The Slippage: A Novel (2 page)

The doorbell rang. It was Eddie and Gloria Fitch, faces avid for approval. “Sorry we’re so early,” Gloria said. “I should have taken longer to get ready, as you can probably tell.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” William said. “It’s not that you’re here early. It’s that everyone else is late.”

Eddie, short and bald, piloted a bottle of wine into William’s hands.

“I could use a drink,” Gloria said. She was short, too, with round features and a sharp tongue.

“Your husband just gave away your wine.”

“That?” Gloria said. “I wouldn’t drink that.” Blondie’s collar jangled faintly on the deck. “Ooh,” Gloria said. “Must pet dog.”

William and Eddie worked for the same company, and they stayed by the door for a minute, faintly talking shop. “So they’re changing the name of the division?” Fitch said with an anxious giggle. He had a nervous constitution. William imagined him fidgeting through his sleep.

“They seem to be,” William said.

“I hope they’re not focus-grouping it to death. That costs money, and don’t they need that for our bonuses? Though we didn’t get bonuses last year. Maybe I just answered my own question.”

“I think you did,” William said. “But it could always be worse. We could have no job at all. And then how could I afford to throw this party? And how could you afford to bring wine?” He held up the bottle, turned it until it was pointed toward the deck. “Let’s go.”

On the way out, he noticed that the door to the master bedroom was shut. “Hold on,” he told Eddie. “I have to tell Louisa one thing.” But Louisa wasn’t in the bedroom. “Guess what,” William said to the closed bathroom door. “Eddie and Gloria showed up first. Big surprise, I know. I’m taking them out back.” When William made it outside, Eddie was unzipping wax from around a cheese, looking up at the overhang. “Painted the eaves and trim the other week,” William said. “Doesn’t look quite right now. Give it a few weeks of sun, though, and it’ll fade to match.”

“I know what you mean,” Eddie said, waving the cheese. “New things just remind us that most things aren’t new.” It wasn’t what William meant at all, but he nodded anyway.

The other guests were starting to arrive. Many of the men were bald and heavy. The women, with a few exceptions, fared better. Gloria Fitch was over in a corner, talking to sleek, epicene Paul Prescott, who held his thumb and finger just far enough apart to suggest he was indicating the thickness of a steak. He probably was. Graham Kenner, preceded by his aftershave, was lamenting the Congress. “Set phasers to socialism,” he said.

William served drinks, refilled bowls of nuts and olives. “Hey,” Graham said, reaching out to snag his elbow. “We missed you and Louisa the other week.”

“Missed us how?”

“We had one of these at our place. A little get-together for Cassandra’s fifty-first.”

“Oh,” William said.

“We sent real invitations and everything.”

“Huh,” William said. “I don’t remember seeing it. Maybe we had a conflict. Louisa takes care of those things and doesn’t always tell me.”

“Speaking of Louisa,” Gloria said, leaning in, “where is she?”

“She wasn’t feeling great,” William said. “Let me go check.” He went back to the bedroom. The bathroom door was still closed. He tapped on it. No answer. He pushed it open slowly; the bathroom was empty. He checked the garage, the kitchen, even the laundry room, feeling increasingly foolish. On the way back out, he noticed that the junk room door was closed. That was what they called the spare bedroom off the main hall; they had marked it for a child when they moved in, and over the years it had filled with everything but. There was no answer when he knocked, though he thought he heard the jingling of Blondie’s collar. “Hey,” he said. “You in there, girl?” He tried the knob but it was locked. He jiggled it, knocked again, gave up.

Out on the deck he started to make hamburger patties for the grill, shaping rounds with his hands and then smashing them flat. Gloria Fitch had escaped Paul Prescott and was talking to a pair of young women William didn’t know. Graham Kenner had buttonholed Helen Hull, by acclamation the prettiest woman in the neighborhood, to tell her about a study he’d read recently regarding parental favoritism. “You know how people say parents love their children equally?” he said. “That’s not true. We’re hardwired to prefer some of them to others, because we evolved from species that cull their young. You know: if you eliminate a third of the offspring, the rest have a better chance of surviving.” He popped an olive in his mouth illustratively. The party had just started, and already the talk had turned to survival.

The doorbell rang, then rang again, its own echo. It was possible that it had been ringing for a while. “Someone get that?” William said, but no one did. He wiped his hands on a towel and went himself. It was Tom, wearing torn jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon bird. William knew what kind of bird it was but he couldn’t quite retrieve it: not a stork but something in that area. There was a woman behind him, a tall, voluptuous blonde in a white dress and a white hat. Her sunglasses were dark to the point of blindness.

“Billy Boy,” Tom said. He stepped heavily into the foyer, long hair falling over his forehead, and clapped a hand on William’s shoulder. The gesture wasn’t overly emphatic, but it shifted William back all the same; Tom was as tall as his sister but twice as broad, with a deep chest and powerful arms. He resembled Louisa most closely in the eyes, which had the same distant brightness, like a ship coming in at nighttime. “My man,” Tom said. The smell of alcohol rose off him like a cloud. “Good to see you. Point me toward the eats and drinks.” Unguided, he wobbled past William.

William and the woman remained in the doorway. William smiled weakly.

“I am Annika,” the woman said, extending her hand.

Tom was already deep into the house, but her voice turned him around. “Ah, yes,” Tom said. “My lovely Swedish companion. Her grandfather was the minister of finance. They have finance in Sweden. It is one of their
in-dus-tries
.” His finger made a spiral in the air through which the syllables of this last word passed.

Annika came into the house slowly, shaking her head as if she were getting water out of her ears. “I thought I would die in that car.”

“The heat?”

“No. I thought Tom would kill us. He insisted on driving.”

“His car?” William said.

“Have you seen his car?” she said. Tom owned a Charger of uncertain vintage, with a dented, crooked rear fender and tatty floor mats that covered but did not conceal a riot of discard: gum wrappers, receipts, hair, lint, pennies. It was in the shop more than it was out of it. “Mine, though I let him drive. He can be very forceful in his arguments. But there’s no way he’s driving us home.”

“You don’t have an accent.”

“Neither do you.” They squinted at each other until she remembered. “Oh, that. I’m not Swedish. I was born in Chicago. My mother’s Swedish, though. She was a film actress there.”

“Would I have heard of her?”

“It’s possible.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “This is her dress I’m wearing. It was on-screen with Marcello Mastroianni.”

William took the opportunity to stare. He was staring too much. The woman was too full. “My shirt was on local cable access,” he said. “It was discussing the lagging housing market. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

“I never know what to say to celebrities,” Annika said to William’s shirt. Then, to William: “Should we go in? I should be a good date and fix Tom a drink. Maybe I’ll water it down a little.”

William sent Annika ahead and tried the junk room door again. “Louisa,” he said. “Your brother’s here. With a woman claiming to be his girlfriend, even.” There was a shuffling and scraping from within, but still no answer. “You coming?” he said. “I’m going. There’s hosting to do. We have guests to feed.”

Tom was already in demand, occupying the center of at least two conversations. He not only taught art at the local college but was an artist himself, which gave him the special status of a seer, or possibly a madman. “Sculpture is dead also,” he was telling Helen Hull, which meant he’d already made the same pronouncement about painting. Tom billed himself as a chart artist. He made large-scale graphs that he transferred to canvas. Sometimes he called them meta-graphs, sometimes still lifes of information, sometimes “data tragedies.” It depended on his mood, and to a lesser degree on his audience. Annika was evidently familiar with the performance as well; she stood off to the side, drinking white wine.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” Tom said, catching sight of William. “It puts a man in mind of nature. Mother Nature, I mean, not human nature. Human nature, well, the less said about that the better.” He laughed sharply and returned to the discussion, probably to drive a stake through drawing’s heart.

The matte-black grill sat atop a white concrete island. From where William stood, he could see the window of the junk room, and he squinted to see if he could catch the curtain moving. He lost himself in the grilling. So many small pieces of meat about to disappear into larger pieces of meat. He put sausages on, took them off. Chicken followed. He added vegetables, peppers, and onions. The food hissed as it hit the grill.

Alcohol, a fuel, had increased the speed of the proceedings. Graham Kenner was explaining that city government had its own special brand of corruption, which he said was “homegrown and thus perfect for survival in the local ecosystem.” Gloria Fitch was recalling how, in college, her boyfriend had rouged up her cheeks so she looked like a doll and made her sit cross-legged in bed, completely naked. People had moved closer to the edge of the deck, but no one had yet ventured onto the lawn. A squirrel patrolled the zone between the eagle tub and the lion tub.

Tom appeared at William’s elbow. “Burgers?” he said.

“Getting there,” William said.

Tom made to drain his beer, which was already empty. He puffed and relaxed florid cheeks. “I haven’t seen Louisa yet. She’s around?”

“She is,” William said. “I think she might have run out to the store for more ice. Our ice maker is on the fritz.”

“Fritz,” Tom said. “Fritz.” The way he said it made it sound ridiculous. He stepped up onto the concrete island that surrounded the grill, where there was not quite enough space for both of them. “Damned precarious up here,” he said. “But the view is really something.” Annika was coming across the deck now, and Tom hopped back off the concrete onto the grass. “Well, well, well,” he said loudly. “And they told me there wouldn’t be any women here today who would meet my high standards.”

“When I think of you,” Annika said, “high standards aren’t the first thing that come to mind.” She encircled his thick wrist with her eloquently thin fingers and they wandered off, Tom weaving as if avoiding obstacles. William plated the food.

After another trip inside, and another session spent thumping on the junk room door—lightly enough, so as not to draw the attention of the guests—William went back outside and collected shards of conversation. He heard Graham Kenner on the fiction of a benevolent government and Paul Prescott on brandy’s healing powers and Helen Hull on how pleasure was a subdivision of something, though he didn’t hear what.

He looked around for Annika and found her sitting on the stairs leading down into the yard, holding an unlit cigarette and smoothing her forehead with her fingertips. She wasn’t talking to Tom, who was halfway across the deck with Eddie Fitch, swinging his drink like a pendulum. More precisely, she was not-talking to Tom: she stared in his direction, slightly baleful, every once in a while taking a sip of wine.

William walked up to Annika. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said.

She blanched. Her wine was next to her, on the railing, and she picked it up as if that were the problem.

“You’re not eating. That’s against the rules.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was just admiring the lawn.” She meant the tubs, but she didn’t mention them. That happened often.

“Very admirable, I agree. But you have to eat.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

“I know you are,” he lied. “Tom told me. That’s why we have grilled vegetables—for you and people like you.”

“Okay,” she said. “You sold me. I’ll get myself something and be right back.”

She returned a few minutes later, plate heaped high. She slid it onto the railing until it balanced and then she lit her cigarette. She was about the same height as Louisa, which meant that she was almost as tall as William. He looked toward the house, toward the junk room. Were the blinds moving?

“Well,” Annika said after just one drag on her cigarette. “If I’m going to eat healthy, might as well get rid of this.” She looked around for an ashtray, couldn’t find one, then bent down and dropped the cigarette into a beer can.

“Don’t do that on my account.”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Although . . .”

“Although what?” William said. He was excited to hear.

“I think this was someone’s beer. It belongs to that bald man over there.” She pointed to Graham Kenner. “What if he wasn’t finished?” She knelt to pick up the can.

“It’s no matter now,” William said. “That beer is, for all intents and purposes, no more. It has left our world for another world. We should wish it well.”

Annika came up slowly, like she wasn’t certain she wanted to. “I can’t bear that tone,” she said. “The tone like we’re in a play. Don’t you think I get plenty of that with Tom?”

“I can see how you might feel that way,” William said.

“Or not,” she said, frowning. “Who am I to complain? People are who they are. You either take them as they come or you don’t take them at all.” She had a look on her face like a lifeguard about to go into a churning sea. “Okay, then,” she said, coming to her feet, “let’s go find the boy.”

The afternoon light was draining, and with it the specifics distinguishing one guest from another. William found Tom by height. He had no drink in his hand, but it was shaped like he was holding one. Fitch, beside him, was laughing so hard he was bent over.

“What’s so funny?” Annika said.

“Milady,” Tom said. “Allow me.” He pulled out a chair with a flourish and then sat in it himself.