The Slippage A Novel

FOUR




Thursday followed suit, and Friday followed Thursday, and by the end of the week, having exhausted the rest of the house, William started spending most of his time in the junk room. He put his feet up on the couch. “Yes, doctor,” he said to the dog. “I understand this is a confusing series of events.” He reviewed his circumstances. He was “out of office,” taking the time as sick days, because he had struck a nephew of the founder of the company. Who but a sick man would do such a thing? The phone rang. It was Baker, and William let it go through to voice mail. It rang again few minutes later and he answered without looking.

“Hollister, Antonelli, and Day,” he said.

“Where can a girl go for a cup of coffee in this town?” It was Emma. “Ideally there would be no one else there.”

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.”

“Coffee,” she said. “Just tell me. I need a cup and I’m tired of waiting in lines behind people who are trading tips about how to avoid the bad science teachers in middle school. And that’s not even the worst of it. Today there was a little girl, maybe seven, ordering coffee for herself. Can’t parents go to jail for that?”

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m at the mall on Gerrold Street. Do you know it?”

“Do I know it?” William said. “I know it like the back of my own hand, if my hand had lots of clearance sales. There’s a great out-of-the-way place about six blocks from there.”

“You have no interest in joining me,” she said, hanging the sentence by a tiny question mark.

“Sure,” he said. “I have a meeting but I can cancel it.” He went outside. A kid was playing basketball in the Zorrillas’ driveway. He vaguely remembered that cousins were visiting from Ecuador. He walked by Louisa’s car, which seemed huge to him. Why had they even bought a four-door?

When he arrived at the mall, Emma was sitting on a bench outside the frozen yogurt store. “I’ve had it with driving,” she said. “Will you do it? You can give me a tour.” And then she was in his car, in his passenger seat, pulling the belt across her midsection. Her hair was dark gold where it was matted to her head by the heat. He drove north on Ashmore, past an elementary school where kids ran wild in the concrete yard. “If you were a teacher, you’d work there,” he said. A block later, there was a hospital. “If you were a doctor, you’d work there,” he said.

She pointed at a post office. “If I worked there, look out,” she said. “Postal, postal, postal.”

“What?” he said. “You’re not settling in the way you had hoped?” He tried to keep the thrill from his voice.

“Stevie’s out of town.”

“Oh,” he said. “Business trip?”

“Sort of. He writes songs, and he’s always had this thing about getting them out there so that they can be heard by the people they way they were intended.” She put up quotes, though he wasn’t sure where they were supposed to go.

“I saw him playing guitar one morning in the garage.”

“Right. Since we’ve been here, he’s gotten obsessed with having Arrow buy one of his songs as its identity music.”

“You mean to replace the regular Arrow theme?” William hummed the melody, which like most Americans he’d known since childhood: it had a run of high notes and a run of low notes, with a beat of silence splitting the two.

“Yep. That’s all he’s been able to talk about. And because marketing is now separate from everyone else, it means he has to go back to Chicago once a month or so for meetings with the media buyers and the outside ad people. Whenever he’s there he wakes up, goes to the gym, and calls me to pump up his confidence. I’m never awake and never happy to hear from him. If Arrow buys the song, he says it could validate him as a songwriter, but I think he’s mainly thinking of the payday. And money isn’t music.”

“Very small amounts of it jingle,” William said.

Emma laughed, but not like she had in Chicago. That had been like light on the surface of water. This was like being pulled down into it. “There’s a problem here,” she said. “It’s a place where I know nothing and I have nothing. I’m cut off from my life, my job, my friends. And all Stevie can do is talk about new starts. For him, maybe.”

Emma took off her coat. She was wearing an old-fashioned pink dress, the kind of thing William would have expected to see in an advertisement from the 1950s. Beneath it there was a telltale swell of belly. He could do nothing at first. Then he could speak but had nothing to say. Then he had something to say, and he said it. “Well, that looks like a new start.”

“It is,” she said softly. “I’m due in September.”

“Congratulations.”

“I wanted to tell you at the party, but we’re not telling anyone yet. I had a miscarriage a few years ago, so we’re waiting as long as possible.”

“Right,” he said. “Good plan. Better safe than sorry. It suits you, though. That was my one criticism of you in Chicago: not pregnant enough.” This time her laugh was better. “You don’t know boy or girl yet, right?”

“No. I hope it’s a boy. I know how much trouble girls can be. Stevie says he doesn’t care. Maybe he doesn’t. But the money worries him. He keeps saying that a baby is a capital expenditure, that it’s a way of spending money now but earning more back later.”

“I know what a capital expenditure is,” William said. “I work in financial writing. That’s forward thinking. Promote that man.” His hands felt loose on the ends of his arms. He was still trying to see his way around the small hill.

“For me, I’m more focused on other things. I feel horrible half the time, and then the other half is like I’ve been plugged into some universal outlet. My hair has gotten healthier. When I drive by restaurants, I can smell what’s cooking in the kitchen. My libido has gone completely haywire.”

“It has?” William missed a turn.

“It has. It used to be a predictable thing, a steady line. Now there are days where sex is the farthest thing from my mind, and days where I’m at its mercy.” She inspected her fingers. “Where I’m absolutely devoured. It’s like being fifteen again, but this time I know what all the fuss is about.”

They were on Norris now. “We’re near the coffee shop,” William said.

“Isn’t this the turnoff for our street? Your street?”

“Sort of. It’s the back way.”

“Actually,” she said, “can we stop here for a minute? I could use some help moving something. Do you have time?”

William pretended to check his watch. “Sure,” he said. “Let me just call and shift a meeting.” He banked off Norris onto Terhune, merged into Emerick, picked up Irving. He dropped Emma off on her driveway and then backed across the street to his own. He called Karla. “I might not be able to pick up Christopher,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t expect you to do it every day. Just now and again.”

“Can’t do it now,” he said. “But I can do it again.”

He sat in the car and waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, but he needed a short delay. He thought back through Southern Christmas, back to Chicago. He thought about how Emma had looked in the bed that second morning, about how he had gone out to the hallway to call Louisa, about how he had left a message saying Chicago was boring, about how he had walked into the bathroom while Emma was showering and she had invited him in and he had declined and she had asked him what, does this kind of thing happen to you all the time, and he had affected a tough tone and said yeah, all the time, there are lots of girls like you, and she had opened the shower door so that steam came out. “There are lots of girls like me, but I’m not one of them,” she had said.

William walked across the street. Emma was still outside, shoving something from the pathway to the lawn with her foot. “Look,” she said. “Some of these roof tiles fell off. That guy who sold it to us said he’d just gotten the roof redone.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” William said.

“Obviously,” she said. “But Stevie didn’t bother checking. He’s such an operator at work, but get him out of the office and there’s no one more gullible.” Inside, there was a masonry of boxes against the dining room wall; the place looked like a set under construction. “Task at hand,” she said. “It’s a husband’s job, you’d think, but he’s too busy working on his song. Did I tell you the title? ‘I Stand (For America).’ With parentheses and everything.”

She brought him water and he stood at the kitchen counter and drank it. Emma’s house was like his own—the floor plan was the same, bedrooms off to the right along a narrow hallway—and so he didn’t need to ask where the bathroom was or search for the niche with the garbage can in the kitchen. The differences came down to the accents: the fixtures in the guest bathroom (hers were better) or the sliding glass door that led outside (he won here).

“William,” Emma said from the bedroom. “Will you bring the big box in here?”

He went into the back of the house, turned left. “In here?” he said. He slid the box against the wall. The book she had been reading when she came to the door was on a table near the bed, title covered this time by a pair of sunglasses. He turned to find Emma blocking the door. She took his hand, put it on the center of her chest, and slid it down across her belly. A fact broke through the afternoon. “Go to the bed,” Emma said. He did, and watched as she swiftly popped the snaps on her shirt and unclasped her bra. The cups sat loose on the swell of her belly; her breasts were not much larger than he remembered, but they were darker at the nipples, harder to dispute. “Is there a reason you’re still dressed?” It was the same voice as in Chicago, but thinner; it was as if it had been stretched from there.

“I don’t have anything,” he said. “You know.” He made a circle with his thumb and middle finger.

“Haven’t you been paying attention? You can’t get pregnant on top of pregnant.” She covered the distance between them, eyes beginning to go liquid as she reached the bed. William had trusted her in Chicago, without any reason but her beauty. He had distrusted her at Gloria Fitch’s party for the same reason. That afternoon, in her house, he tried to make his peace with what he saw, buttons all undone, but it was too much for him; he was unable to do more than peel the fabric back to the hips and trace what was beneath. It worked for her but not for him, which worked for him.

Breaths weren’t words. They were more. He turned toward her when he heard them stop. “Shit,” she said, and he felt a surge of terror. “It’s two. We need to get my car.”

She dressed again, quickly, forgoing her bra, and he even sped a little on the way to the lot. They couldn’t find her car at first (“That’s because it’s beyond anonymous,” she said. “I don’t even know the plate number yet”) but she identified it by the rear passenger window, where there was a doll of a bear cub with suction cups on all four limbs. “It’s waving good-bye to you,” she said. “Go.”

William made it home in time for a quick shower, after which he put his work clothes back on and went to get Louisa. While he waited for her outside her office, he thought back, with some effort, to the first time they had met. The guys at the paper had talked about the new writer who’d been hired from a Dallas magazine, a woman who specialized in restaurants but had also done good work on municipal corruption. They had her name as Louise, and that made William imagine someone older, to the point where he didn’t even think to connect it to the tall brunette who was standing out in front of the building, squinting at the name plates, as he went out. He assumed she was there for the temp agency that shared the building and was surprised and a little embarrassed to return from lunch and find her in the small front lobby of the newspaper, filling out new-employee forms. What stayed with him most specifically was how she had folded her frame into one of the small uncomfortable lobby chairs and failed to meet his eye. Later, she claimed nerves, though nerves couldn’t explain the smile she directed down into her paperwork: sly, knowing, waiting him out.

“Funny that you were thinking of that,” Louisa said after she got into the car and asked him why he looked like he was a million miles away. “Guess who called me today?”

“Me, but from the past?”

“Now that’s a long-distance call,” she said. She folded and unfolded her hands brightly. “No. It was Jim. He’s going to be in town in a few weeks. The usual drill: business, one night off, wanted to know if we could meet him and his wife for dinner or drinks.”

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not. Just tell me when.”

They passed a fire truck going the other way, and when he turned onto their street he jerked his head up to signal that he had just recovered a recent memory. “Oh,” he said. “I talked to our new neighbor today. She was getting into her car. She looked like she was expecting. Or maybe fat.”

“That’s nice,” Louisa said.

“Is it?” he said. “That’s all we need: another kid in the neighborhood.” She turned away in hurt. Her injury was his protection.