The Slippage: A Novel (14 page)

“That’s okay,” Christopher said. “We had a birthday party at school and I had two cupcakes. My stomach is small.”

“Not as small as your brain,” William said. “I am offering free ice cream.”

They ordered for Christopher; William waved it off. “Grown-ups don’t need it,” he said, but he got a swirl cone when Christopher insisted. They sat underneath a huge elm that had been called the Suicide Tree since William was a child, because kids were always trying to climb it and always falling to injury.

“I would never do that,” Christopher said. “I’m not stupid.” He waited a professional beat. “Did you?”

“Ha ha,” William said. He remembered a time when Christopher, maybe a year old, had climbed into bed between him and Karla. William had already known that things with Karla were dissolving, and from a mixture of guilt and justice, he had started to leave the bed. “No,” Christopher had said, and pulled himself close to William. The boy was a line of warmth running up the center of his chest.

“I was thinking of a swirl cone, too, but I think I’m a little old for that,” Christopher said. At the edge of the shade, a little girl ate cotton candy with both hands, as if she were devouring a cloud.

Later, at home, William watched the first movie he found, a drama about a revolt in a Portuguese colony. He got up to fill a bowl with ice cream. The chocolate syrup was nearly empty; he drained the last few drops and got back to the movie. Some men fought for their life against colonial oppressors. Others finished out a bottle of chocolate syrup while they watched a movie about those people.

When the movie ended, William pulled a dining room chair flush to the front window and monitored Emma’s house. Looking outward, he saw his lawn, then the street, then her house, but he also saw his reflection in the inside of the window. Who was that man? He had imagined he might travel the world. He had imagined he might squander his fortune in the most interesting and daring manner. He had read a passage in a book about how a mind of the first order accepts no limitation of its freedom, and that had filled him with a kind of spaciousness that he thought, at the time, was hope. He had imagined many things. One of the things he had not imagined was that one day he would be sitting at the front window of his house, looking across the street in search of what was not even really freedom. Blondie trotted up and leaned her head against William’s leg. “Don’t bug me when I’m working,” William said. A bee bulled the windowpane. Rain soughed on the grass. “Go ahead and tell your mom on me,” he told Blondie. “See if I care.” The dog turned doleful eyes on William. Was she sad because she didn’t understand or because she did?

“I need you.”

“I’ve been dreaming of this call,” William said. “Well, some people would say dream. Others would say nightmare.”

“I need help.”

“On a workday?” William said. “Can it wait until the weekend?”

“Not really,” Tom said. “I need to move to a new studio. You have a car and, let’s pretend, muscles.”

“Okay,” William said. “I think I can make it.” He tried to load up his response with reluctance, silently hint at an important meeting he’d have to miss or the duties that would accumulate in his absence. It was wasted on Tom, probably, but he considered it practice.

Tom worked in the warehouse district on the east side of town, on the first floor of a squat building whose front door was done in a crazy quilt of woods. When William pulled up, Tom was out on the curb, leaning on a street sign. It looked like he was trying to push it over. “Park around the corner,” Tom said. He led William through a side entrance and down a long hall. “I’ve had enough of this place,” he said. “They used non-drying oil in the varnish on the doors, and it blistered up so now they don’t lock right. Then things started going missing from people’s studios: a couple of radios, some clothes, cash. Part of me wants to stay, but the rest of me thinks I should go, and I am a democrat of me.”

“So where are you moving?”

“To the school. Some space mysteriously opened up. I think they always had it, but it wasn’t worth mentioning until my show started attracting attention. Now that they have a hit on their hands, they’re eager to do right by the talent.”

Boxes were stacked inside the door of the studio, most filled with poster tubes that contained oversize versions of Tom’s charts, and Tom took the first box and William took the second, and they went until both car trunks were filled.

“I have to do a final sweep of the place,” Tom said. “Entertain yourself.” A few of the other studio doors were open and William could see what was inside them: sculptures made from used car parts, portraits of trees turning into women or vice versa. A back door was open; William wandered out into the narrow street behind the warehouse. The alley was a graveyard of what William assumed were once considered inspirations. There were left shoes, maybe eight of them, in every color of the rainbow; various chrome bathroom fixtures glued together; sports magazines with the faces cut out. There was an oversize wooden crate with a metal cleat at its base that five years before William might have lugged home and turned into a doghouse for Blondie. He tested the thing’s soundness with the palm of his hand.

“That’s a nice one,” a man’s voice said. William turned to see a pile of coats, and then a face inside them. He was old, his features shrunk almost to nothing, his cheeks burned red from drinking, and he had an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. “You going to take it?”

“I was thinking about it,” William said.

“Well, for me, I like to call it home,” the man said.

“I’m sorry,” William said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s not true,” the man said. “I can usually get into one of these buildings at night and find myself a corner. When these warehouses were abandoned, it was worse. They’d lock them up with big chains and I’d have to sleep outside. But when all the artists started coming, that meant people needed to get in and out, and people means me, too.” He scratched his face everywhere and then covered his mouth to belch. It was shocking, the order in which people let things go. “Do you have a little spare change?”

William dug in his pockets. “Here,” he said, stepping toward the man.

“Oh,” the man said. He basketed his hands.

“You don’t have a cup?” William grabbed an empty paint can, turned it upside down so that the loose top clattered to the ground, and deposited the change. “Here,” he said. “Now you have a paint cup.”

Tom was calling William from inside the building and then his head poked through the door. “You out here, Billy Boy?” Tom said. He noticed the man on the step. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” the man said with exaggerated politeness. And then, to William, “You ready? It seems like your friend wants to get going.” He made a point of checking the spot on his arm where a watch would have been.

“Good luck,” William said idiotically as the door closed.

Tom drove across town toward campus, and William followed. When they pulled into the corner of a small quadrangle, Tom hopped out and pressed a key into William’s palm. “It’s right in there,” he said, pointing at the closest building. “I’m second floor, by the stairs. Get started. I’ll be up in a second.”

William carried boxes until there were no more. Then Tom joined him, and the two of them stood at the center of the room, admiring the clean lines of the studio and the surrounding buildings visible through the window. Quality clouds hung over the spires. Tom moved into the doorway. “You see me here at the brink of a new life,” he said. “It all changes, starting now. I can already feel the ideas coming on. I am channeling.” He stretched out his arms so that he filled the doorway.

“At least you’re not grandiose,” William said.

“At least there’s that,” Tom said. “Thank you kindly, sir. I’ll be seeing you soon enough. I plan to call you on that favor I mentioned. Now I’m heading to the snack bar, where coeds and foodstuffs abound. I can already feel the burger coming on.”

On the way home, William thought he saw Louisa’s car parked outside a cell phone store. The weeks since the Hollister incident had been an uncertain time for him: what he could bring into the light, what needed to stay under wraps. The day before, the parcel post man had come again. Through the window he could see the brown truck grazing in the street. He was halfway to the front door when he stopped: if he signed for the package, Louisa would know he was home during the day.

William got an e-mail from Fitch, who said he’d witnessed a whispered conversation between George Hollister and Baker. “I’m not sure what they were talking about,” he wrote. “I guess it was you. I’m not sure.” Even Fitch’s e-mails fidgeted. Later, Baker called, and though William didn’t pick up, he listened to the message, which contained a highly vague consideration of the company’s likely recourse. “I feel I’d be remiss not to be comprehensive about the possible outcomes. There is a suspension policy outlined in the employee handbook.”

“You’d better get used to having me around,” William said to Blondie. “Did you hear that? Suspension policy outlined.” The dog tried to turn away, but he gripped the underside of her jaw. He needed maximum engagement. “Let me tell you what happened today at work,” he said. Harris had worn the same shoes and tie as George Hollister and taken some ribbing for it. Cohoe had tricked Susannah Moore into believing he had slept in the office to finish up the Powell account. Or maybe he had left the office early to go to the doctor, just for a checkup. More practice: William would tell these stories to Louisa, and she would nod, not really listening, and he would be secretly disappointed that she was no closer to finding him out.

Thursday followed suit, and Friday followed Thursday, and by the end of the week, having exhausted the rest of the house, William started spending most of his time in the junk room. He put his feet up on the couch. “Yes, doctor,” he said to the dog. “I understand this is a confusing series of events.” He reviewed his circumstances. He was “out of office,” taking the time as sick days, because he had struck a nephew of the founder of the company. Who but a sick man would do such a thing? The phone rang. It was Baker, and William let it go through to voice mail. It rang again few minutes later and he answered without looking.

“Hollister, Antonelli, and Day,” he said.

“Where can a girl go for a cup of coffee in this town?” It was Emma. “Ideally there would be no one else there.”

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

“Coffee,” she said. “Just tell me. I need a cup and I’m tired of waiting in lines behind people who are trading tips about how to avoid the bad science teachers in middle school. And that’s not even the worst of it. Today there was a little girl, maybe seven, ordering coffee for herself. Can’t parents go to jail for that?”

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m at the mall on Gerrold Street. Do you know it?”

“Do I know it?” William said. “I know it like the back of my own hand, if my hand had lots of clearance sales. There’s a great out-of-the-way place about six blocks from there.”

“You have no interest in joining me,” she said, hanging the sentence by a tiny question mark.

“Sure,” he said. “I have a meeting but I can cancel it.” He went outside. A kid was playing basketball in the Zorrillas’ driveway. He vaguely remembered that cousins were visiting from Ecuador. He walked by Louisa’s car, which seemed huge to him. Why had they even bought a four-door?

When he arrived at the mall, Emma was sitting on a bench outside the frozen yogurt store. “I’ve had it with driving,” she said. “Will you do it? You can give me a tour.” And then she was in his car, in his passenger seat, pulling the belt across her midsection. Her hair was dark gold where it was matted to her head by the heat. He drove north on Ashmore, past an elementary school where kids ran wild in the concrete yard. “If you were a teacher, you’d work there,” he said. A block later, there was a hospital. “If you were a doctor, you’d work there,” he said.

She pointed at a post office. “If I worked there, look out,” she said. “Postal, postal, postal.”

“What?” he said. “You’re not settling in the way you had hoped?” He tried to keep the thrill from his voice.

“Stevie’s out of town.”

“Oh,” he said. “Business trip?”

“Sort of. He writes songs, and he’s always had this thing about getting them out there so that they can be heard by the people they way they were intended.” She put up quotes, though he wasn’t sure where they were supposed to go.

“I saw him playing guitar one morning in the garage.”

“Right. Since we’ve been here, he’s gotten obsessed with having Arrow buy one of his songs as its identity music.”

“You mean to replace the regular Arrow theme?” William hummed the melody, which like most Americans he’d known since childhood: it had a run of high notes and a run of low notes, with a beat of silence splitting the two.

“Yep. That’s all he’s been able to talk about. And because marketing is now separate from everyone else, it means he has to go back to Chicago once a month or so for meetings with the media buyers and the outside ad people. Whenever he’s there he wakes up, goes to the gym, and calls me to pump up his confidence. I’m never awake and never happy to hear from him. If Arrow buys the song, he says it could validate him as a songwriter, but I think he’s mainly thinking of the payday. And money isn’t music.”

“Very small amounts of it jingle,” William said.

Emma laughed, but not like she had in Chicago. That had been like light on the surface of water. This was like being pulled down into it. “There’s a problem here,” she said. “It’s a place where I know nothing and I have nothing. I’m cut off from my life, my job, my friends. And all Stevie can do is talk about new starts. For him, maybe.”

Emma took off her coat. She was wearing an old-fashioned pink dress, the kind of thing William would have expected to see in an advertisement from the 1950s. Beneath it there was a telltale swell of belly. He could do nothing at first. Then he could speak but had nothing to say. Then he had something to say, and he said it. “Well, that looks like a new start.”