by Owen Thomas
Hollis set down the glass of Chateau Coutet St. Emilion Grand Cru and resumed. He took up another slice of Nicki-the-Greek’s Chef’s Mistake pizza in one hand and the remote control in the other. The pizza box was unfolded over his body from neck to waist like a greasy cardboard blanket, as though he were homeless, living beneath an upper middle class bridge. He folded the slice into a doughy sluice and took a bite. As he chewed, he worked his thumb, finding his rhythm again, cycling through the channels.
To his left, the couch belonged to Ben, reclining like a king, lowering long strings of cheese and assorted toppings into his mouth like grapes.
“It’s a fine pie, isn’t it Daddy-O?”
“It’s a fine pie, my boy. The best.”
“It’s the best pie, Daddy-O. Isn’t it? The best.”
Hollis did not look at his son as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the blaring, blue-lit rectangle across the tenebrous living room. It flashed and screamed like a tortured spirit every time he flexed the muscle in his thumb.
He glanced up suddenly to find Ben, as if by magic, standing before him pulling another slice from the box. Connected to his father by a lengthening leash of cheese, Ben hopped back to the couch and lay back down.
Hollis changed the channel. An explosion. A man on fire, coming through a wall. He changed the channel. A shark the size of an ocean liner with a leg in his mouth the size of a toothpick. He changed the channel. A breast. An ankle. He changed the channel. New Orleans like a bowl of dirty soup. He changed the channel. A lion on the back of a wildebeest, claws in, jaws open. He changed the channel. George. Change. Dick. Change. Saddam. Change. A low pressure system bearing down on the Northeastern United…
“Hey Daddy-O?”
“Yes Ben.”
“Can we watch something?”
“We are.”
“No. I mean watch-watch something. Can we watch one thing on the Ol’ Idiot Box while we eat our pie?”
Hollis straightened and looked over at Ben.
“Oh. Well sure, Benny. What do you want to watch?”
“I want to watch Fantasia, dad.”
“Fantasia. Which one is Fantasia? Here, you take this” he tossed the remote onto the couch. “I’m not much of a T.V. watcher, I’m afraid.”
“Thanks, dad.” Ben punched in three numbers. The rectangle across the room became a box of unruly water. Mickey is axe-murdering a hapless, hard-working broom.
“Ah, cartoons.”
“It’s not a car-tooooon, Daddy-O.”
Now there are broomsticks with buckets by the hundreds, laying wet siege as Mickey comes undone.
“Looks like a cartoon to me.”
Hollis looked over at Ben, the micro expressions of his face splashed in blue light, small crescent eyes never leaving the screen. He chews as he answers.
“Dad, it’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. That’s a poem not a cartoon.”
“A poem?”
“By Goat.”
“Goat?”
“He’s German, dad. That’s what David says. Hey Dad?”
Hollis looked back at the television. Mickey was drowning.
“Hey Dad?”
“Yes Ben.”
“When is David coming over here?”
“I called him. He was busy and said he would call back.”
“Did he call back, dad?”
“Not yet. He will.”
“What if he doesn’t call back, dad?”
“Maybe we’ll just go over and see what’s keeping him. Would you like that?”
Ben beamed, his mouth full and smeared with marinara. He nodded.
“Okay then. Eat your pizza pie and watch your… your poem there. Maybe later we’ll take a drive out to see David.”
Hollis closed the pizza box and then fought and grimaced his way out of the suede stomach to a standing position. He felt the pain in his abdominal muscles intensely. And his lower back. And his thighs. And yet, he almost felt nothing at all. After an hour and a half of television, he could barely remember what he had watched. No, not watched; seen. He had not really watched anything. For the second day in a row, his mind was elsewhere. He had ordered a pizza for dinner, even though he hated pizza, because he did not have the mental focus necessary to prepare a meal. Even an evening out with Ben at a restaurant would have entailed a greater distraction from the one thing on the horizon of his consciousness that he could tolerate. That one thing –that singular image pulsing in his brain, not coincidentally, at the same rate at which his thumb had depressed the remote control button – was simply, beautifully, this: Beth… Beth… Beth.
He set the pizza box on the couch next to Ben, picked up his glass and retreated downstairs to his den where he could think about the thing he wanted to think about without distraction or competition or other obligation. He sat at his desk, slowly turning his wine glass between his fingers.
Beth… Beth… Beth.
He reached to the back of the desk and retrieved the Bonsai in its glossy ceramic pot. He turned it in circles, cocking his head. Now with only two of its graceful, deasil-swirling branches remaining, the tree presented the arboreal equivalent of a gap-toothed smile. The third branch was still on the floor behind the desk, tangled in electrical cords where, after hacking it off in his fit of rage at Susan, he had kicked it as some sort of ill-conceived punishment by proxy.
Hollis regarded the tree pathetically, like one might regard a street urchin or a lost pet that had gotten into a bruising scrap with something wild. He slid the pot back and took another sip of wine.
Beth… Beth… Beth.
After her telephone call, now, incredibly, a full day ago, Hollis had not bothered to put away the guitar or to get dressed before making his airline reservations. The phonebook had been right there in front of him; a quarter-page listing of numbers – from Nolander, L & S to Marquart, John – between his fingers. The magic combination of numbers that corresponded to Beth’s location on the globe was scribbled across the ragged bit of paper in failing black ink. Hollis had stared at the numbers, not recognizing his own handwriting. He had folded the scrap of paper neatly and set it on the counter. He had stared at it, blinking slowly as the refrigerator thrummed through the floor beneath his naked feet. And then, without thinking twice, Hollis had lurched into action, seizing the yellow pages, finding the airline number, dialing it, getting it wrong, dialing again, stating his need, banging his way out to the antique roll-top desk in the hallway for his credit card number, and telling the customer service representative that he hoped she had a very nice day. Before he really appreciated what he was doing, it was done.
He had then left the kitchen in a daze, elation, confusion and sickness all part of one state of consciousness for which there is no name. He had made it half way up the stairs to the bedroom when it hit him that he would also need a rental car. He had turned, knocking the neck of the guitar sharply against the railing, and headed back downstairs to the kitchen where he flipped through the phonebook trying to remember the agency that provided the discount for OFSC retirees. And then that was done too. It was arranged.
Most of the rest of that day had been one long exercise in distraction and perseveration. He dressed himself from the pile of clothes on the floor, but misbuttoned his shirt and forgot his belt, which had slipped under the bed. He put away the guitar case back downstairs in the junk room behind Greta, just where he had found it, only to return to find the guitar itself leaning up against the counter in the kitchen.
Time slipped past him undetected, like water from the scales of a fish. He had been thirty minutes late picking up Ben from school. Ms. Daley, who clearly had other plans, was visibly angry. This much should have been readily apparent to him even before he had stepped out of the car to greet them. But Hollis, for whom life was suddenly a bowl of perfect sweet cherries, had neglected to notice her anger, let alone apologize, and could only smile and toss around sobriquets like they were party favors at a George Bush fundraiser. Ben was Big Ben and
Ben-o-Buddy and Ben Franklin. Ms. Daley was, affectionately, Teach and Professor Daley and, best of all, the Daley News which had been his opener, as in: Well, well, if it isn’t Ben Franklin sittin’ outside on the curb learnin’ all about the world from the Daley News! He had not needed to explain the witticism. It was the wink that really sold it.
The drive home – with its three near misses, its late screeching stops, and its last-second corrections – should have felt harrowing. But it was not harrowing. The worst of it had barely registered amid the singular pulse in his ears.
Beth… Beth… Beth.
There were occasional variations to this pulse denoting some angst or disturbance in the background that he unconsciously incorporated into the rhythm.
Such as Beth… Beth… Ben.
Even in the throes of his distraction, Hollis was not oblivious to his on-going responsibilities as a father and, in Susan’s sudden absence, sole caretaker. If he was going to leave Ben for any amount of time, he needed someone to stay over. He certainly did not care to face accusations from Susan that he had behaved irresponsibly when it came to Ben, even though, it must be said, he didn’t care what in the hell Susan thought about anything – Anything! – and even though Susan was the last person in the world who had any business accusing anyone – especially him! – of abandoning responsibility. What mattered in the end was not what Susan believed or expected, but what was best for Ben.
He could have called Martina Davis. She was usually available on short notice, and Ben seemed to like her okay. But Hollis was not entirely sure he trusted Martina in his home. She was prone to snooping and, while she appeared to adore Susan, Martina did not seem to like Hollis very much. He did not think it was personal. Martina, who was in her late fifties and twenty-years divorced and who lived off her daughter’s oncology practice, seemed to have a thing not so much against Hollis as against men, generally. Men are pigs, she liked to say to Susan, adding a lackluster present company excepted whenever Hollis was around. Men are dogs. Men are rats. Men are weasels. Men are snakes. The entire animal kingdom served Martina more faithfully as metaphor than her ex-husband, or his veterinary practice, had ever served her as a spouse.
Had this been the old days, he would have asked Inga Van Susteren to look after Ben. Inga had always been great with the kids, at least until Tilly’s great exotic fish massacre. Inga he could trust. But that had been before Ben and, anyway, Heinrich and Inga were long gone now. So these days it was Martina Davis whenever they needed surrogate parenting.
David was always a theoretical option, but rarely a realistic option, for anything other than evening or weekend needs. David’s teaching schedule generally precluded any daytime responsibilities. Per the norm, Hollis had written David off without any consideration and had almost called Martina. But then, in looking for Martina’s phone number, as Ben and Ms. Daley sat on a curb several miles away, it had struck Hollis that David might be a realistic option after all. As luck would have it, David had been suspended. His days were free and, no doubt, were far less productive than they could be. Maybe the situation had changed, or would change imminently, but it was worth a try.
Hollis had placed the call to David immediately. There had been no answer. On the third ring, just before the answering machine took the call, Hollis had remembered about Ben and had looked at his watch and cursed and hung up the phone without leaving a message. He had called David again that evening. This time David was home, but couldn’t talk; clearly anxious to get off the phone. Hollis had detected an edge in his son’s tone. He could tell he was not alone. He had heard a voice. A moan. A woman’s moan. David had seemed to be out of breath. He could not know for sure, of course, but Hollis suspected that his call had threatened to interrupt the coital pleasure of one Mae Chang; a cause certainly worthy of putting off the call to a later time.
So Hollis had waited. Despite the urgency, he had not asked for the favor he needed and needed soon. David had said he would call tomorrow, which was now today, and yet had not done so. All day Hollis had waited. He had called twice more, once this morning and again later in the afternoon, but there was no answer and he hung up without leaving a message. He had fought back an inclination to be irritated; dampened a ready assumption that David had simply ignored the request in order to pursue far less important goals. Perhaps the suspension had run its course and he was back at school. Or perhaps David and Mae were still… in the middle of things. If there was the slightest chance that they were still having sex, if it was some kind of god damned sex marathon, Hollis did not like the idea of his disembodied voice bellowing through David’s home, causing them to freeze up in mid-thrust, panting, ears peeled, listening for what could possibly be so important. He would wait.
Beth… Beth… Mae.
He had tried mightily to bar at the gates of cognition all images of David and Mae in flagrante delicto. But he couldn’t. Telling himself to not imagine what precisely he had interrupted utterly defeated the purpose of the instruction. Silky Mae Chang had flooded his brain like a drug, like buckets of dopamine sloshed in through his ears by hundreds of animated brooms; a distraction from the distraction already in place and wrecking havoc, sweetening his delirium. It was not so much Mae herself, although the image of her in his mind was integral to the problem. It was more about his powerful, visceral sense of two people – not necessarily his son and his son’s girlfriend, but any two people… well, any two people at the top of their sexual game – losing themselves to unbridled carnal urges right on the other end of a telephone connection. Like it or not, planned or not, he had connected with … with… IT. It was out there, happening, as it should be happening, as he remembered it, raw and primal and powerful and unscripted and non-judgmental and uninhibited and he had tripped right over it – not some slick cinematic fakery, not some glossy depiction mailed to his home, but the real deal – he had tripped over it, the thing with smell and feel and taste, he had connected with the idea of it and he could not turn his mind or his imagination away. He felt like he was on the other side of a thin hotel wall, trying to sleep and yet, with every fiber of his being, trying to sharpen the rhythmic knocking and bumping and low, guttural grunting into a clear moving picture in his head.
For much of the afternoon, the secret, intimate cadence that governed his brain and regulated his pulse was Beth… Beth… Mae, and on occasion, especially each time he thought of calling David, it was Beth… Mae… Mae. But soon enough those rivers of longing merged and the presence of Mae Chang had softened and blurred and then disappeared entirely, leaving only, again, Beth… Beth… Beth.
And then there was the most troubling variation of all: Beth… Susan… Beth. Troubling in the sense that it was less of a rhythmic variation as a rhythmic interruption; a claxon ripping into dream. Susan, the thought of her, the idea of her, had found its way into his eddying consciousness like a pollutant, a bit of Styrofoam, circling around into view like clockwork. He refused to feel guilty about going out to see Beth – about going out to help a friend in need. She had no right – no right! – to judge him, to construe his noble response to an innocent plea for help into something cheap and common. It enraged him to think how certainly she would insinuate depraved motivations; how disingenuously she would look past her own rekindled, albeit confused and entirely passive-aggressive sexual appetite and trot out the dirty-old-man canard; how conveniently she would ignore her own blatant irresponsibility as she accuses him of abandoning his DS child for a little action in Phoenix. Helping Bethany was not about action. The God’s-honest truth was that action was entirely beside the point. Not, of course, that Susan was in any position to condemn him for that anyway. No. She was in no position to speak; not even if some kind of action was, hypothetically, in the offing.
Hollis put his glass down and leaned forward and opened the drawer of his desk. He rummaged around until he found a working pen and a sheaf of old premium bond, ecru-colored stationary. He separated out a single page and put the rest back i
n the drawer. In clean, block lettering at the top of the page it read: Ohio First Securities and Credit, L. Hollis Johns, Commercial Loans, followed by the address of the main OFSC branch. He drew a firm line beneath the header, as if to separate the past from the future. As if to make a god damned point about things. It felt good.
S –
I have been thinking a great deal about our “discussion.” I write these words not out of anger or malice. I write them out of consideration for our long history together and out of respect for your right to know where things stand between us. I have never had any interest in hiding my feelings or concerns from you and I have no intention of changing that now. You deserve the truth. I would certainly say any of this to you in person, but you are not here. I have no idea where you are or when you will return. I suppose I could call you, but I have no interest in interrupting whatever and whoever may be occupying your time. Perhaps when you return we can have another “discussion” and I can share my thoughts with you in person. But, in the meantime, I write this note so that, in the event you return before I do, you will have an opportunity to reflect on what I have to tell you.
And what I have to tell you, Susan, is simply this: I am through. I am through being judged. I am through being controlled. I am through being deliberately misunderstood for your own purposes. The days of trying to make me into someone I am not – someone contemptible and irresponsible and disloyal – those days are over. I refuse to be cowed into changing who I am. I refuse to accept your self-serving assessment that I have been a callous father and an inattentive husband. You know that I am not such things. And yet, for many years now, you have pretended – yes, Susan, pretended, as you are pretending now, wherever you are, playing saviors of humanity – you have pretended that I am someone who I am not. I think you must do it to feel better about yourself. I honestly do not know any more why you think the things you do. I only know that I am done with it. If you must have a villain in your life, then you must choose someone else. If you are so determined to see your spouse as your foil, then you must choose another spouse. That is not a threat, but a simple statement of fact.
