The Slippage: A Novel (16 page)

When he got home Louisa was watching TV, and he watched with her, a decorating show where they scraped sticky wallpaper off a baby’s room and repainted it a pale green that even William had to admit was a huge improvement. “They said there are only seventeen kinds of patterns that can repeat,” Louisa said, and William, feeling a weight in his chest, didn’t answer. She got up to make them dinner, and he noticed that there was a red-brown hair on the sleeve of his shirt. He trapped it with a fingertip. It was human, but it wasn’t Tom’s or Louisa’s or Emma’s or anyone else’s he knew. It was proof of a world beyond him, of questions he would never be asked, and the thought of that allowed him, suddenly, to breathe.

There had been a few brief periods of unemployment in William’s life, but only one that had resulted directly from his actions. He had been a copywriter in a small advertising agency where he had a boss only a few years older than him, a slick former athlete named Frank who was married with kids and also running around with a redheaded secretary. (William couldn’t remember her name; Jessica?) Frank talked about “isolating what is wanted” and “finding the center of a product,” but mostly he just dumped his own work on William’s desk along with unreasonable deadlines. William accepted the situation with good enough humor at first, but one night he saw his boss and the secretary fighting in the parking lot. She was crying. Jenny. He reported the incident to the head of the company, and a week later Frank fired William. “I don’t know what you were thinking, guy,” he said. William felt he had struck a blow for truth or morality or fairness or something like that, and it took about six weeks before it all drained out of him and he saw that he’d been a damned fool. This time it was even quicker. The sense of righteousness he had felt as he squared his feet and shifted his weight had gone out of him the second he landed the blow on Hollister.

Instead, he was fidgety, angry at himself and at everyone else, too. He couldn’t tell Louisa yet, or at least didn’t want to, and her manner was discouraging him even further. After the party she said she was coming down with a cold, and she was, but even after recovering she remained in a state of steady insensibility. She was a thick gray brush overpainting all other colors. After a week in the gray he needed something brighter, and that need bloomed into flesh and blood in the form of Karla.

She was at lunch first, as always. This time she was unusually casual, in a T-shirt and a brown wraparound skirt.

“Sorry I was late,” he said.

“It happens,” she said. “It’s more or less the only thing that happens.” She didn’t seem angry. “Look,” she said, flashing her fingers in front of him. “I got my nails done. Aren’t you proud of me? It’s because I have a date.”

“That’s nice,” he said.

“I suppose it is. It never hurts to know that things are about to start happening again.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“A historian. He has a specialty.” A newly done finger went to her mouth to help her retrieve it. “He studies why there’s an uneven pace of scientific discovery across the history of civilization. I don’t think much will come of it, honestly, but I can probably get in a good six weeks before I realize that. And how about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Well, the house, for starters. Are you building?”

“Not yet. Louisa thinks I’m stalling. And I think she might be right.”

“That can’t go on forever.”

“I don’t need forever. I need forty years, probably. Then it’s moot.”

“What are you waiting for?”

William drew a breath and then lobbed his confession into the conversation. “I lost my job,” he said, “or I’ve set the wheels in motion, anyway. And I’m sleeping with the woman across the street.”

Karla’s eyes widened at the first and narrowed at the second. “Superstar,” she said, nodding on the first syllable. “Tell me more.” He pulled down the screen and started the projector. Certain scenes were edited; he didn’t mention, for example, that Emma was pregnant. Others were reframed for close-up. Hollister’s nose, he said, almost shouted with blood; he opened his fingers wide on both hands to re-create the effect. “I don’t want to say I regret anything, exactly,” William said. “The guy at work is impossible. She’s beautiful. This is the natural conclusion for both. But I’ll probably be back at work next week. And Emma and I are ending things. Things are winding down.”

A little smile rippled across her lips. “Right.”

“Do you remember once, when we were going out, you said something about how wrong choices were like water that’s so deep you can’t find the bottom?”

“Come on,” Karla said. A hard shadow crossed her forehead. “I said that? Was I high?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I didn’t know what I was talking about. Don’t worry about stage-managing things. If they end, they end.”

William looked at the damp patches on his napkin, which were making shapes he didn’t understand. There was a woman across the table from him, giving him advice on intimate matters, though the two of them had long since discovered that their philosophies on such matters overlapped only slightly, and only temporarily. And yet he was hanging on her every word. How had it come to this? There was so much that was unknown to him. “That’s it?” William said. “If they end, they end?”

“I guess my point is that they do end. The other morning I was in bed and I heard cabinets opening and closing and a spoon clinking against a plate. It was Christopher, getting up and getting himself breakfast. It was such a wonderful feeling, but it also made me a little wistful. Time goes.” Sadness crossed her face. “But don’t tell Louisa. Please. People always think honesty is the best policy, but in a case like this, it can be a kind of attack. Full truthfulness isn’t always called for.”

“Like I said,” he said. “It’s winding down.”

William wasn’t ready for home. He owed Emma a phone call, but he wasn’t ready for that either. He drove to the coffee shop, failed to buy coffee, stood in front of the news rack, where magazines hung like dead game. He had nowhere to settle his eye: garish letters obscured beautiful faces. There was a women’s magazine about hot new colors. He learned that one was white.

In his car, with his hand. In her car, with her mouth. In her house, a second time, with added urgency, as if Stevie might come home any minute, though he was out of town. Things were not winding down.

After the second time in her house they were too afraid to stay still, for fear that one or both would fall asleep, and so she asked him a battery of questions. Had he been inside the house when the Johnsons had lived there? Yes. Had he ever been in the bedroom? No. Had he ever had a fling with anyone else in the neighborhood? None of your business, but no. Did he have any recurring dreams? “What?” he said. “I tell you, and you look inside my head and know what I really want?”

“No,” she said. “I want to tell you about mine.” She was younger, maybe just a girl, and she was standing in front of a tree with a large hive in the fork of a low branch. Honey massed thick at the base, a drop in delay. As she stood there, bees emerged, flew around the base of the hive, just a few at first and then dozens, a small cloud, and then the cloud was a tornado. There were soon so many bees, she said, that they were a kind of smoke; she covered herself, preparing for the worst, but they just passed across her. “Then I wake up,” she said. “Usually with my hands on my face.”

“Do that now,” he said. “Cover your eyes and don’t uncover them until I say so. That’s the game.” He made a buzzing noise as he approached the hive.

A few days later, he was out on his front lawn pruning bushes. He liked the feel of the clippers when they first encountered a branch, the resistance a brief moment of conscience. Emma came out to her driveway and squinted up at the roof. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said. “Taking the day off?”

“Working from home,” he said.

“Listen,” she said. “I have a question for you.” She came slowly across the street. “How does recycling work here?” They were on the side of the house, hidden from view, and William began to explain the principles of separation: paper, plastic, glass. “Come on,” she said. “Are you serious? I wasn’t.” They went into the garage and she put her arms around him and they leaned up against a stack of boxes. “You are more and less careful than other men, and one of those things, I like,” she said. They sat on the workout bench he used for guitar and he ran his hands back and forth along the outsides of her thighs. “I’m so sorry I ended up here,” she said.

“Stevie’s job,” William said. “You don’t control that.”

“It’s only partly that,” she said. “Last summer I had a thing with another guy. When that ended, I was inconsolable. Stevie felt like we needed a fresh start.”

“He knew about the guy?”

“No. But he knew that the longer we were there, the more I was slipping away. It was impossible for him not to know. I was like a picture getting fainter.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this in Chicago.”

“You say that like you deserve to know,” she said. But she moved closer and kissed him, not quite on the mouth, and he put his hand at the small of her back. “I have to go,” she said. “But maybe you can come by one of these days.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No. And not the day after.”

The day after that, he carried a spare recycling bin across the street, one neighbor helping another, and Emma met him at the door. An hour later, she propped herself up on an elbow, scissored a pillow between her legs, and started to talk. At six, she said, she had loved everything: pets, the weather, music, hats, her sister Helen, the color red, the way light flattened itself against the inside of a lampshade, poems about how children loved everything. By eight, though, she was keeping a notebook of the exceptions to this rule (“Amanda’s shoes make her look like a monster”), and by ten, the notebook was filled. Twelve was the year she learned the secret: not to love everything (because it stretched your heart out of shape), not to keep a record of the things you hated (because it shrank it), but to write about the things you wanted to move past love and hate, into a place of understanding. So she composed a paragraph about the way her mother looked when she laughed. She tried to capture the way her sister’s straight lines were turning like a melody into curves. “One night,” she told William, “I was playing with some neighborhood kids and tore open the tip of my index finger on a stray end of barbed wire.” She watched as blood blossomed from the cut. It was red, one of the things she loved. She had just started getting her period two months before, and this whole business of bleeding seemed like a paradox. How could it be that when things came out of her, she felt larger? “I wrote that down and showed it to my sister and she didn’t laugh at me, which was shocking,” Emma said. She put her book next to her bed before she turned the lights out, and she was happy it was there when she slept. Twenty years later there was no book anymore; it was a faint memory fading fast.

“Why are you telling me this?” William said.

“Because you’ll listen,” she said.

He showered at her place, opened her medicine cabinet afterward: there were vials for sleep and anxiety, along with some others whose labels he couldn’t decipher. “Come on out,” she said, and he did, and she rewarded him for his obedience. It wasn’t until he was home that he saw he’d missed a handful of calls: Fitch, Louisa, Baker. Baker’s message was uncharacteristically short and impossible to misunderstand: “You’re wanted at the lawyer’s office in the city. Monday at eleven.” His voice was flat and William lay on the couch in imitation of it. He unbuttoned his pants. He buttoned them back up. He turned on the TV but couldn’t find anything that held his attention. He washed his hands twice, once in the bathroom and again in the kitchen sink before dinner. He felt a new hostility to clues.

Louisa brought dinner home from a new chicken place near her office, and then they went out to the deck and William listened in vain for his favorite bird and Louisa scratched Blondie’s ear. When Louisa looked at him, he looked away. When she looked elsewhere he felt a sense of loss. The difference was spreading.

The southbound platform was mostly in shadows and the digital sign announcing train times was covered, from William’s vantage, by a tall man in lean tweeds and a hat. William stood beside a three-person bench, the rightmost seat occupied by an older woman with headphones, the middle seat by her backpack. Closest to William was a young woman reading a magazine, a redhead with tiny perfect features wearing one of the worst outfits he had ever seen: an orange leather jacket that looked like it belonged to a crossing guard, a short gray skirt, gray tights with a floral pattern, and thick platform shoes. It was like five kinds of music were being played at once, none well, but truly beautiful girls weren’t undone by bad fashion. They triumphed over it. “Do you want me to have her move her bag?” she said, gesturing at the older woman.

“No,” William said. “I’m conducting an experiment to see how entitled and oblivious people are.” The young woman laughed. The older woman pinched the bulge on the cord of her headphones, to either change the volume or take a call.

“Off to the office,” said a man passing by, to no one, but William was not going to the office. He was headed into the city, to Hollister’s lawyers, to meet his maker. He moved off to a quiet spot to call Louisa. “Hi,” he said. “Busy day so far. Everyone wants to meet.”

“Don’t be too late tonight,” she said. “Tonight’s the night we’re supposed to meet Jim and his wife for a drink.”

“Right,” he said, though he had no recollection of making the plan.

“I said around eight,” she said. “So let’s leave here at quarter of. Though if you’re running late, tell me, and we can just meet there.”

“Right,” he said again.

When the train came, he packed on with the crowd and took a seat next to the young woman, careful to hide his Hollister employee handbook in his shoulder bag. He got her name, which was Georgina, and this little show: first, her driver’s license photograph, which she dismissed as terrible but which was far from it; then an expedition into the deeper reaches of her purse for the business card of the modeling agency she was visiting. William thought he saw a condom in there, next to a tube of lipstick. “This must be thrilling for you,” she said.