The Slippage: A Novel

by Ben Greenman

  But now, the unthinkable had happened: a year had gone by and her letter was open on the kitchen counter, heating up the place. “Dear William,” it said. “I have some very surprising news I need to share with you. I am moving. Stevie got transferred to a new division of Arrow that’s based in your town. We will be neighbors. And when I say neighbors, William, I mean near neighbors. I looked up the address, and it’s right across the street. Life’s funny sometimes, and sometimes it’s anything but. See you soon.”

  He read the note a second time and let his finger rest on words he thought he was supposed to understand. He threw the rest of the mail away but put the letter in his pocket, and when he reached the bedroom, he transferred it quickly to the drawer in the table beside his bed. He could not see it but he could sense it there still, and so he lay in bed and forced his mind to rise, like mist off a river, and hover at the top of the bedroom, before it passed through the ceiling. He could take the sky, bit by bit, until he saw it all stretched out before him: the houses, the cars, the lights twinkling in the dark carpet of the town at night. And so he rose and the letter did not. It stayed there in the bottom of the table, a small white rectangle that shrank until it was a scrap, a shred, nothing or even less than that, so long as he stayed aloft.

  Part IV

  THE NEIGHBOR POLICY

  ONE

  William waited for signs of life in the house across the way. At first he was casual about it, angling his kitchen chair during meals so he could see out the front window. It looked just like a house: nondescript cream-colored façade punctuated by a few shuttered windows. A bright green vine climbed calligraphically alongside the front door. The first Saturday he set an alarm for seven and walked Blondie up and down the street, a surveillance pass. The Monday after that, he invented an excuse to go out to the garage, where he pushed the weightlifting bench up against the small vertical window and remained at his post until Louisa called him in to watch TV with her. Then, at ten or so on the morning of the second Saturday, the front door disgorged a young woman. She knelt by a green puff of shrubbery, rearranged something William couldn’t see, and then made her way along the narrow path toward her garage. It was Emma, unmistakably, if only from the wide swing of her right hip when she walked. She touched the handle of her door, tested it for tightness, appeared to adjust it slightly, and passed back inside the house. He had seen it all from his post, through the dusty pane of duty glass. The whole thing had taken ten seconds, tops.

  Sunday, errands; Monday, work; Tuesday-to-Friday’s assault on meaningful memory. Then Saturday again, and a rare rain that pattered on the glass door that led from the kitchen to the deck. The weather cleared at lunchtime, and Louisa went to run errands, and that was his cue to walk across the street and knock on the door. Emma answered. Her hair was shorter than before, and slightly darker. Her face was holding back nearly everything. He sensed someone behind her. “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi,” he said. “Bill Day.”

  “Bill?” she said, smiling uncertainly. A book was wedged under her arm. He didn’t recognize the cover and couldn’t see the full title—something about a mirror.

  “William, I guess. Most people call me William, though whenever I meet new people, I try to go by Bill. Sounds friendlier. But it never seems to stick. Anyway, I live right across the way there.” He lifted an index finger and pointed it, so deliberately that no reasonable observer could have perceived it as casual.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “You’re moving in?” He heard his own foot dragging across the bricks of the walk.

  “Trying to. We’re box people at the moment.”

  “Completely,” he said, not sure what he was agreeing with.

  A man’s voice came from inside the house. “Who is it?”

  “A neighbor.”

  The man appeared beside her, wearing tight blue metallic shorts. “Hey,” he said. “I’d shake your hand but I’ve been oiling up my bicycle so I can take a ride.” He laughed at a joke that maybe he thought he had made. Emma had described him as tall, or at least compared him to someone tall. He was not. He put his arm around his wife. “Stevie,” he said.

  “William,” William said.

  “Emma,” Emma said.

  There was a silence. “Where are you guys coming from?” William said.

  “Chicago,” Stevie said.

  “Great city,” William said. “I haven’t been there for years.” He grimaced. What if that remark wound its way back to Louisa? He would write it off as a misunderstanding. Everything is not always perfectly understood. His foot was scuffing faster now. A brown parcel-post truck rumbled around the corner. It was probably headed for the Zorillas’; the wife had lost her job and was working from home, buying and selling collectibles. But it pulled up at the head of William’s driveway and a young black man with dreadlocks hopped out. “Oh, look, a package,” William said. “I should go get that.” He bid a quick good-bye and went back to his house. The package was addressed to Louisa, a box of unrevealing size and weight from a catalog house he didn’t recognize. He carried it inside, flipping a waist-height wave back across the street, but the door was already closed.

  That night, he and Louisa were watching TV, a crime drama they had joined halfway through and were trying to piece together. “Your phone,” Louisa said. William shook his head and let it ring. Later in the bathroom, he checked for a message; there was none, but he had her number now. He slept encircled by the memory of Emma as she stood there in the doorway, saying his name like a question.

  Louisa was up before him, already in the kitchen, menacing the coffeemaker. “This machine,” she said murderously. “It won’t listen.”

  The old machine had expired with an electrical puff. “I’ll get a new one,” William said, but he preferred store-bought coffee, and so he forgot, and Louisa reminded him, and he forgot again, and finally she sighed with exasperation and said she was going online to call in the cavalry.

  The cavalry, which had been designed by an award-winning Swiss architect, was a chrome sphere with a recessed instrument panel that promised, according to the box, “total control over the coffee-making experience.” For the moment, it seemed to be exercising total control over Louisa. “Damn it,” she said. “I can’t get this to do what it’s supposed to do.” She put both hands on the sphere and lifted it off the table as if it were a head.

  “Which is?”

  “Turn on?”

  A piece that looked important gleamed on the counter. “Maybe that’s something,” William said.

  “That’s from the old one. I think. Or the rice cooker. I don’t know.” Louisa returned the head to the counter and scooped food into the dog’s dish. She had set out a small bowl of cereal for William and a glass decorated with the Statue of Liberty. “So what’s your day like?”

  William filled his glass up to the crown. “I don’t know. The usual. Tote that barge, lift that bale.” He began to hum.

  “Don’t sing,” she said. “I don’t want to have to stay in a hotel.” Marriage, having grown tired of labor, resupplied old plots and conflicts, snippets of familiar dialogue. “It could be worse. At least you don’t have to deal with curators all day long. Nothing’s worse than a female martinet.”

  “You’re going to have to help me out with that one,” he said. “I failed zoology.”

  Louisa laughed, but only briefly, and William moved into the space the silence created. “Hey,” he said. “I ran into Eddie Fitch and he invited us to a party. It’s a theme party, kind of.”

  “They always are,” Louisa said. “What’s this one?”

  “Southern Christmas.” It was based on something that Helen Hull had told Gloria: “She was talking about how when she was growing up in Manitoba, she had so many signs that autumn was changing into winter. Now there’s no good way to tell.”

  “So Gloria decided to do it for her?”

  “I guess.” William opened the gate t
he rest of the way. “It’s kind of a welcome-wagon party for the new people, too, I think. Have you met them yet?”

  “Not really,” Louisa said. “So this will be a good way.” She put the butter back.

  “Yeah,” William said. But he pinched the bridge of his nose when he said it. An old affair across the street: it was a secret he had to keep, a spot of frostbite on his memory. Tom had said that conventional morality left something to be desired, but William thought the problem was that it left nothing to be desired. It was a dull steady heartbeat that trailed off over time. In Chicago, he had put the paddles to this slowly dying heart. He had clobbered his expectations of himself and then convinced himself not to think about the consequences. But now the past had surfaced, and there was movement in water he needed to be placid.

  Louisa cleared his bowl and glass from in front of him and then started in on the counter: she folded up a newspaper, rolled up catalogs she didn’t want, dumped them all into the garbage. “I hope there was nothing in there for me,” he said. He hadn’t brought up the issue of the mail since she had left the bag on the counter, and things seemed back in swing, with a steady stream of publications they didn’t need.

  She leaned across him to get the pitcher of water. She had missed a button on her nightshirt and he widened the opening. “Hey.” Louisa gripped him at his wrist. “Got to go,” she said. “I’ve got bales of my own to lift.” The museum was opening an exhibit on the history of local signage. Louisa had written the wall text and had to proof the plaques before they were placed. One night, Tom had come by to help her out with what he called “the intentionally dead language of museum writing.” He pretended to be cynical, took on a tone, but William heard something else instead: Tom’s pride in his sister.

  “Ready to go,” William said. “I need to be at the office fifteen minutes ago.” He had Loomis work to do. It was piled up on his desk, heating up the place. “So we’re not going to get any coffee from this UFO?”

  “I’ll return it,” Louisa said. “But I’m very disappointed. I thought Swiss engineering was the best in the world.”

  “I don’t see how,” William said. “Even their cheese has holes.”

  Louisa untangled her purse strap from the back of the kitchen chair. “You want to walk out with me?”

  “I’m not quite ready.” He figured he could take a few minutes to watch the house across the street, maybe catch sight of Emma. He’d seen her the night before, coming in from a supermarket trip. She was wearing a tank top and he got the curve of her shoulder into his mind and couldn’t get it out.

  William went to the den, took a magazine from the table. He noticed, maybe for the first time, that the design on the wallpaper was a four-blade pinwheel cornered by a quartet of birds. He surveyed the rest of the room. There was the shallow blue ceramic vase on the windowsill, the strange broken-neck lamp over the recliner. How could he fairly move to a new house when he knew so little about this one?

  He lay down on the couch and balanced his phone on his chest. Suddenly it buzzed, a tiny heart attack. William flipped the phone open. It was a text from Louisa. “Make sure water bowl before you go,” it said. “Dog thirsty.”

  William gazed out his office window into the park across the street and wondered what it had all looked like a thousand years before, and whether the change had been for the better. To his left was a legal pad on which he had block-printed the name O’SHEA, then crossed it out and written LOOMIS. He turned to his computer, opened up the brochure file, and got to it. He needed to create the impression that any TenPak investor, but especially a principal, was in for the ride of his life. He moved words from one sentence to another, shifted punctuation. He polished the paragraph until he could almost see himself in it.

  Through lunch, beyond lunch, into afternoon, conversation came to him as if through water. The reason was simple. The reason was Emma. He still hadn’t called her back, hadn’t even dialed a single digit of the number. She had called him again, this time leaving a message. It wasn’t much—a slow hello, then a quick call me back—but he snapped the phone shut without deleting her voice mail and tried to make sense of the hectic jazz in his chest.

  An alert blinked on William’s screen for a meeting down the hall. In Baker’s office, an intern was tending to a reference shelf in the corner. He was tall and slim and possibly Baker’s nephew. Fresh energy came off him in waves. “I have some information about our new employee,” Baker said. He paused to invite speculation.

  “The one from San Diego?” Fitch said.

  “He’s starting any day, right?” Harris said. It seemed like it. A cubicle had been cleaned, except for a note taped at shoulder height that said “Hold All Walls for Harry.” A replacement chair had come down from Vyron—Antonelli, always rocking, had damaged the last one’s spine. Someone had even tacked up a California postcard on the wall over the desk, though it was of the Bay Area. Approximate hospitality was better than none at all.

  “Well,” Baker said. His voice was even deeper and more resonant when it carried news. “George came to me the other week to ask if I thought it was a good idea to bring the man in immediately or let him finish out the quarter in San Diego. Because when he comes here, he’s going to be part of the team. And that means that he’ll need to understand everything about the way we’re selling TenPak.” He pointed at William. “When you write, you make customers believe. But you also make these men believe.” He pointed at Fitch, Harris, and Cohoe. “And when they believe they sell, and their sales create more belief. It’s a virtuous circle.” His voice dropped another half step. “The new hire is a true son of this company.”

  “Meaning what?” Cohoe said.

  “Meaning that he’s shattering sales records. Not just in San Diego, but for any city, any division.” Baker patted the desk emphatically. “That’s one of the reasons I decided to delay him. For these weeks, especially, I don’t want him to make the rest of you think too much about what you are or aren’t doing, especially given the circumstance with O’Shea and Loomis. Because you know whose team it is?”

  “All of ours?” Fitch said.

  “No,” Baker said. He looked confused. “It’s Arthur’s team.” Now Harris looked confused. “He’s senior by a month and he consistently tops sales figures. Six months from now, it might be the new guy’s, but that remains to be seen. We’re having some issues with TenPak, as I’m sure you all know, and we need to remedy them. So for now Arthur is the main character in this movie. The rest of you are in supporting roles.”

  “I’m the main character?” Harris said. He didn’t sound convinced.

  “Wait,” William said to Baker. “If he’s the main character, what are you?”

  Baker tilted his large head and considered the question. Its difficulty seemed to please him. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m the director.”

  Fitch went for the door. Cohoe followed.

  “William,” Baker said. “Wait a moment.” He squared himself at his desk. “Loomis,” he said softly. The word was hard inside the whisper.

  “Yes,” William said. “I just finished those up this morning. You want Harris and Fitch to take them over?”

  “He dropped out.”

  “Impossible,” William said.

  “Not only is it possible,” Baker said, “it has happened.” He picked up the phone and began to dial. “Now we’re on to Gardner. This is the next domino and also the last we’ll permit.”

  He dismissed William with a nod.

  William got to work on Gardner. He leaned heavily on the language. He had typed two letters of a longer word when he felt himself decoupling from the brochure. An airplane was going by outside, and he thought of what the people in the plane were seeing as they looked back down toward the earth. More precisely, he thought of what they weren’t seeing: they weren’t seeing the trivial details of the day, the things that had to be moved into close range so that they would seem significant at all. People focused on what was right in
front of them, perfected their ability to analyze those things, all the while growing blinder to what lay beyond it. He thought of all the people improperly used in this process, all the people whose lives depended upon being able to accumulate wisdom—or at the very least, those whose lives were hollow without it, the judge, the critic, the cleric. He was not one of those men, he knew. He had always known that. Now he knew something else, which is that he would likely never be one of them. The chirping of a bird outside recalled him to his chair, and to the screen in front of him, where he finished up the word he was typing and switched to numbers, multiplying them together to demonstrate how value could increase.

  As at every Gloria Fitch party, the music was too loud, careering confusingly from big band to Motown to disco. Gloria insisted Eddie was the culprit. “He has a tin ear,” she said. “In the sense that it needs to be pounded flat.”

  The Fitch house had always struck William as comic, mainly because of the address (1111, like it couldn’t quite get started), but also because of the clash between the ornate Victorian doorbell plate on one side of the front door and the driftwood owl sculpture on the other side. The crowd was in back, small and evenly spaced, standing in groups of four or five around tiki torches staked into the grass.