The Slippage: A Novel (9 page)

A little more than a year before, William had been in the same position, though it was nighttime, and the air was cool from recent rains. Louisa drank coffee and read the paper. Blondie toyed with a bug she had trapped between her paws. William set up an old boom box that was busted unless you put a foot on it to hold the cassette door closed. That’s what he was doing, and singing along: “Would you miss your color box, and your soft shoe shining?”

“Don’t sing,” she said. “It offends my ears.” He whistled instead, and his favorite bird joined in above, the one that sounded like a firework. “Hey,” Louisa said, shaking the paper, “here’s one thing that might interest you: it’s an article about a deck and porch trade show in Chicago next month.”

“What exactly do you think of me?”

She laughed. “It looks pretty impressive. You should go.” She started reading, suddenly serious on his behalf. “‘For two days in July, the convention center will be host to the world’s largest deck and porch event . . .’ See? It’s an
event
. You would have a good time. I’ll buy you the tickets, even.”

“With my money? You’re too good to me. Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“I’m trying to be nice to you. You like these kinds of things, even when you don’t admit it.”

“I admit it,” he said. He pulled her chair to his and brushed his fingertips along the side of her head.

“Put your mouth where your fingers were,” she said. The surface of her face did not change except to admit that there was more beneath it. She led him, her fist around a single finger of his. That was all it took sometimes.

He got in under the wire for conference registration, overstuffed an overnight bag—toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, two days’ worth of clothes, phone, cord, a few books in the corners—and drove himself to the airport, filling with the lightness he always felt before a trip.

Coming down in the plane over Chicago William read the city as a text, each block a paragraph, each building a word. What did that make the people? Characters, maybe.

He checked into the hotel and then wandered back downstairs, past the tables with fliers, the posted schedules, a banner connected to another convention advertising something called “Legislative Karaoke.” In the hotel lobby, he struck up a conversation with a fellow conventioneer named Pete, who had inherited a series of camping lodges in Wisconsin. Pete convinced him to come out for drinks. “I have a cousin here,” he said. “She’s young, and her friends are even younger. They know a bar near here.” The bar was lined by curved wooden beams, and after hours spent watching young women pretending to resist the advances of men, William began to feel the whole place sinking. “I’m feeling tired,” he told Pete, who was making inroads with a pale girl whose face was tilted up to show long thin nostrils. He went back to the hotel and slept partly dressed, atop the comforter.

The second day was William’s first in the crass cathedral of the convention hall. All around him, farther than he could see, people stood hawking additions to decks, techniques for perfecting them, plans for care and upkeep. One woman sprayed a piece of wood with what looked like silver paint. Another demonstrated fireproofing by holding a match to a square of fabric from lawn furniture. A tall redhead, in a blindingly pink bikini, struck a bored pose in a hot tub that had no water in it.

William looked at post caps in the shape of lions and welcome mats that showed pictures of famous baseball players and lawn sculptures of fantastical animals like unicorns and dragons. Eventually he came to a booth that displayed craftsman lanterns decorated with regional filigree: one set had a Western theme, cacti and cowboys, another mountains and pines, a third a lobster and a sailboat. A young blond woman was also in the booth. When she turned around, she showed bright eyes beneath dark eyebrows and a full, rounded mouth that contained teeth that were neither too small nor too white.

“I’m just browsing,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no. I don’t work here. I thought you did.” She sounded Southern, but lightly so.

“No,” he said. He put on a loud stage whisper. “We can steal these lanterns and run.”

She reached out and touched the nearest lantern. “I wish they had the whole New England set out. I might steal that. But this is an odd assortment, one of each. It’s all over the place. I wonder if there are other booths that have the same thing but different.”

Together they went to explore. At the next booth, surf music was playing from speakers hidden in plastic rocks and a small man with a flowered bow tie was bending and straightening, bending and straightening. Looking closer, William saw that he was applying a sheet of PVC to a flat surface. “Imagine this is a balcony,” he said. “We treat them like they’re roofs. We lock the PVC in place mechanically, using trained applicators, because we have learned over thirty-five years not to trust adhesives.”

“I’ve learned the same thing,” the woman said. “But with men.”

The small man blinked. “We’ve put down more than a hundred million square feet of this material.”

Deep in the hall someone dinged a digital bell.

“Well,” the woman said. “I think I hear a Sunbrella calling my name.”

“Which is what?” William said. But she was too far to hear.

The end of the day’s program was signaled like an intermission, a tug on the lights to dim them. William went to the hotel bar, where a small combo measured out mediocre jazz and the pretty bartenders brightened coldly in anticipation of the coming tide. What was William drinking in those days? What wasn’t he drinking? Probably he started with scotch. He liked the way it glowed in his glass and even the way he hated the smell. Pete popped up on the other side of the bar, came to thump William on the back, said he was sitting in the back with some friends and William should join them. From a distance, William gave Pete’s group the once-over: two older men, one older woman, one younger man. They laughed and tipped forward into the light, which was not what he had in mind. He spoke to the bartender for a little while. She was trying to break in as an actress. “I can do either comedy or drama,” she said, doing neither.

Midway through his second glass, William saw a woman step into the bar, look around as if lost, and then proceed to Pete’s table: she had blond hair cut short, tan shoulders, a slight curve to her back, like an archer’s bow. She was walking away from William, mostly, but he saw that it was the woman from the convention, his friend from the lantern booth. He steeled himself with what was left of his scotch and then headed over to return Pete’s thump. “Hey,” he said.

“Mr. Bill,” Pete said. “Meet my people.” He rounded the table counterclockwise. Alan was a mortgage broker in Ontario. Roy was a musician turned forest ranger. Ana was a Cuban artist and, apparently, Pete’s date while in town. William nodded at each description, absorbing little. The young blonde was in the middle of a conversation with a young man who was scouting locations for a new television drama about deep-sea divers. “The shadows of the palm trees are like dazzle paint,” the man said. William leaned over to shake hands. “Simon,” he said. “And this is Emma. She’s a caterer, working at the show.”

“I’m not working it,” she said. “I’m looking for supplies for deck catering.”

“Whatever,” Pete said. “It still doesn’t explain why she knows so much about the ocean.” William nodded, introduced himself, said that it was nice to meet everyone, looked at Emma as he said it.

About an hour later, the waitress appeared at William’s arm to see if he wanted a refill on his whiskey, except that it wasn’t the waitress; it was Emma. “Pete was looking for you,” she said. “He wanted to know if you want to go out with a bunch of us tomorrow night.”

“What are you?” William said. “The search party?”

She moved up, as if by levitation, onto the stool beside him. The small band was stuck wetly in the middle of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” “I’m here,” she said, “to tell you how I know so much about the ocean.”

She was thirty-one years old. She had been born in the eastern suburbs of New Orleans, to a chemist father who worked in an oil lab and a dancer mother, Russian-born, who had forgone her own career and opened a small studio instead. Emma had danced, too, hated it, been delivered out of bondage by injury in her late teens, had switched over to marine biology in college, and had seriously considered a career in it. “Which is how,” she said. College was Chicago and summers spent working in restaurants, and an older boyfriend who taught her to cook and encouraged her to start catering. “The money was good enough that I postponed grad school for a year,” she said. “Then it got better.” She had been a caterer for almost ten years, and had been good at it for five. “It’s the kind of thing where commitment really matters. When you run an event, it’s like conducting an orchestra. So many moving pieces.” She paused and flipped her hand outward like it was hinged. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should shut up.”

“No,” William said. “I mean, maybe about work. I could live with that. But how about the rest of life?”

“Ah,” she said. “The rest of life.” There was a disorderly silence and no strong indication that she wished to go on talking, though eventually she did. “Married for about two years. His name is Stevie. He works for Arrow, the car company, in marketing.” She drew a line on her forehead with a finger wet from ice. “One of his commercials was on the TV a little earlier.”

“How did the two of you meet?”

“At a party his company threw. I was sort of seeing another guy, but Stevie came up and started talking to me and he was attentive and funny and handsome. I was in high cotton.”

William downed his second scotch and then a third. Emma nursed a gin fizz. It must have rained while they were in the convention center, because the sun was coming off of wet concrete, and then it was low in the sky, and then it was gone.

“Hey,” William said. “Is that his commercial?” He pointed at the television, but it was too late. They were on to advertising computers.

Emma set her legs apart, on either side of his. “You don’t have any idea,” she said, “do you?” William shook his head. She was right. He didn’t. But then he realized that he didn’t even know what part of his ignorance was being identified. “Let’s go,” she said.

They took the elevator up in silence. William was tall enough that he didn’t mind crowded elevators; sometimes he enjoyed them. He was standing behind Emma, watching the seam where her roots darkened and disappeared into her scalp. When the doors opened, she turned left and then right and then stuck her card key into the chrome box hanging below the door handle. The panel blinked green and she put her shoulder into the door. William followed her in and went straight to the bathroom. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“Not at all.”

When he came out, he noticed a man’s suit hanging on the closet door. “What’s this?” he said. “Is Steve here with you?”

“Stevie,” she said. “And no.” He looked around the room. It was his room. “Remember when I asked to see your wallet?” He nodded, more to try to locate the memory than to agree. “Well, I just took your key.”

Or maybe he was remembering it wrong. Maybe he had given it to her, laughing as if he was returning it, and they had ridden up in the elevator under the spell of this fiction. Or maybe he had interrogated her further about her job and her marriage, asking questions in rapid-fire delivery until she sighed and said “
Pochemuchka
,” which was, she explained, an affectionate insult for an overly inquisitive friend. They had held hands in the hall and looked at their joined shadow. They had duplicated the pose in front of the mirror and looked at their joined reflection. Or had they?

What he did remember for certain is that she had taken off her shoes, and that their removal had the opposite of the effect it should have, making her seem taller, and that by now he accepted the paradox of her physical stature and realized that the only way to resolve it was to render her horizontal, which he did, lightly pushing her backward onto the bed. Out loud, though not to her, he said, “We really should turn on the television.” He didn’t think she had heard him, but she reached back and found the remote control and switched it on. He lay down on the bed beside her. They were both fully clothed. The only bit of come-on, except for the fact that she was in his room, was the shoes, and that was hardly anything at all. Maybe it was just going to be the TV.

For a little while they lay on the bed that way, rigid as skis, and watched the closed-circuit convention channel, which was showing footage from that morning. She switched channels until she found an ocean documentary, and she started to tell him about the animals of the deep, how their eyes had a reflective curtain just behind the retina that kept light in, a
tapetum lucidum
, and her chest was gently rising and falling, and the hollow at the base of her neck was fluttering. William propped himself up on one elbow so that his face was above hers. He traced the line of her jaw with his finger. There was something comical about her at that moment, despite her beauty, and she seemed to sense it, and she crossed her eyes and jutted out her tongue. “Oh my,” she said. “What’s a nice girl like me doing with two gentlemen like you?”

This set her to giggling, and she kept it up all through the kiss, and the unbuttoning of her shirt, and the unhooking of her brassiere. Only when William squeezed the side of her skirt to pop open the bar fastener did she stop, and it was to draw a deep breath and continue. William tried a steady voice. “I don’t know,” he said. “This isn’t . . .”

He never got to say what it wasn’t. Emma clapped a hand over his mouth and, with her other hand, tugged at his belt. He excused himself and leaned on the bathroom counter weakly, telling himself that he was in the grip of excitement rather than fear. When he came out of the bathroom, the nice girl was naked on top of the sheets. He breathed in sharply, as a reflex, and went to his knees by the edge of the bed, where he put his mouth on her breast. She gasped and he moved down, away from the source of the gasp.