The Slippage: A Novel (6 page)

For a little while they were together again. William read the newspaper to the boy and fed him from a bottle and held him frequently enough that for the rest of his life he would be able to remember the hot little body with its rapid, rabbity heartbeat. When William and Louisa got back together, Karla wrote herself out of the scene, though they still met twice a year to mark the passage of time on each other’s faces.

“Move your elbow,” Karla said, pointing up at the waitress. “She’s trying to give you your iced tea.”

“Thanks, Mom,” William said.

“You wish,” Karla said.

“Speaking of which,” William said, “I have a story.” He had been at the park a few weeks before and had seen Christopher by the basketball courts, ringed by friends. When William had waved, the boy had returned a stiff reverse nod, chin lifted from chest as if by guide wire.

Karla laughed. “Ten years old and already treats you like a colleague.”

“I could use a man like him down at the office.”

“How’s it going over there, anyway?”

“Been better,” he said. “But things are tough all over.”

“True,” Karla said, blushing a bit because she had no idea. She was living in a large house in the best part of town and casually dating a young filmmaker, also independently wealthy, who took her on ski vacations twice a year and was teaching Christopher to ride a horse. “And how’s the home front?”

“Ah, the home front,” William said. “Smooth? Bumpy? Who can say? Louisa’s brother moved to town. She threw a party for him and then refused to come out.”

“For how long?”

“The whole party.”

“Hmm,” Karla said.

“The party’s not the only thing,” William said, and then had to think if it was. “I think she might be hoarding the mail.”

“Hoarding?”

“Squirreling it away. I found two bags of it in the house, hidden in corners.”

“Is she depressed?” Karla, precise in so many things, defaulted to the vaguest language when it came to the feelings of others.

“I don’t think so,” William said. “The other day, she drove me out to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere.”

“Sounds like a mob hit.”

“Turns out it’s land she owns. We own.”

“Congratulations,” she said.

“I guess,” he said. “I stood there in front of the land and felt empty.”

“It’s an investment,” Karla said.

“But in what?”

“In your future,” she said. “I hope you didn’t make her feel bad about it.”

“Sometimes people place the future between themselves and the present,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to make things work now. If I do that, then the future’s just the sound of that same note sustaining.”

“That’s beautiful,” Karla said. The idea was something William had acquired from a magazine, which didn’t make it less beautiful.

William paid, as always. It would have been nothing to Karla, and he wanted it to be something, at least. The cashier was the daughter of the owner. She smiled when she saw him looking at her. He had known the girl since she was six or seven and seen her at least yearly since then. She had been small and plump as a child but was now tall and angular, with a pleasant open face and skin as tight and fresh as an apple. Over the years she had absorbed hundreds of thousands of glances, touches, conversations, not to mention time itself, the minutes, the seconds, the smaller pieces that could not be casually measured but were still indisputable. She had grown thin in part because she had grown full with time. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and she had the body of a young woman, mostly there, never quite there. William wondered if Karla, looking at the girl, would think of the younger versions of herself, or of an older version of Christopher. William thought of the girl who had sat beside him in school when he was twelve; hair sprouted from beneath her arms and it shocked him. His arms felt leaden, not quite his own, both then and now. He thanked the girl, asked after her father, and went out to join Karla in the parking lot.

William’s afternoon was oversold, a trio of conference calls laid end to end, and when he finished the third he went to the bathroom, wet his hands, and ran them through his hair. The office water was hard, or maybe it was soft: he didn’t know which, but within an hour his hair would be stiff as a brush.

On his way down the hall, William saw Fitch standing outside Antonelli’s office, pointing at the door. “I think I saw him in the break room,” William said.

“Not today you didn’t,” Fitch said. “He’s gone. Fired. There’s a new guy coming to replace him next week from San Diego.”

When William heard that changes were coming, he’d feared that this would be the first. Antonelli didn’t always have his mind in the game—hadn’t since that morning five years before when he had woken up early to play a round of golf on the course that bordered his backyard. He had eaten breakfast with his children, kissed his wife on the forehead, and made it to the first tee by seven. Antonelli was playing with an older Chinese man assigned him by the course, which was how he preferred it: “Less conversation means more concentration,” he liked to say. He birdied the first hole and parred the second. The third hole was the one that backed his house; it had a water hazard in the form of a small lake. Turning to square himself with the tee, Antonelli noticed Linda, his three-year-old daughter, peering through a gap in his fence. He waved. She shouted something. Antonelli could not hear and so he pointed to his ear. She shouted again. “
Pete
,” the Chinese man said. “She say
Pete
.” Pete was Antonelli’s son, six. Antonelli jogged closer to the wall. “What about Pete?” he said. “He fell in there,” she said. She indicated the lake. Antonelli went in with all his clothes on. He didn’t even drop his driver. Pete was in the shallows, not breathing, a lump on his head from where he had knocked against the rocks. Antonelli pulled him out onto the fairway and pumped his chest. The Chinese man called an ambulance. Antonelli’s wife arrived just in time to watch her son expire on the lawn.

Like many personal tragedies, the incident was discussed frequently in Antonelli’s absence but never in his presence. Two years after Pete’s death, when Antonelli told the guys his wife was pregnant again, there was a moment of silence, a tensing, that preceded the round of congratulations. Once, William and Louisa had run into the Antonellis at a restaurant. William met the new baby, also a boy, and squeezed his foot. Louisa had praised him for this. “It’s the normal thing to do, which is why I’m glad you did it,” she said. But in the office, no one knew exactly how to handle the matter other than to ignore it, in part because they did not wish to do further injury to Antonelli, and in part because they feared, like all superstitious men—that is, like all men—that any mention of the drowning might begin an invisible process by which they, too, would be robbed of that which was most precious to them. Most of the other guys had kids, too, mostly sons, and on slow weeks they would bring the boys around and charge them with delivering paperwork or making copies or carrying out other duties that were not significantly more trivial than what went on at Hollister on an average day. William looked forward to opening his office door to a miniature Fitch or Cohoe. The last time, Elizondo had instructed his five-year-old son to walk into Antonelli’s office and say, “Lou, I really appreciate all that you’ve done for the company, but I think it’s time we go our separate ways.” Antonelli had laughed at that. Everyone had agreed it was a good sign. But it was a bad one.

William was heading for the elevator when he saw Harris standing in Baker’s office, pointing out through the glass. William moved and Harris’s finger moved with him. William stepped in. “O’Shea dropped out of TenPak,” Baker said.

“What?” William said. “I was just about to send over the presentation.”

“No point,” Baker said. “He’s gone for good.” He rose up slightly behind his desk: broad, mahogany, it was like a ship at the head of a fleet.

“So what should we do?”

Baker pinched his chin and stared past William. Behind him there was a painting of an island, a conical mountain, ringed by clouds, rising from its center. William had heard the story of the mountain: Baker had climbed it as a young man, though the painting was made decades earlier. One of the other climbers who’d scaled the mountain with Baker had said that, after reaching the summit, most of the men on the expedition acted as if they had survived a tragedy. Their behavior became indefensibly risky, and for a number of days base camp became a blur of sex and drugs and gambling. Baker, by contrast, was exactly the same coming down the mountain as he had been going up. His only concession to the ascent was to acquire the painting, a testament to his calm mastery of the world.

“I think we should go down the line to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Harris said.

Baker frowned and nodded. “That’s prudent,” he said. “There’s another gentleman, a Mr. Loomis, who put in about eighty. I was just telling Arthur, I think you should clean up what you did for O’Shea and then Arthur and Edward will take it over to him. Can that be tomorrow?”

“If for William, then for me,” Harris said.

“It works,” William said. “I heard about Antonelli.”

Baker lowered his head slightly. For a second, William thought the gesture was a guilty one—clearly, he’d known Antonelli was about to get the ax—but his head rose back up on a tide of purpose. “Louis was a valued part of this company,” Baker said. “This economy can sometimes make harsh demands. Which is why it’s all the more important that we keep this company running as smoothly as possible. If the Loomis meeting happened tomorrow, that would be best.”

William made for the elevator. At the head of the hallway, he saw George Hollister again. Twice in three days: it had the feel of premeditation. William stopped at the stairwell. “No elevator for me,” he called down the hall. “I have to go up to nine to pick up a file.” George Hollister started to give him a thumbs-up but then extended his right index finger and, for a few excruciating seconds, conducted an imaginary orchestra. “Friday,” he said. “Scriabin. They’re staging the full
Mysterium
. I can only imagine that a man of your refinement will be there.” William pushed into the stairwell, where a man of his refinement took a step upstairs, as if he were actually going for a file, then turned and hurried downstairs. In the lobby, he bought a bottle of water and an energy bar and handed the woman a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

“Big spender,” she said brightly. It occurred to him that he was. He unwrapped the energy bar and nibbled the edge. His phone buzzed. “Hello?” William said.

“Hey,” Tom said. “Want to come over? I’m hanging.”

Most of the university campus was done in Collegiate Gothic, but the art gallery occupied a sleek new glass-and-steel structure that had been endowed by a hedge-fund billionaire with roots in the community. The permanent collection filled the flat disk of the main building; new exhibits went into the wing, which extended to the north like a tonearm. William entered through the front door and gave Tom’s name to a fiercely tattooed brunette whose face was almost entirely obscured behind a Japanese graphic novel. “That way,” she said, extending a finger elegantly.

Tom was alone in the middle of a mostly empty large room, head lowered, looking like someone else’s artwork until William got close enough to see the phone in his hand. “Send him over,” Tom said. “I need him to make sure the projector works.” There was a word for what Tom was, with his thick limbs and his large head and his jaw always set.

“Billy Boy,” he said, turning. “Just firming up a few last things.” He waved toward the far wall and his shoulder muscles shifted beneath his shirt. “Video loop over there.” Burly: that was the word.

Tom was a graphist. Not a graphologist—“that’s handwriting analysis, and everyone types these days,” he said—but a visual artist whose work consisted entirely of charts and graphs, most drawn on paper, a few painted on canvas. His subjects were self-referential and possibly philosophical: he made charts, he said, about the way people looked at charts. Before Tom came back to town, Louisa, in a burst of sisterly pride, had shown William an online interview with Tom. “Graphs are supposed to help us see clearly,” Tom said. “But what if they teach us that seeing clearly is impossible?”

The interviewer, a young man with early gray at his temples, leaned forward into his next question: “The untrained eye might say these are just comic versions of ordinary graphs, the kind you might see in a newspaper.”

“As Kepler said,” Tom said, “the untrained eye is an idiot.”

That video was not in the exhibit. Instead there was another short feature, narrated by a young woman, that called him a “prop comedian whose props are some of our most commonly held ideas” before giving way to a montage of his graphs: bars, pies, points. The final was a line graph that rose sharply and then fell off as it went. It was titled
How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time
.

Next to the video were three huge gray bars stretching from the floor toward the ceiling, and over them an equally huge caption that read
Percent Chance That, in the Original Full-Color Graph, Each of These Bars Was the Color It Claims to Be
. The first one, labeled “red,” rose to 60 percent, “green” went to 70, and “blue” left off around 25.

Tom was off the call now, coming toward William with a purposeful stride. “Funny,” William said.

“Funny slash sad,” Tom said. “If a color isn’t what it says it is, what is it?”

“I’m no philosopher,” William said. “But I would say that color is a liar.”

“Isn’t a lie just a deeper truth?” Tom said. “Each of these works is a way of conducting an experiment into what we believe: into conventional ways of organizing ideas, conventional narratives, conventional morality. And all convention leaves something to be desired. Here, let me show you the new pieces.” A hand went on William’s shoulder again, and William felt the weight of Tom’s attention.

Beyond the smoked-glass door at the corner of the room was the lobby for the entire exhibit, which was called
Faculty Voices
. Participants included, according to a brochure, a Native American woman who rendered biblical scenes on parfleche and a Frenchman who created grotesque miniature sculptures and set them before distorted mirrors that reflected them back as normal. The tattooed brunette from the front desk was there, sitting behind the same book. “Jenny,” Tom said. “This is Billy, my brother-in-law. I’m going to show him all the important work in the show, by which I mean all of my work.” The girl lowered the book, beaming. Was she his next-in-line? Or maybe she’d already passed through.