The Slippage A Novel

FIVE




William was loading dry cleaning into the back seat of his car when he noticed Tom’s Charger parked alongside a sagging Cadillac. A chunk of Tom’s grille hung like a loose tooth. William peeked into windows. He didn’t see Tom in the barbershop or the grocery. He was about to give up when he heard a tapping noise that summoned him to the Chinese restaurant in the corner of the mall. He pressed a hand to the window for shade. Tom tapped the window again with his chopsticks and motioned William inside.

A chair was already pulled out. “Sit,” Tom said. He was unshaven, or at least unevenly shaven. On the table in front of him there was a bowl of white rice, a pair of empty beer bottles, and a plate with the remnants of something glutinous. “Chicken, I think,” Tom said when he saw William looking. “Pork? Whatever it was, it wasn’t very good.” He shoveled rice into his mouth like he was stoking a coal car.

William hung his jacket on the back of a chair. “They asked for you at the Fitches’.”

“Like I said, busy.” Tom tugged on his own ear. Giving the sign to steal, William and Louisa used to joke when they saw someone gesturing like that.

“I keep waiting for you to call in that favor.”

“Keep waiting.” He slashed a finger across his throat. William wasn’t sure what he was killing. “Something else is hatching. A woman, the mother of one of my students, called me. She went with her daughter to the show and she wanted to meet me.”

“She’s a groupie?”

“No,” he said. “A publisher. She wants to do a book of the graphs.” He scowled on the nouns.

“Sounds terrible,” William said. “Someone likes what you do. I feel for you.”

“That’s not it at all,” Tom said. Grains of rice plummeted from his chopsticks. “I don’t know if I want my work in a book. It’s like a sealed cube with mirrors on the inside.”

“People open books up. They read them.”

“Maybe I’m wrong to be fixating on the book. Maybe it’s more about this woman. You should have heard the tone of her voice, like she’d just found the thing of value that was going to move her forward in her career.”

“Maybe she did,” William said. “Why is that a problem if you’re the thing of value?”

“You understand even if you say you don’t,” Tom said. “She’s just doing what all ants do, which is to go on up the anthill. You can’t stop them. You shouldn’t even try. What you can do is prevent yourself from wondering what a man should never wonder, which is whether you’ve already gone up the anthill and come back down.” Outside the window, a car alarm began to chirp. “Damn it,” Tom said, pounding the table hard enough to rattle the beer bottles. “That thing’s been going off every ten minutes for the last two hours.”

“How long have you been sitting here?” William said.

Tom wasn’t listening. “What about these fires, Billy Boy? People are whispering that they’re being set on purpose. We were right there. We could have seen the perpetrator stealing away.”

“I heard a report on the radio yesterday where they said they don’t think Birch Mutual was linked to the rest.”

“Think about fire, though. There’s this absurd idea that it needs people to set it. It’s so much older than we are, so much more basic to the planet. We have our human creativity, but it pales in comparison to what fire does. It destroys other things and creates more of itself. We just move along in our boring lives, boring office jobs.”

“Yeah,” William said. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Tom jerked his head up. “How do you mean?”

“I don’t have a job like that. Not anymore. I punched my boss.” He had Tom’s attention now. “The other day, one thing led to another. Isn’t that always how it goes?”

“Until it gets back to the Prime Mover,” Tom said. “That’s the thing that causes movement but is itself unmoved. But none of us is that. We receive one stimulus and produce another, and eventually it all adds up to life, or what people like to call life.” He seemed to feel the vanity of what he was saying and caught himself. “Does Louisa know?”

“Not yet. Officially I’m on leave. I’m waiting to hear my fate.”

“Well, she won’t hear it from me. But you know what they say. Amor tussisque non celantur.”

William took a stab at it. “Love and fighting can’t be hidden?”

“Love and a cough,” Tom said. “It’s Ovid. I think what he means is that wives have a way of finding out. Though it sounds like she’s a little inward these days, with all those thoughts of new houses dancing in her head. How long’s it been, a month?”

“Less.”

“In the course of a life, a month is nothing.” Tom produced a pen and started scribbling on a place mat: arcs, lines, loops. “Figure you live until seventy. That’s more than eight hundred months. If you graphed your life, you wouldn’t even see this. No one would. So don’t worry that it’s so consequential. Contextualization is the leading cause of endurance.”

“Makes sense,” William said. It didn’t, exactly. He didn’t know whether Tom was advising him to tell Louisa or not.

Tom folded the place mat and pushed it toward William. “Do you know how I got into graphing in the first place?”

William sensed something large about to surface. “I have to go,” he said.

Tom reached out for William’s shoulder. His hand held William in place. “I need something,” Tom said. “From you. A favor.”

“Is this the one from the barbecue?”

Tom blinked and then brightened. “Right,” Tom said. “That act of kindness has become a likelihood again. And this time I can tell you more. I need for you to be my wheelman.”

“For what?” William said. “Are we pulling off a heist?”

Tom didn’t answer. He was bent over his place mat again, scribbling madly. “There are three main shapes in a life,” he said. “The bell, the L, the whale’s tail.” William left him there, still scribbling.


When he got home Louisa was watching TV, and he watched with her, a decorating show where they scraped sticky wallpaper off a baby’s room and repainted it a pale green that even William had to admit was a huge improvement. “They said there are only seventeen kinds of patterns that can repeat,” Louisa said, and William, feeling a weight in his chest, didn’t answer. She got up to make them dinner, and he noticed that there was a red-brown hair on the sleeve of his shirt. He trapped it with a fingertip. It was human, but it wasn’t Tom’s or Louisa’s or Emma’s or anyone else’s he knew. It was proof of a world beyond him, of questions he would never be asked, and the thought of that allowed him, suddenly, to breathe.