The Slippage A Novel

SIX




And so William was back home, which meant planning the party Louisa had suggested, and checking on progress at the new house, and sitting on the deck of what would soon be the old house and watching the trees whose names he did not know sway in the breeze. He was trying to do some reading, too. Tom had encouraged him to pick up Cranston’s self-help book; the first time he had dismissed the suggestion, because it was the afternoon when he’d accused Tom of arson, and that day was best discarded wholesale. But on the drive home Tom mentioned it again, and William was in no real position to resist. He found a used copy, a compact paperback with a burnt-orange cover, and dipped into it whenever he had the time.

It was mostly unreadable, or rather readable only in bursts so short that the process could not fairly be called reading. The text was densely uninteresting, filled with bromides about life’s triumphs and trials illustrated with anecdotes drawn from Cranston’s own unremarkable experience. Still, something in the third chapter had caught his eye. “Life,” Cranston wrote, “is a series of substitutions designed to distract you from the fact of your deprivation.” The idea stayed with William. He had tried to forget about the loss of his job by spending time with Emma, and tried to forget about Emma by spending time with Christopher. Now, without Christopher, he was substituting again, with Cranston. But that would go soon, too, and something else would take its place. None of the options was satisfactory, but none was any less satisfactory than the rest, and even the first link in the chain, his job, was only helping him to cope with some other absence or emptiness. Recognizing this all as an endless cycle made him feel marginally less deprived, and he wondered whether he actually was laying down the foundation for a better understanding of himself. It was a cheering proposition, and it propelled him through the wasteland of chapters four and five.

In chapter six, another insight came forward. “An unhealthy impulse,” Cranston wrote, “should never be discharged in action, but can never be completely defeated by inaction; rather it should be concealed from the view not only of others, but of the possessor of that impulse.” A feeling of recognition circulated hotly through William, who underlined the passage and put a star in the margin.

For weeks during the summer, William had been keeping two secrets, one professional, the other personal, and he thought that when he came clean about his job, it would be easier to withhold the facts about Emma. Instead, when he disclosed his professional secret, he felt the personal one growing inside him with increasing pressure, trying harder with each day to break free. After the trip upstate with Tom, though, the count was back to two again, and he was calmer. “Maybe the second acts as a kind of buffer,” William said. “This way, if I have a sudden attack of honesty, I’ll just spill the thing about Tom and Jesse. Don’t you think?” Blondie didn’t answer.

William was going through the neighborhood with her, late at night, on a walk no one needed but him. It was cold and cheerless and he walked quickly, toward the open mouth of the cul-de-sac. He passed the Kenners’, saw the blue glow of a computer screen. He passed the Morgans’, smelled something baking. He passed the Zorillas’, heard the faint sound of a woman either crying or moaning, but flattened, like it was coming from a television. At the end of the street, he took Blondie left and came back up the parallel street. He stopped in front of Annie Martin’s house, which backed Emma and Stevie’s. It was dead quiet, which meant that Annie Martin was awake; when she slept, she ran the radio loud so that people would think there was life in the house. He passed through her yard to the border of Emma and Stevie’s lawn, where he looped Blondie’s leash around the low half branch of an oak. He whispered the dog’s name. He went farther into Emma’s yard until he could see her bedroom window.

Emma came into the frame in her underwear, brushing her hair. She wore a white T-shirt but then she took it off. Her breasts hung heavy, and her belly was emphatic beneath them. She traced down the middle of her stomach with her index finger and he remembered doing the same. She turned away from him, toward the mirror, and he felt the nearness of her body through the window, through the wall. Then a noise spooked him, a rustling in the bushes, and he crab-walked toward the right side of the house, where he encountered another noise. It was Stevie’s guitar playing, coming from the rearmost window of the garage. He was playing a series of notes, slowly, tidally. Each note had a shape, most round, some jagged, and yet they all seemed to fit together. It was beautiful until Stevie began to sing, and then it was something else. William shifted his weight forward, and just at that moment a cat scampered across his path, flashing eye-shine up at him. Blondie chuffed and rolled a bark in the bottom of her throat, and William untied her and hurried along the strip of lawn to the street.


The next day, he saw her again. He had stocked up for the party—rum and vodka, plastic cups and paper napkins, chips, dip, peanuts both plain and flavored, olives as big as eggs—and the young cashier had remarked upon the purchase, and he had said that it was all for him, and the girl had laughed, a bell in the afternoon.

At home, he unloaded the bags into the garage and leashed up Blondie for a walk. “You look awfully familiar,” he said. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

A shadow overtook him at the head of the street, just outside the Roth house, which had a paper scarecrow hanging in the great window that overlooked the front lawn. It was Emma. “You weren’t going to invite me?” She tried to sound indifferent, but she was out of breath from coming up the block. It was warm and humid, and half circles of sweat darkened her green blouse under the arms. Her hair was matted to the sides of her head. It occurred to him, for one crazy moment, to tell her that he’d liked it better through the window the night before.

“To what?”

“This party at your new house. I didn’t get an invitation.” They went under a shade tree that was either dead or close to it; Blondie circled the trunk as far as her leash allowed. “Look,” Emma said before he could talk. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. But Stevie asked me and I don’t have a good answer.”

“What about the truth?”

“Hilarious. He’s under the impression that all of us are friends. He talks to Louisa some evenings, driveway to driveway, just the kind of neighborhood chitchat that normal people do.”

“How do you know you’d even be able to come?” He indicated her belly. “You won’t want to bring a baby to a boring party.”

“Why not?” she said. “Just make it right.”

“And if I invite you, that will be right?”

“Sure,” she said. “Neighbors at parties of neighbors. Normal.”

“Okay,” he said. “Especially since the occasion is that we won’t be neighbors for long. I lived here for ten years and you chased me out in four months.”

Her expression cracked a bit, and what came through was sadness mixed in with a little bit of triumph. “Don’t be mean,” she said.

“Not mean,” he said. “Just saying.”

“We might not be long for this place either,” she said. “Corporate creative has really taken a shine to Stevie.”

“Corporate creative? A shine?”

“The less said, the better,” Emma said.

“I’m not saying anything,” William said. “So that should be best.”

“Hey,” Emma said. “Look.” Higher up on the tree’s trunk, William could see the edge of a honeycomb protruding from a hollow. “They usually use bigger spaces than that,” Emma said. “They smooth the bark near the entrance. Can you see?” She angled her head up. The wind freshened and gusted behind them. A spot appeared at the corner of the hive and bombed down at Emma. “Ouch!” she said. She hit at her own hip. “Damn it.” What looked like a bee’s corpse tumbled to the ground.

“It’s exactly like your dream,” William said.

“Yeah,” she said. She frowned. “That’s what I think about my life every day. Just like a dream.”

William wasn’t up for more conversation. He tugged on Blondie’s leash and headed for home, counting twenty steps before he turned and looked back. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, not exactly, but what he saw was a woman he had known for a few weeks, at most, staring up at a tree as sunlight dappled the grass beside her flatly.