The Slippage: A Novel (25 page)

“That’s a story,” he said.

“I have time,” William said.

Tom set down his sandwich. “Well,” he said, “I first moved up here right after college, to study with Kenneth. She was just a girl, the daughter of my painting teacher. She was seventeen, maybe. But she had this unearthly glow. I would go to Kenneth’s house to drop something off or have a drink and I would spend the whole time looking at her. Have you ever read Rousseau?” William hadn’t. “Well, there’s a passage about when he was young and in love with a young woman. She starts to eat some food and he calls out to stop her. There’s a hair on it, he says. She puts it back on her plate in disgust and he grabs it and gobbles it down. It’s the closest he can get to her. That’s how I felt about Jesse. Then I got a job teaching, and I left town.”

“Was there a romantic farewell?”

“No, not at all. Kenneth drove me to the airport. She was in the back seat. I think when I was out on the curb she waved and told me to have a good time. I loved her, though, and the idea of her stayed with me wherever I went. You know: St. Louis, Belize, New Zealand, Timbuktu. My world tour. I had girlfriends, but they were substitutes, except that they didn’t do what substitutes are supposed to do, which is distract you from the original. They just reminded me of her. Now and again I came back to visit Kenneth, and I saw her then.”

“So then you got involved?”

“That would make sense, but it didn’t happen then either. I didn’t want to disrupt her life, or his either. But I kept coming to see her, and at some point I started to see that she felt the same way about me that I felt about her. It wasn’t a flash of lightning or anything that dramatic. It just became clear to me. At that point, I felt strong enough to stay.”

William was confused. “To stay with Kenneth?”

“To stay in town. I quit teaching. I took a job at a store, started sculpting a little. Within a month, everything was in place. Jesse and I did the whole thing, moving in together, forsaking all others. We were going to get married.” He fell silent. The story was over, except that it wasn’t.

“So what happened?” William said. “It ended?”

“It did.”

“And now you’re reconsidering? She is?”

Tom ate a little more of his sandwich, seemed to taste it less. He scratched along his chin. “We had a son,” he said.

William started to speak, but Tom, having started up again, wasn’t stopping. “It was about a year after we got together. We were ecstatic. He was the last piece of the puzzle. Big baby, laughed all the time, a real bruiser. He started walking the day after his first birthday, and we used to joke that you could feel the ground shake when he put his foot down. Then he started fainting. We took him to the doctor, who said it was convulsions from high fever. One morning Jesse went in to wake him up. His lips were blue. We got him to the hospital right away, but right away wasn’t soon enough.” William understood now; Jesse hadn’t been pointing at the ground, but rather beneath it. He was one and a half, Tom said, and that’s the age he stayed. “He had an underlying cardiac problem, something called long QT syndrome. It’s named after the part of the cardiogram that widens.” His fingers, deft from practice, drew a graph on the table. “When people say ‘dead and gone,’ what do they mean? Where do they think people go, exactly?”

William didn’t know what to say. “Louisa never mentioned anything.”

Tom let William wait for a while. He was looking past William, into the middle distance, and for once he didn’t seem as if he wanted to be seen. “That’s because she doesn’t know,” he said. “We weren’t talking for a few years there before I moved upstate: sister with happy, settled life doesn’t seem to care about brother with unhappy, unsettled one, to the point where, even when brother moves a few hours away and his life starts to come together, he doesn’t feel comfortable calling her. And then, when Jesse and I split up, I did anything I could not to think about it, which included not mentioning it to anyone. I got rid of most of the photographs, kept only one where he was sleeping in the crook of Jesse’s arm and one of him sitting up in bed. I didn’t want the rest of them because I didn’t understand what they were documenting. That’s when I started making charts, in fact. It was my way of struggling with facts and what happens to them when they’re no longer true in any measurable way.” Tom made a funny birds-fly-away gesture that didn’t belong to him at all, or to any man William knew. Maybe it was something Jesse had done. “When Louisa told me about the job at the college, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be only a few hours away from Jesse, wasn’t sure I could. But I took the job and didn’t think about her, except to think that maybe one day I would go see her. I got my courage up, lost it, got it back again. Once or twice I called but hung up when she answered. It was a mess. I was a mess. Then, a few weeks ago, I was here working. I was trying to think of what the baby looked like and I couldn’t,” he said.

“What was his name?”

“Michael.” The word crossed the space between them. “That was the day I went to the old studio. It wasn’t there. I broke down and called Jesse and managed to say hello when she answered. We started talking, carefully at first, about why we ended things, about how our lives had gone, about what we remembered and what we needed to remember. She agreed to let me come and see her. You were my ride. I had all the hope in the world. Then, last night, she said she didn’t think she could make a go of it.” He finished off the second beer, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair. He looked completely bereft and, despite the fact that his eyes were closed, more like Louisa than ever. “So that’s that,” he said. “I guess it’s what the experts call closure.”

“I’m sorry,” William said, hearing the words emerge without any sense or meaning, and gradually the rest of the room returned: the men at the bar wrapping up the conversation about their ski trip, the intolerable sandwiches, the lottery machine strobing green.

Tom threw a twenty and two fives on the table. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said with great spirit.

The convenience store connected to the restaurant was stocked densely with chips, candy bars, sticks of meat, and a rainbow of sugared waters. The woman at the counter was speaking in rat-a-tat Chinese but understood enough to hand William down the pack of gum he wanted and to give Tom a small envelope of aspirin. Out in front, on a bench, there was a man about William’s age and a boy, no more than ten, stroking his father’s arm and looking impassively into the parking lot. One of them might have been blind. In the car, a few miles later, William mentioned them to Tom, but Tom was no longer with him. He had been musing on the passage of time, wondering whether people moved through it or vice versa, and he quoted Shakespeare on the matter, “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me,” and that last word had launched him into sleep.

And so William was back home, which meant planning the party Louisa had suggested, and checking on progress at the new house, and sitting on the deck of what would soon be the old house and watching the trees whose names he did not know sway in the breeze. He was trying to do some reading, too. Tom had encouraged him to pick up Cranston’s self-help book; the first time he had dismissed the suggestion, because it was the afternoon when he’d accused Tom of arson, and that day was best discarded wholesale. But on the drive home Tom mentioned it again, and William was in no real position to resist. He found a used copy, a compact paperback with a burnt-orange cover, and dipped into it whenever he had the time.

It was mostly unreadable, or rather readable only in bursts so short that the process could not fairly be called reading. The text was densely uninteresting, filled with bromides about life’s triumphs and trials illustrated with anecdotes drawn from Cranston’s own unremarkable experience. Still, something in the third chapter had caught his eye. “Life,” Cranston wrote, “is a series of substitutions designed to distract you from the fact of your deprivation.” The idea stayed with William. He had tried to forget about the loss of his job by spending time with Emma, and tried to forget about Emma by spending time with Christopher. Now, without Christopher, he was substituting again, with Cranston. But that would go soon, too, and something else would take its place. None of the options was satisfactory, but none was any less satisfactory than the rest, and even the first link in the chain, his job, was only helping him to cope with some other absence or emptiness. Recognizing this all as an endless cycle made him feel marginally less deprived, and he wondered whether he actually was laying down the foundation for a better understanding of himself. It was a cheering proposition, and it propelled him through the wasteland of chapters four and five.

In chapter six, another insight came forward. “An unhealthy impulse,” Cranston wrote, “should never be discharged in action, but can never be completely defeated by inaction; rather it should be concealed from the view not only of others, but of the possessor of that impulse.” A feeling of recognition circulated hotly through William, who underlined the passage and put a star in the margin.

For weeks during the summer, William had been keeping two secrets, one professional, the other personal, and he thought that when he came clean about his job, it would be easier to withhold the facts about Emma. Instead, when he disclosed his professional secret, he felt the personal one growing inside him with increasing pressure, trying harder with each day to break free. After the trip upstate with Tom, though, the count was back to two again, and he was calmer. “Maybe the second acts as a kind of buffer,” William said. “This way, if I have a sudden attack of honesty, I’ll just spill the thing about Tom and Jesse. Don’t you think?” Blondie didn’t answer.

William was going through the neighborhood with her, late at night, on a walk no one needed but him. It was cold and cheerless and he walked quickly, toward the open mouth of the cul-de-sac. He passed the Kenners’, saw the blue glow of a computer screen. He passed the Morgans’, smelled something baking. He passed the Zorillas’, heard the faint sound of a woman either crying or moaning, but flattened, like it was coming from a television. At the end of the street, he took Blondie left and came back up the parallel street. He stopped in front of Annie Martin’s house, which backed Emma and Stevie’s. It was dead quiet, which meant that Annie Martin was awake; when she slept, she ran the radio loud so that people would think there was life in the house. He passed through her yard to the border of Emma and Stevie’s lawn, where he looped Blondie’s leash around the low half branch of an oak. He whispered the dog’s name. He went farther into Emma’s yard until he could see her bedroom window.

Emma came into the frame in her underwear, brushing her hair. She wore a white T-shirt but then she took it off. Her breasts hung heavy, and her belly was emphatic beneath them. She traced down the middle of her stomach with her index finger and he remembered doing the same. She turned away from him, toward the mirror, and he felt the nearness of her body through the window, through the wall. Then a noise spooked him, a rustling in the bushes, and he crab-walked toward the right side of the house, where he encountered another noise. It was Stevie’s guitar playing, coming from the rearmost window of the garage. He was playing a series of notes, slowly, tidally. Each note had a shape, most round, some jagged, and yet they all seemed to fit together. It was beautiful until Stevie began to sing, and then it was something else. William shifted his weight forward, and just at that moment a cat scampered across his path, flashing eye-shine up at him. Blondie chuffed and rolled a bark in the bottom of her throat, and William untied her and hurried along the strip of lawn to the street.

The next day, he saw her again. He had stocked up for the party—rum and vodka, plastic cups and paper napkins, chips, dip, peanuts both plain and flavored, olives as big as eggs—and the young cashier had remarked upon the purchase, and he had said that it was all for him, and the girl had laughed, a bell in the afternoon.

At home, he unloaded the bags into the garage and leashed up Blondie for a walk. “You look awfully familiar,” he said. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

A shadow overtook him at the head of the street, just outside the Roth house, which had a paper scarecrow hanging in the great window that overlooked the front lawn. It was Emma. “You weren’t going to invite me?” She tried to sound indifferent, but she was out of breath from coming up the block. It was warm and humid, and half circles of sweat darkened her green blouse under the arms. Her hair was matted to the sides of her head. It occurred to him, for one crazy moment, to tell her that he’d liked it better through the window the night before.

“To what?”

“This party at your new house. I didn’t get an invitation.” They went under a shade tree that was either dead or close to it; Blondie circled the trunk as far as her leash allowed. “Look,” Emma said before he could talk. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But Stevie asked me and I don’t have a good answer.”

“What about the truth?”

“Hilarious. He’s under the impression that all of us are friends. He talks to Louisa some evenings, driveway to driveway, just the kind of neighborhood chitchat that normal people do.”

“How do you know you’d even be able to come?” He indicated her belly. “You won’t want to bring a baby to a boring party.”

“Why not?” she said. “Just make it right.”

“And if I invite you, that will be right?”

“Sure,” she said. “Neighbors at parties of neighbors. Normal.”

“Okay,” he said. “Especially since the occasion is that we won’t be neighbors for long. I lived here for ten years and you chased me out in four months.”

Her expression cracked a bit, and what came through was sadness mixed in with a little bit of triumph. “Don’t be mean,” she said.

“Not mean,” he said. “Just saying.”

“We might not be long for this place either,” she said. “Corporate creative has really taken a shine to Stevie.”

“Corporate creative? A shine?”

“The less said, the better,” Emma said.