The Slide: A Novel (2 page)

Finally I saw him. Despite limitless wealth, Stuart continued to drive the first car his parents bought him, a mid-nineties Ford Explorer variously dented and run-down. He viewed himself as the unique product of convergent psychocapitalist forces, so driving his big dumb American truck car until it died was a way to both honor these forces and assert his individuality. When I opened the door, he was nodding and not smiling.

“And so begins what might be the worst year of your life.”

“Start simple, please, and tell me how,” I said.

“Can’t,” he said. “Your version won’t be anything like mine. What do you know about Cambodia? Don’t get me wrong, this is going to be difficult. I promise. But not Cambodia.”

After graduating from Brown the year before, Stuart went straight from the baggage claim to his parents’ pool house for a swim and a beer. Weeks passed and he decided he might as well live there and avoid the potential explosions with his father and stepmother at the main house. And so he stayed. He inhabited the pool house as if it were some sort of womb, subsisting on the runoff luxury that trickled from John and Deanna Hurst’s massive home. Details of his year were sparse. He admitted to devoting a fair chunk of his time to open-ended thought, and he also mentioned blowing the occasional line of Talkative.

“Situations came up.” Stuart rolled through a stop sign. “Some of them involved women who won’t enter a room unless there’s Talkative inside.”

Now Stuart had found an apartment. I knew this because he had sent me a series of e-mails. I knew the building dated from the turn of the last century, and was gorgeous, and classy, and likely about the most amazing apartment I had so far ever seen. The old woodwork, floors that would creak under our feet. Old Cardinals pennants hanging on the walls of his first personal home.

We drove into downtown Clayton, a mixture of ten-story office buildings and overpriced restaurants. Women in unrevealing skirts stood with jacketless men on street corners, not exactly smiling. The storm that I listened to all night had dropped leaves and small branches from the trees that lined these streets, great bodies of green flirting with squat glass towers. I was always shocked when I returned from LA to find so much color, like some regional détente with nature.

“How are those allergies?” Stuart asked.

“Allergies,” I said. “I forgot all about my allergies.”

We’d come for housewarming supplies. He parked us between two silver luxury SUVs. The plaque on the wall said:
STRAUB’S MARKET: FINE GROCERS SINCE 1901
. Whatever sort of place it was back then, what we stepped into was a boutique market where local families kept charge accounts, a spectrum of beige with miniature shopping carts and grated chrome shelves.

Stuart picked a jar of apricot mango wasabi sauce. “I’m guessing things didn’t end well with Audrey.”

“At some point a guess stops being a guess.”

“You look horrible,” he said. “What went wrong?”

“Every possible thing went wrong. It was a sequence of mistakes based on various kinds of selfishness. I stand by some of my actions. Other actions I can hardly believe were mine. Remember our plan to travel after graduation? Instead, she’s in Europe with Carmel for three weeks and I’m here.”

“So this is punishment,” he said.

“Yes. Because I am a selfish asshole prick man.”

We moved to the meat counter, a thing of local legend. Two goateed men wearing white aprons eyed us suspiciously until Stuart ordered eight flank steaks and four pork loins.

“I think you’re going to appreciate some of the work I’ve been doing. A few recent projects are investment-worthy if I can find the right people.”

It was generally assumed Stuart would work for his father, but nobody had the foggiest notion when he’d start. Two months earlier, at school, I’d received an envelope with a business card tucked inside:

Mentation as employment, research in its loosest, most wandering sense. No specific hours as such, only the faith that every so often he’d stumble upon a worthwhile thought.

The store’s stereo played a Bach fugue. A woman with a green basket over her arm sneezed, and at least three voices blessed her. How many of these women had had face-lifts? It was impossible for me to know. Audrey came from a family of surgeons, which meant she could tell without fail who’d gone under the knife. We’d go on day trips from campus into Hollywood to stroll Melrose and pretend to window-shop.

“Look at her neck,” she’d explain in that voice of hers. “Necks don’t lie. Also notice she doesn’t have earlobes.”

I carried as much Budweiser as I could and met Stuart at the checkout lane. Now the old woman in the forest-green apron eyed me suspiciously. Childish features still intact, my face round, nose, I suppose,
buttonlike,
I must have looked a little like every grandson in the entire world, because old women were always finding me charming. This one did not. I handed her my driver’s license.

Our total was a little over three hundred dollars. Because he was missing the index finger on his right hand, Stuart’s pen grip was always awkward and comical, but now what came out was a fantastic signature, sinuous letters curling into themselves with much flourish. This was new.

The apartment was in the Central West End, an almost-urban area close enough to downtown that half the city was afraid to go there. Lining the highway were commercial developments I’d never seen before. Soon we came to the bridge of the Science Center, where kids on field trips aimed speedometers at traffic. The whole highway moved at a cautious fifty-eight. Once we exited, Stuart made a series of rapid turns and I lost all sense of direction, all I could see were houses and trees, trees
everywhere,
until he came to a stop where a fire truck and several police cruisers blocked the road.

“Well.” He flicked his cigarette to the ground. “How’s this for something.”

I followed a few steps behind. The visuals were powerful—spinning lights, various troops of personnel moving across the scene, a thin crowd of gawking onlookers. At the center of it all was a building, its top quarter collapsed by the tree that had fallen into it. I had been awake for much of the storm that moved through during the night. There was a solid hour when drops were massive and the wind a force. And now here was this tree at this awkward angle, the rubble of fallen brick, a barbarous act of partial destruction.

I heard shouting and the clunk of boots on pavement. The firemen leaned against their truck and watched. Stuart remained calm, so I tried to remain calm. I took turns looking at Stuart and looking at where the tree had fallen through the apartment. His arms were crossed at his chest.

“Looks like no other apartments were damaged,” he said.

“That’s the apartment. The e-mail.”

“Look close and you can see my red couch in there. See it? Totally great couch.”

Imagine the sound of a tree severing from itself and falling through a building. Thunderous crack of wood followed soon by crash of brick and plaster and more wood. At ground level, the stump and about six feet of splintered tree remained, doomed. What was this? Surely wind alone couldn’t have cracked so massive a trunk down the middle.

“Those firemen look bored as hell,” he said.

I looked at the crowd of
onlookers
. Were these walkers who had just happened upon this disaster? Several were talking into phones. It would be a hard scene to leave once you stumbled upon it; a tree falls in the city and select few are there to look. There would be the natural urge to describe it all to some friend or family member, dial a random number and share with whoever answered. To describe was to make real; listen to what I’m seeing. You’ll never believe what I saw. I used to say
girlfriend
and find reassurance, a word to frame that corner of my world.

I overheard the man next to me speaking of a particular fungus. Dutch elm, he said, then again to someone else. Dutch elm. I shared the fungus theory with Stuart, speaking out of the corner of my mouth as if delivering a grave national secret.

“Well,” he said. “Well well well well.”

Here was actual trial, and Stuart was handling it like a weathered veteran. Was it really only one year between us? Though I had friends in my class through school, baseball teammates and the normal balance of sundry peers, there was something to having a friend a year older. He was a guide of sorts to whatever was to come in year X + 1, a role I knew he relished. Now he was composed, stoic in the face of immense loss. With this and the signature, I felt honored to be standing so close to him.

“I wonder who you’re supposed to tell. The firemen? They’ll point you in the right direction, at least. Get the insurance agent out here.”

“I got a car full of meat, Potter. Let’s go back to the pool house.”

We walked back to the car and climbed inside. I adjusted the air-conditioning onto my face and watched the spinning lights until we were around the corner. I didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know what to say. Look at you. You’re a rock.”

Now, backtracking along the route we’d taken earlier, I felt the first bored pangs of recognition. There was the park. The Science Center. Fifty-eight miles per hour.

“I would sure like some response here.”

“My apartment has been demolished by a mixed act of nature and insidious vermin. Fine. You want me to talk about it, and I wouldn’t mind talking about it, but I am not someone who can complain.”

“You can’t complain. But even that is a kind of complaint.”

“You and I don’t live in Cambodia. There aren’t land mines in our backyards that could blow off our limbs every time we go out for a jog.”

This was my best friend, driving the Ford.
Look at him,
I thought.
Look and absorb and perhaps steal.
It seemed suddenly very clear that of all the resources I had in the world, all the unfairly distributed and crapshoot gifts I’d been blessed with, perhaps Stuart Hurst would prove the most valuable. Because the basic truth was that I had a decision to make, one I had put off for as long as I possibly could because I didn’t have the proper tools. Or, rather, I had too many tools and no concept of how to use them. I needed considerable help.

“I want to contract some thought.”

“I know just the guy,” Stuart said.

“I owe it to her and I owe it to myself. I have three weeks. Three weeks to devote to nothing but deciding whether I’m actually in matter of serious fact in love with her. I ask myself all the time: are you in love with her? And I answer. I say the word and I believe the word, but then at the same time I
hear
the word, and it sounds hollow.”

“Quick,” Stuart said. “Are you in love with Audrey?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I see what you mean.” He considered this for a mile. “Realize I have to charge you. We’re not playing kickball here. This is what I do professionally. The more serious I take what I do, the better I end up doing it.”

“Maybe part of the question is answered by the fact that I’m looking for third-party help,” I said. “Maybe that’s data for you to add to the pile.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I used to be an emotionally rich young male, Stubes. Now I’m like, what’s the cardboard. Manila.”

“This sounds like the sort of thing where I work at my own pace until I reach a conclusion and then charge you retroactively. Meaning there will have to be a certain level of trust between us that I, mentator, am not going to screw you, client. But I will charge you. Break, sure. Discount, sure. Free lunch, no.”

We passed our old middle school, the Ladue fire department, the Amoco station where I’d once seen two hockey players kick and tear at each other until the ground was covered in blood and flannel and khaki. Audrey had questioned what I wanted. We had entire conversations about what we might each possibly want. Over time it became clear that what she knew of desire was far greater than the filaments I had at my disposal. And this, among so many other things, had led to profound loss of sleep.

“We will of course still throw a party,” he said. “Call it a Welcome Back, Potter party.”

I sneezed twice, then let my head fall against the window.

“You expect there to be women at this party? Talkative?”

“Damn yes,” he said. “Research.”

june