The Slide: A Novel Read online

  And whatever scant sense this made remained the best I could possibly do. Headlights gave me a carnival shadow. A station wagon passed me on the left.

  This was the break between sophomore and junior years. We had spent much of the previous vacations making various trips east and west, more camping and more driving, guest rooms in parents’ homes, two hands reaching over voids to pull the other across. Some of this was fear, yes, acknowledged out loud by us both. The normal caution of two people who have found something very right and dread the catastrophe of its loss. The normal doubts of our love’s fortitude in the face of the normal selfish impulses. So it was perhaps as a test of strength that we had each semi-passively developed a separate agenda for this second summer. I’d given in to the idea of an INTERNSHIP, a word I ran into everywhere, something meaty and real with a PR firm that required a tie and taught me the value of coffee. I was certain this was a good idea. Her own plan, involving Spokane, Washington, and work as an ecological watchdog, felt just as certain, and the thought after two effortless years was that distance meant trial, and trial meant strength, and strength meant, among other things, health. And so: we would be apart.

  About midway through the summer, I ran into a girl at Stuart’s pool whom I remembered from a neighboring high school, a girl taller and blonder than Audrey who drank like a sink drain and wore this blood-red minimal tank top thing with one tiny strap that kept falling off her shoulder. Audrey was too pretty for me; everyone I spoke to agreed with me on this. In defense I always thought of myself as the smarter one, even in the face of staggering counterevidence. This blond girl was not pretty. But she was attending Denison, or maybe DePauw or it could have been Kenyon, and all other factors equal, nothing brings two people together like a shared sense of missing out.

  “Football games with cheerleaders,” she said. “A short balding guy waving a huge flag.”

  “Rabid bands of fraternity guys burning couches after a big win,” I said. “Or loss. Either way. Guys who leap at any opportunity to ignite something big and inert.”

  “Or dating,” she said, and sipped from my beer. “There’s no dating at a small school. It’s either you’re with this person, or you’re not with him. With. Like welded onto.”

  Audrey had begun speaking vaguely about a nascent interest in health, basically of all sorts, and there was apparently more cancer in Spokane than there should have been. Before and after what happened with the blonde, Audrey and I spoke on the phone roughly every three days, and no conversation felt long enough.

  During these I found words and made sure to believe them before I spoke: “Places on my body I didn’t realize were linked to emotions. My elbow, I think of you and my elbow hurts.”

  “I like this.” Audrey’s voice warm through the cool plastic of phone. “Keep going.”

  “There is a paradox here. Because the only way to offset the pain of missing you is to think of you even more. Your image is the only thing capable of easing the pain of your image. I think of the breakfast we had at that little airport diner after you kept me up all night. Your hair up in a bandanna, only one earring.”

  “Your fault up all night. Your fault only one earring. How could I sleep after that? How could I let you sleep after doing that with me?”

  “We are in a state of total sexual exhaustion. You are sitting at the table stirring your coffee. The planes are to my left. You lift the coffee with both hands to blow across its surface, I see the two rings on your right hand, and your lips pinch into a shape like an animal home or cave opening. And I watch closely while you watch me, and you blow out, and I imagine crawling in and exploring. Then you do the wink and I nearly die.”

  “Potter, tell me again you love me.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You don’t have to say it every time I ask.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Tell me again,” she said, and I did.

  But look. There I am on the couch of Stuart’s pool house, and here is the admittedly not beautiful blond girl in the red tank. She has the shoulders and neck and body of all women. She is another woman. People are going home and she is leaning, pressing a hand into the leather cushion and saying:

  “You probably shouldn’t sleep on this couch.”

  “My skin,” I explained. “It sticks every time I roll over.”

  “What you should probably do is drive me home. I’m staying in my parents’ basement. You should see it. My mom just had it redone like an apartment down there.”

  I parked two driveways down from her house. We ducked through a basement door into a room dark as punctuation, with the dank smell of sustained moisture, and all I could think was BE QUIET, like as long as we didn’t make a sound everything would be just fine. We stumbled onto her bed and went straight for the middles, no respect for nicety. On my way back to the car I stopped, curled, and puked violently into the hedge, which I suppose lent a taste of realism.

  Having completed one loop around my parents’ neighborhood, I began a second. I was going to walk until I’d barely make it up the steps to my room, drag my sorry frame up there, and fall immediately asleep. Squirrels or no, eventually insomnia had to yield to exhaustion. I walked faster.

  A month later we were back at school, together in Audrey’s room. The internship was over and people in Spokane continued to have cancer. How hard would it be to pretend nothing had changed?

  “Tell me something,” she said, threading arms through a shirt. I ran a hand up her thigh and spoke truthfully. “I missed you so much there was a texture to it. I could palpate and feel myself missing you.” I reached up and lifted her shirt.

  Little pieces of my running shoes reflected the streetlamps, and this, for some reason, made me walk even faster.

  I had never known true guilt, never known even a diluted version to hold up to what I felt once I was back at school. And the experience of guilt was more worrisome than the fear of the guilt’s origin coming to light, was worse for its utter complexity and richness of feeling and certain sort of beauty. This would become occasion for great internal turmoil, that the guilt felt richer even than what I called love. But of course if not for the love the guilt wouldn’t be guilt, it would be only a sense of achievement, however minor.

  But the real poetry of it all was housed in the fact that Audrey, too, had cheated that summer. With a man named Jim. She allowed Jim to stick his dirty hippie penis into her precious and private vagina. Jim who continued to exist in my mind, as I walked without growing tired, as a thick, tall, curly-haired beaver man in broken-down sandals and a perpetual three-day beard.

  We passed months at school before anything became known. Into October. I awoke those mornings in her flowered sheets, angled into her vacated half of the bed. She would be at class or out jogging or really wherever, and my eyes would come into focus on the things that defined her: the raggedy bear without a nose or ears; framed pictures of her with brother and sister, the dock of some lake, pictures of her parents in their youth, pictures of the five of them, their own little private army, on Christmas morning; her clothes scattered madly across everything at all. Computer up there on her desk. Windows open.

  On the third lap I switched from brisk walk to slow jog. A man in a bathrobe hustled from his house to a Mercedes in the driveway, rummaged by dome light through the front seat, then turned and sprinted back inside. The house’s automatic lights stayed on for a few moments, a footprint in wet sand. I kept jogging.

  Somewhere is a doctorate thesis waiting to be written on how many times a given person can confront an open e-mail in-box before personal ethics and respect for privacy defer to animal curiosity. Or to suspicion born from guilt. Plus, if I wanted to check my own e-mail while at Audrey’s, on the chance that say a classmate or professor had written me, it meant I had to first sign out of hers. And hers was open. There. Still naked, I moved from bed to her desk chair, and there they were: a series of messages from out-doorjim71. Cool sweat, the sweat of p
anic as I scrolled down the page. In ten minutes I had read them all, roughly twenty messages from Jim. Who tested soil pH and loved the earth mother. Who spoke of the nights around the fire and the guitar he played for her. Who wrote songs for her. Hippie asshole Jim, who claimed to love and cherish my Audrey in ways that far eclipsed the amount of time they’d spent together.

  I still still wasn’t wasn’t tired.

  Audrey sits cross-legged on top of the bed I made after discovering the reality of this Jim hippie fuck. I stand by the door.

  “Love? He loves you? Two months in the forest and this guy tosses around love like some what, like Frisbee? Some glowstick?”

  “This is my computer. These, all of these, are my messages.”

  “You are an evil, evil woman.”

  “Potter? Did you see what I wrote back? Nothing! Because that’s what it meant, all of it. I swear to you, I swear it on everything I have. My family, Potter. My life. I don’t know why. Please don’t make me say why or how or what. I’m sorry, lover. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  I open her door and scream into the hallway, “Evil!”

  Shapeless colors behind shut eyes, rage. Slammed the door twice and stared. She sat still, legs crossed, breathing through her nose. Same spot in the middle of the bed, she hadn’t moved. Oh, she waved a hand and shook her head, her face twisted into some highly specific version of grief tempered by dismay at my invasion of privacy. The pressure at the base of my throat, rage, my esophagus massaging a swallowed mouse, and I could imagine my own face’s exact mixture, rage castrated by immoral symmetry, and all I wanted was for the world to be angry, purely and simply.

  And so I told her.

  “You FUCK,” she yelled, and now she stood and pointed and repeated her charge for some time. I began slamming her door again. Soon she dropped the you, leaving only a series of fucks ringing over the sound of the door.

  “You!” I reminded her. “You! You!”

  Before I could begin a fourth lap I was stopped by a series of white arcs drawn in the neighbors’ yard, dozens of unfurled white banners. They came from nowhere and trailed across house and grass, up into and through trees. I inched forward and saw dark figures moving efficiently through the lawn, launching rolls of toilet paper into the air, waiting, then launching them again. I admired their stealth. When my friends and I had done this, noise had always been our downfall. We could never suppress the hubbub of mischief and adolescent nerves. These kids were silent. Determined. The prank had evolved, grown more severe, and I was relieved to see it in such capable hands.

  At some point that night at school, when we were too tired to go on, all the fuck and yous changed to sorry. It made sense; the fight was doomed from the start, constrained and defeated by its own parameters. We screamed and screamed, then crumpled on the bed like two dirty tissues. For a while, neither of us was willing to make a move. Then I touched a single finger to one of her toes.

  “I am,” I said. “I am sorry.”

  “Now what?” she asked. “What’s left? Who’s the asshole?”

  “Come here. Just here.”

  “No. No. You come here,” she said. “You come closer.”

  One of the teenagers spotted me and communicated with the others in a signal I didn’t catch, but slowly the rolls of toilet paper came to rest. There were only four of them, four boys, though with their efficiency it had seemed twice as many. They exchanged nervous looks and it occurred to me that they’d come here because of the youngest Hoyne, the neighbor daughter who by now must have been in high school. I approached the closest kid and saw a face equal parts wholesome rebellion and magnificent fear. For a second I seriously considered punching him, to see if the other three would rush to his aid and beat me enough that I’d finally get some rest. The kid breathed loudly through a mouth ruled by braces. I reached out and we engaged in a prolonged handshake, long enough that by its end rolls of toilet paper flew again, leaving hygienic white trails that scaled trees and striped across the yard. I crossed back to my parents’ driveway and sat with my back against a tire of the 4Runner, hoping the kids would keep going through the night.

  The lack of worthwhile rest began to complicate my interactions with the world. At times I delved into a fugue state and corners went fuzzy, objects floated by with no apparent destination. I grew suspicious of just about everything, including the queasy awareness that somebody knew me well enough to forecast within seconds when I’d want to eat breakfast. I began instituting little tests of my mother’s timing. One morning I stalled upstairs after brushing my teeth. This was no problem for her. The following morning I essentially sprinted from my bed to the kitchen, only to find her at the stove, angling the frying pan, toast-eggs sliding onto a plate. She was unflappable.

  I waited until she was outside in her garden, then began searching through the cabinets below the phone. I moved my search outward, eventually going through every cabinet in the kitchen. I wanted the Yellow Pages, and this much was good: to want. Frustrated, I moved to the new computer room. And there it was on the desk, displayed as if the Yellow Pages were the whole purpose for building the new room. I split it open and turned to temporary employment, picked the largest ad, then called a small one next to it.

  “We accept walk-ins any day of the week,” the woman explained. “We’re here ’til five.”

  “You mean today? I expected some sort of wait. Maybe I should make an appointment for later in the week.”

  “Walk-in only. Thank you for choosing ProTemps.”

  I dug through a still-unpacked duffel to find my olive-green pants, a wrinkled white shirt, and the cleaner of the two ties I owned. I found my dress shoes and a pair of black socks from my father’s dresser. It took six tries to get the tie right.

  Stuart phoned during my drive. “What is the worst injury either of you sustained in the presence of the other?”

  “I broke a finger one night. Tripped over a bush.”

  “Broken finger. Good. Afterward, did she care for you: A, tenderly; B, fairly; C, politely; or D, rudely?”

  “She said I was an idiot for trying to steal a security golf cart. Then I don’t know. B? Which one was B?”

  “Very good, Poot. That’s all I need for now.”

  A woman behind glass slid me a clipboard with a pen attached by twine. I dropped it, picked it up, and took a seat between a teenage Latino kid with slick hair and a thirty-something black woman in purple stockings. The fourth of us was a young white girl, no older than me. She bit at her lip in concentration, pen in one hand while the other gently rocked a baby carrier in the next seat. I turned in the forms and was given a second clipboard, along with a small, solar-powered calculator. This was a rudimentary problem set of arithmetic and basic geometry I sped through without the help of the calculator. Clipped behind that was an alphabetization quiz. I worked rapidly, impatient to secure some sort of labor. I was ushered into a back room where I sat at a computer and typed a passage as quickly and accurately as I could, something about a woman named Sandra and sales projections. I was sent back into the waiting room. I found huge satisfaction in this evaluation; the whole sequence of movement and tasks was just what I needed. After a short wait, I was led through a door, down a short hallway, and shown into an even smaller room with one desk, a ficus, and two framed pictures hanging on colorless walls. The first showed a long bone-white beach, electric-blue ocean rippling onto the shore, Acapulco!! bright red in the sky. The other was puppies crawling out of a picnic basket in a field.

  A short beefy man with a very big nose stood behind the desk and gestured for me to sit. I crossed my legs professorially and interlocked my fingers over my knee. I could feel my face bright with accomplishment. The nameplate on his desk said Alex Doggerty.

  “Potter Mays.”

  “Here I am,” I said.

  “Well, great. Let’s get right at it, shall we? I’ve got your test scores here, Mr. Mays. Tell me, what sort of work were you looking for?”

  “I
’m not sure,” I said. “That’s why I came here.”

  “Good, Potter. We’re glad you did. No need to panic whatsoever. At ProTemps we pride ourselves on the ability to find work for everyone, from the highest skilled down to those we call ‘legs’ or ‘hands.’ So you have nothing to worry about. Now before we begin, is there any chance at all that you might have, accidentally or on purpose, either way, any chance that you shall we say embellished your educational background?”

  “None chance,” I said, and he made a note, looked at me, and made another note.

  “Okay then. That’s terrific. Let’s have a look.” He opened and spun the file so I could read it. “We’ll begin with the math. Not your strongest suit, but I’m sure you knew that by now. Incorrect answers are marked in red.”

  The paper looked like it had been mauled. Nearly every problem was marked incorrect, blood-red lines scrawled from top to bottom. And worse, upon further review they actually were incorrect. Long division, multiplication, simple subtraction; I had failed awesomely.

  “Also, there are a few hiccups with the alphabetization,” he said, and I’ll give him this much, the word alphabetization caused him no trouble at all. “Here you’ve got Peterson in front of Parvenik? And here, on the one-through-ten sequencing. You put the four next to Kennison, the five next to Jacobs, and the six next to Harris.”

  The puppies in the grass tussled with their gleeful little puppy snouts. I was almost sure Alex’s tie was a clip-on. He tapped his pen on the desk and held a steady grin.

  “But typing, my goodness. Seventy words per. That’s something, I should say. Something.” His voice went flat.

  “I wrote,” I said, “a lot of papers in college.”

  “Ah yes. Of course.” Holding his pen like some brand-new and intimidating piece of technology, he scribbled a note on the pad of paper in front of him. “We’re going to find you work, Mr. Mays. You might not believe it now, but I promise. And though basic knowledge of arithmetic and the alphabet is crucial to most office work we staff, that doesn’t mean we won’t succeed in placing you in a just great job. So keep that head up, alright, hoss?”