The Slide: A Novel (34 page)

Between our words came the grunts and heavy breath of the blue-shirted workers. We stood for several minutes before I checked on Opal and saw her stick a piece of grass into her mouth on her way back to the log. The workers moved in concert, the many extremities of this body. So quiet out here, only the clatter of labor against the peace of fading light.

“So you’ve found her,” he said. “You found your mother.”

“What? Not my mother. The mother I was looking for. I mean, for whom I was looking.”

Opal was sitting again on the log and I wanted very much to join her, I realized. So, too, did I believe she wanted me on the log next to her. Impossible to be sure, though, here inside this place with its agenda. Or even out there; always impossible. Rich smiled at me.

“There she is,” he said. “Nobody has to stay here any longer than they want. You want to convince her to leave with you and go back out there, you go right ahead. Keep in mind she’s been living this lifestyle for a time now. Legs want to move and hands want to lift. The human back wants to carry weight. It’s natural, and these explain why we’ve got the body parts in the first place. To work. Just because so many have forgotten this doesn’t make it any less true. You know this already, I bet, working with the water. If you want my advice, it’s this. Listen to yourself. Nobody here is going to rush you into some decision about staying or going. We’re happy to have you as long as you want to stay. There’s work to be done. Plenty. We could use a man like yourself.”

Here again he took my hand and shook it like this meant something to us both, then left to cross the field. I turned and moved back toward the log, where Opal sat with her hands in her lap. Hair pulled behind ears. I sat next to her and listened to her hum some tune and then stop. Cicadas and crickets all around us singing or rubbing legs or whatever it was they did to find mates.

“I want to say something.”

“What kind of mother. I know. Because I broke one of the biggest rules there is. But I don’t stop loving him just because I’m not there. And he’s with his dad, and do you know his dad loves him too? He does. And he is a good man overall. Just because I don’t love him doesn’t make him a bad man. They go to baseball games together.”

“How long will you stay here.”

“I don’t know how long.”

“Set a time. Stay that long, then go back.”

“Why are you here? Really?”

What profound appeal there was to being seen through. Her thumb went into my waistline and I could feel the shift. There were creases in her face and I liked them very much. Her entire face, origin of Ian’s. Same beauty. Here on our log I thought of the other fallen tree and Stuart’s return to the pool house, his trip for cake mix and his new love Marianne and my old new love Audrey and where I was, developmentally, when I met her. I moved my hand to the small of her back, damp with sweat. The sun had left us. Still the workers kept going in what I wanted to call the
gloaming
but wished I didn’t.

“You can come back with me,” she said.

“That’s my line.”

“Unless you want to stay here. Or unless you want to leave.”

What was out there, anyway? Emaciated catalysts like fatherly pride, suspicious urges to please your mother. Here there was the job, the task, the work of callused hands. I could recover my calluses. There was only lifting, and carrying, and building. Wanting and working. I watched a man crest the hill carrying at his waist a stone the size of an overweight cat. This simplified little society, removed from the distant exasperations of the twentieth century. They had outsprawled sprawl itself.

“I’ll show you my room,” she said.

“I’m to believe that this is something you desire.
Want
in the strict common sense of the word.”

“Come on.”

We walked quickly across the grass and back among the grapevines. By now, the evening sky had bled off its light and Opal’s lamp framed us in a yellowish bubble, anchored by the steady hiss of gas. Around us were other lights, flickering their way up the hill, shadowing pairs of contented workers. I followed her through the vineyard until the main building appeared up ahead. She led me up the hill, across the patio, and into the building, pushing with a small palm against a portion of wall that was actually a door.

Inside was the kind of warm soundlessness that fills ears like a wet finger. A long hallway with many doors we passed along the way. Lighting was mounted on walls. We met people as we walked, similarly dressed cultists who flashed meaningful smiles in passing.

“This way.”

We turned a series of corners, descended a short staircase. The building was much larger than it appeared outside. I had the sensation of going deeper, always turning down a dimly lit hallway that would lead farther inward. Disorientation like liberty. The air was damp and odorless and still as a stalled car. At the bottom of another staircase was a door, which we stepped toward. She stopped short, turned, and gestured with an open palm.

“We’re here,” she said.

august

six

w
indowless room lit yellow by propane lamp in the corner. Twin mattress on the floor, no furniture, no nothing. Seen from above, shape of two people could be one. Tangled. The young man and the older woman on the bed.

She and I on the bed.

You wake and think,
Wait just a goddamn second. These are not
living quarters. There are no dressers. No closet. This is the sex room.

It was time for reevaluation. I looked at her face, older than she was before. Her naked woman leg touched my own boy-man half-tanned skinny leg, and I thought,
All of this has become wrong.
You.
All your mistakes. Fucking.
I saw her hand on my chest rise with my breath.

First thing was to get OUT of the BED.

I moved her limbs and slid myself away from Ian Worpley’s mother. I crawled on the floor and found the jeans from that morning years ago when I’d put them on, but no shirt anywhere, anywhere. And now from this angle, maybe that was a dresser outlined against the wall.

As I stretched her pale-blue polo over my head, Opal rolled onto her side and mumbled something.

“No more room.”

That was all. I breathed quietly and prepared for what was sure to follow: pursuit. Running through dim hallway labyrinth, sconces of light blurring with speed, find the door and stumble outside. I would run to the waiting sports car and stomp the accelerator.

I cracked the door and pulled it shut behind me.

Halfway down the hallway, the panic of disorientation. I reached a fork and went right, climbed a set of stairs, then turned several more corners. I reached a door and pushed and felt the ick of late-August night.

Darkness, thick, cut by one circle of towering parking-lot lighting. Two men stood in the gravel lot, good-natured bald men wearing our same shirt. They threw a Frisbee back and forth that glowed in the dark. One of them raised it in offering, and I shook my head no and walked. Good-natured shrug and back to their game. I eased the Z out of the lot.

Here was Potter Mays, failed lover, taking Highway 94 like a tear down a cheek. They said you could pass, they gave permission, and you felt obliged. He glided into the left lane, then went back to the right.

What was good about the road were the headlights that passed just inches on my left, the constant chance of collision. My speed plus their speed times weight of automobile plus adjust for friction, gravitational constant, physics, and the irrefutable edicts of the universe. The sound that lucky survivors of horrible wrecks try to describe but can not, crumpling of metal and shattering of glass, the thunderous fall of that grand supernal gavel.

I had stayed in that bed for too long. At this very late hour, most of the city’s traffic lights had abandoned their normal cycle for the blinking of red or yellow, colors of summer. No traffic to speak of. I came to a stop at the first light in a long stretch of downhill road marked with a series of red dots. I turned and soon found myself tracing the edge of Forest Park, past the huge old antebellum mansions. Here the lights ran with no regard for time or traffic patterns. I pulled alongside a snub-nosed Honda with shiny shiny rims, dropped low to the ground. Couple of boys with a girl in the back, kids all of them, children maneuvering the city late at night. Glimmering purple paint job, ground effects, and a decal of Calvin pissing onto Cubs logo.

I wondered if they knew Zoe. They could have had lockers in the same hallway. They could have sat next to her in class and stared.

And what force of nature! A pretty girl’s smile, regardless!

The light blinked, and neither of us moved. The Civic pulled slightly forward and I recognized this as a moment when things could begin.

The Civic lurched and I dropped the gas.

Varoom.

I was winning. Then I saw in my mirror that the Civic had made a U-turn, brake lights now shrinking into darkness.

The garage light turned on, the in-dash clock said 3:52. Shoes went here, by the front door. House: dark, still but for the sound of my father snoring.

I opened the door to their room and inched past their bed and into the master bath. Still sharing this bed despite it all, sleeping as if at peace. Only explanation was this: Carla would require substantial aid, something far stronger than her usual warm milk. Two sinks, hers here with the cotton swabs and swiveling makeup mirror and the amber plastic canisters for prescription pills. I held them up to the streetlight through the window until I found the label that said,
Take one pill one half hour before desired
sleeping time
. My father snored steadily. Poured a number of pills into my hand and replaced the canister.

I stood at the foot of my parents’ bed. They were both here, both parents. Look how huge, this bed. Two bodies slid by mutual agreement to farthest reaches of the mattress, the valley between. I thought of the mess of limbs in which I had awoken and brought one of the pills to my mouth and swallowed it.

A half hour later and I was still watching them sleep. My mother had shifted slightly and my father had rolled over when his snoring had woken him, then settled back into his rhythm of breath.

For me, sleep was some destination miles from here, a full day’s drive to the coast, the endless waves that washed you inward while the undertow beneath pulled forever out. If it was everyone’s fault at once, that would imply nobody’s guilt—and this was the terror of it all. I swallowed a second pill.

I remembered going with my father to sandbag against rising floodwaters in 1996. Service. All the money I had taken from my pockets over the years and dropped into a homeless man’s hand. The homeless women with children. Phone calls to grandparents. All the apologies for those names and numbers and faces I had forgotten. How many apologies? Small to large, the limitless wrongs. Stealing candy from the five-and-dime as a boy. Sorry. The lies, from incremental to grand; caught lying, I’m sorry. A liar and doer of wrong. Nonbeliever and ogler and arbiter. Disbeliever.

My father kicked at the blanket. I moved to my mother’s side of the bed and saw she was wearing earplugs. For her: silence. No husband, no apologies. I bent and looked into her closed eyes.

You were or you were not remorseful, and if you were not, you were a robot or sociopath.

I whispered to her face, “I am sorry,” then again, having crossed to his side of the bed, kneeling among the saw of his labored breath and knowing, things equal, the man before me would as soon forgo this rest in favor of work. Whispered, “I am sorry,” and swallowed another pill.

And were they awake, surely they would have answered in kind.

It was for these moments that we had designed language, all the rules and games. Wild-card piece, the chute or the mousetrap or the Sorry. Other cards in the game: I am waiting; I am happy; I am in love. No assurance the state will last beyond the saying of it.

This was the time I stood at the foot of my parents’ bed, watching them sleep. That man had never successfully forgiven that woman, though he had claimed to. THOUGH he had tried very very hard and was still trying to this day. And said he did forgive. She would never forgive him for failing to forgive her or failing to see how hard she was trying to forgive herself. Though she, like him, had, was, and would continue to. Try.

I was not tired in the least. I swallowed another pill.

The alarm radio came on and I hurried from their room and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

She did not ask how I knew of her son or if he had grown. This was an ethical mistake, mine, involvement. Her balances unhinged. Young man arrived, and she took hold with her language of community and labor and led me inside. But for what desire? What vacancy or need of that failed mother-woman? Trouble. Call the thing
desire
and blame the body. Obey the body, invent the why at your leisure. Apologize.

This was the world of codes and guidelines. These were the mechanisms.

The day arrived seamlessly. There was a noise above me, what might have been something moving in the attic. It was now a bit past seven o’clock. It was now eight. It was now nine-thirty, and my mother left the house.