A Regular Guy

by Mona Simpson

  Olivia needed a moment of stillness to remember she hadn’t done anything wrong. It had been her youth, and the men she’d slept with she’d loved or thought she loved. Owens’ idea of goodness was so fragile it could be corrupted by something as natural as breeze.

  It’s a small thing I do, she thought, not even nurse, but he really did save lives. Owens was always trying to get her to admit the enormity of it. And though Olivia would’ve liked them to be even, he had done that one great thing.

  To say that Olivia was a nurse’s aide was true and missed the point. She was not like Owens. For Olivia, there was such a thing as a job. She made decent money and had for some years now. She believed this marked her as an adult, distinct from, say, Mary, who enchanted her as a watercolor might.

  Olivia told Owens when he came in and knelt on the futon. He suggested they take sweatshirts and get in the car and drive. There were things she knew in him that no one else knew. She slept in the back seat while he drove, but when he stopped at Buck Meadows, she got up and helped pitch the tent, and they laughed all night. They woke up early, drenched from the damp ground and aching.

  “I was thinking we should go away,” he said. “Live on the banks of the Ganges and think about God all day.”

  “Don’t ever forget you were like this,” she begged, taking his hand. Then she gulped. “Why don’t you give it all away? I promise you won’t be sorry.”

  “I don’t think I can. I mean, who am I going to give it to?”

  “The poor.”

  “Which poor? It’s not enough to go around. So the question is, are you just going to be cavalier about it or are you going to really do your homework? It’s like business. You want the most bang for your buck.”

  “Okay. So do your homework, then.”

  “My homework would take years, though. I don’t know anything about charities. Most of what I know is what you and everybody else know, and that’s that they don’t work very well or the world wouldn’t be what it is. I always figured the best thing to do is just park it someplace and then take ten years and decide.”

  “It’ll never be just us, will it?”

  He took her chin and turned it to the sky. That was Wednesday.

  On Saturday, they went to the city to look in stores for ancient carpets and tables like the ones Franciscan brothers had used. Before and after work, Owens drove to the new house. Nights, they slept in the Copper King’s mansion, Olivia tucked under his arm, watching silvery miniatures of Ingrid Bergman falling in love.

  It was hard for Owens to believe that a woman like Bergman was not alive and young, somewhere. When he read in a magazine on Monday that she had a daughter attending graduate school in New York City, he idly dialed the number of some advertising men he knew in Manhattan, who offered to make inquiries. He was listed in that same magazine as one of America’s twelve most eligible bachelors. Kathleen had brought it in. He carried it around with him and on Tuesday presented it to Olivia as a kind of gift.

  That afternoon, Owens had a reaction akin to waking up. The man from the jewelry store left two messages about stones transferred from a large safe in Texas. Every hour now, he felt pressure from Rooney. He had no time to plan a wedding, and that was exactly the kind of thing Olivia couldn’t do right. He’d thought of the chapel Saint Francis built in Assisi, or, right here, Alta’s first church. In the middle pencil tray of his desk drawer at work, he kept the slender ring that had been his mother’s.

  He needed two quarters, maybe three. Tomorrow he had to fire his chief crystallographer, which was going to be hard because Theo had been with him since the beginning. But Exodus had to come first.

  That night he confessed to Olivia. “A lot of people are depending on me. They’ve got families. And for us, too, maybe we should get our house in order and then, in a year or so … I don’t know, I’ve just been getting kind of sick whenever I think of it.”

  He made all his claims on behalf of others. It wouldn’t be fair to them. He was always a we, even without her. And her needs were only for herself.

  On Friday, Olivia went to the doctor’s office and had an abortion. She told Owens that night, after it was done. When he understood what had happened, he began a long, slow sinking, nothing at all like the freedom he’d imagined, the freedom he thought he’d had before.

  Olivia and Owens would never fully understand the end of that mutual week-long dream, because Gunther Michaelis got sick again four days later. This time was the real time, according to his doctor; the tumor was most likely inoperable, and in a typical storm of perversity the old man had refused all treatment and was simply preparing himself to die. Olivia’s brother, in New Orleans, spent the day making and canceling plane reservations, deliberating and then apologizing too long.

  For the first time ever, Olivia asked Owens for money, and he gave it to her with relief. She moved Gunther Michaelis out of his hotel, into a furnished two-bedroom apartment, where she and Huck camped out, to accompany him in his final days. The dinette looked out on the public garden Noah’s father had made.

  Olivia cooked for them all. Every night, she made her father meat, because he liked it. They pooled their finances and every supper became a feast, with roasts and chops, potatoes, a dessert. The main thing Olivia ate during this time was rice. She’d boil a pot of white rice and eat it with cinnamon-sugar and milk, the way her mother had fixed it.

  Owens visited, but he was clearly a stranger in this apartment, where the floors were strewn with flannel shirts and books he’d never heard of. Olivia’s father had never liked Owens and made no effort to hide it. “When did I ever say I liked you?” he asked, the third night there, and then looked blankly up at him like an owl.

  Her father’s illness was a marathon Olivia had nothing to compare to. Huck had written a master’s thesis and that, like this, had been a period when time ceased to be marked by the conventions of weeks and hours but moved rather by internal measure, broken only with the repeated interruptions of meals and sleep. Olivia and Huck went through work by rote, watching the clock. Neither of them had a job that matched the intensity of life in the apartment, where everything was rented.

  Gunther had few possessions. He’d lived for years in a small room with a kitchenette in the Presidente Hotel. But he now made an elaborate ritual of distributing what remained.

  Otto Lark drove up the fifth night in his rickety convertible. The two men laughed and drank in the bedroom, speaking the faraway language their children never learned. As men, their lives had been as different as two lives that started from the same point could be. At twenty they had both been handsome, at least as they remembered themselves, and full of expectation. Otto loved literature and hoped to be a poet, and Gunther intended to paint; neither became what he loved. Otto spent years chasing the fleeting happiness he had known in his youth, with flat-chested women in his classes every semester. Gunther loved direly and only once. His wife had stolen his ability to paint when she’d stunned him with her greater talent. After she took her life, there had been nothing left to give him pleasure. But the two men sang songs from their youth, and before he went, Otto danced around the small living room with Olivia.

  “I promised him you’d come over to eat once a week,” Otto said. “Because I’ll be the only one you have. Your mother was such a woman. He never got over her.”

  “She’s a lot like her mother, don’t you think, Dad?” Huck said.

  Otto looked at Olivia sharply, as if for the first time. “I don’t see it.”

  Olivia’s brother, Nicholas, was always far. For three years now, he’d lived away from their family and not come home. For him especially, Olivia thought, their father was dying too soon. His father’s decline had snatched away Nicholas’ anger and left him mute. In only one year, Olivia thought, he could have come back as a man, with something of his own.

  Near the end, Olivia had thanked Nora for letting her come, because she’d never had a chance to nurse her own mother. Nora had told her she
would love her whatever she did and to go out and try to find a nice life for herself, one where she felt comfortable. The last time Olivia saw her was a cool, sunny day, and Nora wanted to sit outside. Olivia helped her sit down on the cement step, slipping a blanket under her loose buttocks. A watery wind bent the long grasses.

  “He’s my son,” Nora had said, “but if he’s not good to you, you go find somebody who is, who makes you feel real nice. Because you’re a good girl, a good, good girl.”

  The first Sunday Owens came to the apartment, he found Olivia roasting prime rib. He drove to the bungalow, where Mary gave him leftovers.

  “How’s Olivia?” she asked.

  “Well, you know her dad’s sick.”

  “But she’s not sick at all?”

  “Oh, no, she’s fine.”

  “God, I was so sick. I threw up almost every day.”

  Owens looked at her sternly. “You know we’re not having the baby.”

  “No,” Jane said.

  “How would we know?” Mary asked, her eyes closing.

  “I thought I told you,” he said.

  Jane pushed up in a jerk. She ran to her room and slammed the door.

  “Why are we always the last to know? Doesn’t your own daughter matter?”

  “Leave me alone,” Jane shouted through the door. She could hear the siss of shoe soles on the sidewalk. I am the one child, she thought, out of three who could have been. She remembered the long-ago picture of the man she thought was her father. She was almost as old now as him.

  That night, Gunther Michaelis called Olivia and Huck to his bedroom and made his request, breaking into wicked fits of laughter. He relished outwitting the young doctor. His plan was to die when he wanted to die, not to wait one minute longer. “I’ve got the pills,” he announced with glee, sweeping the plastic canister from under his pillow and brandishing it before their astonished faces. “I stole them.”

  Of course this was not all. He wanted them to help. Olivia and Huck tried to talk him out of it, but it was no use. His only interest at this late moment seemed to be in thwarting the doctor, fixed in his mind as a stand-in for the forces arrayed against him. One night, he repeated, they were to help him. Not yet, but soon. They would read the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, they would tell each other the burdens of their souls, then they would say goodbye and “put me to sleep,” he said. “I want Nicholas here too.”

  And so Olivia and Huck and later Nicholas entered into another secret, a secret greater than any they’d known so far. Also, what they planned to do was at this time illegal in the state of California and punishable by law.

  The next morning, Olivia sat at the kitchen table eating muesli, her mother’s recipe, with lemon and oats, and fresh fruit chopped into it. Her mother bought good food, Olivia thought with consolation, even when they were poor. She took joy in it. Olivia was reading the newspaper.

  “I heard you up,” her father said. Disheveled by sleep, his curly hair stood straight. His face seemed even longer than usual, and his front tooth that was gray, overlapping the other, made him look almost tender. For the thousandth time in her life, Olivia was fooled.

  “Sit down,” she said, giving him her chair. “Eat my breakfast.”

  He sat and ate obediently.

  “I made it like mom,” she said.

  The electric clock in this kitchen that had nothing to do with them hummed.

  “Go ahead and marry him, then. You’ll be rich, if he’ll have you. Maybe you’re just the one he wants to play with. If he thinks he’s too young for a family.”

  Olivia’s mind swept in great arcs for ways he could have known—the pads she’d bled into she’d carefully taken out to the garbage cans behind the building—until she realized with a stop that it was Huck. Of course Huck had told.

  “I’ve got something to give you from your mother. It’s nothing like what he can give if he wants you. You don’t have his earrings anymore, I see.”

  “They’re at home,” Olivia lied.

  More than anything Owens could give, Olivia wanted the earrings her mother had worn every day, or the bracelet she’d saved for special nights. Her usually guarded heart leapt ahead to gratitude, and she fell on his neck, kissing him.

  “Get off me and let me eat my breakfast.” That was like him and didn’t bother her.

  She sat for a moment on her hands, waiting with the happiness we feel when anticipation is accompanied by certainty. They were opals, both the earrings and the bracelet, its special little chain underneath to make sure something so precious could never be lost. Her mother had been buried with her ring, as Gunther had insisted, so she would always be claimed.

  “Here,” he said gruffly, “open your hand. She wanted me to buy this for you before you were even born.” His fingers pushed something into her palm. It was a child’s ring, gold, like the one her mother still wore, with a small opal in its center. “If you ever have a girl,” he said, shrugged once, and then continued eating.

  Olivia had a premonition that her brother wouldn’t come to the funeral and that she would have to help him live with that.

  But he came now. And then it was inevitable that Huck felt left out, as he always had. Nicholas and Olivia got tired of telling him he was no intrusion, that they wanted him there, but they began to feel that his constant need for reassurance really was an intrusion.

  Their father changed every day, sometimes between morning and evening. One of his last possessions was a pair of pipes, fitted in a latched case, he’d been given by his grandfather when he went to university in Stockholm. One night, he slept with them, guarding them jealously, saying he couldn’t decide yet to whom he’d present them. Nicholas very badly wanted the pipes, but he wasn’t about to say anything. The next morning, the old man asked Olivia to take them away.

  “Have you decided who you’d like me to give them to?”

  “Throw them out, for all I care. It’s no concern of mine.”

  Olivia offered the pipes to Nicholas, but he declined. With a stepchild’s greed, Huck gladly accepted, justifying himself with the idea that he would save them and someday give them to Nick.

  That night, there was a rasp on the door. It was Melinda, Nicholas’ high school girlfriend, who’d continued to sleep with his shirt every night long after they broke up, and whom he scorned. She’d evidently heard Nicholas was back in town, and she brought a cobbler she’d baked, with peaches, blueberries and figs, the tin loaf pan warm through the towel. Olivia thanked her, taking it. Her hands were long and white; she’d baked with hope. And Nicholas ate it. They all did, on Gunther Michaelis’ bed, after she left.

  The third Sunday, Gunther Michaelis demanded a party. It was a clear summer night, typical of Alta in August, and Olivia and Huck reluctantly turned their thoughts outside the apartment and called the people they knew by rote to be their friends, although they hadn’t seen them or truly thought about them for what seemed like such a long time. Nicholas, in his own mumbled gesture, went to the store and bought a fifty-dollar bottle of brandy.

  Karen Croen came with Dave and offered Gunther a massage. He allowed her his shoulders while he sat in the recliner Nicholas and Huck had carried outside. Uncle Otto and Owens busied themselves making a fire. Jane and Mary brought Amber and Ruby, who knew Gunther from the bookstore. Melinda came with two pies, which Nicholas tasted and complimented, but not within her hearing. Noah came to his father’s garden, for an hour from the lab, where he and Louise were keeping vigil. Gunther had given him an extravagant gift that he still had, and he could recall Olivia’s envy. It was an antique paint-by-numbers set depicting a horse in a field. In those years, her father called Noah “little gnome” and told everyone that he would be an artist. His own children’s lives, he said, were too soft. Noah never completed painting in the little puzzle shapes, but his sister had, and the set gave his mother the idea that she could earn money from painting, even from a small California town. She wrote to the Canadian address on the inside o
f the thirty-year-old box and found her employment for the next eleven years.

  Owens’ father and sister hauled in a bushel basket of apricots. When each person arrived bearing perishable gifts, Olivia felt an unaccountable, immense gratitude. As if what she’d ever done in her life was productive only in luring one more person here to honor him. She counted numbers and felt satisfied with each new friend. They left the door of the apartment open so they could hear the telephone, and three people called.

  By the end, forty-five people stood around the fire, singing songs and eating the homemade delicacies, and not one of them, even those who knew Gunther, came because of him.

  Owens remained from first to last, making himself useful, Olivia seemed impassive, and he didn’t want to disturb her facade. In her proximity to death, she too seemed to be living on a different plane. But they needed to talk.

  He told Mary he’d wished a hundred times in the past weeks that he and Olivia still had the baby. What if Olivia hadn’t been so swift to act on his passing doubt? The next day might have found him given to settlement. He confessed he often caught himself forgetting, swimming in the full daydream.

  “A long time after this is over,” he finally whispered to Olivia, “I hope we can go back to where we were and think of fixing up our house and starting a family.”

  “But it’s your house,” she said. “It’s not our house.” Her eyes were big, and she stared into the dwindling fire.

  He took her hand and pushed on his mother’s ring, which he’d had enlarged.

  She wasn’t used to wearing rings. The small, sharp stone hurt the fingers on either side.

  The next day, Gunther Michaelis decided it was time. They read poetry about angels and he said goodbye first to Huck, thanking him, in a formal manner, for gracing his broken but beautiful family. “We shall always be indebted to you for your gravity and humor,” he said, “qualities we don’t organically abound in.” Then he called his children to his sides. “I loved you both,” he said quickly, “but forget about me.” They stayed on his bed, each tucked under an arm that stayed warm for a long time after his breathing stopped, until they had cramps and shooting pains in their knees and Olivia’s foot fell asleep.