A Regular Guy

by Mona Simpson

  And now Olivia was once and for all marrying Owens.

  It was the fifth straight week Noah and Louise had lived in the lab, running their experiments all night. They had been finishing, it seemed, for months now. There were no more brilliant flashes, only small steps, changing one of a hundred factors fractionally. Still, the fish embryos were finally telling their secrets.

  At four in the afternoon, Noah received a call on his office line. It was autumn, Nobel season, and here and at Harvard and Caltech and MIT, all the full professors were racing to their answering machines every hour. Last year, Noah’s ridicule of his senior colleagues was fierce. Now, because for the first time they had results, he viewed it as part of the human comedy.

  “You can have all the kids you want.” It was the doctor. “Like I told you you would be, you’re fine.”

  Nothing changed, not even Noah’s expression. He felt his good news most just by holding still, keeping on with his work in the normal way.

  He went to the microscopes to see how Frank was doing with the slides he was making of double-mutant flies. It was strange to have Frank around again, this man who for so long had been a parable. When they were in graduate school together, Frank worked graveyard at the company where he’d met Owens. Then he quit school to make money for his family, and of course he made plenty at Genesis. But that was years before, and now Frank was back to biology, an unpaid researcher in Noah’s lab, with a good temper and no seeming regrets.

  For no reason then, looking at the slides, Noah thought again of the woman with the O.I. baby. That paper with her number kept getting lost and turning up again. For over two years now, Noah had been meaning to call her. Today he would, but where was that little paper? He’d seen it last near the centrifuge. He left Frank to his meticulous work and rolled over, but he couldn’t find it.

  The child would be about three years old, with no help from him. Noah had already failed them. He didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl. When I was that age, Noah thought, I’d had ten fractures. His father had made him a four-caster scooter, around that time. He’d become too heavy for his mother to carry. The child would have bruises, certainly. Noah had never seen himself as a baby: there were no pictures. Michelle started taking pictures of him when he was seven and she had her first Brownie camera. He wanted to see the child.

  He had to find the mother’s number. He could call her friend Julie Carradine and ask.

  After midnight, when he finally got home, Louise was waiting outside his door. “Forgot my key,” she said.

  Since they’d been working around the clock, she sometimes slept in his apartment. He had two single beds, each against a wall, from the last time he’d fractured an arm and needed an attendant. He asked her to turn around and face the wall while he maneuvered into bed.

  “You don’t really seem like a Californian,” she said.

  “I’m a Jew,” he said, surprising himself.

  “I know,” she whispered, still facing the wall. “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  They talked in the dark. She was used to him and he was used to her, so they never worried anymore what they would talk about, and their conversation had momentum.

  She told him a long story about a dog she had in high school, and how her mother had thrown a rock at another dog to protect hers.

  Why is she telling me this? Noah wondered.

  “Do you have to marry someone Jewish?”

  “I’d want to,” he said, without knowing why. His grandmother maybe. “But I probably won’t.” Marry at all, is what he meant, but was she asking if he’d consider her? He was probably imagining it.

  They didn’t say good night. There was a pause, then Louise fell asleep. After a while he heard her deep regular breaths. She made a sound when she slept, a very fine whine.

  Noah couldn’t sleep. He heard the occasional traffic outside. His life was hurtling forward too fast, like a whirling ride he’d gone on once as a child in his chair, with the wheels locked, hanging on to the back of a huge metal teacup. They were getting very near to their gene’s structure, and Louise and he were having these talks. He wanted to skid his hands on the wheels to slow it all down.

  He slept with his chair so he could touch it. He thought of the small picture of Louise’s father on her lab bench, his uneven shoes.

  Now he wished he’d said it didn’t matter to him if his wife was Jewish.

  In the morning, he got up first so she wouldn’t see, then wheeled to the bathroom. He liked thinking that she’d wake to the sounds of water in a bath. Noah had some ideas about how to live, and he could appreciate increments. His family had never been like that. They had to have it all perfect, or the rest was wrecked.

  Noah’s favorite part of the day was his bath. He loved to sink down so all but his head was underwater. Sometimes, when work was yielding, he seemed to swing from pleasure to pleasure, and this was the first one. He had always loved water. He somehow had to tell Louise he could have children, but that there was a chance …

  In the bathtub, holding up a small mirror, he shaved. He blew steam onto the glass and made thumbprints. His hair was wet, the uncurled ringlets falling below his shoulders.

  The apartment was perfectly quiet. But he hefted himself out. She’d be up soon. He sat a moment in his chair, bare legs out in front of him: maybe six inches less didn’t matter. Then he put on socks and shoes. He never wanted her to see his feet. His shoes were unmarred, like a baby’s, decorative.

  “Morning,” she finally called, then ran in a dredge of energy to the bathroom, to brush her teeth and wash her face. She was wearing a man’s watch. Her wrists and ankles, though no other part of her, were extremely thin.

  He sat stirring the oatmeal as coffee brewed. Here at home he had enough pots to do both at once.

  For the first time, they went to work together. He felt extremely self-conscious. This was the worst of everything, in a way. Not sleeping together but looking as if you were. She was his postdoc. And he didn’t have tenure—oh, God. He decided to take the elevator up to Rachel’s lab. They couldn’t walk in together at eight in the morning.

  Louise said, matter-of-factly, “I saw a guy in a wheelchair doing wheelies and turning around in the air.” The way you’d mention, One of my best friends is Jewish.

  He didn’t say anything, and they entered the campus. Louise was taking small fast steps, half running to keep up. He was wheeling faster and faster ahead of her. “Can you do that?” she called after him.

  “I don’t do tricks. Don’t dance. Don’t play basketball.”

  “In other words, you don’t do anything you’re not the best at.”

  “How do you know I’m not the best dancer? Actually, I’m going to a dance in December.” This was true. His yearly duty. He volunteered at the annual oxymoron, the Wheelchair Prom, for teenagers at the center.

  He wheeled over to the elevator. “I’ll be down in half an hour.”

  Noah picked up and put down the phone a dozen times that day. He’d found the slip of paper in a pants pocket and wanted to call the woman with the baby. But a man answered every time, and he hung up. For some reason, he wanted to talk to her alone.

  That Tuesday evening, at nine o’clock, holding the X-ray film up to the light, and after finally deciphering the sequence, Noah saw the ladders. They were unmistakable and beautiful. It was their gene.

  He looked again. Then Louise looked and the Dane looked and Frank looked and his two graduate students looked too. It was there.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Frank said, and everyone left to get a drink. Noah didn’t want to. There were a thousand things to do. But it wasn’t even that. He just wanted to be in the lab. To keep still.

  After Frank left, Noah took over the slide-making. In an hour, the two grad students came back to their benches, along with Louise, who offered to help. Noah didn’t mind doing it himself. He’d always had good hands.

  But at midnight he knocked the nail polish the
y used for mounting off the arm of his chair. Oh, shit. The bottle spilled out empty; he rolled over to the cabinet but couldn’t find another. Everyone but Louise was gone for the night, and she was asleep on the couch. She’d probably be touchy if he woke her up to get nail polish. “Just because I’m a woman,” she’d say. “I don’t wear it either.” And she didn’t. She chewed her nails down so the cuticles puffed.

  He wheeled out to a 7-Eleven across the highway, open all night. Clear Base Extra Strength was what he needed.

  The 7-Eleven’s selection was limited. He didn’t see any clear. Not to mention base extra strength. He was willing, this once, to switch brands.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the acned boy behind the counter. “I need some Clear Base Extra Strength nail polish. Not for me, obviously.”

  “Hey, whatever. But we just got what’s there. They lock up the storage room at night.”

  The closest thing was a palish pink. This was the kind of thing that drove him crazy. How could he send in slides tinged pink? On the other hand, what did it matter? He couldn’t wait around all night to get the right shade of fly mount. It had taken him years to find this gene, and it would be just his luck to be beaten out now that he finally had data.

  He bought the small bottle of polish and, finishing the mounts back at the lab, he thought of the mother with the baby. He could send her the article, if they took it, as some sort of apology. These past two years I’ve been busy with … flies. He lifted a hand to the ends of his curls. Louise’s damn flies loved his hair. Maybe they were expertly sawing it off.

  Later, Louise yawned and stumbled over. He explained about the pink polish.

  “Oh, you should’ve told me. I’ve probably got some at home.”

  He looked up at her, surprised. There were sides to women, all of them, he would never understand. “Too late now,” was all he said.

  The next day, he brought a bottle of French champagne to the lab, with a warm peach pie he’d made with brown eggs and honey. In Kaskie’s family, all pies were made with honey.

  Noah wrung his hands, showing the chairman around his lab. If he had his way, his lab would run forever, always working and never watched. I did my best, he wanted to be able to say. I did what I could do.

  He wished he knew specifically why his gene was important. All of a sudden, he thought of all the labs on higher floors. He always got basement rooms or first floor for his labs and classrooms, as if there were no such thing as an elevator. He wished he had a lab with a view. He always wanted one more thing than he had.

  An hour later, he’d forgotten about the window. The chairman had slapped his back and called him “old boy.” Noah suspected he’d forgotten his name. The chairman was now back at his desk, writing letters to the journals to send with the abstract. Maybe they’d have a chance at Science or Cell or Nature. Rachel had already come down to report. “He was majorly stunned,” she said.

  After today it wouldn’t be them alone anymore. Louise was already receding, as uncharacteristically humble as a regular graduate student. The department chairman hadn’t said anything to her.

  He remembered the full smell that came in the van’s windows as he and Louise drove up through the hills on a summer night. This great romantic time in Noah’s life was over now perhaps.

  Everyone in the building would be coming by to see. Secretly, Noah felt he had things others didn’t. He went through his desk. There was the scrap of paper with the number. It felt better just to have it. He put it in his pocket.

  In April, two weeks after the acceptance from Nature, Noah’s chair got a flat tire on his way to the gym, and he didn’t have his tool kit. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and he was stuck in front of a clothing store, whose large window caught him like a mirror. He looked at himself as if opening an envelope: against all odds, maybe it would be a gift. He’d gotten used to being lucky, but what he saw was the first bad thought. So this is really it, all I am. It was over before I was born, in a whim-crack of biology. Scuff marks on a white wall. He touched the top of his head, where his hair was thinning.

  A rasp on the pavement, and it was Jane, walking fast. She took her sleeve to wipe his eyes. “What is it, Noah?”

  “I’m losing my hair.”

  She ran her left hand through it as his mother had, but even his mother had often seemed distracted. “You’ve still got a lot left.” She touched his shins with her shoe. “That’s what you mind, isn’t it? Yours are just smaller.”

  “And crooked.”

  “My feet are flat,” she said.

  “I don’t even want to tell you about my feet.”

  She squatted down and held on to the arms of his chair. “You know what? You should let me take a picture of you. I can make you look great.”

  “Not with a camera you can’t. My sister tried for years.” Like FDR, he liked no photograph of himself that showed the chair. All the pictures he kept were from the chest up. Certain girls in school had liked him for his face; one had told him he had beautiful tragic eyes. But Michelle did photograph his chairs, all but the first. And he loved those photographs, cherished them. The second chair she’d done in black and white, empty on the pavement with all its nicks and dents. But he was thinking now about that first wheelchair, which was thrown away long ago. I learned how to love by loving a thing.

  Noah was okay now. He felt like a bird after a ruffled squawk. He sighed. “I got a flat tire and I don’t have a spare. Can you push me down to the bike store?”

  “Sure.” Jane pushed him slowly, a little fearful. For all the time she’d known him, he never liked to be pushed, ever. She’d asked him years before, when they first met, and those were the only times he’d sounded mean.

  “My problem’s a woman. Do you think a woman could see me as a man?”

  “You are a man,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “How’s your dad?”

  “Well, I’m afraid to go in his house, he has it so perfect. The walls are all smooth. And the floors. I got a bad splinter and I had to have a tetanus shot.”

  “There’s a reason people use polyurethane,” Noah said.

  “Yeah, and when I have an apartment, I’m going to use it a lot.” Jane handed him a homemade campaign button: JANE FOR JUSTICE. PRESIDENT. Her election was in a week.

  She waited in the bike shop while Noah helped the repairman fix his tire. “Where were you going anyway?”

  “Oh, I was on my way to the gym. You want to hitch a ride?”

  Jane had always loved to ride on the chair, but he hadn’t asked her in years, not since she was a small girl. And she never asked, because she thought she might have got too heavy. But riding now, she remembered the old sensation: Noah really did have a different life. You’re lower, and you always have the sound of wheels. She closed her eyes, hearing that sound again, as if she were inside a flock of birds and hearing the strenuous work of flying.

  His gym was like nothing she had ever seen. She was fifteen years old and frankly embarrassed. A blush rose to her face, and she couldn’t think of what to do with her hands. All over the walls were blowups of big men and women with huge muscles posing in tiny underwear. And that wasn’t the worst part. Men and a few women with muscles like that were actually here, wearing shorts and thong tee shirts, grunting and making horrible noises with machines.

  “Do you come here a lot, Noah?” she asked.

  “Not for a while. I’ve been working too hard. But it beats physical therapy.”

  “Aren’t you scared?” she whispered.

  He laughed. “They’re sweethearts,” he said. “Up you go now, so I can exercise.” He rolled to what looked like a torture machine, swung out of his chair, wriggled onto the bench and began to engage with the hanging silver balls in a series of sit-ups.

  Noah didn’t see Jane again for two months. One morning in June, he opened the door for the newspaper and there it was, in four-inch type. His first thought was, They
didn’t call me.

  He felt something like fear growing as he read the article. He couldn’t imagine Owens without an office and a staff—he was a lone man always backed by a chorus. He was Chaplin, Busby Berkeley. He was the only famous person Noah knew.

  Before he finished reading, Noah tried to call. Four numbers, and none of them worked. He felt like a stranger. Owens had always been able to slip into the anonymity of the rich or famous, either or both, whenever he wanted to, but this time he’d taken Olivia with him through that wall, into the other, unreachable world. Why this now for Olivia? Her time for peace had never once yet come.

  Noah called Jane. He learned that she’d won her school election and that Owens now saw almost no one, so everyone in his life had begun to see more of one another. Olivia stood by as his nurse, giving reports from the front door of his new house. Only Jane slipped in and out freely. More than a handful of adults checked in with her daily, for information. Not one believed it was fair. He deserved many scoldings from them, but not this, not taking Genesis away. Genesis was what he had been good to. And Jane came to love him as she’d imagined loving the young criminal, with a regular care bent towards protection.

  “I tell him, ‘You’ve got to eat, Owens,’ but he won’t, Noah. He’ll only eat asparagus.”

  Listening to her, Noah remembered a wager he’d once made with her father. Owens bet she’d get married, have a kid before she was twenty and not go to college. Noah said graduate school, the works. Jane was probably ten at the time. Typical of Owens, he’d bet dinner anywhere in the world, winner’s choice. Noah knew he’d win, though by then Owens would have forgotten and collecting would be out of the question. But as she went on about her father now, Noah thought, She’ll just be a mother, like them all. Her spirit as a child had promised more.

  Noah arranged to meet with Jane and Mary after his workout.

  When he emerged from the gym, wet and re-dressed, he bought a coffee to take to work. He opened the lid to his cappuccino, blew on it, waiting for the girl he saw every Tuesday. And here she was, in a pink coat today. She had those polio crutches and she swung quickly between them, then sat down with a hard fall, into her car.