A Regular Guy

by Mona Simpson

  This was about as close as he came, Jane figured, to apologizing.

  “What made you change your mind about Jane?” Olivia asked, reading in bed, wearing a tee shirt and underwear. He moved around the room, still dressed.

  “What do you mean?” It is a difficult circumstance to live with someone who doesn’t believe in your goodness, and Owens had endured that irritation for some time now. He’d made adjustments to it, as to a physical pain.

  “Well, when she came to Alta, you said you were going to be nice but you didn’t think she was yours. And now you obviously do. So what happened?”

  “Livia, when she came here I didn’t know her. And Mary can be pretty loopy.”

  “I sometimes wonder, what if Jane had had problems?”

  They had reached a strange plane in their relationship. They each said things they knew to be wrong and couldn’t stop themselves, thinking, I can’t help it. Neither of them doubted for long that they would break up, but neither knew when one of them would feel the strength.

  Owens left the room. It was dusk, still early enough for bike rides outside, families walking.

  She followed. Olivia had long felt herself to be on an investigative journey, as if there were some evidence yet to be found that would determine conclusively whether he was better or worse than she feared. What she went over, again and again, was his change towards Jane. She needed to know why he loved her. “I think we should talk about this. It matters if we ever have children.”

  He didn’t answer, only lowered his head to his arms. For some reason, he remembered the day Mary told him she was pregnant. He’d never told her that they would stay together. The weird thing was, she just went away. And the problem seemed gone. But then it would bob up at stray moments, and years later he finally understood: this would never go away.

  That was how he felt now about Olivia. He doubted they could ever make it better anymore, but she existed in him like a permanent thread-line pain.

  One evening in April, Olivia ran the twenty-one-day-old convertible into a copper beech. She was lucky, so lucky, to be fine. The tree was over a hundred years old.

  They became careful with each other, then matter-of-fact. A few days later, she flew to Asia. He called her there, in the middle of the night. “I really cared about you. I want you to know that.”

  Every day, they broke up again, on different continents, over the phone.

  There are things you know about a man you don’t know you know until they’re useless, Olivia understood in Singapore. How far he swings his arms when he walks. Olivia looked for him, from behind, in a crowd. She always saw one small part of him and then felt disappointed.

  Eliot Hanson arranged for a check to be sent to Olivia. Owens had vacillated wildly over the amount. He’d decided on twenty-five thousand, finally, as a kind of token. Eliot was particularly sad, for no reason, as he sealed the envelope. He himself had married into money.

  He felt a certain vicarious victory when the check was returned, by certified mail, a few days later. He took it upon himself to visit Olivia, to urge her to accept this or some larger form of compensation. She refused to discuss it, merely shook her head and shut the door.

  Three Regrets

  During the month of May, Owens asked more than a hundred people who they thought was more beautiful, Olivia or Eve Peck. It was his particular talent to ask with such searching depth in his eyes that people shuddered. They didn’t want to get the wrong answer, but they had no idea and they didn’t really care. Most of them had had enough of Olivia but didn’t know Eve Peck.

  At seven o’clock one Thursday evening, Eliot Hanson stopped by the house. After a few minutes of conversation about marks, yen and T-bills, Owens asked the question. There was nothing lighthearted in his face.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Eliot said. Eliot knew Olivia, the flash of her long hair. She was tall, straight up and down, usually wearing faded jeans. Eliot knew from his wife, Hazel, how difficult jeans were to fit for women. They seemed to shop around a great deal for them, and even then they had them nipped in and let out, shortened.

  More than a few times, Eliot had seen Olivia walk out in a huff.

  He’d met Eve Peck only once. She was slimmer, Indian-featured, beautiful in a way that would last. She seemed intelligent and kind.

  “Come on, really. Tell me what you think.”

  “I don’t know either one of them, Tom.”

  “Well, you know Olivia.”

  “Yes, and she’s always been very nice to me.”

  “And what do you think of Eve?”

  “I like her too, so far as I know.”

  Eliot had not driven all the way down to Alta to discuss the relative material dimensions of Olivia and Eve Peck. It was time, he’d decided, to inform Owens about his mother. “Sit down,” he said, and handed Owens the file.

  He then began to explain the contents in his annoyingly thorough way, to the point where the greatest mystery of Owens’ life had, in the course of half an hour, begun to bore him. Eliot was still on the woman’s sophomore year of college, information he’d gleaned from computer searches.

  “Cut to the chase,” Owens said.

  Owens wished for a moment that he could ask this woman, his mother, whom he should marry. But she was only twenty-three when she died, younger than either Olivia or Eve.

  Olivia’s small life song: Nobody else will believe, but I was the one who said no. Twenty years later, her children would know that he begged, “We’ll change our socks and we’ll change our shoes,” but she was the one to say no.

  No one will ever believe

  that I was the one who said no.

  He came to me and begged with rings

  but I was the one who said no.

  Twice Owens found a young guy at Olivia’s new cottage, who disappeared into the garage when he came and turned Olivia’s bike upside down, to fix. As they argued Owens heard the wheels outside, whirring.

  Driving home after divesting himself of Owens’ mother and her large file, Eliot Hanson thought of his wife’s legs. Hazel was short, five feet nothing, but sturdy. Her legs reminded him, sweetly, of a panda, but he felt agitated because Owens had in all probability made a negative assessment of Hazel. Not only was she short but she was covered with freckles.

  There were views of her he found beautiful. Hazel had fine tapered fingers. Great strong arms. But Hazel looked like most women in jeans. When they were dating they had fallen into the habit of having real meals, including a dessert, at Hazel’s apartment. Every night, she did the dishes. She often changed clothes and would stand washing at the sink in her long kimono. One night, there, he asked her.

  Later, for years and years, the story was told to friends: “I was just washing the dishes, and he said, Well, maybe we should get married.”

  He hadn’t had a ring or anything. Owens already owned an extraordinary ring; Eliot knew because he’d had to liquidate some treasury notes. That had been more than a year ago now. As was his habit, Eliot worried whether Owens had taken sufficient care to protect the stone, and he made a note to himself to check on the computer tonight whether the item and its appraisal had been included under any insurance policy.

  Hazel had been so happy it rang out of her face. Then she served dessert. After she cleaned up, they always had tea and dessert.

  “I’m getting old enough to have things I regret. I really regret three things. I regret not working harder with Livia, because I could’ve made that work. And I regret the way things ended at Genesis. I should never have hired Rooney.”

  Jane was waiting for the third thing, the one he’d saved for last. It had to be her. Even as old as she was, she felt her cheeks blush. She hoped he wouldn’t see and wanted him to look at her.

  “And I regret not spending more time with my mom before she died.”

  In her stunned disappointment, Jane babbled. “Even if you had spent more time, you’d probably always feel that.”

  “N
o. I didn’t even take off a week. I really could have.”

  That was different and true. There was nothing she could think of to say then. She searched her mind, the way she’d scribble all over a piece of paper, and she discovered nothing. So she shut up.

  Her first ten years, she wasn’t even a regret. She could forgive him. She had been ready to. She was only waiting for him to ask.

  “I don’t want to blow it with Eve,” he whispered. “You know I’ve got the ring.”

  “Is it the same one you had for Olivia?” Jane said.

  He didn’t answer. He was finding it generally more difficult to manage his child as she became older. In fact, he had two rings in his possession. “How should I ask her?”

  “Put it on her finger while she sleeps,” Jane whispered, “so she wakes up engaged, like in a fairy tale.”

  He did just that, with his mother’s ring, and Jane knew she’d never get the credit.

  On Owens’ wedding day, for the second time in his life Alta was given snow, but he wasn’t there to see it. With Jane, he and his bride flew to Italy, where they would be married in Assisi, in a chapel he’d read about but never seen.

  Mary spent the day cooking, the snow falling in fine lines outside. She kneaded bread again and again, pounding hard between rises. At five o’clock, Olivia came over with a bottle of wine. They ate the food he would rather have been eating, toasting the end of some long epic in their lives.

  Here

  Light fell pink in their house. The old windows had a drop of gold in them. Roses bloomed outside the windows, and you could smell them. There were insects too. Good insects, crickets and ladybugs. Owens had purchased ten thousand and released them into the yard.

  There are roses outside.

  I can just go outside and pick roses if I want.

  Why didn’t I get a start like this?

  Why wasn’t I born now?

  When the baby was born, Jane had wanted to move in with Owens and Eve. Owens offered Mary a trip around the world and presented her with a globe to plan her itinerary. He suggested she pick a pursuit—butterflies, birds, astronomy—to structure her journey. She went to a Viennese psychiatrist, who said, capaciously spreading his arms, “It sounds like they’re trying to get rid of you.”

  Eli was like a child with Owens: impressed, always trying to please. They decided to send him along too. So now they were traveling with a woman who claimed to have been on the last plane out of China in 1949 and was going back for the first time. Every week, Jane received postcards from their adventure.

  “She says her life would be different, not different but a lot better, if I’d never been born.”

  “You know, Jane,” Eve cautioned, “people say a lot of things in fights that they don’t really mean.”

  “I know. But she’s right. Her life would be different.”

  No one could say anything to that.

  “We paid good money for our house, and we have a right to sleep in it!” Owens hung out his upstairs window and yelled down to the teenage boys sitting on the hood of a car, pitching empty beer cans into a metal drum in which they’d lit a fire. The people across the street were having a party.

  He planned to go over the next day, knock on the door and state his views.

  Jane just pulled a pillow over her head.

  For Easter, Owens decided they should work in a soup kitchen, but when Eve called the listings in the yellow pages, it turned out all the soup kitchens were full up.

  “We have lots of volunteers round the holidays,” said the man Owens asked at the old Auburn church.

  “Well, this is Tom Owens. Could you please call me if anybody cancels.”

  And sure enough, they got in off the waiting list. The organizers set Jane up at the apple cider, which she ladled to mumbled gratitude, as much for her young face as for the warm styrofoam cups she handed out.

  A man about Owens’ age settled over his dinner with an amazed look on his face, his long arms rested on either side of the place mat. He face bowed down to inhale the steam. “What a wonderful meal,” he said.

  Owens put his head down in his own folded arms; given his tastes in food, he couldn’t eat anything here. He finally looked up, to see Eve showing two old men the baby. All he wanted to do was protect that child, so newly risen, it seemed, she could dent. Love of the one conquered love of the many. But he’d been raised by a woman who didn’t give birth to him; he himself was unowned. What he lived for now was her: her fresh, unimprinted love. He felt such gratitude to Eve for being able to love him. Olivia had tried and been unable.

  The baby spit up on Eve’s clean blue-and-white striped shirt. Eve was young, with a young mother’s strength and courage. Jane was always surprised that she didn’t get only the best clothes. She didn’t seem to buy much at all, from what Jane saw, not even furniture. Jane watched what she did carefully, because Eve was the first woman she really knew who’d gone to college and done everything, like a man. Noah’s friend Louise was like that too, but she seemed mad all the time. Julie had been a lawyer, but Jane knew she cared more about her house and the details, like dishes and placemats. Eve made it all look easy. And when something spilled, she didn’t worry. Her engagement ring was too big and she’d never had it made smaller. She just wore it every day with a piece of yarn.

  Owens felt a primitive pride. His success allowed him to give his family a good house and simple clothes and a dinner to come home to every night. He could offer them this forever, and that was what mattered now.

  Owens had discovered that he liked to bake, and he was quite proud of his bread.

  “Whenever I pass this place,” he told Jane, “I always think of Olivia.”

  They were on a side street Jane had walked probably a thousand times already in her life. On the corner was the antique store where Amber had once bought her the Chinese painted pillbox she’d lost in the American River, and across the street was the drugstore where Noah Kaskie had taken her for hamburgers when he found her that first day here. Owens was pointing at a plain downtown hotel. “Because that’s where her mother blew her brains out.”

  “With a gun?”

  “Yup. She had a gun.”

  They stood looking at the building, which Jane had seen for years but never before taken even a fraction of a second to consider. The top floor no longer had the raised letters pronouncing its name, but their stencils remained legible. Jane knew Alta by now as the place she’d grown up in and was dying to leave, ticking, counting the months and days before she could go free; but occasionally, for a moment, she could imagine herself later, the new person she would become. This hotel too she would add to her collection of monuments that marked the education of her youth.

  A teacher at school had helped her fill out the long pages of application to the college in New England she’d seen only pictures of—a town of brick buildings covered with ivy, everyone riding bikes and wearing corduroy and sweaters. She had forged a parent’s signature, tracing from an old Genesis annual report she’d found in the local library. Every day she had to be home first to get the mail, and yesterday the letter had come.

  From a pay phone, she’d called Eliot Hanson. If she was going to go to New England, he would have to pay.

  She didn’t know how to ask them; once, they’d agreed together she should never go to school. So she’d told Noah first.

  “Why didn’t you stay back East? Do you think the quality of life’s better here?”

  Noah had shrugged. “Quality of sidewalk. You should go.”

  Now she and Noah picked up Owens at his house and then continued on their walk.

  “So what do you think?” Noah asked. “You going to run for something?”

  Jane looked at her father, eager for the answer. She’d wanted to ask him that too.

  “Naw. You can’t go making a fool of yourself on roller skates if you’re a senator or something. I’m sick of representing things. I want to just be a goof. I think that’ll be a lot fun
ner. No, I’m glad history’s passed me by.”

  “Look over there,” Jane said, when they finally wound back home. The neighbors in the yellow house across the street seemed to be having another party. People slowly moved over the lawn in long ballroom dresses.

  “She’s a debutante, the daughter,” Jane said. “But what is that exactly?”

  “Oh, it’s a horrible little club,” Noah said, “set up so the upper classes can guarantee that their children marry into the upper classes.”

  “No, Jane,” Owens said. “I don’t think that’s what it’s about with our neighbors. Their daughter has some hearing problems. She’s actually pretty deaf. And they want her to have as normal a social life as possible. So I think that’s why they have all these parties. They figure if they have a lot, people will maybe invite her to theirs.”

  Noah snickered. The deaf, in his experience, were often snobs.

  They all came to Jane’s graduation. For that day, the old teachers turned up, carrying rich Mason jars of preserves they’d made from fruit picked at night in Alta’s parks. Old stragglers, single people from her years over the mountains, came too. Bixter handed her a puppy from her bucket, its eyes still closed. Eli had castanets on his fingers, Olivia brought a bouquet of daffodils.

  For those who knew her earlier in her life, what had become of Jane was amazing though also a sorrow, not because she was lost to them forever but because she had ceased to engage their deepest interest. These were people who had been willing to fight for her survival, and now she had not only survived but was thriving. To many of them, what was rare and best in her bloomed only in shaded obscurity; her odd clarity, her frangibility, her allowance for their small comforts and predilections, had not long survived her drive over the mountains. That soft-fingered child was somewhere buried, another victim of the frontier. She had survived, in ways most of them had not, and they carried their losses everywhere behind them, jangling like a string of tin cans.