The Slide: A Novel (18 page)

The bird by the window turned to give me a full profile. My gaze went to the shadows on the attic’s floor, which I followed over to the small puddles forming around Freddy’s pale feet.

“That’s the reason you can’t look at me it’s your eyes your eyes are like teeth like shark teeth they are starving. Eyes can show love but there is no love in teeth. Your shark eyes make me have to go away.”

“I understand,” I said. “And I think it’s an issue of resentment. I think part of me resents you for leaving me alone.”

“I’m here I’m right here.”

“Either I resent you or I resent myself, or maybe I resent Richard and Carla. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“But there’s no difference no difference we’re the
same
because Dad is the same and Mom is the same we’re all the same thing. This is what it means to be a family to have everyone separate but the same.”

An idea came to me. Such joy did I take in this idea that it left almost no room to be pleased with myself for coming up with it. I knew enough about myself to know it was only a matter of time until I disobeyed and looked at Freddy. As long as I could see, I would look. This could only work if I was somehow made blind. I stood and moved toward the window.

“Where are you going what are you doing?”

“If there’s light in here, I’m going to look,” I said. The cardinal cleared off to another corner of the attic. I bent to pick up the fallen box. “I’m a visual learner. It’s that simple. Hold on a second. Once it’s dark we’ll be fine. I won’t be tempted to look.”

“Leave my box there don’t move it.”

“Cardboard boxes are designed to be moved,” I said, lifting.

I hefted the box on top of the other and shimmied it back against the window, sealing out the streetlight. I turned and faced back into the attic.

“Freddy?”

I struggled to adjust to the modicum of remaining light. After a minute I was able to pick out the shapes of boxes and the trapdoor and ladder downstairs. Freddy, of course, was gone. I laid myself across the box mattress and heard the bird flitter through some unseen ceiling aperture back into the night.

I stood in the warehouse, watching the company’s black workers run the bottling machine. Purified water, drawn from the city’s wells and treated with some combination of chemicals and filters, got red caps. Turquoise was Natural Spring, from a spring somewhere in southern Missouri. Blue caps were saved for Premium, drawn from an exclusive, highbrow spring in rural Arkansas. Cheap, better, best. But the more I looked, the more it seemed all the waters were coming from the same giant drum. I was likely missing something simple and easily explained. But what an infinitely abusable system: the arbitrary assignment of quality and value based on color. These basic long-standing assumptions I held about goods and services and the way things worked—threatened every time Marshall pulled a lever to fill the bottles, which slid to Eddie waiting at the end of the belt. No check, no balance. One big drum. Eddie grabbed soft plastic caps from the boxes at his feet and hammered them onto a bottle. Bottles collected into racks arranged by color.
Worth.

The van, though, was real. All the rust and all the stink surrounded me as I waited in highway traffic that made no sense and seemed to come out of nowhere. Two lanes thinned to one, and the left-turn signal of the car in front of me pulsed endlessly. But there was nowhere to turn. I began a series of maneuvers to alert the car’s driver of his signal. I turned on my own blinker and let it go for a minute. I waved my left hand out the window. I tried to honk, but the only sound that came of it was that of fist pounding dead steering-wheel vinyl. A total breakdown of communication. The signal blinked.

Audrey always had difficulty reconciling the titanic danger of driving with the laissez-faireness with which most people approached it. Whereas otherwise her life was defined by a sort of reckless assertion, which I loved, behind the wheel she went turtle. The caution she exhibited at every corner or hillcrest, every highway on-ramp. Driving as if acceleration itself was to blame for the modern world’s many crises.

“Green,” I would say with forced patience, which isn’t anything like real patience. “Aud. Green light.”

“What’s our hurry here exactly? Must you snap?”

Riding shotgun, I was implicated and therefore guilty to the force gathering behind us, the fully justified rile. Horns and the squeal of tires as drivers cut around us, then back into our lane. Glaring on the way by or slowing briefly to our pace and gesturing, yelling.

“It’s just there’s a contract in play. We all agree that when the light changes, we’ll move forward. By not moving forward—”

“Am
too
moving.”

“By inching forward like this you violate the contract. Which explains the honking. And this guy with the finger.”

“Oh hurryhurry big hurry. We’re, what, slaves to a lightbulb?”

And for the lightbulb comment I would fall back into love with her as we accumulated speed, only of course to stop at another light a few blocks down the road, be surrounded again by the same cars and fingers and the same eyes. Whole thing all over again.

I finished the day’s deliveries by one-thirty and went directly to Stuart’s. I stepped over a cat and made my way around the house. There was one body at the pool, a female person in a lounge chair. Marianne. This was becoming serious, and I felt myself inch toward some psychic sort of edge. Who was this farm girl? What really was she doing here, really? She waved to me, and the well-known guidelines said I was supposed to wave back and continue my approach. Then I realized it wasn’t Marianne sitting by the pool waving but Deanna, Stuart’s stepmother. I unlatched the fence and walked toward the pool.

“Can you believe it? Sometimes even little old me is allowed to use my own goddamn pool.”

There were two plastic cups and a crowded ashtray on the table next to her chair. The top to her swimsuit hung loosely and covered her in a way that seemed coincidental. She wore dark sunglasses, big black circles like two coasters hiding most of her face. There was no way to know if she was looking at me or the house or nothing at all.

“And now, which one are you?”

“Potter Mays,” I said. “We’ve met before.”

“That might could be, Potter Mays. You the one who just finished school?”

“They gave me a rolled-up piece of paper and everything.”

“Well well. That makes you how old?”

“Twenty-four. I took two years off halfway through school so I could travel around. Just you know. Be.”

She dropped her glasses down her nose. I stood near her feet. She appraised, then smiled, showing an unnaturally bright set of perfect teeth.

“Bull
shit
you did. You’re no more twenty-four than I am sober.”

Deanna was a tall woman with long legs stretched and crossed at the ankle. I wanted to age her in the early region of forties, but with second wives it was sometimes hard to know. She’d been John Hurst’s secretary for six years when he told Stuart’s mother they were no longer husband and wife. Twenty-some-odd years of marriage, an unspeakable betrayal. So there was a villainous sheen to the woman, a covering of something like dust from the marital demolition she was so central to. This combined well with the boastful air she conveyed. Two years ago I’d reacted to the news of the divorce with a mixture of undefined awe and reluctant envy. Allegiances shattered, commandments broken—it was a scandal compelling on several levels. But that they’d gone so far as to marry somehow saddened and thickened the farce. I considered asking how many words she could type per minute.

“He’s not here, I take it.”

“Him and that country girl drove off an hour ago. Can’t say where they went. But if you’re planning on staying I’m going to insist you make me a drink. Gin, splash of tonic, and about five ice cubes.”

I went inside and pulled a plastic cup from the cupboard. What was it about second wives? X years his junior. X years younger than wife the first. Without these bases of comparison they would float agelessly among us. Maybe it was the adjective alone,
second
. All this word implied. The same way ours was a
college
romance, encapsulated within a very small and jagged-edged universe. Outside of that universe we were without adjective, floating in the ether. Gin and tonic happened to be Audrey’s drink of choice. It was also Carmel’s. In fact it was Carmel’s drink first, decried with rigid authority. Boop bop gin. Beep blip tonic. I stirred the drink and walked back outside.

“There’s a doll. Damn if it isn’t hotter than all hell.”

I saw the slightly exhausted sag of her upper arms, the prominence of veins on legs bent and pinched at the knee, the patient weariness in the corners of her mouth.
Gravity
. But still she lacked the markings of a serious caregiver. Stuart’s real mother was a small and gentle woman, the sort of mother who’s made ecstatic each time one of her children surpasses her in height. Teaching her family to share and listen and care for those with fewer resources, which for the Hursts was everyone; her work was to offset the various corruptions embedded within the world of limitless capital.

I asked if I would offend her with a personal question, and she said, “Oh
please
.”

“Why didn’t you ever have children of your own?”

“A certain mechanic I loved once told me I lacked the shocks and struts to be a good parent. No, I have never been keen on children. How about you. Kids?”

“Just myself.”

She took a long sip, then swirled the ice with a finger. I asked what she thought of Marianne and she licked the finger.

“Where in the hell is your drink?”

“Stuart believes she’s a genius,” I said.

“Oh, he does, does he. Well, she might be. Though I wonder if he’s thinking of the right kind of genius. Got a tendency to miss things from time to time. Misinterpret. There ever was a boy who got wrapped up in his own legend, it’s our Stewey. Of course I never said that. Who am I to judge the prince of this land.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Sit down, Potter Mays. You’re in my sun. That’s better. What I mean is, Stuart Hurst, Esquire, fancies himself the center of a very specific world. Am I right? Heir to a throne he doesn’t much want. Am I right?” She set down her drink and dropped her lounge chair two clicks toward flat. “Lends him an air of authority. He’s got this kind of resistance about him, though everyone alive knows it’s a matter of time alone until he goes working for his daddy.”

“I guess. Sure.”

“Sure you’re sure. Now. What is it brings you to the prince?”

I looked at Deanna and felt a gust of exclusion blown in from some foreign land I was too young and stupid to even visit. I felt like a dog might feel, staring at a horse. We were the same shape, roughly, but the differences in scale and skills were immense.

“Just a quaint, selfish concern. Nothing important.”

“Some girl, I bet. Some dumb girl doing dumb things got you worried might be the goddamn end of the universe. And by now we’re old friends, Potter Mays. Friends share.”

Here was a woman who’d persisted long enough as a secretary that she eventually usurped her boss’s master bedroom. Before, she had loved at least one mechanic. But what else? What jobs, what varied lives with what array of others? She had been run through a system, her own sequence of boxes checked or left empty. She emerged older, scathed, and was rewarded with astounding wealth, empty days of cat-watching and gin. By all standards, she’d won. Deanna Hurst had beaten them all.

“There’s a girl,” I said.

“Sure is.”

“It’s an issue of love. After four years together we’ve reached a kind of chasm. Who was chasm? Hegel? Point is, I either step into this chasm or turn and walk away. Or leap over the chasm. I’m not sure how the metaphor is set up.”

“Chasm. Okay. I don’t mind that idea. I can attest to a chasm or two along the way. Now, but what’s keeping you from making this decision on your own?”

I scratched my forehead and wished I had made myself a drink.

“Nothing. Myself. Her, maybe?”

I coughed. She sat up and looked at me like I’d just vomited into her lap.

“And with all the people in the world, you thought to hand this decision over to Stuart
Hurst
. Boy, if that was dumb alone you might be okay, but I got a feeling what’s wrong here isn’t a problem of dumb. I got a feeling you’re a pussy.”

“I mean.”

“My goodness. You almost had me for a second. Mixed up a stiff drink and handled yourself like a man. Nearly had me fooled. That’s the worst kind of pussy too. Sneaky little-boy pussies like yourself.”

And as if I owed her further proof, I offered no defense. All I could do was sit there while she pounded the rest of her drink and lay back down into her lounger. Swallowing and smiling with disgust. I couldn’t imagine what her eyes might have looked like behind the glasses.

“Little pussy boy, look at you. Who’s the tall muscle freak? Edward? Edmund? Least that one’s got a set of balls on him. By association I figured you had something going on too. Now I look at you and wish I didn’t have to.”

“I have to be back at work. Should I get you another drink before I go?”