Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  The decision of his first-born child not to apply to a single Ohio school except for UNOH Columbus had been difficult for Hollis to fathom except as an extraordinarily gutsy move given David’s only slightly above-average grades. After all, they might have declined and then where would he have been? But, confirming much about the world and Hollis’ connections in it, UNOH did not decline. David’s letter of acceptance had been signed by Henry Cahill, Dean of Admissions, who had referenced Hollis as good friend and had acknowledged Benjamin Easly as one of Ohio’s great business pioneers, concluding that UNOH would be proud to share in David’s undeniably bright future.

  It had been a moment of tremendous pride for Hollis, warranting a confiscation of the letter for framing and a nearly immediate telephone call to Henry Cahill to thank him and to make plans for him and David and Susan to take Henry and his wife, Eunice, out to celebrate and so that Henry could meet David in person. David’s lackluster response to the dinner idea had been irksome, but not particularly troubling, for David had always been given to bouts of mysterious sullenness when came to acknowledging his indebtedness to others. It was not troubling, but maybe it should have been.

  David’s ultimate decision to actually reject the invitation from UNOH Columbus in favor of an invitation from Tulane – a decision that had come just one week before a ridiculously awkward dinner with the Cahills – had left Hollis mortified. Obviously anticipating Hollis’ opinion on the issue, David had mailed in the Tulane acceptance before announcing his decision. Just as the intransigent humiliation of the Vanguard Academy was ready to give way in the dawn of a new academic era, David had found a way to give new life to that bitter taste. Hollis had once again traded on his hard earned business relationships for the benefit of his son and, just as Charles Compson before him, Henry Cahill would shake his head at the misjudgment of extending Hollis a hand.

  It had not occurred to Hollis that perhaps David saw the Dean’s letter as an invitation for another Vanguard Academy-sized disappointment and had rejected UNOH simply to avoid the risk of failure in his father’s eyes. At the time, all Hollis knew was that his son had the judgment of a horsefly. In the throes of his disappointment, Hollis had strung together a dozen examples of David’s incredibly poor decision-making – from the decision to send his little sister into the van Susteran home after a football, to the constellation of a bad decisions as a student of the Vanguard Academy, to the confounding decision to reject a personal invitation from the Dean of Admissions to attend UNOH Columbus – all of which had seemed to come at Hollis’ expense.

  Of course, the expense of attending Tulane – including tuition, travel to and from the great state of Louisiana, and all the incidentals – far exceeded what Hollis would have paid for an education to be provided closer to home. David had charted his collegiate course taking it wholly for granted that money would not be an issue. And even though money had not, in fact, been an issue – for Hollis would certainly pay whatever it took to educate his children – he had had to quell a sense of resentment. Too often he had felt that his essential role as a provider was at best unacknowledged and, not infrequently, as when he used his reputation and his network of associations to open important doors, his contribution was seen as an inconvenience to be managed and out-maneuvered.

  Had he been less of a father, had he been less selfless where the interests of his family were concerned, he could easily have sharpened the point of his indispensability. He could have told David that Tulane was his choice to make but that he would need to get a job to defray the extra costs. But he had not done so, because it was simply not in him to do so. He would provide. He would shepherd. He would pay the money and he would open the doors and he would offer wise counsel and they, in turn, could take the money and they could slam the doors and they could take or leave the wise counsel. His children’s success in life would be its own reward, rendering all expressions of gratitude for his role in that success superfluous. And so, with Hollis’ full blessing, unblemished by lecture or recrimination, David had disappeared off to Tulane without need or worry.

  David gone, Hollis had set his hopes, albeit tentatively, on hellion Tilly for an Ohioan post-secondary education. But he knew now that that was always the thing Tilly was the least likely to do precisely because it was something he, Hollis, had wanted. Not wanted in a selfish way, but wanted for her. Had he been thinking, rather than delicately extolling the virtues of Ohio colleges, he should have been demanding she go to school out of state. Then she might have stayed.

  But, when the time came, Hollis had not let himself become too disappointed with Tilly on that score. The eye-popping tuition statements from Tulane had gone a long way towards inuring him against the distress of failed expectations in willful children teetering on the precipice of adulthood. All pain came from resistance. Wesleyan was a good school, even if it was in Connecticut. Hell, Wesleyan was, at the very least, a school and not the name of a new Rock and Roll phenom.

  When the admissions envelope from Connecticut arrived, he had extracted it from the stack of bills and held it up to the light and then taken it upstairs to Tilly’s room. He leaned it carefully up against the glossy red telephone, shaped like a pair of lips. They sat, as they always had, in a perpetual pucker on the empty night table next to the bed in which Tilly never slept. He could not tell its contents, but he had had a good feeling.

  He had looked around him at the room, marveling at the contrasts – from the poster homage to 1980’s punk icons, to the lace curtains and matching bed ruffle, to the volumes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Conner, Ray Bradbury, Anton Checkov, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and a dozen others, to the yellow, vinyl beanbag, like an enormous goldfish in the corner – a leftover from the house in Dayton before his mother had swept through in a fit of unwelcome refurnishing – that he had pulled from out of the corner of the junk room and given to his daughter when she was seven. He had marveled that all of it was her, was Tilly, and yet, no combination of it added up to who she was or what she wanted, whatever that was.

  The simple answers will never apply to Tilly, Dr. Swenson had said.

  When next she appeared, Hollis had followed her down the hallway to her room as nonchalantly as he could and loitered in the doorframe. Tilly, his daughter. Her long hair pulled back in a loose braid. Tan and clean and healthy and shaped suddenly like a grown woman, suddenly just like her mother on the bleachers at the pool when he had seen her for the first time, pushing himself out of the water, his eyes on hers in a revelation of everything that was to be.

  Tilly had casually picked the envelope off the nightstand and turned it over.

  “Have you read it?” She asked, not turning around.

  “I don’t open your mail.”

  “Not the letter. The story. My story.”

  “Not yet. It’s on my nightstand. I’ve got so many things I’m reading. Not fiction, really. I’ve got a variety of books that I’m reading. Some books on philosophy. A book on meditation. A book on the Buddha. But I’ll get to it.”

  She had turned and handed him the envelope.

  “You open it,” she said.

  “Me?”

  “I want you to be the first to read this.” And just what had that meant? So like her. The words honorary, the tone laced with a barely deniable truculence.

  “Really?” His tone skeptical. “You want me to be the first?”

  “Yes.”

  And so he had been the first. Dear Ms. Johns, Wesleyan University is pleased to offer you… It was short and sweet, promising materials to follow.

  “Congratulations, kiddo.”

  “Thanks.”

  And then, unceremoniously, she had turned and left him in the hallway with a lump in his throat and his eyes welling over. He had not even minded that she could see his emotion; that she would know that she had such a power over him. She could know that he was sorry for all that had gone wrong between them. That she had won. That whatever the goddamned strugg
le was all about, she had won. He had been willing for her to take that victory with her. And yet, while Hollis had hoped she would perceive and understand his emotion, he had not been willing – he had not been strong enough – to stop her and tell her those things. The opportunity between them had stretched and then snapped at the length of the damn hallway.

  Shortly after, Tilly had graduated from Bertrand J. Wilson High School in the upper three percent of her class, higher than her brother by a sizeable margin. After the graduation ceremony, Hollis did not lay eyes on her for nearly three weeks, and then only in passing as she picked up clothes and mail on a day when a late afternoon dentist appointment had brought him home earlier than otherwise would have been the case. It was a foreshadowing of the college years that were to come. She called home every couple of weeks, always during the day. She told Susan whatever she was willing for her mother to know about the life of a Connecticut co-ed and Susan, in turn, had dutifully related the news to Hollis over dinner when he returned from work. Hollis listened to such sound-bite dispatches from the front lines of academia with genuine interest but a feigned satisfaction. Theirs was to be a relationship by proxy and he knew it.

  Whatever the dinnertime reports, the telephone bills had suggested that while Susan faithfully related the news, it was also true that she was not relating the full subject matter of the conversations. Hollis did not believe it likely that it took Tilly seventy-five minutes to explain that she had a cold and was enjoying her 19th Century Lit class. No. They were spending a lot of time on the telephone and the dinner table reports were far too scant to account for all of it. The calls had become about long-distance mother-daughter bonding; an intimacy of listening that strangely had not been possible living beneath the same roof or in the same city.

  That Susan had evidently found a way through to Tilly was wonderful. Good for Susan. Except that it wholly excluded him. While he was off earning the money to pay for the phone bills, his wife and daughter were enjoying leisurely afternoon bonding opportunities. Worse, and more to the point of his unease, Hollis began to suspect that the bonding had taken on a momentum and an intensity that can only come with commiseration. The girls were really talking. It had not been long before the calls to Connecticut were as common as the calls from Connecticut. The calls to Connecticut tended to be much longer on the days that followed arguments between Hollis and Susan, which occurred with a far greater frequency and regularity than the calls from Connecticut. The jig was up the night Susan had suggested – if it is possible for one to scream a suggestion – that they seek a marriage counselor to introduce a more productive and supportive dialogue into the relationship.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve said all night.”

  “It’s not ridiculous, Hollis. It’s not. You’re just afraid some neutral third party is going to tell you that you that your drinking is interfering with your ability to relate to other people.”

  “That’s simply insane, Susan.”

  “Is it? Am I insane? Is Tilly insane? Try telling Tilly she’s insane for thinking you drink too much. Try telling Tilly she’s insane for thinking we need counseling.”

  Yes, the girls had really been talking.

  Tilly had returned home for three of the four Christmas breaks and one of the four Spring breaks. Whenever she returned, they had picked her up at the airport, Susan fussing and clucking and keeping Tilly occupied with the latest gossip as Hollis slung luggage off the carousel and onto carts and into the car waving off Tilly’s protests.

  When she was home, she reinhabited her old, all but abandoned bedroom, which they had been careful not to change in any way. That decision had been in ridiculous deference to an article in McCall’s Susan had clipped opining that there was no quicker way to alienate your children from the family than to invade and remake their sanctuary as soon as they were off to school.

  That had been an argument for the history books. Heaven forbid that he should do anything to alienate Tilly’s affections. Hollis had pushed for the meditation room that he had always believed would have put Tilly’s southern exposure to good use. Susan had seemed to grasp the concept of meditation, but not so much the need for a special room or, still less, the idea of Hollis actually meditating any time or anywhere. In any event, she was not risking psychological damage to her daughter who had not spent ten minutes in that room in the last eight months prior to leaving home. Alienation was not an option.

  Preserving Tilly’s old habitat had not kept her visits home from having a surreal, alien quality to them. Although Tilly was in the house and more present physically than before she had left for college, her emotional presence was ever less substantial. Her seasonal visits were not as a returning daughter, but as a short term-tenant; a bed and breakfast guest whose pleasantries had an air of formality uncommon to normal family relations and unprecedented in the Johns family. The roving social life that had so dominated Tilly’s later high school years had all but disappeared and, when she was not doing laundry or helping Susan cook or decorating the tree with her brothers, she spent much of her time alone, reading her books and listening to secret music on a pair of collapsible headphones she kept in her purse.

  She had been perfectly courteous, pleasant and helpful. Unnaturally, antiseptically so. She had not sought Hollis out for conversation or companionship, but she had not run from him either. She answered his questions about Wesleyan and Connecticut and her studies, elaborating here and there as a foreign tourist might elaborate on some of the fond eccentricities of the place she calls home; the place where she currently is not. Her inquiries of Hollis were but polite contributions to subjects he took the initiative to broach – his excellent health, his rising stock as a mover and shaker at OFSC, the possibility that he might be selected to participate in the 2001 Pacific Rim Banking Conference in Tokyo, his budding interest in Buddhism, his intention to relearn the guitar. Her glassy interest in these things – oh my, dad, Japan! Well, that does sound interesting – was just enough to satisfy the requirements of conversational decorum.

  When, in a surprisingly desperate effort to smash through the veneer of formality, Hollis had jokingly reminisced about the time when there had been no respect between them at all – I was thinking about that damn stereo of yours the other day, Tilly, and I have to say the earphones are a dramatic improvement – Tilly had declined to take the bait, instead smiling sweetly and changing the subject.

  The Christmas of Tilly’s senior year she did not return to Ohio. Susan’s dinner table synopsis had been that Tilly was using the break to interview for editing jobs on the west coast.

  “Editing? I thought she was going to write a book.”

  “I’m sure she will. But for now she’s into editing.”

  “Editing what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I don’t know if she knows, Hollis. Magazines. L.A. Quarterly or something like that. That’s one of the interviews anyway.”

  “Magazines? I thought she wanted to write books? What happened to books? You know. Literature.”

  “You don’t just start out writing best-selling novels.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just don’t.”

  “Is she working on one at least?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Don’t be in such a hurry, Hollis.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when she starts writing, God only knows what she’ll want to write.”

  That night in bed as Susan drifted off with an irritating lack of concern, Hollis had significantly downgraded his expectations for Tilly from best-selling novelist to career magazine editor, whose job it was to redline and punch up in-depth articles on the latest anklet fashion trends and the Ten Bedroom Secrets Every Spouse Needs to Know. His daughter was destined to be the person whose job it was to cull the split infinitives from the pages of McCall’s; like picking the flies out of the horse shit, he had thought.

  In his m
ind, he saw Tilly not as a beautiful twenty-one year old, but as a leather-skinned, chain-smoking sixty-five year old hunched over a keyboard in the blue glow of an editing cubicle, respected by her younger colleagues for her facility with language and her institutional knowledge of a publication read by teenagers and stage mothers everywhere, and remembered affectionately for the extra-salty personality she would end up affecting in order to cover for the bitterness of a wasted education.

  But, for all of his concern over the downward shift in Tilly’s professional trajectory, Hollis had overlooked the west coast connections of her first job interviews. It had not been a detail that stood out from the rest of the information he had been given to process and it was not something that in and of itself concerned him.

  But perhaps he should have smelled Hollywood even then.

  For it should not have been the job of editing, but the place of editing that gave him pause. California. Los Angeles. As he had since come to realize, Tilly’s future would not be lost to a career of menial editing, but to the plague of America’s entertainment culture. He should have somehow intuited that the California interviews were a harbinger of doom. He should have suspected that his only daughter was soon to be sucked body and soul into the glittering maelstrom of narcissistic whoring that rewarded the insipid, the violent, and the prurient, callously discarding everything and everyone else into the scrap heap of wasted humanity. He had failed to recognize the first small step on a slippery slope that led directly into the lion’s den.

  Before Hollis had fully perceived the reality of the situation, his only daughter, Matilda Leona Johns, the little girl who had hidden away in the basement to play submarine adventure with Greta the Boiler, who had won the Ohio Mayfield Award for short fiction, who had graduated from the renowned Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, who had edited the Los Angeles Quarterly, was baring her body on celluloid for public viewing and accumulating a carnal knowledge of movie directors – Hollywoodspeak for pimps – twice her age.