyone did.

In his wheelchair, Noah still had long blond ringlets. Owens imagined his face was what women might find noble. His chest and arms
were average, but it was as if the strength drained as it went down his body; his legs were much smaller than his arms, and Owens couldn’t tell if they were straight or shriveled.

“So what’s your life like?” Owens said, staring at Noah, no hint of laughter on his face.

“Guess about like yours,” Noah answered.

“I always passed your garden when I was growing up. And now I know you’re a great scientist. I heard about your mutation.”

“Thank you,” Noah said simply. Generally, it was hard for him to take compliments, although he craved them. But Owens made it easy. He shaped his praise like a small, careful package. Most people babbled on and on, making you stop them. “Is it hard having everyone know you?”

“Yeah, it is. You probably understand what that’s like. I mean, I knew who you were. I knew you went to Caltech.”

“In the wheelchair.” Noah snorted.

“That too. People get all these insane ideas that have nothing to do with who you are. When what they know is one or two things.”

“That you’re rich.”

“See, the word
rich
means a lot of things I’m not. I happen to have a high net worth, but most other people in that category got their money a very different way. I didn’t grow up rich. I don’t think like a rich person. I don’t live like a rich person. It doesn’t matter to me very much at all. I just feel like I’ve been given this resource and I’ve got to make sure I use it to do something good.”

“I feel that too,” Noah said, believing, at that moment, that he’d also been given something. Much of the time, he lived in a state of fight. Some days he stopped trying altogether and lay still on his back in the bed, contemplating the wheels’ scuff marks on his apartment’s white walls. But he meant what he said to Owens and felt closer to him afterwards. Owens had been present for this blare of confidence and hadn’t laughed.

“Well, I admire you.” Owens was in a state he rarely achieved, which he would have described as the emotion of respect. He believed that Noah was going to be a great scientist, and leave an important human record. He felt, in a way no one else would understand, that
they were the same, he and this small, strangely formed young man. He wondered, suddenly, if Noah had ever had sex.

They headed down the hill to where their friends had spread out picnic blankets. Olivia walked up the trail to meet them, her hands skimming the tops of weeds. She had a look that meant:
See. I can lead to where everything is true
.

Owens lurched into her arms, tall-ly, awkward, full of intention. For a moment, he felt he was in love. She nursed his surge of feeling and looked over his shoulder at Noah, who was making his way down the trail with switchbacks.