The Slippage A Novel

THREE




William wondered why Congress couldn’t pass the budget. He shook the newspaper once, sitting there at the kitchen table, but nothing came loose, and he went back to the first paragraph. According to a media studies professor, it was the result of “political optics,” though two senators, one a Republican and the other a Democrat, stuck to a more traditional interpretation, blaming each other. The yen was doing bad things and people couldn’t stop it. In Cape Cod, dolphins were beaching themselves by the dozens, possibly because of increased temperatures in shallow waters.

On the bottom of the front page, there was a piece about a fire at the Sunny Isles Marina that too closely resembled the ones at the hardware store and bus station. The authorities were wondering whether the marina was a sequel to the depot. “Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of incidents with suspiciously similar fingerprints,” said the fire commissioner. “We’ve asked the police department to mobilize tactical units, which allows them to hold officers on shift.” There had been no deaths or serious injuries, only property damage. “But property damage is something,” the commissioner said. “People work hard for what they have.” William straightened up into this truth. This was the man he was, a responsible professional with a clear-headed interest in the world around him, not a disgruntled midlevel employee who had just straightened his arm into a senior executive’s face. He had learned, via e-mail, that his presence would not be needed at the office while human resources and legal measured out his fate. It would take a week, possibly longer. He sipped at his orange juice and imagined the moment when he would be asked to apologize.

“Morning,” Louisa said behind him. Her reflection in the sliding glass door rubbed its eyes. “Why are you up so early?”

“Busy day today,” he said. “Did I tell you about this investor who bailed out of TenPak?”

“You didn’t,” she said. “You probably sensed I wouldn’t be interested.”

“Well,” he said, “unless I really made the whole process clear to you, and then you’d be fascinated. People say they want a return on investment, but what they really want is the grind of the process. They want to feel their money coming or going, and most people, amazingly, don’t really care which. When the feedback stops, they lose their nerve.”

“You’re a little wound up this morning,” she said. “Is that why there’s no coffee? Did you make a pot and drink it all?”

“Funny,” he said. “No. I just couldn’t sleep and when morning came I felt ready to go.” William let a hand pet the dog’s head; it was the same hand he’d used to hit Hollister. “Want to carpool today?”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’m heading in soon, and I think I’ll be done on the early side, so I can even pick you up.” He had worked out the angles: he didn’t want to risk Louisa’s coming home early and seeing his car still there, in the driveway, so for the time being he would control whatever transport he could. “Less driving, more thriving. Save the world, save ourselves.”

After William dropped Louisa off at the museum, he made a right like he was headed to his office; then he pulled into a small parking lot a few blocks away, where he sat in front of a drugstore and watched a manager unlock the doors and turn on the lights. Nothing in the man’s gestures suggested excitement. William bought a tube of toothpaste he didn’t need and went back to the car, where he called Karla.

“What’s Christopher doing today after school?” he said. “I have kind of an easy day. Want me to pick him up and take him for a snack or something?”

“Really?”

“Sure. I had a good time at the park the other day.”

“Well, today he has a music lesson,” she said. “How about tomorrow?”

He tried not to agree too readily. “Okay,” he said.

“Sounds great,” Karla said. “Thanks. But no ice cream.”

“Don’t tell me what to eat,” he said.

The next day, a steel-gray Thursday, he arrived at school early—he had tried to drive around all day, even roamed across town in search of a sandwich shop he remembered from his youth, but he had found it too quickly—and waited outside in his car, wondering how long he had before someone grew alarmed at the sight of a man lurking on the avenue that bordered the campus. When the bell sounded, he looked for Christopher. Karla had told him exactly what corner the sixth graders used for dismissal. There was a shallow stairwell that came up from a paved play area, and at a few minutes past three a troop of children came into view, some talking to each other, some with their heads down, most looking for their grown-ups. A child with a flower on her shirt was followed by a child with confusion in his eyes, and this pattern repeated down the line, down the stairs, down through the years, forever. Christopher found the car and tried the door; William had forgotten to unlock it, and they teamed up for the lowest form of comedy, his attempt with the handle exactly overlapping William’s attempt with the lock. “Want some ice cream?” William said once Christopher was in and buckled.

“That’s okay,” Christopher said. “We had a birthday party at school and I had two cupcakes. My stomach is small.”

“Not as small as your brain,” William said. “I am offering free ice cream.”

They ordered for Christopher; William waved it off. “Grown-ups don’t need it,” he said, but he got a swirl cone when Christopher insisted. They sat underneath a huge elm that had been called the Suicide Tree since William was a child, because kids were always trying to climb it and always falling to injury.

“I would never do that,” Christopher said. “I’m not stupid.” He waited a professional beat. “Did you?”

“Ha ha,” William said. He remembered a time when Christopher, maybe a year old, had climbed into bed between him and Karla. William had already known that things with Karla were dissolving, and from a mixture of guilt and justice, he had started to leave the bed. “No,” Christopher had said, and pulled himself close to William. The boy was a line of warmth running up the center of his chest.

“I was thinking of a swirl cone, too, but I think I’m a little old for that,” Christopher said. At the edge of the shade, a little girl ate cotton candy with both hands, as if she were devouring a cloud.

Later, at home, William watched the first movie he found, a drama about a revolt in a Portuguese colony. He got up to fill a bowl with ice cream. The chocolate syrup was nearly empty; he drained the last few drops and got back to the movie. Some men fought for their life against colonial oppressors. Others finished out a bottle of chocolate syrup while they watched a movie about those people.

When the movie ended, William pulled a dining room chair flush to the front window and monitored Emma’s house. Looking outward, he saw his lawn, then the street, then her house, but he also saw his reflection in the inside of the window. Who was that man? He had imagined he might travel the world. He had imagined he might squander his fortune in the most interesting and daring manner. He had read a passage in a book about how a mind of the first order accepts no limitation of its freedom, and that had filled him with a kind of spaciousness that he thought, at the time, was hope. He had imagined many things. One of the things he had not imagined was that one day he would be sitting at the front window of his house, looking across the street in search of what was not even really freedom. Blondie trotted up and leaned her head against William’s leg. “Don’t bug me when I’m working,” William said. A bee bulled the windowpane. Rain soughed on the grass. “Go ahead and tell your mom on me,” he told Blondie. “See if I care.” The dog turned doleful eyes on William. Was she sad because she didn’t understand or because she did?


“I need you.”

“I’ve been dreaming of this call,” William said. “Well, some people would say dream. Others would say nightmare.”

“I need help.”

“On a workday?” William said. “Can it wait until the weekend?”

“Not really,” Tom said. “I need to move to a new studio. You have a car and, let’s pretend, muscles.”

“Okay,” William said. “I think I can make it.” He tried to load up his response with reluctance, silently hint at an important meeting he’d have to miss or the duties that would accumulate in his absence. It was wasted on Tom, probably, but he considered it practice.

Tom worked in the warehouse district on the east side of town, on the first floor of a squat building whose front door was done in a crazy quilt of woods. When William pulled up, Tom was out on the curb, leaning on a street sign. It looked like he was trying to push it over. “Park around the corner,” Tom said. He led William through a side entrance and down a long hall. “I’ve had enough of this place,” he said. “They used non-drying oil in the varnish on the doors, and it blistered up so now they don’t lock right. Then things started going missing from people’s studios: a couple of radios, some clothes, cash. Part of me wants to stay, but the rest of me thinks I should go, and I am a democrat of me.”

“So where are you moving?”

“To the school. Some space mysteriously opened up. I think they always had it, but it wasn’t worth mentioning until my show started attracting attention. Now that they have a hit on their hands, they’re eager to do right by the talent.”

Boxes were stacked inside the door of the studio, most filled with poster tubes that contained oversize versions of Tom’s charts, and Tom took the first box and William took the second, and they went until both car trunks were filled.

“I have to do a final sweep of the place,” Tom said. “Entertain yourself.” A few of the other studio doors were open and William could see what was inside them: sculptures made from used car parts, portraits of trees turning into women or vice versa. A back door was open; William wandered out into the narrow street behind the warehouse. The alley was a graveyard of what William assumed were once considered inspirations. There were left shoes, maybe eight of them, in every color of the rainbow; various chrome bathroom fixtures glued together; sports magazines with the faces cut out. There was an oversize wooden crate with a metal cleat at its base that five years before William might have lugged home and turned into a doghouse for Blondie. He tested the thing’s soundness with the palm of his hand.

“That’s a nice one,” a man’s voice said. William turned to see a pile of coats, and then a face inside them. He was old, his features shrunk almost to nothing, his cheeks burned red from drinking, and he had an unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. “You going to take it?”

“I was thinking about it,” William said.

“Well, for me, I like to call it home,” the man said.

“I’m sorry,” William said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s not true,” the man said. “I can usually get into one of these buildings at night and find myself a corner. When these warehouses were abandoned, it was worse. They’d lock them up with big chains and I’d have to sleep outside. But when all the artists started coming, that meant people needed to get in and out, and people means me, too.” He scratched his face everywhere and then covered his mouth to belch. It was shocking, the order in which people let things go. “Do you have a little spare change?”

William dug in his pockets. “Here,” he said, stepping toward the man.

“Oh,” the man said. He basketed his hands.

“You don’t have a cup?” William grabbed an empty paint can, turned it upside down so that the loose top clattered to the ground, and deposited the change. “Here,” he said. “Now you have a paint cup.”

Tom was calling William from inside the building and then his head poked through the door. “You out here, Billy Boy?” Tom said. He noticed the man on the step. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” the man said with exaggerated politeness. And then, to William, “You ready? It seems like your friend wants to get going.” He made a point of checking the spot on his arm where a watch would have been.

“Good luck,” William said idiotically as the door closed.

Tom drove across town toward campus, and William followed. When they pulled into the corner of a small quadrangle, Tom hopped out and pressed a key into William’s palm. “It’s right in there,” he said, pointing at the closest building. “I’m second floor, by the stairs. Get started. I’ll be up in a second.”

William carried boxes until there were no more. Then Tom joined him, and the two of them stood at the center of the room, admiring the clean lines of the studio and the surrounding buildings visible through the window. Quality clouds hung over the spires. Tom moved into the doorway. “You see me here at the brink of a new life,” he said. “It all changes, starting now. I can already feel the ideas coming on. I am channeling.” He stretched out his arms so that he filled the doorway.

“At least you’re not grandiose,” William said.

“At least there’s that,” Tom said. “Thank you kindly, sir. I’ll be seeing you soon enough. I plan to call you on that favor I mentioned. Now I’m heading to the snack bar, where coeds and foodstuffs abound. I can already feel the burger coming on.”


On the way home, William thought he saw Louisa’s car parked outside a cell phone store. The weeks since the Hollister incident had been an uncertain time for him: what he could bring into the light, what needed to stay under wraps. The day before, the parcel post man had come again. Through the window he could see the brown truck grazing in the street. He was halfway to the front door when he stopped: if he signed for the package, Louisa would know he was home during the day.

William got an e-mail from Fitch, who said he’d witnessed a whispered conversation between George Hollister and Baker. “I’m not sure what they were talking about,” he wrote. “I guess it was you. I’m not sure.” Even Fitch’s e-mails fidgeted. Later, Baker called, and though William didn’t pick up, he listened to the message, which contained a highly vague consideration of the company’s likely recourse. “I feel I’d be remiss not to be comprehensive about the possible outcomes. There is a suspension policy outlined in the employee handbook.”

“You’d better get used to having me around,” William said to Blondie. “Did you hear that? Suspension policy outlined.” The dog tried to turn away, but he gripped the underside of her jaw. He needed maximum engagement. “Let me tell you what happened today at work,” he said. Harris had worn the same shoes and tie as George Hollister and taken some ribbing for it. Cohoe had tricked Susannah Moore into believing he had slept in the office to finish up the Powell account. Or maybe he had left the office early to go to the doctor, just for a checkup. More practice: William would tell these stories to Louisa, and she would nod, not really listening, and he would be secretly disappointed that she was no closer to finding him out.