The Slide: A Novel (19 page)

“There it is—little pussy with that little pussy face. Pussy arms. Pussy legs.”

I parked the van inside the warehouse, tossed the MTs into one pile and the flattened cooler boxes into another, then filled out the day’s paperwork. At home I bathed and ate a salami sandwich. I found the stack of papers I’d printed in the computer room and put them into a manila folder. I carried the folder out to the garden, where my mother was gardening. She didn’t immediately notice me. I pretended to walk in exaggerated comical movement for the audience. She made no acknowledgment of my presence. Her face was in a state unlike any I’d seen on her, violently focused on the task at hand, everything chin to hairline somehow appearing both furrowed and taught, a wrinkled stretch.

I decided this wasn’t something I should watch. I left my mother in the garden and continued across the driveway, up to the door of the Hoynes’. I rang the bell and waited, clutching the folder at my waist. Inside the folder were SAT exercises I had stolen from a Web site.

Nancy Hoyne welcomed me into her home. She offered juice or tea or there was also soda if I wanted. I thanked her and said I was fine. No snack, thank you, I’m fine. She led me to the basement door and asked how my summer had been. This, too: fine. Her hand on my shoulder, she thanked me for making time. Carla and Deanna and now this, such array of motherhood. I told Nancy Hoyne it was really my pleasure.

She waited until I’d reached the final step before shutting the door. Like most furnished basements I had known, this one was decorated to take advantage of the little natural light that came through the shoebox windows up high on two of the basement’s walls. The walls were off-white, the carpet cream, and the couch in the corner a kind of wheat, or oat color. In the deepest part of the room, in the very elbow of the couch sat Zoe, her legs crossed beneath her, back straight and hair parted in the middle, falling to either side of her face. It was too cool for a tank top, but hers was light green. I tried and failed to not notice her nipples. Lying on the coffee table were a two spiral notebooks and pencils, a Starbucks cup and her cell phone.

Angel on the couch, young man waiting at the bottom of the steps. Mother upstairs mixing one part lemonade with two parts iced tea.

I projected officialdom as best I could, confirming that my role was concrete and without room for movement or discussion. Zoe seemed impressed by this. I had brought with me guidelines for the best way to approach an analogy, and also how to complete a sentence without knowing any of the words. I would save when to guess versus when to not guess for a future lesson. Once she began the practice test, my eyes strayed to the pencil, the hand that held it, the arm, shoulder, the neck. When she looked up from the workbook and caught me watching, I glanced quickly clockward.

“Nine minutes.”

After the test we finished with fifteen minutes of vocabulary drills. And here the angel shifted to a position of repose on the couch, which I tried to offset by crossing my legs professorially at the knee.

“Elegiac.”

“Spressing sorrow,” she said, one arm behind her head.

I nodded and flipped to the next card.

“Mendacious.”

“Habbing a false character. Liar, liar, your pants on fire.”

“Non compos mentis.”

“Not his fault. Him too dumb or him too crazy.”

“Demooterate.”

“Demooterate?”

Given the alternatives, such childish play was harmless, distraction from the repressed grumblings of desire.

“Wait a second. You make that up, teacher man? You makum upum brand-new word?”

“The English language is an undulating beast, a universe of flux where meaning and use shifts with context and terms are created according to necessity.”

“Dem
oo
terate,” she said. “Importantizing that which isn’t naturally important.”

“Absolutely.”

I was performing a service for a client. An educated man sharing his education with a coincidentally beautiful little but not so little girl. Sanctioned and funded by the family unit upstairs.

july

four

i
drove, I read the billboards out loud, I tried to picture Audrey with a bald head. Certain heads flourish and achieve a new cranial power when stripped of adornment. I carried bottles of Premium water. Other bald heads are bumpy and ridged and misshapen, an embarrassment. From time to time, mistaken tallies from the morning warehouse hour would come to haunt me in the afternoon when I ended up with the wrong bottles for the day’s final deliveries. On these occasions I would swap out extra caps from the box I kept between the front seats, dark blue for red, Purified magically turned into Premium. Customer none the wiser. Eddie and Marshall laughed knowingly when I asked whether there was any difference in the waters. I wondered what rule book said I couldn’t do this for the rest of my life.

I was in the van when my phone rang. The call was from
SLH!,
and I was dripping sweat, and there are times when a son’s instinct is to avoid even the prospect of his father’s voice. When the same number called again a minute later, I began to worry. For the most part, I’d gone through life under the presumption that Freddy’s drowning had purchased my family a future free from further pain; an unsaid cosmic reparation for the bereaved. But my father never called, and now twice. The closest analogue I knew to worry involved Audrey, and to be honest that was worry perverted by obscene jealousy and idiot anxiety. I grabbed at the phone in the passenger seat.

“Dad? What’s wrong?”

“Hi, Potter. It’s Sherry.”

“Sherry?”

“Hang on a minute and I’ll get your dad.”

Sweat like a ruptured pipeline.

“Son.”

“Dad? What’s wrong?”

“Your mother’s got one of her things. Something at the zoo. So we’re on our own for dinner, you and me. Good game tonight. The Braves. Just swept a series in Cincinnati. Got that young pitcher, the guy, that Ortiz from Colombia. One of these South American guys with an unhittable slider.”

Of course everyone was still alive. I couldn’t imagine my mother dead. Not the woman who could find life in the tiniest errand or activity. And my father was too weathered; men with catalogs of history and permanently broken noses don’t die. He was an institution all his own, imperishable.

“Do you always talk like this at work?”

“How’s that.”

“Short, clipped proclamations,” I said. “Zero inflection.”

“You and your old dad. Dinner and a ball game. One of her activities, gluing centerpieces together for a fund-raiser. Hundred fifty bucks a plate, black tie. We’ll go somewhere I can wear jeans. When was the last time I wore jeans to dinner? There’s your inflection. Need at least two of these three from the Braves. Keep pressure on Chicago.”

The rest of the day I took scenic routes and moved slowly. The pool house, end point of end points, had lost my trust. Stuart had, as they say of overgrown lawns,
let the place go
. And in this matter I was helpless. For what recourse was there, really, for the young man who’d lost a friend to unreliability? Was I to plead for more attention? Say
hey, hey, Stuart, pal, look at me?

At home, I waited on the couch, clean and hungry. Carla was wearing one of her nicer sweaters and black pants that couldn’t be confused with pajamas. Clearly she was going somewhere.

“Is there a reason Dad is so gung-ho about eating with me tonight?”

“Reason? No reason,” she answered from the kitchen. “He wants to spend time with his son.” Now she was in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. “No reason. Wants to talk with his son. I suppose that’s a reason.”

I asked her to please repeat her plans.

“The Zoo-Ado is a week from Friday. We settled on a theme months ago, now we’re beginning the preliminary decorations. The centerpieces and candle fixtures. Don’t ask me the theme, because I’m not at liberty to say. Our goal this year is to wow. We want people to walk through those doors and think,
wow
.”

“So there’s no reason for the dinner,” I said.

“He deserves a little of your time, I think. Sit down with your father. No reason.”

Out of habit I went to check my e-mail and, after however many hundred previous times proved fruitless, found a message sitting there from Audrey. For a few minutes I stared at the subject line:
the search spreads southward
. I closed the browser window and sat back in the chair. A box at least was something to hold, tangible. I opened another browser window and read the message.

P
. . .
so far no faeries. our search has moved to swizzerlund. we got bigger nets and sharper focus. carmel says you’d be a better kisser if you put a little less heart into it. not sure yet if i agree.

loves.
—a

I deleted the message quickly, but this didn’t have nearly the effect I’d hoped. Las Vegas, fall break of senior year. A haggard, early-morning, still-up kiss as just-up joggers and elderly tourists provided context. Following a river’s flood of white Russians and much financial ruin. Audrey was asleep in the room six of us were sharing. Carmel and I stumbling from Caesars and sloshing our way to Mandalay Bay, the far end of the Strip. The kiss itself was mostly to signal that we should turn around. An awful kiss. We stopped cold and stepped apart and I felt as if I was staring into some warped mirror, a grotesque and unfeeling reflection of myself—Audrey’s other, and potentially realer, love—the gorgeous robot who kissed like she spoke. A wholly soulless and trite moment of imagined desire. Its only sliver of pleasure was that of fulfilled convention: to kiss Carmel was to acquiesce to history and expectation. Complete the unsaid contract of boyfriend and girlfriend’s desirable friend. And so a tiny sort of relief for the deflation of that balloon, the release. And then: repulsion and regret and certainty that Audrey would surely find out. Balloon of fear and shame that had floated since that kiss and had now, here at the computer, exploded into a sharp gust of wind, the stink of transgression aged eight months. Stench of my own putrid notions of What’s Okay to Do to a Young Woman Who Loves You with All of Her Pure and Wondrous Heart.

Carla left the house humming and, as if choreographed, Richard arrived seconds later. A flash of charred gray suit through the side door, vanishing into the bedroom, then reappearing in jeans and a polo, spinning the car keys around his finger. His shirt was tucked neatly into jeans held up by a needlepoint belt: a series of red birds and yellow bats against a navy blue background, a single black stitch border around each color, giving the whole thing a vaguely digitized look. Needlepointed by Carla sometime in the eighties.

“You get behind the count to Ortiz and you’re in trouble. Throws that slider that breaks in the last eight feet.”

On these rare nights of nonwork activity, my father would drive his second car, a silver 1979 Datsun 280Z. The body showed minor signs of wear, enough flaws to save it from the boring sterility of a too-prized thing. These included a rather noticeable dent in the roof that both was and completely was not my fault. The black leather bundled around the base of the stick shift was cracked but clean, Armor All-ed to a semireflective sheen. I always wondered if it was morbid to think, even abstractly, about the day I would inherit the Z.

He drove us to Sportsman’s Park, a small restaurant in Ladue named after the former stadium of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was a single-story cottagelike building, split through the middle into a bar on one side, dining area on the other. All walls but one were layered with St. Louis sports memorabilia: baseballs and jerseys and pennants and black-and-white photos of local heroes posing with the restaurant’s owners. The sixth wall was dominated by a big-screen projection TV, circa not recently. Sportsman’s succeeded at being both cozy and pretentious, with a typical bar menu highlighted by the Heavy Hitter, a pound of wings served with a chilled bottle of Dom. Printed along the bottom of each menu page was the tagline
Where the Elite Meet to Eat
. This was not ironic. This was Ladue, home to the Hursts, meaning wealth, and, tonight, us.

In public, my father was frequently recognized and expected to say hello. People I had never seen. I ducked into the dining side and found an empty table. In a minute he joined me, turning his chair to face the blurry television, and sat. The network wunderkind and former-player color man called the action.

“Have you read what they’re saying about this catching prospect? This Brosky. Bresky. Beesk.”

“Brandt,” I said. “Derril Brandt.”

We watched the screen. A waitress appeared who I could have sworn I knew in some old and unspectacular way, and my father ordered two beers.

“People are calling him the next Johnny Bench.”

“Except I guess he can’t block a pitch in Triple-A to save his life,” I said.

The game would triangulate our discussion, a satellite to bounce statements off, replacing eye contact. Mainly I expected we would sit silently, chewing and watching the birds.

The color guy said,
In a situation like this, you’re thinking, move
the runner over and set the table for the big guns.
The network wunderkind said,
A one–one changeup comes in high.