by Owen Thomas
David had let Hollis do all the talking and had looked on meekly deferential as Hollis had signed the check. When it was done, they had repaired to Hollis’ office where Hollis had produced a loan repayment agreement to memorialize their delusional fantasy that they were entering into an arms-length business arrangement that required the repayment of a principle sum plus interest over a defined term and with severe consequences for default.
The reality of the document to which they had affixed their signatures, however, was that it more closely resembled the yard-mowing compensation agreement they had signed when David was in the seventh grade than it did any sort of loan agreement ever signed by Hollis Johns in the whole of his banking career. The interest was calculated to be Prime minus two. Payments were due on the first of the month although there was a grace period for the first year in which there was essentially no consequence for a missed payment, the rationale being that, in order to make the mortgage payments and repay the loan, David would need some earning momentum in a job he had not yet secured in a career he did not yet have. After the first year, or longer if it turned out to be necessary, the event of a default would hike the interest by one-half of one percent.
Five months before David returned to the place of his high school graduation, this time as a teacher, he had moved out of the house and into his own space. He took with him his bed, his dresser, his bookshelves, his clothing, his books, his stereo, his music, his stuff. Everything that had packed the corners of his old bedroom had found an instant place in David’s newer, more generous bedroom. The living room and the kitchen and the kitchenette, on the other hand, had gone completely unfurnished. Susan, citing the generosity of Hollis’ mother, Mary Ann Easley-Johns, who had not only purchased their first home in Dayton but had also furnished it, pressed Hollis for permission to buy some basic furnishings. A sofa. A table. Some chairs. Hollis had refused.
“He’s got to make it on his own, Susan. He’s a grown man. I’ve given him one hell of a boost. Now he needs to set some priorities and save for what’s important.”
David had, in fact, set priorities and saved his money. The first thing he purchased, at roughly the cost of his first missed loan installment, was a large color television for his unfurnished living room.
It was, therefore, more than just a little ironic and, well, irritating that, years later, David had trotted out his playfully sardonic observation that Hollis had adopted a Clintonian Model of Truth to disguise a secret affinity for, of all things, television. Ironic and irritating. David watched television and lots of it. Hollis, damn it, did not.
Buckeye football, admittedly, was a clear exception to the rule. Hollis did watch televised football. And he did watch the Ohio Sports Center’s Hall of Fame Highlights or The Ohio-Lights Show as it was called, which, as a collection of great and not-so-great moments in the sport of football, fell squarely within the same exception.
It was during the Tuesday rebroadcast of the Ohio-Lights Show, when Susan had left to take Ben to school, that Hollis had been struck by the sudden unbidden image of himself as he once was: a trim, powerful, flat-bellied, muscle-bound Adonis.
It was not the Ohio-Lights Show itself which had conjured such an image, but the infomercial demonstrating the revolution in lean muscle fitness that was the CoreFlexx 9000. The CF-9000, as it was called by a deep but polished off-screen voice, was a sleek, black, lightweight, fully collapsible, easy to assemble, surprisingly simple piece of equipment. It consisted of a minimalist lacquered frame; a sliding-pivoting-articulating padded seat; six arm-like appendages that swung up and down and in and out; twelve black nylon stirrups, one hanging at each end of each appendage; a series of lacquered metal hooks soldered up and down the length of each appendage and along each bar of the frame; and six, bright red, specially patented, tongue-shaped rubber straps with holes in each end that connected in seemingly endless combination to the hooks. It was as though an exotic, poisonous black metal bug with red warning stripes had swallowed a common rowing machine and then promptly flipped over on its back to digest.
The infomercial had rather prominently featured Katie, a young lightly golden woman in a high-gloss, honey-blonde ponytail, a blue two-piece bathing suit and spotless white tennis shoes. She was a work of carefully crafted fantasy, from her flawless forehead to her delicate naked ankles, missing a last name but perfectly equipped in every other respect. Nothing of Katie was too big or too small, too hard or too soft, too pouty or too severe. She was an association of gracious curves connected by smooth, taut lines. Her muscles moving like underground torrents, there and gone and there again, everywhere and no where. Her face a perpetual and delicate balance of strain and confidence, pain and pleasure, struggle and triumph.
Katie’s job was not to speak. Katie’s job was to be seen – to be anonymously watched – as the CF-9000 put her through the paces. Biceps, triceps, quads, pecs, lats, delts, abs, glutes, thighs, calves and back again. The voyeurs – millions of them – watching Katie from their cup-holding, snack-laden Barcaloungers, their perspective gliding effortlessly along two alternating 180-degree arcs: one horizontal, at ground level, moving from far left to center to far right and back again, and one vertical, starting at ground-left rising to the birds-eye view directly above Katie’s lithely pumping, moistened form and swooping down to ground-right. And back again.
Katie was working hard, breathing hard, sweating in an all-over body-glisten sort of way, and yet, she remained in perfect control, moving in slow, deliberate sweeps of her arms and her legs, stretching and compacting her exquisite torso, showing in her face and her eyes just how easy and fun – indeed, how deeply satisfying and pleasurable – it was to muscle train with the CF-9000.
Hollis, whose bladder had been in great need of relief, had found himself unable to take his eyes off the television. As Katie moved, writhing on the belly of an upturned metal weevil, an unseen man spoke to him calmly, encouragingly, offering a sanitized enthusiasm tempered by the discipline of science. He explained that the CF-9000 was designed by lab-coated experts with European surnames who understood that the power of resistance was the key to both muscle building and muscle toning.
The secret was in the specially patented rubber straps that hooked easily to the arms and body of the miracle apparatus. The thicker the strap, the greater the resistance, the more dramatic the results. And anybody, the man had said – literally anybody older than a toddler – could see impressive results in just weeks of modest use. There had followed a series of stills made to look like Polaroid photos. A professional man in a tailored suit. A college girl stepping out of car. A grandmother spiking a volleyball.
Katie had returned suddenly, in a sweep of Polaroid photos magically brushed from the screen. She was busy working out her thighs and her calves. She was focused. She was ecstatic. The unseen man had begun extolling the patented rubber straps, but Hollis had muted the sound. He had sat motionless, his bladder beginning to spasm, watching her move and breathe and glisten. Watching her model human perfection.
On impulse he had reached for the phone, dialed the toll-free number and recited the requested information to a man named Chad. What the hell. Sure, express delivery.
Katie had rolled over to face the black bug, honey-blonde ponytail laying between her bare shoulders, hands gripping the upper bars, stirrups looped around her ankles, pelvis rising and falling to meet her heels. Superimposed arrows showed that she was working her glutes.
The realization that Katie had reminded him of Bethany Koan did not occur to him at first. Something about her perfect little body and her tight golden skin had nagged at him, tugging at his attention until Beth was so powerfully in his mind that the association had finally porpoised up from the depths into conscious thought. Even when the association had finally announced itself, after the infomercial was over and as he had stood sighing in relief over the toilet – he still stood to urinate, he refused to sit down, like a child, like a woman, like an old man, he did not need to
sit and tuck his penis down between his legs to pee – and so even as he stood in relief over the toilet and the powerful single stream of urine – not a spray, not a dribble – a hard, equine jet of urine plunging down into the bowl, he still could not identify the nexus between Katie and Beth.
He had zipped up and washed his hands and had just returned to the living room to finish watching the Ohio-Lights Show when Susan returned. She had called out his name from the foyer and then disappeared upstairs saying something about traffic.
Hollis had turned off the television and picked up the newspaper from the coffee table. He had already read the newspaper, of course, but it was still within arms reach, right there where he had left it, and he was not opposed to rereading it. He would read again about the shocking Gulf Coast devastation wrought by the hurricane named Katrina and how, incredibly, there were some shameless opportunists beginning to exploit the tragedy for the sake of political mischief, attempting to hold the Bush Administration accountable for an act of God. The response was inept, they claimed. Looters and thugs were being slandered. The Executive Branch was racist. The Army Corps of Engineers were incompetent. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had farmed its talent from the International Arabian Horse Association.
All of that was certainly worth a second read. That and the business section.
But he would be damned before he handed Susan the satisfaction of finding him watching television on a Tuesday morning.
He snapped open the paper as she came back downstairs with a basket of dirty clothes. She set the basket on the floor and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Julia asked about you,” she had said.
“Who?”
“Julia Daley. Ben’s teacher.”
“Oh, Miss Daley.” Hollis had turned the page and folded the paper back on itself.
“She thinks you’re cute.”
“Cute?”
Susan came out of the kitchen, dropped a handful of dishtowels into the basket and headed down the hallway to the bathroom.
“You know, not sexy cute, just cute. Getting-old-but-still-functioning cute.”
“MmmHmm.”
He turned the page and folded it cleanly. He read again how the President had saved room in his remarks about Hurricane Katrina to buck up Senator Lott: Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house – he's lost his entire house – there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. Liberals, it seemed, were taking advantage of the remark to make the President look bad.
“Hollis.”
Her voice was plaintive and sharp, now ricocheting its way out of the bathroom and down the hall.
“Oh, honestly, Hollis.”
“What is it?”
“Criminy.”
“Susan. What.”
“There’s urine…it’s everywhere. Again.”
“It is not everywhere, Susan.”
“Did you get any in the toilet at all?”
“Very funny.”
“Maybe you’d like to clean up your own spray.”
“So leave it.”
“Will you please sit down to pee?”
“I don’t need to sit down.”
“Do you want me to count the splashes? One, two, three, here’s four, and five, although you could really count that as two that have run together…”
“Susan! I know how to piss!”
“Well… no, Hollis, … I don’t think you do.”
She had fallen into silence behind the hiss of water running in the sink. Every now and then a grunt and a sigh would tumble out into the hallway. She had made an unseen production of scrubbing walls and the floor and the side of the vanity. Probably the ceiling too, just so that she could prolong the sound of her labors for his benefit.
There was no need for any of it, of course. It was all theater; another opportunity to vent her irritation that he had fared perfectly well in her absence.
Susan, he understood, had liked to think of herself as the lynchpin, the saving grace, without which all that was around him – and even himself – would crumble into a heap of rubble and dust. To prove that point, she had disappeared in a pique of anger to a lesbian peace rally. She had, no doubt, expected to return to find Hollis exhausted, emaciated, soiled, on his knees, clutching dirty laundry in one hand and raw spaghetti in the other, weeping at the miracle of her return and begging that she never leave again.
But Susan’s wish fantasy, borne entirely of her own low self-esteem and her need to infantilize her perfectly competent husband, was far from the disappointing truth that he and Ben had fared very well without her. Life was as it ever had been, if not better, and with a great deal more freedom. Such as enjoying his wine and his music and meditating anywhere, anytime, and going out for drives while Ben was in school and falling asleep whenever and wherever it suited him, and watching the Ohio-Lights Show weekday morning rebroadcast and, yes, even reading Playboy Magazine if he happened to pick one up on impulse while at the liquor store.
Susan had extended her stay in Peebles for a week and he and Ben were fine. She had extended for another five days after that and they were still fine. She had spent the full three weeks since her return looking for ways to prove that he was incompetent and that she was indispensable.
The day of her return had been devoted to a rant about the clothes that he had supposedly ruined. She had refused to listen to reason. She had not, for instance, considered that perhaps she was mistaken, and that she had not actually told him to hang up the crème blouses. He had used the low-heat setting, just as instructed. He had ironed the knit thing, just as instructed. And, contrary to her need for drama, her bras did not appear to him to be particularly bluish.
But Susan had not been willing to be objective. Nor had she been willing to focus on practical solutions rather than hysterical blame-laying. She had refused, for instance, to simply rewash the blouses and the knit thing that she claimed were now too small for a toddler and simply stretch them back into shape. Fixing the problem – assuming there was a problem to fix – was not of any interest. Getting excited was all she had had in mind and she had scratched that particular itch with gusto.
So, no, he had not given her the satisfaction of defensive hysteria, nor abandoned his claim to domestic competence, nor conceded her indispensability.
Finding no satisfaction in the clothing drama, Susan had moved on to other make-believe issues: rotting vegetables; unmade beds; wastebaskets packed with – of all things – trash; plants he had been careful to not over-water which she was convinced were like dead sticks and which, with great dramatic flair, she had yanked out by the stalks and stuffed into a plastic trash bag that she slung angrily, like an iron ball on a chain, from one planter to the next; empty bird-feeders; and a collection of dead flies on the window sill over the kitchen sink.
None of those tirades, however, had succeeded in getting a rise out of Hollis. Indeed, such concerns failed to merit any response from him at all, although, as to the plants, he had tried to convince her that a little water and fertilizer should do the trick.
But again, Susan was not interested in fixing problems. She was interested in identifying problems and, failing that, inventing problems out of whole cloth. Accusing Hollis of bad aim in the bathroom was simply the latest such effort.
He had tuned Susan out – she and her sounds of exasperated toil – and had continued to look at the paper, not actually reading it but thinking again about little taut golden brown Katie, pumping and writhing on the belly of the same CF-9000 that was at that moment being prepared for shipment to his doorstep. He turned the page and absently folded the paper back, imagining her without the scrubbed-white tennis shoes and then without the blue bathing suit. He had felt himself hardening as the CF-9000 had become in his mind a kind of facilitative apparatus; exercise equipment made for tandem workouts and advanced sexual fitness.
Mutterings from Susan and then the flushing toilet.
Hollis had turned
the page, not reading. Not seeing. The CF-9000 had softened and widened into a queen bed. Katie had turned magically into Bethany. Beth! Beth who was his Katie. Beth who was young and perfect and full of it and who saw in Hollis the same perfection that he saw in her. The sight of her. Awash in cold moonlight, framed against the moody sea of orange-flecked parking lots stretching out in the blue darkness from beneath the window of Westin Room 713. Beth! The memory of her pouring over his senses. The smell of her. The feel of her. Her hair, teeth, ankles, her tongue, her toes, her fingertips, the perfect curve of her nails, the swing of her hips, her lips, ears, breasts, her mouth on his mouth. Beth!
“When you’re done with the newspaper,” Susan had said suddenly from the hallway, “don’t throw it out. I think I need to start lining the bathroom floors.”
Hollis had not responded, turning and folding back another page as though he had been too engrossed in his rereading of the Katrina nightmare to hear or to care about what she was saying. She had then moved on downstairs with the basket of laundry.
But she had taken the moment down into the basement with the dirty towels. The images in his head had dissolved into incoherent vapor. He turned on the television. A man in a muddy wooden boat was floating between cat-dappled rooftops.
Susan had been back for three weeks. He had waited for the deluge of detail about her retreat; her pampered protest in Peebles. He had told himself to be patient; to let it come. She would be full of the politics of war. She will have learned from her unshaven sisters in protest how to wear righteous rage on one’s sleeve. She would be refreshed in how to be bitter and accusing of everyone who dares to understand the complexity of the world, relishing every opportunity to vilify those who are not slaves to dichotomous value systems: black and white, good and evil, friend and enemy. He was prepared to hear the rehearsed, regurgitated, ad nauseum laments over George Bush and Dick Cheney and about how incredibly stupid she had been to help vote them into office in the first place, all without ever directly accusing Hollis of leading her astray but suggesting in every syllable of every unreasoned, histrionic word that he was ultimately to blame; that he, Hollis, her husband and the father of her children, by his vote and by the force of his opinion, was responsible for the Iraq War and the slaughter of innocents.
