Ben Greenman - The Slippage

William’s afternoon was oversold, a trio of conference calls laid end to end, and when he finished the third he went to the bathroom, wet his hands, and ran them through his hair. The office water was hard, or maybe it was soft: he didn’t know which, but within an hour his hair would be stiff as a brush.

On his way down the hall, William saw Fitch standing outside Antonelli’s office, pointing at the door. “I think I saw him in the break room,” William said.

“Not today you didn’t,” Fitch said. “He’s gone. Fired. There’s a new guy coming to replace him next week from San Diego.”

When William heard that changes were coming, he’d feared that this would be the first. Antonelli didn’t always have his mind in the game — hadn’t since that morning five years before when he had woken up early to play a round of golf on the course that bordered his backyard. He had eaten breakfast with his children, kissed his wife on the forehead, and made it to the first tee by seven. Antonelli was playing with an older Chinese man assigned him by the course, which was how he preferred it: “Less conversation means more concentration,” he liked to say. He birdied the first hole and parred the second. The third hole was the one that backed his house; it had a water hazard in the form of a small lake. Turning to square himself with the tee, Antonelli noticed Linda, his three-year-old daughter, peering through a gap in his fence. He waved. She shouted something. Antonelli could not hear and so he pointed to his ear. She shouted again. “ Pete ,” the Chinese man said. “She say Pete .” Pete was Antonelli’s son, six. Antonelli jogged closer to the wall. “What about Pete?” he said. “He fell in there,” she said. She indicated the lake. Antonelli went in with all his clothes on. He didn’t even drop his driver. Pete was in the shallows, not breathing, a lump on his head from where he had knocked against the rocks. Antonelli pulled him out onto the fairway and pumped his chest. The Chinese man called an ambulance. Antonelli’s wife arrived just in time to watch her son expire on the lawn.

Like many personal tragedies, the incident was discussed frequently in Antonelli’s absence but never in his presence. Two years after Pete’s death, when Antonelli told the guys his wife was pregnant again, there was a moment of silence, a tensing, that preceded the round of congratulations. Once, William and Louisa had run into the Antonellis at a restaurant. William met the new baby, also a boy, and squeezed his foot. Louisa had praised him for this. “It’s the normal thing to do, which is why I’m glad you did it,” she said. But in the office, no one knew exactly how to handle the matter other than to ignore it, in part because they did not wish to do further injury to Antonelli, and in part because they feared, like all superstitious men — that is, like all men — that any mention of the drowning might begin an invisible process by which they, too, would be robbed of that which was most precious to them. Most of the other guys had kids, too, mostly sons, and on slow weeks they would bring the boys around and charge them with delivering paperwork or making copies or carrying out other duties that were not significantly more trivial than what went on at Hollister on an average day. William looked forward to opening his office door to a miniature Fitch or Cohoe. The last time, Elizondo had instructed his five-year-old son to walk into Antonelli’s office and say, “Lou, I really appreciate all that you’ve done for the company, but I think it’s time we go our separate ways.” Antonelli had laughed at that. Everyone had agreed it was a good sign. But it was a bad one.

William was heading for the elevator when he saw Harris standing in Baker’s office, pointing out through the glass. William moved and Harris’s finger moved with him. William stepped in. “O’Shea dropped out of TenPak,” Baker said.

“What?” William said. “I was just about to send over the presentation.”

“No point,” Baker said. “He’s gone for good.” He rose up slightly behind his desk: broad, mahogany, it was like a ship at the head of a fleet.

“So what should we do?”

Baker pinched his chin and stared past William. Behind him there was a painting of an island, a conical mountain, ringed by clouds, rising from its center. William had heard the story of the mountain: Baker had climbed it as a young man, though the painting was made decades earlier. One of the other climbers who’d scaled the mountain with Baker had said that, after reaching the summit, most of the men on the expedition acted as if they had survived a tragedy. Their behavior became indefensibly risky, and for a number of days base camp became a blur of sex and drugs and gambling. Baker, by contrast, was exactly the same coming down the mountain as he had been going up. His only concession to the ascent was to acquire the painting, a testament to his calm mastery of the world.

“I think we should go down the line to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Harris said.

Baker frowned and nodded. “That’s prudent,” he said. “There’s another gentleman, a Mr. Loomis, who put in about eighty. I was just telling Arthur, I think you should clean up what you did for O’Shea and then Arthur and Edward will take it over to him. Can that be tomorrow?”

“If for William, then for me,” Harris said.

“It works,” William said. “I heard about Antonelli.”

Baker lowered his head slightly. For a second, William thought the gesture was a guilty one — clearly, he’d known Antonelli was about to get the ax — but his head rose back up on a tide of purpose. “Louis was a valued part of this company,” Baker said. “This economy can sometimes make harsh demands. Which is why it’s all the more important that we keep this company running as smoothly as possible. If the Loomis meeting happened tomorrow, that would be best.”

William made for the elevator. At the head of the hallway, he saw George Hollister again. Twice in three days: it had the feel of premeditation. William stopped at the stairwell. “No elevator for me,” he called down the hall. “I have to go up to nine to pick up a file.” George Hollister started to give him a thumbs-up but then extended his right index finger and, for a few excruciating seconds, conducted an imaginary orchestra. “Friday,” he said. “Scriabin. They’re staging the full Mysterium . I can only imagine that a man of your refinement will be there.” William pushed into the stairwell, where a man of his refinement took a step upstairs, as if he were actually going for a file, then turned and hurried downstairs. In the lobby, he bought a bottle of water and an energy bar and handed the woman a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

“Big spender,” she said brightly. It occurred to him that he was. He unwrapped the energy bar and nibbled the edge. His phone buzzed. “Hello?” William said.

“Hey,” Tom said. “Want to come over? I’m hanging.”

Most of the university campus was done in Collegiate Gothic, but the art gallery occupied a sleek new glass-and-steel structure that had been endowed by a hedge-fund billionaire with roots in the community. The permanent collection filled the flat disk of the main building; new exhibits went into the wing, which extended to the north like a tonearm. William entered through the front door and gave Tom’s name to a fiercely tattooed brunette whose face was almost entirely obscured behind a Japanese graphic novel. “That way,” she said, extending a finger elegantly.

Tom was alone in the middle of a mostly empty large room, head lowered, looking like someone else’s artwork until William got close enough to see the phone in his hand. “Send him over,” Tom said. “I need him to make sure the projector works.” There was a word for what Tom was, with his thick limbs and his large head and his jaw always set.