The Slippage A Novel

TWO




“Word around the office is, they’re going with Domesta,” said Eddie Fitch. He tipped his empty paper coffee cup, set it upright, tipped it again.

“Domesta is horrible,” William said. “It sounds like a car, or a pill.”

William worked for the Hollister Company, which occupied two floors of a mirrored office building downtown. The Hollister brothers, Leon and Julian, had started in residential development but maintained a sideline in mortgage brokering, and over time they had shifted into customized investment packages. Their flagship offering was TenPak, which had one foot in real estate and another in stocks, required an initial commitment of ten thousand dollars, and promoted, while not exactly promising, returns of 10 percent annually over a ten-year period. William was the editorial manager of the sales department, which meant that he was charged with preparing one-sheets and brochures for the salesmen when they went on sales calls. When people asked him what he did, he said financial writing, and over the years he had come to believe it.

“I used to drive a Domesta,” Harris said. “Got terrible mileage.”

Lunch was the spine of the day. Everything else moved away from it in both directions, at a constant speed. A group of them, what William thought of as his group, was eating in the lunchroom on the eighth floor, sandwiches brought from home or purchased from the ancient vending machine in the break room. “You’d just think they would have told us at the same time as everyone else.” The week before, a memo had come down from nine announcing that the real estate and energy-investment divisions were being rebranded. Energy had quickly received a second memo informing them that they would hereby be known as Vyron. Real estate had been left to hang in a cold wind: sales had dropped for two consecutive quarters, and there were whispers that the staff would be thinned out before the end of the year.

Baker cleared his throat. Deep-voiced, caramel-skinned, always clean-shaven even on close inspection, he was the group manager. He had started at the same level as the rest, around the same time as William, but he had risen through the ranks like a flame on a curtain. “Pill is what they’re going for,” Baker said. “The economy has been sick, or perceived as such. So how do you cure it, or create the perception of cure? Take a pill. Domesta has been proven effective in treating consumer debt and securing equity in your primary residence. Side effects may include nausea, hair loss, and ectopic pregnancy.”

Harris and Fitch laughed. They were both easy laughs, though of much different species. Harris, tall and skinny, with hair that would have reached nearly to his waist if he were of average height, laughed like a cowboy, slow and appreciative, while Fitch erupted in childish giggles.

“The side effects include nausea?” William said. “You mean when people hear the word? I can understand why. I’m getting a little queasy myself.”

Another pair of laughs. William didn’t know if he deserved them. He was well liked, but the things he assumed people liked about him—his height, his voice, the fact that he had kept his hair and stayed relatively trim into his early forties—were things he had no control over. And so when people nodded at his comments or smiled at him in the hall he simply returned the gesture, neither pleased nor displeased, passing back something he had already decided had no value.

“Why change at all?” Harris said. “What was wrong with Hollister Homes? Don’t people want a trusted name in an economy like this?”

Baker steepled his fingers. “These days,” he said, “financial-services companies are among those most likely to rebrand, along with food services and technology.”

“Maybe they’re still making up their mind,” William said.

“Minds,” Fitch said.

“No, I think William is right,” Harris said. “I think ‘mind’ is right.”

“How can you say either, really?” Baker said. “Corporations are a highly specific form of organism that balances both collective and individual thoughts.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” William said.

“Me too,” Harris said, and laughed.

“As long as my name’s in the middle of the checks,” Fitch said, “I don’t care whose name is on the top.” He looked to Harris for support. “That’s my thing.”

“Here’s mine,” Harris said. He wadded up his napkin and arced a shot toward the wastebasket in the corner.

“Perfect,” Fitch said. “Two for Harris.”

“That’s a three-pointer,” Harris said.

“No way,” Fitch said. “Too easy. Shoot at a can that’s farther away.”

He did, and missed.

“Pick that up, please,” Baker said, flipping a hand toward the wad, lord to liege.

Fitch giggled. Lunch was over, with very little solved.


“William,” Baker said. “Stay a minute. I need to discuss something with you that I have already discussed with Nicholas and Susannah.” Baker called everyone in the office by the longest version of their first name. “We have an issue with O’Shea.” He called customers by their last.

O’Shea was a local restaurateur who had bought into TenPak for a hundred thousand the previous January and doubled down in June. But then a cloud settled over him: his wife left him, his teenage son was in a car accident, and there was a kitchen fire that shut his restaurant for months. He had requested the return of his entire investment. “That can’t happen,” Baker had said. “When money goes out like that, it can start a stampede, especially in an economic climate like this one. Can you prepare a new one-sheet?”

“Sure,” William said. “I have the spring brochure. I can revise and reprint that.”

“Wonderful.” Baker buttered the word. “Come by tomorrow and show me what you’ve done.”

William tinkered with text and reviewed the accompanying artwork: a couple about his age, standing near what was probably a beach, holding hands. A boat in the distance distracted the eye. He marked it out with a circle and a line.

At four, he stretched his legs and went down the hall. He had read that each continuous hour of sitting shortened a man’s life by ten seconds. Susannah Moore, who oversaw the office information network, was explaining the new e-mail protocol to another woman, her voice a colorless music. In the break room, Antonelli and Cohoe were holding cups of coffee; Harris was steeping tea. “How can you drink that stuff?” William said. “I’m going out.”

“Done for the day?” Harris said.

“No,” William lied. “I just need to get out of the office for a little while. I’ll be back.”

“Some people don’t have real offices,” said Cohoe, who did.

At the elevator, a man appeared at William’s side. It was George Hollister, short and thick, his graying hair shaved tight, his features crowded into the center of his face. George was a nephew of the founders and the nominal boss of the division, though he didn’t come in most days, and when he did, he mostly sat in his corner office watching a Japanese cable channel that none of the other TVs in the building seemed to get.

Hollister was standing next to the last elevator, which worked only by pass card. He and William had a checkered history, in the sense that there were a limited number of moves in the game. Years before, Hollister had seen William out one evening at a performance of the Symphonie Liturgique, making use of subscription tickets Louisa had ordered. Hollister was alone, and possibly a little tipsy, and he had clasped Louisa’s hand and expressed surprise to see William. “I didn’t figure you for a music lover,” he said. A few weeks later, in the office, Hollister asked if he could expect William at Il Seraglio that weekend, and the time after that he wondered if William had any opinion on Dohnányi and laughed aloud. The whole thing began to shade into malice, and William kept to the outer circuit of the hallway in a largely successful effort to avoid Hollister. This time, he had failed.

“Good afternoon,” Hollister said.

“It’s not bad,” William said.

“How have you been?” Hollister said. And then, without waiting for an answer: “I thought of you the other day. I was at a Lyatoshynsky event, the Mourning Prelude.” He held his fingers to his mouth and then opened them in a bloom of appreciation. “But I didn’t see you there. Is everything all right?”

The elevator arrived in time to save George Hollister’s life.


Tuesday came, rang its dampened bell. William rolled out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, urinated, fished his toothbrush from the cup, brushed, showered, toweled dry, pulled comb through hair, pulled clothes onto body, breakfast table, cereal, car, road, parking space, elevator. Somewhere along the way he became himself.

The morning passed without incident: he readied the presentation for O’Shea, reviewed the new brochure, visited the break room at regular intervals. At one, William walked over to the Red Barn, a dim, dingy restaurant on a small side street off Oakmont. Karla, a small forceful brunette who worked hard to seem relaxed, was waiting at a table. “Hi,” she said. “I already ordered. Iced tea, right?”

“You’re too good to me,” he said.

William had been with Karla before Louisa—or, as he liked to say, between Louisas. Karla was a part-time Realtor with a sideline in floristry. She approached both jobs indifferently; her father, an engineer who had discovered a new material for industrial packing, had left her with enough money that she never needed to mention the amount. It was a mountain whose top she couldn’t see. William had met her at work, when he was in advertising. They had been friends at first but had passed across the center of some odd chemical equation and become sporadic lovers. He had other girlfriends and she had other boyfriends. “We do this because we like it,” she said, in a voice that made him unsure whom she was comforting. Then one night at dinner she pointed at his smiling face and said, “I’m about to change that.” She was, she said, pregnant.

He was thirty-two years old, never married. He knew there was, at best, a one-in-four chance that he was the father, but he felt that fraction settle into him with a mix of thrill and misgiving. She kissed him and put her hand in his hair. “I need a sample to know for sure,” she said, and pulled for science.

The DNA tests let him off the hook, pointing instead to a South American businessman who had been in town for the summer only, and then Karla stopped answering William’s calls. When the baby was born, a boy named Christopher, she asked William out for coffee and apologized for cutting him off so abruptly. “For a little while I just couldn’t,” she said. Then Christopher’s father had been piloting a small plane from Miami to the Bahamas when it crashed into the ocean. “It’s not like he was around,” she said. “He didn’t want anything to do with us. But this is so permanent.” Her lower lip trembled. He had never seen her so close to crying.

For a little while they were together again. William read the newspaper to the boy and fed him from a bottle and held him frequently enough that for the rest of his life he would be able to remember the hot little body with its rapid, rabbity heartbeat. When William and Louisa got back together, Karla wrote herself out of the scene, though they still met twice a year to mark the passage of time on each other’s faces.

“Move your elbow,” Karla said, pointing up at the waitress. “She’s trying to give you your iced tea.”

“Thanks, Mom,” William said.

“You wish,” Karla said.

“Speaking of which,” William said, “I have a story.” He had been at the park a few weeks before and had seen Christopher by the basketball courts, ringed by friends. When William had waved, the boy had returned a stiff reverse nod, chin lifted from chest as if by guide wire.

Karla laughed. “Ten years old and already treats you like a colleague.”

“I could use a man like him down at the office.”

“How’s it going over there, anyway?”

“Been better,” he said. “But things are tough all over.”

“True,” Karla said, blushing a bit because she had no idea. She was living in a large house in the best part of town and casually dating a young filmmaker, also independently wealthy, who took her on ski vacations twice a year and was teaching Christopher to ride a horse. “And how’s the home front?”

“Ah, the home front,” William said. “Smooth? Bumpy? Who can say? Louisa’s brother moved to town. She threw a party for him and then refused to come out.”

“For how long?”

“The whole party.”

“Hmm,” Karla said.

“The party’s not the only thing,” William said, and then had to think if it was. “I think she might be hoarding the mail.”

“Hoarding?”

“Squirreling it away. I found two bags of it in the house, hidden in corners.”

“Is she depressed?” Karla, precise in so many things, defaulted to the vaguest language when it came to the feelings of others.

“I don’t think so,” William said. “The other day, she drove me out to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere.”

“Sounds like a mob hit.”

“Turns out it’s land she owns. We own.”

“Congratulations,” she said.

“I guess,” he said. “I stood there in front of the land and felt empty.”

“It’s an investment,” Karla said.

“But in what?”

“In your future,” she said. “I hope you didn’t make her feel bad about it.”

“Sometimes people place the future between themselves and the present,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to make things work now. If I do that, then the future’s just the sound of that same note sustaining.”

“That’s beautiful,” Karla said. The idea was something William had acquired from a magazine, which didn’t make it less beautiful.

William paid, as always. It would have been nothing to Karla, and he wanted it to be something, at least. The cashier was the daughter of the owner. She smiled when she saw him looking at her. He had known the girl since she was six or seven and seen her at least yearly since then. She had been small and plump as a child but was now tall and angular, with a pleasant open face and skin as tight and fresh as an apple. Over the years she had absorbed hundreds of thousands of glances, touches, conversations, not to mention time itself, the minutes, the seconds, the smaller pieces that could not be casually measured but were still indisputable. She had grown thin in part because she had grown full with time. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, and she had the body of a young woman, mostly there, never quite there. William wondered if Karla, looking at the girl, would think of the younger versions of herself, or of an older version of Christopher. William thought of the girl who had sat beside him in school when he was twelve; hair sprouted from beneath her arms and it shocked him. His arms felt leaden, not quite his own, both then and now. He thanked the girl, asked after her father, and went out to join Karla in the parking lot.


William’s afternoon was oversold, a trio of conference calls laid end to end, and when he finished the third he went to the bathroom, wet his hands, and ran them through his hair. The office water was hard, or maybe it was soft: he didn’t know which, but within an hour his hair would be stiff as a brush.

On his way down the hall, William saw Fitch standing outside Antonelli’s office, pointing at the door. “I think I saw him in the break room,” William said.

“Not today you didn’t,” Fitch said. “He’s gone. Fired. There’s a new guy coming to replace him next week from San Diego.”

When William heard that changes were coming, he’d feared that this would be the first. Antonelli didn’t always have his mind in the game—hadn’t since that morning five years before when he had woken up early to play a round of golf on the course that bordered his backyard. He had eaten breakfast with his children, kissed his wife on the forehead, and made it to the first tee by seven. Antonelli was playing with an older Chinese man assigned him by the course, which was how he preferred it: “Less conversation means more concentration,” he liked to say. He birdied the first hole and parred the second. The third hole was the one that backed his house; it had a water hazard in the form of a small lake. Turning to square himself with the tee, Antonelli noticed Linda, his three-year-old daughter, peering through a gap in his fence. He waved. She shouted something. Antonelli could not hear and so he pointed to his ear. She shouted again. “Pete,” the Chinese man said. “She say Pete.” Pete was Antonelli’s son, six. Antonelli jogged closer to the wall. “What about Pete?” he said. “He fell in there,” she said. She indicated the lake. Antonelli went in with all his clothes on. He didn’t even drop his driver. Pete was in the shallows, not breathing, a lump on his head from where he had knocked against the rocks. Antonelli pulled him out onto the fairway and pumped his chest. The Chinese man called an ambulance. Antonelli’s wife arrived just in time to watch her son expire on the lawn.

Like many personal tragedies, the incident was discussed frequently in Antonelli’s absence but never in his presence. Two years after Pete’s death, when Antonelli told the guys his wife was pregnant again, there was a moment of silence, a tensing, that preceded the round of congratulations. Once, William and Louisa had run into the Antonellis at a restaurant. William met the new baby, also a boy, and squeezed his foot. Louisa had praised him for this. “It’s the normal thing to do, which is why I’m glad you did it,” she said. But in the office, no one knew exactly how to handle the matter other than to ignore it, in part because they did not wish to do further injury to Antonelli, and in part because they feared, like all superstitious men—that is, like all men—that any mention of the drowning might begin an invisible process by which they, too, would be robbed of that which was most precious to them. Most of the other guys had kids, too, mostly sons, and on slow weeks they would bring the boys around and charge them with delivering paperwork or making copies or carrying out other duties that were not significantly more trivial than what went on at Hollister on an average day. William looked forward to opening his office door to a miniature Fitch or Cohoe. The last time, Elizondo had instructed his five-year-old son to walk into Antonelli’s office and say, “Lou, I really appreciate all that you’ve done for the company, but I think it’s time we go our separate ways.” Antonelli had laughed at that. Everyone had agreed it was a good sign. But it was a bad one.


William was heading for the elevator when he saw Harris standing in Baker’s office, pointing out through the glass. William moved and Harris’s finger moved with him. William stepped in. “O’Shea dropped out of TenPak,” Baker said.

“What?” William said. “I was just about to send over the presentation.”

“No point,” Baker said. “He’s gone for good.” He rose up slightly behind his desk: broad, mahogany, it was like a ship at the head of a fleet.

“So what should we do?”

Baker pinched his chin and stared past William. Behind him there was a painting of an island, a conical mountain, ringed by clouds, rising from its center. William had heard the story of the mountain: Baker had climbed it as a young man, though the painting was made decades earlier. One of the other climbers who’d scaled the mountain with Baker had said that, after reaching the summit, most of the men on the expedition acted as if they had survived a tragedy. Their behavior became indefensibly risky, and for a number of days base camp became a blur of sex and drugs and gambling. Baker, by contrast, was exactly the same coming down the mountain as he had been going up. His only concession to the ascent was to acquire the painting, a testament to his calm mastery of the world.

“I think we should go down the line to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Harris said.

Baker frowned and nodded. “That’s prudent,” he said. “There’s another gentleman, a Mr. Loomis, who put in about eighty. I was just telling Arthur, I think you should clean up what you did for O’Shea and then Arthur and Edward will take it over to him. Can that be tomorrow?”

“If for William, then for me,” Harris said.

“It works,” William said. “I heard about Antonelli.”

Baker lowered his head slightly. For a second, William thought the gesture was a guilty one—clearly, he’d known Antonelli was about to get the ax—but his head rose back up on a tide of purpose. “Louis was a valued part of this company,” Baker said. “This economy can sometimes make harsh demands. Which is why it’s all the more important that we keep this company running as smoothly as possible. If the Loomis meeting happened tomorrow, that would be best.”

William made for the elevator. At the head of the hallway, he saw George Hollister again. Twice in three days: it had the feel of premeditation. William stopped at the stairwell. “No elevator for me,” he called down the hall. “I have to go up to nine to pick up a file.” George Hollister started to give him a thumbs-up but then extended his right index finger and, for a few excruciating seconds, conducted an imaginary orchestra. “Friday,” he said. “Scriabin. They’re staging the full Mysterium. I can only imagine that a man of your refinement will be there.” William pushed into the stairwell, where a man of his refinement took a step upstairs, as if he were actually going for a file, then turned and hurried downstairs. In the lobby, he bought a bottle of water and an energy bar and handed the woman a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

“Big spender,” she said brightly. It occurred to him that he was. He unwrapped the energy bar and nibbled the edge. His phone buzzed. “Hello?” William said.

“Hey,” Tom said. “Want to come over? I’m hanging.”