Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  Some of them noted Tilly’s nomination, to which he offered a falsely modest shrug and declared that he and Susan had not been particularly surprised. Oh, Tilly’s going places, he told Stuart and Pam Williams. We’ve always known that. It was always just a matter of time. Some of them asked about the kids, generally, to which he responded that they were all doing exceptionally well. Tilly’s got her sights on an Oscar. David is teaching the hell out of those kids in Wilson High and he is considering taking his talent to the university level where it will be better rewarded and appreciated.

  He did not receive any inquiries about Ben, and this was no great surprise. Most people had no reason to know of Ben. Those who did know of Ben, found it more comfortable to avoid entirely the subject of Downs Syndrome; something they did not understand and did not want to catch by association. Not that they didn’t care; certainly they cared. But what if something was wrong? What if this … this … syndrome was acting up? What if some medical or developmental unpleasantness was transpiring? Why make Hollis share all of that misfortune? Really, why get into all of that? Hollis, as every member of the Johns family, was used to the avoidance spawned by such discomfort, and it no longer bothered or surprised him.

  What did surprise him a little was that very few people made any inquiries about Susan. His wife had come to know most of the older guard at OFSC over the years and she had seemed to Hollis to be rather highly regarded by his colleagues. Granted, those relationships were largely superficial and infrequently tended, forged mostly over cocktails at holiday parties and hotdogs at the annual barbeques. But still. Even Patti Osgood from Accounting and Steve Reisling from Escrow, who had always seemed to have something they wanted him to pass along to Susan, failed to acknowledge her existence tonight.

  The last any of them had seen of Susan had been at Starlings, the scene of his own retirement party. It had been an elegant, but much more subdued affair – dinner and drinks above the winking lights of Columbus – attended mostly by the commercial loan department, and a few from administration, and several members of the board, Wally Nunn not among them. A few laudatory speeches had punctuated an evening of reminiscing and some very expensive wine. It had been a more intimate, meaningful send off than the extravagant hullabaloo for Wally Nunn that was now raging about him.

  And they had all so easily made Susan an integral part of that evening; as though the social proceedings embedded a ritual of return; of re-entrusting his care back to his wife. Susan had stayed close at his side, raising her glass, holding his hand, answering their call to receive him and to give him what they no longer could. Help me! What am I supposed to do with him? She had joked and they had laughed with her and mockingly refused to take him back. They had closed down the restaurant that evening, five or six of them outlasting all the others, leaning back in their chairs and telling war stories and drinking, all of them seemingly unwilling to let the night go spinning into the next era.

  And Susan had been a part of all of that. But tonight, strangely, Susan, like Ben, was never mentioned by anyone other than Hollis.

  That the apparent lack of interest in Susan might have had something to do with the stunning young figure at his side – her arm draped comfortably through the bend in his own – never occurred to Hollis. Bethany moved as he moved through the evening, encountering each conversation as though it was entirely unlike any of the others that preceded it. In each case, after the initial barrage of how-you-been, catch-me-up niceties, just as the conversation forced a choice between substantive dialogue and continuing on one’s way, Hollis would gesture genteelly to his side. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine … Bethany generally took things from there, engaging them with her innocence and beauty and intelligence, lavishing Hollis with praise for his generosity and attentiveness, showing keen interest in the lives of those to whom she was introduced. Laughing. Smiling. Radiating. Hollis watched these exchanges with a kind of prideful love, as though she was of his making; as though she reflected well on him.

  And, after all, didn’t she? Was she not his choice? Did she not reflect something in him of value? Was he not younger and more in the game than they had remembered or imagined? Still out there in the world, in motion, making deals?

  He watched the flicker of renewed interest come into their eyes, each and every one of them, as she spun her magic. Suddenly, the bar and the dance floor and the bathroom were less compelling objectives. They lingered. They indulged. Hollis, where did you ever find this one? They said. Look out Columbus! They exclaimed. Here’s my card; I mean it now, they offered. It was the men, mostly, who then usually took their leave with a prolonged overly-sincere handshake with Bethany and a knowing wink to Hollis, or an elbow in his side.

  He knew what the wink meant. And the elbow jab. They were mistaken, certainly; but how could you tactfully correct such a misimpression in such surroundings? Do you reach out and grab them by the arm as they disappear into the crowd towards the bar and tell them that the relationship is really quite innocent? That, in supposing him a lowly adulterer and unfairly impugning his motives? Would they ever admit their lurid assumption? Would they even believe the denial? Wouldn’t they simply take his concern about their opinion as confirmation? Who really cared anyway? Who really gave a damn?

  So each time Hollis let it go. Winking back. Jabbing back. Shooting them with his finger. Winking again. What was the harm? What the hell. And they moved on together, arm-in-arm, to the next square yard of ballroom, to the next person, to the next exclamation of Hollis!

  Within three hours time, as Saturday slinked unobserved into Sunday, the throngs had thinned considerably and the band had lost its verve, trading swing for sap. Hollis had introduced, most of those with whom he had once worked. Of those, he had falsely promised a round of golf to at least a dozen, included Wally Nunn who, three sheets to the wind, had hugged Hollis and called him John and had said that he did not want to be congratulated on his retirement – Stop it, John; stop it John; don’t say that; Shhhhh – but rather wished to be bid a hearty bon voyage, as he was setting sail into his next life.

  Hollis had said that Wally should be careful what he wished for and he could feel Beth laugh to herself next to him, her mirth entering his body at the place their arms connected. Wally Nunn, who resembled a sagging and distended tower of tapioca pudding, was certainly not in good health and it was not unreasonable to suppose that he might have found the next life at any moment. No more numbers John. No more meetings. From now on, only wine (raising his glass) women (gesturing at Beth) and … and… (pointing at Hollis) golf! From now on, John. Golf! ‘Cause I can’t sing, John. I can’t. But I’m god-damned gonna live and play golf and see the world and spend money like its … it’s …water, and let all these poor bastards worry about getting things done. We paid our dues, John! We’re out the other side. Free, John. Free!

  Ironically, the only notable absence of the evening was that of Vernon Ashe, in charge of the OFSC on-again, off-again, internship program. Vernon, they learned, was quite ill with something that might be pneumonia and that might only be the flu but, in any event, prevented him from making the celebration. Bethany, they were told, should pay a visit to the office when Vernon was back in the pink. Several colleagues, of common gender, offered to notify Bethany as soon as that was possible.

  So they left with a handful of promises, but no deal.

  Outside, the early morning air was cool and refreshing and quiet in its dark, free expanse; everything the chaotic ballroom had not been. Hollis breathed deeply as he fished the ticket out of his pocket and handed it to the valet. Beth yawned and hugged his arm like it was a stuffed animal. He patted her hand.

  On the ride back she was quiet again, staring out the window of his car at a floating landscape that was more suggestive than real; a topography of shapes that lay sleeping beyond the fields of spot-lit parking lots beneath the tarp of darkness. He looked at her and she was suddenly the same as those dark shapes, sitting next to him in his car,
silent and breathing and slightly melancholic, but beautifully so.

  It had been a long day, and she was probably tired. That, and from Beth’s perspective, Wally’s retirement party had not really produced an actual discussion with Vernon Ashe about an internship and perhaps that was disappointing. So perhaps there was some of the frustration that always went hand-in-hand with youthful impatience. She would learn. He would teach her to be patient.

  But whatever her thoughts now, Hollis did not wish to interrupt. He let her be and they both rode in silence and felt that strange and moody intimacy that comes with not talking; with simply being in the company of another. Without the need for words.

  From a distance, the Westin gleamed of its own incandescence, rising up beyond the banking horizon of Interstate 70 like a giant exotic stalk burning from within. As he pulled into the lot, Bethany turned, her hand on his arm and the light back in her eyes.

  “Want to see where I’ve been meditating?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure,” she said laughing. “You can tell me if I’ve been facing East.”

  Hollis parked the car and escorted Bethany into the hotel, crossing the spot in the lobby where he had first seen her that evening, before Tilly’s party, emerging from the elevator bay in her own ferocious and youthful beauty, surrounded by insignia-festooned conventioneers of the kind now roaming the halls and congregated in loose, restless clots in the lobby and outside the front door.

  Bethany idly fussed with her hair in the mirrored walls of the elevator, pulling and teasing a strand here and a strand there, pulling her fingers through the thick of it, along the back of her head, until they disappeared like children walking in tall golden grasses, each reemerging at the top of the hill. She turned her head ever so slightly in one direction then the other, inspecting her profile. Not that there was anything wrong or in need of fixing. It was all just unconscious grooming. Instinctive self-maintenance. Doing what was in her nature to do.

  Save for a muffled screaming and gun-fire from beneath a door near the elevator, the seventh floor was quiet. Hollis followed Beth toward the end of the hall on a well-padded carpet the color of ferrous soil. It stretched out beneath a pattern of fallen leaves and vines that interlocked and repeated and disappeared beneath the long walls.

  At the end of the hall, Bethany stopped and fished her fingers around in her little purse for the card key. Finding it, she closed the purse, turned, and kissed Hollis on the mouth, her hand with the card key against the back of his neck, pulling him down to her, the smell of her filling him, the length of her body exploring the distance between them. She lowered herself slowly, releasing him, separating her mouth from his, trailing the tips of her fingers along his cheek.

  Hollis watched her, at once from very far away, as though from the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, and yet so close as to be unable to see the entirety of her face in a single glance, or to know any single thing about her in a single thought. The very idea of her was suddenly lost to him.

  Bethany opened the door deftly, without ever looking away, her face the same as it ever was, her eyes, her lips; but not the face he knew. Without a sound, she stepped inside and disappeared.

  Hollis had enough presence of mind to stop the door from closing, his hand extending as though the reflex of a crossing guard. But he did not follow her. Not for an eternity of seconds. When, at last, the door closed itself behind him, there was only the light at her back, from outside the windows, the dim glow of a thousand parking lots of Columbus in the distance, and of the moon beyond Columbus, like a cold yellow iris.

  Bethany stood on the far side of the bed, placing her earrings on the nightstand. She straightened and slipped her arms, pale and smooth and lovely, from their burnt yellow sleeves. And when the dress fell from her body, down, down, down into the shadows below the bed, it was like the sun slipping down into some boiling African sea as the world finds the darkness that has always been waiting.

  CHAPTER 21 – David

  Rhonda Davenport is a waterfall. An enormous wall of silken aqua and teal spilling in layered sheets off shoulders that are like great fleshy cliffs. Her hair is bedroom blonde, pillowed and fluffed and curled. She is taller than I am. I conclude that she was probably a real looker in her day, before Jack and his ill-fated pancreas.

  She has overburdened her cracker with hummus and, because I am a freak of powerless concern whenever I am back in the place of my upbringing, I am preoccupied with the well-being of my mother’s carpet. I am readying the napkin that tightly wraps my glass of wine; preparing to thrust it forward, plucking lumps of tumbling hors d’oeuvres from mid-air.

  But the hummus clears the teeth without incident and I relax. Rhonda washes it down and continues.

  “Anyway,” she says “I probably spend two to three hours a day on E-Bay. I’ve made twenty-six thousand so far this year. Last year I made twelve, but I was still getting the hang of things.”

  I act impressed. Because I am impressed; but mostly because I cannot fathom spending that much of my life plugged into an electronic garage sale.

  My mother breezes by to deliver a plate of crab cakes and to fuss with the crudités. She is in dangly earrings and a light blue dress that flares at the heels and makes her strangely tall and elegant. She is still wearing her apron. To Eat is Human, to Cook is Divine. She looks older than I remember. She has always looked older than I remember. Older than when I was a child asking to stay over at Peter Wilson’s house. Older than when I was seventeen watching her, pregnant with Ben, haul Tilly screaming up the staircase – you leave him alone! You leave him alone! – as my father lectured me about responsibility and consequences and about the merciful forbearance of Inga and Heinrich Van Susteren, whose house had been trashed and whose fish had been killed all for the sake of my autographed Dan Marino football. Older than earlier in the evening when she grilled me about Mae’s absence, and when she handed me a slip of paper and told me to write out a review of Tilly’s movie she knew I would not write.

  It’s not so much that she looks old, which she doesn’t, or that she is getting older before my eyes, which, I suppose she is, undetectably. It’s that I am forever stuck with the historian’s perspective. The way things are, is for me the way things were; at least until I open my eyes and pay attention and look around and realize that things are as they are, not as they were. She kisses me on the cheek the same as she always has.

  “He’s a good boy, Rhonda. I’m telling you, he’s a good one.”

  “Baby doll, he’s not a boy any more. He’s all MAN.” Rhonda lets out her trademark bellow and pats me on the cheek. I can feel myself blushing.

  “Oh, Rhonda, wait ‘til you see his girlfriend. Wait ‘til you see Mae. Is she here yet, David? I haven’t seen her yet.”

  She is festive and gay, my mother. She’s got her party game-face on, asking questions to which she already knows the answers, but asking in an excited and animated way that makes answers irrelevant. She is Ricardo Montalban on Fantasy Island and maybe a little bit of speed. Smiles everyone! Smiles!

  “No, mom. I told you; I don’t even know if Mae is …”

  “Now she is a good-lookin’ woman. She’s sick a lot for someone who looks so healthy, but she will knock your eyes out.”

  “Mom…”

  “Yeah?” Rhonda looks at me appraisingly. “He’s got himself a looker does he?”

  “Rhonda, I’m telling you… you’ve never seen a better looking couple. They should be in a magazine. I kid you not. She’s a goddess; a model.”

  “Ohhhhh… A model!”

  “She’s not a model, Rhonda.”

  “Oh, David. No, she’s not a model. She’s a lawyer.”

  “She’s a paralegal, mom.”

  “Whatever. She’s gorgeous and her parents are lovely and they have a beautiful, just luxurious home up there on the water with this fabulous fifty-foot sailboat, oh, wait ‘til you meet her, Rhonda. Just wait. She should be here any minute.”


  “Mom…”

  “Well good for you David.” Rhonda pokes me in the chest with a bejeweled finger. “Good … for … you. Good to know somebody in the world is still getting laid on a regular basis. What’s it like having hot sex on a sailboat?”

  “Oh Rhonda…” Mom shakes her head and bustles off into the kitchen, pretending to be amused rather than offended. She is not prudish, as she is often quick to declare, but she has a compulsive allegiance with social decorum that prevents her from encouraging ribald humor. Best to leave the room shaking her head in mock delight. Rhonda Davenport, on the other hand, has a compulsive allegiance with ribald humor, which prevents her from encouraging social decorum.

  Rhonda bellows again, drawing looks from around the room. She pops in another small mountain of hummus and picks up where she left off – the Internet – inquiring about my own surfing habits. I tell her that I have never really had the time or interest for idle surfing, leaving out the greater truth that I do not have access to a computer that does not belong to either my girlfriend or my employer, neither of whom have been very keen of late to grant me access to much of anything. I could purchase another porn-free computer of my own and resume my relationship with my own Internet service provider, but I would rather eat and stay warm in the winter.

  Rhonda Davenport does not need to know these details. She segues into her own not-so-secret penchant for porn – for those of us without the real thing, as she is fond of saying – asking if I have seen the latest video of the guy with a johnson so large that he’s made a series of hats and little tubular outfits for it.

  “David, it’s hysterical. Give me your email address and I’ll send you the video. A baseball player, and the English sea captain, and the Navy guy, and the policeman. They do these little skits. Someone in his family is an incredible seamstress. The construction worker is a scream. He wears this little denim number and this yellow hard hat.”