A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson Read Free Book Online Page B

a month, wanting to meet the female scientist upstairs. When Noah finally capitulated, Owens had reported back: “I could never fall in love with someone like her.” Noah had found himself babbling, “I think she has a really pretty face.”
    “If I were a biologist,” Owens said, “that’d be what I’d want to do. I’d want to sequence the genome.”
    The two men were odd friends for each other. They both had known Frank. Noah had gone to graduate school with him. Then Frank left academics and started Genesis with Owens, but eventually he left that too. When Owens let himself think about it, which he only rarely did, he felt keenly, and with a flat acceptance, this loss of Frank. The day-to-day quality of his life was lower and there was nothing he could do about it. It troubled him that Frank belonged to a world he’d chosen over theirs. Most people Owens knew worked for Genesis and were, in one way or another, being paid by him. Noah understood that Owens had intended for a long time to make him one of those people and perhaps today he planned to close the deal.
    They walked through the university square, its sandstone arches copied from a four-hundred-year-old mosque in Egypt. Frank and Noah had been graduate students here, partners. Owens stood solemnly, looking over the pavilions, as if he had a problem he couldn’t fully articulate. In the last five years, he had found himself in the odd circumstance of luck. Everything he touched turned to money. Noah had some inkling of what that would be like: for a while, four years back, his experiments were working. Owens probably experienced the strange apperception of momentum and the courage that came from it; his trajectory was going up and up, and if he multiplied the stakes he could only multiply the gains. Before, he’d been poor—so poor, Frank said, that his currency was not cash but apples. At first his prosperity must have been exhilarating. But the more he experimented, the more he proved himself invincible. Nine hundred people worked under him now, maybe a thousand, including men he considered his best friends and, from what he said, women he’dslept with. People always warned that in science, after you’ve made a great discovery, it’s almost impossible to think the way you did before. And of course nobody believes it’s luck when luck happens to them.
    “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