The Slide: A Novel (22 page)

I stood up and began walking circles through the basement. I swung my arms and hopped. Outside, movement was limited to the slow and gentle. You operated within the rules of the atmosphere and did whatever you could to minimize your confrontation with the air around you. To move with any quickness was to risk angering the tyrant.

“Twelve minutes.”

Down here I was free to dart and cut. In the free space by the stairs I went through a series of basic calisthenics, ending with thirty jumping jacks. Zoe, consummate student, was not distracted. I dropped and did push-ups, then hustled back to my chair.

“All done,” she said, lifting herself from the floor to the couch.

“If you finish early you’re supposed to go back and review your answers.”

“Reviewed. Think I aced this one.”

All of the sun tea in the world, all of the lemonade.

Rarely were all three of us in the same room. There was a new presence in the house, floating shapelessly, this looming conversation that was sure to come soon: the technicalities of our family’s situation. More than once Carla had approached me, but I had sensed an explanation coming, perhaps seen something in her posture that warned me of her intention, and I had changed rooms, stepped outside, or driven away completely. They continued to share their bed in the first floor’s master bedroom, which seemed impossible until I realized that, between them, there was nothing new here. This secret of theirs, fresh to me, may in fact have been old, stale, a gradual and slow decay of which they’d known and adapted to.

Late one night I drafted a message to Audrey, taking my parents and their split as a perfect excuse. But reading over it I realized it was all wrong, too much us, so I clicked delete and confirmed, yes I really mean it, computer.

And when my mother brought home a new water-filter pitcher, her timing struck me as drastically wrong. What could she have meant by introducing a new kitchen appliance at a time like this? She walked through the door carrying a single plastic grocery bag. Inside were two boxes, the pitcher and a six-pack of replacement filters. I sat at the counter and watched her open the box and read through the instruction packet. She submerged the filter in cold water and left it to soak as she went about her household business, while the replacement filters sat on the counter like some cruel reminder of time’s passing. Three months each, a full year and a half embodied by that box. Who could say where Carla would be by then? Or Richard? Not to mention, not to mention.

I was eating breakfast when my father first encountered the pitcher. Carla was in the garden. He removed the full pitcher and held it like some mysterious alien technology, then set it on the island. He stepped back slightly and considered the pitcher before looking at me. I shrugged and quietly mopped up yolk with toast. The silent offense here had to do with our stellar record of public water filtration. To my father, the city’s consistent performance in national tap-water rankings was a source of great pride, our small modern version of the ancient Roman feats of aqueduct design and upkeep. And now it occurred to me how redundant he must have thought my chosen profession. Insults, insults; both of us turning on him, only son and only wife.

Good old Dad.

The argument, once they got around to it, was a quiet affair, endearing almost, not unlike two new lovers’ first experiments with contact. It was Sunday afternoon and they seemed unsure exactly what behavior they were allowed to exhibit in front of me. They stood in the kitchen while I sat on the couch. The sentences I caught were fragmentary and full of gaps.

“I have to wonder when we became too good for tap water.”

“Tastes better, for one. And safer, Richard. All the impurities.”

From the couch it was difficult to know how much of their fight was taking place at the subsonic level. What body language and nuance of posture? She would busy herself with drying a dish or wiping the counter. He would stand still and maneuver his hands through the air over the island.

“Impurities, chemicals, things I don’t want in my body. This is my body. My only.”

“Simply no reason. It’s
unfounded,
Carla, based on fear alone.”

“Then don’t
use
it, Richard. It will be
mine
.”

“These are good, hardworking people, Carla. The record is there. I can show you the numbers.”

They went on like this, an argument that couldn’t possibly matter as much as it did. It was like a contest to see who could say the other’s name more. Such emphasis on those syllables.
Richard
. Perhaps this was the point of bringing the pitcher home: stage a fight for the boy, illustrate the rift.
Car-la.

They stopped talking when I stood from the couch. My mother moved to the sink and my father opened the refrigerator. I sat at the counter.

“Let’s try to all three of us say the word
divorce
at the same time. See if anything happens.”

My mother looked through the window above the sink into the backyard. She waved her hand in front of her face as if at a fly. My father began to make himself a sandwich on the island, folding slices of meat onto bread. Without once looking at him, my mother opened a cabinet and handed my father a plate. Damn impressive, that, and it seemed to me that this would be their greatest loss of all, the routine comfort of spousal awareness. To know a person so deeply so long, but to what end? Once that person was gone away to someplace else?

“We’re giving ourselves some time to think. This is hard for all three of us. Neither your father nor I has said anything about divorce. Have we, Richard.”

“There’s someone at the front door,” he said.

A few seconds later the doorbell rang. Stuart, with Marianne at his side. She raised a hand in a short little wave.

“Where have you been?” Stuart asked.

“Me?” I said, letting them inside. “Where have I been?”

Their arrival immediately transformed the scene into one of reunion and introduction. It was difficult to gather five people into a kitchen without feeling some kind of joy. My parents were happy to see my old friend after all these months, happy to meet his girlfriend, who was happy back, nodding hello with her hands pouched into overalls. Stuart explained they’d come on their way to the riverfront for the final day of Fair St. Louis, the annual riverside whoop-de-do of independence. Tonight there would be fireworks launched from barges on the river, screaming skyward and booming, colorful bursts glittering against pitch black, silver light reflected off the Arch. Originally a Fourth of July event, the fair had fallen later and later each year as city organizers and
SLH!
compiled resident/consumer research.

“You should come, Potsky. Obviously.”

“Have you all gone down yet?” Marianne asked my mother.

“Not this year. No.”

Stuart and my father began a conversation about work, and I listened as Stuart shared his most recent idea, a diet technique no crazier, he insisted, than jaw wiring or stomach stapling. My father chewed his sandwich.

“We introduce a tapeworm into the client that will feed on whatever the client feeds on, like any good parasite will. Then, after a predetermined time—based on how much weight this client wants to lose—the tapeworm, which has been genetically engineered to live for precisely as long as the client wants, dies. Expires. We introduce it to the market as a quick-fix kind of treatment, optimal if you’ve got, say, the Oscars coming up. What got me here was realizing you can’t get fat if there’s something inside you intercepting the food before it reaches your intestine.”

I watched my father’s face for a clue as to whether this was a ridiculous idea or a sort of good idea. His eyebrows appeared to climb slightly. Meanwhile, my mother and Marianne left the kitchen for a tour of the house. Richard took another bite and Stuart poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher in question. My father set the plate on the counter and slid it toward the sink. He wiped the mustard from the corner of his mouth, then wiped his hands in the napkin.

“How do you plan on introducing the parasite into the client’s system?”

“Thinking a soluble gel-cap enclosure. I’ve got the ear of a guy at Monsanto.”

“What did I hear about your father the other day. Is there a new account, something big? A national firm, a New York coup of sorts.”

I heard the women moving through the house and caught up with them in the living room. I wasn’t certain why, but I didn’t like the thought of Marianne and Carla alone together. Then the house’s phones came alive, the staggered multipitched ringing, and my mother excused herself, leaving me standing with Marianne, the simple country girl. She stood at the fireplace, looking at a picture on the mantel.

“I told your mom that she did a great job decorating this place. Except I think that made her sad for whatever reason.”

I saw her shoulders from behind and felt something warm and lurid rising through my chest. No, no, I didn’t care for this Marianne girl one bit. I wanted her out of my living room immediately. She moved to a window and brushed aside the curtain, looking outside.

“They’re thinking about moving into something smaller,” I said. “Once I get my own place.”

She turned from the window and approached slowly. I saw her forehead coming at me and was grateful to have a full head’s height on her. She stopped once she was very close.

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“Go right ahead.”

“This thing of yours about meeting all of Stuart’s friends. He’s mentioned it several times.”

“And you’re concerned that maybe something ungood is going on.”

“I have to wonder how you decided everything you needed to decide about me within those first few minutes.”

“We’re talking about that first day, when you were staring at my tits.”

“No, see, I
defended
your tits.”

“That right? To who?”

“To me. I convinced myself to excuse your arrogant nakedness.”

“How about we make this deal. You tell me about Stuart’s finger and I’ll describe what I saw.”

“Can’t. It’s a long-held secret source of Stuart’s power. I think only three people know the story outside of his immediate family.”

“Plus one,” she said. “He told me the first night I met him, over our uncooked cake.”

She walked past me and down the steps. I heard them saying goodbyes and weighed the options, which right now felt like the only two options in the entire world, ever. I descended the stairs and yelled goodbye to parents who, by now, were surely in different rooms.

To ride in the ad was to participate in a complex and devious system of promotion. I sat in the backseat and watched Marianne’s hand outside the passenger window cut a rising and falling curve through the wind. Occasionally we met eyes in the rearview mirror, though I couldn’t say who was catching whom.

Stuart lit them two cigarettes.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to smoke in the ad,” I said.

“My relationship to the ad has evolved. I’m exploring the boundaries between us. Which is why I can’t just hand it over to Edsel, no matter how much he wants or thinks he should have it. He said he’s meeting us at the fair also.”

He inhaled, then leaned forward to blow the smoke directly into the stereo. He dropped the rest of the cigarette onto the floor mat and let it burn briefly before stomping it out.

We passed Forest Park and the community colleges along the highway. I had begun to fear her in small but meaningful ways, this simple country girl who was growing less simple and less country each minute.

When she said something I didn’t catch, Stuart responded, “We’ll find a funnel cake, I assure you of that.”

The downtown streets were like my father’s dream, dense with pedestrians. We parked and began walking. The crowd had its own rhythm, bobbing heads and shuffling feet. For a second I saw the vision, the
St. Louis Hooray!
master plan. Wasn’t this what the city was missing? With no urban center there was no crowd, and with no crowd as its opposite, how strong was our sense of the individual? Maybe this explained the region’s primary obsession: the crowded ballpark.

The three of us entered the sweeping fairgrounds through enormous inflated Budweiser gates, flanked on either side by enormous inflated Clydesdales. Here among the happening came a fuzzy and numb wave of community. We made our way into the crowd until we came upon two lines stretching in opposite directions, one to purchase tickets, three to the dollar, the other to exchange tickets for sixteen-ounce cups of Budweiser, thirteen tickets to the beer. My head pounded.

“I have pockets full of money,” Stuart said. “I’ll wait for tickets, then catch up with you two in the beer line. We’re going to show this system who’s boss.”

He poked Marianne’s bare shoulder and left us. Deceit, gullibility, monogamy. Two men in front of us wore Blues hockey jerseys and jean shorts and smoked menthols. The line moved us forward and I remained quiet because this was the pattern we’d set within the fairground chatter around us, the children and their tantrums, man talk and woman laughter and the reverse of that. Stuart had spoken of honesty and their unprecedented version of nakedness, sweeping admissions and revelations of long-held beliefs.
Eliminating the metaphor.
The air smelled sweaty and alcoholic. Slightly in front of me, her neck was dark beneath hair gathered into the loosest, most vague version of a ponytail. I wondered what would happen if I just reached for it, wrapped fingers around her hair, and jerked downward, just to see. She’d, what, scream?