Ben Greenman - The Slippage

“Did you have fun?” he said in the car.

“It was fine,” she said. Her posture was perfect and unwelcoming.

“You seem tired.”

“I wouldn’t say tired,” she said. “Something at the party bothered me.”

He stopped at the lip of the road. “What?” he said.

“I felt a little trapped. You and I have this big news about the house, but I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think it’s going to happen, at least not any time soon. You seem like you’re stalling.” The idea had always been there, in the shadows. She had put light on it, but too much, and now it was an eyesore.

William took a long loop on the way back, passing near the lot on Harrow, though the night was so dark that they seemed to be in no place at all.

When they got home, Louisa settled in the kitchen with a glass of wine. “You coming to bed?” William said, but then he saw the white string of the headphone cord dangling down from her ear. He went to bed without her and woke so tired he wondered if he had slept at all. Louisa was beside him, headphones still half in, one earpiece at sea on the light blue sheet.

Blondie nosed the front door to show she wanted walking, but William was in no mood for it, so he let her into the yard and went out to the garage. He smelled the sick-sweet odor the second he put his hand on the doorknob: a rat. It was small enough not to fear, fetal in death; ants crawled in a thick static over its legs and its belly. He used a plastic bag as a glove, scooped it up, and turned the glove inside out. The garbage can was wedged behind a stack of boxes, recent purchases Louisa had decided to return. The coffeemaker was among them. He threw the rat away. Next to the boxes was his guitar; he was about to pick it up when he heard the fuzz of a chord from elsewhere in the morning.

He hit the garage door opener with the heel of his hand to reveal Stevie, with his own garage door open, playing his own guitar. William walked down the driveway. He looked closer and saw that Emma was in the garage, too. Stevie said something to her and brushed a fingertip across her forehead. It reminded William that there was much he didn’t know. This was not a new thought, but it was one that was suddenly large within him. He gave a salute and got his arm back down before his blood froze entirely.

The rain had eased off, but the river of the audience flowed out onto the street, churning up adjectives. “It was brilliant,” one woman said. She was older and wore a dress covered with flowers. Her friend, in a blazer, tried his hand: “Dark.” Then: “Provocative.”

William and Louisa navigated a traffic of hats and umbrellas. “I thought the movie was slow,” she said. William only nodded and said nothing. “I am telling you my opinion so that you can tell me yours,” Louisa said.

“It’s loosely based on Crime and Punishment ,” William said.

“That’s not an opinion,” she said. “You know that scene where his father went to the library to research other robberies before he planned his? That’s how I would do it.”

A man behind them was making a point: “Tragedy becomes trivia more quickly than you would care to admit, and then trivia is rebuilt into history.”

“He’s on a date,” Louisa said in a stage whisper. They slowed and the man went by them: he was older than his voice, with teeth that did not quite line up properly and hands that cleared space for his words. His date seemed not to be a date at all, but a woman a generation older, perhaps his mother.

The sun was going down over town on a Saturday. A traffic cop was posting fliers soliciting information about a recent fire at a bus station that was under construction. Louisa stopped under the coppery sky and breathed in deeply like she was taking a cure. “We could just leave,” she said.

“What?”

“You know, just pick up and go.”

“Go home? I thought you said dinner.”

“No, I mean go for real. Forever. A woman in my office did. She and her husband sold their house and bought one they’d only seen in pictures. They made enough on the sale that they have six months to find jobs.” William pictured himself in a city where they had never lived: Miami, or St. Louis, or Phoenix. He might go to work for a newspaper again and come home every night wrapped in righteousness. But Louisa was just baiting the hook. “She’s going to fail, you know. I give her six months tops.”

“That’s nice.”

“She should have taken smaller steps, the kind that don’t lead you right off the edge of the cliff.”

“What is it they say about the difference between falling and flying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever they say, I’m sure it’s wrong.” They were around the corner now, in front of a boutique hotel that had gone in and out of business over the years, always changing its name, never changing anything else. William and Louisa had stayed there on what passed for their honeymoon. The place was shut now, though a sign in the window said it was just for renovation. Louisa stared for a long time at the sign, or at least at the spot in the window where it was hanging. William tried to remember what floor they had stayed on, what Louisa’s hair had looked like then, whether they had fallen asleep at all. Much of life turned out to be a test of how much you could forget without losing the thread entirely.

“You know what I did at work yesterday?” Louisa said. “I reviewed snack-time procedures for classroom visits. There’s actually a written set of rules. Teachers are required to submit lists of any especially slow eaters so they can be served first.” She reached out and touched the window. He was still not sure what she was looking at. For a moment, William imagined that she was ten years younger, or fifteen: that no choices had been made, not even the good ones.

“All this talk of snacks is making me even hungrier,” he said. Now she was the one who only nodded.

The restaurant’s motif was nautical; the small framed cases on the walls held artifacts from shipwrecks. The waiter was chatty; he had a family at home, he said, “if you call a boyfriend and a dog a family.” He listened to old radio dramas every night. He was writing a play about Eisenstein and thought he could take the lead. “Don’t pay me any mind,” he said. He disappeared for a stretch and then returned to set it all down for them: the soups, the salads, the salty fish. William had considered ordering a complicated cocktail, and now that he saw the waiter’s pleasure in serving, he regretted that he hadn’t. “I hope you’re finding everything to your satisfaction,” the waiter said, spreading his hands over the meal in benediction.

“Of course we’re finding it,” William said. “It’s right here on the table.”

Louisa laughed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” she said.

The waiter gave her a mournful look. “But everyone is,” he said.

At the end of dinner, William went down the narrow hall toward the bathroom, took out his telephone, turned it over in his hand. Louisa was waiting for him to come back, but he loitered in the hall, watching her in the stripe of mirror. She was trying to be sad so as not to be angry, but it seemed to make her angry that she couldn’t be sad.

“You’re a nice guy, William.” Karla told him so on the phone, and she said it again when she met William in front of her house on Hardy and deposited the package in the passenger seat. William wasn’t sure what to do with this information, if in fact it was information. Karla shut the door to the car and then rapped on the window until William lowered it. “I just wanted to say bye,” she said.

“Bye,” William said.