The Slide: A Novel Read online

  I remembered something.

  “I believe hoss, Alex, came into usage as a bastardization of horse.”

  “That’s great!” He stood and extended a hand. “Thank you for choosing ProTemps. We’ll be in touch just as soon as something comes up.”

  I shook as firmly as I could, then turned and carefully left his office. I walked with both hands out in front of me, completely distrustful of my spatial relationship to earthly objects. The baby was staring and the secretary was quite possibly laughing as I sped through the office, back out into the spiteful glare of an impossible and disastrous summer day.

  june

  four

  several days later I came home to find a second package waiting on the kitchen island. White box, flat and rectangular, sent from abroad. Par avion. I shook it and listened. I set it down and glared at it. My mother entered through the side door, her hands caked with dark brown earth and face like birthday candle flame, a shade of red stretching well beyond this single moment.

  “Sonny boy. That came for you today.”

  She went to the sink to wash her hands. My mother’s feelings for Audrey were less than clear. The natural wish to see her only son made happy set against the stealthy undercurrents of rivalry, and the protective factor, the inevitable distrust. With my father it was perfectly simple: he liked Audrey. Adored her. That first dinner together, all the questions he had prepared for her, and how his face alit at every question she offered back. From that first visit between freshman and sophomore years, Audrey was exceedingly good at this. She knew to ask about the additions to the house and to ask about law, funnel what she knew of public health into a series of questions about first Richard’s legal practice, then about SLH! once he took over as director. And she knew enough to never ever ask about Freddy.

  I watched my mother use the small brush to get underneath her nails. Now she handed me a steak knife and stood on the other side of the island. She could, if she so chose, stand there forever. I cut through one end of the box and removed a single rectangular object encased in bubble wrap.

  “A picture,” she said.

  Dammit, she was right. A picture of the two of them outside a beautiful European chateau on top of a hill above this green-yellow tableau of trees and hills and fields and far far in the background the gray pinprick of a farmhouse. The whole scene illuminated through Jesus Christ cloud break, just so nicely beautiful it might have been painted. The picture was set in a hand-carved frame of some dark ancient wood, intricate squiggles and beautiful tiny flowers. I examined closely the setting, the margins between chateau and sky, looking for signs of forgery or enhancement. But the colors were real. Scenery: real. Girls: beautiful. And one of them: bisexual.

  My mother found her reading glasses. “Who is that with Audrey?”

  “Carmel,” I said.

  “She’s very pretty,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And a robot.”

  Before Audrey and Carmel’s friendship, I knew Carmel as everyone else knew her, the gorgeous and lithe girl from Long Island, olive-skinned and enchantingly standoffish. She spent that first year running through boy-men, obliterating them. I saw three of my personal friends fall by her hand, crumble into pathetic heaps and then take months and more to claw their way upright. Women, once her interest in women became known, fared no better. She was not wicked and she was not cruel. She was not governed by malice. All she was was immune to what anyone might call humanity. She was a robot.

  The photograph’s subject was more the terrain than the girls, but the delicacy by which they’d been set toward the bottom right corner was worrisome. For someone had taken this picture, some person with whom I was now irrevocably linked, the photo-taker a surrogate me, and I surrogate him. Or her. Or him.

  Audrey’s other friendships remained loose affairs with little given or taken. She had her family at home and me in her bed. By the spring of sophomore year, Carmel had become the third. For a time I had to remind myself that Audrey having a friend this close was a good thing. But there was something almost promising about this variety of selfishness. Clutching at her like a boy in a sandbox unwilling to share his favorite toy, I demonstrated my love. Add to this the manner in which we moved on from the cheating, confident, recklessly confident, and were made stronger for the experience. Mounting evidence that this, Us, was to be celebrated. Later, once things between us were descending into something not very good at all, I would think back to my reluctance to accept her nascent friendship with tousle-haired Carmel, razor-blue-eyed robot, and wonder what I might have seen then, briefly, before my eyes fell shut in the peace of alleged love.

  “Well, it’s a thoughtful gift,” my mother said, and went into her bathroom to shower. I continued to examine the picture, searching for either a flaw or message within the shapes. Ten minutes later she came back to the kitchen and began rummaging through the freezer for pieces of things to turn into that night’s meal. I was still looking at the picture.

  “There’s plenty of food, son, if you’d like to eat at home tonight?”

  “Yeah. Think I might.”

  I took a seat at the kitchen counter and watched her move from stove to fridge to cabinets, opening the oven to check on the chicken. Carla’s cooking was simple but rewarding, the sort that succeeded by sheer repetition and basic heartiness. Thawed boneless chicken breasts in simple sauce. Croissants that burst from within cardboard tubing when she unpeeled the wrapper. These meals contributed to my sense of our wealth as a bit junior-varsityish. It was also partially geographical—we were privy to neither that snobbish entitlement of the Northeast’s aristocracy nor the whimsical grandeur of California’s recent rich. Nor did our wealth have the history and blemish of the South’s. Like St. Louis itself, we had our heels planted fast in the soil of the middle ground.

  Not that my father had ever failed to work as hard as he possibly could for his salary. He was the director of St. Louis Hooray!, a publicly funded consulting project conceived to revitalize, invigorate, and elevate the city of St. Louis back onto the national stage—what amounted to nothing short of a metropolitan makeover. Before that he’d spent thirty years at the law firm of Cave-Bryant-Newman, which would have been Cave-Bryant-Newman-Mays had he not asked to remain silent in his partnership. He took a junior position with the firm immediately out of law school and, with steady and dutiful grit, ascended. Under the aegis of former Missouri Senator John L. Dunleavy, SLH! selected my father as their founding director for his deep local roots and unfaltering dedication to the city’s future. Born in South City to German parents, skin and soul toughened by the rigor of immigrant life in Middle America and the early loss of his father to cardiac arrest, Richard’s story was one of real trial and actual hardship, a protracted struggle to MAKE ENDS MEET. He won scholarships to the University of Missouri and Washington University Law School. His mother succumbed to breast cancer within a week of his passing the bar, at which point he watched two younger brothers depart for coastal pastures, one to Boston, the other to Charleston. Through it all, Richard Mays remained. He’d never worked a job out of state and had dedicated himself to the city he loved deeply. Enough to win widespread local respect, even a certain kind of regional fame.

  General consensus was that I looked more like my mother.

  She maneuvered through her kitchen with almost musical precision, reaching here for this while balancing this over that. Eventually I stood and began opening my own sequence of drawers and cupboards and set out three place settings around the circular glass table in the dining room. I straightened napkins and made sure the spoon was outside the knife. The house was filling with the fragrance and sounds of mealtime, vegetable odor, the clatter of pots, creak of oven door.

  My father entered through the side door wearing a gray suit. Briefcase leaned against wall just inside the new computer room. Son high-fived, wife kissed on cheek. Tie loosened in a two-step pull—down, down—as habitual as his steps across carpet.

 
Next the wife, with her own acquired and polished habit: “Day go well?”

  “The day was fine, actually. The meeting with the mayor.” A moment’s pause as he seemed to process that I was in the kitchen. “Three of us tonight? Should I open wine? I should.”

  The father disappears into master bedroom to Mister Rogers his shoes, hang the jacket, rack the tie. He moves toward comfort, decompression, release of less permanent cords of tension. Goes to basement, emerges with bottle, joins wife and only child in kitchen. Pleasant meal at home with the family.

  I filled glasses of water from the tap and carried them to the table. For a few moments I examined my reflection in the smudgeless glass, and when I looked up they were upon me, closing inward, bearing serving dishes of chicken and vegetables as we triangulated ourselves around the circular table. My father spoke his quiet grace, which I applauded for its elemental role in the grand ritual, a nicely official starting point. Amen.

  “I had lunch with Nancy Hoyne today.” Carla spoke while dumping what was surely excessive salt onto her plate. “I didn’t realize Jesse was in town for a few weeks before he heads back to Northwestern.”

  I nodded with a full mouth, unsure to whom her comment was directed. Richard and the Honorable Derrick Hoyne, neighbor, had a history that dated back to high school wrestling. Nancy was one of my mother’s few still-married friends. Their son, Jesse, was an outrageous prick and engaged to a former J. Crew or some such model, some cute, small-faced New Englander. Then there was the daughter, a blond pigtailed little girl I’d always glared at out of totally unfair association with her brother.

  “Nancy and I both wish your father and Derrick could get over their little disagreement.”

  “That’s what happens, Potter, when you’re a judge and sit in that chair all day. How can you be wrong when your chair is so high? Look at their tiny heads down there. They look like ants.”

  My mother reached again for the salt. I tried to keep track of the things that were being said. Much of what could have been their own private conversation was being channeled through me. I watched my dad take a bite of his chicken. I watched his jaw muscles work. But this feeling of remove allowed me to perceive them in a certain way, a setting-apart of the mother and father so I could more fully honor them, commandment numero five. My mother spoke and I watched her wait for my father’s response. Incredibly, our first meal all together since my return, the First Supper, and at some point I would have to offer a contribution of my own. I thought to describe my trip to ProTemps or discuss the sounds from the attic I heard in bed. Or baseball, because there was always baseball, a sport that was perhaps invented by a father in search of something to discuss with his son.

  Audrey’s fluency in the language of gesture: the way she leaned into a response, closing in like an insect to nectar, eye contact and gentle movements of the head and shoulders, the way she sent cards and handwrote letters and called distant cousins on birthdays, the scarf she learned how to knit to give Carmel. And now the starfish undisturbed in the deep end of Stuart’s pool and the photograph of Carmel at the foot of the stairs. Gestures of infinite meanings, codes for which I lacked any key.

  “You know, Dad, I realized today I have no idea what’s going on with SLH!”

  But my timing was off, and now he had to hurry to finish chewing.

  “Let me ask you a hypothetical, Potter. Imagine you have a job that pays between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars a year. You are a successful young professional. But your job is not your life. You still enjoy meeting friends at a bar, going to ball games. You are either married or a bachelor.”

  “So in this fantasy I don’t live entirely off the charity of my parents, you’re saying.”

  What I saw on his face might have been a very very subdued and reluctant smile.

  “I know for a fact,” Carla said, “that whatever you end up doing, you’re going to be great at it. Whatever it is. Could be anything.”

  I couldn’t believe how much salt. I thought about warning her, but which was salt—heart attack? Or blood pressure? Surely this was my father’s responsibility.

  “The hope,” he said, “is that young people of considerable trend impact will choose to live in an urban environment. This is what we learned from Denver. It comes down to lofts—young adults with disposable income. What a term. Disposable. Right now we’re exploring options. Widening sidewalks for outdoor café seating. Planting trees and creating incentives for urban groceries and restaurants. We’re considering cobblestoning one or two key streets.”

  My mother was watching me listen to my father. I instinctively reached for the asparagus. She passed the salt.

  “We have a city stacked with empty buildings. There are dozens. Old paper plants, button factories. What we’ve begun doing is looking at the city from the outside, as a prospective customer or resident. Is it kind of sad to have to sell the city to its own residents? Yes it is kind of sad. But it’s also crucial, because if we continue to let downtown,” he paused, “slide, then the inner rings of suburbia become threatened, and the movement continues forever outward, to the fringes.”

  A lot of this sounded familiar.

  “These people out there don’t understand why their tax dollars should be funneled back downtown. The city is where they go to see baseball, and then they leave. But nobody has to leave. Leaving can be undone.” Here he set down his fork and began gesturing with his hands, flat, gliding motions over his plate. “The goal is a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Down town doesn’t have to die. We’re going to pump that place so full of life people aren’t going to know what to do about it. There will be people and life on every corner, there will be people bumping into one another. There will be life brimming from the streets, everyone watching each other live. People will wave and say hello. It will not die. It will not.”

  The table was quiet. I tried to focus on knife in fowl, fowl in sauce, fowl and sauce coming on fork toward mouth.

  “What’s really neat is the level of control,” Carla explained. “With a loft you can say where you want the walls. Imagine that: wall here, please. Bathroom over here, if you don’t mind. One catalog I saw offered six different models of sliding glass doors.”

  I was eating and having a conversation with my parents, under whose roof I was once again living. They’d been married for thirty-some-odd years. Their anniversary, like all anniversaries, was in the summer. Look at the posture, the nonverbal cues, notice the tone of words. Consider the ramifications these variables imply. Take extensive notes.

  There was an entire family of squirrels living in the attic. I heard them up there, a cluttered, domestic scampering directly above my head. A family of squirrels, each one with its funny little character traits. Mom clad in apron, dad in bowler hat, little vest, daughter squeaking on tiny little squirrel cell phone, son pushing around on miniature skateboard.

  Sadly, this was all I had. Because if days were tough, these sleepless nights were a kind of Audrey multimedia carnival. I saw our past charted graphically, four years’ worth of colored bars and slices of pie. I saw emotions as historical artifacts, their genesis and evolution, eventual conflict and abatement. Initially I’d fallen for the farthest reaches of her extremities—tips of fingers, those half spheres of gentle skin behind forever unpainted nails—then worked my way inward. By the time I made it beyond her calves and forearms, thighs and shoulders, and reached her center, it was clear she felt the same. She ran fingers over my childish frame and smiled.

  You try to sleep, then try not to try to sleep, then try not to try to remember what you’re trying. You sweat and rage and fume over the fact of your sweating, raging, fuming.

  The incidentals came at me from all angles and with shocking resolution. A particular trip to the Ralphs on Indian Hill when Audrey stopped among the vegetables and reached down and wrapped her fingers around a rubber-banded bundle of asparagus and brought it up to her ear, listened, laid it right back down. As if trying to
get a sense of where the asparagus was coming from. The trip to the twenty-four-hour Toys “R” Us by the outlet malls in Rancho Cucamonga when, during a frowned-upon race through the aisles on little pink girl bikes, I stopped briefly to check out a reissue of Optimus Prime, then had to pedal furiously to catch up to her. It was the pedaling furiously I remembered, how hard I had to work.

  And oh Jesus that noise. Even when the squirrels were at rest there was another sound, this awful like tap or pat from somewhere up there with the squirrels, in apparently the busiest goddamn attic this side of the Mississippi. Sex everywhere we could manage it, exploring campus nooks and crannies. Put your foot here. Hold this. The study lounge of her dormitory, carpeted. Later that week we lay naked in bed, fan blowing, Audrey pressing a finger against the twin rug burns on my knees. Pain and joy. Memories arrived with perfect lucidity and a fondness that worked like some inverse torture. Sharing a table in the library, studying, she reached across and pushed my copy of Franny and Zooey to the floor. I retaliated with her City of Quartz. One by one until all of our books stacked into a beautiful interdisciplinary pile. Our ridiculous laughter.

  Like some kind of godshit squirrel carnival up there. I went to the hallway closet that accessed the attic. Tossed winter coats and slid boxes of Christmas decorations into the hall. I lowered the ladder and stared up into the black black black above. Scared. There was a light switch, but it was upstairs in the middle of that darkness, which now seemed absolutely idiotic. Squirrels, I thought, squirrels bite and carry disease. Everyone knows this. I was wearing boxer shorts and nothing else. I climbed the ladder and stood with my shoulders and head through the trapdoor, listening for signs of squirrels. Nothing. Minutes passed, and I climbed the last few rungs until I was fully and completely in the attic.