The Slippage: A Novel (18 page)

“Hey,” William said. “What if I hadn’t been home when you had called me that first day? Or what if I hadn’t taken your call?”

“I would have moved on down the neighborhood watch list,” she said. “Graham Kenner has a big bald head.”

She shifted her weight; there was a creaking in the innards of the bed. They were in Tom’s studio, on the narrow couch. It was Friday, one of the days that Tom taught all afternoon. William had nixed the idea of going to her house, countering with a drink at a new Cajun place and then a motel. She had scowled. “When you’re from real Louisiana,” she said, “you don’t do that kind of fake. I’m unhappy even thinking about what they do to crawdads.” The studio had a desk, a lamp, a small TV, walls covered with tacked-up charts, a minifridge filled with spring water, and nothing much else.

“I should write a children’s book about marine animals,” she said into William’s stomach.

“A book?”

“I’m going to have a child, I read books, I know about animals. It’s a no-brainer.” She shifted in a way that pleased him. “After I write it, I’ll take the manuscript down to the publisher’s office. He’ll be small, bald, with glasses. I’ll probably wear something low-cut. Helps close the deal, you know.” They would get down to titles. “They’ll want something clever and foolish, like
A, B, Sea
. I’ll hold out for
Fear Is an Octopus
, even though it sounds like a thriller. The book will come out before the baby’s first birthday. It will sell like hotcakes. I’ll start getting fees for media appearances and soon I’ll have enough money to get my own apartment, away from Stevie, away from here. I’ll get Danish modern chairs and a massive flat-screen and you can come visit me and we can try the thing with the tub again.”

William repeated the only thing that fully made sense to him: “Hotcakes.” He went across the studio to the window shades, which were drawn. The small tabletop television was on, showing another marine documentary.

“I like thinking the screen is a mirror rather than a window,” Emma said. “We came from the water. We are mostly water.” She sat in the chair, her legs apart, and William swam to her across the blue room. “You know who’s afraid of the water?” she said while he touched her. “Stevie is. Always has been, since he was a kid. When he wants to overcome his fear, he fills up the sink and puts his face in it. It was something he read in a self-help book: own your phobias so they can’t own you. Most of what he does began as something he read in a self-help book.”

“Sometimes you don’t seem to like him very much,” William said.

“Thin line between love and hate,” she said, huffing toward orgasm.

Three days later, back in Tom’s studio, she put on a podcast about sharks. “When I was a kid,” William said, “I loved sharks.”

“Yeah?” she said. She was taking off her bra.

“Nature’s ultimate killing machine,” he said in an announcer’s voice.

“I think maybe you’ve misunderstood,” Emma said. Her pants were off now, and she was standing in front of him. “Sharks kill a handful of people. You know how many sharks people kill? A hundred million a year. That’s a whole Mexico of sharks.” She got up on the bed, on her knees, and guided his hand between them. “Let’s get back to me. Do this, okay?”

“Should I keep moving or else you’ll die?”

She set her expression in a prim frown, almost marmish. “That’s another myth. They need water flowing over their gills, but they can move it with their mouths. Quiet. Let me concentrate. And go a little slower, and with a lighter touch.” Her marmishness receded. She gripped him hard by the shoulder, drew in a breath that she couldn’t keep, relaxed her grip.

The shark show had given way to a survey of microscopic organisms, narrated by a woman with an overripe British accent. She needed switching off. On the far side of the desk, there was a folder marked, in Tom’s hand, “NEW.” William opened it. It contained a set of charts, all burned, some along the edges, some in the middle. One had a charred arc that stretched fully from lower left corner to lower right, riding high in the middle. That one was labeled
How Much Fire Liked This Piece of Paper
. “Look,” William said, holding it up. “It’s like he collaborated with nature.”

Emma didn’t care, and said so. “I think I’ve reached my limit.”

“With what?”

“All of it,” she said. She had been coming across the street one afternoon, not to go to William’s house even but to retrieve a garbage can lid that had blown up onto the Eatons’ lawn, and an older woman on the Zorillas’ driveway, the mother-in-law maybe, had seen her. “I didn’t feel guilty about it. She doesn’t know enough about the neighborhood to know where I should rightly be, not to mention that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I felt hemmed in, and kind of exposed, like I wanted to run back inside. It was a combination of claustrophobia and its exact opposite.”

“Agoraphobia,” William said, happy to help.

“The load I carry,” Emma said. She stood and showed it. “What will you do without me?” she said.

They were together in public only once, a few days later. Louisa was home sick with a cold and Stevie was out of town, so William and Emma let their lust and optimism ferry them across town to a park, where they sat with the sun at their back and watched the purple shadows of their heads upon the black paved path.

Then they went to an Indian restaurant, where she asked the waitress to bring her the hottest entrée and then, after one bite, fanned a hand in front of her open mouth like she was waving to someone in there. He was beginning to like her again as he had before.

But then after the meal, when they were standing outside the restaurant, she gripped his hand hard and brought her face so close to his that she could be heard even if she whispered, though she spoke loudly. “I need you to listen,” she said. Her eyes were down to slits as if anything wider might harm him. “I’m turning this off.”

“Right,” he said. He spoke casually, to hide the fact that he was heartsick.

She smacked him across the cheek, trying to look playful as she did it. “Do you hear what I’m saying? This is it, William. What’s the matter with you?”

“Everything about me is matter,” he said.

She showed her teeth but did not laugh.

He was joking, but also dead serious. People were matter and not the good kind: they bore the burden of their consciousness. Unconscious matter had the right idea. It just
was
, and continued to be. “Take me home,” she said. The sidewalk was unconscious, and he stood on it and did his best to be like it. The car was unconscious and he leaned on it and did his best to be like it. “Now,” she said. The radio was unconscious and he fiddled with the knob. “Take me home now,” she said, and he covered the distance quickly and looked away from her as he pulled up just around the corner, in the spot they’d agreed was safest, and as she left the car he closed his eyes and listened to the click of her heels as she went from unconscious car to unconscious street. When she passed out of earshot he was suddenly conscious again and found he was gripping the wheel hard on both sides, as if he were trying to keep himself from washing away.

Louisa had a family friend who had died of cancer in her early thirties, and Louisa made a point of visiting the grave every year, a little more frequently when she became older than the woman ever did. The cemetery was twenty minutes beyond the new house, and one afternoon, after they stopped by the building site, she told William she wanted to visit Sylvia. They stopped to buy flowers. “She liked marigolds,” Louisa said. There was no rain yet, but the sky was the same color as most of the tombstones.

Louisa stopped in front of a small stone that had mostly melted into the earth. “There she is. Or isn’t,” she said. “She wasn’t the strongest woman I ever knew, but she had a certain quality. She always seemed like she was telling you the truth, even when she wasn’t.”

“I wish I could have met her.”

“You did,” Louisa said. “When we were dating the first time. She liked you. She said you had a way of putting her at ease.”

Louisa stood by Sylvia’s grave, talking to herself. William couldn’t hear much of what she said, but he thought she was apologizing. He remembered something from a college lecture: burial had started with the Neanderthals, who may have had at least a vague belief in an afterlife.

He wandered off down paths that were like alleys and avenues in this planned city of the dead. He found a child who died before he was ten, a baby who died before he was one. He found a woman who had ascended nearly to a century. He imagined his way down into the graves, holes that held back all light. “Ready?” Louisa said, and he didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure what the question meant.

What it meant, it turned out, was that she was ready. That night in bed she reached over and took his hand, and happiness went through him like a current, racing across pathways that had become accustomed to confusion. She woke before him the next morning and made breakfast, and she was whistling when he came out of the bedroom. In the invisible choreography between them, she had taken a step he hadn’t expected; she seemed happy to be with him. And the happiness wasn’t desperate or frenetic or insistent; rather than trouble every room with this new energy, she let it ripen into what could only be described as a state of happy relaxation, wineglasses left out on tables, kitchen happily disarranged. “I don’t know,” she said when he asked her. “Perspective check, I guess. When you see what death really is, how still it is, it makes you want to move through life instead of resisting it.”

If there was to be any alienation, it would have to come from him, and so it did. One night, he found a T-shirt of hers heaped in the corner of the couch and snatched it up in sudden rage. “Just because you don’t want to be in this house doesn’t mean you have to treat it like a garbage dump,” he said, and she smiled until it was clear that he was serious, at which point she took the shirt and left the room. Another night he got on her about an open jar of peanut butter and how ants would find their way to it. He wasn’t sure what explained his sudden volatility, except that it was a form of distraction, both from Louisa’s new contentment and from his own growing sense of unease, shading faster than he wished into a kind of terror. He had located the source. It was no mystery. He had lost his job and he had agreed to build a new house and he was remembering Emma’s face and the yearning softness he had seen in it, once or twice, when she wasn’t determined to show him how strong she was. While he had been with her, he’d been able to put her out of his mind, but now that she was gone he could not. The farther the flame, the worse it burned him. Emma did not ignore him. That would have been rewarding. Rather, she saw him across the street or once in the supermarket and said hello, with a quick smile and wave. She was free to be friendly when friendly was no longer a borderland to something more dangerous. He resented the wave and the smile but would have been ravaged by their absence, and that was the real problem: not that he couldn’t stay with his true feelings, but that he didn’t know what they were anymore.

One cloudy evening, William looked out through the attenuated light and saw Emma getting into her car. She was holding a parcel and dressed casually; he figured it for a quick trip. “I’m going for a walk,” he said to Louisa.

“Looks like it might rain.”

“I can see that,” he said. “I’m not concerned, and you shouldn’t be either.” He tried to slam the door between the hall and the garage but it just eased shut on spring hinges. He shuttled up and down the block in what was turning into an impotent drizzle. A bicycle belonging to one of the Kenner kids was abandoned at the edge of the Morgans’ yard. William wheeled it back and left it under a tree. In the middle of the street he saw a broken bottle and threw it away in the Eatons’ garbage can. The wind was picking up, and William was about to head for home when Emma’s car came around the corner. He saw a head in the passenger seat: Stevie. She parked in front of her house, got out, gave William another eviscerating wave. “Holy God,” he heard her saying to Stevie. “I felt like I was in half.” On the rear window of her car, the bear doll was hanging from a single arm. William knew just how it felt: melodramatic.

He marched back inside, passed through the house, found Louisa in the kitchen making sandwiches. “So,” he said. She tilted her head at him, squinted happily. Behind her in the window a leaf bounced on an updraft. “I need to tell you something.” And then he did. There were two stories that needed telling, Hollister and Emma, and he told only the first. It was a tactical operation, not a kamikaze mission.

She bit her lower lip, shook off a thought. “So,” she said, possibly not mocking him.

“So,” he said. “That’s the situation as it stands. I am not working there anymore.” He braced himself against the counter. “We’re okay with money for a little while,” he said. “At some point, later in the summer, I’ll have to start looking for something.”

She set the sandwiches on the table and straightened the plates before she spoke. “I’m less bothered by this than maybe I should be. I didn’t think you were happy there.”

“Who could be?” he said. But he had been, so long as he’d been left alone.

“And now we can make more serious plans about the house.” He must have looked stricken; she seemed very surprised for a moment and her forehead bunched in worry. But then her face relaxed into a smile and she didn’t look like she wanted to leave the room. “It’s something constructive to think about.” She hadn’t meant the joke but she took credit for it, a quick bow. “You’ll see.” Then she blushed and ducked her head and said, “I wish you could see what a good idea this really is.”

“It was disgusting.”

William was spending most Tuesday afternoons with Christopher, and sometimes Thursdays as well. They went to the bowling alley. They went to the movies. They went to the arcade in the mall, where William dominated on a deer-hunting video game. The days shaded into one another as if in a montage. Even Christopher sensed that. “We should have theme music,” Christopher said. He hummed a wobbly melody.