The Slippage: A Novel (5 page)

“And all of the other, too,” William said. “Land, land, land.”

“I drove by there last week,” she said. “It wasn’t real yet, but I wanted to see how it felt. A few lots over, there’s a construction site. Someone’s putting up a house. The workmen were just driving away, and I walked up to the front where the doorway’s going to be.”

“Was it safe?”

“I even poked my head in. It had that distinctive smell, sawdust over earth, some faint electrical haze. The plans were tacked up near the front: they’re going to have a sunken living room and a big island in the kitchen and a nursery with a little porch off the back.”

“The best-tacked plans,” William said.

Louisa eyes flashed out at him, but only for a second; then the anger was gone, like an arrow taken away by the wind. There were tears instead. “That girl’s dress was so beautiful,” she said. “And Tom ruined everything.”

William watched a college basketball game, played along with an old game show whose answers he already knew, failed to laugh at a stand-up comedy special. The dog lounged beside a knife of lamplight on the rug. He kept flipping channels, high in the spectrum now: cooking class, home-design competition, travel documentary. He put his hand on his stomach in what he imagined was a Napoleonic manner. He crouched on the floor next to the dog and locked his ankles under the couch for sit-ups. They weren’t hard until twenty, and then they were too hard. He went back through channels in descending order, the pictures washing over him in a rinse.

He had a brief idea that he might play some guitar, and he went into the garage and turned on the lights. When he was younger, he had learned the rudiments, mostly to impress a girl at college. He was mediocre at best, but when he moved to the house he had set up a guitar and an amp in a corner of the garage. Louisa called it his rehearsal space, which pleased him until he considered the possibility that she was mocking him.

In the corner by his guitar there was another plastic bag, tied up like a hobo’s kerchief. He opened it to find even more mail, mostly advertising circulars and catalogs, along with a postcard from a distant cousin of Louisa’s who had moved to Australia. This mail was dated earlier than the batch he had found in the junk room. He left the bag where it was, shut off the garage light, and wondered what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

Louisa was tough. It was something he used to tell his friends as a joke, admiringly but with a touch of exasperation, until he realized how true it was. She was tough when her father died and tough when her mother died. She was tough when she lost her job at the publicity firm and had to send résumés around for more than two months before the museum job came open. So what had rattled her now? He laid out the year in his mind. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no extreme misfortune. He could ask her but he doubted she’d even admit to the bags of mail.

The dog needed a reason not to rush after him down the hall. William pitched him a treat, which hit the floor with a little hop and disappeared into the narrow triangle between the garbage can and the counter. Blondie scrabbled for it and William made his getaway. In bed, Louisa was on her side, over the sheets, eyes closed. He went toward the bathroom with small, quiet steps, unsure if she was awake and unwilling to find out. When he came back to bed, Louisa was curled beneath the covers, pretending to hide. “You in there?” he said. But there was no noise and barely any life in the heart of that snow hill.

“Word around the office is, they’re going with Domesta,” said Eddie Fitch. He tipped his empty paper coffee cup, set it upright, tipped it again.

“Domesta is horrible,” William said. “It sounds like a car, or a pill.”

William worked for the Hollister Company, which occupied two floors of a mirrored office building downtown. The Hollister brothers, Leon and Julian, had started in residential development but maintained a sideline in mortgage brokering, and over time they had shifted into customized investment packages. Their flagship offering was TenPak, which had one foot in real estate and another in stocks, required an initial commitment of ten thousand dollars, and promoted, while not exactly promising, returns of 10 percent annually over a ten-year period. William was the editorial manager of the sales department, which meant that he was charged with preparing one-sheets and brochures for the salesmen when they went on sales calls. When people asked him what he did, he said financial writing, and over the years he had come to believe it.

“I used to drive a Domesta,” Harris said. “Got terrible mileage.”

Lunch was the spine of the day. Everything else moved away from it in both directions, at a constant speed. A group of them, what William thought of as his group, was eating in the lunchroom on the eighth floor, sandwiches brought from home or purchased from the ancient vending machine in the break room. “You’d just think they would have told us at the same time as everyone else.” The week before, a memo had come down from nine announcing that the real estate and energy-investment divisions were being rebranded. Energy had quickly received a second memo informing them that they would hereby be known as Vyron. Real estate had been left to hang in a cold wind: sales had dropped for two consecutive quarters, and there were whispers that the staff would be thinned out before the end of the year.

Baker cleared his throat. Deep-voiced, caramel-skinned, always clean-shaven even on close inspection, he was the group manager. He had started at the same level as the rest, around the same time as William, but he had risen through the ranks like a flame on a curtain. “Pill is what they’re going for,” Baker said. “The economy has been sick, or perceived as such. So how do you cure it, or create the perception of cure? Take a pill.
Domesta has been proven effective in treating consumer debt and securing equity in your primary residence. Side effects may include nausea, hair loss, and ectopic pregnancy
.”

Harris and Fitch laughed. They were both easy laughs, though of much different species. Harris, tall and skinny, with hair that would have reached nearly to his waist if he were of average height, laughed like a cowboy, slow and appreciative, while Fitch erupted in childish giggles.

“The side effects include nausea?” William said. “You mean when people hear the word? I can understand why. I’m getting a little queasy myself.”

Another pair of laughs. William didn’t know if he deserved them. He was well liked, but the things he assumed people liked about him—his height, his voice, the fact that he had kept his hair and stayed relatively trim into his early forties—were things he had no control over. And so when people nodded at his comments or smiled at him in the hall he simply returned the gesture, neither pleased nor displeased, passing back something he had already decided had no value.

“Why change at all?” Harris said. “What was wrong with Hollister Homes? Don’t people want a trusted name in an economy like this?”

Baker steepled his fingers. “These days,” he said, “financial-services companies are among those most likely to rebrand, along with food services and technology.”

“Maybe they’re still making up their mind,” William said.

“Minds,” Fitch said.

“No, I think William is right,” Harris said. “I think ‘mind’ is right.”

“How can you say either, really?” Baker said. “Corporations are a highly specific form of organism that balances both collective and individual thoughts.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” William said.

“Me too,” Harris said, and laughed.

“As long as my name’s in the middle of the checks,” Fitch said, “I don’t care whose name is on the top.” He looked to Harris for support. “That’s my thing.”

“Here’s mine,” Harris said. He wadded up his napkin and arced a shot toward the wastebasket in the corner.

“Perfect,” Fitch said. “Two for Harris.”

“That’s a three-pointer,” Harris said.

“No way,” Fitch said. “Too easy. Shoot at a can that’s farther away.”

He did, and missed.

“Pick that up, please,” Baker said, flipping a hand toward the wad, lord to liege.

Fitch giggled. Lunch was over, with very little solved.

“William,” Baker said. “Stay a minute. I need to discuss something with you that I have already discussed with Nicholas and Susannah.” Baker called everyone in the office by the longest version of their first name. “We have an issue with O’Shea.” He called customers by their last.

O’Shea was a local restaurateur who had bought into TenPak for a hundred thousand the previous January and doubled down in June. But then a cloud settled over him: his wife left him, his teenage son was in a car accident, and there was a kitchen fire that shut his restaurant for months. He had requested the return of his entire investment. “That can’t happen,” Baker had said. “When money goes out like that, it can start a stampede, especially in an economic climate like this one. Can you prepare a new one-sheet?”

“Sure,” William said. “I have the spring brochure. I can revise and reprint that.”

“Wonderful.” Baker buttered the word. “Come by tomorrow and show me what you’ve done.”

William tinkered with text and reviewed the accompanying artwork: a couple about his age, standing near what was probably a beach, holding hands. A boat in the distance distracted the eye. He marked it out with a circle and a line.

At four, he stretched his legs and went down the hall. He had read that each continuous hour of sitting shortened a man’s life by ten seconds. Susannah Moore, who oversaw the office information network, was explaining the new e-mail protocol to another woman, her voice a colorless music. In the break room, Antonelli and Cohoe were holding cups of coffee; Harris was steeping tea. “How can you drink that stuff?” William said. “I’m going out.”

“Done for the day?” Harris said.

“No,” William lied. “I just need to get out of the office for a little while. I’ll be back.”

“Some people don’t have real offices,” said Cohoe, who did.

At the elevator, a man appeared at William’s side. It was George Hollister, short and thick, his graying hair shaved tight, his features crowded into the center of his face. George was a nephew of the founders and the nominal boss of the division, though he didn’t come in most days, and when he did, he mostly sat in his corner office watching a Japanese cable channel that none of the other TVs in the building seemed to get.

Hollister was standing next to the last elevator, which worked only by pass card. He and William had a checkered history, in the sense that there were a limited number of moves in the game. Years before, Hollister had seen William out one evening at a performance of the
Symphonie Liturgique
, making use of subscription tickets Louisa had ordered. Hollister was alone, and possibly a little tipsy, and he had clasped Louisa’s hand and expressed surprise to see William. “I didn’t figure you for a music lover,” he said. A few weeks later, in the office, Hollister asked if he could expect William at
Il Seraglio
that weekend, and the time after that he wondered if William had any opinion on Dohnányi and laughed aloud. The whole thing began to shade into malice, and William kept to the outer circuit of the hallway in a largely successful effort to avoid Hollister. This time, he had failed.

“Good afternoon,” Hollister said.

“It’s not bad,” William said.

“How have you been?” Hollister said. And then, without waiting for an answer: “I thought of you the other day. I was at a Lyatoshynsky event, the
Mourning Prelude
.” He held his fingers to his mouth and then opened them in a bloom of appreciation. “But I didn’t see you there. Is everything all right?”

The elevator arrived in time to save George Hollister’s life.

Tuesday came, rang its dampened bell. William rolled out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, urinated, fished his toothbrush from the cup, brushed, showered, toweled dry, pulled comb through hair, pulled clothes onto body, breakfast table, cereal, car, road, parking space, elevator. Somewhere along the way he became himself.

The morning passed without incident: he readied the presentation for O’Shea, reviewed the new brochure, visited the break room at regular intervals. At one, William walked over to the Red Barn, a dim, dingy restaurant on a small side street off Oakmont. Karla, a small forceful brunette who worked hard to seem relaxed, was waiting at a table. “Hi,” she said. “I already ordered. Iced tea, right?”

“You’re too good to me,” he said.

William had been with Karla before Louisa—or, as he liked to say, between Louisas. Karla was a part-time Realtor with a sideline in floristry. She approached both jobs indifferently; her father, an engineer who had discovered a new material for industrial packing, had left her with enough money that she never needed to mention the amount. It was a mountain whose top she couldn’t see. William had met her at work, when he was in advertising. They had been friends at first but had passed across the center of some odd chemical equation and become sporadic lovers. He had other girlfriends and she had other boyfriends. “We do this because we like it,” she said, in a voice that made him unsure whom she was comforting. Then one night at dinner she pointed at his smiling face and said, “I’m about to change that.” She was, she said, pregnant.

He was thirty-two years old, never married. He knew there was, at best, a one-in-four chance that he was the father, but he felt that fraction settle into him with a mix of thrill and misgiving. She kissed him and put her hand in his hair. “I need a sample to know for sure,” she said, and pulled for science.

The DNA tests let him off the hook, pointing instead to a South American businessman who had been in town for the summer only, and then Karla stopped answering William’s calls. When the baby was born, a boy named Christopher, she asked William out for coffee and apologized for cutting him off so abruptly. “For a little while I just couldn’t,” she said. Then Christopher’s father had been piloting a small plane from Miami to the Bahamas when it crashed into the ocean. “It’s not like he was around,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with us. But this is so permanent.” Her lower lip trembled. He had never seen her so close to crying.