Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  But in later years, when Hollis’ success in the world of high finance began to solidify itself as a reality – rather than as spit and a prayer masquerading as reality – Hollis began to explain Susan’s early attraction for him somewhat differently.

  Shallow physicality and the unfair head start had certainly been part of it. But he suspected that Susan must have perceived, even if only subconsciously, that his shoulder muscles disguised something greater within. Some part of her must have smelled the success for which he was destined; as though she admired in advance who he was to become, and what he was to make of himself. She must have suspected that her free-to-be-you-and-me, pot-smoking, protesting, neighbor-loving, Mother Earth-muffin, Age of Aquarius ethic was an indulgence of youth not meant to last and that it would leave her disheartened, unhappy and in need of a strong, sobering cup of coffee that she would be too poor to afford whenever the well-meaning delusions of that era gave way to reality.

  Hollis believed that something in Susan always understood he was her safety net, and that whatever happened in Cambodia, and whoever really killed John, Bobby and Martin, and whatever the fate of Dr. King’s dream, he would be there to catch her in the end, and that the end would be a beginning. Their beginning. And he would wait for it. He would wait her out. He would be with her on her terms until she was ready to let go. And then they would begin.

  And somehow, Susan had understood that. She must have. Something in her must have understood that he – Hollis Johns – was more solid, more enduring, than anything else in her life. She must have known that Hollis could simply see farther than she could; that he knew what lay beyond her own horizon. She must have known that she had the luxury to abandon herself to the grandiose delusions of youth as long as he was there to catch her when the unstable earth beneath her feet betrayed her trust. She must have known that he would be there to reel her back in when it was time to grow up. He, the voice of wisdom and maturity. He, the patient man who loved her enough to wait for her until the world stopped turning. In the meantime, she must have known in the unconscious way that we know things, that he would grow up enough for the both of them and would work uncommonly hard to soften the ground for their future.

  And when the time came, she did need him and he did catch her. He caught her and he reeled her back in just as she knew he would; just as surely as if she had been a prize rainbow trout swimming in Buckeye Lake believing it to be the entire universe.

  That their courtship was on-again, off-again, was not a surprise to either of them, or to any of their friends. They were too different to reasonably expect anything else. Every so often, things would unravel. Misunderstandings would harden, differences would sharpen, and they would argue to an intermission. Usually, the precipitating event came as a political discussion that devolved headlong into an exercise in comparative shortcomings. His naïve deference to the leanings of culture and power. Her hyper-cynical distrust of authority and naïve allegiance to the allegedly disenfranchised. His alcohol, her pot. His ties, her lack of underwear.

  They would split for two or three months at a time, each dating other people, always from their own respective tribes – for her, fellow student activists, thin, stringy-haired things who wrote bad poetry and masturbated guitars and talked a good game about the evils of the world; and for him, a series of slightly older women in the working world beyond college life. A waitress. A secretary at the office of the UNOH Registrar. A summer clerk who worked for the agency that employed him.

  For Hollis, these intermittent dalliances had always been undertaken, at least initially, with a peculiar sense of relief. The relief of solitude. The relief of not having to bargain for his own identity. These women – who in his memory were now but a single, apolitical, shape-shifting, not-so-smart amalgam he conceptualized as the women who were not Susan – had given him whatever he wanted, believed whatever he believed, without question or resistance or doubt. If the amalgam had had any ambition at all, a dubious proposition, then he, big-shouldered, college-educated, mogul-in-the-making Hollis Johns, had been that sole ambition. He was the answer to the looming question of the future and, accordingly, the women of the amalgam were believers in whatever he believed. Not critical believers; but grateful believers, drinking in every drop of attention he would deign to give them and, in return, giving him back confirmation of everything he believed about himself. The not-Susans offered all the ease and comfort of dating a gender-reversed mirror, not so much because they were genuine approximations of Hollis, but because they offered nothing of substance that might distort his own reflection. And this, compared to Susan Kimbell, made them easy and a relief.

  But, relief always melted into ennui. After several weeks, usually just when his relationship with the not-Susan was emerging into the realm of sexual possibility, Hollis lost all interest, his erstwhile attraction hissing out of the equation altogether like air from a punctured raft. As the not-Susan swirled its wine and licked its lips and found his ankle beneath the table, Hollis was discovering the intensity with which he wanted out. From that point, it was only a matter of two or three weeks of going through the motions before he got his wish, during which time he touted the importance of sexual restraint before marriage as a necessary counterweight to the out-of-control free love culture. The not-Susan amalgam always emphatically agreed, of course, not understanding that sexual abstinence would soon prove an insufficient counterweight and that all the virtues of a purely platonic relationship would need to be added before Hollis would be satisfied he was doing enough to save American culture. And then he would simply disappear.

  Hollis generally tried not to think of how Susan had felt about him during the intermissions in their courtship. Such musings always seemed to lead him into speculation about just how free Susan had been with herself in those years. Given the culture she tended to celebrate in those times, he wondered whether the intermittent freedoms from their relationship had meant freedom to explore multiple lovers; abandoning her restraint; ceding her control to the lure of convenience and spontaneity and stringy-haired musical masturbators.

  He knew that many of Susan’s fellow flower children desired her. He was not a flower child; but he was also not blind. There had been the looks and the gratuitous touches that no one could really disguise, even when he and his big shoulders were around. He also knew that Susan was naturally affectionate, trusting and dangerously open to the unscripted moment. Inevitably, knowing this about Susan led Hollis to fear how faithful – how experimental – she had been during the times that they were not actually seeing each other. Those thoughts, strangely even now, were like small, unpleasant currents delivered to tender places in his chest and he invariably back-tracked in his ruminations to find a more comfortable path through the maze of memory.

  But somehow he and Susan had always found a way back to each other, the intermittent dalliances all crumbling to dust, barely diverting them from a relationship that was destined to go the distance.

  He had been accepted, grudgingly at first and then as a noble act of tolerance, into her circle of friends. His inclusion would never have been possible, of course, without Susan’s good word. But the real truth of it was that Hollis had simply been too charming to resist. They were all good-and-ready to hate him, and his clean-cut athletic looks and his barrel chest did not help matters much, suggesting that, in a world in need of radical change, Hollis was far more likely to be a part of the problem than a part of the solution.

  But hating Hollis had turned out to be as unrealistic as changing the world. Affability was probably the greatest gift Homer Johns had ever given his oldest son. The old machinist, who had dropped out of school and struck out on his own at age sixteen, was not a smart man by any means. But Homer had known how to run a business in a small town. He had known in his marrow how to connect with other people and he had survived the world by his talent with metal and by the sheer force of his personality. To know Homer was to like him instantly. Hollis and his younger bro
ther Clayton, and his younger sister Maribel, all grew up with an innate understanding of how to revive dead John Deere combines and how to unlock the doors of the world with a smile and a word, usually strung together into some kind of apocryphal anecdote.

  Homer Johns had found the mother of his children without a penny to his name. She was the lovely MaryAnn Easly, whose father – none other than the venerable Ben Easly – owned Cincinnati Pulp Incorporated. Those who really knew Homer would have predicted him to marry up, and they might have foreseen that his charm would ultimately provide for a brood of well-fed and educated children who took after their father.

  So, as it had been with Homer, it was not possible to dislike Hollis. Susan’s flower brigade soon learned that Hollis knew how to tell a good story and a good joke. He’d argue with them one minute and defend them the next with equal vigor and one by one they understood that Hollis was one of those people about whom it is said, often in some compensatory way, that he would give the shirt off his back.

  The arguments, usually in the commons, or out on the lawn on the hill beneath Taylor Hall, or in someone’s room, were epic. The Aquarian flower children, assailing God and country; Hollis, advocating a degree of deference to the government that they could not stomach. But, in time, the differences in politics and intoxicants did not deter a genuine and mutual affection. To Hollis, Susan’s friends were well meaning and honorable, however misguided and naïve. To the Aquarian flower children, Hollis Johns was well meaning and honorable, however misguided and naïve. That, and they each claimed to their credit an abiding loyalty and affection for the lovely, spirited and infectiously effervescent Susan Kimbell. They loved her. And he loved her. Desperately. More than all of them combined, he loved her.

  When they were together, particularly after a separation, his life took on a glittered, hyper-oxygenated quality that left him feeling slightly out of control. Susan had an air of unpredictability and danger about her; like she would do anything; like she was so full of energy that unless she channeled it into some shocking or profound act of love or generosity or protest or anger or declaration of enthusiasm for living, she would combust into flame. She was easily the most attractive girl he had ever met and while that might not have been true in any objective sense – her eyes were bright, but slightly asymmetrical, her nose was a little large, her ears were a little small – he found her physically irresistible and her manner intoxicating.

  He closed his eyes.

  Hollis remembered those days like he recalled Columbus carnivals on hot nights at the threshold of his adolescence. He felt the covers on the bed pressing in over his body and he tested their weight – once, twice, three times – clenching the muscles in his groin until the covers lifted, albeit imperceptibly, near his waist.

  Susan had generally indulged his identity as a budding real estate mogul, and to some conscious or unconscious extent, she may have actually believed in the inevitability of his success. But Hollis was honest enough with himself – now, all these decades later – to know that his professional potential was only a minor note in the strange and beautiful score to their courtship.

  He understood that the underlying melody binding them together had really come from Susan’s genuine openness to possibility; from her embrace of every potential that life had to offer at that particular crossroads. In Susan’s world, there was very little slippage between what could happen and what did happen; between believing and being. Raw potential filled every singular moment to the bursting point, transforming ordinary experience into almost magical events – love under a full moon on the grassy slope beneath Taylor Hall; picnics under a blue sky at Miller’s Quarry; fishing the bounty of Buckeye Lake; skinny dipping in Colony Creek; weekend road trips to Chicago for the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield – magical events that linked together in his mind filling an entire era of his life.

  Looking through her eyes, even extraordinary things had been possible. Wise, prescient real estate moguls were possible. Teaching an antidote to poverty and violence was possible. A wealth with which to build charitable, politically conscious empires was possible. Landing and walking on the Moon was possible. World peace. Racial equality. He could love her and she could love him deeply and forever. Extraordinary things.

  …merican body-count in the past thirty days threatens to exceed that in any month since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Administration officials have uniformly declined to comment on reports that…

  Hollis turned off the alarm with a deftly delivered slap. Susan moved slightly next to him, but the rhythm of her breathing resumed unbroken. It was 6:30.

  He assumed that she had gone to bed the previous evening angry. Alone and angry. He had stolen into the bedroom after two o’clock, naked for having undressed in the hallway and, after laying his clothes over the back of the chair, he had slipped carefully, imperceptibly, beneath the sheets, as though he weighed less than one of the feathers in his pillow. Susan had not moved, and if she had been pretending to be asleep, then she had been convincing, right down to the slackened face and the softly burbling snore that tended to follow a bottle of wine.

  She had been full of it once, he marveled in memory. But somewhere back there – at some point unnoticed by either of them – Susan had surrendered. She had surrendered to an inevitability of her own making and now, like a fruit long since pulled from the vine, that inevitability was starting to show on her face, and in her posture, and in her walk. The way she brushed her hair. And ate her food. The laugh was still in tact; still like an open flame that could set fire to the furniture when she got going. The laugh and the open smile – the last to go. But these were very rare treats indeed; timid animals living in thick woods that could be coaxed out into the open only with great effort.

  If she had gone to bed angry, it was because she had indulged in the childish assumption that he – her husband – had abandoned her little telephone party to run off and have his way with Bethany Koan. If she had gone to bed angry, it was because she had cast herself in the role of Beth’s competitor and had then declared herself the loser at the hands of an unfaithful husband and her own adolescent imagination. Had she stopped for only a second to consider it, she would have known the very idea to be preposterous.

  It was not that the idea was preposterous because he was an undesirable man. He no longer had the swimmer’s physique or the wavy dark hair of his youth, and certainly not the starburst swim trunks, but he was still, obviously, quite desirable, even to someone like Beth, who could have her pick of any man she wanted.

  Nor was the idea preposterous because Beth was either undesirable or unwilling. She was, obviously, highly desirable – as all of his former OFSC colleagues, many of his friends and his son, David, could now attest. And as to willing…well, there were no longer any doubts about that.

  Rather, Susan’s assumptions were preposterous because they failed to account for his character. They wrongly assumed in him a lack of control and a certain baseness that in other moods, he might have found insulting. She should have known that his intentions concerning Bethany had always been honorable; that she, Susan Kimbell Johns, was his wife and that Bethany Koan was not his wife, nor his lover, but merely the daughter of a benefactor and friend. Where was the faith? Where was the trust?

  No. He opened his eyes.

  No. Screw faith. Screw trust. Where was her knowledge of his character? Had she simply not been paying attention all of these years? She should know him to be above that sort of thing. She should know at least that much.

  He closed his eyes.

  But, if she did not know, well, then he was not insulted. Her assumptions about him – if, indeed, she harbored such assumptions – were prosaic and a little sad. But he chose not to be insulted. For life was all about choices. Even emotion. Even perception. And he chose not to pull a long face and to be insulted. He chose instead to see his wife as a victim. Not a victim of a philandering husband – because she did not have a phil
andering husband – but rather a victim of her own insecurity. A victim of her own choices; most significantly, her own choice to be a victim.

  But back in the day, my-oh-my, how different she had been. Back in the day Susan had been anything but a victim. If anything, she had suffered from an over-estimation of her own power and independence. Naïve, yes, to a fault. There was no denying that. But absolutely self-possessed. A free-agent. Confident in her own sexual allure and, at the same time, disarmingly innocent about most things. She pulled you in; made you want to tell her things, show her things, explain the truth about the world. And you did it; chest stuck out, making up most of it as you went along – geopolitics, economics, business, cycling property values – deigning to explain the truth about the world to her, as she listened intently, tucking ribbons of silky blonde hair behind her ears, leaning forward so you can smell the faint residue of soap on her skin as the pink pads of her toes burrowed down into the cool grass, or down into the shore mud along Buckeye Lake, or down into the towels and clothing piled into the bottom of the skiff. You did it and she soaked it up and you felt like a man, like an explorer planting flags in uncharted territory, declaring entire continents of her understanding as your own and dazzling the natives. And when she leaned in to kiss you, pressing the warm flesh of her mouth into yours, pulling you forward, like you are weightless, pulling you down on top of her, down into the grass, or the cool lake mud, or the cottony bottom of the skiff, it is all your doing and all because of you, because you have shown her the way and because you are great and she is grateful and for a split-second as you settle over her and close your eyes, drinking her into your senses, it occurs to you that your heart is racing and that you have lost control, and that she has been leading you from the very first moment.