by Owen Thomas
He climbed out of bed and eyed his wife as he untwisted his pajamas and put on his robe. Susan was still sleeping hard, even as blades of new sunlight were slicing through the blinds and leaving long, bright strafing patterns up the covers and along the side of her face. Her mouth was open slightly and she was snoring. Her hair was matted and tangled and limp over her ear.
Hollis cinched the belt of his robe with a sharp yank.
She looked like she had been dropped into the bed from ten thousand feet up. But for the mucous-laden rasp of her breath and a low snore like the sound of a straw finding pockets of old, wet mud – but for these things, she was quiet and lifeless.
Hollis padded downstairs to his study and retrieved the straw mat that he stored in a roll behind the door. Then he headed back up to the living room where he unrolled the mat in its usual spot on the floor behind the couch. He took off his robe and draped it over the back of the sofa, looking through the windows before him out into the back lawn. Ambitious shafts of sunlight were igniting the rhododendrons and bleaching the lawn the color of young apples.
The restorative function of sleep was certainly important. Even essential. But one had to know something of the line between restoration and over-indulgence. Life was about getting up in the morning. Every morning. Greeting the day and whatever it had in store. Even on the weekends. The notion that on weekends it was permissible, even expected, for people to sleep in until ten o’clock in the morning was, for Hollis, a kind of heresy. For most of America, weekends were a regular mini-holiday not just from work, but from living – from consciousness. Weekends were like little opium dens of time tucked in between Fridays and Mondays where people kept the blinds pulled and burrowed into mountains of blankets and cushions and wafted in and out of a dream-laced stupor. Reading the paper in bed; eating breakfast in bed; watching the weekend sports shows in bed.
We were a nation of weekend invalids.
Hollis listened to the still of the house behind him. The refrigerator hummed in a low thrumming from the kitchen as its frozen-half dumped another load of ice cubes into the bucket. The wall clock in the dining room was dicing the morning into even, cylindrical pieces that fell silently upon the fibers of medium-plush ecru carpeting. The boiler fired up out in the garage, heating its hard, fluoridated brew like a giant industrial coffee maker. But while Hollis could feel his wife and his youngest son sleeping, those were all the sounds that reached him. The rest was quiet.
Two robins snagged and yanked his attention forward, hopping in and out of shadow; getting those worms.
Sleep-in Saturday was the lamentable precursor to Casual Friday. The slothful lassitude infecting the American weekend had crept like a slimy flange of mold or some unctuous tendril of irresponsibility, backwards into Fridays. Hollis remembered when OFSC had contracted the Casual Friday disease. It started, he had speculated, with an irrepressible envy of Kevin from the mail room; a good looking, world-by-the-tail sort of fellow who breezed through the loan and mortgage departments each day with a whistle on his lips, smelling like…what…like wet hay, and dressed like he had come by horseback. Beat up cowboy boots and jeans – a bandanna tied halfway up the right thigh – and flannel shirts and a braided leather bracelet. Thick, black, wind-tossed hair falling damply, halfway down his neck. Ever so unshaven. Everything but the ten-gallon hat and a six-shooter. Cowboy Kevin never actually said the words howdy ma’am, but the women loved him as though that was his normal greeting.
And before anyone could think to recognize that it was Cowboy Kevin who did not fit in – that it was he who was inappropriately dressed for the business world – he was gone, leaving in the echo of his whistle a number of young, immature bankers and their assistants who yearned for greater sartorial expression.
Sport coats began replacing suits. Eventually someone forgot to put on a tie and then someone else decided a sweater was an acceptable substitute for a jacket. Someone else decided to start the day with the loosened tie and rolled up sleeves look. And this continued for a number of months before the final stage of the Casual Friday incubation period, when someone – Vincent Meyers in Home Equity and Mortgage Origination – finally thought fuck it and showed up to work one Friday like he was showing up for a garage sale. It was enough to spark the open revolt. Thereafter, Fridays at OFSC were populated with people who might be bankers but who might also be people stopping by to ask directions to the Laundromat. It was increasingly difficult to tell.
Hollis, of course, had never even been tempted to relax his standards. Even once the disease had come out of its incubation and erupted in seeping pustules of denim and lesions of corduroy, Hollis did not buy the official post-hoc rationalization that comfortable employees are happy employees and happy employees are productive employees. He did not buy the notion of the friendly neighborhood banker, approachable and inviting in his cardigan and his dungarees. Hollis did not like the idea of professional bankers dispensing financial advice as though they were taking a break from cleaning out the gutters and raking the leaves from the back yard.
It was not a matter of being comfortable. It was a matter of professional propriety; of commanding respect from a position of self-respect. It was a matter of inspiring faith – inspiring confidence – not by being comfortably approachable, but by being professional. Who knows best about banking? Who should you talk to about investing your life’s savings? Who do you trust not to be lead astray by the illusions of equity in a leveraged buy-out? The one who is dressed like a banker, that’s who.
In this and similar respects, Hollis had always been the hold out, a bulwark against the decay of personal and professional standards. He had worn suits and ties to the office, every day. Just to make the point, on Fridays he always wore one of his black or navy three-piece pinstripe Hickey-Freemans. There was something about a silk vest and handkerchief that said fuck you to those who – out of vanity or ill-defined personal character – would care to follow the lead of Cowboy Kevin in the mailroom. At home, he got his ass out of bed early, especially on weekends. Although, now that he had retired, there really was no distinguishing a weekday and a weekend, a fact that made today, Wednesday, feel very much like a Saturday.
The patch behind the sofa was now fully bathed in yellow, syrupy light. Hollis had chosen to start each day here because the wall and the back of the sofa and the carpeted floor and the floor-to-ceiling windows created a small open box that trapped the morning sun.
He pulled his pajama top over his head and draped it over the back of the couch next to his robe. Then the bottoms. He stood naked in the sun and stretched, reaching up to the ceiling with straining fingertips, then slowly, slowly bowing to the East, his hands flattened, lowering to the floor, lower, lower, until his knees must bend and bend and bend and his hips must articulate his left thigh towards the North and his right thigh towards the South, separating in a yawning, fleshy ‘V’ so that his hands, thumb-to-thumb, can pass through the space down along his abdomen and down past his unencumbered penis, as the flats of his palms slowly come to press against the carpet between his naked feet.
The robins, which see him as a large, pale, unprepossessing frog preparing to leap through the window and out onto the lawn, hop off to look for breakfast elsewhere.
Before the inevitable lotus position, there is a series of careful, deliberate stretches that follow, Hollis painstakingly arranging himself on the straw mat in a supinated posture, as though a large, shaved, begging dog had been tipped over on his back; then fully extending each leg, in turn, skyward so that the flat of each sole parallels the ceiling – a sight which from the other side of the couch might have alarmed anyone who had managed to shake the somniferous spell of morning and wandered down into the living room. But humans would be spared the fate of the robins and Hollis knew this.
When he had finished stretching and was finally in place – bare buttocks centered on the straw mat, the little dry reeds leaving their marks, his legs crossed, the backs of his arms perched at
op his knees, each thumb drawing back its respective forefinger – Hollis closed his eyes at the warm pressure of sunlight and began his fifteen minutes of meditation. It began, as usual, with a self-congratulatory acknowledgement that while others were sleeping their lives away, he was busy expanding his consciousness.
This was a ritual that had begun a few months into his retirement, a natural outgrowth of his forays into the discipline of eastern philosophies. What had started as an intellectual exercise to keep his mind sharp and to assimilate new information and to keep expanding into and conquering new realms even into his retirement, had eventually manifested into a precise relationship with the universe. An understanding. And, for fifteen to twenty minutes every morning, he paid homage to this understanding, this blooming of consciousness, facing East in naked, meditative reverie.
Or at least on most mornings. He did make allowances for circumstances, or moods, inimical to the inner peace and oneness required of true meditation.
He could not, for instance, do any of this – the stretching, the meditation, the communing with morning – if he was angry or frustrated. Nor, relatedly, if Susan was home and awake. Not only was there the distraction of her interminable demands on his time and attention, her questions and commentary and petty concerns (not to mention the tinny clamor of cable news which she seemed to need in the morning like some people need hot coffee or a shower), but there was also the irritation of being judged by someone who did not know enough to understand what he was doing, let alone passing judgment.
The nudity all by itself would spark such paroxysms of concern in Susan – concern that someone trespassing through their backyard might see him and his engorged oneness with the universe – that she would not be able to help wondering aloud whether and why it was really so necessary for him to disrobe. I mean honestly, Hollis, she would probably say, is it really necessary? She would insist on a crash course, then and there on the nuts and bolts of meditative practice – her in the living room with a dishrag in her hand talking to the back of his head behind an empty sofa as the TV blares on and on from the kitchen about the scourge of terrorism. Not everyone does it that way, Hollis, she would likely instruct. I just don’t understand why that is really necessary. As though she were capable of comprehending such things in the first place. It’s not the nudity. Nudity is fine. I’m not a prude, Hollis. But there is no need for it in front of the window. I mean is there? Is there something special about meditation that requires the risk of exhibitionism? I don’t know. Maybe it does. Maybe. I’m just asking. As though she were even willing to understand or to do anything other than dismiss every practice or belief that had not already been sanctified as part of the mainstream pabulum.
Fortunately, Susan was a sleeper like the rest of the world and was oblivious to this personal ritual by which he began his days.
He cleared his mind, listening to the sound of his own breathing and feeling the rhythm of his own heart, waiting for that feeling of the walls around him melting away, his consciousness expanding beyond the patch of sunlight behind the couch. The feeling came after a minute or two, but then receded just as quickly. It was more difficult this morning. More difficult keeping his mind clear and not thinking about the time.
Each time he emptied his thoughts, Suki Takada found her way back in.
There was still three hours. Plenty of time. And yet, he found it impossible to not calculate and recalculate the minutes in his head. He was anxious for their day together. Pleasantly so. He knew this, acknowledged it even, but he did not know precisely why. It could be, simply, that it was something out of the ordinary – an island of purpose in a sea of retirement – for him to escort her to the various academic institutions Ohio could offer those aspiring for a Masters in Business Administration.
Or it could be that he felt immense pleasure in doing something to help his friend, Akahito Takada, who had asked him – he, Akahito Takada, had actually needed him, Hollis Johns – to help shepherd his daughter into her career. It was a great honor to have been asked, to be needed by this man, whom he so respected.
Or it could be that he found Suki Takada bright and refreshing and enjoyable. They had eaten a simple lunch together and it had been easy, fresh and full of laughter, as if they had known each other for years. She had great cobalt eyes that smiled with her mouth and he liked that in a face. He liked it very much. No scorn or judgment or even secret reservation. Hers was a face that offered simple and happy acceptance.
And, in fact, when it came right down to it, it could have been not just the pleasure of her company, but the fact that Suki Takada had seemed to find Hollis as knowledgeable and wise and as interesting as Hollis had found her father, Akahito. She asked him questions. Questions of genuine interest about himself and about what he knew. She was interested in learning. How refreshing was that? Someone genuinely interested in learning something new. Someone who hungered for knowledge and wisdom wherever it might be found rather than taking offense at anyone who offered the slightest guidance. He knew that Suki respected her father and she would, some day, respect a husband. And that, too, was refreshing.
Or it could have been all of these things, which, stirred together, effectively prevented Hollis from emptying his mind as he sat in his little patch of sunlight behind the sofa. Indeed, in his mind’s eye, Hollis was not sitting naked behind the couch. In his mind’s eye Hollis was not sitting in his living room at all. In his minds’ eye, he was still sitting in the back booth of the dingy little restaurant of the Zumstein Drive Ramada.
He cut short the exercise after twelve minutes. Donning his robe, he slung his pajamas over his shoulder, replaced the meditation mat behind his office door and then headed back upstairs to shower and shave and dress. When he reemerged from the bathroom, the bed was empty and made.
He encountered his wife in the kitchen amid the smell of frying eggs and Canadian bacon and the sound of Wolf Blitzer providing a retrospective color-coded analysis of the President’s foreign policy record.
That record, Wolf’s head was shouting into his kitchen, is dramatically different when viewed through the red-state filter than when viewed through the blue-state filter. CNN red-state polling shows that 72% of those surveyed rate President Bush’s second-term foreign policy initiatives as either ‘successful’ or ‘highly successful’ with only 11% rating those same initiatives as either ‘less than successful’ or ‘failed’. Blue-state …
Hollis slipped a piece of bread into the toaster.
“Would you like a piece of toast?” He asked.
Susan looked at him as she pressed a round of bacon into the pan with the edge of her spatula. It hissed and whined and pleaded for mercy giving up names and secrets.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning. Do you want some toast?”
“Uh…yes. Thank you. Did you sleep well?” Her voice had that tightly ascending, muscled cheeriness to it, as though the morning pleasantries were an empty ritual she had to make him endure because that was her thankless responsibility.
“MmmHmm.”
“Did you sleep well, Hollis?”
“I said yes.”
“Oh. Good. I finally just went to bed last night. What time did you get to bed?”
“Hmm?”
Hollis peered interestedly into the toaster. He left his place at the counter for the refrigerator. There he retrieved a grapefruit and returned to the toaster stopping by the knife drawer on his way. He checked on the toast again, fidgeting with the temperature dial. Placing the grapefruit on a clean paper towel, he sliced it carefully in half. He looked up to find Susan staring at him in fixed irritation. Hollis arranged a look of polite surprise on his face.
“Hmm?”
“I said I finally went to bed without you last night. What time did you finally come upstairs?”
“Oh…I don’t know. One or two maybe.”
Public perception of the administration’s second term domestic policy initiatives shows a similarly f
ractured picture. As you can see from the summary, CNN red-state polling shows that 69% of those surveyed …
“What were you doing so late?”
“Just things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Mmm… I have a number of projects I’m working on.”
“What kind of projects?”
“…”
“Hollis?”
“Hmm?”
There was a measured, counting-to-ten sort of pause that included the filling of lungs with bacon-scented oxygen. “What kinds of projects are you working on?”
“Just things I’m reading about. Things I’m learning. Things I’m experiencing.”
“Like what? What are you experiencing?”
Hollis looked at her sideways as he cut triangles of grapefruit free of their casings.
…from the Brookings Institute and Lorna Wilson from the Heritage Foundation to comment on just what these polls indicate about the state of the American electorate. Dr. Farnsworth, what is your take on these numbers? Wolf, I think the numbers show rather clearly just what can happen when the government lies, dissembles and plays fast and loose with the public trust. I don’t think it can be gainsaid that …
“Well, I don’t think I deserve such a look, Hollis, simply for asking what you have been up to. And why on earth do you have on a tie?”
“I’m not up to anything. Nothing that you would find interesting or understandable.”
“Well, why don’t you just try me, Hollis,” she said sharply. “You know, I might surprise you. I’m not an idiot.”
“Susan,” he said, regarding her with a look of labored patience. “I have interests. Okay? I have interests that are not your interests. That’s all I meant.”
“I understand that you have your own special interests, Hollis. Believe me, I understand that. For years and years I’ve understood that.” She flipped the second disk of bacon and jabbed at it with the rounded corner of the spatula. “I’m trying to have a normal, sharing relationship. Normal, Hollis. Normal. I would like to be included. I go to bed alone every night. At least you can tell me what you were doing in your study at two o’clock in the morning.” She turned to face him, the spatula helping to shape her questions, hitting the last syllables of each like a hammer hits a nail. “I mean was it more with your bonsai tree? Were you reading more about the Buddha? Were you…were you on the Internet? Were you listening to your music? Are you still building a … what do you call it… a wine database? Were you …”
