The Slippage: A Novel (12 page)

Back by the tree, Paul Prescott was smoking a joint and telling a story about the nest of spiders he’d found in the basement when he first rented his bakery. Graham Kenner shook his head and said he was done buying muffins there, and Cassandra Kenner shook her head in a different way, and Gloria Fitch took the joint from Paul and put her arm around Graham Kenner’s neck. “Weren’t you supposed to think of some carols for the party?” she said.

“Carol was my first wife,” Graham Kenner said. “Now I’m with Cassandra.”

“Oh, her,” Gloria Fitch said.

“She’s right behind you,” Graham Kenner said, doing an impression of a scared man in a movie. “Don’t tell her about Carol. She’s very jealous.”

“I’d kill Eddie if he ever cheated on me,” Gloria said, and Eddie laughed like she didn’t mean it, and then Cassandra Kenner was laughing, too, screaming in like a jet.

Louisa, back now, chuckled along with them, even though she hadn’t heard the start of the joke. She’d been sharing a cigarette out front with Alice Deutsch. “She wanted to talk about this guy she’s been seeing. He sounds completely wrong for her. I gave her a checklist and told her, ‘Don’t be afraid to wait for the right thing.’”

A clatter went up from the kid corner, crying and laughing twined together into a noise William could not name.

The party wound on, high spirits floating out of bodies that were slowly sinking down. Graham Kenner and Helen Hull showed each other their stomachs. Paul Prescott showed pictures of earlier in the night. Alice Deutsch left, and then Emma and Stevie, and Louisa tugged on William’s arm just as he was thinking of tugging on hers. “Let’s go,” she said. “Treat a lady right.”

“Did you have fun?” he said in the car.

“It was fine,” she said. Her posture was perfect and unwelcoming.

“You seem tired.”

“I wouldn’t say tired,” she said. “Something at the party bothered me.”

He stopped at the lip of the road. “What?” he said.

“I felt a little trapped. You and I have this big news about the house, but I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think it’s going to happen, at least not any time soon. You seem like you’re stalling.” The idea had always been there, in the shadows. She had put light on it, but too much, and now it was an eyesore.

William took a long loop on the way back, passing near the lot on Harrow, though the night was so dark that they seemed to be in no place at all.

When they got home, Louisa settled in the kitchen with a glass of wine. “You coming to bed?” William said, but then he saw the white string of the headphone cord dangling down from her ear. He went to bed without her and woke so tired he wondered if he had slept at all. Louisa was beside him, headphones still half in, one earpiece at sea on the light blue sheet.

Blondie nosed the front door to show she wanted walking, but William was in no mood for it, so he let her into the yard and went out to the garage. He smelled the sick-sweet odor the second he put his hand on the doorknob: a rat. It was small enough not to fear, fetal in death; ants crawled in a thick static over its legs and its belly. He used a plastic bag as a glove, scooped it up, and turned the glove inside out. The garbage can was wedged behind a stack of boxes, recent purchases Louisa had decided to return. The coffeemaker was among them. He threw the rat away. Next to the boxes was his guitar; he was about to pick it up when he heard the fuzz of a chord from elsewhere in the morning.

He hit the garage door opener with the heel of his hand to reveal Stevie, with his own garage door open, playing his own guitar. William walked down the driveway. He looked closer and saw that Emma was in the garage, too. Stevie said something to her and brushed a fingertip across her forehead. It reminded William that there was much he didn’t know. This was not a new thought, but it was one that was suddenly large within him. He gave a salute and got his arm back down before his blood froze entirely.

The rain had eased off, but the river of the audience flowed out onto the street, churning up adjectives. “It was brilliant,” one woman said. She was older and wore a dress covered with flowers. Her friend, in a blazer, tried his hand: “Dark.” Then: “Provocative.”

William and Louisa navigated a traffic of hats and umbrellas. “I thought the movie was slow,” she said. William only nodded and said nothing. “I am telling you my opinion so that you can tell me yours,” Louisa said.

“It’s loosely based on
Crime and Punishment
,” William said.

“That’s not an opinion,” she said. “You know that scene where his father went to the library to research other robberies before he planned his? That’s how I would do it.”

A man behind them was making a point: “Tragedy becomes trivia more quickly than you would care to admit, and then trivia is rebuilt into history.”

“He’s on a date,” Louisa said in a stage whisper. They slowed and the man went by them: he was older than his voice, with teeth that did not quite line up properly and hands that cleared space for his words. His date seemed not to be a date at all, but a woman a generation older, perhaps his mother.

The sun was going down over town on a Saturday. A traffic cop was posting fliers soliciting information about a recent fire at a bus station that was under construction. Louisa stopped under the coppery sky and breathed in deeply like she was taking a cure. “We could just leave,” she said.

“What?”

“You know, just pick up and go.”

“Go home? I thought you said dinner.”

“No, I mean go for real. Forever. A woman in my office did. She and her husband sold their house and bought one they’d only seen in pictures. They made enough on the sale that they have six months to find jobs.” William pictured himself in a city where they had never lived: Miami, or St. Louis, or Phoenix. He might go to work for a newspaper again and come home every night wrapped in righteousness. But Louisa was just baiting the hook. “She’s going to fail, you know. I give her six months tops.”

“That’s nice.”

“She should have taken smaller steps, the kind that don’t lead you right off the edge of the cliff.”

“What is it they say about the difference between falling and flying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever they say, I’m sure it’s wrong.” They were around the corner now, in front of a boutique hotel that had gone in and out of business over the years, always changing its name, never changing anything else. William and Louisa had stayed there on what passed for their honeymoon. The place was shut now, though a sign in the window said it was just for renovation. Louisa stared for a long time at the sign, or at least at the spot in the window where it was hanging. William tried to remember what floor they had stayed on, what Louisa’s hair had looked like then, whether they had fallen asleep at all. Much of life turned out to be a test of how much you could forget without losing the thread entirely.

“You know what I did at work yesterday?” Louisa said. “I reviewed snack-time procedures for classroom visits. There’s actually a written set of rules. Teachers are required to submit lists of any especially slow eaters so they can be served first.” She reached out and touched the window. He was still not sure what she was looking at. For a moment, William imagined that she was ten years younger, or fifteen: that no choices had been made, not even the good ones.

“All this talk of snacks is making me even hungrier,” he said. Now she was the one who only nodded.

The restaurant’s motif was nautical; the small framed cases on the walls held artifacts from shipwrecks. The waiter was chatty; he had a family at home, he said, “if you call a boyfriend and a dog a family.” He listened to old radio dramas every night. He was writing a play about Eisenstein and thought he could take the lead. “Don’t pay me any mind,” he said. He disappeared for a stretch and then returned to set it all down for them: the soups, the salads, the salty fish. William had considered ordering a complicated cocktail, and now that he saw the waiter’s pleasure in serving, he regretted that he hadn’t. “I hope you’re finding everything to your satisfaction,” the waiter said, spreading his hands over the meal in benediction.

“Of course we’re finding it,” William said. “It’s right here on the table.”

Louisa laughed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” she said.

The waiter gave her a mournful look. “But everyone is,” he said.

At the end of dinner, William went down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, took out his telephone, turned it over in his hand. Louisa was waiting for him to come back, but he loitered in the hall, watching her in the stripe of mirror. She was trying to be sad so as not to be angry, but it seemed to make her angry that she couldn’t be sad.

“You’re a nice guy, William.” Karla told him so on the phone, and she said it again when she met William in front of her house on Hardy and deposited the package in the passenger seat. William wasn’t sure what to do with this information, if in fact it was information. Karla shut the door to the car and then rapped on the window until William lowered it. “I just wanted to say bye,” she said.

“Bye,” William said.

“Bye, Mom,” the package said.

After a series of calls thick with implication, Karla had gotten to it. She wanted William to take Christopher out for an afternoon. “He’s been having a rough time ever since Matthew and I split up.”

“You split up?”

“About a month ago. Matthew moved on. I knew he would. It should be his slogan: ‘Matthew moves on.’ He got close to Chris, though, which means that now I have a boy on my hands who wonders why people get close to him, then run away. Will you take him to the park for me?”

“You want me to leave him there?”

A mix of laughter and sadness filled the line. “Just take him out there. Throw some bread at the ducks. I don’t care. He knows you, he feels safe with you. Be a kind of uncle.” And so William had stood looking into a cage in his garage, thinking of how little of what he owned appealed to a boy. He had a baseball glove, but it was plastic, a developer’s giveaway from a promotion a few years before. He had a Frisbee that was also a giveaway, and a kite he’d bought as a birthday present for Graham Kenner’s son but never delivered. He dumped them all into the trunk and went inside to find Louisa. She was in the junk room, on the computer, a catalog open next to her. “I’m heading out to run some errands,” William said. “I have to get some stain for the deck and a few other things. What are you up to?”

“I’m going to try my best to do nothing.”

“Okay,” he said. “See you around four.” She hadn’t mentioned the new house in days. He wondered if the idea had moved on or if it was waiting in the weeds, ready to take him when he wasn’t looking.

Small, dark, with a weight in his gestures, Christopher sat still for most of the drive, staring forward. Karla had let on that Christopher was flourishing in some regards and wilting in others. He could tie knots, more kinds than William knew existed, and he loved to read the newspaper in the old-fashioned way, and he could sketch out the history of the nation from the time of early Indians. He was a devoted if not a good athlete, especially when it came to sports where speed trumped strength. But he was lonely. “He has a hard time making friends,” Karla had said. “Sometimes he’ll be talking about something that interests him, and it’s like his entire being is lit from the inside, and then he’ll suspect that I’m not listening, or giving him my full attention, and he won’t get angry so much as empty. He’ll just vacate the spot where he was a minute before. If that happens with his mom, who’s trying her hardest, I wonder what happens with kids at school.”

William asked Christopher if he preferred music or talk radio. “Talk,” he said, but the first station they found was a pastor suggesting that modern man was in exile from himself, and Christopher grew bored and started to talk about a dead turtle he had found behind his house, its shell beginning to soften. To a series of questions about class, about sports, about girls, Christopher issued brief responses and then was rigid with them for a few seconds. “You love being interviewed, I see,” William said, and the boy surprised him with a smile.

At the park, William popped the trunk and told Christopher to pick out what he wanted. He went right for the kite, a red hexagon with a yellow tail. “This,” he said. “Definitely.”

The park brimmed with children. Teenage girls thumbed cell phones. Small boys offered up die-cast cars to older brothers. William got the kite up in the air and passed Christopher the reel; he played it out or in, trying to keep the thing aloft. Every few minutes it went into irons and came crashing back to the ground. “That’s the thing about kites,” William said.

“I don’t mind,” Christopher said. “It’s fun to get it going again.” He ran to launch it: a successful flight, then an unsuccessful one, then a brief stay in a birch tree. Another boy a few years younger than Christopher came toward them from the far end of the lawn, cradling a mangled delta kite; his father followed, explaining something about inevitability. Then, behind the man, William noticed a man biking around the edge of the park: Stevie. He was wearing the same blue biker shorts he had been in at the door and a bright yellow T-shirt with an Arrow logo. Stevie spotted William, hopped off his bike, and wheeled it over.

“Hey,” William said, trying for neighborly. “You here for the exercise course?”

“No,” Stevie said. “Tweaked a delt the other day moving some furniture. I’m just doing laps. Who’s this?”

“This is Christopher,” William said. “Friend of the family. I’ve known him since he was this high.” He kneeled down and pressed his hand down flat to the ground. The three of them smiled against the light wind. It felt almost like friendship. Then Stevie started telling Christopher how to fly the kite. “Get it up above the tree line,” he said. “That way there’s enough wind to keep it aloft.” He was right, William knew, but Christopher was having fun running back and forth.

The wind surged, then faded, and the kite drifted into a dead patch. Christopher and William followed it as it slid slowly downward. “Make sure the bridle is set correctly,” Stevie said. “I think the way you have it, the thing comes down too fast.” Christopher fiddled with the kite and relaunched it. This time it went up over the trees and shone like a deep red place in the bleached-out sky. “Will you look at that?” Stevie said. “I knew it would work.”