The Slide: A Novel (5 page)

WOMAN:
A beautiful
beautiful
roof.

Fish-eye shots of fountains spewing from the ground floor toward the ceiling, computer renderings of a crowded food court, all sleek-lined and reflective. Towering palms sprouting from huge clay pots.

MAN:
You have to be there to believe it.

WOMAN:
Be there.

MAN:
Believe it.

WOMAN:
September first. Will you be there?

Upstairs in bed, I listened to things I couldn’t see. Air conditioner. Branches against windows. Squirrels in the attic. Soon I heard my mother in the kitchen and recalled that she had her own trouble sleeping when my father was away, and this seemed a nice kind of family tie. I went to the bathroom and drank a glass of water, another, then went back to bed and tried to fall asleep.

At 2:46 I developed an erection, one of these that materialize out of thin air, reversing the natural order of erectile cause and effect—that generate, rather than signify, arousal. Boredom boner. Math class boner. The animal sounds skittered above me and I rolled onto my side.

Two unfamiliar naked bodies zipped into a shared sleeping bag, growing rapidly acquainted. Everyone else could have been on Jupiter. Audrey was from Portland—Oregon, she said, not Maine. I admitted being unaware there even was a Portland, Maine, and in return she admitted she probably couldn’t pick Missouri out of a crowd of two. This was honesty, bedrock. She was the baby, with an older brother and sister who shielded her like a secret. An extremely tight family, she said, friendship and safety, yes, very tight indeed. I milked details and hung on words and committed names to memory: brother Brandon in med school and sister Caroline in business school. Obstetrician father Doug and cardiologist mother Marilynne. Audrey couldn’t imagine what it must have been like growing up an only child.

“It was . . . What was it? Lonely sometimes. But at the same time you always feel special, like you’re the point of everything.”

“Ooh. Dangerous,” she said, then laughed, and the sound of it I also committed to memory, fearing the chance I might never hear it again.

Sex driven by what I could only call
portent
. Nighttime sky immense and distant, two sleeping bags zipped together, hard earth surely somewhere below us though we no longer had any knowledge of or use for it, she ran fingers across my hairline. Curled into my shoulder and, in that bedtime voice I came to love, then tremble beneath, then eventually react to with nothing but confusion, added, “Can’t believe I just did it with a stranger.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back, “did it.”

I stood from bed and put on shorts and shoes, a T-shirt to keep the mosquitoes off my chest. Downstairs, I thought briefly of my mother back there, alone and restless in her own bed. Except now I realized my father wasn’t out of town. To avoid even momentary consideration of this development, I rushed through the front door, leaving it unlocked, wondering if I should have put on socks.

I walked in the middle of the street, moving clockwise around the neighborhood’s loop. The pavement beneath my feet was smooth and black and recently tarred. My plan was to pound memory out of my head, beat it senseless and move on.

For me the cheating might have germinated in something as simple as tradition, the oldest and most habitual example of human weakness, our mundane inability to find happiness inside what we have. But never for a second did I feel consciously unhappy, so my own explanation felt more complicated than these and was further compounded by disgust for the very redundancy of the whole thing.

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 panic 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.