Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  But his mood had collapsed again at the disapproving, bordering on disgusted, expression of Miss Daley who, at roughly forty minutes into her lesson plan, had greeted them at the threshold of the classroom. Without a word, Miss Daley had followed the fat-slickened scent of Ben’s lunch down to the grease-stained paper bag in his hand, and then, as Ben had charged triumphantly past her into the heart of the class like a conquering hero with a chest full of gold doubloons, she had looked up at Hollis with hardened eyes that said that all of her lowest expectations about him – the things Susan had warned her about – had just been confirmed.

  Hollis had not intended to pay Ms. Daley’s breasts any notice; not the left one and not the right one. And he had known better, of course, than to flirt. Neither the wink, nor the pat on the shoulder, had been intended as flirtatious. If anything, they were reflexive. If anything, they were innocuous gestures meant to encourage forgiveness or at least a measure of understanding. But, whatever they were, they were not helpful. He had been dismissed with a curt, perfunctory smile and a toss of blonde hair.

  Damn it, Susan.

  The drive home had seen a seamless escalation from peevishness to outright anger, imaginary arguments raging in his head. And you have the nerve to call me selfish? Me? You think that I don’t take responsibility for anything? Really? Really, Susan? Well what about you, damn it? What about you?

  At the corner of 68th and Shawnee Road, he had come out of his head just in time to avoid rear-ending a woman on a motorcycle who, for a split second he had imagined was Gayle. He slammed on the brakes and thrust his hand at the steering wheel for the horn. His hand missed the horn, but the tires sounded off sharply against the pavement. The woman turned around and glared, pulling her sunglasses down with a finger. Hollis pointed angrily at the stoplight in front of her, which at that very second had turned green. The woman, who was much younger and prettier than Gayle, flipped him off and roared away.

  God damn it, Susan.

  But by the time he had pulled into the driveway, anger had given itself over to something dark and slow and empty that he could not name and that he could only measure as the absence of other more obvious feelings. Now he sat on the bed and stared across the bedroom to the pillow of grey light pushing up against the curtains that he had never bothered to open.

  He wondered where she was. He wondered if she was happy. If she was enjoying herself and, if so, who was with her, around her, sharing in that joy? Was she laughing? Were they all laughing? Did she feel relieved to be free, away from home, off living the life without anyone looking over her shoulder? Pretending she was still twenty years old? Who the hell wouldn’t? Who didn’t want that kind of fantasy freedom? Wanting it wasn’t really the point. Having the gall, having the nerve, to simply throw all responsibility to the wind and go off chasing that which she wanted – screw the family, screw dignity, screw reputation, screw all reasonable limits, drugs, sex, whatever – that was the point. The audacity of it all was the point. To accuse him of reading Playboy, and to do so from within a marijuana cloud; to accuse him of infidelity as she writes a love-letter to Gayle; to accuse him of irresponsibility and self-absorption and then just storm out of the house for god knows where or for how long – days? Weeks? Like a teenager. Like Tilly for Chrissakes. That was the damn point.

  What Susan conveniently refused to recognize was that it was he, Hollis, her husband, who made her little flight from reality possible. She was counting on him to be rational and stable and dependable so that her real life, the life they had spent decades building and that she surely wanted to preserve, would not fall apart while she was off debauching. How convenient for her that he was around and could be counted on to not go crazy, to not start dropping acid and masturbating to Allen Ginsberg and wiping his ass with the American flag. How fortunate for Susan that Hollis – good ol’ unreliable, philandering, Playboy-reading, self-absorbed, wife neglecting, child abusing, alcoholic Hollis – could be counted on to mind the fort as she was off living the life.

  Hollis realized, rather suddenly, that the slow, dark emotional void he had felt when he first sat down on the bed was now filling, had filled, was spilling over, with a liberating sense of entitlement. If it was okay for Susan… then by God why was it not okay for him? If she was suddenly free to throw all adult, responsible standards of conduct to the wind; if she was free to do more than talk about it, think about it, fantasize about it; if she was going to do things like drop everything and walk out of the house to smoke doobie and ride on the back of motorcycles and get a little action; if that was the new order of the day… well then… damn it… why should he be left at home to count the dust motes and keep up appearances?

  Hollis clutched the edge of the bed with his fingertips. He listened. At the outer edge of his hearing was a lawn mower droning in rectangles across the street. Voices called. Cars passed. Closer in was the sound of silence; the sound of an utterly empty home. The sound of freedom.

  He stood up, grimacing at the pain in his upper thighs, but with a new, even if not entirely defined, sense of purpose. He took off his shirt and his pants and his underwear and his socks, leaving them in a heap on the middle of the bedroom floor. Slovenly? Yes. Childish? Irresponsible? Definitely. Did he care? Absolutely not.

  He toured the house, top to bottom, utterly naked. All of the front blinds were still drawn, but had they not been drawn, had they been open to the neighbors and to the entire world, he thought to himself that he would not have cared in the least. These were the new rules. It was now permitted for one to do whatever she – or he – pleased, without any consequence. He poured himself a glass of Chablis, sat naked at the dining room table and worked on the crossword puzzle. The crossword puzzle! Something he never did. Ever. What time was it? 12:30 in the afternoon? Good. Great. He did not give a shit about the time.

  He wandered out into the living room and stretched out on the sofa, the white expanse of his lower body unfurling heavily off into the near distance over Susan’s floral throw pillows like a great fleshy tongue flopped out in the middle of a garden waiting for raindrops. Anyone peering into the living room through the drawn curtains would surely have marveled at the odd tableau, a challenging homage to 17th Century Flemish masters; the rubenesque beauty of Venus in the Mirror, here, now, strangely, was the retired American male commercial banker equivalent: Hollis on the Couch.

  He turned on the television and set his thumb to work flitting up and down the stations, finding nothing much to hold his interest but watching television anyway. He was playing by new rules now. Decadence was now its own value.

  …can be angry at me if you want to. You can claim that I, Mike O’Donnell, am part of the problem. Except that I’m not the one undermining our troops, am I? I’m not the one like Cindy Sheehan and all of her pinheaded acolytes that act without regard to the fact that we have tens of thousands of U.S. troops out there up to their you-know-what in sand and angry terrorists. Okay? So you can try to blame…

  He turned off the television and went into the kitchen where he rummaged through the cupboards and dug into boxes of crackers and then a box of cinnamon-wafer cookies. He ate a handful of Ben’s favorite cereal. He took a bite from a bar of chocolate. Savored it. It pleased him so much he took another bite and then a third bite before the second bite was really finished. He opened the refrigerator and took out the peanut butter that should have been part of Ben’s lunch. He opened the jar and broke off another large piece of chocolate and rammed the chocolate into the jar like it was a spoon. He pulled it out again and looked at it up close, inspected it, licked a ridge of peanut butter from his finger, and then he put the whole thing in his mouth, forcing his lips out and over the end of the bar. As he did, the tail of peanut butter flopped out onto his chin, as though he had eaten a sand-toned lizard.

  It made for slow, sticky chewing, but it was delicious. He left the rest of the chocolate and the open jar of peanut butter on the counter, there to be discovered by someone who care
d; someone who gave a damn. He, certainly, did not give a damn.

  He grabbed his wine and went downstairs to his den, smacking his lips and grimacing on each step as his legs negotiated his concessions to gravity eight small, painful inches at a time. He closed the den door out of instinct but then opened it again when he remembered that there was no one home to disturb him. He sat down at the desk, rotating in his chair, left and right, back and forth, back and forth, surveying the room around him. He closed one eye and held the wine glass up to the other eye. He swiveled; left and right, back and forth, back and forth. He was a fish in a bowl of dry, champagne-colored, slightly fruity water. He looked at his books, at his tower of music, at his naked foot, all on the far side of a thin curvature of glass; these things not on the inside with him but, this time, on the outside, all suddenly alien, all suddenly inexplicable to him.

  He leaned forward and put the glass on the desk and crossed his arms over his bare chest and then leaned back again, this time as far back as the chair would allow so that his feet rose up off the floor. His penis repositioned itself, flopping along the crease in his lap to point up to the shelves above and behind him; as if, in all of its sudden and wonderful freedom it was selecting something to read.

  Hollis wondered what she was doing. He tried to imagine her. Tried to picture her. Sitting in the grass or at a picnic table. Or in some dirty basement or meeting hall, strewn with ratty furniture and greasy pizza boxes. She is surrounded by her rabble-rousing friends. Music of the revolution is playing over and over and over. They are plotting, confessing, unburdening themselves. Building that false solidarity; that unassailable allegiance that must be fortified with drugs and sex and artistic delusion and apocryphal stories. Family stories. Husband stories. They are armoring against the world; indulging grandiose machinations to defeat a common enemy. She and her so-called “friends.” That confederacy of dunces. That collection of reality refugees taking shelter from the real world, flattering themselves as… as… what… as part of a diaspora of conscientious objectors, driven from their lives by an evil government and mainstream heterosexual overlords. It was not difficult to picture. He had seen it all before. He had lived it all before. Been there, done that, as they say.

  He had always let Susan own the calling to protest injustice. To organize, to fight, to march, to chant, to be angry and indignant at the status quo. From the very beginning, he had let her claim that mantle as her own. Without challenge or usurpation or even dilution by sharing. In the beginning, she had used that identity to hold him at a distance. He was free to watch the Kent State Flower Children, admire them, support them, spar with them, party with them, but he could never truly join them. Intuitively, he had always understood that. The revolution was her thing. If it became his thing, really his thing, along with everything else in their courtship that was his thing, then Susan feared she would lose herself utterly. She feared that she would be subsumed and that she would disappear as a separate person.

  She never said that, of course. But he had gotten the message loud and clear anyway. So he had let her have her special identity. He had not challenged her authority; her claim to self. He had not tried to walk with her on that particular path. She had fancied herself as an irresistible, bare-footed avatar of the coming new order; a leader of others; seductress to the uninitiated. That was who she wanted to be for him.

  And she had been. She had been.

  But she was not the first. Susan had not been the first cultural revolutionary to spellbind him; to mesmerize him with that potent combination of incredible beauty and fearless purpose. Susan never knew this – because he had never told her. Never told her that he had marched in the revolution before she had ever painted her first sign. Never told her about Minnie Watson; about wanting to lie down in the street for her; about wanting to tear out the heart of the establishment and to hold it aloft, still beating, just so that Minnie Watson might notice; about his willingness, his eagerness, to be beaten and locked up just so that Minnie Watson might smile and thank him.

  Minnie Watson. Hollis gave a silent chuckle. My God. How long had it been since he had thought about Minnie Watson? Decades. It had been … decades.

  He had not, then, been uninitiated in matters of revolution. But he had let Susan think so. Counterculture politics was her thing and he had let it be her thing. He had played the role of the besotted hanger-on. The enthralled spectator. The adoring fan who could never do what she did: taking on the world; taking to the streets; getting it said. His enthrallment was genuine. There had been no acting in that regard. But the rest – the notion that she was unique; that she was the first; that he could never do the very thing that made her feel special – that had been a gift of love.

  It was, he now thought to himself, swinging his feet above the carpet, as though Susan had had a picture of herself in her head. She had wanted that picture to be the same one that he carried around in his own head. He had accepted the picture; without question. He had adopted it wholesale. He had carried it around in his head, just like she wanted. Not because the picture was true, but only because she had wanted it to be true. And that was enough. That was love.

  Minnie Watson. My, my, my. Minnie Watson.

  Hollis shook his head and leaned forward, bringing his feet to the floor. He reached for the wine and stood, grimacing. He took a drink, scratching himself. Mmmm. Chablis and peanut butter. Not good. He set the glass down again and shuffled out of the den and down the hall to the junk room.

  He pushed open the door to the junk room and snapped on the light. Greta, in all of her dark solemnity, sized up Hollis’ naked form in the doorway. As de facto family historian, Greta registered the moment, somewhere deep in the black iron chambers of her heart, as she had countless other moments; trusted to do so out of an unshakeable faith in the loyalty of her silence. No one could ever make Greta talk about the things she had seen.

  Hollis scanned the room that was packed to the rafters with memory. The boxes of old photos. The home-brewing kit. The darkroom equipment. Fifteen years of National Geographic Magazine. The board games. The slide projector. But none of that held any interest for him. He stepped inside, onto the cool bare concrete, passing around Greta to her backside. The guitar case was leaning up against the wall in the corner.

  “Ah, there she is,” he said.

  Greta did not respond. Hollis picked up the case and left the junk room, retreating back to the den. He laid the case across the arms of the desk chair and opened the lid.

  The Guild Acoustic six-string was still in its bed of red felt. Its finish was dull and scarred with a triangular chip missing from the bottom of the fret board. One of the tuning pegs had been replaced; it was black instead of ivory colored and was much larger than the others. The B and the G strings were missing.

  Smiling to himself, Hollis lifted the guitar out of the case. Beneath it was the leather shoulder strap, tooled with flames. He attached the straps and slung the guitar over his neck, pulling his shoulder through the opening. The muscles in his chest seemed to rip in half at the movement.

  Hollis winced and stooped a little, arching his shoulders towards the floor until the pain subsided. Then he straightened and strummed the four strings. He plucked the E and hummed. He tightened the tuning peg a full three turns. He plucked. Hummed. Tried to find that familiar harmonic resonance. He left the den slowly, plucking and humming and tuning, moved down the hallway, plucking and humming and tuning, and up the stairs, plucking and humming and tuning and grimacing.

  By the time he was back upstairs and passing by the front door, Hollis felt like he was close enough on the E string and began the process anew with the A string, circling the living room trying to match the ideal sound in his head with the sound coming from the real world. Trying to close the gap, inexplicably, between the past and the present; between Susan’s new freedom and his own. He wandered into the kitchen, pausing at the counter to break off another chunk of chocolate and pop it into his mouth, then cont
inued out to the dining room table, pluck, tune, hum, as though he were some penniless relation to Lady Godiva playing for clothing, pluck, tune, hum, or an escapee from a Mariachi asylum.

  He pulled out the chair – his chair – in which Susan had been sitting two days earlier, writing in her blue notebook, preparing to say things to him that she would surely regret in time and maybe already did regret. He sat down, grimacing. The fabric was cool and soft on his bare bottom. Pluck, tune, hum. He leaned back and crossed his legs. Pluck, tune, hum. He tried to think of the old songs. Don’t know a soul who’s not been battered; don’t have a friend who feels at ease… Pluck, tune, hum. Teach, your children well... their father’s hell, did slowly go by… Pluck, tune, hum… I’d like to teach the world to sing… Pluck, tune, hum… ring.

  He stopped. It was an alien, electronic trilling more than a ring. Another pretend verisimilitude courtesy of the digital age. But it got his attention. The unexpected intrusion into a private and unguarded moment brought his vulnerability into a sudden and sharp relief. His heart seemed to pause and then race to catch up with the beat of time, which had not paused. Another trilling. He stood up suddenly, knocking the face of the guitar against the table. He cursed at the pain in his legs, making his way to the kitchen phone, banging the neck of the instrument on the doorframe. Another trilling. He swung the guitar around his back and picked up the handset. He heard the crying before he could speak.

  “Hello?”

  “Hollis. Oh Hollis. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I abandoned you… I didn’t mean… I didn’t want…”

  “Wait, now slow down. I didn’t think you’d call. Are…”

  “Oh, Hollis. I love you. I do. I’ve done a terrible thing to you but I love you. I need you. I need you to help me.”