The Slippage: A Novel

by Ben Greenman

  The far edge of the yard was reserved for children, and they occupied it wildly, an unregimented army. Eddie Fitch emerged from among them, tousling the hair of a boy who was not his, and came toward William and Louisa. “Hi there,” he said, waving from close enough that a wave was unnecessary. “You look nice,” he said to Louisa. He was right: she was wearing a tight green top and black pants, both new, and she had darkened her hair close to the color of her twenties. “How about that meeting the other day?” Fitch said. “The way Baker’s voice gets, I feel like he’s narrating a documentary.” Here on home turf, he seemed more sure of himself. He explained Southern Christmas: there was a small artificial tree, beneath which Gloria had put flamingo-colored boxes. “The boxes all had to be the same size. If you only knew how much she cares about every last little detail.”

  Gloria, gliding by, punched her husband in the shoulder. “Don’t tell them,” she said. “I like the illusion that things just come together.”

  “Are you talking dirty to me?” Fitch said. Suddenly his face darkened and he stepped toward the far fence. “Hey,” he said. “Get down off of there now. Because I said so. I don’t need another reason.”

  Gloria moved them across the lawn. The guests of honor were already in place, sitting in chairs in the corner by the tree. “What are we supposed to do?” William said. “They’re having an audience? Is it like the Pope?”

  “It’s exactly like that,” Gloria said. “Once again, your command of world affairs is second to none.”

  The Pope was surrounded by prelates. As William drew near, Graham Kenner was pointing at the tree. “Set phasers to generosity,” he was saying. He was always setting phasers. Cassandra was telling Helen Hull about a fire that had gutted an abandoned hardware store a block away from her office. “Well, hello,” Graham said to Louisa. He wobbled backward a bit. “Will your brother be joining us? He was the life of the party last time.”

  Louisa pinched her mouth into a smile. “No,” she said. “I don’t think this is his scene.” They hadn’t seen Tom much in recent weeks. He was deep into new work. “When I’m at the beginning of a project like this, I’m clean as a dream,” he told William on the phone. “This is the best part of being on the wagon, the first part, before it starts to roll too fast and you have to jump off.”

  In the seam between Louisa and Paul Prescott, William could see the side of Emma’s hip, a gray skirt and a band of leg. He experienced a pang of fear, not because he was about to come face-to-face with her, but because she was about to come face-to-face with Louisa. He wondered, suddenly, if he had even mentioned her by name. He was certain he had. Hadn’t he?

  The crowd cleared. William took a deep breath and a shallow step. Louisa followed. “Hey, stranger,” Stevie said. “You had to come all the way across the neighborhood to see us?”

  “Well, this was where the party was,” William said. He was offended when Stevie laughed. The man had that effect.

  Gloria came to touch Stevie’s elbow. “These are the Wheelers.”

  Emma extended her hand. “You’re William, right?”

  “I am,” he said. “It’s easy to remember because it’s such an uncommon name.”

  “We met before,” Emma explained to Gloria. “He came over to the house one of our first weekends in town. We were just getting out of boxes. He saw us struggling up the path, I think, and I asked him to recommend a place in town to eat.”

  “I hope you didn’t go where he told you,” Louisa said. “He has terrible taste.”

  “And this,” William said, waiting a beat, “is my wife.”

  “Wait,” Stevie said. “Who has terrible taste?”

  “William.” She pointed at him. “Him.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sure. I assumed that. In food, though, not wives.” He showed a high percentage of his teeth. And then, to Louisa, “I think you and I get home from work around the same time.”

  “Ah,” Louisa said. “So you’ve seen my one-woman show, Louisa in the Driveway After Work. It’s doing very well. It’s been extended indefinitely.” She was holding an unlit cigarette now and she waggled it like vaudeville.

  “Are these the new ones?” Alice Deutsch said, squeezing in next to Paul Prescott. She had been in the neighborhood for four months and was eager to be out of the spotlight.

  “New one,” Emma said, standing and curtsying.

  William felt a surge of weakness. “Can I get anyone a beer?” he said.

  “I’m okay,” Emma said at his back. “I make it a policy not to get drunk the first time I meet people.” Alice Deutsch led a chorus of laughter, and it wasn’t until William got to the cooler that it occurred to him that the remark was not meant for the group. He took his time at the cooler. Through a small window, in the kitchen, Eddie Fitch minced garlic for Bloody Marys.

  When William returned, Stevie was surrounded, eulogizing Chicago. “It was a great city, but I was a drone back there,” he said. “Huge hive. Then they split us off and moved us. Someone read a study that said that marketing does better if it’s semi-independent.”

  Gloria Fitch held up a hand to stay him. “What did you do there?” she asked Emma.

  “She was a caterer, and a good one,” Stevie said. “She had to stop her business, but she’s so great she’ll get it started again in no time.”

  Emma stepped forward into a smile that looked like it was already hanging there.

  “Right,” Gloria Fitch said. “Because it’s so easy to restart a business. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.”

  William felt an unexpected desire to rescue the man. “Did anyone read that article about the new convention center they’re proposing?” he said. “They say it’ll help local businesses.” No one took the topic up, not even Stevie, and so William went back to the cooler for another beer.

  He was bent down, gripping a longneck, when he saw shoes he did not recognize in legs he unaccountably did. He straightened up and offered Emma his beer. She shook her head. “Bill, is it?” she said. The vagueness was gone from her voice. Her face was turbulent despite itself. Unexpressed ideas leapt up from it in a spindrift. For the first time, he felt a tremor of Chicago. “How are you, really?”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Good,” she repeated. Was she mocking him? Echoing? Words meant nothing.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you,” he said. “Nice to have you in the neighborhood.” It wasn’t true, but William wasn’t certain this was a truth situation. On the other side of the yard, a girl—William thought it was the youngest Kenner—pushed a Fitch boy down roughly; he came to his feet, shoved her back, and then, almost as an afterthought, began to cry.

  “Look,” Emma said. “I didn’t ask to come here. Stevie brought me. What’s my basis for objecting?”

  “You don’t care for the kinds of people who live in a place like this?”

  This brought a broad smile that she quickly condensed almost to a point. “I think we need a ground rule or two. You and I, well, we’re not going to see each other. Alone, I mean. We’ll be neighbors, fine, but there’s not going to be some weird moment when you and your wife and me and Stevie get together and drink dandelion wine and confess everything and end up in bed like it’s Culver City in 1969.” Her fingers were interlaced and at her chest, though he didn’t know if she was keeping something out or in.

  “Right,” William said. “I hate Culver City.” He tried to open the beer bottle with his bare hand; the teeth of the cap tore into his palm.

  “Good,” she said. “Better than good. Great.” She lowered her hands, one until it flattened against the wall, the other landing on her hip. She looked like she had in Chicago—younger, unguarded, with a fragile ridge of shoulder blade. “I welcome the opportunity to become a part of this neighborhood. You have lovely public parks, I’ve noticed. And one of these days, you’ll have to come over to the house. We have a deck.” This time she aimed the joke squarely at him, and he took it on the chin. He had his beer alm
ost finished before she was out of sight.

  Back by the tree, Paul Prescott was smoking a joint and telling a story about the nest of spiders he’d found in the basement when he first rented his bakery. Graham Kenner shook his head and said he was done buying muffins there, and Cassandra Kenner shook her head in a different way, and Gloria Fitch took the joint from Paul and put her arm around Graham Kenner’s neck. “Weren’t you supposed to think of some carols for the party?” she said.

  “Carol was my first wife,” Graham Kenner said. “Now I’m with Cassandra.”

  “Oh, her,” Gloria Fitch said.

  “She’s right behind you,” Graham Kenner said, doing an impression of a scared man in a movie. “Don’t tell her about Carol. She’s very jealous.”

  “I’d kill Eddie if he ever cheated on me,” Gloria said, and Eddie laughed like she didn’t mean it, and then Cassandra Kenner was laughing, too, screaming in like a jet.

  Louisa, back now, chuckled along with them, even though she hadn’t heard the start of the joke. She’d been sharing a cigarette out front with Alice Deutsch. “She wanted to talk about this guy she’s been seeing. He sounds completely wrong for her. I gave her a checklist and told her, ‘Don’t be afraid to wait for the right thing.’”

  A clatter went up from the kid corner, crying and laughing twined together into a noise William could not name.

  The party wound on, high spirits floating out of bodies that were slowly sinking down. Graham Kenner and Helen Hull showed each other their stomachs. Paul Prescott showed pictures of earlier in the night. Alice Deutsch left, and then Emma and Stevie, and Louisa tugged on William’s arm just as he was thinking of tugging on hers. “Let’s go,” she said. “Treat a lady right.”

  “Did you have fun?” he said in the car.

  “It was fine,” she said. Her posture was perfect and unwelcoming.

  “You seem tired.”

  “I wouldn’t say tired,” she said. “Something at the party bothered me.”

  He stopped at the lip of the road. “What?” he said.

  “I felt a little trapped. You and I have this big news about the house, but I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t think it’s going to happen, at least not any time soon. You seem like you’re stalling.” The idea had always been there, in the shadows. She had put light on it, but too much, and now it was an eyesore.

  William took a long loop on the way back, passing near the lot on Harrow, though the night was so dark that they seemed to be in no place at all.

  When they got home, Louisa settled in the kitchen with a glass of wine. “You coming to bed?” William said, but then he saw the white string of the headphone cord dangling down from her ear. He went to bed without her and woke so tired he wondered if he had slept at all. Louisa was beside him, headphones still half in, one earpiece at sea on the light blue sheet.

  Blondie nosed the front door to show she wanted walking, but William was in no mood for it, so he let her into the yard and went out to the garage. He smelled the sick-sweet odor the second he put his hand on the doorknob: a rat. It was small enough not to fear, fetal in death; ants crawled in a thick static over its legs and its belly. He used a plastic bag as a glove, scooped it up, and turned the glove inside out. The garbage can was wedged behind a stack of boxes, recent purchases Louisa had decided to return. The coffeemaker was among them. He threw the rat away. Next to the boxes was his guitar; he was about to pick it up when he heard the fuzz of a chord from elsewhere in the morning.

  He hit the garage door opener with the heel of his hand to reveal Stevie, with his own garage door open, playing his own guitar. William walked down the driveway. He looked closer and saw that Emma was in the garage, too. Stevie said something to her and brushed a fingertip across her forehead. It reminded William that there was much he didn’t know. This was not a new thought, but it was one that was suddenly large within him. He gave a salute and got his arm back down before his blood froze entirely.

  TWO

  The rain had eased off, but the river of the audience flowed out onto the street, churning up adjectives. “It was brilliant,” one woman said. She was older and wore a dress covered with flowers. Her friend, in a blazer, tried his hand: “Dark.” Then: “Provocative.”

  William and Louisa navigated a traffic of hats and umbrellas. “I thought the movie was slow,” she said. William only nodded and said nothing. “I am telling you my opinion so that you can tell me yours,” Louisa said.

  “It’s loosely based on Crime and Punishment,” William said.

  “That’s not an opinion,” she said. “You know that scene where his father went to the library to research other robberies before he planned his? That’s how I would do it.”

  A man behind them was making a point: “Tragedy becomes trivia more quickly than you would care to admit, and then trivia is rebuilt into history.”

  “He’s on a date,” Louisa said in a stage whisper. They slowed and the man went by them: he was older than his voice, with teeth that did not quite line up properly and hands that cleared space for his words. His date seemed not to be a date at all, but a woman a generation older, perhaps his mother.

  The sun was going down over town on a Saturday. A traffic cop was posting fliers soliciting information about a recent fire at a bus station that was under construction. Louisa stopped under the coppery sky and breathed in deeply like she was taking a cure. “We could just leave,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know, just pick up and go.”

  “Go home? I thought you said dinner.”

  “No, I mean go for real. Forever. A woman in my office did. She and her husband sold their house and bought one they’d only seen in pictures. They made enough on the sale that they have six months to find jobs.” William pictured himself in a city where they had never lived: Miami, or St. Louis, or Phoenix. He might go to work for a newspaper again and come home every night wrapped in righteousness. But Louisa was just baiting the hook. “She’s going to fail, you know. I give her six months tops.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “She should have taken smaller steps, the kind that don’t lead you right off the edge of the cliff.”

  “What is it they say about the difference between falling and flying?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever they say, I’m sure it’s wrong.” They were around the corner now, in front of a boutique hotel that had gone in and out of business over the years, always changing its name, never changing anything else. William and Louisa had stayed there on what passed for their honeymoon. The place was shut now, though a sign in the window said it was just for renovation. Louisa stared for a long time at the sign, or at least at the spot in the window where it was hanging. William tried to remember what floor they had stayed on, what Louisa’s hair had looked like then, whether they had fallen asleep at all. Much of life turned out to be a test of how much you could forget without losing the thread entirely.

  “You know what I did at work yesterday?” Louisa said. “I reviewed snack-time procedures for classroom visits. There’s actually a written set of rules. Teachers are required to submit lists of any especially slow eaters so they can be served first.” She reached out and touched the window. He was still not sure what she was looking at. For a moment, William imagined that she was ten years younger, or fifteen: that no choices had been made, not even the good ones.

  “All this talk of snacks is making me even hungrier,” he said. Now she was the one who only nodded.

  The restaurant’s motif was nautical; the small framed cases on the walls held artifacts from shipwrecks. The waiter was chatty; he had a family at home, he said, “if you call a boyfriend and a dog a family.” He listened to old radio dramas every night. He was writing a play about Eisenstein and thought he could take the lead. “Don’t pay me any mind,” he said. He disappeared for a stretch and then returned to set it all down for them: the soups, the s
alads, the salty fish. William had considered ordering a complicated cocktail, and now that he saw the waiter’s pleasure in serving, he regretted that he hadn’t. “I hope you’re finding everything to your satisfaction,” the waiter said, spreading his hands over the meal in benediction.

  “Of course we’re finding it,” William said. “It’s right here on the table.”

  Louisa laughed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” she said.

  The waiter gave her a mournful look. “But everyone is,” he said.

  At the end of dinner, William went down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, took out his telephone, turned it over in his hand. Louisa was waiting for him to come back, but he loitered in the hall, watching her in the stripe of mirror. She was trying to be sad so as not to be angry, but it seemed to make her angry that she couldn’t be sad.

  “You’re a nice guy, William.” Karla told him so on the phone, and she said it again when she met William in front of her house on Hardy and deposited the package in the passenger seat. William wasn’t sure what to do with this information, if in fact it was information. Karla shut the door to the car and then rapped on the window until William lowered it. “I just wanted to say bye,” she said.

  “Bye,” William said.

  “Bye, Mom,” the package said.

  After a series of calls thick with implication, Karla had gotten to it. She wanted William to take Christopher out for an afternoon. “He’s been having a rough time ever since Matthew and I split up.”

  “You split up?”

  “About a month ago. Matthew moved on. I knew he would. It should be his slogan: ‘Matthew moves on.’ He got close to Chris, though, which means that now I have a boy on my hands who wonders why people get close to him, then run away. Will you take him to the park for me?”

  “You want me to leave him there?”

  A mix of laughter and sadness filled the line. “Just take him out there. Throw some bread at the ducks. I don’t care. He knows you, he feels safe with you. Be a kind of uncle.” And so William had stood looking into a cage in his garage, thinking of how little of what he owned appealed to a boy. He had a baseball glove, but it was plastic, a developer’s giveaway from a promotion a few years before. He had a Frisbee that was also a giveaway, and a kite he’d bought as a birthday present for Graham Kenner’s son but never delivered. He dumped them all into the trunk and went inside to find Louisa. She was in the junk room, on the computer, a catalog open next to her. “I’m heading out to run some errands,” William said. “I have to get some stain for the deck and a few other things. What are you up to?”