The Slippage: A Novel (3 page)

Annika got a chair for herself and pushed it alongside Tom’s. William took a spot on a built-in bench across from Tom. “Did you have a nice talk?” Tom said. Annika slid out another cigarette, turned it over consequentially, returned it to the pack. Lines of strategy were visible between all of them, which made the whole thing beautiful, if unbearable. It was like a card game without cards.

One of the young women who’d been talking to Gloria Fitch wandered over. Sour-faced, eyes drenched in blue makeup, hitching a skirt that was already too short, she leaned on the deck rail. “Tamara,” she said, blurrily enough that it was unclear whether she was calling out or identifying herself.

Tom stood and bowed at the waist. “Good evening,” he said. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

“I’m Paul’s niece,” she said.

“I don’t know Paul,” Tom said.

Her eyes skittered from side to side. “I’m also a student at the college,” she said. “I came to one of your summer lectures.”

“Of course, of course,” Tom said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.” He gestured to his chair. “Sit, sit. A lady should not be kept on her feet.”

Tamara waved him off. “Thanks, but I’m okay,” she said. William slid over and made room for her.

“We were just talking about art,” Tom said. “But if you came to my summer lecture, there’s no reason to rehash it.”

“Oh,” she said.

“And yet,” Tom said, “I’m interested in what an intelligent young woman has to say about the matter. Do you remember the distinction drawn between urban and rural art forms?”

“Well,” she said. She ran a hand through her hair. “I was auditing.”

Tom leaned toward her as if he was about to release a secret. Instead his head drooped forward until it was nearly in her lap. He brushed a fingertip across her knee and then, grasping that same knee, pulled himself in closer and looked up her skirt. “Ah, for the views of the countryside,” he said.

“Come on, man,” Tamara said. “Don’t be a snake.” She was smiling as if he had said something kind.

“I think I’ll take a refill on that wine,” Annika said, standing.

Tom had a hand on each of the girl’s knees now, delicately, as if he were measuring tremors. He whistled faintly.

“You were drinking white?” William said.

“Anything.” She wasn’t looking at Tom or the girl.

“I’ll get it,” William said.

They walked briskly together, saying nothing. Annika stopped at the crackers and started to turn them like she was looking for the perfect one. William, affecting purpose, continued on into the kitchen, where he found a bottle of white wine in the refrigerator.

On the freezer door was a picture of him and Louisa, a Post-it note stuck just beneath it. “Family vacation?” it said. The question mark tripped William up. He marched to the junk room. Where knuckle had gone before, fist now went, a bass note against the door. “Louisa,” William said. “This is ridiculous. I’m done entertaining your brother. He’s however many sheets to the wind a person can be. I’m going to have to drive him home.”

“I thought there was a girlfriend,” he heard her say. “Can’t she do that?” She sounded far away, though the room was small.

“The mummy speaks,” William said.

“I’m in here,” she said.

“You should be out here.” She didn’t answer. “I’m losing my patience,” William said, pretty sure it didn’t matter. Just then he heard a noise, a pollen of alarm filtering in from outside.

Tamara, the young woman in the skirt, was pointing into the yard, and William followed her finger to find Annika sitting cross-legged on the grass, about five feet to the right of the rightmost tub, the tiger. She had grown tired of waiting for William to bring her wine and had switched to the orange punch. Tom was on the grass, too, though without his shirt, which lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs. He tottered toward the eagle tub, went slowly around it, and then shook his head, an unsatisfied customer. He did the same with the lion and arrived at the tiger, where he stood silent for a moment and then lowered himself into the tub. “Uh oh,” Eddie Fitch called to William. “I think that’s your cue.”

William went down into the yard. The grass crackled under his shoes. He stood next to the tiger tub.

“Are you my father?” Tom said.

“No,” William said.

“My father’s dead,” Tom said. He made a noise like a sob. His legs were up and he had kicked off his shoes. He took an airline bottle of single malt out of his pocket and emptied it into his mouth. “You know,” he said, “it seems at last that things are looking up.” He lifted the bottle as if to toast and then threw it as hard as he could toward the eagle tub. “Shatter,” he said, but it merely bounced once in the grass and settled.

William extended his hand to Tom and pulled, aware as he did that Tom was coming to his feet voluntarily; he was too thick for William to move if unwilling. His belt was undone, buckle dangling, and his belly hung out over his pants. “It’s come to this,” he said.

Everyone else at the party was lined up along the edge of the patio now. Their mouths were parted slightly, as if they were tasting the air. William looked toward the bedroom window. The curtain was pulled aside now and he could clearly see Louisa. William wondered if she could hear Tom. “I require the protection of a truly moral man. Are you that man?”

William sensed that the question was in earnest. “I might be,” he said. “Though not by design. It just kind of happened that way.”

“A good man designs,” Tom said. “A great man submits to design.” He sat down hard, belt buckle clanging on the side of the tub. William felt something slide across the back of his legs and stepped free. It was Blondie, sniffing the whiskey in the grass. William turned back toward the house and saw Louisa there, at the edge of the deck, tasting the air with the rest of them. Tom spotted her too. “Lou,” he cried. “It’s good to see you! There’s nothing more important than family, is there?”

At this, Annika burst into tears. Her crying was arrhythmic and harsh and sounded, finally, foreign. Tom shouted at her from the tub. “Goddamn you,” he said. “You’re so beautiful.” He stepped out of the tub, grabbed for her dress, got a bunch into his fist, and pulled. She reached for William to steady her, but he was no match for Tom’s power. William pitched forward, a side of a tent collapsing. Annika’s leg buckled. The punch, still orange in the dusk, splashed across the front of her dress.

Louisa sprang into action as if this were the moment she had been waiting for. She sped down into the yard, seized Tom by the arm, hustled him back up onto the deck; she located paper towels and club soda for Annika; she loaded Tom into Annika’s car and waved as the car grumbled off down the gravel driveway; she returned to the deck, triumphantly smoking one of Annika’s cigarettes and regaling the group with the story of what they had just seen. She grew animated in the retelling; a thin strip of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. “I don’t know how, but I knew just what to do,” she said, a note of surprise carbonating her tone.

William watched her with admiration. He wanted to keep the picture in his mind: his girl, on top of the world, and him right there with her. The cigarette burned down. Guests said their good-byes. Louisa stood to gather plates and cups. “Don’t bother,” William said. “I’ll get it.” When he looked for her again, she was gone, and he was alone in the thickening night.

Most of the neighborhood was green, streets canopied by trees, lawns compassed by hedges, the houses themselves rarely exceeding complementary pastels, but about a mile north of William and Louisa was a stretch of highway that exploded simultaneously into tight-lipped gray and chattering color, a half mile of strip malls where buildings were densely packed in bric-a-brac and reader boards shrieked the latest specials. It was difficult to pass through this part of town without cringing, and for that reason its southern boundary was a site of welcome relief, as well as something of a local landmark. The last building on the strip had been a barbecue restaurant called the Pit, a faux log cabin topped by a stout iron pole, on top of which sat an enormous plastic pig wearing a chef’s hat. The Pit had changed hands two or three times as a restaurant and then become a discount-retail outlet, though the new proprietor had wisely chosen to keep the sign. To get home, William turned right at the pig on the pole, which is what he was doing when the real estate agent waved to him from another car.

“Hi there,” she said. He couldn’t remember her name, but her face was the same as always, fully invested in a synthetic smile.

He returned her wave silently. It was Sunday morning and he was out for coffee only.

“Good news,” she said. “We sold it.”

“Great,” he said. The light changed and he went around the corner.

It took him a few blocks to realize what she meant. The cul-de-sac where William lived was considered one of the most desirable in the area. His neighbors had not changed since shortly after he had moved in: Brooker and Pentz to his left and Eaton and Roth to his right, the other side running from Marker at the closed end of the street through Morgan, Johnson, and Kenner, with Zorrilla at the mouth. The houses were all one-story, Graham Kenner liked to joke, because that is what they told. More than once William had stepped out to collect his newspaper or water the lawn and seen at least one other man doing the exact same thing. There was a laugh of recognition and embarrassment they used in these situations. The structure of the street was as rigid as a crystal. Then one day at a party, Ron Johnson’s wife, Paula, clinked on a glass and pulled her lips in with a secretive smile. “Someone has some news about sunny California,” she said victoriously.

At first the neighbors had cheered the move, in part because it introduced some excitement into an otherwise uneventful April, and in part because most people disliked Ron Johnson and were glad to see him go. But after a month or so, with the
FOR SALE
sign still planted in the front lawn like a taunting flower, William began to resent the place on two counts. For starters, it bothered him that Ron Johnson could afford to move without selling. People whispered that the money came from Paula’s parents, though Ron had assured William it wasn’t true. The second issue was that the vacant house began to look like a missing tooth in the smile of the street. It was directly opposite William, the first thing he saw when he left his front door in the morning, and he began to internalize its failure.

Now, finally, the place was sold. William went left on Conroy and right on Powell. He gunned the engine enthusiastically as he took the shallow turn off of Brashear, then coasted through the intersection of Jensen and Patrick. When he turned onto his street, he spotted the absence immediately: no sign at all, just the flat broad lawn, which was under the care of the Realtor and as a result far healthier and more manicured than it had ever been when Ron Johnson lived there.

Louisa was on the phone in the other room. Her voice rose and fell in angry waves. He put her cup of coffee on the counter and drank the rest of his.

“Back already?” she said, coming into the kitchen. “Someone’s here, cleaning. Your doing, I assume?”

“I thought it’d make things easier.” Louisa, who could be lenient to the point of indifference about much of the house, was obsessed with keeping the kitchen in order, and so the day before, in a burst of foresight, William had arranged for a cleaning lady. The woman had arrived promptly at eight and stood with him on the deck. Beer bottles lined the edge of the railing; paper plates dotted the long table. Both had a faintly musical arrangement. William apologized for the mess, and she smiled. “Without mess, I don’t work,” she said. “This is three hours at least.” Excitement clotted her voice.

“I’ll go check on her,” William said. But she was on a cigarette break, and he went down into the yard, where he found the whiskey bottle Tom had thrown. Ants rioted around it. In the house to the south, the boy who spoke to his parents as if they were children was already awake. He was crouched behind an overturned bench with a foam dart gun, carefully watching as another boy, a friend, pressed himself flat against the trunk of a tree. William copied the posture against the big tree in the corner of his own yard, but there was no one coming for him. One of the birds whose name he didn’t know chirped loudly in the tree just overhead; its song was an exclamation point with feathers, a sharp whistle that went straight up.

In the kitchen, he paged through the newspaper, not quite reading. Louisa, spoon in hand, appraised a grapefruit that was titanic by any standard. “Hey,” William said. “How about that party?”

“How about it?” Louisa said.

“You should have come out earlier.”

“I had my reasons,” she said.

“I don’t doubt that,” said William, even though he did. “So what were you doing that whole time?”

“What was I doing? I don’t know. I read a little. I went onto my computer to listen to the radio, or whatever they call it now. If I’d known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have waited so long. I would have loved to see everyone before Tom went into the drink,” she said.