The Slide: A Novel (31 page)

“Is that true about your job?”

“The company has suspended operations under suspicion of widespread fraudulence. I have a feeling Debbie Dinkles is going down hard.”

“I don’t understand how I didn’t know that,” he said. “I’ve been out of town recently, but that’s no excuse.”

“I forgot that you wear V-necks.”

I sat on the bench and my father sat next to me. He raised both elbows to the backrest, allowed his legs to spread naturally, while I kept mine crossed at the knee to conceal the idiot cock that had gotten me into this mess. Ian hit another ball cleanly and teed the next. The envelope in his back pocket was pushed a bit further upward.

“It’s a good thing you’re doing for this kid.”

I stood from the bench but stayed where I was. A ball-collection buggy drove along one side of the range, then turned into the middle. The driver was encased by a protective cage of metal latticework as he drove from one side of the range to the other. Every so often a ball clanked off his buggy, adding yet another sound of collision to this place, all the more special for its infrequency.

“Have a seat, son.”

Throat clearing. Ian hitting balls, each a little better than the last. My father’s arm around my shoulders.

“Things happen. A big part of parenthood is watching your child make mistakes. I’m sure you can imagine the dilemma here. Do you step in and fix the problem? You could. Or do you let the child fail? Failure guides us, it hardens and teaches. It also causes damage and leaves a mark. So there’s a choice to make, every time. Hands on, hands off.”

Sweat. Repeated blinking. I imagined myself folding into a compact little ball and being absorbed into my father’s gaping armpit. The buggy driver maintained his course despite the football players now making a point of aiming for him.

“Your mother and I have worked like yeomen to not blame each other over the years. Sometimes we have found success, other times less so.”

By now it was apparent Ian was aiming for the collection buggy as well. He tracked its movement left to right, angled his feet and shoulders to where the buggy was going. My instinct was to rush over there and smother the jock-asshole mentality before it took over his worldview. But the kid! He was killing the ball! A stroke fluid and smooth, right in every way. He narrowly missed the buggy, then rushed to tee up a new ball for the next shot.

“I want you to promise one thing for me, Potter. No matter what happens, where any of this leads us. Promise to call me on the telephone. A father derives something huge and uplifting from a phone call from his son. You and I don’t speak on the phone often. We never have. But I can’t stress this enough, every single phone call will make me happy. I promise to be happy to hear from you, wherever you are, until the day I die. This is a promise I can make with the straightest of faces. Because the love I have for you eclipses anything you can fathom at your age. Know this much, Potter. We are a selfish species. I am outrageously selfish. I bet you don’t know that. You want an explanation for almost every one of the world’s problems? Overlapping selfish instincts. Name it. The only thing that breaks this selfishness is family. Especially your first child. People like to believe marriage is the big hurdle in terms of selflessness, but they’re wrong. You are still two people with two sets of interests. A child, though, shifts the whole paradigm.”

Ian teed a ball, lined up his stance, checked the progress of the cart, and swung calmly.

“And of course it goes without saying that you have to call your mother.”

I watched the ball shoot skyward, hang for a second, then fall. Ian leaned left. Breeze blew and a bird chirped. The ball came down squarely in the middle of the wire mesh protecting the driver’s head. Ian gave a tiny hop, then turned to face us on the bench. He held out the club and smiled hugely.

“Your turn, son.”

I took the club and stepped onto the turf, teed a ball of my own. Ian sat on the bench next to my father. I loosened with practice swings and tried not to think about my arms or shoulders. I lined up my shot, inhaled deeply. I was going to OBLITERATE this ball.

My swing came in too low, caught more of the turf than it should have. The ball barely moved, trickling less than ten feet into the range. The club’s head went much, much farther. In strobe motion I watched it detach from the shaft and soar end over end out into the grass, spinning in a way that could have even been beautiful if it wasn’t my father’s ancient seven iron. I stood for a second with the suddenly lightened club in my hands, then began after the club head, into the range. I walked off the turf, stepped over and through the initial batch of mis-hit balls, then continued deeper into the field. Beginning my passage into the void. The first sign of opposition was the kid driving the cart, who had shut down the engine and was waving his arms in the tight pattern allowed by the protective cage. He was screaming. And here was something new: the balls made noise as they flew, a steady whiz buzz whistle. Now there were screams behind me too, screams of
whoa
and
hey
as people noticed the young middle-class adult white male taking large, determined steps into the range.

“Man on range! Man on range!”

I reached the approximate area I thought the club had landed and began to circle. This was a land of palpable neglect, untrimmed and lumpy, the antilawn. There was no telling how fast the club had been going, what kind of bounce it had taken. I was standing in a plot of grass that had been deemed RECEPTACLE. The kid in the cart continued screaming, and I thought about grass as its own kind of medium, a venue for such varied goodness in the world. Now I looked from clumpy green driving range to fat smooth seamless sky. I spun to the tees and saw a wall of people moving toward me, everyone converging from their partitioned bits of turf. Three football players and the couple to their right and a horde of single men in shorts and belts.

“Turn around,” I told them. “There is no problem. It’s here somewhere and I’m going to find it. Seriously, leave me alone.”

But still they came, moving in a scattered line toward where I was standing. Behind them I saw Ian standing next to my father on the small square of turf, watching as the crowd of would-be golfers formed a giant circle around me and tried to help.

The buggy found it. The club’s head had churned through the ball-retrieval system and came out chopped and dented to shit. My father stood by his car, holding the headless shaft between two fingers. In a few hours he was boarding a flight to Baltimore to examine their waterfront urban-reclamation project. His eyes looked like ashtrays and I knew: he had seen the photographs and they had reminded him of his own erstwhile desires and the restraint he had exercised without fail, every single time. The plot had spread itself outward and was implicating those around me. This man of virtue who shook Ian’s hand and told him to keep swinging, then shook my own hand quickly before driving away.

Standing in the parking lot, we were so very close to the batting cages. They were right
there
and yet could have been somewhere in the Dakotas, so removed were we from their effect. The kid leaned against a Buick and ran one shoe across the top of the other.

“Let me see the letter, Ian.”

“No.”

“I can help.”

“It doesn’t even say anything! She doesn’t say when she’s coming back. It’s so stupid! Everyone always runs away but nobody explains why. Or, or if they do say why, the reason is always so dumb there’s no way it’s the real reason.”

“It can be hard, sometimes, for people to find the words to fit the reason. Even when it feels obvious, things get jumbled between your head and mouth. It’s language. Sometimes language is insufficient.”

“Like what happened to your girlfriend? Why did she go away?”

“For that there are branches and lists, diagrams. It’s. It’s a big complicated issue.”

“What’s her name?”

“Audrey,” I said, and it was the first taste of the word on my lips all summer. “Audrey. Audrey needed evidence that I still loved her.”

“But that’s so easy!” the boy said. “Even when my parents would throw things at each other, I could tell my dad wasn’t throwing as hard as he could. That’s how come I knew he loved her.”

I had to sit down for a minute.

“What are you doing?”

“You should give me the letter, Ian.”

“Get up!”

I turned my head and saw the grille of a Chevy Cavalier staring me down, turn signal going, and I knew I had sat down in the middle of the lot. But still the car did not honk, oh no, no, not in this town. Too rude.

Ian yelled, “Fine! Fine, here, just get up.”

I stood and took the envelope from his hand.

He moved back into the grass in front of the parked cars and I followed. I did not remove the letter from inside and read it. I did not do anything except notice the absence of a return address and the absence of a stamp or any official postmark, just a single word typed across the envelope’s back, single tiny word saying
Irenia,
right before the kid grabbed the letter back.

“And if hard work is gonna save us all like she says it is, why couldn’t she work hard to be with my dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want to do any of this. I want to go home right now.”

The sun on the drive back was blinding. I lowered both of my car’s visors and also held up a hand to my eyes. Ian played with the radio until he found a local sports call-in show, then fell immediately asleep.

He awoke as I made the turn onto Waldwick Drive. On the radio, the Cardinals center fielder said,
At this point you don’t ask why.
See the ball, hit the ball. That’s all we’re doing out there.
We sat at the curb for a minute before he turned to face me.

“I don’t think you should come over anymore.”

He dropped out of the car and I watched him walk the path to his house and I saw a weight to each of his steps, a sluggishness, and knew at least some of that weight was compliments of me.

august

five

a
t home the next day, I stood facing the kitchen phone, flipping through my mother’s day-calendar on the counter. Perhaps the progression could be tracked in these pages: her anger, her loneliness, and finally sadness, her sorrow. In today’s calendar box were the words
Lunch w/ Nancy
. Potential explosion of my plot nestled within bland but crucial peer support for my mother. If not now then soon.

I opened the junk drawer directly below the calendar. It had not always been this way, junked. Over time mess had trounced order, the frenzy of collected objects. I reached a hand inside and rummaged through the assortment of clothespins, scissors, batteries, old photographs, markers, and safety pins. How in the world would they decide to apportion all this shit? I came upon a photograph and lifted it from the drawer. Warped, corners bent and peeling, it retained its central image, which was me standing next to Audrey. Tough to discern our condition by looking. My arm was around her waist. We were smiling, standing next to a fountain in an obscure courtyard among the school’s academic buildings. Our school and its myriad fountains. My mother out for a visit during sophomore year. Or was it junior? Frame the couple, press the button. The fountain was four cupid angels spitting streams that crisscrossed as they arced into the pool.

Anger comes first, but only in bursts because anger is exhausting. Loneliness, though, is effortless, a passive state. And from lonely, the slide to true sorrow is polished smooth, all but automatic.

Who were these two people in the picture? My only memory of this fountain was from a few months prior. February: a point in the saga when both Audrey and I worried openly, abandoning completely our pretext of joy derived from fortitude and longevity. It was almost eight o’clock, that hour when the desert chill settled down for the night and the campus burbled with quiet activity: the genius Asian and Indian premeds living up to their parents’ rigid expectations; the broad-shouldered basketball players, like Zeuses among our bespectacled and scrawny majority, walking sorely from practice to private, late-hour meals in the dining hall; the light-skinned alcoholic sons and daughters of outrageous privilege, rolling bocce and pounding cans of Busch; the shy, bookish lovers tangled atop blankets in the quad. The future somethings of our great nation.

Valentine’s Day, and we had plans for dinner in a few hours at the cramped Italian joint we defaulted to for most occasions. Our paths happened to meet in this courtyard. Which made no sense whatsoever; we both lived on the opposite side of campus. But there we were, facing each other by the spitting cupids, arm’s length apart, eyes dodging then settling into each other as the bell tower chimed.

“These angels keep on spitting,” she said.

“Today’s a big day,” I said.

No solution. Not then and not soon afterward, and not now, still. I’d given her not a single word for how many months? And why not? The phone was right here in front of me. The potential of her voice, right this second. How long? Despicable silence.

I lifted the phone from its cradle on the wall and ran my thumb lightly over the sequence of long-known numbers. This was presuming she’d returned from Europe. Presuming she’d gone home. Presuming she wasn’t living in Vermont or Boulder or God could only say where else. Presuming she wasn’t with Carmel or someone else, some new foreign person. You can feel panic’s arrival; it descends like heat. Where was Audrey? I could have written.
Asked.
The phone became extremely heavy in my hand and I let it fall to the counter.