Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Well?” he had repeated, perhaps with more intensity then he had intended, “What would you have him do?”

  Rather than responding, David had asked for Susan to pass the broccoli. And so much the better. It had all been a charade anyway. Hollis had then let David off the hook by returning his attention to his steak, shaking his head to himself.

  It bothered him more than it should have, David’s immunity. It made him wonder where he had gone wrong; what he had said or done to twist his son in this way. What Ohioan was immune to football? Where was the Buckeye pride? It was not that Hollis hadn’t tried. He had. Again and again and again he had tried. Heroically he had tried. Hours of catch in the back yard and out in the street in front of the house as the daylight waned and the smell of hickory barbeque thickened in the settling dusk. He had enrolled David in a summer football camp run by the OSU Athletics Department. Not cheap. They had attended almost every home game the Buckeyes ever played, rain or shine, whether David wanted to go or not. They went anyway. Pushing past David’s tears and tantrums and the predictable entreaties by Susan, they had gone anyway. And hadn’t they loved every game? Hadn’t they? Win or lose? For the experience of loyalty and fidelity and allegiance that only college sports can deliver? Hadn’t they?

  And yet, after all of that, David had refused to play high school ball. Refused to sign up for any position with the Wilson High Cougars. Flat refused. No amount of persuasion from Hollis – and there had been a great deal of that, far too much for Susan’s sensibilities – had weakened David’s resolve to not play football. To not love, live, breathe football. The only real advantage that public high school had offered over a private specialized education – like the kind Hollis had pushed for and that David had unceremoniously destroyed – was that public high schools had better football programs. And yet, having forced his way into public school, at the expense of Hollis’ reputation, David was unwilling to scrimmage. Bull-headedly, selfishly unwilling even to try.

  The problem, the disappointment, went well beyond football. Any sincere devotion to any athletic endeavor David might have chosen would have satisfied Hollis. He was not picky. Football would have been nice. Football would have been great. But it needn’t have been football, or any sport, for that matter. Swimming. Golf. Fishing. Hollis had pushed – encouraged was a better word – David in all of those directions. He had encouraged David to love all of the enriching pastimes that Hollis had loved.

  But none of that great and sustained effort – all for David’s betterment – had paid off. He had refused, almost at every turn, to give into the natural forces that will, if you let them, sculpt a son from the joys and passions of a father. The acorn had fallen from the tree and, by force of will that acorns do not normally possess, had rolled itself down the hill and across the field and into a depression of alien, denuded, Hollis-poor soil. What of the father’s love in the world was in the son? Almost none. Could it be said that to know the son was to know something of the father, or vice versa? Sadly, no.

  David was plenty smart, true. Not quite Tilly-smart, but he had a prodigious noodle between his ears and he knew how to use it. And yet, that was simply a part of his DNA. So too his good looks; the eyes, the chin, the shoulders, the hair. The only things David had taken from Hollis were the traits he had no choice but to take. David had ample personal charm and a good sense of humor – qualities that Hollis possessed in an almost embarrassing abundance – but the reflection of Hollis in those qualities was no more a product of David’s affinity for Hollis than was David’s blood type.

  David did have a way with folks when he wanted to turn it – whatever it was – on. The heart-breaker was what people had called him; back when he was still a boy but old enough for others to know that it – this thing about him – was not a just a cute phase but a collection of permanent and compelling attributes relating to his physical appearance and his personality. But again, none of that – it – was accomplishment, none of it true character, none of it consciously developed or acquired or earned through experience. None of it was a choice. It, as it turned out, was all genetically-encoded Hollis. And Susan, yes, yes, but mostly Hollis.

  David, of course, had taken such blessings utterly for granted. Normal and to be expected, Hollis supposed, except that David’s relative lack of contribution to his own success in life had left genetic fortune as the only thing he had going for himself. David should have dropped to his knees and thanked Hollis the day Mae Chang had walked into his life. She had not been lured in by David’s accomplishments; that was for sure. And she wasn’t after his social distinction as a public high school history teacher. Nor was she after his money. Mae was born to money. And David didn’t have any money that was not Hollis’ money, just like he didn’t have a roof that was not, essentially, Hollis’ roof.

  No, Hollis suspected that for Mae it was all a chromosomal appreciation. It was David’s warm eyes and his easy smile and his solid frame and, Hollis assumed, the all-important appendage. David was hung like his old man and Hollis had no doubt that his boy knew how to use that prodigious noodle too. But most important, Hollis surmised that Mae had found in David an animal magnetism that was locked into a genetic code passed directly from Grandpa Holcum Wallace Johns, to Homer, to Hollis, and on to David that David could not have neutralized if he had tried.

  If Hollis was less than fully accepting of David’s station in life – and Hollis was not sure that was true, for he truly believed as the Buddhists believe that all pain comes from resisting what already is, and that he had made an early peace with his own shattered expectations for his first born – but, nevertheless, if it is true that Hollis was less than fully accepting, it was only because David’s unrealized potential was so great. With a little extra effort, with an ethic of investing in his life beyond the minimum required for maintenance of a rather pathetic status quo, David could set the world to spinning. Spinning, not from having a career, like Tilly, of outrageously inappropriate pandering to the baser urges of American culture. Spinning, not from having answered a siren call to become another spectacular wreckage in the rock-strewn shallows of depraved narcissism. Spinning, not from having an unparalleled thirst for cheap attention. No, all of that would be Tilly’s domain. Rather, David could have set the world spinning from a consistent demonstration of unmitigated competence driven by uncompromising intelligence and an uncommon ambition to make his mark in the world. With a sincere effort, David could be a man of true substance.

  Barring that, David could at least get married and have a child so that someone else might put that Johns genetic code to good use. A grandchild would have allowed Hollis to start again on a clean slate, to impart some wisdom, to instill some character. Hollis would not be around forever. Someone needed to be ready to step up and assume the mantle of family standard-bearer. Someone – someone other than Hollis – needed to give a damn. That someone, apparently, simply did not yet exist. He – or she, it really didn’t matter to Hollis – needed to be created. First the genetic code, and then the football and the golf and the fishing and the wisdom and the character and the hunger for achievement and all the rest of it that had never taken root with his own children. He and Susan had tried a third time and had been blessed, yes, blessed, with the beautiful, wonderful gift that was Ben. But little Ben, bless his overabundant heart, could not by himself pick up the ball that David and then Tilly had dropped and carry it the remaining forty-five yards – who was he kidding? Sixty-five yards – into the end zone. Ben could not carry his debilitating twenty-first chromosome and the ball of paternal expectation. Hollis would not ask it of him. Hollis needed a grandchild.

  And yet, even here, David had shown no sign of ambition, living down to his sacred creed of underperformance at any cost. For reasons Hollis did not understand, David had been either unable or unwilling to close the deal with Mae. A woman like Mae was only going to hang around for so long, and while David certainly had the ability to attract women, he showed no discernabl
e interest of starting a family. Many a time Hollis had had to counsel Susan to stop worrying.

  “David and Mae are right on track,” he had said. “Marriage is coming. Grandchildren are coming. It’s just a matter of time.”

  But Hollis no longer believed his own words. David was not going to marry. There would not be any grandchildren. Not because David had concluded he didn’t want any children – which would have been disappointing but at least a decision to be respected – but because he couldn’t be bothered to contemplate his own future.

  There was nothing particularly new about David’s aversion to living with an eye towards the future. The Vanguard Academy had, after all, been all about David’s future. The Academy – Charles Compson’s OFSC-financed labor of love for the benefit of Ohio’s budding intelligentsia – had been the on-ramp to a door-opening glide path for David. And yet, despite the incredible synchronicity that had produced such an opportunity in the first place, and despite the extraordinary effort it had taken to convince Susan and David of its importance, and despite the incredible, college-tuition-sized expense Hollis had swallowed in order to reserve a seat for David in those classrooms, David had pissed it all away, thoroughly soaking Hollis in the process.

  The irony was that David had pissed it all away only because giving in to sexual impulse had, apparently, seemed like a much better idea at the time than his future. Now, all these years later, when a grandchild and the resurrection of the Johns family legacy might actually depend on David’s impulsive procreative urges, he could not be bothered.

  That David had been only fifteen at the time of his tragic misjudgment, or that he had vociferously, albeit unconvincingly, denied the allegations resulting in his ignominious expulsion from the Vanguard Academy, did nothing to mitigate the loss of opportunity. Neither the unaccountable adolescent hormones Susan had been so quick to finger as the real culprit, nor the imaginary stack of Bibles upon which his hopelessly irreligious son had sworn his innocence, could change the reality that a modicum of judgment – the tiniest concern for his own future – would have averted disaster.

  But no.

  David’s penchant for poor judgment had prevailed and the doors to The Academy had been slammed in his face. Tilly never even had a chance to apply. Who knew how she might have turned out? Who’s to say where Tilly would be now had she been spared the sort of associations that seemed unavoidable in public education. Besides that, Tilly might have had to work for her grades; free time as one of Satan’s minions a rarity.

  The lost opportunity to Tilly – who might have gone haywire anyway – was entirely hypothetical. Not so for David. Had he kept his nose clean he would have made it. He was already in; all he needed to do was work. But no. A lusterless public education at Wilson High School had filled the gaping hole left in David’s future like common seawater through a ruptured hull. His grades had been good enough, but nothing spectacular. He had not been challenged. They had let him coast and he had coasted.

  And goddamnit if he wasn’t there still, walking the halls of Bertrand J. Wilson High School, teaching history of all things, a pauper preaching the gospel of the dead and dated to a generation of star-struck, over-entitled, over-stimulated, over-fed, under-nourished, litigiously-inclined piss-ants sworn to a future of idolatry, uncompromising mediocrity, violence, and virtual sex.

  And what inestimable collegiate experience had Bertrand J. Wilson High School book-ended? Four years at Tulane. Four years not in an Ohio university. Four years not pursuing a business degree. Four years not apprenticing in the summers, forging new and important business relationships with movers and shakers, people Hollis already knew and, who either from their gratitude or indebtedness or simply from the strength of their affection for him, were just itching to give the son of Hollis Johns an early leg up.

  No. Four years in New Orleans.

  New Orleans was not a place you received a first-rate education. New Orleans was where you went to experience first-rate debauchery on a grand scale. First-rate corruption. Real, quality, top-drawer poverty and violence. Sex and drugs wrapped seductively in fat tongues of improvised, heavily syncopated sound, spilling in obscene displays of public carnality out onto the sidewalks where you were about as likely to be separated from your life as your money and common sense.

  David had laughed off such concerns, insisting that New Orleans was more than the French Quarter. That Hollis was over-reacting to gross stereotypes; implying an unworldly ignorance that was itself based upon a stereotype of the ingenuous Ohioan rube. The suggestion, typically tongue-in-cheek, was that Hollis had been self-sequestered for far too long in Ohio with other Ohioans, those severely earnest, doctrinaire, morally root-bound people who proudly identify with hard brown seedpods and who hotly debate – to the point of bumper-sticker campaigns – whether the state fruit should be the apple or the pawpaw.

  But Hollis had not over-reacted. David and Susan had grossly under-reacted. They had never seemed to understand that New Orleans was not an environment for learning. It was not a place where a boy can reasonably be expected to shake off the misjudgments and immature preconceptions of youth – a good shaking David had rather desperately needed. New Orleans was a place that reinforced and legitimized the very mentality responsible for those misjudgments and immature preconceptions. A culture that celebrated its own debauchery and that worshipped its institutions of over-indulgence is not what David had needed. Nor was it a culture likely to produce an education that was worth the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars Hollis had paid before it was all over; a figure that included all expenses without any earnings offset from his son.

  A beads-for-breasts culture – and that, ultimately, in Hollis’ opinion, is what New Orleans boiled down to – was inimical to higher learning and responsibility. It was not a place for preparing. It was a place for partying which, Hollis suspected, was exactly what David had spent his time doing. Partying. Drinking. Probably smoking the odd joint or two. Sleeping around. Sleeping in. Generally abusing himself and short-changing his potential. He had graduated almost smack in the middle of his class, and in the lower third of his fellow history majors. Although he was considerate enough to keep it to himself, Hollis concluded that the B.A. of David’s degree stood less for Bachelor of Arts than it did for Below Average.

  And then, suddenly, as if he had never left, David was back home, inhabiting his old room like an invertebrate inhabits an abandoned mollusk shell, not because he liked it particularly, but because it was available and easy and free. College had changed him not enough or, at least, not in the intended ways. He was the same David, there was just more of him. He was larger, ganglier than before he had left. He was a good eighteen inches taller, his shoulders had filled out and the shoes he left in the foyer for others to trip over seemed huge. His voice had dropped and he filled out his shirts on the rare occasions that he actually stood fully upright. He smelled bigger, older.

  He was not in the way, exactly, but his presence was inescapable. He used the phone a lot, much of it long distance to friends he had left in New Orleans. They all knew the number. David liked his beer. He liked his pizza. He liked his munchy-crunchy-cheesy-little-snack-things that might have provided breadcrumb-like clues to his whereabouts had he not been so ridiculously easy to locate. He liked his music and he liked it loud. He came and went at odd hours. He slept at odd hours. He watched television at odd hours but only because he watched television constantly – in his bedroom, in the kitchen, in the living room – and some of those hours of wholly indiscriminate entertainment were bound to be odd.

  He ate at odd hours but, again, only because he ate constantly and, again, with a disturbingly indiscriminate zeal. He studied for his teaching certificate in the dining room, books and practice exams spread from one end of the table to the other, often leaving the rest of them no choice but to either go out to dinner or to eat on t.v. trays in front of the Idiot Box, forced to endure whatever electronic pabulum was already being pumped into th
e living room as a complement to David’s study effort.

  David certainly had not asked Hollis to buy him a condominium. That had been entirely Hollis’ suggestion. David had seemed disconcertingly content to carry on the living arrangement in perpetuity. Susan, who was happy for the help with Ben, had not applied any pressure whatsoever.

  And so days turned into weeks, which turned into months. Only in rare, sporadic glimpses, a horizon of change would bob into view with off-handed comments from David that one day, once he was finally teaching and drawing a salary, he would save up to afford his own place.

  But such comments were too often dreamy and made of a distant, mildly aspirational longing, missing the sharp tones of urgency that should always accompany feelings of claustrophobic panic and desperation. On such occasions, Hollis often found himself staring at his son – who was usually draped languidly over the furniture, feeding bits and chunks of things into his mouth and more or less evenly dividing his attention between Hollis and the television – and asking something like And when do you think that might happen, David? Such questions, Hollis recalled, were certainly not missing the sharp tones of urgency that accompany feelings of claustrophobic panic and desperation.

  And thus, the condominium.

  It was not a gift. Both of them understood that up front. David had made a deal of refusing the condominium as a gift. It was not a gift. It was a loan in the form of a down payment and the first six installments on the mortgage.

  With interest, David had insisted. With interest, Hollis had agreed.

  The closing had been conducted in an OFSC conference room. Hollis had scheduled the event into his workday just like any other meeting. David attended, but only eventually, appearing in the doorway fifteen minutes late as Hollis was into his third fishing story with the closer and the agent who had begun to show signs of concern for their own schedules. David was wearing jeans, hiking boots and a black t-shirt that made emphatic demands on behalf of Tibetans and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.