The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  We set the table together and then tucked in to the pot pie. Our conversation was stilted as we ate. At one point, Simone’s glitter-encrusted cellphone rumbled on the table, and she picked it up to glance at its screen. Then she looked at me and saw what I’m sure was an expectant stare on my face. All those questions, those anxieties, no doubt flaring in my eyes.

  “She just needs her time,” Simone said. “Philip, she just needs her time.”

  Ah.

  Got it.

  After dinner we did the dishes and then I gave Simone an hour of screen time. After that, we read books together in the living room — me returning to my bulky biography of the British working class; she rereading one of the later Harry Potter novels, which she adored — and then it was soon time for bed. Unlike Naomi, Simone was fairly self-sufficient in this regard. She passed by the living room at one point, PJ’d and teeth-brushed, to fetch a glass of water to take up to her bedroom. She did not stop by as I read my book to give me a hug or a kiss; she just tossed me one of her crook-armed, thirteen-year-old’s waves before sprinting, like some pajama-clad fawn, back up the stairs. You’re growing up way too fast, young lady, I thought.

  Okay, this stopped being funny twelve hours ago.

  I sat at my desk, seething — once again — at the screen’s wretched whiteness. How could this be happening to me? I mean, Rani hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head: I am Mr. Full Professor with Ten Books Published by Age Fifty. I do this. This is what I do. I put words on pages. Pound out books, columns, articles, essays, ephemera. I do this. This is what I do.

  It was there, somewhere. I knew it. The case I wanted to make in my Proper Apology, all the things I wanted to say, about Cheryl Sneed, about women, about the world they lived in, and why I was a complete shitbag for having said what I said. It was there. It was there. It was all there — wasn’t it?

  Okay, Sharpe, I thought. Just get something down. Anything. Put something on that page before you call it a night. Don’t let this be a wasted day.

  So I placed fingers on the keys and typed:

  The

  I stared at it, that one word.

  Fuck it, I thought. Fuck it all to hell.

  Then I saved my “work,” closed my laptop, and sent myself to bed.

  Tuesday, November 10

  Today, the Internet tells me, is Tuesday, November 10. The weather sites say Toronto will be rainy with a high of plus nine degrees. It is the kind of day, perhaps, that induces clinomania in a certain type of person. The sort of day where you think (you think; I certainly wouldn’t) that it’s better to remain in bed all day, not face the world at all, just lie there under your body-warmed sheets and receive a long, mellifluous blow job from your stay-at-home wife. Your stay-at-home wife stays at home, after all. She might as well make herself useful. (I, of course, would never think this. And besides, my stay-at-home wife was not at home. Day 3 and still no sign of or any word at all from Grace.) Yes, the weather sites indicate it’s going to be that kind of day. Meanwhile, let’s check the headlines: 25,000 Syrian refugees will be coming to Canada. The new PM says so. Come on in, boys, the water’s fine. Canada has a new PM? Is Harper really gone? Ah, yes, the Sprout got himself elected last month, and via a landslide no less. In the meshugas of threatening to rape a woman on live TV, I must have forgotten to mention that. I like the new PM. I wasn’t planning to. But then he proved himself a genuine centrist, and I ended up agreeing with every last thing he said. That’s the thing about being a genuine centrist. I’m sure the Sprout feels the same way. It’s like attending the most affable dinner party over and over again, every single day, all the time. I think this is why I’m a centrist. It’s the only way someone like me has any hope of achieving affability. Meanwhile, the news tells me, Calgary’s commercial real-estate market is in free fall thanks to dropping oil prices. The collapse of ODS Financial Group won’t help matters — the firm had, like, three offices out there. Also, today is the fortieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Well. I know the feeling, on both counts. I get your vibe, Edmund. I understand where you’re coming from, Calgary. I’m down there in the depths with you both.

  Indeed, for the second morning in a row, I had risen early, very early, too early, an anxiety stirring me awake like nightmares, like a fast and unshakeable terror, and I crept in the pre-dawn darkness up to the my third-floor office, closed the door, sat down, opened my laptop, opened my Word doc, and glared at that travesty, that train wreck, that abomination of the previous day’s output. The future of my Proper Apology felt more uncertain than ever. What was its structure, its skopos, its range? How should it begin? What crescendos should it build to? What were its points of reference, its point? I had nothing. I had nothing.

  What’s more, in a few short hours I would need to face my survey course students and the promise I had made to Sebastian. The thought of it filled me with a rancid dread. If only I could get something down now, onto that limitless Word doc, it might provide me a kernel of inspiration to confront my hostile classroom. Or maybe the opposite was true: maybe engaging my students and Sebastian about my unconscionable acts last week might trigger a bit of stimulation to this lifeless endeavour, this clogged creation. I thought about that as the early morning hours passed. I rested fingers on keys, begging fate that at least an opener, a brave beginning, might now emerge.

  Beyond my closed door, I could hear movement on the third- floor landing.

  “Philip? Philip, are you there? I don’t think this homework’s right. Can you come help me?”

  Gladly.

  The homework was not right — assignments in column B were for Wednesday night, weirdly; assignments in columns A and C were due now — so I got Simone to fix them while I made us a breakfast of cereal and toast. As we ate I checked her work and deemed it satisfactory. She packed up her bookbag and I did the thing I forgot to do yesterday: I made her a lunch, assembling tuna sandwich with avocado, accompanied by yogurt, pear, banana, and granola bar. She deemed it satisfactory. Then I assessed her wardrobe. “Maybe a sweater today?” I asked, conjuring Grace’s guidance. “That brown turtleneck you got for Christmas last year?” Simone agreed.

  In the front entry, I helped her into her raincoat and then she squeezed her bookbag onto her narrow shoulders, pulling the straps tight. Perhaps I was expecting a few words of encouragement from my stepdaughter before she left. Have a great day writing, okay. I’m sure you’ll knock it out of the park. I was, after all, almost certain that she has said those exact words to Grace during her own interminable bouts of writer’s block. But Simone did not say this to me. She just grabbed our only functional umbrella out of the hall closet, yanked open our front door, and slipped out into the morning with her usual, cheery “Okay, bye!” and then was gone.

  I harrumphed, there in the wake of her absence.

  Squeeze, dash, shake-shake-shake, pour. The Bloody Joseph and I headed upstairs where I took a shower (gingerly dancing around the nozzle’s random spurts of scalding), got dressed, then marched myself back up to my office with new-found zeal. I was done fucking around, reader. This was it. This was it. I didn’t need morale-boosting from a child. I didn’t need inspiration from a gaggle of under­gradu­ates. This was it.

  I sat down and settled in at my laptop. Okay. Just apologize for what you did, Sharpe. Get it out. Get it done. This is it. Be genuine. Be sincere. Make it HUGE.

  Here we go here we go here we go.

  I leaned in. I leaned back. I farted lustily.

  Oh sweet goddamn motherfucking Jesus — what is wrong with me?!?

  For the longest while I sat there in a haze, in a daze, in a dysthymic trance, pouring the Bloody Joseph’s last gulps down my gullet with a rhythmic, mindless tilting of my hand, like I was one of those weighted drinking birds you see on office desks sometimes. I was drooping, reader. I was withering on the vine. I was just about ready to curl up into a fetal p
osition there in that chair. I was just about ready to die. I was going to die. I was going to die right then, right there, at that desk. Goodbye, world. I’m going to die now. I’m going to die at this goddamn desk.

  Then I had a revelation. Yes, yes. Perhaps what we needed, reader, was to get back to first principles. You know? We needed to return to some kind of pre-computer, pre-typewriter age where it was just us, our minds, and the most basic of chirographic implements. Yes, yes, I thought. A corking idea. The first draft of my biggest-selling book had been written by hand, after all. And so, too, would this.

  I rolled over to my filing cabinet and dug out a fresh pad of canary paper, then rolled back and grabbed a pen (uni-ball Vision blue — accept no substitutes) out of the jar on the desk’s corner. Then I had another thought: perhaps I needed a change of scenery, too. I mean, if you’re going to apologize for threatening to rape a woman, maybe you shouldn’t be surrounded by bookshelves stuffed with canonical works of Western philosophy. So I flung myself — and I mean flung myself — out of my office with pen and pad in hand. Oh, yes, there was a real spring to my step now. I went down and set my gear up at the kitchen table. Yes, yes, this was perfect.

  Squeeze, dash, shake-shake-shake, pour. I sat down, uncapped the uni-ball, and sipped.

  I stared at the pad for — oh God, I don’t know how long. I tapped the table with the pen’s end. I fluttered the pad’s pages with my thumb. Was this not just like that afternoon at Oxford, all those yesterdays ago, with Rani, in post-coital cheekiness, telling me to fuck off and stop whining (no, no, not whining — whingeing, whingeing; such a great British term) and write what I damn well wanted to write? Yes, it was exactly like that. So do it, Sharpe. Stop your whingeing and write.

  I stared into the canary pad’s deep yellow soul. Oh, please, I thought. Please release me — release my mind. You can do it. You can. You’ve done it before. So do it. Do it now. Now!

  I leaned in. I leaned back. I let out a weepy sigh.

  Then I looked up at the clock on the wall.

  Oh fucking Christ!

  I hate being late. I am always late.

  I tried to nab a Beck on Parliament Street, but no Becks came. So I stood at the bus stop, but the bus wouldn’t come. So I began walking through the drizzle northward to Castle Frank Station. When I was almost exactly between my stop and the next, the bus came rumbling by, its wide rump jostling, its exhaust pipe spewing black death. I chased after it, running in that shambling way that fifty-year-old men try to run when they’re late. But it was no use. I arrived at Castle Frank Station on foot, wheezing and gasping and drenched. I paid my fare and went down to the platform. Then I waited. And waited. There soon came an announcement — that cringe-inducing, robotically staccato voice — over the PA.

  “Attention. Passengers. On line two. We are currently experiencing. A delay. WESTBOUND. At. BROADVIEW STATION. With a passenger assistance alarm. Activated. On board. A train. Response personnel are …”

  Oh for fuck’s sake, people, I thought. Get your shit together!

  I waited. And waited.

  And waited.

  Finally, another announcement boomed through the station.

  “Attention, passengers. On line two. The delay we were experiencing. WESTBOUND. At. BROADVIEW STATION. Is now. Clear. Regular service. Has resu —”

  The whoosh of the train arriving at the platform cut off the remaining words.

  On the way to St. George Station, I wondered if I had time to stop and acquire yet another poppy, should the veteran who’d been selling them outside the station last week still be there. Remembrance Day was nearly upon us and I felt nakedly conspicuous now without that symbolic gesture poked into my chest. Indeed, as I looked around the subway car, it seemed as if everyone — all the grim, swaying masses — had a poppy on now. Like judgy red eyes, those plastic blossoms stared at me from dozens of jacket lapels. Yes, I thought. Despite being very late for class, I would stop and buy yet another poppy, if I could. I needed the dignity, this one shred of social decorum before facing my students and Sebastian.

  I arrived at the station, bounded up the stairs, pushed through the turnstiles, and glided up the escalators to street level. I came out into the drizzly day and veered toward campus. As I hustled, I looked around for the veteran, that bereted, blazered old goat, but there was no veteran there. There was no veteran selling poppies. Instead, reader, in his place, hovering on the sidewalk ahead of me, was a millennial, a very eager millennial, wearing what looked like hiking boots and cradling a clipboard on her arm. She was clad in a nylon vest with BECAUSE I AM A GIRL emblazoned on the tit. She stepped right into my path as I approached.

  “Hey there, fella — nice hairdo!” she said with sweet-faced phoniness. “I just know you want to stop and talk to me.”

  “No — fuck off!” I snarled, and barrelled past her.

  But then I felt bad. Terribly bad. I doubled back and called her over. So sorry, that was incredibly rude of me. Please. Please, I want to hear your spiel. I do. So after a not-brief squint of trepidation at me, she launched into it, and we had the requisite exchange. What? Really? Little girls still not going to school, eh? Why, that’s just dreadful. No, of course. Of course. Anything I can do to help. Sorry — what? Oh. Well, I might have forty dollars here in my wallet. Sorry — what? You’d like me to sign up to your — You want me to give you my credit card number, right here on the street? Well, I don’t see why not.

  Needless to say, by the time I dealt with all that I was now catastrophically late for class. I ran, readers — ran like the dickens, like the devil, like Forrest fucking Gump — through campus and toward the lecture hall. The day’s rain misted my face. My shirt came untucked from my waistband. I felt my comb-over sprout wings and try to fly off my head. I blinked like a psychopath as brow sweat — in clear defiance of the chilly autumn day — rushed to join the Jacuzzi of rainwater pooling in my eye sockets. I arrived at the lecture hall, yanked open the doors, and hurled myself into the auditorium. A quick gander at the seats as I marched up onto the stage revealed that less than a quarter of the class was still there. Some of the stragglers sat absently lingering over their phones or laptops, their feet up on the seats in front of them. Others were clustered together as Sebastian tried to lead them in a group discussion. A few had been just getting up and were about to slink away. I cut them off.

  “I threatened Cheryl Sneed!” I screamed. The room jarred. People clutched inward in a kind of terror. I was panting man­iacally in my dishevelment, but I plugged on. I plugged on. “I threatened her, people,” I said. “I did. On TV. In a most appalling, abhorrent way. And we didn’t talk about that, last week. We didn’t, but we should have. So we’re going to talk about it today. We’re going to get all of this out in the open — right here, right now. So everyone please sit down.”

  They all sort of blinked at me.

  “Sit the fuck down!” I squawked, even though most of them were, in fact, already sitting the fuck down. Those who weren’t descended back into their auditorium seats with reluctance, with great petulant chucks of their bookbags.

  The room fell silent. I paced the stage like a tiger, my nostrils flaring. I could sense Sebastian’s stare — wide and baffled, frightened and, most of all, angry — all over my body. My heart thudded in my chest, and I took in long laborious breaths as I summoned what I wanted to say, felt it rise and flower inside my mind.

  I just let it all come pouring out. I did. Do you believe me, reader? I don’t blame you if you don’t, because I don’t believe it either. And the reason I don’t believe it is because I don’t remember it. It’s true. To this day I have no idea what I said, there on that stage. I wish I did. It certainly would’ve helped with the stalled project that was my Proper Apology. But by this point I was caught up in a kind of hypnosis, a delirium that made me wonder if this was what speaking in tongues was like. Apparently, I put on quite a p
erformance. In fact, one of the students in the room, perhaps the only student who went on to do graduate work in philosophy, said later that it was the single most impassioned, persuasive, and enthralling lecture he’d ever seen me give. I wish someone had recorded it. I wish I could remember what I said.

  By the time I finished, I had come down off the stage to take up a more personable position in front of them. I tried to draw everyone in to me, an intimate engagement, as if I were a folksinger. It felt like I’d been talking forever, even though just a few minutes had passed.

  “… but I want to hear from you,” I said. “I want to know what you think. Questions? Comments? Please. Let’s just get it out. Let’s just talk about this.”

  The silence shimmered. I looked from face to face to face: most were staring at their laps, lowered in a kind of contemplative meditation. Sebastian’s was neutral, cryptic. Please, I thought. Please. Please.

  Then, finally, a strawberry blonde in a denim jacket raised a hand. Oh blessed child. “Yes?” I asked, expectant.

  “If you feel all that,” she said, “then how come you gave that awful quote to the Globe and Mail on Thursday?”

  I told them that some feminist firebrand had attacked my daughter’s Facebook wall that morning, and I was out of my mind with rage when that reporter got a hold of me.

  That seemed to get things going. A couple of hands went up; a couple of skirmishes volleyed around the room. Some pimple-faced boy at the back, referred to earlier in the term as a “gamer” (whatever that was), cavalierly threw out the word “feminazi,” and I cut him right off. “We don’t use terms like that in this room,” I said. But the girls were already on it. The girls let him have it. The kid rushed to claim they were silencing him, censoring him, stifling him. But I reminded the little shit that you don’t get to participate in meaningful conversations if you can’t stay within the bounds of civility, if you resort to reductive terms. What about the chick on your daughter’s wall? he asked. Same thing, I told him. “She used a reductive term. She called me a ‘piece of shit’” — this earned a light laugh from the class — “so we deleted her comment. It was completely out of bounds and unwarranted, so we didn’t respond. We didn’t engage.” This led to a tasty little chat about the term “reductive,” and what counted as “in bounds” versus “out of bounds.” This inevitably led back to my scrap with Cheryl Sneed and that unconscionable dig I took at her. Again, the girls were on it. They were on it. And I marvelled, as I stood there with my back against the stage, at how close all this was to the surface for them, how they talked as if they’d been having this conversation all along, having it with each other, having it right under our noses, well before I ever violated Cheryl Sneed on live TV. Indeed, they said, my slip had been the very essence of reductive thinking, to diminish a woman right down to her sexual bits, and to force something onto her against her will. And my remark was not horrifying because of its novelty. Far from it. It was horrifying — yes, horrifying, but also exhausting, dispiriting — because it was so commonplace.