The Fiction of Owen Thomas

The Lion Trees

A Novel

 

Hollis: Excerpt A

Hollis Johns contemplated the tree again, raking the line of his jaw with his fingers.  With deliberation, he raised his blade to the base of the lower-most, ancient and gnarled branch, positioning it carefully between the trunk and the scalloped oval knot.  His muscles tensed and he was, at last, ready to sever the old limb from fifty-eight years of growth. 

Then he thought better of it, again, and returned the shears to the desk. 

Another slug of wine and some more contemplation.  Deeper this time.  Much deeper.  The Tao of the bonsai was patience and discipline.  And above all, wisdom.  Great wisdom.

“Hollis?!”  His wife’s voice was thick and muffled and distant, burrowing its way down two floors into his leather-appointed basement study.  His sanctuary.  His retreat.  His bunker.  “Hollis?!”  she tried again.

Sighing, Hollis swung his left arm over the back of his chair and reached for the volume knob of the stereo with two fingers.  The room swelled like an orchestral lung. 

It was Schubert tonight, but anyone would do, really. Susan would eventually get tired of calling out his name and would come down to fetch him.  She would be wearing that look of labored marital decorum – a thin, elastic politeness stretched over her face like over-taxed sandwich wrap; her muscles straining to contain exasperation and anger and decades of complaint.  A supremely unconvincing façade that, Hollis knew, she meant to be unconvincing. 

And he would be equally unconvincing. Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you, was all he needed.  Schubert would do fine.

It was a shame, he thought, that these pretensions, his and hers, were necessary at all.  This was not the way he wanted to relate. He hated that word, relate. 

Communicate.

No, he hated that word too.

Interact.

Yes, this was not the way he wanted to interact with his wife.  Why? Because directness and honesty in all things were greatly preferred.

Another swallow of wine and a one-quarter turn of the potted tree before him.  The sides of the octagonal planter were a slick, dark green, like wet evening grass.  Through his fingertips, he felt the roughened porcelain of the planter bottom scrape against the wooden desk.  The lower-most branch of the old tree rotated into the pool of butter light beneath the desk lamp.  Hollis narrowed his eyes and lay the branch across his outstretched palm. 

Then he sighed.  The Japanese understand. 

They understand what it means to live an honest life.  That is the benefit of such an ancient culture.  Wisdom is a crop that grows very, very slowly. It thrives only in old, mature soil.  Americans are such an infantile culture.  We cultivate infantile crops.  Not small.  Infantile.  Big and loud and brash and self-satisfied and unruly like hyper-fertilized weeds growing in an undisciplined crawl out of the gardens and across the floors and up the very walls of Christendom. We are so slavishly obsessed with youth.  We eschew anything and everything that is around long enough to have any value. Why keep a veteran of the loan department when you can have the slick kid with a flashy smile and a head full of hair and an MBA for a diaper?  The older you are, the less value you have.  That’s all there was to it.  Wisdom cannot flourish in our culture.  Our soil is too alkaline.

“Hollis?!”

And without wisdom, there is no honesty.  The wise man knows that pretensions deceive the self as well as others. . . . No, that’s not quite right. 

With the flesh of his thumb, Hollis stroked the branch, twisted and bent with age at an angle irregular to the rest of the tree. 

The wise man knows that pretensions deceive the self and that what others believe about us does not matter.  That was really the key, he thought.  Why do we care so much about what others think of us?  Why was that so important?  That conceit – that the opinions of others matter—was at the root of all pretension.  The honest man, the wise man, just does not give a damn about how he is perceived by others.  He is who he is. He is a scoundrel. He is a knave.  He is a hero.  He is a bastard.  He is a regular old chap.  But he is not a fool who, for the sake of another’s impression, ultimately deceives himself into believing he is somebody he is not.  He is honest and forthright in the world only because he has freed himself from the burden of giving a damn.

“Hooooollllliiiiis!”  Susan had now crossed the threshold between beseeching summons and domestic yodel and this prompted in her husband a heavy sigh and another swallow of wine, two acts which experience had honed into a single almost elegant process: exhaling through the nose directly into the glass and a simultaneous draining of wine over the tongue.

Hollis: Excerpt B

Hollis Johns arose early. He had never been one to sleep in, even on weekends.  Sleeping in was a harbinger of creeping indolence.  It foretold a lack of caring.  A taking of things, everything, for granted. 

He climbed out of bed and eyed his wife as he untwisted his pajamas and put on his robe. Susan was still sleeping hard, even as blades of new sunlight were slicing through the blinds and leaving long, bright strafing patterns up the covers and along the side of her face.  Her mouth was open slightly and she was snoring.  Her hair was matted and tangled and limp over her ear.

Hollis cinched the belt of his robe with a sharp yank.

She looked like she had been dropped into the bed from about ten thousand feet up.  But for the mucous-laden rasp of her breath and a low snore like the sound of a straw finding pockets of old, wet mud… but for these things, she was quiet and lifeless.

Hollis padded downstairs to his study and retrieved the straw mat that he stored in a roll behind the door.  Then he headed back up to the living room where he unrolled the mat in its usual spot on the floor behind the couch.  He took off his robe and draped it over the back of the sofa, looking through the windows before him out into the back lawn. Great ambitious shafts of sunlight were igniting the rhododendrons and bleaching the lawn the color of young apples.

The restorative function of sleep was certainly important.  Even essential in the long run.  But one had to know something of the line between restoration and over-indulgence.  Life was about getting up in the morning.  Every morning. Greeting the day and whatever it had in store.  Even on the weekends.  The notion that on weekends it was permissible, even expected, for people to sleep in until ten o’clock in the morning was, for Hollis, a kind of heresy.  For most of America, weekends were a regular mini-holiday not just from work, but from living—from consciousness. Weekends were like little opium dens of time tucked in between Fridays and Mondays where people kept the blinds pulled and burrowed into mountains of blankets and cushions and wafted in and out of a dream-laced stupor. Reading the paper in bed; eating breakfast in bed; watching the weekend sports shows in bed.

We were a nation of weekend invalids.

Hollis listened to the still of the house behind him.  The refrigerator hummed in a low thrumming from the kitchen as its frozen-half dumped another load of ice cubes into the bucket. The wall clock in the dining room was dicing the morning into even, cylindrical pieces that fell silently upon the fibers of medium-plush ecru carpeting.  The boiler fired up out in the garage, heating its hard, fluoridated brew like a giant industrial coffee maker. But though Hollis could feel his wife and his youngest son sleeping, those were all the sounds that reached him. The rest was quiet.

Two robins snagged and yanked and stretched his attention forward, hopping in and out of shadow; getting those worms.

Sleep-in Saturday was the lamentable precursor to Casual Friday. The slothful lassitude infecting the American weekend had crept like a slimy flange of mold or some unctuous tendril of irresponsibility, backwards into Fridays.  Hollis remembered when OFSC had contracted the Casual Friday disease.  It started, he had speculated, with an irrepressible envy of Kevin from the mail room; a good looking, world-by-the-tail sort of fellow who breezed through the loan and mortgage departments each day with a whistle on his lips, smelling like…what…like wet hay, and dressed like he had come by horseback.  Beat up cowboy boots and jeans – a bandanna tied half-way up the right thigh—and flannel shirts and a braided leather bracelet.  Thick, black, wind-tossed hair falling damply halfway down his neck. Ever-so unshaven. Everything but the ten gallon hat and a six-shooter.  Cowboy Kevin never actually said the words howdy ma’am, but the women loved him as though that was his normal greeting. 

And before anyone could think to recognize that it was Cowboy Kevin who did not fit in – that it was he who was inappropriately dressed for the business world—he was gone, leaving in the echo of his whistle a number of young, immature bankers and their assistants who yearned for greater sartorial expression. 

Sport coats began replacing suits. Eventually someone forgot to put on a tie and then someone else decided a sweater was an acceptable substitute for a jacket.  Someone else decided to start the day with the loosened tie and rolled up sleeves look. And this continued for a number of months before the final stage of the Casual Friday incubation period, when someone – Vincent Meyers in Home Equity and Mortgage Origination—finally thought fuck it and showed up to work one Friday like he was showing up for a garage sale. Hollis recalls that Vincent had done this on the pretense that he was not feeling well or that he was in the office only for a couple of hours for some reason or another.  But it was enough to spark the open revolt.  Thereafter, Fridays at OFSC were populated with people who might be bankers but who might also be people stopping by to ask directions to the Laundromat. It was increasingly difficult to tell.

Hollis, of course, had never even been tempted to relax his standards. Even once the disease had come out of its incubation and erupted in seeping pustules of denim and lesions of corduroy, Hollis did not buy the official post-hoc rationalization that comfortable employees are happy employees and happy employees are productive employees.  He did not buy the notion of the friendly neighborhood banker, approachable and inviting in his cardigan and his dungarees. Hollis did not like the idea of professional bankers dispensing financial advice as though they were taking a break from cleaning out the gutters and raking the leaves from the back yard. 

It was not a matter of being comfortable. It was a matter of professional propriety; of commanding respect from a position of self-respect.  It was a matter of inspiring faith – inspiring confidence—not by being comfortably approachable, but by being professionally distinct.  Who knows best about banking?  Who should you talk to about investing your life’s savings?  Who do you trust not to be lead astray by the illusions of equity in a leveraged buy-out? The one who is dressed like a banker, that’s who.

In this and similar respects, Hollis had always been the hold out, a bulwark against the decaying of personal and professional standards.  He had worn suits and ties to the office, every day.  Just to make the point, on Fridays he always wore one of his black or navy three piece pinstripe Hickey-Freeman’s.  There was something about a silk vest and handkerchief that said fuck you to those who – out of vanity or ill-defined personal character—would care to follow the lead of Cowboy Kevin in the mailroom.  At home, he got his ass out of bed early, especially on weekends.  Although, now that he had retired, there really was no distinguishing a weekday and a weekend, a fact that made today, Wednesday, feel very much like a Saturday.

The patch behind the sofa was now fully bathed in yellow, syrupy light.  Hollis had chosen this as his place to start each day because the wall and the back of the sofa and the carpeted floor and the windows created a small open box that trapped the morning sun.

He pulled his pajama top over his head and draped it over the back of the couch next to his robe.  Then the bottoms.  He stood naked in the sun and stretched, reaching up to the ceiling with straining fingertips, then slowly, slowly, slowly bowing to the East, his hands flattened, lowering to the floor, lower, lower, until his knees must bend and bend and bend and his hips must articulate his left thigh towards the North and his right thigh towards the South, separating in a yawning, fleshy ‘V’ so that his hands, thumb-to-thumb, can pass through the space down along his abdomen and down past his unencumbered penis, as the flats of his palms slowly come to press against the carpet between his naked feet. 

The robins, which see him as a large, pale, unprepossessing frog preparing to leap through the window and out onto the lawn, hop off to look for breakfast elsewhere.

Hollis: Excerpt C

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. He had never denied that.  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 five-minute 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, light weight, 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 and certainly 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. Captioned photos appeared on the screen as he spoke, threatening to obscure some portion of Katie’s remarkable physique.  An affordable, space-efficient machine that could easily regulate muscle resistance as it isolated strategic muscle groups would change body sculpting forever. And that, the man had said, is precisely what the CoreFlexx 9000 was doing for Katie and for scores of thousands of people of all ages, sizes, and experience.

Katie had then vanished beneath a five-second video of a grimacing pre-adolescent boy extending his tethered arms out in front of his body. The boy had then been replaced by an older, white-haired woman demonstrating the strength in her leotarded legs.  She, in turn, had disappeared beneath the video of a professional body-builder trying to explode his biceps.

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. Another grandmother, this one 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. 

Yes, the CF-9000. 

Deluxe model, sliding seat, extra lat-builder arm set (the full bug). 

Yes, black. 

Yes, sure, the entire family of CoreFlexx Patented Resistor Straps. 

That’s right, all thirty-six sizes. 

Correct, four hundred ninety-nine, ninety-nine. 

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.

What the hell. Sure, express delivery. 

Click.  Hollis had never stopped watching.

The realization that Katie had reminded him of Bethany Koan did not occur to Hollis at first.  Something about her perfect little body and her tight golden skin had nagged at him and tugged 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 had plunged downward 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 Emergence 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.”

“Yes, Miss Daley.”

Hollis had turned the page and folded the paper back on itself.  “And how is Miss Daley?”

“Good.  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. 

“Cute. You know, not sexy cute, just cute.  Getting-older-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…its 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.”

“Hollis, if you would just…”

“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.”