The Slide: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t like anything you just said.”

  “Yeah, see, you ain’t gonna like it.”

  We got out of the car and began walking toward the Baja Beach Club.

  “Are you gay?”

  “No,” I said.

  This was man. A particularly brutal example of man, for sure, but exemplary nonetheless. The men in the hostels in Europe, the backpackers walking a few steps behind Audrey and Carmel. American? Care for a drink? Listening to their stories, cocking their heads to project interest. Gestures for Audrey, the things I’d stopped having to do. Men trained in the arts.

  “Hold on. Why is everyone so young? What is this place?”

  “Technically legal is the same as totally legal. Don’t think about specifics.”

  We were close enough now to read the sign that said 18 and overs ONLY. I knew of such clubs out here, with an indoor sand volleyball court and the rhythmic pump of bass, hair gel gleaming in the strobes programmed to match up with that song about wanting to fuck you like an animal. Jäger shots spilled while being passed from adults to children, wall decorations that glowed fluorescent in prevailing black light. I stopped walking.

  “Edsel. Don’t go in there. These are children, tiny little people. Look at their legs, look how small. Look at the zits on the guys. I can’t go in there. Be serious.”

  “You’re either coming or you’re not. Don’t make a single difference to me.”

  End of lesson one. I watched him move into the middle of the line, an enormous body among a collection of small frames in jeans that rode low and tight. The ogre surrounded by tube tops and plastic hoop earrings. I returned to my car and drove back into my father’s city.

  The Hoyne daughter was next door, shooting lazy jump shots at the basket bolted above her parents’ garage. She shot and missed and followed the stray ball as it dribbled into the lawn, pulling from a cigarette as she walked. She hit a few and missed several more. I had memories of this little girl running insane circles through a front-yard sprinkler, cackling and spinning. Now it occurred to me that she had seen me pull into the driveway and had likely noticed that I hadn’t left the car in what felt like at least three or four hours, and she was probably at this moment trying to recall the Five Simple Steps to Reporting a Sexual Deviant memorized for health class. I opened my car door just as she lobbed a shot that was short and left enough to bounce off the rim and into the grass separating the two driveways. She ended up following the ball, facing me as I pushed the door shut.

  “You fall asleep in there?” Her hair was straight, feathered at the end so it just reached her bare shoulders.

  “I was looking for something,” I said.

  “You should have tried turning on the light.”

  “Except the thing I was looking for, that wouldn’t have helped.”

  “Oh Lord. You’re home from college now and all deep.”

  “I am a very complex person. This is true. I am rife with depth.”

  “Outstanding. May I offer you a smoke?”

  The girl stepped over the ball and continued toward me. I pressed a button on my key and there was the flatulent honk of alarm.

  “Word around our house is it’s good for your parents to have you home,” she said.

  “They keep telling me that.”

  She lit a cigarette in her mouth and passed it over. “Where’d you go?”

  “A tiny school near Los Angeles I promise you’ve never heard of.”

  “Loss Angle-less. Wow. I bet you’ve got a story about running into someone famous at a place you totally wouldn’t expect, like the dentist. Because we always assume people like that either don’t go to the dentist because their teeth are too famous for cavities or they have their own private dentist on the set. Which are both completely wrong, I’m finding out.”

  “If it weren’t for the burritos I’d say bomb the whole place.”

  The girl laughed and put her thumbs in the belt loops of her jeans. I took a shallow drag and tried desperately not to cough.

  “I’ve got plans to go west also. My dad says Stanford, and I say Berkeley, so I guess it’ll come down to my SATs. They want me to take one of those classes, but there’s something gross about paying for some number.”

  “I agree completely.”

  I wiped a palm on my thigh and tapped ash from the cigarette in a manner I hoped looked cool and practiced.

  “I should go inside. I’m only out here because my parents banned cigarettes from the house last week. They’re afraid all the smoke is cutting into our cat’s life expectancy. Hey, come say hi next time you see me. Neighbors and all.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Righteous.”

  I smoked the rest of the cigarette and watched her walk back toward her house, kicking the ball as she went. Just before reaching the garage, she turned.

  “How’d you do on the verbal?” she yelled.

  “Not bad. I was an English major. So.”

  “English majors get the chicks, right? Isn’t that what they say?”

  Inside my home, I opened the fridge, removed the plastic carton of chicken salad, doused its contents with pepper, found a fork, and stepped into the living room. My father was spread out on the couch, watching baseball highlights. I fell into the recliner.

  “Your mom asked that if I was still up when you got home to please tell you good night. So good night.”

  “Good old Mom.”

  “Cubs won. Houston won. Cincinnati won.”

  “What’s that make us, six back?”

  “Seven.” He sat up. “Noticed you talking to the little girl next door.”

  I saw past my father through the curtains to where I’d been standing minutes earlier.

  “I can never remember her name,” I said.

  “Ophelia,” he said. “Or is it Lolita.”

  I laughed, just a single shot of air from my mouth and nose, but it was wonderful. I remembered that he was a funny man sometimes, when he wasn’t so engulfed in the struggle to keep this city alive. I suddenly felt guilty for where I’d been with Edsel, out cavorting in the farthest reaches of sprawl when I should have been supporting downtown.

  “There’s wine left if you want. In fact, why don’t you bring me the bottle. I could use a little more.” My father stretched his hand straight out in front of him, looked at the watch that had slipped around to the underside of his wrist. “No. Never mind.”

  The two of us sat in the glow of the TV. My father was gathering steam to go to bed. Soon this man would stand and I’d hear the sequence of creaks and pops from his bones, wispy exhalation through big nostrils. I found myself wishing he would stay.

  “Names. I ask and people tell and I listen, I’m sure I listen, but then it’s never there.”

  “I’m exactly the same way,” he said.

  “You request info, you receive info, and yet for some reason you don’t retain info?”

  “Why ask for info if you don’t want it?” he said. “Whose time are we wasting? Everyone’s is whose. Everyone’s time.”

  “It’s our fault,” I said.

  “Certainly not theirs,” he said.

  And yet still he stood up. Bones popped and he picked up his empty wineglass and he breathed heavily as he turned the corner around the couch.

  “Hey,” I said. “We going to a game sometime soon?”

  “I would love to go to a game,” he said. “Pick a game and check with your mother if I’m in town. Or check with Sherry. Sherry probably over Mom. My schedule changes.”

  He stood over the couch for a good minute, and I could only imagine what sort of torture his thoughts might have been, how this schedule weighed on him, owing so many things to so many different other people. His wife, my father had a wife to think about and care for, not to mention a child for whom he had to provide. Not to mention the union itself, marriage, institution. And then the whole entire city, the city itself relying on his success. And how much love? How could one man contain
so much love for such copious others?

  “Good night, sport.”

  After a while, I stood from the TV and walked stiffly through the living room to the basement door, then descended. I found the boxes I’d hauled across the country and had to tear open several before locating the right one. Then I went upstairs to lie in bed naked on top of the covers, one arm at my side, the other holding the book I suddenly wanted very much to read. William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style.

  I listened for squirrels but heard nothing.

  july

  one

  her family never liked me. This was a message passed with little subtlety. The surgeon father and med-school brother glared at me with delirious conviction: this young man does not deserve our Audrey. Even before the cheating, the screaming and slamming. At dinner during the first Portland visit, I was sure med-school elbowed me in passing. The business-school sister pretended I was either too small or too dumb to address. It didn’t take long to realize that general disinterest and prevailing rudeness were symptoms of an issue more basic than whether or not they cared for me personally. The problem was my love. Whether the decision was communal or something each came to alone, none of them bought that I was in love with Audrey. They decided quickly and unanimously that my claim to love was insincere. And thus why bother? Why even pretend civility? It made sense. Of the four, only the cardiologist mother spoke to me as a wholly rational and worthwhile human being. Given the same data, she interpreted my alleged nonlove as a signal of inherent weakness, an unfixable character flaw, and thereby found reason to pity and speak softly to me with tender condescension I had no trouble gathering she enjoyed.

  “Families worry,” Audrey said. “They need to believe that I’m in good hands.”

  She took my hand and pressed it to her mouth and made clear that her faith in me was deep and unqualified.

  “You love me. I know. If they don’t know now, they will eventually. Just you be Potter and I’ll be Audrey. Like normal. They’ll see. They have to see. They’re not idiots.”

  Before I left this first visit, they stood together once more in a line so I could observe their considerable force. Gathering to see me off, aligned as if to say, In the permanent reality of our family, this, too, we know, will pass. Littered waste cleared off their lawn. And on the way to the airport Audrey avoided excuses, because you don’t have to excuse family, and we spoke predictably of missing and longing and the number of days before we’d see each other again.

  The second Portland visit occurred winter of junior year, post Jim and the blonde in the basement. And this time I explicitly focused on the impression I made. I cleared the table and washed dishes and poured the med-school brother wine. I brushed the small of Audrey’s back in passing, leaned and whispered into her ear in full view of the parents. She crept into the guest bedroom and we made silent love, then lay staring at the ceiling.

  “Stop worrying about them,” she said. “Just be Potter. I’ll be Audrey.”

  Trembling at the sound of her voice, I recognized the girl at my side, epicenter of my world, was capable of mass demolition. That she could disappear, or die, or declare this whole thing over. At any given second she could crush, kill, destroy, with a word. Twin bed, musty guest room, hostile environs: where I came to understand just how much of love was based on fear.

  And still the family didn’t buy it. This time no phalanx, hardly even a goodbye. Airport drive, I squeezed Audrey’s hand and told her I loved her more today than any day before. She nodded and said, I know.

  During the third visit that following July, only Marilynne the cardiologist was home. The other three were on various trips of their own. I prepared fresh salmon and lentils from a recipe I’d memorized and we talked of our final year of school and the upcoming presidential election. After dinner the women turned in early, leaving me alone in the TV den of their massive doctor house. I had never seen such thorough photographic record of a family’s history. Here were Brandon, Caroline, and preadolescent Audrey floating off some lake dock. Here was Marilynne with children at a formal affair. A thousand smiles passed between family. How could these people have been wrong about me? They were surgeons and ambitious young adults sharing a nature of familial love I had never known. They were not idiots. And this was troubling.

  Our parents would finally meet at commencement, a few loaded and awkward moments while Aud and I stood tight-lipped in gowns and dress shoes. Overlapping fields à la those of magnets, the forces here what your boy’s problem is and what we find lacking in your girl. Silent. Masked. I wanted to fucking explode.

  Nor would she even really look at me in their presence. Because by then Audrey’s defection was nearly total, to the surgeons’ theory and consequently to Carmel’s heartless ones and zeros. No more forgiveness, no maybe, no benefits of any doubt. This boy does not love our Audrey. Never mind that her parents’ opinion might have created its own eventual outcome, as prophecy so frequently can. Never mind that we were still Potter and Audrey, still two halves of some whole, something, this injured limping organism of our private creation. No longer did or could or would I provide the proof she needed. Never mind that pain itself could be her proof, if she would only step back and look. Look! Never mind any of it. For she was off—off to colorful Europe with binary Carmel, leave this sprawling gray region behind.

  It was a noon-ten first pitch against the Cubs and we had the French doors open so we could watch from outside. I sat at the deck table, glazed and getting glazeder in the heat, picking at some nature of crust on my T-shirt. Stuart was in the kitchen, pouring a blender of margarita into pastel plastic cups. There was little mystery how the afternoon would progress. Edsel would appear sometime soon, somehow, then Matt and Becky would show up and maybe Eric and Melissa, other couples with their dogs. Couples in St. Louis usually have dogs and are usually engaged. In the kitchen, Stuart stuck a finger into his ear and jiggled it. Saturday.

  At some point the Saturday thing had begun. There were people in the pool, people on all sides of me, people in the kitchen, talk of sports and whine of blender. Now the ogre was throwing horseshoes in the grass. I leaned back in my chair and watched pregame footage of batting practice. The center fielder shagged a lazy pop fly.

  “We lose another series to these fucks and I’m gonna fucking barf all over the place.”

  This was Eric.

  Melissa his fiancée said, “It’s the Cubs, honey. Fuck the Cubs.”

  It was this rivalry, Cards–Cubs, at once fierce and passive, that most bookmarked our city in the national arena. Chicago’s proximity made for near splits at either ballpark, the stands like some insipidly cordial Crip–Blood mixer. Richard had raised me to both despise and pity the Cubs, though it always felt to me that a true rivalry required at least some venom and ire. But people believed in it, and that, finally, was what mattered.

  Matt tossed a tennis ball his yellow Lab ignored. Becky turned a glossy page of her women’s magazine. A girl I’d never seen before, Kathy, visiting from Indianapolis, stared gloomily at the middle of the table. Melissa discussed with Becky the plan to join a new gym. Kathy continued to stare through the table and said she hadn’t worked out since she and her boyfriend broke up, a breakup that was apparently behind her visit here.

  Becky said, “Because, you guys, the other day at the Galleria I was buying a shirt for this thing and I kept literally running into this big fat woman. And I mean it wasn’t even her fault. The stores are tiny. The Post ran a thing today with the plans for the New West County. The stores are way way bigger.”

  The girls wore flip-flops and kept their hair up in jubilant ponytails. They went for hour-long elbows-out walks because you only get one set of knees.

  Stuart said, “A kid I knew at Brown is devoting his summer to visiting every major-league ballpark.”

  “The fuck for?” Eric said.

  Sometimes I imagined pissing on Eric’s face.

  “My thought is he bel
ieves it will keep him alive longer.” Stuart raised his hands and gestured. “Checking them off of his list.”

  “He should practice yoga,” Melissa said.

  “Consider the raw vigor of a professional baseball game,” Stuart said. “Twenty-eight stadiums in one summer, bypassing two in Canada. You average, what, twenty-some thousand people per game? We’re looking at serious life exposure.”

  I watched shirtless Edsel throw four horseshoes, then make his way over to our table. There was something always vaguely threatening about the slowness with which he’d approach. The predator bearing calmly down.

  Stuart finished the Relaxation with one grand pull. “Going to a ballpark on game day is like putting death on hold while you click over to see who’s on the other line. Once the summer’s over and he’s seen the parks, I’m going to sit down with him and have a nice long talk. See if he feels more alive. My guess is yes.”

  Eric said, “You want to feel alive? Contribute. Put on a pair of slacks and go to work.”

  And I thought, Just because you and your future wife say fuck back and forth, it doesn’t mean I have to respect you. I watched the ogre squeeze the tennis ball in his palm. Every now and then he caught my eye and twisted his face into some rictus of I couldn’t tell what because of the beard: joy, pain, mockery, repulsion.

  “Contribute,” Eric said. “Save the nonsense for retirement.”

  I lit a cigarette and held it between my lips. Grasping the wrought-iron chair, I turned my torso severely to the right, stretching my sore back. Matt and Eric had moved to floating recliners, their distended stomachs baking like flesh muffins in the summer heat. For a moment they appeared not as peers but as decaying matter, two assortments of biological dross wasting in the sun, slowly and relentlessly advancing toward death. I put out the cigarette and stood.