The Slide: A Novel (3 page)

two

m
y mother’s timing was a thing of minor and inescapable beauty. Two eggs, fried like clockwork into the hollowed middle of two pieces of toast. I came down the stairs into the kitchen and she was there at the stove, angling the frying pan so the meal slid neatly onto a plate. Every single morning, impeccably timed, an act so simple it approached the mystical. She washed and toweled the pan, then returned it beneath the counter, where it waited until the next morning.

I spent a lot of time saying
thank you
.

There felt a certain theatricality in play. I was audience to my mother’s ongoing task to prove to herself there were things to be done. I sat on a stool at the counter and watched her move through the kitchen and into the new computer room, pass back through the kitchen on her way to the basement door. Humming some pleasant tune. Or from the living-room couch I could see her outside working in the garden, digging into mud and wiping sweat from her forehead with the topside of her wrist. Other times she would exit stage altogether. Errands conceived from those succinct, colorful notes stuck to the phone and pages of her day calendar. Off to coffee and lunch with her small circle of women friends left over from days of teaching or that bygone era when my family attended church. These were mostly divorced women who I believed relied on my mother as a wholly different sort of character, the compassionate listener who could serve as a hopeful reminder that even in these days of widespread matrimonial ruin, certain marriages could still endure.

The doorbell rang not long after she left. The air outside hung like a curtain, thick with humidity and birdsong and green-yellow greens brilliant in the sun. A delivery woman stood on the porch wearing all brown, box in one hand, signature pad in the other. Her dark face was rich with layers of matte makeup, her hair shiny. I looked from the package, addressed to me, to her brown truck waiting in the street, hazards clicking.

The box was from Audrey. I set it on the kitchen island and pulled a paring knife from the magnetic strip above the spice rack. I walked a few uncertain circles around the island, grim revolutions like a field beast that’s stumbled upon another creature’s kill. I picked it up, set it down, walked away, returned. I went and sat on the couch and weighed my options. I realized the knife was still in my hand. If I wasn’t careful, this package was going to defeat me. So I went and slid the knife through the packing tape and watched the top of the box pop upward. Inside I found purple tissue paper, crinkly hand-torn pieces stuffed to protect a smaller box within. Inside this smaller box I found more tissue paper and a starfish with two of its legs missing. I looked for a note or card and found nothing, though I couldn’t help but be impressed by the care Audrey must have devoted to the packing job.

For a brief second I viewed this gesture as something good, even selfless. A gift. But maybe not. Maybe reimbursement of previously extracted generosity. Maybe winking retribution, a nebulous and loaded inside joke. Four years ago I had found this starfish washed onto the jagged black beach rocks at Big Sur, then carried it up the hill to Audrey, lying horizontal on the hiking trail, eyes closed to the afternoon’s fleeting bits of sun as it descended into that great blue-gray body of water to our right. I had been searching for something to give to her since we met the night before. I understood neither the origin nor meaning of this desire, but I knew I wanted to watch a gift pass from my hands to hers, and I wanted to see her response. On the way down the hill I’d found a patch of wildflowers and picked a few of varying lengths into what I thought looked like a charming little bouquet. Then I spotted the starfish and dropped the flowers.

Audrey sat up and made an awning over her eyes. With her other hand she reached to take what I was offering.

“What a beautiful gift,” she said. And
smiled,
wide, surprised, lovely. “Thank you.”

The night before, we’d met while sitting in a circle with others who had signed up for the school’s optional Orientation Adventure. She sat at roughly my ten o’clock. Later it became clear that neither of us had wanted or planned to participate in “OA” (two letters proffered with near-cultish adoration, as if the trip’s acronymity alone was confirmation of our new school’s pure awesomeness and desert of future annual-fund donation) but had each inadvertently signed up in the whirlwind of prematriculation paperwork. Our meeting, then, was the result of an elaborate system of coincidence and what I would come to recognize as monumental institutional forces. Meaning our meeting felt
official
and
deliberate,
but also—and this was our shared view of the equation—resoundingly and cosmically
right
.

Our assigned adventure was piling into two Ford Econoline vans and driving up the coast to pass hastily rolled joints and tepid cannons of white zin around a campfire. We each discreetly made certain to be in the same van.

The sun was beaming and here was this new person, this softly brash Northwesterner with dirty-looking hair, and she was alternately smiling at me and at the starfish.

“Should I treat this like your class ring, or like your varsity jacket?”

I thought about this while the starfish spun inside her fingers. Already I’d begun to long for the reward of her mouth’s curl, its opening, the squint of eye.

“There’s a good chance I’m just trying to get laid,” I admitted. “But I don’t think that’s all.”

Laughter then, and I bore witness to the reward of honesty as the sun lit her cheek as if from inside.

“Don’t assume this means you’re getting into my pants,” she said.

“In that case give it back,” I said.

“Never. You gave it to me and it’s mine. So just help me up, then back slowly away with that penis of yours.”

I had never felt such rich desire to give a girl a gift. In high school there had been ridiculous little trinket bracelets wrapped around teddy-bear paws, pairs of almost weightless earrings that slid around inside their little cardboard boxes. I’d given them because I could tell it was expected by just about everyone and I was highly reverential of the emerging laws of boy–girl activity. But for Audrey, this girl with the small green eyes, I wanted to share everything the world had to share. I would take only what I needed and share the rest. In exchange, she would smile.

Hiking back to camp, we held hands until the path narrowed and we were forced into single file. That night, several hundred yards and also a thousand miles away from the others, we zipped two sleeping bags together and I shared select details about my past, about baseball and the Midwest and my dead brother, Freddy. Then Audrey let me into her pants.

I stood at the kitchen island with the starfish. The box held no evidence of the missing legs, just these two dreadful vacancies where they’d broken from the center. I carried the brittle thing with me to the car, set it in the passenger seat, and drove to Stuart’s.

What remained of the Hurst family resided in Ladue Farms. Forbidden: soliciting, trespassing, and shirtless jogging. It was one of many neighborhoods in Ladue marked by one of these wooden or wrought-iron placards hanging quaintly from a painted metal pole. The street was narrow and speed-bumped, overhung by a canopy of oak and sweet gum trees—one that in winter storm would be salted and plowed hours before the city’s own. The pool house sat in the deepest corner of the Hurst compound, connected to the main house by a winding umbilical of flat-laid gray stone. Stuart was supine on a lounger by the diving board, wearing a pair of his father’s running shorts.

“This shows up today. Shipped I guess before she left for Europe. First and best gift I ever gave her. Last time I saw it there were still five legs.”

Stuart took the starfish, smelled it, rubbed it against his cheek, smelled it again, then tossed it into the pool. “Maybe the legs broke off between LA and Portland. You weren’t the only one with a long drive.”

“I’m to see this as a nonstatement. I’m supposed to watch it sink to the bottom of your pool and think, no big deal. Either that or you’re gauging my reaction, making observations.”

“Listen to me,” he said, shaking the ice around his plastic cup. “You start thinking about this and there’s no end. You will be trapped by this gift, paralyzed. You want my advice? On the house? Do not even begin trying to understand what this means.”

Stuart spoke in big rounded words that left little room for dissent. I thought of his tree-squashed apartment and felt something like gratitude, for if anything magnified Stuart’s wisdom it was proximity to his pool. I also wondered how much of his authority came from having only nine fingers. I did what I could to focus on my immediate surroundings. Here there was food and drink and music and magazines. There were cats, five tabbies that roamed the grounds in a miniature pride belonging to Deanna, Stuart’s stepmother, who was of indeterminate age and by all accounts alcoholic. I changed into a swimsuit and took a seat on the diving board. With water up to my ankles, I faced away from Stuart, into the sun, so if I wanted I could look down to where the starfish had come to rest in the deep end.

“She is smart,” I said, and let this hover for a moment. “Not to mention beautiful. Not to mention funny, sometimes, when she chooses to be. Bonus credit awarded to the person who knows when and when not to be funny. I don’t. Plus soft, Stubes, and hard too, granite when the situation demands. All of this at once. But did I appreciate her adequately? Of course not. Not until the second after the second we said goodbye. What’s the word to describe the inability to appreciate what you have before it’s gone? Some ancient Germanic term to capture perfectly the nature of my idiocy. There’s a word, there has to be a word.”

Stuart walked a lap around the pool, went inside briefly, then sat down at the deck table. He opened a small Tupperware container and dumped a pile of Relaxation onto the frosted glass. Even missing one finger, my friend was the best roller of Relaxation I’d ever seen. I assumed this was something he picked up at Brown, a skill handed down from a brilliant prodigal outcast son of Sudanese royalty, some moonlit Ivy League passage of sacred rite. In high school he and I bought five-dollar blunts from a guy on the basketball team, prerolled with the cheapest Relaxation you could imagine. The most they ever gave us was a kind of enhanced headache.

“Here’s one,” he said. “Take your normal hammer with bright-orange rubber grip and top-of-the-line head. Heavy iron. Except the handle itself, in a development I’m sure is my own, is
hollow
. This allows me to introduce a heavy liquid, say mercury, that will slide along the chamber of the hollowed-out hammer, providing an extra kick when the hammer is dropped. Ka
boom
.”

“The mercury,” I said, “provides leverage.”

“That’s exactly right. The swing downward is augmented by the momentum of sliding mercury.”

“Pretty fine, Stubes. Now can you help me sleep at night?”

“That sounds like personal advice,” he said. “I work the technical side, yeses and nos.”

A slight hill led from the pool to where the main house stood, huge and brick, beastly, almost, in its ratio of square footage to inhabitants. Up there John Hurst lived with his former secretary among polished hardwood floors and Oriental rugs and plaid wallpaper. After catching him with the secretary—a scenario we agreed was too well trodden to achieve any real heartbreak—Stuart’s mom took her divorce settlement and claimed a lake-front home in the Ozarks. He had a sister in DC and a brother in his second year of Peace Corps in Mongolia.

Time here at the pool moved differently, slower or just less evenly than elsewhere. The automatic vacuum probed the depths, every so often spouting into the air when it strayed too close to the surface. I saw Deanna the stepmother’s form in a second-floor window of the main house, appearing to gaze out at us for a moment before moving onward. The shade migrated and we stayed at the table, getting at the pile of Relaxation. Deanna appeared and disappeared. Audrey sitting on her parents’ living-room floor, bags packed, tearing apart enough pieces of purple tissue paper to fill both of the boxes.

“A job,” I said. “At least I could wait tables. Something.”

Stuart said, “Let me tell you what happens at restaurants. No matter how hard you resist, your coworkers take over your social life. You can fight it all you like, you can promise you’re just going to work there, that this isn’t a social thing. But it happens. Drinking at work segues into going out after work. And because you don’t know anything about what these new friends do when they’re not at work, you find it literally impossible to have a conversation outside of work that has anything to do with anything other than work. It’s one thing when it’s just two of you—because it is again literally
impossible
that you’re not going to end up dating or at least going home with at least one coworker—but when there’s a whole group of you somewhere, then it’s even worse, because now the only thing all of you have in common is the restaurant. And at some point the conversation deteriorates into a chorus of personal slander against whatever employees aren’t in attendance. Trust me. It will take over your life.”

He was a sage. During the next couple hours we went from the table to the deck loungers to the couches inside the pool house. We spoke frequently enough that we never forgot we weren’t alone. The television was situated along the far wall, next to the fireplace, and there were two couches, both coffee-brown leather with blankets neatly tossed over their backs, and one love seat. In the free space between the kitchen and the couches was a wooden dining table with four hand-carved chairs. Stuart’s bedroom and the bath/changing room were in back. We watched the last half of a Cardinals victory over the Brewers, then went back outside.