Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

But he was saying something much more improbable than that. “Your mother is tired, honey. I am tired. Or I was. Today I am not. I am retired today.”

“What?” the daughter said, in a tone of shock and wonder that was extremely gratifying. Mrs. Hollingsworth loved her husband at this moment. She thought it a lie designed to take pressure off her in the daughter’s eyes, and to shock the daughter. But she did not believe her husband to be as malicious with respect to the children as she had become. And indeed he was not, for it appeared instantly that he was not lying.

He told the daughter that he was retired and that he and her mother had enough money to live on and that they were liquidating everything and hitting the trail. “I don’t know,” he said, “if we will take taxis or get a dope van.”

“Where are you going?” The tone was now accusing. How had this smooth pea come out of her wrinkled self?

“I don’t know that either. We might actually sit right here, but we are going somewhere else nonetheless even if we do not move an inch.” Mrs. Hollingsworth almost heard this as “a inch,” as if Oswald had said it. Had she put her husband in Oswald too? There was something aggressive in her husband’s voice. It was a good voice, a voice he used professionally as a judge, and he could use it well. He could scare a man into straightening up, a jury into nullifying all notion of nullifying itself. He was cranking it up in the living room on his own daughter. He was a quietly desperate man himself, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized. That she might be insane and he desperate gave her a thrill.

Her husband was now carrying on almost like the man in the tub, but with consummate articulation and elocution, bench-grade. Strangely, she could understand what he was saying much less well than she had understood the man in the tub with her, but she could hear that it was the same kind of song, if it was not the same song. The particulars were now daily and daylight ones, for the daughter’s benefit. Life was too short to be afraid of it all your life, he was saying, but like this: “There is no dignity in the Volvo. Would you like one?” Ho! He said that! Even odder noises were coming out of the daughter. “No, no, honey. Not give it to you, but Blue Book value,” and some huffing purse-sweeping outrage and the door closed and the daughter was gone.

A silence caught the house. It was the ticking of the middling day of the settling suburban house that drove her mad. But there was this new presence in it with her. It sat back at the table. It sighed and, she could see it well, folded its hands in calm regard. It brushed its good haircut back from its temples and looked modestly unkempt and drowsily wild. It was tired. It was retired. It was going to get up in a minute or two and come get in the tub with her. This development was positively luminescent in its improbability, in its corniness, in its fairy-tale dynamic and melodrama. She had written her husband back into her life, her life back into itself; they maybe had one where before they had not. That this had happened was not, she thought — adjusting some heat into the tub via a hose that would make no sound, so that she could hear her husband move toward her — to be looked hard in the mouth. It was to be ridden. If anything happened, they were to fight or run, according to whether it was time to fight or run. Mrs. Hollingsworth knew all about it.

Her husband’s cologne came through the door before him. It was of course the same cologne Forrest had worn and that she had dabbed on many times herself. He got in the tub in the same position as the wounded man. He did not say a word.

His legs were out in front of them, like something on exhibit, straight and narrow and suit-pale. He shimmied them, setting up a small standing wave of ripples in the tub, and stopped and held his legs still. “I wonder if I can still run,” he said.

Mrs. Hollingsworth put her whole tongue in his ear, like a teenager. “If I can still do that,” she said, “you can still run. Did you really retire?”

“I am as retired as a dog ready for another dog to lie on top of him.”

Startled, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hey! General Forrest said that!”

Her husband said, “I know General Forrest said that. Anybody went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School knows that.”

“Anybody went” was Ray Oswald. Dogs under dogs was Forrest. The whole thing had been her husband, her apprehensions of fifty or a hundred too-familiar years with her husband, whom she had found again by making him a list, a list of her husband, a meal at last for him. And the man she had taken out of powder-blue oxford cloth and put in red plaid was her husband, wounded and tired on pin legs in her tub.

The best things in the universe are the out-of-mind and the invisible, those sunny caves of ice you forget when you wake up — as Coleridge put it before his hybridity was adjudicated. Mrs. Hollingsworth distrusted the fairy-taleness of all this, but not enough to not believe it. She and her husband had emerged from stupefaction, and she was not going to gainsay it. They were going to get on the horse of this new life, real or not, and ride. They were going to tear the very air with determination to win. They were not going to inspect the cause or weigh their slim chances. “Come in the bedroom, love,” she said to her retired skinny-legged husband. “You be canvas and I’ll be silk. I’ll be a thimble, you be silver. I’ll melt you into the ground. There is no operator’s manual for my gizmo.”

Her husband stood up and got himself a towel and headed for the bedroom. He had nothing on but that impish look, and he said not a word, a retired judge.

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, including The Interrogative Mood and You & Me. His novel Edisto was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Little Star , and the Paris Review , and he is the recipient of the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Whiting Writers’ Award. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he teaches writing at MFA@FLA, the writing program of the University of Florida.