The Slippage A Novel

Part II



A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME





ONE




Most of the neighborhood was green, streets canopied by trees, lawns compassed by hedges, the houses themselves rarely exceeding complementary pastels, but about a mile north of William and Louisa was a stretch of highway that exploded simultaneously into tight-lipped gray and chattering color, a half mile of strip malls where buildings were densely packed in bric-a-brac and reader boards shrieked the latest specials. It was difficult to pass through this part of town without cringing, and for that reason its southern boundary was a site of welcome relief, as well as something of a local landmark. The last building on the strip had been a barbecue restaurant called the Pit, a faux log cabin topped by a stout iron pole, on top of which sat an enormous plastic pig wearing a chef’s hat. The Pit had changed hands two or three times as a restaurant and then become a discount-retail outlet, though the new proprietor had wisely chosen to keep the sign. To get home, William turned right at the pig on the pole, which is what he was doing when the real estate agent waved to him from another car.

“Hi there,” she said. He couldn’t remember her name, but her face was the same as always, fully invested in a synthetic smile.

He returned her wave silently. It was Sunday morning and he was out for coffee only.

“Good news,” she said. “We sold it.”

“Great,” he said. The light changed and he went around the corner.

It took him a few blocks to realize what she meant. The cul-de-sac where William lived was considered one of the most desirable in the area. His neighbors had not changed since shortly after he had moved in: Brooker and Pentz to his left and Eaton and Roth to his right, the other side running from Marker at the closed end of the street through Morgan, Johnson, and Kenner, with Zorrilla at the mouth. The houses were all one-story, Graham Kenner liked to joke, because that is what they told. More than once William had stepped out to collect his newspaper or water the lawn and seen at least one other man doing the exact same thing. There was a laugh of recognition and embarrassment they used in these situations. The structure of the street was as rigid as a crystal. Then one day at a party, Ron Johnson’s wife, Paula, clinked on a glass and pulled her lips in with a secretive smile. “Someone has some news about sunny California,” she said victoriously.

At first the neighbors had cheered the move, in part because it introduced some excitement into an otherwise uneventful April, and in part because most people disliked Ron Johnson and were glad to see him go. But after a month or so, with the FOR SALE sign still planted in the front lawn like a taunting flower, William began to resent the place on two counts. For starters, it bothered him that Ron Johnson could afford to move without selling. People whispered that the money came from Paula’s parents, though Ron had assured William it wasn’t true. The second issue was that the vacant house began to look like a missing tooth in the smile of the street. It was directly opposite William, the first thing he saw when he left his front door in the morning, and he began to internalize its failure.

Now, finally, the place was sold. William went left on Conroy and right on Powell. He gunned the engine enthusiastically as he took the shallow turn off of Brashear, then coasted through the intersection of Jensen and Patrick. When he turned onto his street, he spotted the absence immediately: no sign at all, just the flat broad lawn, which was under the care of the Realtor and as a result far healthier and more manicured than it had ever been when Ron Johnson lived there.


Louisa was on the phone in the other room. Her voice rose and fell in angry waves. He put her cup of coffee on the counter and drank the rest of his.

“Back already?” she said, coming into the kitchen. “Someone’s here, cleaning. Your doing, I assume?”

“I thought it’d make things easier.” Louisa, who could be lenient to the point of indifference about much of the house, was obsessed with keeping the kitchen in order, and so the day before, in a burst of foresight, William had arranged for a cleaning lady. The woman had arrived promptly at eight and stood with him on the deck. Beer bottles lined the edge of the railing; paper plates dotted the long table. Both had a faintly musical arrangement. William apologized for the mess, and she smiled. “Without mess, I don’t work,” she said. “This is three hours at least.” Excitement clotted her voice.

“I’ll go check on her,” William said. But she was on a cigarette break, and he went down into the yard, where he found the whiskey bottle Tom had thrown. Ants rioted around it. In the house to the south, the boy who spoke to his parents as if they were children was already awake. He was crouched behind an overturned bench with a foam dart gun, carefully watching as another boy, a friend, pressed himself flat against the trunk of a tree. William copied the posture against the big tree in the corner of his own yard, but there was no one coming for him. One of the birds whose name he didn’t know chirped loudly in the tree just overhead; its song was an exclamation point with feathers, a sharp whistle that went straight up.

In the kitchen, he paged through the newspaper, not quite reading. Louisa, spoon in hand, appraised a grapefruit that was titanic by any standard. “Hey,” William said. “How about that party?”

“How about it?” Louisa said.

“You should have come out earlier.”

“I had my reasons,” she said.

“I don’t doubt that,” said William, even though he did. “So what were you doing that whole time?”

“What was I doing? I don’t know. I read a little. I went onto my computer to listen to the radio, or whatever they call it now. If I’d known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have waited so long. I would have loved to see everyone before Tom went into the drink,” she said.

“You mean the tub?” William said.

“I mean the drink,” she said. “That’s the last time we have a party for him.”

“I hope he got home okay.”

“He does his damage before he gets into the car. He’s the world’s oldest living child.”

William lowered the newspaper. “Says the younger sister.” Louisa pinched her mouth into a frown. “Seriously,” he said. “Do you think it’s okay that you hid out for the whole party?”

“Why?” she said. “Did you miss me?” She stood up and poured out her coffee, which was still mostly full. She wore tight aqua sweatpants that had not always been that tight and a cheerful pink T-shirt from the gift shop of the local history museum, where she worked as a curator.

“We’re supposed to be in this together.”

“You seem like you came through it with flying colors,” she said without turning around.

“Says who?”

“You don’t really want to fight about this, do you?”

“Fight, no. Talk, maybe.”

“You don’t really want to do that either.” She fit herself into a safe place by the kitchen wall. “It was one party. I didn’t make it out. No need to enter it into the permanent record.” Her fingernails tattooed the countertop with a series of rapid taps.

“Fair enough.”

“I’m going to shower and head to the grocery store.”

“I’m fixing some things around the house,” he said. “One of the lanterns on the deck is cracked, and the inside wall of the garage is damaged.”

“The traditional couple,” she said. “Traditionally maintaining their traditional home in their traditional neighborhood.”

“Oh,” he said. “That reminds me. The Johnson place sold.”

“Bound to happen,” she said. “Would have been more surprising if it didn’t.” What had happened? They had been taking it to Tom, and then William had started in after Louisa, and then the ground had reversed and she was bearing down on him. William rotated his coffee cup, suddenly eager for the day to start.


William hadn’t been into the junk room in weeks, but things were just as he remembered. There was a scarred wooden desk and a ripped beanbag chair, an old computer that worked too slowly connected to a printer that William wasn’t sure worked at all, a box of dog toys they had been sent as a promotion and never unpacked, discarded exercise equipment, a musical doll that had been Louisa’s when she was a baby, a wall calendar from a previous year. A white plastic bag, fat bellied and rabbit eared, hung from the window crank. He emptied it onto the desk: there were magazines and advertising circulars and a letter from an old college roommate of William’s who had made a killing online and now spent all his time plumping for environmental causes. He was soliciting donations and had included, as a personal appeal, a photograph from just after college, when he and William had driven to a music festival in New Orleans. William looked at the William in the picture: slimmer, lower hairline, more definition along the way. There was something in the eyes, too, a productive unknowingness. William had recently turned forty-two, a number he experienced as an atrocity. No man ever felt completely happy looking at a younger version of himself.

William left the mail in the bag, though he transferred the photo to the bottom drawer of the small table next to his bed—his museum of self, the place where he kept old letters and postcards, along with some dirty magazines and a coin collection he hadn’t thought about in years. “Louisa,” he said, coming into the kitchen. “Do you know why there’s a bag of mail in the junk room?” But Louisa was gone to the grocery.

In the first years of their marriage, William and Louisa had fought often, and he had blamed inexperience, or high spirits brought on by the habits of the inexperienced: too much drinking, too little kindness. As time went on, a civility replaced the combat, and it wasn’t until much later that it occurred to him that this placidity might be the result of what was absent rather than what was present. By that point, they mostly had only each other. Louisa had one close friend, Mary, who worked at the hospital across the municipal plaza from her office and whom she saw for lunch a few times a month. Her one ex-lover of note, Jim, was now living in Seattle with his wife and two children. William and Louisa had met Jim for dinner or drinks once every five years or so, when he was in town on business, and the meetings were cordial, heavily nostalgic, maybe a little longer than they needed to be, harmless.

For William’s fortieth birthday, Louisa had taken him for dinner in a new restaurant attached to an old hotel downtown. She debuted a low-cut red dress for the occasion, and, after a few drinks, produced a room key from a matching purse. “Another round of drinks?” she said. “We’re staying here tonight.” He put a hand on the back of her thigh in the elevator and she showed him the hollow of her throat and said, “Yes, yes,” the way she should have, but her voice came at him as if from the bottom of a well. He couldn’t do anything much in the room, and she forgave him in that same distant voice. “Things can happen,” she said. “Or not happen. That’s just how it is.”

Later that night, she shot awake and stared at the hotel walls with unfamiliarity in her eyes. “I’m not sure,” she said, and just as quickly she burrowed back into her pillow, leaving him awake and alone in the inky blue air.

Her speech in the hotel was incomplete, but that didn’t change the fact that it was essentially accurate. He had always counted on his ability to see Louisa clearly, but a part of the picture had smeared. In the months that followed, he started performing small gestures: flowers (she liked marigolds), candy (chocolate, the darker the better), the remote when they watched TV at night. He was surprised to find himself succeeding. She was ardent, generous, cooked him a meal as a surprise and placed the flowers in a prominent vase in the center of the table. “You know just what to do,” she said, looking straight at him without giving the impression that she’d rather be looking away. He ate quickly, flushed with relief.


William was watching TV in the den when Louisa appeared beside him, hair piled atop her head except for one damp strand that snaked down her forehead, aqua sweats swapped for a yellow sundress. “Will you take a ride with me?” she said.

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said.

“Well, now I just don’t know what to say,” she said. She headed toward the front door. “Where are you going?” he said. His car, a nondescript sedan, was in the garage.

“I’m driving,” she said. “My plan.” Her car, a nondescript SUV, was in the driveway, and they climbed in.

The radio was playing a song Louisa liked, and she sang along. In the morning, she had been all nuance, impossible to untangle; now she was a bright, straight line and he had to blink against it a little.

She went along Ennis, turned on Arnold, and merged into Morton. “We’re going to the mall?” William said.

“Quiet,” Louisa said. “It’s for your own good.”

Inside the mall, the white floor was slick with light. Fake flakes of snow swirled on a giant video screen, even though it wasn’t winter. Girls in high spirits laughed brightly on the perimeter of a carpeted pit where young mothers herded toddlers.

William and Louisa passed through the department store at the south end. Louisa stopped when they reached a clamor of oversize screens. “This is an appliance store,” William said, trying to hide his disappointment.

Half a dozen salespeople were milling around in identical blue uniforms, and the closest of them, a young man with tight cornrows, stepped toward Louisa. “Can I help you?”

“We want to look at dishwashers,” she said.

“How green?” She squinted and he stepped right, toward a row of low plastic boxes. “These do much better with water usage and energy expenditure. But if plates go in really dirty, they don’t always come out really clean.”

“I don’t see the point of not getting things clean,” Louisa said.

“It has to do with how much effort you’re willing to put in at the sink.”

“Does it come in stainless steel? I don’t like the black or white.”

The salesman pivoted to his left obligingly. “These are also good,” he said. “It’s turnover time so they’re on sale.”

“Green?”

“Not so much. To be honest, I hear there’s not a huge difference between one kind and the other.” His face suddenly fell, as if the beliefs upon which he was building his world had been disproven. “Here’s my card,” the salesman said. When Louisa moved to take it, he let it go quickly, as if it was hot.

“This way,” Louisa said to William, gesturing broadly as if she were guiding him down a runway. They ended up two doors down, at an almost identical store where the salespeople wore red instead of blue. The man who approached them was older, with owlish glasses. “You came to the right place,” he said, examining Louisa from head to toe in a manner that William did not find entirely reputable. He championed the stainless steel, and Louisa filed his card alongside the other one. “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s that.” She turned to leave.

“I guess we didn’t need the big car after all,” William said.

One of the girls from before was on her hands and knees in the kiddie pit. It looked like a game at first, but she was wailing to her friends. “Those are my mom’s earrings. She’ll kill me if they’re lost.”


In the car Louisa sat staring straight ahead, belt pulled partway so that the buckle bumped her shoulder. “Come to think of it, I want to check out one more place,” she said.

“Just one more?”

“I can drop you at home if you want,” she said. This was the impatient tone again, and William sensed now that it was concealing something.

Louisa backed out of the parking lot, went right on Kerrick, swung onto Francis, took a left at Harrow. She drove past one appliance store and then another. “Look,” William said. “Dishwashers.” But she said nothing, only drove, until there were no more buildings lining the roadside, just trees and scrub, and they went ten minutes beyond that, to a part of town he was not sure he had ever been to. She pulled over to the side of the road, switched the engine off, and got out to stand next to the car.

William joined her.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said. “What are we looking at?”

“What do you think?” she said.

William tilted his chin up and tried to piece it together, but the land didn’t look like anything: grass held down by sky.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“It’s ours,” she said.

“Ours?” William said. He didn’t even flinch, which made him proud. “When did this happen?”

“A while ago,” she said. “When my dad died, he left me some money in a trust. It matured. At some point, it was clear that it wasn’t going to make any more money where it was, so I put it here instead. The rest is still in an account.”

“The rest?” He tipped an invisible hat. “Nicely done,” he said. “Really. Wow.”

“It almost didn’t happen. Yesterday they called me and said there was a problem with the sale.”

“What kind of problem?”

“It turned out the bank had processed something incorrectly. That’s why I didn’t come out. I didn’t want to face everyone while I was still reeling. It would have been just another thing I tried to do and failed.”

The squint that came was from confusion. “But you didn’t fail, right?” he said. “You said this is ours.”

“We went through the paper trail and found it, and they remedied their error before I got off the phone with them.” She’d been speaking slowly, but excitement was hurrying her along now. He stared down at the grass between his feet. His left shoe was coming undone at the toe, where Blondie had put her teeth into it.

He looked back up at the land. “It’s big,” he said.

“An acre,” she said. “Is that big?” Louisa pointed to the end of the property line and back. It was mostly featureless, save for a tall elm at rear left and a browning knoll at front right. Fish-scale clouds roofed the afternoon and what was left of William’s shadow lay down on the hill.

Suddenly she sprinted into the middle of the lot. “Land,” she said, her voice bright and young. “Land, land, land.” A crack in the clouds showed enameled blue sky. Then she was back at his side, up on her toes as if she were greeting him after a long time away. “I just wanted to show this to you.” An artful pause followed. “Thanks for coming out.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “I like to know about every new investment.”

“Is that what it is?” she said. She packed back into the car, fully proud now, face prim in profile. “I like thinking about the actual land. It’s like a new country, but miniaturized. We don’t know what will happen here.”

William nodded, but not because he agreed. Mystery was for people whose desire to make life better outweighed their fear that it might become worse. William, for his part, had brokered a tentative peace with the flat line. It held its ground. And measured against the gravity of time, wasn’t that a form of getting better, really?


She went on brightly through dinner, her conversation ventilating the kitchen, but then whatever motor was spinning inside her began to wind down. “I’m going to go watch TV,” he said, and she just nodded.

A movie he didn’t recognize was on one of the channels he paid extra for. It was about an older actor whose stardom in Westerns was built on the backs of his long-suffering family. He was trying to make peace with his grown daughter. The scene William came in on was played out over swelling strings. “I thought your cowboy hat was so big,” the daughter was saying. “But the other day I tried it on and it almost fit me.”

Louisa appeared at the door and knocked vertically along the frame. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. He muted the TV.

“So,” she said. “What do you think of it? The land, I mean.”

“A lot,” he said, but when she didn’t answer right away he wondered if he’d been too glib.

The cowboy was alone now with a bottle of whiskey. He lifted it. He lowered it. He tipped it until the golden liquid was at an incline.

“I’ve been thinking about the things we have,” she said, “and the things we don’t have.” Her sentence, split by the pause, fell open in two halves. “All of this,” she said, casting her hands upward into the room.

“And all of the other, too,” William said. “Land, land, land.”

“I drove by there last week,” she said. “It wasn’t real yet, but I wanted to see how it felt. A few lots over, there’s a construction site. Someone’s putting up a house. The workmen were just driving away, and I walked up to the front where the doorway’s going to be.”

“Was it safe?”

“I even poked my head in. It had that distinctive smell, sawdust over earth, some faint electrical haze. The plans were tacked up near the front: they’re going to have a sunken living room and a big island in the kitchen and a nursery with a little porch off the back.”

“The best-tacked plans,” William said.

Louisa eyes flashed out at him, but only for a second; then the anger was gone, like an arrow taken away by the wind. There were tears instead. “That girl’s dress was so beautiful,” she said. “And Tom ruined everything.”


William watched a college basketball game, played along with an old game show whose answers he already knew, failed to laugh at a stand-up comedy special. The dog lounged beside a knife of lamplight on the rug. He kept flipping channels, high in the spectrum now: cooking class, home-design competition, travel documentary. He put his hand on his stomach in what he imagined was a Napoleonic manner. He crouched on the floor next to the dog and locked his ankles under the couch for sit-ups. They weren’t hard until twenty, and then they were too hard. He went back through channels in descending order, the pictures washing over him in a rinse.

He had a brief idea that he might play some guitar, and he went into the garage and turned on the lights. When he was younger, he had learned the rudiments, mostly to impress a girl at college. He was mediocre at best, but when he moved to the house he had set up a guitar and an amp in a corner of the garage. Louisa called it his rehearsal space, which pleased him until he considered the possibility that she was mocking him.

In the corner by his guitar there was another plastic bag, tied up like a hobo’s kerchief. He opened it to find even more mail, mostly advertising circulars and catalogs, along with a postcard from a distant cousin of Louisa’s who had moved to Australia. This mail was dated earlier than the batch he had found in the junk room. He left the bag where it was, shut off the garage light, and wondered what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

Louisa was tough. It was something he used to tell his friends as a joke, admiringly but with a touch of exasperation, until he realized how true it was. She was tough when her father died and tough when her mother died. She was tough when she lost her job at the publicity firm and had to send résumés around for more than two months before the museum job came open. So what had rattled her now? He laid out the year in his mind. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no extreme misfortune. He could ask her but he doubted she’d even admit to the bags of mail.

The dog needed a reason not to rush after him down the hall. William pitched him a treat, which hit the floor with a little hop and disappeared into the narrow triangle between the garbage can and the counter. Blondie scrabbled for it and William made his getaway. In bed, Louisa was on her side, over the sheets, eyes closed. He went toward the bathroom with small, quiet steps, unsure if she was awake and unwilling to find out. When he came back to bed, Louisa was curled beneath the covers, pretending to hide. “You in there?” he said. But there was no noise and barely any life in the heart of that snow hill.