The Slide: A Novel
Page 27
There was no sex. What brief physical contact we had was for photographs, plus a few passing touches to a wrist or a shoulder to confirm presence: a refresher course in object permanence. Sex, as I’d come to understand it, was driven primarily by speculation. Our bodies by now had adjusted to a certain distance between them, and they had learned that desire for sex brought about the consequences of sex. Although, had she chosen to cross the hall late one night from the guest room, certainly I would have loved her.
For the most part, our time together was passed in loaded, but not unpleasant, quiet. When she first arrived, our timing was stuttered and awkward, but with each hour we settled into the shape we’d cleared over the course of the summer, one of comfortable mystery. Only once did I look at her in a way designed to convey the remorse I felt. In her return look I saw that she neither expected nor desired further apology, nor nor did she especially want to apologize for anything of her own. Her immediate plan was to spend time in Portland before even considering what to do next. Settle into her familiar role as youngest daughter. I mentioned that I’d been thinking about moving to Louisville, Kentucky. She laughed and asked why. I said no real reason.
On her last day we drove north, across the Missouri River to Elsah and along a road that bent with the path of the river. We stopped to watch levees fill and empty, found stores that called themselves antiques stores, and ate fried catfish at a riverhouse of dark impressive wood. We posed for an on-site photographer, leaning against a railing on the second-floor deck so that the wooded bluffs, and the river, and the whole country could be seen behind us. Two prints cost us nine dollars, buy one copy get a second half price.
And then she was gone.
Someday soon I will figure a way to get the last of the toy-store purchases into Ian’s hands. Anonymously, or under the veil of a third party, so he will accept them for what they are. Two baseball mitts and nothing else.
Audrey’s departure set into motion the household activities everyone saw coming. Cardboard boxes began accumulating in the sunroom, my mother’s possessions ready to go even if she was not. There is a condo in Webster Groves, a renovated two-bedroom unit in an old six-flat building heavy on charm. She and I walked through it together. For now, my father has taken over the guest room. The snoring is nothing after the squirrels. While it hasn’t been stated explicitly, it is clear that whatever ultimately happens, they need to abandon this house. At some point it will appear on the market and sell immediately to a family with truckloads of strange furniture and flatware and abundance. There doesn’t seem to be much of a rush; parents behaving like old friends, teammates in this grim but not crippling preparation. And at the same time unrestricted in their sadness, allowing it to spill into the open freely. Tears at all hours, my mother padding a box with crumpled newspaper, pausing to cough strange laughter into her hands. The curtains in the family room came down one afternoon, and the new levels of sunlight made us wonder why we’d needed them in the first place.
On the day of the grand reopening ceremony for the Union Rock Bridge, I stood in my bedroom, listening to the silence of the attic above me. Boxes up there and nothing more. I was to dress presentably and get to the site, ten minutes upriver from downtown. This was a project my father had been spearheading for several years, an old truss bridge that had once been part of Route 66, now a cornerstone of the new River’s Edge Bike Path. A late-afternoon ribbon-cutting and dedication. Would my mother be there? Yes, she told me, of course she would. By the time I arrived, the refreshments tent was deserted, everyone already on the bridge aside from a few caterers and my old friend Stuart, who stood with both hands submerged in a tub full of ice. I approached and stood next to him for a few minutes, trying to organize the gratitude I knew I owed him, along with an apology for so gravely misunderstanding why he had given Edsel the Explorer.
In the swollen clarity of my hospital bed I had come painfully to suspect that Stuart’s gift was not to the ogre, but to me: a car provided to settle half of the formal blackmail demands. Several days later, during my recovery at home, a postcard arrived from Harrisburg, PA, scrawled in stickish handwriting I knew without doubt was Edsel’s. The photo was a young blond girl, a child in a yellow dress, standing on the front porch of an old home with a mansard roof. The message was two short lines: Game over. Thanks for playing. I tore the postcard into small pieces and understood. The car, a gift to take the ogre away from here, Harrisburg or anywhere else. A wonderful thing Stuart had done for me. But in the days that followed I had still not thanked him. Why? Other, subdermal bruises, perhaps; pride and ego.
But before I said anything, Stuart began detailing a fight he and Marianne had had during the night. He said that at one point their voices got so loud they became tangible. He’d been awake since. He shifted his hands in the ice and described taking the ad to a church parking lot at daybreak, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire. An hour later he’d stumbled upon a newspaper with an article on today’s event and decided to walk here. I had never seen him like this, skin hanging from his face, eyes the red of new brick, voice whispery and thin.
And would it be too much to say that my heart opened to my old friend and that I found myself forgiving him for everything? As he handed me a bottle of Evian from the tub, I tried again to thank him. I said I appreciated what he had done for me, the car the money the generosity, and that I could never repay him. I spoke slowly and clearly and looked straight into his eyes. Before I finished, he grabbed me around the arm.
“My God, Potsky. The blackmail. I’m sorry, man. I should have helped but I didn’t really. When he came over and asked for the Explorer it was just like he’d asked a thousand times before. To be honest I forgot all about the blackmail. He said something about he’d gotten a job in New York and that he needed the car to get there. So I thought, Take the fucking car. What’s a car? I was sick of hearing him ask. You know, he’s really an asshole, that guy. Some job in an investment banking firm. Hoedecker and Cohen. No idea how he managed that. North tower south tower, who knows. Potsky, I’m sorry. I shit the bed on this. I really did. I didn’t help you.”
I could see him there, Edsel, in dark slacks and a white button-down shirt, a tie, they would require a tie. He would be man of the times, lewd and powerful, built like an oak. In the morning he would board his train, groggy-eyed and swaying, one hand on the head-high railing for support, among the writers and designers, students and teachers, the lonely and strung out, the nervous and confident cheats and priests and lawmen in blue, lawyers and lawyers and bankers. A downtown train that would sift passengers as it rumbled on ancient tracks, growing more financial, more singularly aimed with each stop, until those who disembarked were near uniform in their devotion to capital. Edsel among his rightful kith, exuberant and insatiable.
We began walking to the bridge. You could still smell the paint they’d used to cover the old rusty I-beams, bright blue, and the new plastic of safety railing and fence. We stopped at the back end of the rows of folding chairs, facing a temporary stage just beyond the bridge’s halfway mark. A woman at the microphone was speaking about the value of recreational trails for a thriving city body. A red ribbon stretched between two metal poles in front of her. Stuart and I stood along the southern railing at the bridge’s defining quirk, a twenty-two-degree kink designed to help boats align themselves on their way downriver.
I turned to Stuart and said that it was going to be okay. He squinted back at me.
“With Marianne, I mean.”
“You’re right. Thank you. Her thing is—Jesus, man, what happened to your face?”
The official record would show that I had been beaten by a crazed, anonymous batting-cage patron. One broken nose and much bruising, deep bruising. Swelling and overwhelming tenderness across my face and chest. I saw my friend’s hand on the railing, gap of bright blue where a finger was missing. Living through the trials that defined who we were, my face and its fragile smile. I said I’d tell him about it
some other time, and he nodded.
The seats were full, at least a hundred people here along with a small press corps. Richard sat on stage, flanked by several men I recognized for their demeanor of local power. I spotted my mother along the aisle in the front row. She had gotten a haircut, so now instead of bushy it looked darker, straighter, harder. I loved her for diving so brazenly into this realm of bodily control. My father was as I would remember him: forceful and static, a man forever occupying the middle of his element.
He was looking at me, my father, up there among these round-faced men of local celebrity, these powerhouses of law and finance and regional clout. The mayor and the current district attorney. Each with his own narrative of ascension. Former Senator Dunleavy stood at the microphone, bald and iconic, philanthropist and heir to massive old wealth. The man sitting to my father’s left was a St. Louis native, Washington University Business School grad. Mark, I thought, Mark something, who had spent much of his career in New York before returning here to the Midwest as St. Louis Hooray!’s chief financial officer. These men on stage. Mark leaning now to say something into my father’s ear while my father held our eye contact. Mark who had been convinced to come here, at least partially, by a hearty meal around my family’s smudgeless glass dining-room table. To leave his position at Hoedecker and Cohen, a serious handshake upon agreement. A hearty slow-motion smile from them both now. Hoedecker and Cohen. My father’s gaze still fixed, sailing over the audience to where his son stood at the blue railing over the brown river. And thank you alone wouldn’t do a thing.
Richard Potter Mays, risen to a certain level of influence and a certain kind of might. A good man who loved his sons enough, and loved his wife enough, and loved himself enough, to do whatever he could to protect the one son who didn’t drown.
I thought of Audrey’s island, and her spear, and knew without doubt that if there was to be love in this world—and there was—it had shed all name and could only be considered and spoken of as gifts. Here was a bridge, gift from the city to the city. Two baseball gloves sat in my car. There was a starfish. Crippled, yes, and gone forever, but a gift.
Stuart said, “Man, this morning, after the ad, on the walk over here, you know what I kept thinking about? Go crazy, folks.”
“Nineteen eighty-five,” I said. “Ozzie and his miracle to beat the Dodgers. To this day I hear Jack Buck’s call and shiver. Six years old, and I remember sitting in front of the TV with my dad. Ozzie hangs over the plate. He’s not the long-ball threat from the left side.”
“Trying to handle the smoking Tom Niedenfuer. Big man from the North Country. Minnesota. First baseman and the third baseman guard the lines.”
“Smith corks one into right, down the line. It may go. Go crazy, folks, go crazy. It’s a home run. And the Cardinals have won the game. By the score of three to two. On a home run by the Wizard.”
“Sixteen years,” Stuart said.
“Go crazy, folks, go crazy.”
I heard polite applause from the chairs, then a male voice requesting a warm welcome for the man without whom none of this would have been possible, St. Louis’s own Mr. Richard Mays. I began to clap. As did Stuart. And at this point the polite applause grew, and stacked, and evolved into something loud and powerful and hearty enough that we all seemed impressed by the applause, everyone in the small crowd clapping, hands chest-level or higher, including my mother, who wasn’t the but was among the first to stand before others joined, and still others, until every single person on the bridge was standing and clapping for my father. And also for themselves, clapping for the success of the clapping, an ascending spiral. Stuart and I watched and clapped. We didn’t stop, and soon enough my father began clapping back, seated at first and then standing, moving to the lectern, his hands in front of him, completing the circle. Those standing from chairs turned to either side and seemed to clap for their neighbors. This was the beauty of applause, its lack of defined object. It was sound alone, a celebration, a noise that would continue for as long as we made it. Sound of human percussion. I continued clapping.
acknowledgments
To . . .
Roger and Terry Beachy, Noah Eaker, Susan Kamil, Jennifer de la Fuente, Carol Anshaw, Janet Desaulniers, Sara Levine, Margaret Chapman, Odie Lindsay, Thomas King, Jake Cosden, Tommy, Todd Rovak, Kathryn Corrine, Violet Brown, David Cohn (I may be a writer, but I’m no Serengeti), Janie Porche, Robert Fulstone, Liz Cross, Cait, Andrew Yawitz, Eric Nenninger, Tracy Marie, Sarah Aloe, Eden Laurin, Pomonans, skateboarders, and the magicians from whom I thief. The St. Louis Cardinals and the greatest defensive shortstop to ever play the game. And then back to Roger and Terry Beachy, Roger and Terry Beachy, repeated to the point that I can no longer speak.
. . . Thank you.
about the author
Kyle Beachy lives in Chicago. This is his first novel.
THE SLIDE
A Dial Press Book / February 2009
Published by The Dial Press
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 by Kyle Beachy
The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beachy, Kyle.
The slide : a novel / Kyle Beachy.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-440-33821-5
1. College graduates—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E235S65. 2009
813'.6—dc22. 2008029631
www.dialpress.com
v1.0
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
June
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
July
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
August
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Labor Day
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright