by Mona Simpson
“No, no, I don’t think you should drop it. I’ll tell you what: I’d like you to just keep it for me. Sometime I’ll want to know all this stuff, but I don’t want to hear about it right now.”
What was he like before?
For Olivia, during the years which were and always would be the time of her great love, that was the constant question. Was he always the same?
The only people who’d known him before were his family. His father had opinions; his father could say, but he wouldn’t. “Stubborn,” was all he offered. “Still is.”
Pony wasn’t close enough to know much, but she said he studied magic. “I can make you go away,” he’d warned her. Apparently, for a month Owens went around measuring things between his thumb and first finger. “You’re as big as this; I can measure you. You fit into my eye, so you’re not very big.” He claimed to have made a horse disappear.
“I think he believed it himself,” his mother said, shaking her head. Nora’s illness provided Olivia with an opportunity she’d wanted—to prove herself entirely good. She went up after her shift at the hospital, in the late afternoon. Twice a week, she brought along Karen Croen, whom Owens had hired to give his mother massages. Karen was a person whom mothers always liked. “Just a nice, nice girl,” Olivia’s own mother had said.
Olivia stayed in the room, setting flowers in a clear glass jar on the dresser, and listened to Nora’s confessions while Karen worked.
“I just felt like having a roll,” Nora apologized, the day after Owens brought the cherries. Nora had always loved sugar. The three women were eating doughnuts off little plates, enjoying the soft, powdery food of convalescence. Olivia had been a committed vegan for ten years longer than Owens, but with his mother she would gladly eat a doughnut. Olivia liked these afternoons. The time passed slowly, and his mother and dad were easier to talk to than he was. Olivia left these visits happy and relieved; she went to Owens with a gift-feeling of kindness. She believed he was simpler than she’d once thought and that things were going to be better.
Nora could never help but talk.
“He wasn’t very babyish-looking. He was always just different, he had the darker eyes. A lot of babies have blue and then they get dark. But he was what he was right from the start. Or at least when I met him, anyway. I wasn’t the least bit ready. I didn’t even know how to hold a baby.
“He was a good boy. Very pacific. When he cried, those eyebrows would make a real V, and he’d stare up at me like he knew everything and I was wrong.
“To tell the truth, he scared me a little. Sometimes I thought he was judging me and I wasn’t coming out too good. And the once or twice I had to let him wait, when I finally came he was different. He’d look past me, far away, as if he couldn’t stand my sight.
“You know, I think I was afraid to love him. I was afraid her parents would come and take him away.”
“Could they have done that?” Olivia asked.
“The way the law was then, it had more to do with the mother, and they were the mother’s parents. And they never wanted her to marry Tom’s dad. They were a doctor family. Art wanted to hire a lawyer and so we did. But that first year was hard. They were difficult people, always pestering the social worker. I suppose they were upset. She was their only child. But they weren’t happy with us, even after we signed saying we’d send him to college. We made up a budget to show them just how we could afford to save so much every week to put him through. After the judge gave us custody, they moved away. I think it was to Arizona. The first couple of years, he always got a birthday card with a check. But then we stopped hearing.
“They had me scared, though. That first year, maybe I didn’t pick him up enough. Sometimes I think I let him cry in his crib when I really should’ve held him.”
Nora gave the girls cherries to take home with them. Bag after bag of Owens’ cherries were rotting in the refrigerator.
Once they left, Arthur scolded her. “I don’t see how that’s anybody’s business.”
“I didn’t even know until I said it. I didn’t know that’s what I thought.”
Years earlier, in their beginning, Owens and Olivia lay side by side in front of the Copper King’s huge stone fireplace. Olivia made the fire. Birch logs popped and cracked, spitting lines of sparks. Olivia understood fire, blew on it, tented the logs to coax a vertical lick of flame. She’d been a Girl Scout. Owens was twenty-seven and already one of the five hundred richest men in the country, and that night they were alone in the huge unlocked house.
In a slow voice, he told her that he felt grateful to Nora, letting silence around the word batten it. “She took me in when I had no place to go.”
A traveler with no money and no shoes. No crib for a bed, the evil innkeepers. As if all he’d needed was a room. “You were just a little baby,” Olivia said. “Who took care of you the first eight months?”
“Some neighbor woman,” he shrugged. “I don’t remember her.”
“Do you know anything about your real mother?”
“Well, I’ve always thought of my mother as my real mother. But I don’t know much about my biological mother, no. She was some college girl.” He pictured her holding books against her sweater, wearing college shoes, tie-ups with those liver-colored soles.
Olivia, who’d never gone to college, felt ashamed. She could’ve gone somehow, but she hadn’t wanted to put herself forward that way. And Owens sort of blamed her. His memories of his own three months already seemed important. He felt attracted to college girls, their intentness, heads of clean hair bent over long library tables. Later, he would want to give Olivia college. But she would be too proud. That was the problem with people around Owens. They got stubborn, feeling they had to keep something indefinable yet essential about themselves. Olivia didn’t think the people who went to college were any better than she was. And so to enter a classroom and be behind them was more than she could bear. She was behind them every day in other, more obvious ways at the hospital, but that she could live with and had lived with for a long time.
Olivia had her arms around her shins. Her knee, through the hole in her jeans, was warm from the fire. She didn’t want to tell about her family yet: she thought if she did he’d think less of her.
He told her that once it had snowed in Auburn. He was the first one up. He recognized a strange silence in the house. “The world is never that quiet,” he said. And then he saw it out the window, white flakes filling the air. The snow apparently had no density or speed; pieces lofted down aimlessly, never in the shortest distance between sky and ground. The large flakes resembled pieces of bread. He’d put clothes on over his pajamas and stepped outside. He ran out again across lawns, bounding up shallow porch steps and ringing doorbells. Once he heard fumbling footsteps begin somewhere in a house, he was off and running to the next porch. “Nobody knew it was me. By noon it was all gone.”
When she went to temp at Genesis, inoculating for Indonesian flu, Karen and Huck had said, “Do you think you’ll see that guy?”
She shrugged. “If he needs a flu shot.”
Owens never took patent medicines, and in the realm of vitamins he believed only in metals, particularly zinc. But he did accept a vaccine from Olivia, and a week later she was on his floor. She slept with him the first night, easily. She was a girl with no mother.
“What’s he like?” Karen asked. She and Huck had read about him, so they both had questions and opinions.
In a blind way she didn’t fully understand, Olivia resented people’s interest. Perhaps because she intuited the other topic of conversation that surrounded him, though never within his hearing: the matter of whom he would marry.
Too many people speculated about Owens. The cooks, Jane and her mother, even the man who managed his money—they all gossiped. Rumor had it that two unauthorized biographies were being written about him. Reputable newspapers like the Bee and the Mercury News reported not only the glitches in Exodus and the controversy of his rice-and-beans
school lunches but also his romantic whereabouts and the prices of his real estate transactions. Last year, a gossip columnist had suggested a secret engagement between Olivia and Owens. A different columnist described Olivia only as a “leggy blonde” along at the opening night of the opera.
Olivia stood in the room he’d grown up in, with an armload of warm-smell wash. She wished she’d known Owens as the little boy who slept in this bed and sat at this small desk. With Owens, it was easy to assume there was one clear line that divided his life. Olivia folded the laundry while Karen worked on Nora, who was talking. She liked to talk about her children’s childhoods.
“Once, when the kids were young,” she said, “we took them to see the circus. He wanted to watch the magician. But Pony wanted trapeze. Dad flipped a coin, and so we bought tickets for the Hall of Trapeze. We thought Pony was probably too young to get the gist of the magic tricks anyway. And while we were in with the trapeze, Owens had to go number one. So his dad sent him out to the fields. And then, after a while, I said, ‘Gee, shouldn’t he be back? He’s been gone a long time.’ Pony was unwinding her cotton candy, peeling it like an orange. ‘I betcha he’s in that tent,’ I said.
“Dad told me, ‘Damned if I know how he got in with what he’s got in his pocket.’
“But we bought tickets for the magic show then, and there Owens was on the stage, in front of a big crowd, his face the way it used to be when he was mad about something, his eyebrows pressed together in a V. ‘Just lift your foot,’ he was saying, ‘and if there isn’t a silver dollar under the sole of your shoe, then you have nothing to be frightened of.’
“I felt real sorry for that magic man. He looked like a nice man, too. And that can’t be an easy way to make a living. He was wearing a robe that was dirty at the wrists, and I could see he was trembling. ‘Get down here, Thomas Rudolf Owens,’ Dad called.
“But that crowd was on his side and he knew it. They were hooting, ‘Lift your foot! Lift your foot!’ Then the magic man looked down at him and said, ‘Better watch out, little boy, or I’ll make you disappear!’
“And Owens crossed his arms and stood there like a statue. Well, you know it too, he can get that way. ‘Go ahead and do it,’ he said. He’d been threatening to make Pony disappear all those years; he knew how hard it was to do. And that shut the crowd up. There was a real hush, everybody waiting.
“ ‘Do it!’ another kid called, from way in the back.
“ ‘Make me disappear,’ Owens ordered.
“Then the magic man’s face turned upside down almost. In the tent before, that Hall of Trapeze, we’d been watching acrobatics. This magic man had a big face and it seemed like it did three flips and then he ran off the stage, his regular shoes showing through the flap of his gown. A band picked up then, I suppose to keep everybody from looking. And a midget came out, in a tuxedo and tails, real swell, and he had a saw he held up for everybody to see. But Owens reached down, stood on top of a box up there, used for God knows what, and so he was taller than the midget. He must have been eight or nine then. And he held up his hand in the air and waved it for everybody to see: and sure enough, there was the silver dollar.
“The people moved back and forth, and you could hear their candy wrappers twisting. The midget was saying he would saw his wife in half. An announcer said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, from far away Lemuria, we introduce Lady Helena,’ and a spotlight came around this little-bitty woman, she was about three feet tall, but real pretty.
“And Owens did a trick of his own,” Nora concluded. “While everybody was watching that Lady Helena being sawed, he pocketed the silver dollar.”
Olivia nodded. She’d been present before at his unmaskings.
When they walked out to their cars, Olivia tried to pay Karen. Owens had asked Karen to give his mother massages, and she kept it up twice a week. He might remember to pay her sometime, but for now Olivia would tide her friend over. Olivia was different with money since she’d been with Owens. In a funny way, he was expensive. It had to do with people’s feelings. Promises and offers he forgot, or wishes, Olivia made good on. She earned a decent salary, and she could do this. She’d stopped saving. She’d waited before and saved for the time when she’d come into the importance of life. And she believed that was now.
It was still light out, but it was suppertime in this neighborhood, when men came home who worked at jobs by the hour. Karen had eaten at this time most of her life. Olivia had always eaten late.
“Here,” she said, wadding a roll of money in her palm and slipping it into Karen’s.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Karen jammed it down Olivia’s open collar.
“Come on,” Olivia said, chasing after her friend around the yard.
They’d been athletic girls, and the run felt good. They kept on long after either one particularly remembered the money, and it felt enlivening to tackle, with their blood beating quickly in their wrists, smelling the clean numb smell of earth.
“Please,” Olivia said, her hand on her friend’s cheek. “You never let me do anything for you.” They had been friends for over fifteen years already, and Karen was always the good one, glad to help. Olivia’s own mother had always thought Karen had a better heart.
That night, Olivia asked Owens if he still had the silver dollar. She was a little afraid to ask. Sometimes he didn’t like to know people talked about him.
“What silver dollar?”
“The silver dollar that was under the magician’s shoe.”
“Oh, that. She told you that? It was really pretty great. The guy went tearing out and tripped on his dress, just about fell flat on his face. No, I don’t have it anymore. I kept it a long time and then I spent it.”
“Do you remember what on?”
“What are you guys talking about?” Jane asked. They were doing it again. “Who’s she?”
“Yeah, I remember. I spent that silver dollar on my first date with a girl. I took Laurie Gallioto out for a Coca-Cola.”
“A Coke cost a dollar?” Jane asked.
“I was speaking”—his mouth contracted in a small smile—“figuratively.”
“And was it worth it?” Olivia said.
His smile moved through the full sequence of memory. “Yeah, it was,” he said. “She was the first girl I really kissed. You know that lake up from my parents’ house? I kissed her in front of that lake one night, right after supper.”
Jane could tell he was remembering kissing Laurie Gallioto and thinking that nothing else since had been quite like it.
Olivia shook her head. He was always like this. For her, nothing in her life mattered, until him. Later that night, tucking Jane in, she explained. “She is his mom.”
“Yeah, but by the time he and my mom decide to introduce us,” Jane said, “she’ll be dead, and then I’ll never know my grandmother.”
Olivia repeated the story of the magician, as best she remembered.
“My dad was taller than the midget?”
“Well, maybe he was standing on something.”
Jane was thinking of him being taller than the midget when he was younger than she was now. He kept telling her she took after him, that she’d have a growth spurt soon. She worried that she might be a dwarf, then thought of Noah and felt guilty. “When you go again to see her,” she whispered, “can I come?”
“You have to ask him.”
“He’ll say no. Just take me along, I won’t tell.”
Owens didn’t excel in the usual places children distinguish themselves. He wasn’t good in school or sports, and when the teachers received the state test scores every year, they called Nora in to tell her he was underachieving.
“We thought he’d be better in school. His grandparents expected him to be a college professor, or a doctor, even. So we tried to get him to bring his grades up. But he didn’t care. When the teacher asked him a question he didn’t know, he wasn’t the least bit ashamed.
“He’d come in and watch while I fixed dinner. When I
asked if he’d done his homework, he’d just smile his goofy smile and say, ‘You know, that water’ll boil faster if you put the lid on.’ I said I could manage supper myself, so why didn’t he see about his homework so his father’d get a good report card this time. And he’d say, ‘Seriously, do you know why water boils?’ ”
Frank Wu came to visit on a Thursday. Olivia had never met Frank before, and she wondered if he’d come when he knew Owens would be at work. Olivia cleaned out the refrigerator while he talked to Nora in the living room.
Owens had told her about Frank. They were both on the night shift at Valley Electronics, and Frank was way ahead of everyone else. They started at nine and he’d have all his work done by ten-thirty. His mom packed great Chinese dinners, which he’d share with Owens. He was in graduate school then but already talking about quitting. Until Owens talked him out of it, he thought he wanted to go work for Ford. He used to fix cars in high school. He had all kinds of pencil sketches he sent off to the Ford Motor Company, Detroit, Michigan. “They were too stupid to even steal them,” Owens had said.
The man had a high voice and a cascading giggle. “I’m frittering my life away, Nora.”
Olivia had all the vegetables in plastic bags and the jars out on the counter. The last of the cherries had rotted. The shelves smelled faintly of pills as she lifted them out to wash.
“Don’t blame him,” Nora said about something. “I probably didn’t teach him right.”
Frank and Owens had paid Pony fifty cents an hour, and on Saturdays, Frank’s four cousins, shy elementary school girls in pink dresses, worked for free. Three years after that, they made fifty men millionaires, all under the age of thirty. Frank bought houses for twenty relatives. Now he lived up in Berkeley, wandering in and out of classes. Owens thought he was studying arcane dialects of Chinese. They were not in touch. Owens had told her he was kind of mad at Frank for checking out. He had hired thirty-two Wus. Owens walked into the mailroom one day and found twenty-five men squatting with covered teacups, planning a union. “I had to choose,” Owens said. “It was Genesis or Frank’s uncles.”