The Slide: A Novel (25 page)

I must have blinked, because suddenly something had changed—the group had moved several feet away, leaving the ogre standing alone. I couldn’t believe how quickly it went down. He seemed dazed, then began looking for another group.

Matt leaned in and said, “He overshot.”

“By a good yard, at least,” Eric said.

“Who can be comfortable around a person that size? Look at him. He was already tall. Still is. Then he added all that muscle and he became a cartoon.”

“It would be another thing for a guy who wasn’t coming in cold.”

“You’re right. Nobody here has any idea who he is.”

“The contrast between his cheeks upward compared to the mouth and chin area isn’t helping. It looks like some spa treatment Melissa gets.”

“Did he shave with bleach? Is this some attempt at a joke?”

“Good look, otherwise. Good slacks.”

“But where’s the jacket? Does he even have a jacket?”

They were right. Though he’d made his way into the circle, nobody around Edsel seemed to be interested in his presence. He stood peering over shoulders, his massive head jutting upward like an unwanted thumb. They had regarded him, humored him, and now he’d become the eight-hundred-pound ogre no one would discuss. It was almost heartbreaking. Matt and Eric were extremely satisfied with their cool piece of judgment. They sat on their diagnosis like telephone books. Edsel leaned in and said something to the group’s lone woman and she ignored him. They all ignored him.

“He’s done for. What a clown.”

“Jesus. He totally blew this, huh?”

“It’s a joke. He’s a clown.”

Matt tapped a finger to the music. Eric sipped beer, then inhaled through his teeth. Here was the risk of the attempt: failure, public, spotlighted for these hundred eyes, the opinions and pity and casual judgment. Edsel’s attempt at climbing out of his personal muck, and these young men with their voices, words, eyes and faces, ties and glittery watches. I thought of the right word and leaned across the table for their attention.

“Smug,” I said. “Both of you. I never liked you guys but until now I couldn’t say exactly why. It’s smugness. You assholes ooze it with the grins, shit-eating grins and smugness to spare, wearing your slacks, talking your smug shit. Festering smugness, all cozy and smug, got your wives, income, why bother to even try anything. Try something.”

I stood up and waded through the thin crowd of people, most of whom appeared to be in their twenties. At the bar, I turned and stepped onto the foot railing to boost myself over the canopy of heads.
Improvement.
The legendary notion of personal advancement, of bootstraps and pulling upward, here condensed to its purest form.

Edsel was sitting alone at the table when I returned. I sat with him. The beard had served as both weapon and shield. Now he was naked and revealing more than he should have. Didn’t he know this was no place to exhibit gloom? I slid one of the two beers across to the maudlin ogre.

“Something’s gone wrong. I miscalculated, Mays. I shit the bed.”

“It was your rookie attempt,” I said. “They say disappointment keeps you irritated and therefore motivated.”

He spent the next minute staring into my face while I took sips from my beer and tried to act naturally. Occasionally I watched back. Soon enough, I witnessed a change. His features went from those of the rebuked failure to something else, a hopefulness. He shrugged and settled into confidence. Just like that.

“Yeah well, no shit. So I need more training. So what. The beauty of hopping rails is that the old rail doesn’t go away. There are still women. The old rail is the same as always. Skills like mine don’t disappear. Nor’s this mean the night has to be ruined. Look at the night. It is young. Younger than that neighbor you should avoid at all costs. What we’ll do, Potter Mays, is find us some women.”

The bar was thick with smoke and the noise of language. So many words with so many intentions, words born from desirous agenda, well aimed, everyone in this room aiming, aiming. The ogre had not excelled at this exchange. But now, having failed at professionalism, he would retreat to the effortless realm of seduction. And he would take me with him.

“This girl, Edsel, I’m telling you. She comforts.”

“Forget the child for tonight,” he said. “I forbid you to touch that little girl. Trust me. You remember what sex was like at sixteen? The awkwardness? The are-you-sure-this-is-what-you-wants? Is this how a condom goes on? Why won’t it roll on? See you next time my parents are out of town. Be a grown-up for once, Potter. Grown-up sex is a violent struggle. You don’t want comfort. You want powpow and the bang train. Comfort is for the meek. Look over there. Not like that, easy with the stare. Just look. See them? Two friendly girls, all smiles. I’m about ninety-nine percent sure one of them is willing to lie down with you. And now before you say something, yes, she’s got something in her face. Alright fine. Maybe she’s a little bit downy. But cute still. What am I saying? Look who I’m talking to. Monsieur liberal art. You with the open mind. Plus I bet you’ve heard about the sex drives of the retarded, right? You put two retards in a room, they’ll fuck for hours.”

Escape. There was always escape.

I drove home with every window open, radio off, sound of wind like whiteout. The house was dark and still. I slid into my dad’s office and sat down to my empty e-mail in-box. I began to put together an album of songs. Her silver Jetta was full of shit music programmed into boy-scrawled CDs. She was out there now—I could see her through the crack where the curtain met wall—wandering circles in her parents’ driveway. I removed one disc and replaced it with another, and watched her.
Time takes a
cigarette, puts it in your mouth . . .

I left the computer and stepped back into the evening. Now she was talking on the phone, one hand against the side of the garage, lifting and lowering herself through a series of careless pliés. I approached and she handed me a cigarette with the lighter. I smoked and made small circles of my own in our driveway. She looked up and mouthed
sorry
with tiny delicate angel lips. I picked up the basketball from her driveway and shot some jumpers. I walked circles and smoked my cigarette. I pulled a quarter from my pocket and flipped it, thinking heads I would go back inside, tails I would stay. Simplest of equations. T means stay. H means go. It was heads. I flipped it again. Heads. H, then H.

She closed her phone and approached me. I stepped backward from the driveway into the grass of her family’s backyard, moving beyond the limits of the garage light. She was part of it, I wasn’t alone in the process. Hello, body. Within her grasp I felt quiet and I felt warmth. We stood and collected each other. When I pulled, so did she. And grabbed. She went down to the grass, and I did too, and it was wet from the day’s storm, and soft. Then lips and darkness and hair in my fingers and wet soft grass. My knees were between her knees. And for some time we stayed this way. We kissed playfully and then seriously, and then when the kissing moved from serious to necessary, our knees touched, and hers moved outward, and mine followed. I lifted her shirt from her waist and descended down to her bare stomach, brushed lips against untouchably soft skin, the smell of peaches or apple, a flash of light. I moved back upward and her hands went to my waist, fumbling at belt and zipper but not underwear. Pressure. More flashes of light somewhere off to our side, car passing, maybe, or a dog walker’s safety measure. So forgotten an experience I didn’t realize until it was happening. Tightness, pressure. Two layers of cotton, but I was inside her. Barely. Tiny sounds rising, and I stayed with her until I felt the first hints of something approaching slowly from somewhere down this dry road. Then I pulled back and moved my head down to her stomach and laid it there on its side, half deaf to the world.

“Diadem.”

“Whatsits . . . jeweled headband used as a royal crown.”

“Finial.”

“The thingy on top of the other thingy,” she whispered. “An ornament.”

“You are going to be accepted at a top-tier school and have the time of your life.”

When I stood, I found myself sore, tired. I pulled her up and kissed each of her temples, then briefly her lips, resisting the urge to replay the whole sequence again, return to the ground with her in my possession. A girl within arms. But then we were apart, and she moved through light into the darkness of garage, and I slid quietly through the side door into my parents’ unstable home. I walked calmly through the living room, up the stairs to bed, leaving the computer glowing into an otherwise dark office.

august

one

t
here was sun all over the place, and glare, in this season of squint. I parked in whatever shade I could find and ate the bagged lunch my mother kept preparing for me, sitting at the foot of trees. We had reached the month of legend and woe. August, dank and brutal, sucking from the city a steady sour tang of human sweat.

Then there was the other thing, the narrowly averted debasement of my angelic neighbor. I worked very hard to keep her out of the daydreams that came at me with increasingly sexual overtones. Sometimes I fell into a whirlwind of sexual memory, Audrey and others and Audrey again, and I found myself longing for her distant frame—an hour, ten minutes with her familiar body. Thirty seconds, her neck only. Single glancing touch.

Was Zoe a virgin? I told myself:
do not even wonder
. Far more important was that, when asked, I could tell Audrey that, NO, I had not slept with anyone this summer. Because actually this was technically true—if I had pressed myself into anything, it was
cotton,
the underwear had remained throughout, which meant at most what we had done was a kind of play, technical recreation and nothing more—and it was important to milk these rare moral victories when they came.

And look what else I could do! With one minor sleight of hand, one negligible benevolent fraud, I could instantly upgrade the generosity of my existence. Every bottle could be made into Premium with a quick swap of the caps, these “Premium” bottles substituted into orders for Purified or Natural Spring. Compliments of me, no no, you’re welcome. Please, really, it’s my pleasure. If this qualified me as a liar, it was a title well worth the bright looks of gratitude on my customers’ faces. The spread of eye, curl of lip, tilt of head that captured their disbelief. How clear the happiness.
Premium.
Postures changed at the sound of this word. Meaning: the highest grade of drinking water available. And if they pressed why, exactly, I was willing to do this? I said
we’ll just keep it between us,
with a wink and sly nod, and here they grew even further grateful, charmed into one of these minor conspiracies we all so dearly crave.

I returned home one afternoon and opened the front door to the sound of my mother yelling. I stood for a minute, stunned. In the computer room, she yelled a short word and then
stupid
. The computer wasn’t working. I heard a series of clicks, that blandly infuriating
chirnk,
meaning, in computer,
no, that won’t work.
The living room between us was not dark and not light, striped with shadow. Her short bursts of voice came out shrill. She was enraged and breathing loud enough for me to hear from where I stood. And I knew: she hated that room. The computer room, she called it. Angry at the computer and the room that housed it, the house that housed it. I told myself only a jerk would stand there and listen without announcing his presence. She yelled again and I went upstairs to take what turned into the longest and coldest shower of my life. By the time I came back downstairs, the house was empty.

When the second week of August came around, so did the Cardinals. They began hitting the ball with a ferocity that caught the rest of the league off guard: opposing pitchers shook their heads and spoke of mistakes, how they were made to pay. Dinkers fell for singles, gappers stretched to doubles, and hit-and-runs found holes where fielders would have been. We passed Houston and were catching the Cubs.

The city, in turn, was gathering the only real energy it knew. We all began to BELIEVE. Small flags fluttered from hoods and trunks of cars, posters appeared in the windows of businesses.
Go
Cards!!
Local supermarkets ran specials on hot dogs and pork steaks. By this point the salt lines on my hat were whiter than the team’s logo.

Stuart called with an invitation to a night game against the Mets. I made what I considered a pretty solid joke about maybe he had dialed the wrong number, and he said, “Five minutes.” The rolling ad pulled into our driveway, a filthy shadow of its former promotional radiance. There was mud caked into places I didn’t fully understand how mud could get. I opened the door to an interior scarred with cigarette pocks and a deep, deliberate-looking slash across the lumbar. Marianne was not in the car.

“It’s really good to see you, Stubes.”

“Stop right there. No talking in the ad. The ad has become an experimental silent zone.”

“You’re serious.”

He raised his hand from the wheel to quiet me. I nodded and fastened my seat belt.

We arrived at a stadium that was all crowd and cheer. We shuffled among the throng of strangers and their infectious feeling of community, men and women sharing random high fives while beer spilled over the rims of big plastic cups. The panoply of red was about your sense of pride and your sense of place, and pretty much
compulsory
.