The Slide: A Novel (27 page)

“Just a couple things to iron out. First on the list is the question of whether or not you were a virgin. I’m sorry to speak so bluntly, but it’s something I’d like to know.”

“What?”

“Were you? A virgin.”

“I was at one point a virgin. Yes. But it has been a while. I continue to not be a virgin.”

“And would you agree that I never abused the inherent power dynamic of the student–teacher interface to coerce you in any way? This is a yes-or-no question.”

“Sure. Okay. I agree.”

“The point here is just to achieve closure.”

She was smiling at me and I did not like it. “Closure for what?”

“Okay, fair enough, ha, good point. Good point.”

Zoe picked up her drink. I watched her lower her head, lips meeting the bright novelty straw. Her hair today was pulled into pigtails. Then she stood, and I knew that in this place of bitter coffee and watery jazz, the girl standing across from me was gravity, centripetal in every way.

She pulled out her cell phone. “I’m meeting Luke for a coffee date up the street.”

I began nodding and kept nodding. Once she’d walked past me, I switched to her vacated seat so I had visual confirmation of her leaving the premises.

That night, I sat with my mother on the couch watching the six o’clock local news. She sipped from a glass of wine. The female anchor was one I recognized from growing up, except she must have had some sort of work done to her face. The man was the former sportscaster who transitioned to general news a couple years back. He took us live to on-the-scene coverage of a foiled abduction in Warrenton, about forty miles to our west. Police weren’t yet releasing the name of the thirty-year-old suspect in custody. I thought back to my mother’s flash of anger on that afternoon with the computer. Now she was completely still; aside from her eyes, open and glazed, she could have been sleeping. The female anchor introduced part three in their ongoing coverage of the approaching grand opening of the New West County Mall.

I moved from the couch to the breakfast counter and watched my father, who tonight for whatever reason was cooking. I tried not to read into this or see it as practice for bachelorhood. He had a dish towel draped over his left shoulder and an oven mitt on his right hand. It took opening three cabinets before he found the serving dish he wanted. As he cooked, he drank from his old law school beer stein.

I poured myself a glass of whiskey and went back to the couch. The weatherman mentioned a possible break in the heat but said not to hold our breath. From my seat I could see a stack of mail sitting on my father’s desk. And what if one of the envelopes contained the pictures? What if they were accompanied by a note, a collage of mismatched letters cut from magazines, glued messily back into demands? Holding the remote with a straight arm, my mother began slowly climbing through the channels.

At dinner, my father and I spoke about baseball while my mother shook salt over her entire plate. The food was passable and I think better than she would have liked to admit. Now that I had my own scandal, every minute inside this house had become charged with implication, as if the rise in our calamitous prospects had given us something to look forward to. Was this instinctual, this secret desire for things to go wrong so we’d at least have guiding principles for what to do next? The three of us drank our alcohol. At any second it was all liable to crumble into a cloud of dust.

Much later, I found myself awake and made my way back downstairs. In the living room, I sat in my father’s chair and listened to the wheels spinning in the shadows, the secret machinations whirring away.

It seemed my parents, likely distracted by their marital catastrophe, had forgotten to turn off one of the outdoor lights. I crossed the room for the switch but stopped when I saw my mother out there gardening. The clock read 2:30.

I stood at the window and watched. She was down on two knees as if genuflecting to some pagan feminine earth spirit. She was barefoot and wearing her purple nightgown, wristbands on each arm. Who knew what cruel circus of thought might possibly be going through her mind. She had a trowel in her hand and was stabbing into the soil to get at something that wouldn’t budge. I stood until I couldn’t watch anymore, then a little longer. I left the light on for her, though I doubted she really even needed it.

august

two

t
he heat had become something you wouldn’t even discuss. It was three digits—what else was there to say? The city’s old population was passing away at an alarming rate. As these tragedies grew more common, the news gradually eliminated their segments on heatstroke victims, interviews with surviving kin. In their place we had all variations of expert advising us on how to stay safe in what one network termed
Radical, Perilous
Heat
and another, simply,
The Danger Zone
. How comforting the advice of these authorities, how nice to sit and listen to their simple, organized precautions.

We were two and a half games behind the first-place Cubs in the National League Central.

My mother cultivated her therapy of voluntary service. Without fanfare or even announcement, she joined a civilian group that drove Econoline vans through low-income neighborhoods with small bottles of water and battery-operated fans. This was a massive step forward from wrapping Christmas gifts at the Galleria for children’s charities. The more selfless her volunteering, the harder it was to continue seeing her as the villain of this domestic drama.

The meeting was to begin at midnight. Once the sun went down, I covered myself in mosquito repellent and set off walking vaguely in the direction of Stuart’s. Since I blamed at least some of my behavior on the place that had raised me, perhaps moving through it at the ground level could provide the logic for my defense. I began along familiar roads, blacktop, beneath overhanging trees, elm, and cars, mostly silver. I left the neighborhood by the less decorative back way, taking the pedestrian bridge halfway across Forest Park Parkway. I gripped the chain-link fence that rose ten or so feet from the waist-high concrete barrier. Occasional white lights sped toward me, red lights sped away. Four lanes total. I had never even considered the consideration of suicide, but this struck me as exactly the sort of spot where it could happen, provided one made it over the fence. A fair, reasonable challenge for a final small triumph at life’s end. Down the road, I spotted a police cruiser hidden in the shadows waiting for speeders. I walked quickly away.

The photographs were in my back pocket, and with each step I felt them rub against my thigh. Otherwise, my attention was focused fiercely outward on whatever answers might emerge from this exterior world. Flooded by yellowish gaze of streetlight, the colors appeared suddenly retouched, somehow more essential. The forms of buildings struck me as more relevant than ever, each different manner by which lines met and diverged, framing other shapes within. It was as if some hand had reached out and spun the city’s master dials clockwise: resolution, volume, contrast, brightness. The menacing dark, empty enclosures inside common garden ivy, a sidewalk seam tall enough to trip over. Everything was here, the facts of the world, the truth of details.

I crossed a street and entered Shaw Park under the watch of a gazillion cicada eyes and the tidal pattern of their call.
Skee-her.
The park was empty of course, municipal sporting fields and water houses abandoned at dusk.
Skee-her.
I sat against a tree and felt the bark press some fractal design into my back. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find here. Some dark rendezvous, perhaps, any variety of nefarious nighttime business, something to make my own moral decay seem tame in comparison. But I was in the wrong part of the county.

After an hour, I stood and brushed myself off, then continued across the park and eventually along a series of dark, quiet streets while details continued to scream my name. Soon I came upon what appeared to be teenage boys and girls in a circle of chairs in the yard of a modest brick home. There was one man sitting among them, light-haired and boy-faced, with the enthusiastic demeanor of faith. It was a youth group meeting. He wore a collared shirt and khaki shorts and leather sandals.

“Good evening,” he called as I passed. I paused and nodded back. Then one of the young men stood from the chairs and walked crisply to meet me. I saw others in the group smile to one another at his enthusiasm. I reached back to make sure the pictures were secure in my pocket.

“Are you lost?” he asked, and I suspected he wasn’t speaking of geographical bearings.

“Not really.”

I waited for what he would say next, but instead he stood there, weirdly silent, smiling, and big-eyed. Was this how people found religion? Were they awkwarded in?

“What are you doing out here? It’s so hot.”

“Our group prefers to meet under His watchful eye. It allows us to look back up at Him too.”

“And marvel?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

Behind him, some of the others raised hands in greeting. I nodded and continued down the sidewalk.

The pool house was dark, as was the pool itself. I could hear voices, though, a series of syllables wrapped in our Missouri cadence of reluctant twang. As I got closer I saw them: beastly ogre, lithe vamp, and fallen sage.

My God, did I smell awful.

I shut the fence gate behind me. The deck was dry. I stepped over the rafts and recliners that had been dragged ashore and took a seat at the table with my three arbiters. Gray faces, shadowed. They had stopped talking when I reached the gate, leaving a silence of the sort I could tell was my responsibility to break. Marianne pulled on her cigarette and we heard the crispy burn of tobacco and paper backed by the slosh of pool drainage system. My eyes went from my old friend, shirtless and weary-eyed, to the girl and her long, knobby-knuckled fingers raised to hold her smoke. I brushed a mosquito away from my face and looked at Edsel. Countenance of cardboard.

“These pictures are nothing. You’ve got nothing.”

“Don’t be a fool,” he said.

The beard had grown back into something thick and bushy. I maintained steady eye contact and labored to project calm disinterest. He leaned back in his chair, raised his hands to his head, elbows out. He wore a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, those ridiculous arms flexing convulsively. How selfish and paranoid his arms were tonight, hoarding strength like this, taunting our own meager limbs.

Marianne reached for the ashtray and snuffed her cigarette. “Just to be clear, Potter, anyone over twenty-one who has sexual intercourse with a person less than seventeen is guilty of statutory rape in the second degree.”

“Didn’t ask. Did not ask you a question.”

No shadows could conceal the truth of tonight’s caucus. Stuart lit another cigarette and passed it to her. I knew of this girl’s drive to alienate wealthy, generous Stuart from his closest male friend. Lithe and prettier than I had previously admitted, she was circling, closing in on her lame, confused kill.

“You should know also that our state of Missouri defines
sexual
intercourse
as any penetration, however slight. Whether or not there’s emission.”

“Don’t like you,” I said. “Never have. Don’t trust you. Don’t like looking at you. Don’t think I’d mind if you disappeared forever.”

“That’s plenty,” Stuart said.

In the moments that followed, there was momentum gathering. I was certain we all felt it. The force had been revealed the first time I saw the photographs at the game. Plain envelope opened to reveal images of stark confirmation, heavy iron ball set into motion along this steady downhill road. And now details were falling into place, exit ramps were closing, alternatives erased as part of this narcotic certitude.

I felt something tickly on my arm and waved it away. If the lights were indeed turned off to keep away mosquitoes, why wasn’t the citronella candle lit? I waved away another one.

“We’re looking at a blackmail of the classic model,” Edsel said. “Industry standard.”

I could sense a smirk beneath the beard. As with Marianne, there was little ambiguity to the ogre this evening. I had told him I feared him and I meant it in every possible way. He was first and foremost an asshole, but he was also a plotter, a man who found happiness in the creation and performance of schemes, which admittedly required commitment and a strong sense of organization.

“I will give you a list of demands you will have to meet. You don’t meet them, the pictures will go first to your father, then to Derrick Hoyne, former State Senator John Dunleavy, the Ladue police department, and whoever else I can come up with.”

“You conniving son of a bitch.”

“All the names you want, bucko. Blow off steam.”

Time passed loudly. How foolish I’d been to think the spinning I had heard these past nights, that not-unpleasant whirring from the shadows, was plot. Such was my inexperience with the device. In actuality, that sound was freedom, rotating contingencies, the many things that might but might not come to be. Now options were being dislodged from the spin, launched into darkness, leaving the ambient grinding of something increasingly certain, the grating clatter of truth and consequence and impending doom.