The Slippage: A Novel (11 page)

William went to the den, took a magazine from the table. He noticed, maybe for the first time, that the design on the wallpaper was a four-blade pinwheel cornered by a quartet of birds. He surveyed the rest of the room. There was the shallow blue ceramic vase on the windowsill, the strange broken-neck lamp over the recliner. How could he fairly move to a new house when he knew so little about this one?

He lay down on the couch and balanced his phone on his chest. Suddenly it buzzed, a tiny heart attack. William flipped the phone open. It was a text from Louisa. “Make sure water bowl before you go,” it said. “Dog thirsty.”

William gazed out his office window into the park across the street and wondered what it had all looked like a thousand years before, and whether the change had been for the better. To his left was a legal pad on which he had block-printed the name
O’SHEA
, then crossed it out and written
LOOMIS
. He turned to his computer, opened up the brochure file, and got to it. He needed to create the impression that any TenPak investor, but especially a principal, was in for the ride of his life. He moved words from one sentence to another, shifted punctuation. He polished the paragraph until he could almost see himself in it.

Through lunch, beyond lunch, into afternoon, conversation came to him as if through water. The reason was simple. The reason was Emma. He still hadn’t called her back, hadn’t even dialed a single digit of the number. She had called him again, this time leaving a message. It wasn’t much—a slow
hello
, then a quick
call me back
—but he snapped the phone shut without deleting her voice mail and tried to make sense of the hectic jazz in his chest.

An alert blinked on William’s screen for a meeting down the hall. In Baker’s office, an intern was tending to a reference shelf in the corner. He was tall and slim and possibly Baker’s nephew. Fresh energy came off him in waves. “I have some information about our new employee,” Baker said. He paused to invite speculation.

“The one from San Diego?” Fitch said.

“He’s starting any day, right?” Harris said. It seemed like it. A cubicle had been cleaned, except for a note taped at shoulder height that said “Hold All Walls for Harry.” A replacement chair had come down from Vyron—Antonelli, always rocking, had damaged the last one’s spine. Someone had even tacked up a California postcard on the wall over the desk, though it was of the Bay Area. Approximate hospitality was better than none at all.

“Well,” Baker said. His voice was even deeper and more resonant when it carried news. “George came to me the other week to ask if I thought it was a good idea to bring the man in immediately or let him finish out the quarter in San Diego. Because when he comes here, he’s going to be part of the team. And that means that he’ll need to understand everything about the way we’re selling TenPak.” He pointed at William. “When you write, you make customers believe. But you also make these men believe.” He pointed at Fitch, Harris, and Cohoe. “And when they believe they sell, and their sales create more belief. It’s a virtuous circle.” His voice dropped another half step. “The new hire is a true son of this company.”

“Meaning what?” Cohoe said.

“Meaning that he’s shattering sales records. Not just in San Diego, but for any city, any division.” Baker patted the desk emphatically. “That’s one of the reasons I decided to delay him. For these weeks, especially, I don’t want him to make the rest of you think too much about what you are or aren’t doing, especially given the circumstance with O’Shea and Loomis. Because you know whose team it is?”

“All of ours?” Fitch said.

“No,” Baker said. He looked confused. “It’s Arthur’s team.” Now Harris looked confused. “He’s senior by a month and he consistently tops sales figures. Six months from now, it might be the new guy’s, but that remains to be seen. We’re having some issues with TenPak, as I’m sure you all know, and we need to remedy them. So for now Arthur is the main character in this movie. The rest of you are in supporting roles.”

“I’m the main character?” Harris said. He didn’t sound convinced.

“Wait,” William said to Baker. “If he’s the main character, what are you?”

Baker tilted his large head and considered the question. Its difficulty seemed to please him. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m the director.”

Fitch went for the door. Cohoe followed.

“William,” Baker said. “Wait a moment.” He squared himself at his desk. “Loomis,” he said softly. The word was hard inside the whisper.

“Yes,” William said. “I just finished those up this morning. You want Harris and Fitch to take them over?”

“He dropped out.”

“Impossible,” William said.

“Not only is it possible,” Baker said, “it has happened.” He picked up the phone and began to dial. “Now we’re on to Gardner. This is the next domino and also the last we’ll permit.”

He dismissed William with a nod.

William got to work on Gardner. He leaned heavily on the language. He had typed two letters of a longer word when he felt himself decoupling from the brochure. An airplane was going by outside, and he thought of what the people in the plane were seeing as they looked back down toward the earth. More precisely, he thought of what they weren’t seeing: they weren’t seeing the trivial details of the day, the things that had to be moved into close range so that they would seem significant at all. People focused on what was right in front of them, perfected their ability to analyze those things, all the while growing blinder to what lay beyond it. He thought of all the people improperly used in this process, all the people whose lives depended upon being able to accumulate wisdom—or at the very least, those whose lives were hollow without it, the judge, the critic, the cleric. He was not one of those men, he knew. He had always known that. Now he knew something else, which is that he would likely never be one of them. The chirping of a bird outside recalled him to his chair, and to the screen in front of him, where he finished up the word he was typing and switched to numbers, multiplying them together to demonstrate how value could increase.

As at every Gloria Fitch party, the music was too loud, careering confusingly from big band to Motown to disco. Gloria insisted Eddie was the culprit. “He has a tin ear,” she said. “In the sense that it needs to be pounded flat.”

The Fitch house had always struck William as comic, mainly because of the address (1111, like it couldn’t quite get started), but also because of the clash between the ornate Victorian doorbell plate on one side of the front door and the driftwood owl sculpture on the other side. The crowd was in back, small and evenly spaced, standing in groups of four or five around tiki torches staked into the grass.

The far edge of the yard was reserved for children, and they occupied it wildly, an unregimented army. Eddie Fitch emerged from among them, tousling the hair of a boy who was not his, and came toward William and Louisa. “Hi there,” he said, waving from close enough that a wave was unnecessary. “You look nice,” he said to Louisa. He was right: she was wearing a tight green top and black pants, both new, and she had darkened her hair close to the color of her twenties. “How about that meeting the other day?” Fitch said. “The way Baker’s voice gets, I feel like he’s narrating a documentary.” Here on home turf, he seemed more sure of himself. He explained Southern Christmas: there was a small artificial tree, beneath which Gloria had put flamingo-colored boxes. “The boxes all had to be the same size. If you only knew how much she cares about every last little detail.”

Gloria, gliding by, punched her husband in the shoulder. “Don’t tell them,” she said. “I like the illusion that things just come together.”

“Are you talking dirty to me?” Fitch said. Suddenly his face darkened and he stepped toward the far fence. “Hey,” he said. “Get down off of there now. Because I said so. I don’t need another reason.”

Gloria moved them across the lawn. The guests of honor were already in place, sitting in chairs in the corner by the tree. “What are we supposed to do?” William said. “They’re having an audience? Is it like the Pope?”

“It’s exactly like that,” Gloria said. “Once again, your command of world affairs is second to none.”

The Pope was surrounded by prelates. As William drew near, Graham Kenner was pointing at the tree. “Set phasers to generosity,” he was saying. He was always setting phasers. Cassandra was telling Helen Hull about a fire that had gutted an abandoned hardware store a block away from her office. “Well, hello,” Graham said to Louisa. He wobbled backward a bit. “Will your brother be joining us? He was the life of the party last time.”

Louisa pinched her mouth into a smile. “No,” she said. “I don’t think this is his scene.” They hadn’t seen Tom much in recent weeks. He was deep into new work. “When I’m at the beginning of a project like this, I’m clean as a dream,” he told William on the phone. “This is the best part of being on the wagon, the first part, before it starts to roll too fast and you have to jump off.”

In the seam between Louisa and Paul Prescott, William could see the side of Emma’s hip, a gray skirt and a band of leg. He experienced a pang of fear, not because he was about to come face-to-face with her, but because she was about to come face-to-face with Louisa. He wondered, suddenly, if he had even mentioned her by name. He was certain he had. Hadn’t he?

The crowd cleared. William took a deep breath and a shallow step. Louisa followed. “Hey, stranger,” Stevie said. “You had to come all the way across the neighborhood to see us?”

“Well, this was where the party was,” William said. He was offended when Stevie laughed. The man had that effect.

Gloria came to touch Stevie’s elbow. “These are the Wheelers.”

Emma extended her hand. “You’re William, right?”

“I am,” he said. “It’s easy to remember because it’s such an uncommon name.”

“We met before,” Emma explained to Gloria. “He came over to the house one of our first weekends in town. We were just getting out of boxes. He saw us struggling up the path, I think, and I asked him to recommend a place in town to eat.”

“I hope you didn’t go where he told you,” Louisa said. “He has terrible taste.”

“And this,” William said, waiting a beat, “is my wife.”

“Wait,” Stevie said. “Who has terrible taste?”

“William.” She pointed at him. “Him.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sure. I assumed that. In food, though, not wives.” He showed a high percentage of his teeth. And then, to Louisa, “I think you and I get home from work around the same time.”

“Ah,” Louisa said. “So you’ve seen my one-woman show,
Louisa in the Driveway After Work
. It’s doing very well. It’s been extended indefinitely.” She was holding an unlit cigarette now and she waggled it like vaudeville.

“Are these the new ones?” Alice Deutsch said, squeezing in next to Paul Prescott. She had been in the neighborhood for four months and was eager to be out of the spotlight.

“New one,” Emma said, standing and curtsying.

William felt a surge of weakness. “Can I get anyone a beer?” he said.

“I’m okay,” Emma said at his back. “I make it a policy not to get drunk the first time I meet people.” Alice Deutsch led a chorus of laughter, and it wasn’t until William got to the cooler that it occurred to him that the remark was not meant for the group. He took his time at the cooler. Through a small window, in the kitchen, Eddie Fitch minced garlic for Bloody Marys.

When William returned, Stevie was surrounded, eulogizing Chicago. “It was a great city, but I was a drone back there,” he said. “Huge hive. Then they split us off and moved us. Someone read a study that said that marketing does better if it’s semi-independent.”

Gloria Fitch held up a hand to stay him. “What did you do there?” she asked Emma.

“She was a caterer, and a good one,” Stevie said. “She had to stop her business, but she’s so great she’ll get it started again in no time.”

Emma stepped forward into a smile that looked like it was already hanging there.

“Right,” Gloria Fitch said. “Because it’s so easy to restart a business. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.”

William felt an unexpected desire to rescue the man. “Did anyone read that article about the new convention center they’re proposing?” he said. “They say it’ll help local businesses.” No one took the topic up, not even Stevie, and so William went back to the cooler for another beer.

He was bent down, gripping a longneck, when he saw shoes he did not recognize in legs he unaccountably did. He straightened up and offered Emma his beer. She shook her head. “Bill, is it?” she said. The vagueness was gone from her voice. Her face was turbulent despite itself. Unexpressed ideas leapt up from it in a spindrift. For the first time, he felt a tremor of Chicago. “How are you, really?”

“Good,” he said.

“Good,” she repeated. Was she mocking him? Echoing? Words meant nothing.

“Well, it’s nice to see you,” he said. “Nice to have you in the neighborhood.” It wasn’t true, but William wasn’t certain this was a truth situation. On the other side of the yard, a girl—William thought it was the youngest Kenner—pushed a Fitch boy down roughly; he came to his feet, shoved her back, and then, almost as an afterthought, began to cry.

“Look,” Emma said. “I didn’t ask to come here. Stevie brought me. What’s my basis for objecting?”

“You don’t care for the kinds of people who live in a place like this?”

This brought a broad smile that she quickly condensed almost to a point. “I think we need a ground rule or two. You and I, well, we’re not going to see each other. Alone, I mean. We’ll be neighbors, fine, but there’s not going to be some weird moment when you and your wife and me and Stevie get together and drink dandelion wine and confess everything and end up in bed like it’s Culver City in 1969.” Her fingers were interlaced and at her chest, though he didn’t know if she was keeping something out or in.

“Right,” William said. “I hate Culver City.” He tried to open the beer bottle with his bare hand; the teeth of the cap tore into his palm.

“Good,” she said. “Better than good. Great.” She lowered her hands, one until it flattened against the wall, the other landing on her hip. She looked like she had in Chicago—younger, unguarded, with a fragile ridge of shoulder blade. “I welcome the opportunity to become a part of this neighborhood. You have lovely public parks, I’ve noticed. And one of these days, you’ll have to come over to the house. We have a deck.” This time she aimed the joke squarely at him, and he took it on the chin. He had his beer almost finished before she was out of sight.