Read Online A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson - Free Book Online

his search for Albertine, which involved waking their hostess at midnight and obliging her to climb downstairs to find herbook. 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 guyhere 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 skin. 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