by Owen Thomas
“I’m not really just looking for a school; I’m looking for a place to live. I’d like to transition out of business school right into the job market.”
“Smart. Smart,” said Hollis. “I was telling Bethany yesterday that many financial institutions, OFSC included, have internship programs specifically to pick up the best and the brightest even before the graduation rush.”
“I’ve always kind of liked the idea of living in the Great Lakes area.”
“And so you don’t have family in Ohio, then?”
“No. My father lives in Japan. I was raised in California by my mother, but she died when I was a teenager.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fawn Sherwood, knitting her thinly painted brows.
“Thanks.”
Bethany smiled with a hint of wistfulness, as though she had traced this psychic scar so many times that it no longer triggered anything but the memory of pain; as if it was the pain she no longer felt that she missed most of all.
“That’s a hard blow for a teenager,” said Fawn. Bethany nodded in agreement.
“She was killed when her boyfriend’s houseboat caught fire. He was a painter so there was like a lot of flammable stuff that he kept on board.”
“Oh my,” said Fawn covering her mouth and looking reflexively to Hollis.
Hollis nodded and looked down at his feet in reverence for the tragic passing of a woman who, twenty-four hours earlier, he had been surprised to discover had even existed in the first place. He had learned of Bethany’s American upbringing the previous day, back when he was still reeling from the fact that she did not look anything like what he imagined. The photograph of the girl that he had recalled seeing in the home of Akahito Takada – the distinctly Japanese face he had expected to meet that morning at the Zumstein Drive Ramada – was, he had learned, Bethany’s younger half-sister, Fukima. Somewhere in the excitement at Hollis’ phone call, complicated by a language barrier more pronounced than Hollis had remembered, Akahito Takada had failed to make clear that Suki was not the daughter of his current wife, Izume, but his daughter from an early relationship with an American woman whose name Hollis still did not know, but whose blonde hair and Atlantian eyes were still readily apparent in the world.
“Except for the help of her father and the people that care about her, Bethany has been making it on her own,” Hollis said softly, offering a tonal inference of long and personal involvement with Bethany’s struggle that was only slightly more conscious than it was warranted. “She’s a survivor. She’s a credit to her generation. A real cut above most people her age and with more integrity than you can shake a stick at. And I’ll bet every last dollar I own that she is going to make it wherever she goes.”
“I have no doubt,” said Fawn emphatically. “Let me grab some literature on our graduate programs and I can give you a quick tour of the campus and our business school. Will that be acceptable?”
“It would be very appreciated, Ms. Sherwood,” said Hollis on Bethany’s behalf, the vitality having fully returned to his voice. “You know you favor Alice Hilcamp just a little. Did you know her? She worked out here in 1985, 1986, I think. Big skeet shooter, Alice. I remember once…”
The ensuing tour of the main campus, the student union, graduate student housing and the business school of Ohio State University lasted a full ninety minutes. The tour was, frankly, more than Hollis had anticipated. It easily dispensed with the silly notion that they were going to visit all of Bethany’s Ohio educational prospects in one day. Nevertheless, Hollis made no effort to stem the tide of Fawn Sherwood’s obvious and growing personal enthusiasm for Bethany Koan’s academic future. Hollis allowed himself to fall into the background as they walked, letting Bethany’s irresistible ebullience and force of personality take hold of Fawn like a powerful drug. He marveled at her facility with people; so open and simple and utterly guileless.
Bethany showed a keen interest in Fawn’s life story – her career in education, her children, the pharmaceutical marketing career of her second husband, the cancer-ridden pancreas of her first, her strategies for coping with loss, the mood disorder of her sister, her adulterous son-in-law, the boutique in which she had purchased her blouse, the lightness of her perfume and the apparent comfort of her shoes. She also asked questions pertaining to virtually every aspect of student life, university administration, curriculum, joint-degree programs and tuition finance that Hollis could have anticipated and many he could not, revealing an acuity far greater than what he had initially appreciated.
When they had finally returned to the admissions office, Hollis felt fatigued and was more than ready to return to the car. Bethany by contrast, from within her glowing youthful nimbus, appeared as fresh and as lively and as vivacious as she had appeared to him that morning, alighting from the stone wall that defended the Westin Hotel.
Fawn gave Bethany her business card, taking time to write her home and cell numbers on the back, just in case there were any more questions she could answer. On their way back out onto the quad, Hollis squeezed her shoulder in what he intended as a gesture of congratulatory admiration.
“Not bad, kid,” he said. “You sure turned her around.”
It was in the car, about to turn north onto US 23 for the trip up to Delaware and Ohio Wesleyan, that Hollis first opined the impossibility of completing their business in one day. Bethany shrugged, unconcerned.
“I’ve got time,” she said. “As long as you do, I mean. I’ve got two and a half weeks to cover Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, so…”
Hollis smiled at her.
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
He hesitated at the intersection, idling and smiling. He waited long enough to let an opportune break in northbound traffic come and go. The pickup behind them blared. Hollis spun the wheel clockwise and pointed the car south.
“I thought Wesleyan was… where are you taking me?” Bethany clutched his shoulder and laughed. Laughed delightfully. Laughed like a song. Laughed like the colors of Spring. Hollis swelled knowing that he had inspired such a pure, uncomplicated sound; like coaxing a flower from a stem.
“Hollis! Where are we going? Lunch? Are you taking me to eat someplace?”
“Yes, I’m taking you to lunch,” he said. “But it’s much better than that.”
Bethany bounced in her seat.
Lunch, such as it was, came from a hotdog vendor on a sunlit patch of Franklin Park. Bethany had two with everything and a Coke. Hollis, whose digestive tract was still working on the Belgians, had one with ketchup and a bottle of water. They sat in the shade on a slatted wooden bench near a circular fountain. A bird had left its calling card on one end of the bench, forcing them to share the remaining two-thirds. Bethany slipped off her shoes and let the green blades tickle the arches of her feet as they disappeared and reappeared beneath the bench. The bareness of her calf burned through Hollis’ pant leg.
They watched a dozen birds, sparrows and wrens, hopping about in their unconvincing nonchalance, looking for an opening should something drop. Bethany ate her bratwurst without a bun, inciting a feathered melee that caught the attention of more than a few of the jogging mothers pushing strollers on a nearby bike path.
“What does your wife do, Hollis?” Bethany asked, evening the score for an especially timid wren.
“Susan? She’s a stay-at-home mom, I’d guess you’d say. Used to be a teacher.”
“So you have a young child?”
Hollis could hear the surprise in her voice. What she really meant but was too tactful to ask was: So, at your age you still have a young child?
“I have three children actually. I have a son who teaches high school here in Ohio. I have a daughter who lives in California. And I have a son who still lives at home. He has Down Syndrome and so he requires a little extra attention.”
“Oh,” she said sympathetically. “That must be difficult.”
“No.” He looked at her directly, letting her read his face. “It really isn’t.
There’s nothing difficult about Ben.”
A trio of buzz-cut, Rockwellian boys had assembled at the fountain to make paper airplanes. Hollis took the third crash landing in their vicinity as a welcome distraction that he construed as an invitation for instruction.
“Boys,” he said, standing up and scattering the buffet at his feet, “can I trouble you for a piece of that paper?” The smallest of the three looked uncertainly at his friends and then tore a page of the thick graph paper from his pad and handed it up to Hollis.
“Thank you, young sir. What’s your name?”
“Brian.”
“Brian,” he held the sheet of paper carefully in the palm of his hand, “all of life is about balance. Did you know that?”
“No sir.”
“Well, it’s true. Take that to the bank. Especially airplanes.” Hollis articulated his palm so that the page pitched and yawed in circular sequence. “Left and right. Nose and tail. It’s all got to balance out. See? Imbalance will pull anything straight into the ground. But balance, young Brian … balance is the key. That which is balanced – he who is balanced – will float and float and float.”
Hollis knelt slowly to the grass, using the bench where he had been sitting as a table. His face was bent at the level of Bethany’s lap and he filled himself with her fragrance. Brian looked over one shoulder and the two other boys gathered over the other, elbowing for a view.
He folded the paper carefully, first in half, then quarters, then making triangles out of the halves and opposing triangles out of the quarters, fastening the symmetrical folds by bending and tucking corners. He made small, precise tears in the back of each wing and folded in tiny ailerons. When he was done, he stood and weighed the plane up and down in his palm. Satisfied, he handed it to Brian.
“Gently now. Just an easy push.”
Brian took hold of the plane like it was made of glass. He threw it directly into the sunlight. The boys gawked in astonishment and raced off to save their new plane from the bike path landing strip. Bethany clapped and swung her bare feet. Hollis pulled her off of the bench with both hands like she too could float and float and float.
They followed the path, winding through the park until they came to a sign that announced the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Garden.
“Ooo…what’s here?” she asked.
“One of the best bonsai exhibits that you will ever see outside of your native Japan,” he replied with a broad smile. “I love this place.”
“In Ohio?!”
“In Ohio.”
The Bonsai Room, as Hollis called it, like the conservatory itself, was a temple of glass held together by thin steel beams over a floor of wet tile. Narrow, slotted wooden tables, washed in crimson stain, had been built in staggered tiers to hold the diminutive trees in their little pots, arranged just so.
Hollis let Bethany enter first, sweeping his open hand through the doorway in a grandly gallant gesture. She smiled sweetly, letting her fingertips graze his chest as she passed into a fragrant balloon of heat.
They were alone in a forest of small and diverse grandeur: pink azalea, mountain pine, Japanese maple, landepan, santigi, serissa flecked in white petals, scotch pine, Fukien tea, yew, crabapple with bright red fruit, limeberry, spruce, western hemlock blown back in frozen limbo by secret gales, bougainvillea dripping blossoms of watermelon, wisteria with veils the color of ripe mulberry, ginko biloba, banyan, black pine and white lilac of such overpowering fragrance that the air tasted heavy and sweet. They browsed with leisurely reverence, giving each magnificent specimen its due.
“These are amazing, Hollis,” she whispered at last.
He tugged the sleeve of her blouse and headed for the back of the room. At a table in the corner, he knelt to look closely at a Chinese juniper barely twenty inches high. Its miniature wrinkled trunk turned in a gentle corkscrew up into a canopy that divided into six level shelves, fanning out in circular precision like a mossy staircase.
“This tree had roots in the earth before Ohio was even a state,” he said. “Over two hundred years old. Thomas Jefferson was still wiping his nose on his sleeve.”
Bethany lowered herself beside him. “Amazing,” she said, still in a whisper.
“Boy, if trees could talk.” Hollis pointed to a spot near the base of the trunk. “The War of 1812 was probably about here. Civil War, here. The Wright Brothers. World War I. World War II. Korea, here. Viet Nam. The moon landing. Watergate, here. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall. Desert Storm, here. God this is a beautiful tree.”
“Incredible. Just… it’s so perfect. So elemental. So simple and magnificent at the same time. And so… I don’t know. It’s like …” Bethany paused.
“What?”
“It’s like looking at something very far away. Like looking through the wrong end of binoculars. You know? They make me feel so…”
He let her words die off into silence, then he nodded, as if to himself, staring deeply into the tree. “Yes. Yes. I am a student of the bonsai.”
“Really?” she said, sounding impressed. “How many do you have?”
“Oh, several,” he replied, thinking that the number of trees was unimportant.
“Wow. Like, you prune them, or…?”
“Prune them, yes. And study them. Learn from them. You can learn a lot from a tree that has lived through two centuries.”
“Like what?”
He smiled from far away, from within a fog of mystery and ineffable truth. A fog – in the sense of an obscuring, vaporous veil – only to those on the outside looking in; those who, either because they lacked the knowledge, the ability or the will, did not understand the sorts of certainties that he had been able to apprehend. It was a fog his wife hated and foolishly confused with the effects of over-indulgence. That, at least, was her way of feeling better about not understanding. Blame the wine. Blame his consumption for her inability to comprehend. Suki – Bethany – was a student; not incapable, just unknowing. Refreshingly so. Unknowing, but so earnest and so willing to follow the sound of his voice; blindly at first, but learning fast.
“Oh,” he said, standing and moving on, “life. The process of living. Our relationship to nature. Existence.”
“Really? Existence?”
“Yes. Mmm Hmm.”
“How…”
“Understanding the bonsai is complicated. It’s quite complicated.”
Bethany studied the tree a moment longer, as if looking for the complexity.
They moved in silence through the remaining gardens of the conservatory, through deserts and rainforests, into the mountains and across islands of the Pacific, walking the Earth as though the planet had been shrunk to eliminate everything but its arboreal and botanical essence.
The last room on their tour was an open courtyard where the sunlight was at last set free of its cage of glass and allowed to mix with the unseasonably warm September air. According to a sign in the doorway, the sizeable courtyard space was devoted to a wandering, labyrinthine exhibit sponsored by the Columbus Topiary Society. Luxuriant protrusions of boxwood, myrtle, ivy and creeping fig had been shaped and intricately tooled with the hardened precision of granite. Verdant likenesses of animals and buildings and automobiles were grouped in thematic neighborhoods. Plants had been sculpted to look like people; like stuffed toys; like other plants.
Bethany moved her hand listlessly over the head of a miniature green elephant. They slowly passed a gazelle, only two steps away from the outstretched paw of a lioness; claws of defoliated twig almost piercing leafy green flesh.
Bethany was looking but not looking, her perfect features now slightly slack and vacant. She stopped abruptly and stared at him, her mind suddenly re-inhabiting her face.
“Sad,” she said.
“What.”
“That’s the feeling I was looking for. They make me feel so sad, Hollis.”
“What does?”
“The bonsai. It’s not just that they’re small. They�
�re alone. They’re so…I don’t know… isolated in their own little worlds. I mean, it’s a tree, but it’s a tree that normal trees could not possibly understand or relate to. It’s like … it’s like the essence of a tree. You know, Hollis? A perfect tree that has sacrificed everything in order to live as an essence. Those pots are like … like little painted prisons.”
A woman pushing a stroller after her twin children entered the garden of topiaries, the boy and the girl scampering and exclaiming from one likeness to the next.
“A lion, mom! Look! A lion!”
“He’s gonna eat the deer mommy.”
“Don’t touch, Jenny. I won’t tell you again.”
“I want to pet the deer.”
“No touching, honey. It’s a gazelle. Let’s not bother these people. This way.”
“Why did the deer …mom… why did the deer get so close to the lion?”
“He didn’t know any better. Let’s go this way.”
The wind picked up, smelling of autumn and cooling the sun. Hollis held out his hand. Bethany accepted the invitation easily and with a smile, and she did not let go until they were back at the car.
CHAPTER 13 – David
The bulldog is plastic. Of this I am certain.
What is less clear from my vantage point is whether this particular breed of plastic bulldog is of the spring-loaded bobble-headed variety.
It is up on all fours, glowering at me with beady, unrelenting eyes that ask me whether I am a man with nerve enough to find out for myself whether he is, in fact, a bobble-headed bulldog. His black and white muzzle – perfectly motionless – just clears and overhangs the walnut nameplate of Principal Robert B. Robertson, III.
I fix on the name. So there are more of them. There’s a junior and an original too.
He is a mascot, this pug-nosed canine. A genuine Georgia Bulldog. I deduce this from the red banners and pennants – GEORGIA – GO GEORGIA! – GET ‘EM BULLDOGS! – plastering the office wall space between the framed diplomas and the many photographs of severely attractive family members. A couple of college-aged girls; at the beach, on a mountain with skis over their shoulders, at a restaurant twisting their necks grotesquely to get a look behind them at whoever has called their names. A wife at the dinner table. Coming out of a swimming pool. Cleaning a fish. A mother, or a mother-in-law, whose thinning lips appear to have been immortalized in mid-expletive as she stands in a doorway.
