Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  She smiled broadly. “I’m lucky to have you, Hollis. Really.”

  “Well, I’m a resource for most of these people, and they owe me a good turn or two,” he told her. “We’ll grease the wheels with an introduction or two and then, if you decide to apply, well, you’ll be a step ahead of the game. Listing me as a reference won’t hurt you a bit either,” he added with a wink.

  He regaled her with piteous stories of MBA candidates, applying for positions with one of the largest banks in Ohio, who either had no idea of how to prepare a résumé (“He had written the thing out long hand on some notebook paper on the bus on the way over to my office”) or who did not know how to dress for a job interview (“dirty khakis and a t-shirt that said, ‘Give me Rossignol or Give Me Head!’”) or, in one case, a candidate who did not have enough sense to show up sober (“drunker than an Irish sailor on shore leave”). In each case, Hollis refrained: “I’m never going to hire a guy like that! Come on now. What was he thinking?”

  Hello, I’m Ruth delivered breakfast in a flurry of clattering china and a barrage of here ya’ go and there ya’ are, and this is for you and here’s your eggs, Mister Man and get you some jam there, Sweetcakes. The conversation between them resumed after an intermission of buttering and syrupping and cutting and shoveling it in like they had just been released from prison. Hollis could not remember food that tasted so good.

  “Were you the only recruiter for your bank?” Bethany asked.

  “For the last nine, oh, ten years that I was there, I was OFSC’s main recruiter, yes. It was supposed to be one of those duties that got passed around. There was another guy for awhile, but he never liked the job much, so it was mostly my responsibility.”

  “What didn’t he like about it?”

  “Phil? He was old for his age, I guess. He just didn’t seem to enjoy mixing with the younger set. Age is all in your head, Suki. Age is entirely a state of mind.”

  She swallowed a bite of waffle and gave a little laugh as it went down, smiling at him adoringly. Her beatific eyes were a blend of mirth and sorrow, like she had seen a puppy bump into a wall.

  “Hollis.”

  “Yes?”

  She reached across the table and placed her hand atop his own just as Hello! I’m Ruth appeared to freshen up the coffee and juice.

  “My name is Bethany.”

  “Ooooh! Damn. I’m sorry, Bethany. Bethany. Bethany. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  Ruth, still pouring, looked sideways at Bethany without moving her head.

  “Need to get you a nametag, Hon,” she said with a snap of gum. “Keeps ‘em from forgettin’ who ya’r over breakfast.” She slapped down the ticket and disappeared back into the greasy blue gloom of the kitchen.

  “Sorry,” Hollis repeated.

  “No worries.” She gave the issue a dismissive wave. “You’ll get the hang of it. So you were saying.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Mixing with the younger set?”

  “Oh. Right. I really don’t think much in terms of age, Bethany. I really don’t care much about how old your bones are, I care how young your mind is.”

  “That’s really beautiful, Hollis. I get dismissed sometimes, just because I’m young. Like I’m not worth as much as I would be if I were twenty years older.”

  “Oh, I believe that young people can be very wise.”

  “You do?”

  “Bethany, I believe that the soul is different than the body. Different than the mind. And there are a lot of very young bodies with very immature minds that are…” He paused, looking out over the diner to search for the right word. He came back to Bethany who was staring at him in rapt attention, “Inhabited,” he said at last. “Young minds and bodies that are inhabited by very old souls. I believe that chronological age has nothing to do with wisdom.”

  “I think it takes wisdom just to even…to even know that,” she said, not trying to contain her awe.

  “Perhaps it does, Bethany. I guess I’ve just done a lot of studying in this area.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, yes. A lot of studying.”

  “Like, about what?”

  Hollis poured a thin dribble of syrup across the remaining waffle, pulling the sluggish amber thread in an obviously precise but undecipherable pattern. “Oh, about the mind,” he said. “About the soul. About the philosophy of existing. Mmm…about what it means to exist. About reincarnation of the soul and the cycles of existence.”

  He held in his expression an unfocused, far away look, as if he were tuning into another dimension or regarding a spirit hovering somewhere over the hostess station. He blinked, nodded to himself, then again merged with the immediacy of his waffles.

  “Impressive.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if it’s impressive. It’s just an interest of mine. I enjoy learning about the Buddha. I enjoy studying the Tao. I study the beliefs of the Hindus. I read the Daode Jing. These are things that I enjoy.”

  “How can you tell if someone has an old soul?”

  “You just kind of know it, I guess,” he said finally after considering the question and holding her in suspense of the answer. “It’s in the eyes, Bethany. It’s a quality in the eyes. Always look at people in the eyes.”

  “Do you know instantly, or does it take time?”

  “It depends. Sometimes you know right away that the person is an old or a young soul. Sometimes it takes awhile of knowing them and interacting.”

  “Like if they’re wearing glasses,” she offered in a helpful tone.

  “Glasses…”

  “So that you can’t see their eyes.”

  He smiled at the practical, elementary grasp of the issue.

  “Yes, that would tend to get in the way, I suppose, yes.”

  “So when you recruited for OFSC, did you try to hire only old souls?”

  “Well, no. Being a young or old soul does not necessarily mean you will make, for example, a good or a bad investment banker or a good or bad mortgage loan officer.”

  “Hmm,” Bethany nodded.

  “So, I interviewed candidates with an eye toward finding those particular aptitudes the bank wanted and needed in an employee.”

  “I see.”

  “But if the question is with whom do I choose to associate personally,” Hollis pointed at Bethany with a sticky fork, “then the answer is that I always look for the old souls, Bethany. It’s not that the young souls are bad. We were all young souls at some point. It’s just that I have more in common with old souls. They’re more interesting to me. More enriching.”

  Bethany straightened herself, placing her hands in her lap beneath the table, and beamed expectantly.

  “What do you think about me, Hollis? Am I young or old?”

  Hollis leaned back in the booth, dabbing the corner of his mouth with his napkin. He looked at her thoughtfully, sizing her up in the narrowing of his eyes, holding the question, once again, in suspension. Bethany sat like she was posing for a portrait.

  “I think our souls are about the same age,” he said.

  “Really?!”

  “I really do.”

  “Wow, Hollis. The same age! Imagine that. Did you meditate this morning?”

  “I did. I had a very pleasant meditation.”

  “Me too. I had to try it after our conversation yesterday. How long was yours?”

  “Oh,” he swirled his orange juice and looked in the glass before finishing it off. “I believe I did a good hour, maybe an hour and ten minutes or so today.”

  “I only did nineteen minutes. I couldn’t sit still for any longer.”

  “Well, it takes time, Bethany. Time and patience.”

  “Time and patience,” she repeated.

  ‘Yes, you see, meditation is all about coming to peace with your own existence. It’s about accepting the world around you. It’s about not regretting your past and,” he held up a finger for caution, “and not anticipating your future, and about not judging anything or anyone i
n between. Complete acceptance.”

  “Living in the moment.”

  “Living in the moment. That’s right. And that takes time and patience. And I’ll tell you what else it takes. It takes honesty, Bethany. Honesty with yourself. You cannot truly meditate and, at the same time, hold onto false, ego-driven, self-serving notions of who you are and your place in the world. You see, the ego is like a stone, and as long as we cling to it,” Hollis crossed his wrists over his chest for emphasis and just a little bit of drama, “we cannot float. Meditation is all about floating, Suki. Floating. Cling to those illusions and you will sink like a stone.”

  * * *

  The dialectic on the virtues and preconditions of transcendental meditation continued for another forty minutes after settling up, financially if not morally, with Hello! I’m Ruth and resuming the trip to OSU. Abandoning the freeway, Hollis opted instead to coast south along High Street, unwinding its gray ribbon, if not lazily, then at least in a more relaxed manner in closer parallel to the sun-sparkled Olentangy River, flowing over the once bucolic, now quixotically-zoned hinterlands of Columbus proper.

  On impulse, he cut over early, swinging west onto Dodridge Street, past Union Cemetery, and then south again on River Road for the specific purpose of pointing out the Jack Nicholas Museum.

  It was a silly detour, really, born of an anticipation that the museum might just serve as a natural opportunity for Hollis to off-handedly recall placing third with Morgan Fairchild in the 1987 Columbus Celebrity-Amateur March of Dimes Invitational Golf Tournament. What Morgan Fairchild had blown with a drive deep into the ruff off the eleventh-hole tee, he had saved with three consecutive birdies and a miraculous putt that had been enough to finally slip ahead of Murray Rosenblatt and Kurt Russell, who, wills broken, were never able to catch up. Morgan Fairchild had leapt upon him with such exuberance and such a lavishing of hair-tossing and flesh-pressing public affection that even nineteen years later Hollis had not been able to leave the moment behind.

  But even as Jack Nicholas Drive and the brick and mortar Church of the Golden Bear rolled into view, Bethany’s education on the subject of the Great Tao proved too engrossing for Hollis to simply abandon it for the sake of a good memory. The museum came and went without so much as a mention as Hollis connected with Lane Avenue and headed further west towards the grounds of Ohio State University.

  The metaphysics paused briefly as Hollis parked at what he thought was the main administrative building but what turned out to be the OSU Buckeye athletic department.

  “Usually, they came to see me at my office, not the other way around,” he explained standing on the steps of the wrong edifice squinting into the sun trying to get his bearings. But as they leisurely hoofed their way across two well-manicured quadrangles to the admissions office, they resumed their talk of karma and reincarnation and the Buddha with fresh force.

  From the beginning of this meandering Socratic exchange, Hollis found that they had quickly fallen into a comfortable rhythm: Bethany asking; Hollis contemplating; Hollis answering; Bethany following up for clarification; Hollis expounding on the initial answer; Hollis asking a hypothetical question designed to tease out a nuance or an inherent contradiction that their heretofore elementary, entry-level discussion had neglected; Bethany taking a stab at an answer; Hollis correcting amusedly; Hollis revealing the elusive truth like a pea hiding within the hollow of an overturned walnut shell; Bethany receiving the truth with the delight and reverence of minor epiphanies; Bethany asking another question to start the cycle all over again.

  As they walked, Hollis removed his suit coat and swung it over his shoulder, hanging it on a forefinger. He felt a deep and abiding satisfaction that he could not entirely explain and which, in the end, he was simply happy to accept.

  It was more than waffles and sunshine. It was more than a sudden sense of purpose in squiring Bethany through the city and across a college campus towards her professional education. It was more than sharing what he knew about Eastern philosophy or watching as such beautiful truths revealed themselves, unfolding like great wings over a virgin consciousness. It was even more than Bethany’s obvious enthusiasm and gratitude for these things. And while he could admit to being drawn to her beauty and her freshness and her youth and the sheen of her naked legs that he had come to expect and admire whenever he held open for her the passenger door of his car, he did not think that this … attraction … accounted for the sense of fulfillment that eluded his understanding.

  It was not so much the ineffability of the satisfaction that was unusual; it was the satisfaction itself. Ineffability was, after all, common to a man who had taken of late to collecting obscure translations of the Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi and the I Ching; to he who belonged to the School of the Madhyanika, who studied the Enlightened Path and the Five Precepts and the Ten Fetters; and to he who regularly immersed himself in rivers of thought that defied all linguistic expression.

  Rather, it was satisfaction itself, an overall well being, that felt strangely wonderful and alien to Hollis; a well-being of which the waffles in his belly and the sun buttering the back of his neck, and the spongy carpets of bright, green grass underfoot were only a small part. But beyond acknowledging this ineffably wonderful strangeness, he did not question it or try to pick it apart or stare it in the eyes. He simply accepted.

  At the admissions office, Hollis shifted seamlessly from guide to guardian, taking charge of the situation, asking for the Dean of Admissions by her first name and, when she was not available, calling for the Associate Dean with a simple and authoritatively familiar, Tell Jack that Hollis is here to see him.

  As they waited, amidst avuncular small-talk with a secretary, a filing clerk, an intern, and three loitering students with undetermined agendas, Hollis managed to invoke the names of functionaries who had not been associated with the university for at least twenty years. He told the one about how Pete Havasu – Diamond Pete as he was known back then in 1988 – had hooked his own left ear trying to cast a trout lure into Stonelick Lake. It was a perfect self-piercing that not only pulled Pete out of the boat, but also explained his subsequent flair for stud earrings and, at age fifty-six, his new nickname.

  And there was the one about Barbara Wilcox, who christened the new Buck Creek Golf and Country Club by using a 9-iron to slice a ball directly into the left temple of the wife of the Mayor of Dayton, who fell unconscious out of the driver’s seat of her golf cart – where she had been politely waiting for Barbara to play through – and face first into the sand trap at the edge of the seventh green.

  And, speaking of golfing, there was the time he had beaten a Buckeye alum, Murray Rosenblatt, in a celebrity-amateur golf tournament back in …oh, what was it? ’85? ’87? Murray had been paired with Kurt Russell and he had been paired with, what was her name again, Morgan Fairchild, and…

  By the time Fawn Sherwood, the spindly, redheaded assistant to Jack Carlson, had appeared to greet them with the news that the Associate Dean of Admissions was in a meeting and to ask whether there was anything she could do to help them, Hollis had utterly conquered the room. Fawn, wearing red plastic glasses and smelling strongly of floral hand lotion, had to wait until Hollis was finished regaling and the laughter had subsided. Seeing Fawn, Hollis waved off the room with a wink and a good-natured, back to work, the boss is here sort of expression.

  And then he got right down to business, shifting effortlessly as he had a hundred million times in a hundred million deals for OFSC, from easy-going all-the-time-in-the-world charm right into that time is money and money is business and business is life rhythm that, with an assuring smile and an occasional touch on the shoulder, gets people painlessly through the fine print to the squiggle of ink on the bottom line.

  He was, he explained to Fawn, Hollis Johns, formerly of Ohio First Securities & Credit, a long time employer of Ohio State graduates and, notwithstanding his own graduation many years ago from rival Northwestern, he was a regular and enthusiastic
resource for the OSU placement office. He had long been accustomed, strictly for convenience sake, to referring to his alma mater as simply Northwestern, rather than University of Northwestern Ohio. It was, he told himself, a common shorthand among those with any knowledge of Ohio academia, and he should not feel compelled to spell it out on every occasion.

  “Northwestern is a very good school,” said Fawn in a slightly pinched gesture of non-partisan professionalism.

  But Hollis kept moving, undeterred by the not unfamiliar possibility that she had misunderstood. He was here, he told her, as a long time friend of Jack Carlson and as a friend of Gloria Gann long before she became Dean, to introduce his good friend Bethany Koan of Long Beach, California. Ms. Koan was soon to be a graduate of Columbia University in New York where she will obtain a bachelors degree in the field of communications. Ms. Koan is daughter to a very well known figure in the international banking world, a certain Akahito Takada of Japan, and Ms. Koan is now looking to follow in his footsteps with an advanced degree in business administration. Ms. Koan is quite interested in learning what Ohio State University has to offer in this regard and while he, Hollis Johns, had assured her of the quality of the Buckeye graduates that he, personally, has interviewed and hired over his many years at OFSC, Ms. Koan wished to make the trip and see the school for herself.

  Bethany stood at his side, hands clasped behind her waist, as though she were being auctioned. When Hollis paused to take a breath, she smiled, stepped forward and shook Fawn Sherwood’s hand.

  “Well,” said Fawn, “how nice for you to have Mr. Johns as an escort.”

  “Oh, he’s been a tremendous help.” Bethany beamed up at Hollis and back at Fawn, who returned a thin smile.

  “Can I ask what it is about Ohio that interests you? I know Columbia has a fine business school of its own.”

  “Columbia’s a great school, but I need a change of scenery. A change of pace. You know? It may or may not be Ohio. I’m taking some time to look at a lot of schools.”

  “Keeping her options open,” Hollis chimed, cupping Bethany’s shoulder. “Always a smart move.”