Ben Greenman - The Slippage

Midway through his second glass, William saw a woman step into the bar, look around as if lost, and then proceed to Pete’s table: she had blond hair cut short, tan shoulders, a slight curve to her back, like an archer’s bow. She was walking away from William, mostly, but he saw that it was the woman from the convention, his friend from the lantern booth. He steeled himself with what was left of his scotch and then headed over to return Pete’s thump. “Hey,” he said.

“Mr. Bill,” Pete said. “Meet my people.” He rounded the table counterclockwise. Alan was a mortgage broker in Ontario. Roy was a musician turned forest ranger. Ana was a Cuban artist and, apparently, Pete’s date while in town. William nodded at each description, absorbing little. The young blonde was in the middle of a conversation with a young man who was scouting locations for a new television drama about deep-sea divers. “The shadows of the palm trees are like dazzle paint,” the man said. William leaned over to shake hands. “Simon,” he said. “And this is Emma. She’s a caterer, working at the show.”

“I’m not working it,” she said. “I’m looking for supplies for deck catering.”

“Whatever,” Pete said. “It still doesn’t explain why she knows so much about the ocean.” William nodded, introduced himself, said that it was nice to meet everyone, looked at Emma as he said it.

About an hour later, the waitress appeared at William’s arm to see if he wanted a refill on his whiskey, except that it wasn’t the waitress; it was Emma. “Pete was looking for you,” she said. “He wanted to know if you want to go out with a bunch of us tomorrow night.”

“What are you?” William said. “The search party?”

She moved up, as if by levitation, onto the stool beside him. The small band was stuck wetly in the middle of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” “I’m here,” she said, “to tell you how I know so much about the ocean.”

She was thirty-one years old. She had been born in the eastern suburbs of New Orleans, to a chemist father who worked in an oil lab and a dancer mother, Russian-born, who had forgone her own career and opened a small studio instead. Emma had danced, too, hated it, been delivered out of bondage by injury in her late teens, had switched over to marine biology in college, and had seriously considered a career in it. “Which is how,” she said. College was Chicago and summers spent working in restaurants, and an older boyfriend who taught her to cook and encouraged her to start catering. “The money was good enough that I postponed grad school for a year,” she said. “Then it got better.” She had been a caterer for almost ten years, and had been good at it for five. “It’s the kind of thing where commitment really matters. When you run an event, it’s like conducting an orchestra. So many moving pieces.” She paused and flipped her hand outward like it was hinged. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should shut up.”

“No,” William said. “I mean, maybe about work. I could live with that. But how about the rest of life?”

“Ah,” she said. “The rest of life.” There was a disorderly silence and no strong indication that she wished to go on talking, though eventually she did. “Married for about two years. His name is Stevie. He works for Arrow, the car company, in marketing.” She drew a line on her forehead with a finger wet from ice. “One of his commercials was on the TV a little earlier.”

“How did the two of you meet?”

“At a party his company threw. I was sort of seeing another guy, but Stevie came up and started talking to me and he was attentive and funny and handsome. I was in high cotton.”

William downed his second scotch and then a third. Emma nursed a gin fizz. It must have rained while they were in the convention center, because the sun was coming off of wet concrete, and then it was low in the sky, and then it was gone.

“Hey,” William said. “Is that his commercial?” He pointed at the television, but it was too late. They were on to advertising computers.

Emma set her legs apart, on either side of his. “You don’t have any idea,” she said, “do you?” William shook his head. She was right. He didn’t. But then he realized that he didn’t even know what part of his ignorance was being identified. “Let’s go,” she said.

They took the elevator up in silence. William was tall enough that he didn’t mind crowded elevators; sometimes he enjoyed them. He was standing behind Emma, watching the seam where her roots darkened and disappeared into her scalp. When the doors opened, she turned left and then right and then stuck her card key into the chrome box hanging below the door handle. The panel blinked green and she put her shoulder into the door. William followed her in and went straight to the bathroom. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“Not at all.”

When he came out, he noticed a man’s suit hanging on the closet door. “What’s this?” he said. “Is Steve here with you?”

“Stevie,” she said. “And no.” He looked around the room. It was his room. “Remember when I asked to see your wallet?” He nodded, more to try to locate the memory than to agree. “Well, I just took your key.”

Or maybe he was remembering it wrong. Maybe he had given it to her, laughing as if he was returning it, and they had ridden up in the elevator under the spell of this fiction. Or maybe he had interrogated her further about her job and her marriage, asking questions in rapid-fire delivery until she sighed and said “ Pochemuchka ,” which was, she explained, an affectionate insult for an overly inquisitive friend. They had held hands in the hall and looked at their joined shadow. They had duplicated the pose in front of the mirror and looked at their joined reflection. Or had they?

What he did remember for certain is that she had taken off her shoes, and that their removal had the opposite of the effect it should have, making her seem taller, and that by now he accepted the paradox of her physical stature and realized that the only way to resolve it was to render her horizontal, which he did, lightly pushing her backward onto the bed. Out loud, though not to her, he said, “We really should turn on the television.” He didn’t think she had heard him, but she reached back and found the remote control and switched it on. He lay down on the bed beside her. They were both fully clothed. The only bit of come-on, except for the fact that she was in his room, was the shoes, and that was hardly anything at all. Maybe it was just going to be the TV.

For a little while they lay on the bed that way, rigid as skis, and watched the closed-circuit convention channel, which was showing footage from that morning. She switched channels until she found an ocean documentary, and she started to tell him about the animals of the deep, how their eyes had a reflective curtain just behind the retina that kept light in, a tapetum lucidum , and her chest was gently rising and falling, and the hollow at the base of her neck was fluttering. William propped himself up on one elbow so that his face was above hers. He traced the line of her jaw with his finger. There was something comical about her at that moment, despite her beauty, and she seemed to sense it, and she crossed her eyes and jutted out her tongue. “Oh my,” she said. “What’s a nice girl like me doing with two gentlemen like you?”

This set her to giggling, and she kept it up all through the kiss, and the unbuttoning of her shirt, and the unhooking of her brassiere. Only when William squeezed the side of her skirt to pop open the bar fastener did she stop, and it was to draw a deep breath and continue. William tried a steady voice. “I don’t know,” he said. “This isn’t…”