The Slide: A Novel (26 page)

I had to wonder how long Stuart and I would go without speaking. It was a loaded silence that gave me the impression there was a reason he’d brought me here tonight. When we found his father’s seats six rows back from the visitors’ dugout, I held my big fresh Budweiser and turned a slow rotation to take in the growing crowd. These people were St. Louis, all of them, regardless of how long they drove to get here. These guys over there, sure. Those guys. And the women two sections above us, in the hats. Them. The center-field jumbotron blinked the message
The New West County: If you’re not there, why be anywhere?

I asked my friend who it was that had written about being
in
but not
of
.

“Heidegger,” he said. “Among others. Sit down. You’re making people nervous.”

Two innings passed without further conversation. Stuart flagged down an ancient black man lugging his tub of beers and hollering
Cold beer here!
so it had five syllables. The man poured like a true professional of his craft, one old scarred hand overturning two cans at once, a system of angles and air pressure and perfect foam. Stuart paid and the old man continued up the stairs, hollering into the clamor.

We went two more innings before Stuart broke our silence.

“Edsel came by the other day.”

“Oh man, you should have seen it. I’ve never imagined that guy failing at anything. But these businesspeople at the bar the other night didn’t even blink in his direction. And once I saw it happen it was suddenly so clear. He’s as human as the rest of us. Your buddies Dickbrain and Shitmouth were there also.”

“Matt and Eric mentioned that you were extremely rude. That on top of the way you treated Marianne at the fair was enough for me to start to wonder what was happening to you. Then came Edsel, with his photographs.”

He took a long sip of his beer before setting it down. He reached into his pocket and removed a small envelope and folded back the flap. He handed me four pictures, each split between green of lawn on the bottom and a solid half of black toward the top. I flipped through them quickly, then took my time looking at each one.

“There’s an official term for what you’re doing there,” he said. I left the photos in my lap and stared intently at the field. Ball goes here, you move here, back up this man.

“Potter.”

“Dry humping,”
I said.

“I was thinking
statutory rape
.”

There is no mystery to the past. At any time you could stop and glance behind you and see the steps, how this then this, this, and now here you were. I was at the Meet ’n’ Greet Happy Hour sympathizing for the failed ogre, poor failed Edsel, and admitting things to him that I should not have admitted. He was failing so badly at legitimate business that he relapsed into his natural state of assholery, to dangle filthy notions of the developmentally disabled in front of me like some reverse bait, some catalyzing atrocity on a string. I was fleeing and stumbling headfirst to the safety of home and the angel next door, Edsel’s first success of the night.

“How did he get there?” I said. “A cab? He hailed a cab, said Arbor Drive and step on it. And he carries a camera around with him?”

“Not the most important thing, here.”

“That devious piece of. My God, I reached out to him, Stubes! I saw him fail. I watched it happen. And he turns that around? Uses failure to catch me off guard? What kind of person? And you’re friends with this ogre shit? Fine. That’s fine. But you have to listen to me on one thing. This was not sex. I will stand by this all night long.”

“Those pictures would seem to basically obliterate doubt.”

“Explain that neither of us removed underpants.”

“You are on top of her like some ravenous beast. Look at the poor girl. She looks like a victim.”

I flipped through the pictures. We were standing. Next we were horizontal in the grass, legs flat. Zoe looked small and helpless beneath me, and there was no pleasure in what could be seen of the girl’s face. Next her little shoeless feet were flat on the ground, knees up and bent. I looked like some invading army between her legs. Next I was holding one of them, lifting it to my waist.

“I am not a bad person. I have done bad things but I am mostly good. I am overall good. I’m not a rapist.”

“I know that,” he said. “Except, also, yes you are.”

“What am I supposed to do here? How many copies of these pictures exist? They should be mine, shouldn’t they? They’re of me. This is me, my body, a private moment. Edsel. Goddammit all. I have to find him, don’t I? I’ll face him and demand he hand over the pictures. This is not his concern, this private moment. But Jesus, Stubes, he’s so big. What if he says no? I can’t possibly overpower him.”

“Fighting with him will get you nothing but hurt,” he said.

“I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. Come on, Stubes. You two are friends. Aren’t you? My stomach, Jesus. Talk to him for me. These pictures should mean nothing to him. Okay, it’s funny, isn’t it? We’ll have a laugh over it. Jesus. Stuart. I said he was trouble. Didn’t I? I said, what’s that asshole doing at the pool house.”

“If I’m you, Potter, I might accept that he has the pictures. You can’t change that. You can’t un–statutory rape this girl. Edsel is treating the pictures as a commodity with a value yet to be determined. He knows he has something and he wants something else. The only power you have here is doing what you can to give Edsel what he wants. He has proposed a sit-down with the four of us together, a frank, levelheaded examination of the situation as it stands.”

A new beer vendor had a mustache with tips pinned by sweat to his cheeks. Above center field, the jumbotron flashed words and chants. I had a terrible image of my father and Derrick Hoyne dining together at Sportsman’s Park, an amicable neighborly meal until the photographs appeared on the restaurant’s TV. I saw my mother and Nancy Hoyne in their book club, each woman holding an album full of these pictures. I tasted puke, anxious in the back of my mouth.

“Four of us?” I said.

“Including Marianne. As an independent observer and moderator. She’s already agreed.”

Soon a group of fans above left field threw their hands to the sky and stood from their seats, the first lame tries for a wave. This attempt spread clockwise twenty or thirty degrees and the faithful wavers tried again, again, until they scrapped through a very thin but full first revolution. With this success came more faith and energy, and I watched the cheer gather momentum as it swept rotations across the ocean of Cardinals loyal, dual-action source and signifier of their joy.

While those around me rose and cheered, I remained seated, clenching the photographs. For the sons among us, it was simple: admire the fathers, watch and ape the ways they sat and moved their hands. We sons of these men, these factories of pride and shame, these creators, bar-setters, and judges. These fathers. And they likewise were to watch us back, see reflections in our shapes and behaviors, echoes of how they defined themselves. We boys of theirs, emulating traits they once emulated in their own fathers. These ties.

People around me stood and waved.

But what of the aberrations? We half-mirror sons, smudged, foreign. These deviations from values. We who survived only to tarnish the men we admire. We failures, broken models. We gauche wardens of history, entrusted with treasure, carrying hopes inside clumsy shaking hands while our fathers kept watch, appraising, eyes falling shut under the weight of shame. We who managed to crumble beneath pressure’s absence. Crying aloud,
here!,
Father, here is what I do with our name. Here, here, now call me son and love me until you die.

Once the wave died down, Stuart said he was going for a bratwurst and did I want one.

“Take some money. Let me pay.”

He didn’t take the money. Later, we saw the Mets score seven runs on a series of roped base hits and embarrassing fielding miscues and one astoundingly bad curveball that hung like a butchered cow before it was launched into the center-field bleachers. As hope dwindled, I stood to let Midwesterners squeeze past. At some point I had slipped the pictures into my pocket. We sat among increasingly vacant red seats until we were more or less alone in the stadium, today’s loss now finalized into the records. It seemed Stuart was waiting for me to make the first move into this new era of looming photographic evidence. I thought,
Stand up and
move, navigate the situation you’ve made here, with your mixture of pathetic
neediness and nostalgic sexuality, you small dumb little excuse for
a grown man.
Eventually an usher came by and told us she was going to have to call security.

I could not believe how many silver Volkswagen Jettas there were in this city. As if I required reminding. Each one I saw belonged to Zoe until proven otherwise, which gave the day’s work a sense of pursuit, though I couldn’t decide if I was chasing or running away. Most turned out to be driven by people who looked not unlike myself, sensible white males in their twenties who were probably not rapists.

When I ended up behind her silver Jetta moving eastbound on Highway 40, I found her number in my phone’s list of recent incoming calls.

“Raise your hand and wave,” I said.

“Weirdo,” she said.

“Yeah. In the van behind you.”

“That’s odd, because I’m at my friend’s house.” People or a TV in the background laughed. “But I was going to call you. Meet for coffee in an hour?”

I arrived at our closest branch of the giant coffee chain early so I could case the joint and see what advantage might be gained by positioning. These plush chairs and pleasant lighting and pockets of conversation. What lighthearted words were the law-abiding men and women sharing over afternoon beverages?

I secured a chair with my hat and went to the counter for an iced coffee, which I took into the bathroom, only to remember that you weren’t supposed to take drinks into the bathroom, so I quickly put my lips around the straw to protect it from the floating bits of pee and shit.

Zoe was in the purple chair when I returned, flipping through a clothing catalog.

“If I’m to believe these people from Delia’s, stripes and oversize necklines are going to be everywhere this winter. Pointelle yokes with ruffles. I can’t wait.”

I quickly assumed my preferred state of rest, sitting in a composed manner with legs crossed. After a few seconds I switched the crossing of my legs and shifted in the chair. The music went to Ella or was it Billie or maybe Etta.

“I might as well just come out and say this.”

“Good,” I said. “You start.”

“I have a boyfriend.”

“That’s. No you don’t.”

“It’s true. At this party two nights ago there was this guy Luke who I’ve known forever. And he asked if I would go out with him. Nobody’s ever asked me to go out with him before. I didn’t know what to say. I asked if he meant like to a movie or something and he said, no, he meant, like, to be his girl. I couldn’t believe that’s what he meant.”

“He asked you to be his girl? Just like that.”

She nodded.

“Luke the swimmer? You can’t go out with Luke the swimmer. There’s something weird about his ears. You told me about them.”

“That’s Jeremy,” she said. “Luke is nothing. I mean, he’s not someone we’ve talked about. He really has no thing. He’s just Luke. You’d like him.”

“Why would I like him?”

“Jesus, Potter. I don’t know.”

I put my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. The plot churned in the background, wheels greased to spin silently, high-grade Swiss precision bearings. And now the pictures had sucked another person into the affair, this courageous Luke boy with his forthright invitations.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” she said. “Honestly I didn’t expect you to be so sad.”

“Do you want coffee? Let me get you a coffee. Some kind of latte. Shot of vanilla.”

I stood and went to the counter and, facing away from her, ordered a complex and stupidly named drink. I could tell her about the photographs or I could not. She was a responsible young woman with a firm grasp of the world’s ways, a generational forbearance that must have emerged since I left high school. I could pad the truth. The sheer potential here was impressive, the number of ways this could go. The door was not far away. I could stay here or run away. They weren’t all that different. Her drink came, tall, pale, blended, and topped
appropriately
with whipped cream.

“I didn’t realize I was ordering something pink.”

She said, “Listen, I get it. You’re going to say don’t tell anyone about what happened because you could get in trouble. Technically. You’re going to say our fathers are friends and you know my brother and nobody should know, probably. And I’m going to say don’t worry, please, it’s not that big of a deal. It will be our own little secret. Like it never happened. This is good, the drink, thanks. But I probably won’t finish the whole thing. I’m supposed to meet Luke in a minute.”

“You’re being so polite. Stop it. We have to talk about this.”

“But not really,” she said. “As I understand it, things like this happen, then they end, and then you appreciate them as something that happened sometime in the past. And together they make up memory and shape who you are as an adult person.”