Ben Greenman - The Slippage

The stereo was singing about dancing and good times. Tom passed through the room, whispering, with Jesse at his side. William pulled himself to his feet and followed them, at a distance, into the backyard. They had different music out there, wordless, slower. Kenneth was sitting in a chair talking to a girl who was wearing a beaded vest. She was laughing. Tom and Jesse were in the near corner of the yard, talking closely, and then Tom leaned on the fence and drew his hand back sharply. William saw a line on his palm, a red rivulet. Kenneth stood and produced a handkerchief, which he held out to Tom in a courtly manner.

William went back inside to sit with the cousin on the couch. She was talking about God now. More gin was brought his way.

The last thing he remembered was standing with the cousin in the yard. She was still on God, and he was marveling at the way the black lace of brassiere overlaid the brown skin of breast. Tom and Jesse were at the corner of the fence again. Now they were standing at a distance from each other, and she was talking excitedly, pointing at the ground. William thought he saw tears on her cheeks, and Tom’s hands were in the shape of a cage, as if he were protecting a seed.

“And so,” Tom said, swinging his arm over Kenneth’s shoulder the next morning, “I make my good escape. I thank you for your hospitality. Sometimes I don’t know what you see in me.” They had been offered breakfast, declined, accepted coffee in its stead.

“Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it around here much longer.” Kenneth laughed and embraced Tom. “I am sorry that you didn’t get what you came for,” he said more softly.

Kenneth had already loaded their bags in the trunk. Tom told William to drive off, but about a minute later, he told him to pull over. “Pop the trunk,” he said. On top of their bags were two large flat rectangles wrapped in cloth.

William peeled back a corner and saw that they were paintings. “Take them out,” Tom said, and then he shut the trunk and unwrapped them so William could see. The first was a landscape of a placid little town, where two children played in the street and a short, dark woman with long hair stared into a store window at a blue dress pinned to a white backing. The second showed a red boat in a harbor and a man tying a rope around a brown piling. In both, the framing was off center and the colors were subtle but forceful. Tom moved his hand over the face of the woman in the second painting. “What do you think she’s thinking?”

“That she wants the dress?” Like the man in the other painting, the woman wore an expression of casual concentration.

“Exactly,” Tom said. “But the title is Mexican Village, One Minute Before Earthquake . The other one is Florida Town, One Week Before Hurricane . That’s what’s makes these painting so great. They are acts of colossal misdirection.” William looked at the woman’s face again, tried to retrieve her thoughts about the dress, if that’s even what she was looking at. Would she buy it? Would she ever get to wear it? The questions were a close circle around him.

“These are Jesse’s?”

“She only paints Indians,” Tom said. “These are Kenneth’s. And now they’re mine. I bought them with the money from my book advance.” He shut the trunk. “Supporting him is the least I can do. You know what they say about talent: if you don’t have it, help it.”

“You don’t have it?”

“Not like Kenneth. I have a way of seeing that’s unshared by most people, and then a way of seeing my seeing. I look at things the wrong way and then stubbornly insist it’s the right way, all along holding out hope that I’ll make a few converts. When I do, it’ll help the idea that the things I’ve made are art. But talent?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. When I see paintings like this, when I really start to feel what they’re doing, I get weak. And not the kind of weak when you look in the mirror after a bad haircut. Serious weak, soul weak, like there’s something in the universe that can make you better but that you don’t possess, and won’t ever.” He tapped the car with two fingers, as if he were telling a driver to take off.

There were two YOU ARE HERE signs before the highway, one in front of a craft outlet, another by a scenic overlook, each temporarily true, and then a diner with a banner that said EAT HERE NOW. “It makes a good argument,” Tom said. The restaurant was in a shack connected to a small convenience store. On the far wall, there was a lunch counter; next to it there was a bar, a garish pair of abstract oils, and a lottery ticket machine that flashed out a series of numbers. The whole scene was like something of Tom’s, a graph of increasing despair.

They sat beneath a mirrored clock in the shape of a guitar. The obese bartender was talking to a balding man about his youth as a skier. “Two-day blizzard,” the bartender said. “Couldn’t even get out on the slopes.”

“You made me think,” the balding man said. He tapped his head to show the site of the injury. “The snow that year was up to the window in my garage.”

Tom brought two sandwiches and two beers to the table. “Just water for me,” William said. “It’s a little early.”

“Right,” Tom said. He moved both bottles in front of him. “I don’t think there’s a menu, even. You stand there and after a little while they push food at you.” He bit into his sandwich and made a face. “I hope you’re not expecting some kind of best-kept secret.”

Behind Tom, the balding man pressed a series of buttons on the lottery machine. “So how long has it been since you’ve seen Kenneth and Jesse?”

“That’s a story,” he said.

“I have time,” William said.

Tom set down his sandwich. “Well,” he said, “I first moved up here right after college, to study with Kenneth. She was just a girl, the daughter of my painting teacher. She was seventeen, maybe. But she had this unearthly glow. I would go to Kenneth’s house to drop something off or have a drink and I would spend the whole time looking at her. Have you ever read Rousseau?” William hadn’t. “Well, there’s a passage about when he was young and in love with a young woman. She starts to eat some food and he calls out to stop her. There’s a hair on it, he says. She puts it back on her plate in disgust and he grabs it and gobbles it down. It’s the closest he can get to her. That’s how I felt about Jesse. Then I got a job teaching, and I left town.”

“Was there a romantic farewell?”

“No, not at all. Kenneth drove me to the airport. She was in the back seat. I think when I was out on the curb she waved and told me to have a good time. I loved her, though, and the idea of her stayed with me wherever I went. You know: St. Louis, Belize, New Zealand, Timbuktu. My world tour. I had girlfriends, but they were substitutes, except that they didn’t do what substitutes are supposed to do, which is distract you from the original. They just reminded me of her. Now and again I came back to visit Kenneth, and I saw her then.”

“So then you got involved?”

“That would make sense, but it didn’t happen then either. I didn’t want to disrupt her life, or his either. But I kept coming to see her, and at some point I started to see that she felt the same way about me that I felt about her. It wasn’t a flash of lightning or anything that dramatic. It just became clear to me. At that point, I felt strong enough to stay.”

William was confused. “To stay with Kenneth?”

“To stay in town. I quit teaching. I took a job at a store, started sculpting a little. Within a month, everything was in place. Jesse and I did the whole thing, moving in together, forsaking all others. We were going to get married.” He fell silent. The story was over, except that it wasn’t.