A Regular Guy Read online

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said, standing.

  “Um, you know, I’ll pay you for this myself,” Owens whispered, fingertips in jeans pockets, “Not through Genesis.”

  “Don’t worry,” Eliot mumbled, also embarrassed by the introduction of money to this rare intimate conversation.

  Owens immediately sat back down and busied himself with papers from his in box. He opened one stray envelope, typewritten with his name and address, and found only a worn five-dollar bill inside. He shook the envelope, with a bas-relief of his name on its interior, an actual hole made by the period of “Mr.” What’s this? he wondered, turning the empty envelope over and finding no return address. Then he thought he’d maybe lent it to somebody. This warmed him: the commonness of having a small loan repaid. He slid up to get his wallet from his back pocket, slipped the bill inside and patted it with satisfaction.

  The recent statement Eliot Hanson left, chronicling a bond transfer that resulted in a profit to Owens of over a million times this amount, elicited no such response.

  Van Castle

  Owens began receiving envelopes with no return address and no letter inside: only five-dollar bills. Some seemed new, others came creased like very old, hardworking hands. One evening, he collected a pile and absentmindedly distributed them in the cubbyholes that served as mailboxes. But like something thrown away that keeps bobbing back, he found a new batch in his next morning’s mail. “What is this, some kind of joke?”

  By now he realized the error of his original explanation. The memory of that mistaken satisfaction had an unpleasant aftertaste.

  Then he buzzed his secretary, Kathleen, the answer to all questions, and she told him that Kaskie’s van had come in. “Do you want to pick it up yourself?”

  “Nah, I think it’d be nice if he went to get it,” Owens said. “Did we pay for that already? Better call Eliot.”

  For as long as Owens could remember, he’d seen Noah Kaskie around Alta, but it was years before he learned his name. There weren’t many wheelchairs when Owens was growing up, and this kid had long blond ringlets.

  And everyone in Alta passed the public garden, where a man worked every Saturday and Sunday; his son, with the wheelchair parked by the gate, crawled around on the ground, digging. People brought their seedlings, clippings, bare-root roses and fruit trees, or dropped coins into a tin can attached to the fence. Owens heard that the father experimented with hybrids in his garage and made new flowers. He was the first man in Santa Clara County to create a pink-fruited orange and a persimmon with no bite.

  Owens wished he knew them. He and his father often drove into Alta and walked past the garden Saturday mornings, but he stayed close to his father’s long legs. The kid crawling on the ground was an Alta kid. He yelled up easily at other people. Owens thought he’d heard that the kid was an artist, but a few years later the Alta Sentinel ran a picture of Noah in his wheelchair: “Winner of Elks Science Scholarship.” So the kid turned out to be a scientist; Owens thought that fit even better. By then, Owens had met an industrial organic chemist, who traveled the world with petri dishes in his back pocket to pick up stray samples of dirt to screen for microbes. A thin, frowning man, he paced his small living room every night and danced with his young daughters to requiems.

  The evening Owens finally met Noah Kaskie, they talked for an hour. Perhaps it was inevitable that they meet and when they did, it happened to be on a hilltop. Neither man appeared anywhere in Alta anonymously; each was always preceded by his reputation. Worth millions, that guy who started Genesis. The one in the wheelchair, he’s some kind of genius. Neither man’s name came up in conversation without a lowered voice, and to their faces, people strenuously avoided the topics most attached to them in their absence. For each man, there was the hope that no one really noticed and the endless suspicion that everyone did.

  In his wheelchair, Noah still had long blond ringlets. Owens imagined his face was what women might find noble. His chest and arms were average, but it was as if the strength drained as it went down his body; his legs were much smaller than his arms, and Owens couldn’t tell if they were straight or shriveled.

  “So what’s your life like?” Owens said, staring at Noah, no hint of laughter on his face.

  “Guess about like yours,” Noah answered.

  “I always passed your garden when I was growing up. And now I know you’re a great scientist. I heard about your mutation.”

  “Thank you,” Noah said simply. Generally, it was hard for him to take compliments, although he craved them. But Owens made it easy. He shaped his praise like a small, careful package. Most people babbled on and on, making you stop them. “Is it hard having everyone know you?”

  “Yeah, it is. You probably understand what that’s like. I mean, I knew who you were. I knew you went to Caltech.”

  “In the wheelchair.” Noah snorted.

  “That too. People get all these insane ideas that have nothing to do with who you are. When what they know is one or two things.”

  “That you’re rich.”

  “See, the word rich means a lot of things I’m not. I happen to have a high net worth, but most other people in that category got their money a very different way. I didn’t grow up rich. I don’t think like a rich person. I don’t live like a rich person. It doesn’t matter to me very much at all. I just feel like I’ve been given this resource and I’ve got to make sure I use it to do something good.”

  “I feel that too,” Noah said, believing, at that moment, that he’d also been given something. Much of the time, he lived in a state of fight. Some days he stopped trying altogether and lay still on his back in the bed, contemplating the wheels’ scuff marks on his apartment’s white walls. But he meant what he said to Owens and felt closer to him afterwards. Owens had been present for this blare of confidence and hadn’t laughed.

  “Well, I admire you.” Owens was in a state he rarely achieved, which he would have described as the emotion of respect. He believed that Noah was going to be a great scientist, and leave an important human record. He felt, in a way no one else would understand, that they were the same, he and this small, strangely formed young man. He wondered, suddenly, if Noah had ever had sex.

  They headed down the hill to where their friends had spread out picnic blankets. Olivia walked up the trail to meet them, her hands skimming the tops of weeds. She had a look that meant: See. I can lead to where everything is true.

  Owens lurched into her arms, tall-ly, awkward, full of intention. For a moment, he felt he was in love. She nursed his surge of feeling and looked over his shoulder at Noah, who was making his way down the trail with switchbacks.

  But their friendship did not maintain its first height. Noah tended towards sarcasm, which jarred Owens, whose customary answer to “How’re you doing?” was “Great.”

  The trouble started when Owens commissioned Noah’s father to design a garden for Genesis. He wanted to give people nature to look at while they worked. Owens’ childhood attraction to the Kaskie family seemed finally redeemed.

  When Norbert Kaskie completed the industrial garden, it filled the lot, as promised, but all the plants seemed too small. There probably was a garden Owens could have admired. Yet these plants didn’t look pretty to him. In fact, the flowers seemed too bright and orderly even for Noah. The public garden had not been built this way, all at once; Norbert Kaskie had improvised it over years and years. It depended, as did the yard of their rented house, on seeds, donations, whims and regular moving, digging up, all the things you’re not supposed to do. Norbert Kaskie had been an amateur botanist all his life and never once had a gardening job for pay. This time, he’d tried to be good.

  It turned out that Noah’s sister was the artist, a photographer, and Owens also planned to commission a triptych from her for the conference room. Noah worked as go-between, because Michelle was currently traveling the East Coast, following the fall.

  “Can she photograph things other than people?�
�� Owens asked. “For example, if I were a photographer, I think I’d take pictures of the California landscape.”

  It was the “can” that got Noah, the way Owens raised his eyebrows as if he suspected some flaw in Michelle’s education, about which she was, in fact, touchy.

  “She could,” Noah said. “It’s just a matter of wanting to.”

  “Some of the sequoias are three thousand years old, Noah. They’re the oldest living things on the planet.”

  “So. They don’t need Michelle.”

  “Of course they do, because who knows how long they’ll be around? Somebody’ll blast them down or there could be an earthquake; anything could happen. You know what they did to the biggest one? They chopped it down to make a dance floor. Oh, and I think with what was left, they carved out a bowling alley.”

  “Now, that I’d like to see,” Noah said.

  “Anyway, if I were her, I’d make California landscapes.”

  Noah rolled off in a huff, thinking, So that’s what my sister’s talent is supposed to be for—a documentary record of trees.

  Actually, Noah loved trees. As a child, he’d made a workbook, with labeled sketches of branches, glued-in samples of leaves, flowering seeds and bark tracings. Even then he found himself drawn to old, broken-down oaks, ancient cottonwoods, the close rather than the majestic. Noah wasn’t sentimental about big redwoods. He considered refusing the project without telling his sister.

  “I’ve got a problem with Kaskie,” Owens told Olivia, in the car. “I don’t think I can keep his dad’s garden.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  That night, they walked through it on the bare footpaths.

  Olivia shrugged. “I kind of like it.”

  “But I don’t think it’s a question of whether you like it or I like it. I just don’t think it’s great. And I can’t be having gardens that are kind of interesting but might be junk. I have a responsibility to the people who work here to give them something inspiring outside their windows.”

  Olivia laughed. “This could inspire them.”

  “Well, maybe somebody, but not everybody or even most people. Whereas great art, like Shakespeare or Ansel Adams, would—and I consider the best gardens to be art. I guess I’ll just have to tell him.”

  “Does that make them better than Kafka or Schiele. Or the desert, for that matter?”

  Owens had never read Kafka, and he didn’t know who the other one was, but he said, “Yes, it does. There’s a reason deserts are sparsely populated.” He snapped his fingers. “Sissinghurst, that’s the name.”

  “Are you going to pay him anyway?”

  “That’s a good question.” He sighed. “I suppose so.”

  But as it turned out, Norbert Kaskie turned down the payment. Privately, he blamed himself. He knew he’d been unable to replicate the public garden. No more was ever said of it, and six months later the area was sodded and a volleyball net was erected.

  But now Noah was receiving an extraordinary gift, out of the blue. He thought maybe it was the consolation prize for the million dollars he’d lost, though in fact the van had been ordered months earlier. Olivia believed it was her doing. She constantly nudged Owens’ generosity. She understood it was essential to his vision of her that she not want bounty for herself, so she felt most animated in her fight for others’ portions. Under her influence, Owens’ parents received two cruise trips and her cousin Huck got a suit for his birthday. And ever since Noah’s father refused payment for the garden, Olivia had been looking for some sort of compensation.

  Noah was a member of Olivia’s flock. In this period of his life, Owens frequently mentioned Saint Francis and Sister Clare. By the time his daughter knew him well, it was John and Jackie. But do not be too hard on him. It is why movie stars marry movie stars. Great men look to other great men because, in most cases, they cannot model themselves, in the simplest and most common way, upon their parents.

  Noah was at work when he received the call from Owens’ secretary.

  Freckled, nice, green-eyed Kathleen,

  Who comes from a state where kitchens are clean.

  She had a fresh, clipped voice on the telephone, but he knew she was married. “Your van’s in,” she told him. “Just waiting for you to go get it.”

  “Promise me one thing,” he remembered his grandmother saying, holding his chin in her hard fingernails. “That you’ll never buy German.” She’d meant a Mercedes. “You’re Jewish and don’t you ever forget it.”

  Noah had promised; it was easy. He was a seven-year-old Noah then, in a wheelchair, and he’d already had thirty-one fractures. Though his favorite toys for years had been cars, no one knew if he could ever drive.

  And now Noah was getting a German custom-made van. It was Kempf, not Mercedes, but if she knew, she’d ask what Kempf was building during the war. He could have explained this, he supposed, but Owens was dumb about ethnicity. All he knew was that one of his ancestors was an Arab or a Jew, he didn’t know which. He could seem vaguely charmed if a guy he was thinking of hiring or a woman he wanted to date was Lebanese, but if the guy wasn’t that good or the woman wasn’t that pretty, it was Lebanese Schnebanese. And Kempf made the best. Noah didn’t want Everett Jennings. He’d used their chairs most of his life.

  The car lot was in San Jose, and his mother drove him. When they saw the van, it was everything. “We never had a car this nice,” she whispered, though the salesman had left them alone. She ran her hands down the sides. She seemed greedy, pulling lights on, gingerly searching for the brake with her pump (it braked manually). His mother appreciated fine things. Noah had to ask her if he could be alone with it.

  “Do you want me to go and come back?” she offered. “We could have a sandwich.”

  When Noah was young, every time she bought him a new chair, they went just the two of them, without Michelle. And each chair, the first day, felt wonderful and strong, as if there’d be no more afternoons roaming Telegraph Avenue on a loaner while they waited for repairs. She wouldn’t take him back to school. She gave him the day to get used to it. They always went out for crab sandwiches. He no longer had his three old chairs, but he still thought of them.

  The van was deep navy blue, sleek, male, automatic. At the press of a button, a ramp drew down from the driver’s floor, grip bars on both sides. Noah leveraged himself up, pushed the chair to the back. The ramp would lift automatically, but Noah decided not to use more than he needed. Little eases were the first treats on the long slide down to the bed. Brake and gears, everything was manned on top. He’d have to teach himself here, on the lot. Noah had learned to drive on his parents’ old Chrysler, with metal extension bars, which was like driving while working string puppets. The last years, he’d just used buses.

  Owens had ordered the van complete with every option, but Noah didn’t touch the phone. He’d heard that the bills were outrageous and didn’t know when the charges started; maybe when you picked it up. Noah had an underdeveloped sense of money; he thought a call from a car could cost ten dollars or a hundred. But good for an emergency, he thought.

  He remembered the place where he and his mom had always gone for the sweet crab sandwiches. But he was too old for that. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he told her.

  Sometimes he had to make himself be alone.

  When Noah sat high up, he clapped, I lucked out. He felt full with gratitude. Or maybe I deserve it, he considered, but the idea couldn’t hold. Too many people deserved. He touched the leather seat, which smelled of something recently alive.

  “She’s all yours,” the dealer said, tapping the roof.

  The gas tank was full, and Noah started driving, slowly. Working the manual brakes and gas was like juggling; it required all his concentration. Noah was afraid he’d wreck the van before he even got back to the lab. He’d have to park it in the lot there. But he wanted to get used to it now, in the daylight. And there were certain places he’d never been alone. He drove all the way to
an ice cream stand at the beach, where he’d once stopped with Olivia. They’d bought drumsticks and eaten them outside, peeling off the sticky paper before a white-barreled surf. He’d often wanted to return, but not enough to talk someone into driving. Whims were different when you could satisfy them without help. Yet as he sat dutifully eating, sand blew onto his drumstick, opening in his mouth like paper flowers, and all of a sudden he had to show someone. Olivia lived at Owens’ house, so he got back into the van and drove there.

  As he wound past rich people’s land, it occurred to him that this was his first charity. He should have tried it a lot sooner. He’d always assumed that charity humbled you, as being carried weakened the body. The van was new and clean. He lurched over the road, controlling motion. It felt due him, even overdue, this power.

  But elation cannot last. Getting in and out of the van meant work. He’d build up muscles, he decided, in his arms, his favorite parts. He was weak now from years in a chair with pneumatic wheels.