The Slippage: A Novel (20 page)

He reached out and shook Mike’s hand and they went their separate ways, Mike and Marilyn to suburban Pittsburgh, where they married, raised a family of three boys, separated over money trouble, got back together when Marilyn was diagnosed with cancer, and celebrated their twentieth anniversary the week before their oldest son’s high school graduation. Louisa never mentioned that house again, said she didn’t remember it very well when William brought it up, and William learned, slowly, a lesson, which was not to take seriously any desire that did not recur. People were filled with whims, with wants that fit perfectly into a moment, but only that moment, and that had no broader application. And so they never had gone out to the country for that low wall or any other, instead staying in town, more or less rooted to the spot, moving always both up and down, both left and right.

In the wake of their visit to the cemetery, Louisa had become suddenly ardent, and William had receded. Then, after he agreed to move forward with the house, he settled back and waited for another wave of good feeling, only to find that for her, his decision was the conclusion of a struggle, one where she had emerged triumphant, and to the victor went the spoils, which in this case included the right to be quiet again, careful and inward, refusing to reveal too much by word or gesture. When he tried to reach her she did not pull back, exactly, but stayed right where she was, giving up nothing, not even interest.

He tried to rouse her with planning. He spread an oversize sheet of graph paper on the kitchen table. “Come,” he said, and she did, silently, and he took a pencil and drew Harrow, running east to west, and a large rectangle for the lot. “Circular driveway?” he said, and Louisa made no objection, and there it was, a rainbow rising off the horizon of the street. He made a line to indicate the front wall and a notch for the doorway. The rest of the page was only empty space and he felt claustrophobic and agoraphobic all at once. “That’s just the beginning,” he said. Louisa’s eyes shone unhelpfully.

He drew again the next night, and then a few nights later, neither time with any great success, though Louisa did start to pitch in with minor suggestions. She wanted a flower bed out in front, and an asymmetrical fence. The fourth time they drew, there was a ring at the door: Tom, coming to return Louisa’s extra pair of car keys. “This is the old homestead I’ve heard so much about?” he said. He smelled beery.

“It’s the new homestead,” Louisa said. “And you’ve heard nothing about it.” She went into the kitchen to watch the high-tech cylinder make coffee. William wondered if she’d noticed the beer, too, or if she was taking the edge off her own wine.

“It looks kind of traditional. Is that a white picket fence, or off-white?”

“It doesn’t need to be untraditional. It’s not one of your charts,” William said.

“Charts are for water,” Tom said. “Maps are for land.”

“You know what I mean. It’s not an artwork. It’s where we’re going to live.”

“I just think you could do something more interesting,” Tom said. “How about radical verticality?”

“What do you mean?”

“Stories and stories. A tower.”

“The neighbors would love that,” William said.

“Who cares what they say? There’s no kids, so stairs aren’t your enemy. Go up, young man.”

“Zoning doesn’t permit,” William said.

“Get an easement.”

“That’s not what an easement is,” Louisa said. She had come out when Tom said stairs weren’t their enemy. She had no coffee and now she wasn’t going to get it. “It’s late and only getting later. Isn’t there someone at home wondering where you are?”

“If you’re trying to hurt my feelings, I’m just going to stay right here and take it,” Tom said, but he left a few minutes later.

Louisa lifted the floor plan by its corners and told William to open up the junk room. She had prevailed on him to carry out the filing cabinets and break down the exercise machines and throw away any electronic device not in perfect working order. “I now declare this the pin-up room,” she said, and William was gratified by the phrase.

He taped the floor plan to the wall. “Come to bed,” William said, and instead Louisa pulled her knees up onto the couch and began to take liberties with what remained of the red wine. The whole thing seemed chancy at best.

“Running out,” Louisa said. “Back around noon.” William lay on his stomach in bed and sorted through the burr of a lawn mower, a mating cat yowling, the ting-a-ling of a bicycle bell. He was reluctant to get up, not because he was still tired, but because he knew the risks out there.

He went to the deck, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. He had gotten the name of a contractor from Graham Kenner, one he recognized from signs around the neighborhood. “He’s the father of a woman I work with,” Graham said. “Great guy. Loves to talk politics.” That had been enough reason not to call. Paul Prescott had another recommendation, a “true genius” whose addition to Paul’s lake house upstate was “equivalent to the finest work of modern sculpture.” He charged accordingly.

Instead, William dialed a man who came recommended, conditionally, by Eddie Fitch. “My sister used him a while back,” he said. “She liked his work but said he could be a little closed off.” He giggled. “On the other hand, you could say the same thing about my sister.” The man picked up after two rings.

“I’m looking for someone to build me a house,” William said.

“How big?” The voice was Southern, rickety, scarred by cigarettes, at least.

“You mean bedrooms? Square feet?”

The man sighed. “Let’s meet,” he said. “Do you drink?”

“Sure,” William said.

“I don’t, anymore,” the man said. “But I can’t stand those coffee places. I’ll meet you at the Sit Inn on O’Farrell and Randall.”

William didn’t know the place, and as it turned out, almost no one else did either. There was only one other patron at the bar, a white-haired gentleman with a high brow and a squashed nose.

“Mr. Day?” he said.

“Call me William.”

“Wallace,” he said. His rheumy eyes suggested an almost comic surplus of self-doubt. But when William described what he had in mind, Wallace nodded crisply. “Sounds very similar to the first house I ever built,” he said. “More than thirty years ago now. That’s one of the things you learn: no matter how much you think things are changing, you always end up right back where you started.”

“Maybe I can get the prices from thirty years ago,” William said.

“I don’t joke about money,” Wallace said. “My estimate, when it comes to you, will be ironclad.” Something like anger rose into his eyes and washed out against the water. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said. “I tell this to every client before I start working with them.”

“I hope it’s something encouraging,” William said.

“People will tell you that building a house is an emotional experience,” Wallace said. “That you’re providing shelter and future, that it’s the closest male equivalent to childbirth.” William nodded. His heart quickened. The man was articulating his feelings exactly. “Well, that’s bullshit,” Wallace said. “It’s a matter of squaring risk and reward, costs and benefits. That’s all. Don’t get sucked in by the mumbo-jumbo, or the first house you build will be your last.”

The next morning, the two of them drove out to the lot. Wallace was semiretired, living in a small clapboard house not far from William. “I didn’t build it,” he said. “I built the one I raised my kids in, but that went to the wife when we split up.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“You shouldn’t be. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He threw back his head and gave a sharp staccato laugh. They were in his truck, going Kerrick to Francis to Harrow, driving too slow the whole way, radio tuned to classic country, which he played at maximum volume. It had rained lightly the previous night, and a layer of gauzy fog hung low over the land. At the lot, the two of them got out. Wallace said he would start by building an office in what would eventually be the corner of the house. “It’ll be a wooden shack and then we’ll tear it down and it’ll be the gap between the house and the garage,” he said.

“Like a command center?” William said.

“Exactly,” he said. “I’m too old to be outside in a folding chair or leaning on a truck.” He tromped to the edge of the property and pointed. “Right there,” he said. “It’ll go there.” Then he did what he said he would not do and leaned on his truck and went through the list of steps with William: grading the site, preparing it, foundation footings, framing of floors and walls, installing windows and doors, attaching the roof and siding, roughing in the electrical and plumbing, adding insulation, putting up drywall, underlayment, painting, counters and cabinets, sod. “At that point you can put a cherry on top of it,” Wallace said.

“Is there any chance we can get the deck up early?” William asked.

Wallace smiled like he was dealing with a sharp customer. Yes, of course, it could go up fairly early in the process, he said; like the command center, they could use it for things like storage and so forth. Wind was picking up. “I’m cold,” Wallace said. “Should have worn a jacket. Or pants, for that matter.” He threw back his head again. Wallace hadn’t said that he loved the land or that he thought anything built on the spot would be a palace, which suited William fine. Wallace opened the door of his truck and the music he liked poured out.

William’s week was a series of holes he could not fill, and he had to be careful not to fall into them. He devoted the morning to minor repairs around the house, and he drove through the afternoon, skittering from station to station. The news that week was about another fire, this one in a used-car lot, where a large cardboard display in the parking lot had gone up in flames at the same time a small blaze broke out in a corner of the roof. The phrase “intentionally set” had now been replaced by the word “arson.” “We use the term because it has legal ramifications,” a fire department official said. “It has to do with whether or not we can prove the intent of the fire setter.” The language was moving them all toward a new awareness.

That night the doorbell rang. Tom stood there with a bag of chips and a six-pack. “There was another fire.”

“I know,” William said. “So we’re celebrating?”

“Yes,” Tom said, “I
would
like to come in. We don’t have much time.” At eight, he explained, the local news was running a special report. They were reviewing the full set of fires, repurposing old footage, even clips of the anchors reporting the story on the nightly news. “Pull up a chair,” he said. “Would popcorn be inappropriate?”

The fire commissioner came on first to introduce the hour. He had eyes like pinpricks and a habit of turning to the side to point at his whiteboard, which exposed the collop at the back of his neck. “We are looking at a distribution that radiates out from the northeast side of town,” he said. Yellow diamonds appeared on the map.

At first, it was just William and Tom watching the show, which meant it was mostly Tom holding forth. “It’s strange to see the news report of the arsons long after the fact,” he said. “Fire’s supposed to be something primal, but this puts it on a delay, which is also a remove. It’s like Mark Twain said: ‘Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.’ In a way, you wish the cameras would just get there and shoot the fire as it burns. Or that someone would put a camera in the fire even before it starts.” He had raced through a pair of beers. “There should be a whole channel devoted just to that. I’d watch it all the time.” William thought of mentioning the fire graphs he’d found in Tom’s studio, but he caught himself before he did.

When the special broke for a commercial, Louisa joined them. She perched on the edge of the armchair and watched silently as happy children clambered into the new family car. “Hey,” she said. “Does anyone want pizza? I’ll order.”

“Sausage,” Tom said, and she went to call in the order. After she left, Tom said, “She doesn’t seem to hate you as much these days.”

Tom was wrong: she didn’t seem to hate him at all. The floor plan in the pin-up room had restored him to her good graces. “You know what else?” Tom said. “I was reading around in Latin and I found the original for ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire.’
De calcaria in carbonarium
. It’s Tertullian. He was also the first one to explicitly formulate the idea of the Trinity. Oh, and he praised the unmarried state as the highest state of man. I don’t like his reasoning, celibacy and all, but you can’t argue with the conclusion.”

“News is back,” Louisa said, resurfacing to rescue William. The female anchor, cool in considered blue, reviewed the timeline, gave tips for reporting leads, warned against taking suspicious figures lightly. The camera panned to the commissioner, parked massively behind a tiny desk. “Pay attention, as well, to the crowd,” he said. “People gather to watch a fire, and sometimes the arsonist himself is among them. I use the masculine pronoun because that is, more often than not, the case.” A short feature on Karim followed: though most of the investigators did not think Birch Mutual was the work of the same man, Karim’s was still the only death, and so, however imprecisely, he was the face of the problem. Tom stood up and showed the way he’d run, legs almost straight like stilts, and Louisa put a hand over her mouth and asked him to stop.