A Regular Guy

by Mona Simpson

  He’d used the parking space in all his years with Genesis. Even when he traveled, it was always left open. Now that he worked most of the day in the Exodus building, he still parked in his spot and sprinted over.

  Today, though, his space was taken. Furthermore, it was Rooney, not some stranger who didn’t know. Owens instantly recognized the car, because it was identical to his own. When Rooney had first driven it to work, Owens approved, almost. He’d done some research and concluded that if you wanted a sports car, this was the best. But he now wondered if Rooney’d discovered this for himself, or if he’d just gone in and said he wanted one like Owens’.

  Things with Rooney weren’t what they had been. He’d had to have talks with him too many times lately, and in the last month they’d more or less agreed to disagree. When Owens parked and got out, he saw G. J. Rooney, President painted on the curb. Rooney’s car was sealed and locked. Most likely he used the car alarm.

  Owens had heard that back East, where Rooney came from, hundreds of CEOs had their parking spots painted with their names, like plaques on auditorium seats, and that sometimes it was even a negotiating point in contracts. But he’d never wanted Genesis to be like that. So far, Owens didn’t have anything named after him, although a week earlier he’d sent away five hundred dollars to a horticultural laboratory that would hybridize a rose named Olivia. He’d ordered fourteen Olivia bushes to plant in his garden. When he told Jane about this, she wished he’d ordered roses named Jane.

  People deserve to own what they use, he said. Everyone in the company knew where he parked, and a few hundred people, maybe a thousand, unconsciously glanced at the spot when they entered and exited, to see that Owens was there. Owens stooped down to the curb. The paint was dry and G. J. Rooney was the only name there. If he’d put Owens’ name somewhere, Owens probably would’ve railed and had it painted over immediately, but this, in its way, was even worse. He ran up the stairs two at a time, his heart going like something hitting inside a paper bag. From all the hours, he felt more at home here than home.

  First generation builds, second enjoys, third destroys. That triangle jingled. Jane was his second generation. But the way Rooney saw it, Exodus was; and with its expensive fruit juice and the lavish ad campaign, Rooney thought they were enjoying, all right. Rooney was nothing if not prudent.

  Through the glass wall, Owens saw him stretching, hands on back hiphandles, teeth clenched. Full suit and tie every day. Owens told him from the beginning this was a place he could wear jeans, though Rooney always got a straight slight smile when he said that.

  For a long time, years, Owens had an impermeable protection. He tested the limits, dared fate, told more and more audacious things to reporters, missed appointments, canceled, let his temper flare. And nothing happened. He appeared on more magazine covers. In negotiations, he went for the high fair price and stayed firm; more than once he’d walked away. His stamina outlasted others’. The stock rose. Genesis had been rising, and so was he. But now, all of a sudden, it seemed he’d turned a corner. The Exodus guys had created something amazing, but no one could use it yet.

  Owens sat down in Rooney’s office. “Hey, we need to talk.”

  “All right, Tom.” The space between Rooney’s teeth showed not a smile but forbearance of pained anxiety. He reminded Owens of his father’s mother, an old woman who looked out the window and wanted to be left alone. He’d always tried to make her laugh.

  Owens scanned the desk, picked up a memo. Rooney stayed standing, hands still on his hips. “What can I do for you?”

  “See, the way this is written reminds me of corporate BS,” Owens said, slapping the page down. “Like Detroit, threatening people. Remember: they want to be more like us.”

  “CFO made a study of our one-day-air bills, Tom. They’re forty-five percent over any other company, including the big Swiss boys. Same thing with long distance, prime time and international.”

  “Okay, so maybe we have to cut back. But there’s a better way to say it. See, this just isn’t what I ever wanted to do. I didn’t want a company where people who do great work have to worry about these little things. I didn’t want people afraid of getting caught. I happen to believe that impairs creative thinking.”

  “Tom, we don’t need to be paying for everybody’s Christmas packages flying Federal Express. There is such a thing as a post office!”

  “I just think if you start having all these rules, people cheat. The smart people find ways around them. I would.”

  “Not everyone’s you, Tom. We’re not monitoring your phones. You can send all the Christmas presents you like, for Christ’s sake. We’re talking about a company of over a thousand people.”

  Owens shook his head. “That’s not my point at all. As it happens, I actually don’t give Christmas presents.”

  “Tom, let’s talk about next quarter’s budget. I don’t much believe in pyrotechnics.”

  They talked for a good half hour, without convincing each other of anything.

  “I think I’ve learned in my ten years here that it pays to do things right,” Owens said, “even if the bill’s higher at the end. You know, you have to spend some to make money.”

  “You yourself are proof against that!” Rooney exploded. He then explained what he thought was a reasonable proportion: most capital outlay to Genesis, which was still supporting the whole show.

  “You really don’t understand,” Owens almost whispered. “Exodus is awesome. In five years, millions of people all over the world will be relying on our drugs. Rooney, this is what’s going to make our name. And you know I love Genesis.” He walked to the far end of the office and put his hands on the wooden molecular model of their first, best-selling compound, LCSF. “I manufactured it. It makes stem cells, precursor cells. It helps people live after chemo. But NT12 is a cure.”

  The phone rang and Rooney spoke into the speaker. “He’s here, Kathleen. Go ahead.”

  “I wanted to remind him they’re expecting him in fifteen minutes at Jane’s school.”

  There was a lot more to be said. But so far he and Rooney agreed on exactly nothing. And this was Jane’s first month of school.

  Second generation, Owens mumbled, swinging into his convertible, glancing at Rooney’s tight car, barely used and scratchless.

  Owens had gone through three of these cars, all the same model and all black. He’d run one into a live oak the week before the public offering, and he’d banged the back of the next right before he’d introduced his rice-and-beans bill in the legislature. Now, every time Owens tried something big, he expected to crack up a car. That put him at a rate of one every three or four years. He planned not to use the new one the month before his Berkeley speech.

  Once cracked up, he determined, they were never the same again. The only way to console himself for the damage was to order a new one. To spend money replacing something he already had bothered him, but then he forgot about it. “Just as long as you don’t buy any more date farms,” Eliot said. “Talk to me before you do anything like that.”

  He didn’t give up the first car and still drove it a good deal of the time. He kept one perfect and used the other to park at the airport. By now he’d learned to forgive himself such extravagance and to allow for a certain amount of loss. He understood there were elements of destruction in his personality that he could not expunge.

  Second generation. There were signs everywhere that he was beginning to lose. His luck had turned, but he’d give it a run for its money. Because unlike a lot of people as smart as he was, Owens knew he knew how to work.

  A bumper sticker swam up in front of him. MEDICINE WILL CURE DEATH AND GOVERNMENT WILL REPEAL TAXES BEFORE TOM OWENS FAILS. Somebody on the team had designed yellow letters on black, like a bumblebee. The type was gorgeous. For labels, he’d learned a lot about type.

  To make a bad day perfect, Owens had a fight with Mary outside the school.

  “I think this is a school for little geniuses,” Mary blurt
ed, tripping on her high heel. At the meeting, the teacher had told them nothing good. Jane was, she said, “a little butterfly,” excessively concerned with her social life.

  “Cricket more like,” Mary whispered into her lap, because Jane’s voice veered high and screechy.

  Step on a crack

  Break your mother’s back.

  Step on a line

  Break her spine.

  Mary listened to girls’ incessant chanting, up and down, on the sidewalk, almost at the end of the jump rope years. Now, since she had been in school, boys called at night on the telephone, a gulp in their voice, saying, “Jane there?” Their impudence rendered Mary helpless, not indignant, and she soundlessly whispered, “I’ll get her.”

  Her friends, the teacher said, were not the serious students. They were children from troubled homes. Just today she’d discovered a balled pair of stockings and long earrings in Jane’s locker. She handed the contraband over to Mary.

  “Like that Madeleine,” Owens added, continuing the conversation outside, “without the last name.” Madeleine had a last name—the way Jane did, from her mother—but she didn’t use it. “And the other one, what’s her name?”

  “Johanna.” Mary sighed. She’d never liked her own last name. “I suppose it’s natural. We’re not the most normal family either. I never had friends from good homes.”

  “What you did, Mary, is not the point. None of this is the point.”

  “Well, what do you think the point is?”

  “Jane’s gotta work harder, that’s all. I’ll talk to her,” he said, as if that finished it.

  “Well, she’s waiting. She’s making muffins to bring you.”

  It was Tuesday. He’d forgotten all about it. “I’m gonna have to do another night.”

  “I told you a week ago, Owens. I can’t tonight.”

  “Okay. I’ll get her, then we’ll go to the office. I’ll set her up at a desk.”

  “But she has to be in bed by ten. She’s a kid, Owens.”

  All these years outside the school system, Jane had been perfect, a rare something. Here, in school, she went unrecognized. The teacher hadn’t said anything, as other people did always, about how Jane was special. Mary was used to uncertainty about herself. But for Jane to be unexceptional, even to this one big-hipped teacher, tilted the whole world.

  Jane strapped on her seat belt without being asked, balancing the cardboard box of still-warm muffins on her knees. She was glad they were going to his office: she’d made too many for just the two of them. The muffins released a faint sweetness into the car.

  “Now, do you think your muffins’ll be enough for dinner?”

  “Muffins are enough for me,” she said.

  In a way she never was with her mother, Jane felt confidence in his driving, even when he sped. They made up the road, gliding through dark, in no place, really, but together.

  He’d told her about the parking spot and his argument with Rooney, and now was talking about gears and transmissions. He liked to explain machines and chemical reactions and weather, what made fog, how precipitation began. She tried to be alert because he’d often stop and quiz her, make her tell it back in her own words. She didn’t yet understand this was a quality he reserved only for her and that made up a great portion of what he understood to be paternity.

  Jane enjoyed these rides, the sound of road air humming up from the floor, night all around them, and she always regretted the minute they touched ground. He waited too, and they both stared ahead at the dark buildings—ordinary office buildings, rented, like others along this highway. Someday, he told her, they’d build. Genesis should have its own buildings, with land around. He envisioned it as a college campus.

  He’d had architects out from New York trudging these hills, jackets slung over their shoulders, getting mud on their wingtip shoes. The problem they couldn’t divine was where to put it. Owens loved this highway and, remained loyal to it; he’d lived and worked off it for years, he wasn’t going to move to El Camino, even though a fleet of historians reported that it was the original El Camino Real that ran through California all the way to Mexico. He figured it had changed a lot since then.

  They parked in the slot that now said G. J. Rooney. Jane took small fast steps to keep up, across the wide lot. Owens sighed. “Olivia could be more a part of my life here. I told her at the beginning, we could set up a little office for her and by now everybody’d know her.”

  Walking her child’s mincing double steps, Jane tried to be what Olivia wouldn’t. Tonight she’d baked thirty-six muffins, with oat flour, bran, molasses and bananas. She’d tried to copy a muffin from a place Owens liked, called Mae’s, but her efforts were doomed because she listened so carefully to her father that she was limited herself to ingredients he approved of. And Owens, like many people, enjoyed some foods in total ignorance of their composition.

  Jane liked going to her father’s office. She didn’t mind hanging around, waiting. She would have liked a little desk set up there for her.

  She couldn’t start her homework yet. She’d been banished to the microscope room to study, but every time she opened the book it went dull on her, like a pill without water, so she searched the desk drawers and found bags of trail mix, and in the file cabinet a smelly pair of high-tops. An electric guitar leaned in the corner. She would do just one more thing and then her homework. She took out her postcard from Noah.

  Today I heard a boy whine, “What do I need a penny for?”

  “They say when you find a penny it’s good luck.” This wasn’t his mom but some baby-sitter. She looked young and bored.

  “But I don’t need luck.”

  “It’s nice to have, just you keep it, someday you may need it, everybody does.”

  “I don’t like this penny, it’s not shiny.”

  “Give it to me, then,” the baby-sitter finally said.

  He said no.

  Remember, Jane: never give away your luck.

  Noah asked her to write him back, and Jane meant to do that and her homework, but she didn’t have nice writing paper or an envelope or a stamp. There were so many things she always meant to do.

  At midnight, her father had finally come to tell her it was time to go home. She still hadn’t done her homework, but now it was too late to try. She sat on a couch, her knees hooked over the old arm, while he went over just one more thing. Her muffins lay ravaged on the table. Jane craved another one, the banana melt with oats, but he was talking, and to get it she’d have to walk across the room, and everyone would see.

  Owens was his best now, half sitting, talking to guys who trusted him. “We don’t really have much time. We have a deadline, and people are going to be making judgments about us. But what they don’t understand is that that’s not at all what it’s about. What I saw Rich doing down there in his corner or the tests Henry’s going to do just before the sun comes up tomorrow, this is what we’re here for. So in another way that’s not exactly logical, we have a lot of time—all the time we need to go into each one of these problems to the bottom. The worst thing we could possibly do now is pull back. We can’t afford interruptions. Because as you all know, it’s not hard when time is smooth. When there are no days and nights or Tuesdays and Fridays and there’s only the clock of the work. I’ve been on two projects like this, and I can tell you we’re going to do more now, in these eight days, than we’ve done in the past year. We weren’t far enough in before.”

  Jane pulled her knees closer, her tongue touching skin through the jeans hole. She tried to apply what he was saying. But there was no work yet she did. When her mind wandered, it entered lush scenes of reunion with all the people she’d known in her life, watching her receive an award….

  “We got to stay healthy,” he said. “That’s crucial now.”

  Rich stood hunched. He was tall and embarrassed of his height. “Shit,” he said. “My family’s coming in two days.”

  Jane looked around the room at the guys so famil
iar to her father. He’d given her a book about the Manhattan Project and said it was a lot like here. But in the book, the men wore shirts and ties, suit pants, hard shoes. Like Owens, they had faces like fine dogs. But these guys were wilder. Henry’s hair frizzed out five inches, and everybody except Rich wore running shoes. Rich was the one good thing from his semester at Harvard, Owens had said—his professor, who’d come for a year to help him out (as Owens put it) and to secure his children’s inheritance (as Rich explained it to Jane). Owens said he thought all the guys were nice-looking. He could probably hardly see them anymore, the way he had at first or the way strangers might. It occurred to Jane that this transformation could happen to women too, if he knew them this well. But he never would.

  In the beginning, he had hired the people he knew. They smoked dope together and hiked the Grand Canyon. But now he interviewed at graduate schools all over the country. He lectured at these schools and drew audiences of more than a thousand. They offered him large fees for appearances, fees he always donated to their scholarship funds. Young guys like Henry, he said, were as different from Owens at that age as they could be. But he no longer worried, as he once had, that he’d be unable to love his own children because they would be so different from himself. Jane was just glad he’d changed his mind.

  “You’re right,” Rich mumbled. “I gotta know you’re right. I just don’t know what to do with my folks.”

  “Well, these are tough choices. And I’d have to say, your folks, much as you love them, might just have to wait till after D day. We’ve got to find that one step further in purification so whatever protease is eating it up, can’t anymore. I mean, this is the way I look at it. There are people I’d love to see for dinner and go to their house and meet their kid—no, I really would. There’s introductions I’d give, keynote addresses, I’d go to birthday parties, baptisms, the works, I’d meet every one of these women people promise to introduce me to. These people are fine, there’s nothing wrong with them, I like them, I’d learn from them, I’d do ten lectures and I’d have dinner with your parents, Rich—if I weren’t going to die.” He swiveled in his chair. “Come to think of it, even as it is, I’d still love to meet your parents. But after we’re done with this. Same goes for meeting women. So keep those names.”