A Regular Guy Read online

  “Last night,” Owens said, “I stayed at work late, tinkering. I shouted ‘Yoo-hoo!’ when I went to the refrigerator, but I was the only one left. There were a few cars in the parking lot and I didn’t recognize any of them.”

  Noah pictured Owens standing in the dark, posh conference room, looking out. Across the road, horses stood blank in the night wind.

  “So after a while I called Theo; he’s one of the old team. And he said, ‘We have some people over. Marcia’s just serving the salmon steaks.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay, I was just running these tests and I thought you might like to do them with me.’ ”

  Noah knew that Owens didn’t like to eat fish, but the way he said “salmon steaks” seemed festive, like a waterfront restaurant with paper lanterns in a country that’s not your own.

  “And Theo burst in ten minutes later, all red-faced, in a zip-up jacket. I told him jokes to try to get him to lighten up.”

  Noah could imagine them working grimly together.

  “Theo and I used to be really good friends.”

  Owens was probably wondering whom they’d invited for the salmon steaks. Noah suspected he’d eaten artichokes for the last nine nights. When Owens craved a vegetable, he ate it every night and sometimes at lunch until the taste began to disgust him.

  The last time Noah went to Owens’ house, he’d seen a letter from a guy he must have fired, begging for money. In the letter on the kitchen counter, Todd detailed his obligations; he had a wife now, a mortgage, something else.

  Susan and Stephen, the twenty-five-year-old couple who cooked and cleaned for him, wanted retirement benefits, Owens had told him. Even his father called to talk about Owens’ sister, and she needed money too.

  “So what about your work?” Noah asked. “How’s Genesis?”

  Owens looked at his friend in a way that was intended to impart meaning. He touched Noah’s shoulder. Noah was lower to the ground and neither of them ever completely forgot that. “I want to talk to you about that. Let’s get some coffee.”

  “Sometime you have to let me make you coffee.” Noah had never once succeeded in getting Owens to accept his hospitality. And among his building’s labs and department offices, Noah was renowned for his coffee. Two secretaries came with their own mugs and a carton of milk every afternoon. Kaskie was a man beloved by secretaries. Yesterday they’d brought biscotti from the lesbian bakery. Lesbians are good bakers; why is that? A womanish thing. He remembered the girl on the bike, head on her friend’s back.

  Owens stopped in front of the old Alta church. Cool air veiled out of the open door. “I’d like to get married here someday,” he said, although he’d never attended a service. It waited, orderly and still, the pews symmetrical, the altar plain, evenly patched light from the windows the only ornament. “At five or six o’clock on a summer evening.” Suddenly, he turned to his friend. “Where do you think you’ll get married?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Justice of the peace, probably.”

  “I can imagine meeting a woman and being married in a month, if I really knew.” Owens was always talking about love as if Olivia factored nowhere in it. It was Noah’s part to remind him of her existence. The name was met with a sigh.

  “You know, one of my considerations is, I have to think: what would Olivia be like as a First Lady? And I’d have to say the answer is: not great.”

  Noah doubted very much that his friend would marry anytime soon.

  Once, the girl in college had said she loved him. He asked her if she’d said that before, and she’d laughed softly. “Yeah, a lot,” she admitted. And it had ended after only a few weeks. Even when she’d been with him, Kaskie felt amazed, incredulous, that someone so exquisite could love him. He had never gotten used to it. Maybe she didn’t, he realized now, maybe she only said so.

  The two men followed the soft, palm-lined road that led to Alta’s small downtown. They passed the old movie house, which had been restored by the heir of the Valley Electronics Company; it was shiny and polished, with an outsized marquee. Then they were at the Pantheon, which had great coffee made with Italian machines but a manager who didn’t like Owens. He had once tried to bring in a bagel and they’d had a loud altercation, with Owens lowering his voice for the final, gentle statement: “Probably it’d be a lot better for business if someone else had your job, somebody with a very different approach.” At that time, Owens was already a local celebrity, and a number of customers clapped. The manager had never been popular because he chased out young girls on roller skates when they came to buy their ices after school.

  But this morning, teenagers worked the counter and quiet organ music shelved down from speakers on the ceiling. The coffee was served in thick brown cups.

  “So I have something to talk to you about,” Owens said. “I think we found a neurotrophin that can regenerate brains. We’re in monkey trials now. Parkinson’s isn’t going anywhere.” He shrugged. “Unless we make it. I’d like you to come work with us.”

  This wasn’t the first time he’d offered Noah a job. Noah had no plans of accepting, but he was still glad to be asked. He let Owens go on until a salary was named.

  “Whoa, don’t tempt me. Listen, I really appreciate it, but I like what I’m doing.”

  “See, in a couple years, we’d give you a new building and you’d have your own team and you could revolutionize biology. You could leapfrog ten years ahead of all these academic guys.”

  “I don’t think so, Owens.” But this talk disturbed Noah. Could industry do all that? He’d always believed the majority of science was hands, experiments, one by one, deciding what needed to go next in the chain. Making discoveries, not using them. After all, Genesis didn’t find LCSF. Somebody else did and they took it, figured out how to make it in a recombinant form. They put the gene into bacteria. Industry was always, in the end, about products. Drugs maybe, but never cures. Of course, he might be wrong.

  Owens told him about meetings they’d had to discuss how to accommodate him. The salesmanship thrilled Owens a little. Owens liked to overcome objections—this was the game of what he did. But even he seemed strangely reluctant to close the deal he’d spent years idly musing over and the last three days fine-tuning. “So I really can’t recruit you, huh?”

  “Nope. Not today anyway.” Noah lifted his cup with both hands.

  Owens sighed. “Well, let me try one more thing. Because I’ve always had the feeling that we’d be working together someday. And a couple of changes are happening right now. One is that Genesis is going public. Our finances will be subject to review, and we’ll have a board of directors, shareholders, all this stuff we don’t have now. And so I’m offering you a one-million-dollar bonus for coming on board. But that’s a onetime offer. I won’t be able to make it again. And, as you know, Genesis has grown a lot and I’m taking a team of the best guys and we’re going to go off to a new building to work on our neurotrophin. And you could be part of that.”

  Noah pulled at his fingers, miserable all of a sudden. A million dollars. Like a trick: either way, he lost. He thought of the immunologist they called Lydgate up at the medical school, who was always frantic because his wife craved mission furniture. He again felt a sensation he’d had two times before in his life, when he’d thought it was possible he would die: the headachy pain of an overwhelming embarrassment, to be leaving such a mess. His zebra fish, his drosophila, his data, his papers—none of it was far enough along to hand on to another person, to survive without him. Then, in a clearing, he remembered a story Louise had told one night in the lab. Her mother had been engaged to a banker. “If you marry him,” her father had said, “you’ll have an affair with me; but if you marry me, you won’t have an affair with him.”

  “No, I can’t,” Noah said.

  “You’re sure?” Owens tilted his head.

  Noah nodded.

  Owens looked around at various points of the large room, running his palms over his jeans. “Want another coffee?” he asked abruptly. He b
linked, no doubt startled at the rare bluff of rejection, but still, he was glad to have Kaskie in the lab. If he’d said yes, a part of Owens would have wished he hadn’t.

  Noah understood that his friend loved the lab the way he loved the tiny rental cottage, overgrown with roses, where Olivia lived before she moved in with him. There was too little innocence in Owens’ life.

  Noah tried to restrict himself to one cup of coffee in the morning and another in the afternoon, but he accepted anyway. It wasn’t every day he turned down a million dollars.

  Owens sat up slightly to pull out his wallet from his back pocket. It was battered leather, bought from a street vendor, that had shined up like a chestnut. Noah reached for his, patting all four pockets. Damn. He wanted to pay. Though Owens had already offered, he always seemed reassured if you paid. It was as if his money had given him a paternity he’d never asked for and that caused him sorrow. But Kaskie had no cash. He didn’t like to carry much because when he did, he spent it. Still, the guy hadn’t called. How was Noah supposed to know? Was he supposed to carry a twenty in case Owens deigned to drop by and pronounce his oatmeal too salty?

  But instead of money, Owens slid out a school-sized picture of a little girl from his wallet. “Do you think she looks like me?”

  Noah studied the small photograph. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Yeah, I don’t either,” Owens said, slipping the picture back. He sipped his coffee and held the cup midair, perhaps trying to experience what other people must know as leisure. “It’s one of the prices I pay for my life. This woman tried to say she was my kid.” As he extracted two bills, Kaskie began to stammer, but Owens raised a hand. “Recruitment effort.”

  When they left, a girl in an apron ran out after him. “Your change!”

  “Oh, no, that’s for you. It’s a tip. Please tell the manager it’s such a pleasure when he’s not around.”

  The girl’s face complicated, biting down the grin.

  “Hey, seriously, why do you think it’s only the young European men who work in your labs? Why don’t the young French women and the young Swedish women come?”

  Noah shrugged. “A lot of Europeans don’t like it here. Most of them stay just for science. That guy you talked to, he sees nothing America has contributed outside of the bomb.”

  “What about the automobile?”

  “Or corn, potatoes, tomatoes, I’m always telling him.” Noah’s mother was the rare American Jew who’d grown up on a farm. There were pastoral pictures of her posing among rows of cabbages.

  “Electricity. The telephone. The personal computer. How about the movie camera?”

  “Linus Pauling. The alpha helix.”

  “George Eastman, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Land and all of Polaroid. Robert Goddard. Rockets. The polio vaccine!”

  “The Wright Brothers. Jazz.”

  “Commercial penicillin.”

  “I thought that was England.”

  “We made it usable, during the war. The Brits discovered it but they couldn’t make it. What was it some guy said? I think it was, ‘This mold is an opera singer.’ No, Tishler did it at Merck. He grew it and then he refused to patent it. He always used to say if we discovered a cure for cancer, he wouldn’t patent it.”

  They were still chanting America’s contributions when they returned to Kaskie’s lab.

  “What are you talking about?” Louise asked. She was his best postdoc, the most talented and exacting, but she made him nervous. He could usually count on his students to look at him with admiration. But not her. Also, she always wore black clothes, not the usual denim and tee shirts you saw in labs.

  When Noah explained, she exploded in harsh laughter. “You’ve missed the most important one,” she said. “Of this century, at least.”

  “What?”

  She snorted. “The pill, of course.”

  Score one for industry. It made its creators millionaires.

  He thought of Louise’s parents again. They might have married for love, but they were hardly a glamorous couple now. They’d probably been together thirty, forty years. Her father worked as a postman and walked with a prosthetic shoe.

  A Chain Letter

  Owens sat with his feet up on the desk, listening to the girl on the telephone. Her voice was young and impressionable, but she carried a conversation well, not like Olivia.

  “To be perfectly frank,” she was saying. She then went on to chat about things that didn’t require any frankness. She mentioned her aversion to tablecloths that matched the wallpaper and to napkins folded like swans.

  “Swans, really?” he said. “I didn’t notice.”

  They were gossiping about the people who had introduced them, the week before. Their hosts had felt honored to have Owens and pleased that Mrs. Maguire brought her daughter Albertine, who seemed to amuse him. They’d gone to great pains over the dinner party. Next to each place card, a bud vase held miniature roses. Owens and Albertine had been happy enough to eat the careful food and sip the wine, and now they were disparaging their hosts. That is the way of the social world and, especially, of flirtation. Owens enjoyed the teasing ardors of his search for Albertine, which involved waking their hostess at midnight and obliging her to climb downstairs to find her book. He’d written Albertine’s phone number on the sole of his shoe, to avoid detection. In the past, he’d written girls’ numbers on his skin.

  Albertine, though certainly not deaf and blind to her hostess’s weaknesses, not the least of which she considered to be her face, had nevertheless written her an effusive card. She had been brought up knowing how to secure the next invitation.

  Owens did nothing of the sort and in fact planned never to see those people again. “She’s just not very interesting,” he concluded.

  Albertine shuddered with laughter, exhilarated by his lack of social fear. He didn’t seem to believe that people could harm him. She lived inside nets and nets of obligation.

  She wanted to be a journalist, this Albertine, as she explained from her intern’s cubicle at the city desk of the newspaper. In three weeks, Owens learned, she would return to her East Coast hotsy-totsy college, a senior maybe—uh-oh, no, a sophomore.

  Outside his office, a row of visible heads, like men in a subway train, gave the impression of passive waitfulness. It would make a good photograph, through this ridged glass. As it was, they seemed almost black and white. There was something eternal in their posture.

  “To be frank, I don’t like the idea of a chain letter,” Albertine said. “And you’re supposed to send it to ten friends? Ten—who has the time?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely not answering this thing,” Owens said, putting the sheet of paper in his out box, so as never to see it again.

  Her laughter was froth, his a lower bell. They lolled. None of what they said mattered much. He knew he had time, the way a soloist knows when he can draw his notes out very long and every soul in the house will gasp when his bow leaves the strings.

  “Well, I guess I should go,” he said at last, after a long sighing pause that might have meant they’d run out of things to say. A soloist also knows there is a point beyond which he cannot attenuate poignancy. “There’s a bunch of guys here who want to see me.”

  “Really. Who?”

  “Oh, one’s from Newsweek, one’s from Time, I think there’s a guy here from the Wall Street Journal, yeah, there he is. And the New York Times is here … ay-and the Washington Post.”

  She laughed. There was something good-girl small about her that he liked. She was probably thinking, Well, to be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t chat away if the New York Times were waiting for me.

  But that’s what makes you so cute, he mused. They never would be. For me they often wait, and this isn’t the unmixed blessing you think, Pretty Hair.

  The men filed in eagerly, as if instantly awakened to feed.

  He’d woken before dawn in the dilapidated mansion, breeze from a broken window cooling his night-sweat sk
in. Downstairs, he banged on oatmeal. He’d started eating oatmeal every morning with maple syrup. By now he thought of this as his idea. Then he put on the new suit he felt old in. Guys from the bank had told him where to buy it. Slowly he was gleaning names for things. At first the prices shocked him. But he wasn’t going to dress like this every day. He thought of himself as a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom. Out on his terrace, where dandelions cracked tile, gummy on his feet, the moon hung over the sharp edges of the mountains. Insubstantial clouds traced by. Being up early felt good; it reminded him of just coming home from the night shift.

  Last night, he’d made sure to get gas. When you need something absolutely, do it yourself: his father had taught him that without words. Owens was the only one on the wide road. He could drive fast well. This was a small and daily satisfaction.

  He was the first person in the office. He stood in the conference room, at the long window, drinking fresh carrot juice from a carton. It was easy to be patient waiting for light. As his life became easy and cluttered with luck, he thought more about before. Frank would be here today. They had to be at their phones when the stock market opened on the other side of the country. Someday that would change. New York was old and breaking; this would be the center, eventually, soon. Civilization on earth was always organized around oceans. Once it had been the Aegean, then the Mediterranean, and then, for a long time, the Atlantic. But the Pacific epoch had begun. He had decided to stay put, and now it was all coming here to him. Many times in his life already, Tom Owens thought that he’d moved the very capital of America from East to West, because he couldn’t bear to leave home. He’d tried once, at Harvard. He hadn’t liked it much.