The Slippage: A Novel (10 page)

He woke before her. There was a noise somewhere in the hotel, a shallow scraping. He tried to block it out without success. Emma shifted and frowned, opening her eyes, and William saw her seeing him. What did she see? A man who was in bed with another woman, feeling so many things that it wasn’t easy to locate regret among them. He was sure that her face would have been cool to the touch if he had been brave enough to reach out.

The night had made not the slightest difference to their manner or appearance. They got dressed and went downstairs for breakfast. The hostess, an overripe young woman stuffed hopefully into black pants and a white dress shirt, waved a merry hand across the buffet: waffles, pancakes, omelets, donuts, cereals.

Emma clapped. “I was dreaming of this,” she said.

“Was it was a good dream?” the hostess said.

“Not this good.”

“We keep her dreams on a tight budget,” William said.

William joked that way with Louisa, sometimes with desperate regularity, but she reacted like transition lenses: the brighter his tone, the darker the look she returned. Emma laughed easily. She was tired of some other man.

Later, in the lobby, she looked small inside a green armchair. A cherrywood staircase behind her led up into the hotel, toward the room they were done with forever. “I wish we didn’t have just a single morning,” William said.

She frowned at him and fretted the button of her coat. “Don’t say that,” she said. “You’re not part of my life. My life is fine as it is. It’s life, right? Not worth escaping but hard to completely embrace. So I do what I have to do.” Courage pooled in her eyes.

He went home after breakfast. She saw him out to the edge of the curb and shook his hand crisply, as if she had done business with him. From the plane, the city receded beneath him until it was, to his relief, unreadable.

Back at home Emma was a constant presence in William’s mind, a layer beneath everything, and so he moved rapidly to conceal it. He made good on the deck show, ordering the Western-themed lanterns, though when they arrived in the mail they were flimsier than he had remembered. Other attempts to take his mind off Chicago fell similarly short. He bought himself a new alarm clock, but the face was too bright and he could not sleep with it beside his bed. He upgraded his car stereo, but there were not enough gradations in the volume dial and music was either too soft at the fourth click or too loud at the fifth. He told himself that he was more alive to the world around him, and then, when that idea came to seem too romantic, that he was simply agitated. He waited for ordinary life to seal him in again, and a month later the alarm clock’s glare was no longer keeping him awake. He commended time for passing.

But now, the unthinkable had happened: a year had gone by and her letter was open on the kitchen counter, heating up the place. “Dear William,” it said. “I have some very surprising news I need to share with you. I am moving. Stevie got transferred to a new division of Arrow that’s based in your town. We will be neighbors. And when I say neighbors, William, I mean near neighbors. I looked up the address, and it’s right across the street. Life’s funny sometimes, and sometimes it’s anything but. See you soon.”

He read the note a second time and let his finger rest on words he thought he was supposed to understand. He threw the rest of the mail away but put the letter in his pocket, and when he reached the bedroom, he transferred it quickly to the drawer in the table beside his bed. He could not see it but he could sense it there still, and so he lay in bed and forced his mind to rise, like mist off a river, and hover at the top of the bedroom, before it passed through the ceiling. He could take the sky, bit by bit, until he saw it all stretched out before him: the houses, the cars, the lights twinkling in the dark carpet of the town at night. And so he rose and the letter did not. It stayed there in the bottom of the table, a small white rectangle that shrank until it was a scrap, a shred, nothing or even less than that, so long as he stayed aloft.

William waited for signs of life in the house across the way. At first he was casual about it, angling his kitchen chair during meals so he could see out the front window. It looked just like a house: nondescript cream-colored façade punctuated by a few shuttered windows. A bright green vine climbed calligraphically alongside the front door. The first Saturday he set an alarm for seven and walked Blondie up and down the street, a surveillance pass. The Monday after that, he invented an excuse to go out to the garage, where he pushed the weightlifting bench up against the small vertical window and remained at his post until Louisa called him in to watch TV with her. Then, at ten or so on the morning of the second Saturday, the front door disgorged a young woman. She knelt by a green puff of shrubbery, rearranged something William couldn’t see, and then made her way along the narrow path toward her garage. It was Emma, unmistakably, if only from the wide swing of her right hip when she walked. She touched the handle of her door, tested it for tightness, appeared to adjust it slightly, and passed back inside the house. He had seen it all from his post, through the dusty pane of duty glass. The whole thing had taken ten seconds, tops.

Sunday, errands; Monday, work; Tuesday-to-Friday’s assault on meaningful memory. Then Saturday again, and a rare rain that pattered on the glass door that led from the kitchen to the deck. The weather cleared at lunchtime, and Louisa went to run errands, and that was his cue to walk across the street and knock on the door. Emma answered. Her hair was shorter than before, and slightly darker. Her face was holding back nearly everything. He sensed someone behind her. “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Hi,” he said. “Bill Day.”

“Bill?” she said, smiling uncertainly. A book was wedged under her arm. He didn’t recognize the cover and couldn’t see the full title—something about a mirror.

“William, I guess. Most people call me William, though whenever I meet new people, I try to go by Bill. Sounds friendlier. But it never seems to stick. Anyway, I live right across the way there.” He lifted an index finger and pointed it, so deliberately that no reasonable observer could have perceived it as casual.

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

“You’re moving in?” He heard his own foot dragging across the bricks of the walk.

“Trying to. We’re box people at the moment.”

“Completely,” he said, not sure what he was agreeing with.

A man’s voice came from inside the house. “Who is it?”

“A neighbor.”

The man appeared beside her, wearing tight blue metallic shorts. “Hey,” he said. “I’d shake your hand but I’ve been oiling up my bicycle so I can take a ride.” He laughed at a joke that maybe he thought he had made. Emma had described him as tall, or at least compared him to someone tall. He was not. He put his arm around his wife. “Stevie,” he said.

“William,” William said.

“Emma,” Emma said.

There was a silence. “Where are you guys coming from?” William said.

“Chicago,” Stevie said.

“Great city,” William said. “I haven’t been there for years.” He grimaced. What if that remark wound its way back to Louisa? He would write it off as a misunderstanding. Everything is not always perfectly understood. His foot was scuffing faster now. A brown parcel-post truck rumbled around the corner. It was probably headed for the Zorillas’; the wife had lost her job and was working from home, buying and selling collectibles. But it pulled up at the head of William’s driveway and a young black man with dreadlocks hopped out. “Oh, look, a package,” William said. “I should go get that.” He bid a quick good-bye and went back to his house. The package was addressed to Louisa, a box of unrevealing size and weight from a catalog house he didn’t recognize. He carried it inside, flipping a waist-height wave back across the street, but the door was already closed.

That night, he and Louisa were watching TV, a crime drama they had joined halfway through and were trying to piece together. “Your phone,” Louisa said. William shook his head and let it ring. Later in the bathroom, he checked for a message; there was none, but he had her number now. He slept encircled by the memory of Emma as she stood there in the doorway, saying his name like a question.

Louisa was up before him, already in the kitchen, menacing the coffeemaker. “This machine,” she said murderously. “It won’t listen.”

The old machine had expired with an electrical puff. “I’ll get a new one,” William said, but he preferred store-bought coffee, and so he forgot, and Louisa reminded him, and he forgot again, and finally she sighed with exasperation and said she was going online to call in the cavalry.

The cavalry, which had been designed by an award-winning Swiss architect, was a chrome sphere with a recessed instrument panel that promised, according to the box, “total control over the coffee-making experience.” For the moment, it seemed to be exercising total control over Louisa. “Damn it,” she said. “I can’t get this to do what it’s supposed to do.” She put both hands on the sphere and lifted it off the table as if it were a head.

“Which is?”

“Turn on?”

A piece that looked important gleamed on the counter. “Maybe that’s something,” William said.

“That’s from the old one. I think. Or the rice cooker. I don’t know.” Louisa returned the head to the counter and scooped food into the dog’s dish. She had set out a small bowl of cereal for William and a glass decorated with the Statue of Liberty. “So what’s your day like?”

William filled his glass up to the crown. “I don’t know. The usual. Tote that barge, lift that bale.” He began to hum.

“Don’t sing,” she said. “I don’t want to have to stay in a hotel.” Marriage, having grown tired of labor, resupplied old plots and conflicts, snippets of familiar dialogue. “It could be worse. At least you don’t have to deal with curators all day long. Nothing’s worse than a female martinet.”

“You’re going to have to help me out with that one,” he said. “I failed zoology.”

Louisa laughed, but only briefly, and William moved into the space the silence created. “Hey,” he said. “I ran into Eddie Fitch and he invited us to a party. It’s a theme party, kind of.”

“They always are,” Louisa said. “What’s this one?”

“Southern Christmas.” It was based on something that Helen Hull had told Gloria: “She was talking about how when she was growing up in Manitoba, she had so many signs that autumn was changing into winter. Now there’s no good way to tell.”

“So Gloria decided to do it for her?”

“I guess.” William opened the gate the rest of the way. “It’s kind of a welcome-wagon party for the new people, too, I think. Have you met them yet?”

“Not really,” Louisa said. “So this will be a good way.” She put the butter back.

“Yeah,” William said. But he pinched the bridge of his nose when he said it. An old affair across the street: it was a secret he had to keep, a spot of frostbite on his memory. Tom had said that conventional morality left something to be desired, but William thought the problem was that it left nothing to be desired. It was a dull steady heartbeat that trailed off over time. In Chicago, he had put the paddles to this slowly dying heart. He had clobbered his expectations of himself and then convinced himself not to think about the consequences. But now the past had surfaced, and there was movement in water he needed to be placid.

Louisa cleared his bowl and glass from in front of him and then started in on the counter: she folded up a newspaper, rolled up catalogs she didn’t want, dumped them all into the garbage. “I hope there was nothing in there for me,” he said. He hadn’t brought up the issue of the mail since she had left the bag on the counter, and things seemed back in swing, with a steady stream of publications they didn’t need.

She leaned across him to get the pitcher of water. She had missed a button on her nightshirt and he widened the opening. “Hey.” Louisa gripped him at his wrist. “Got to go,” she said. “I’ve got bales of my own to lift.” The museum was opening an exhibit on the history of local signage. Louisa had written the wall text and had to proof the plaques before they were placed. One night, Tom had come by to help her out with what he called “the intentionally dead language of museum writing.” He pretended to be cynical, took on a tone, but William heard something else instead: Tom’s pride in his sister.

“Ready to go,” William said. “I need to be at the office fifteen minutes ago.” He had Loomis work to do. It was piled up on his desk, heating up the place. “So we’re not going to get any coffee from this UFO?”

“I’ll return it,” Louisa said. “But I’m very disappointed. I thought Swiss engineering was the best in the world.”

“I don’t see how,” William said. “Even their cheese has holes.”

Louisa untangled her purse strap from the back of the kitchen chair. “You want to walk out with me?”

“I’m not quite ready.” He figured he could take a few minutes to watch the house across the street, maybe catch sight of Emma. He’d seen her the night before, coming in from a supermarket trip. She was wearing a tank top and he got the curve of her shoulder into his mind and couldn’t get it out.