A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson Page A

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 armswere 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, thatthey 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