The Slippage A Novel

FIVE




Tom was already jabbering as he got into the car: about how skillfully he had deceived Louisa, calling her Wednesday night to complain about a meeting with a cross-state curator that had been called for too early Friday morning (“I even made up a nickname for him to make it seem more real,” he said); about his calculated but entirely believable weariness as he explained that his car was in the shop again; about the silently counted pause before he proposed that William take the trip with him. “I copped to being a terrible driver,” he said, “although I admitted that I don’t mind your company. She gave her blessing. Go ahead, husband, go off with my crazy brother for a road trip where God-knows-what will happen. Who knows, maybe another boss will get punched.” He was looser than usual, almost happy.

The expressway was mostly clear, and the directions Tom gave were surprisingly direct: head north for an hour and west for a quarter of that, at which point there would be a lake and, just beyond it, a town. They passed through gridded suburbs, a large town studded with church spires, a designer village that seemed to be composed solely of historically preserved mansions and bespoke wine shops. They traced the curve of a river and split a grove of trees. The afternoon sun was still strong. “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?” Tom said.

“To see a cross-state curator,” William said. “At least that’s my understanding.”

“Ha ha,” Tom said. “The trip is art-related, actually. We’re going to see one of the greatest painters I know.” They were approaching their destination, and Tom seemed to be feeling the nearness of it. He rocked his weight against the armrest. He rubbed the tips of his sneakers together. He thumped a thumb into the pleat beside him.

“Hey,” Tom said. “I need a place where I can get a little present. Maybe when we stop for gas.” The gas station was next to a modest garden center; Tom settled on a dwarf bottlebrush, which he balanced in his lap like a child. The towns got smaller and the space between them larger. Houses crowded the winding roads. William focused past the windshield, tried to learn from the land, from the people who filled it, but everything seemed behind glass rather than beyond it.

Finally, they pulled up beside a modest, immaculate inn: two stories, a screened porch, a hard-carved sign overhanging the front door that showed two ducks in a pond. As they entered the lobby, heads rose to consider them, then settled back into the business at hand: conversation, magazines, chess. Tom walked to the back of the room, disappeared into a paneled office door, and returned with a tall, thick man, dark skinned and severe of feature. He wore a black poplin shirt with a black suit coat; a stickpin went diagonally through his green tie. “This is Kenneth,” he said. “He works here.”

“That’s a poor introduction,” Kenneth said. “I am the proprietor of this establishment.” His voice rose and fell in a gentle lilt.

“I got you something,” Tom said. He motioned to William to hand it over.

Kenneth took one of the blood-red blooms between his fingers appreciatively. “I like plants.”

“More than people, from what I recall.”

“Can you blame me?” Kenneth said. “Have you met people?”

“This is William,” Tom said.

Kenneth laughed. “Present company excepted, of course,” he said.

They sat at a long table in the lobby. A lamp watched over a stack of tourist brochures. A bottle held a browning mum. “I reread your message this morning,” Kenneth said. “I want you to know that I support this course of action.” His voice was low and level; he seemed like he spoke that way no matter who was in the room.

“I haven’t been able to reach Jesse for a day or two,” Tom said. “I assume things are still on.” His mouth got small when he spoke, as if he was nervous. Was Jesse the man Tom had mentioned on the drive?

“There’s a party tonight,” Kenneth said. “We’re expected to be there.” He turned to William. “You too,” he said.

Kenneth showed them to a room on the first floor, where William flattened himself on the bed. Pen-and-ink birds flew diagonally across the wallpaper, and William imagined them peeling away and circling the room. He must have fallen asleep, because he came awake with a start at the sound of the door opening. The birds went flat again. “Let’s go,” Tom said.

They all packed into Kenneth’s truck, Kenneth and Tom in the front, William in the back. “Sorry for the tight squeeze,” Kenneth said to William. “It’s only a mile.” But a mile meant something different in the country, something bumpier and more vertiginous, and by the time they came to a small house at the round end of a horseshoe driveway, William had to stagger out to steady himself against the truck.

“Come on, city boy,” Tom said. “You have to meet Jesse.”

William heard a voice before the door opened. It was a woman arguing playfully with someone—someone on the telephone, it turned out. She pulled the door open with her free hand and waved them in.

When she saw Tom her eyes widened, in either joy or misgiving. “Gotta go,” she said, and hung up the phone. She was darker than Kenneth, with a tiny frame and nearly perfect features. She could have been a teenager except for the weariness in her eyes.

“This is Jesse,” Tom said. “She was a student of mine. One of the first, in fact.”

“That dates me,” Jesse said.

“That’s what Tom does,” Kenneth said. “He dates you. Or at least he did. All those nights I had to stand on the porch with a shotgun.” Kenneth, William was coming to understand, was Jesse’s father.

“By ‘shotgun,’ I think you mean ‘paintbrush,’” Tom said. “Before Kenneth got into the inn business, he dabbled as an artist.”

“Dabbled?” Kenneth said. “I taught you everything you know.”

“Which is, about painting, exactly zero,” Tom said. “Nice work.”

“While the banter is flying, let me give you a tour of the place,” Jesse said to William. She and Tom still hadn’t really looked at each other.


The tour led through the whole of the house, which was hardly anything, only a living room, a bedroom, and a small yard, but there were careful details everywhere that attested to the vibrancy of the place. The wooden chairs had been carved with a story that went up one arm and came down the other, continuing on the chair beside it. Each of the lampshades had been dyed a subtly different shade. “Sit here,” Jesse said, directing William to a brown leather couch. It was draped in green fabric, like a young woman trying to conceal her beauty or an old woman trying to conceal its absence. A few other guests milled about in the room: two women who appeared to be a couple, two women who did not.

On either side of the front door were two vast canvases, almost floor-to-ceiling, depicting roughly the same scene, an Old West desert with scrub brush in the foreground and distant cliffs. In one, an Indian sat proudly astride a horse, and everything about him was done in vivid color, from the red tips on the feathers of his headdress to the blue squares on his buckskin pants. The other canvas was nearly identical—same desert, same scrub, same horse—but in the Indian’s place was a white man in modern business dress. William wondered if these were the paintings Tom had wanted him to see.


Jesse passed three jelly jars filled with gin to William, who passed the first along to another guest but kept the other two. He felt certain that the real party was on its way, that at some point the front door would fly open and dozens of artists would pour into the house. There would be young men in high spirits and young women pretending at first to resist those high spirits. But the doors never flew open, and William grew more and more drunk, there on the brown couch with the green fabric draped over it. He spoke to a young woman with a shock of orange hair who didn’t complain when he put his hand on her leg. “A cousin,” she said, though he didn’t know whether she was saying that she was Jesse’s cousin, asking if he was Tom’s, or introducing another detail altogether.

The stereo was singing about dancing and good times. Tom passed through the room, whispering, with Jesse at his side. William pulled himself to his feet and followed them, at a distance, into the backyard. They had different music out there, wordless, slower. Kenneth was sitting in a chair talking to a girl who was wearing a beaded vest. She was laughing. Tom and Jesse were in the near corner of the yard, talking closely, and then Tom leaned on the fence and drew his hand back sharply. William saw a line on his palm, a red rivulet. Kenneth stood and produced a handkerchief, which he held out to Tom in a courtly manner.

William went back inside to sit with the cousin on the couch. She was talking about God now. More gin was brought his way.

The last thing he remembered was standing with the cousin in the yard. She was still on God, and he was marveling at the way the black lace of brassiere overlaid the brown skin of breast. Tom and Jesse were at the corner of the fence again. Now they were standing at a distance from each other, and she was talking excitedly, pointing at the ground. William thought he saw tears on her cheeks, and Tom’s hands were in the shape of a cage, as if he were protecting a seed.


“And so,” Tom said, swinging his arm over Kenneth’s shoulder the next morning, “I make my good escape. I thank you for your hospitality. Sometimes I don’t know what you see in me.” They had been offered breakfast, declined, accepted coffee in its stead.

“Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it around here much longer.” Kenneth laughed and embraced Tom. “I am sorry that you didn’t get what you came for,” he said more softly.

Kenneth had already loaded their bags in the trunk. Tom told William to drive off, but about a minute later, he told him to pull over. “Pop the trunk,” he said. On top of their bags were two large flat rectangles wrapped in cloth.

William peeled back a corner and saw that they were paintings. “Take them out,” Tom said, and then he shut the trunk and unwrapped them so William could see. The first was a landscape of a placid little town, where two children played in the street and a short, dark woman with long hair stared into a store window at a blue dress pinned to a white backing. The second showed a red boat in a harbor and a man tying a rope around a brown piling. In both, the framing was off center and the colors were subtle but forceful. Tom moved his hand over the face of the woman in the second painting. “What do you think she’s thinking?”

“That she wants the dress?” Like the man in the other painting, the woman wore an expression of casual concentration.

“Exactly,” Tom said. “But the title is Mexican Village, One Minute Before Earthquake. The other one is Florida Town, One Week Before Hurricane. That’s what’s makes these painting so great. They are acts of colossal misdirection.” William looked at the woman’s face again, tried to retrieve her thoughts about the dress, if that’s even what she was looking at. Would she buy it? Would she ever get to wear it? The questions were a close circle around him.

“These are Jesse’s?”

“She only paints Indians,” Tom said. “These are Kenneth’s. And now they’re mine. I bought them with the money from my book advance.” He shut the trunk. “Supporting him is the least I can do. You know what they say about talent: if you don’t have it, help it.”

“You don’t have it?”

“Not like Kenneth. I have a way of seeing that’s unshared by most people, and then a way of seeing my seeing. I look at things the wrong way and then stubbornly insist it’s the right way, all along holding out hope that I’ll make a few converts. When I do, it’ll help the idea that the things I’ve made are art. But talent?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. When I see paintings like this, when I really start to feel what they’re doing, I get weak. And not the kind of weak when you look in the mirror after a bad haircut. Serious weak, soul weak, like there’s something in the universe that can make you better but that you don’t possess, and won’t ever.” He tapped the car with two fingers, as if he were telling a driver to take off.


There were two YOU ARE HERE signs before the highway, one in front of a craft outlet, another by a scenic overlook, each temporarily true, and then a diner with a banner that said EAT HERE NOW. “It makes a good argument,” Tom said. The restaurant was in a shack connected to a small convenience store. On the far wall, there was a lunch counter; next to it there was a bar, a garish pair of abstract oils, and a lottery ticket machine that flashed out a series of numbers. The whole scene was like something of Tom’s, a graph of increasing despair.

They sat beneath a mirrored clock in the shape of a guitar. The obese bartender was talking to a balding man about his youth as a skier. “Two-day blizzard,” the bartender said. “Couldn’t even get out on the slopes.”

“You made me think,” the balding man said. He tapped his head to show the site of the injury. “The snow that year was up to the window in my garage.”

Tom brought two sandwiches and two beers to the table. “Just water for me,” William said. “It’s a little early.”

“Right,” Tom said. He moved both bottles in front of him. “I don’t think there’s a menu, even. You stand there and after a little while they push food at you.” He bit into his sandwich and made a face. “I hope you’re not expecting some kind of best-kept secret.”

Behind Tom, the balding man pressed a series of buttons on the lottery machine. “So how long has it been since you’ve seen Kenneth and Jesse?”

“That’s a story,” he said.

“I have time,” William said.

Tom set down his sandwich. “Well,” he said, “I first moved up here right after college, to study with Kenneth. She was just a girl, the daughter of my painting teacher. She was seventeen, maybe. But she had this unearthly glow. I would go to Kenneth’s house to drop something off or have a drink and I would spend the whole time looking at her. Have you ever read Rousseau?” William hadn’t. “Well, there’s a passage about when he was young and in love with a young woman. She starts to eat some food and he calls out to stop her. There’s a hair on it, he says. She puts it back on her plate in disgust and he grabs it and gobbles it down. It’s the closest he can get to her. That’s how I felt about Jesse. Then I got a job teaching, and I left town.”

“Was there a romantic farewell?”

“No, not at all. Kenneth drove me to the airport. She was in the back seat. I think when I was out on the curb she waved and told me to have a good time. I loved her, though, and the idea of her stayed with me wherever I went. You know: St. Louis, Belize, New Zealand, Timbuktu. My world tour. I had girlfriends, but they were substitutes, except that they didn’t do what substitutes are supposed to do, which is distract you from the original. They just reminded me of her. Now and again I came back to visit Kenneth, and I saw her then.”

“So then you got involved?”

“That would make sense, but it didn’t happen then either. I didn’t want to disrupt her life, or his either. But I kept coming to see her, and at some point I started to see that she felt the same way about me that I felt about her. It wasn’t a flash of lightning or anything that dramatic. It just became clear to me. At that point, I felt strong enough to stay.”

William was confused. “To stay with Kenneth?”

“To stay in town. I quit teaching. I took a job at a store, started sculpting a little. Within a month, everything was in place. Jesse and I did the whole thing, moving in together, forsaking all others. We were going to get married.” He fell silent. The story was over, except that it wasn’t.

“So what happened?” William said. “It ended?”

“It did.”

“And now you’re reconsidering? She is?”

Tom ate a little more of his sandwich, seemed to taste it less. He scratched along his chin. “We had a son,” he said.

William started to speak, but Tom, having started up again, wasn’t stopping. “It was about a year after we got together. We were ecstatic. He was the last piece of the puzzle. Big baby, laughed all the time, a real bruiser. He started walking the day after his first birthday, and we used to joke that you could feel the ground shake when he put his foot down. Then he started fainting. We took him to the doctor, who said it was convulsions from high fever. One morning Jesse went in to wake him up. His lips were blue. We got him to the hospital right away, but right away wasn’t soon enough.” William understood now; Jesse hadn’t been pointing at the ground, but rather beneath it. He was one and a half, Tom said, and that’s the age he stayed. “He had an underlying cardiac problem, something called long QT syndrome. It’s named after the part of the cardiogram that widens.” His fingers, deft from practice, drew a graph on the table. “When people say ‘dead and gone,’ what do they mean? Where do they think people go, exactly?”

William didn’t know what to say. “Louisa never mentioned anything.”

Tom let William wait for a while. He was looking past William, into the middle distance, and for once he didn’t seem as if he wanted to be seen. “That’s because she doesn’t know,” he said. “We weren’t talking for a few years there before I moved upstate: sister with happy, settled life doesn’t seem to care about brother with unhappy, unsettled one, to the point where, even when brother moves a few hours away and his life starts to come together, he doesn’t feel comfortable calling her. And then, when Jesse and I split up, I did anything I could not to think about it, which included not mentioning it to anyone. I got rid of most of the photographs, kept only one where he was sleeping in the crook of Jesse’s arm and one of him sitting up in bed. I didn’t want the rest of them because I didn’t understand what they were documenting. That’s when I started making charts, in fact. It was my way of struggling with facts and what happens to them when they’re no longer true in any measurable way.” Tom made a funny birds-fly-away gesture that didn’t belong to him at all, or to any man William knew. Maybe it was something Jesse had done. “When Louisa told me about the job at the college, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be only a few hours away from Jesse, wasn’t sure I could. But I took the job and didn’t think about her, except to think that maybe one day I would go see her. I got my courage up, lost it, got it back again. Once or twice I called but hung up when she answered. It was a mess. I was a mess. Then, a few weeks ago, I was here working. I was trying to think of what the baby looked like and I couldn’t,” he said.

“What was his name?”

“Michael.” The word crossed the space between them. “That was the day I went to the old studio. It wasn’t there. I broke down and called Jesse and managed to say hello when she answered. We started talking, carefully at first, about why we ended things, about how our lives had gone, about what we remembered and what we needed to remember. She agreed to let me come and see her. You were my ride. I had all the hope in the world. Then, last night, she said she didn’t think she could make a go of it.” He finished off the second beer, closed his eyes, and sat back in his chair. He looked completely bereft and, despite the fact that his eyes were closed, more like Louisa than ever. “So that’s that,” he said. “I guess it’s what the experts call closure.”

“I’m sorry,” William said, hearing the words emerge without any sense or meaning, and gradually the rest of the room returned: the men at the bar wrapping up the conversation about their ski trip, the intolerable sandwiches, the lottery machine strobing green.

Tom threw a twenty and two fives on the table. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said with great spirit.

The convenience store connected to the restaurant was stocked densely with chips, candy bars, sticks of meat, and a rainbow of sugared waters. The woman at the counter was speaking in rat-a-tat Chinese but understood enough to hand William down the pack of gum he wanted and to give Tom a small envelope of aspirin. Out in front, on a bench, there was a man about William’s age and a boy, no more than ten, stroking his father’s arm and looking impassively into the parking lot. One of them might have been blind. In the car, a few miles later, William mentioned them to Tom, but Tom was no longer with him. He had been musing on the passage of time, wondering whether people moved through it or vice versa, and he quoted Shakespeare on the matter, “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me,” and that last word had launched him into sleep.