The Slippage A Novel

NINE




Louisa had a family friend who had died of cancer in her early thirties, and Louisa made a point of visiting the grave every year, a little more frequently when she became older than the woman ever did. The cemetery was twenty minutes beyond the new house, and one afternoon, after they stopped by the building site, she told William she wanted to visit Sylvia. They stopped to buy flowers. “She liked marigolds,” Louisa said. There was no rain yet, but the sky was the same color as most of the tombstones.

Louisa stopped in front of a small stone that had mostly melted into the earth. “There she is. Or isn’t,” she said. “She wasn’t the strongest woman I ever knew, but she had a certain quality. She always seemed like she was telling you the truth, even when she wasn’t.”

“I wish I could have met her.”

“You did,” Louisa said. “When we were dating the first time. She liked you. She said you had a way of putting her at ease.”

Louisa stood by Sylvia’s grave, talking to herself. William couldn’t hear much of what she said, but he thought she was apologizing. He remembered something from a college lecture: burial had started with the Neanderthals, who may have had at least a vague belief in an afterlife.

He wandered off down paths that were like alleys and avenues in this planned city of the dead. He found a child who died before he was ten, a baby who died before he was one. He found a woman who had ascended nearly to a century. He imagined his way down into the graves, holes that held back all light. “Ready?” Louisa said, and he didn’t answer, because he wasn’t sure what the question meant.

What it meant, it turned out, was that she was ready. That night in bed she reached over and took his hand, and happiness went through him like a current, racing across pathways that had become accustomed to confusion. She woke before him the next morning and made breakfast, and she was whistling when he came out of the bedroom. In the invisible choreography between them, she had taken a step he hadn’t expected; she seemed happy to be with him. And the happiness wasn’t desperate or frenetic or insistent; rather than trouble every room with this new energy, she let it ripen into what could only be described as a state of happy relaxation, wineglasses left out on tables, kitchen happily disarranged. “I don’t know,” she said when he asked her. “Perspective check, I guess. When you see what death really is, how still it is, it makes you want to move through life instead of resisting it.”

If there was to be any alienation, it would have to come from him, and so it did. One night, he found a T-shirt of hers heaped in the corner of the couch and snatched it up in sudden rage. “Just because you don’t want to be in this house doesn’t mean you have to treat it like a garbage dump,” he said, and she smiled until it was clear that he was serious, at which point she took the shirt and left the room. Another night he got on her about an open jar of peanut butter and how ants would find their way to it. He wasn’t sure what explained his sudden volatility, except that it was a form of distraction, both from Louisa’s new contentment and from his own growing sense of unease, shading faster than he wished into a kind of terror. He had located the source. It was no mystery. He had lost his job and he had agreed to build a new house and he was remembering Emma’s face and the yearning softness he had seen in it, once or twice, when she wasn’t determined to show him how strong she was. While he had been with her, he’d been able to put her out of his mind, but now that she was gone he could not. The farther the flame, the worse it burned him. Emma did not ignore him. That would have been rewarding. Rather, she saw him across the street or once in the supermarket and said hello, with a quick smile and wave. She was free to be friendly when friendly was no longer a borderland to something more dangerous. He resented the wave and the smile but would have been ravaged by their absence, and that was the real problem: not that he couldn’t stay with his true feelings, but that he didn’t know what they were anymore.


One cloudy evening, William looked out through the attenuated light and saw Emma getting into her car. She was holding a parcel and dressed casually; he figured it for a quick trip. “I’m going for a walk,” he said to Louisa.

“Looks like it might rain.”

“I can see that,” he said. “I’m not concerned, and you shouldn’t be either.” He tried to slam the door between the hall and the garage but it just eased shut on spring hinges. He shuttled up and down the block in what was turning into an impotent drizzle. A bicycle belonging to one of the Kenner kids was abandoned at the edge of the Morgans’ yard. William wheeled it back and left it under a tree. In the middle of the street he saw a broken bottle and threw it away in the Eatons’ garbage can. The wind was picking up, and William was about to head for home when Emma’s car came around the corner. He saw a head in the passenger seat: Stevie. She parked in front of her house, got out, gave William another eviscerating wave. “Holy God,” he heard her saying to Stevie. “I felt like I was in half.” On the rear window of her car, the bear doll was hanging from a single arm. William knew just how it felt: melodramatic.

He marched back inside, passed through the house, found Louisa in the kitchen making sandwiches. “So,” he said. She tilted her head at him, squinted happily. Behind her in the window a leaf bounced on an updraft. “I need to tell you something.” And then he did. There were two stories that needed telling, Hollister and Emma, and he told only the first. It was a tactical operation, not a kamikaze mission.

She bit her lower lip, shook off a thought. “So,” she said, possibly not mocking him.

“So,” he said. “That’s the situation as it stands. I am not working there anymore.” He braced himself against the counter. “We’re okay with money for a little while,” he said. “At some point, later in the summer, I’ll have to start looking for something.”

She set the sandwiches on the table and straightened the plates before she spoke. “I’m less bothered by this than maybe I should be. I didn’t think you were happy there.”

“Who could be?” he said. But he had been, so long as he’d been left alone.

“And now we can make more serious plans about the house.” He must have looked stricken; she seemed very surprised for a moment and her forehead bunched in worry. But then her face relaxed into a smile and she didn’t look like she wanted to leave the room. “It’s something constructive to think about.” She hadn’t meant the joke but she took credit for it, a quick bow. “You’ll see.” Then she blushed and ducked her head and said, “I wish you could see what a good idea this really is.”