Ben Greenman - The Slippage

William had told the Kenners not to worry if they were a few minutes late, and he was foresuffering the moment when he’d have to reassure the Fitches that it was okay to be the first ones to arrive. He had always had an ability to put people at ease, which was why he came on board quickly whenever Louisa proposed that they host a party. It was a chance to see himself in the best possible light, and there were fewer and fewer of those with each passing year.

They were on the deck, chopping vegetables on the narrow table next to the sliding glass door that led back into the kitchen. “Countdown to Tom,” William said. There was a carrot that looked lost amid several stalks of celery, and he plucked it out, a rescue.

“Can’t wait,” Louisa said. She had mixed up three pitchers of punch: one red, one yellow-green, and a third that was an orange so chemically vivid that William wondered if anyone would want to drink it. “What should I call this one? It’s like a sunrise.”

“Or a sunset.”

“Always the optimist.” She hoisted a glass of the orange. “We could have had the party at midnight and put out bowls of this instead of lanterns. That is, if it was a festive occasion.”

“It is, isn’t it? Aren’t you excited to have your brother back in town?”

“Don’t I look it?” She did, but he didn’t think Tom was the reason. Louisa, who could be quiet when it was just the two of them, came alive in groups. She loved to move from guest to guest, showing each of them an almost imperceptibly different version of herself. From where William stood, it looked like a gem being turned so that it sparkled.

“He’s bringing a new girl. This one’s more serious, he said.”

“I don’t believe him,” Louisa said. “He’s not the type.” She slid her glass forward, let it come to rest for a second, slid it again and then again; it left a series of circles that reminded him of cartoon thought bubbles. “Although I didn’t think I was, either.”

“That was before I came along and swept you off your feet.”

“Let the record show that there was no sweeping of any kind.”

William reached for more vegetables, this time got mainly carrots, sliced lengthwise to multiply them into sticks.

“These all taste the same, even though they’re different colors,” Louisa said.

“Hey,” William said. “Save some for the rest of us.”

“Have you ever known me to drink too much at a party?”

“Comedienne,” William said.

When William had first met Louisa, they were reporters at a small weekly newspaper. He was the veteran, with seven months of service; she had been there only three; they had taken to talking at a going-away party for an older editor. That first night she had talked mostly about her date, a designer at the paper who drank too much and wandered away from her side in the party’s first minutes. “Do you know Jim?” she asked. William nodded dumbly, happy she’d asked a yes-or-no question, content to listen while this tall brunette with a constellation of freckles across her nose explained why two months with Jim was like an endless year with anyone else. Later, he convinced her that she was tipsy and should let him drive her home. Then he had kissed her on the strip of grass between the street and her apartment building, his hand inside the top of her waistband.

He did the same now.

“So presumptuous,” Louisa said. “How could you be sure I wouldn’t just haul off and flatten you?”

“Confidence of youth,” William said. His youth had been filled with many things, but confidence was not one of them. When, a week later, Louisa had come to spend the night with William — she arrived carrying a turquoise backpack that she knelt to unzip — he could not believe his good fortune. In the morning, he tried to keep a straight face in front of the bathroom mirror but his expression shattered with sudden joy. Then one day six months later, in the midst of a fight that was not their first fight, she produced a soft black duffel he had never seen, stuffed her clothes into it, and was gone. A month after that, she was back with Jim. “He’s different now,” she told William, who was different also.

It didn’t take, Louisa and Jim, even when she quit the paper after Jim gave her the idea that working together was straining their relationship. Within three months, they were on the rocks again. But she didn’t come back to William. Instead, she became a story he told to other people. He used it with other women as proof that he was capable of listening, or fidelity, or sorrow. He used it with other men as proof of the unknowability of the human heart. Then, years later, they had met at a party. She was taking a spin around the room, sending up bright little flares of laughter, but when she saw him she froze. They embraced awkwardly, struck up a conversation; he found the courage to ask her to dinner the following week, and they were returned to one another with a velocity that surprised them both.

“Do you know her name?” William said. “Tom’s new girlfriend?”

“No,” Louisa said. “He likes to create mystery.”

“Well, we’ll meet her,” William said. “And then, when no one’s looking, I’ll go into her wallet and see what her name is.”

“Or we could just ask her.”

“You always want to do things the easy way.” He split the remaining stalks of celery and swept them into a bowl. “I’m ready for the party. Are you ready? It gives me a chance to get people out on the deck, which is always my secret ambition.”

“If you talk about it constantly, it doesn’t count as a secret ambition,” Louisa said, digging a moat around the words. She had been pretty as a younger woman but was now beautiful: a certain indistinctness in her face had sharpened, and her eyes were streaked with traces of things both remembered and forgotten. “Though I’ll admit that it’s a nice deck.” Her phone was ringing in the hollows of the house. She handed the orange punch to William. “Try,” she said, and went inside.

William could not, at twenty-five, have anticipated the life he would live with Louisa. He had not been a genius of the present back then, let alone the future.

When they had gotten back together, he had lived in a little house just north of downtown. It fit him snugly, like a shell, and he could not imagine living anywhere else. But a month or so after he and Louisa started dating again, at the close of a restless weekend, she suggested a drive through town, and they ended up on a quiet cul-de-sac punctuated at regular intervals by vaulting oaks. “Let’s live here,” she said. She stepped out of the car and breathed in deeply to show him that she belonged in this new place. By year’s end, they were there, along with a Lab mix she’d rescued from a shelter. She asked William to suggest names for the dog, but he came up mostly blank: he started with “Boy” and then, when she reminded him it wasn’t a boy, moved on to “Girl.” He was relieved when Louisa settled on Blondie. “Look at us,” Louisa said.

William did, slowly at first. The house felt cavernous around him. That first spring, he built a deck so he could sit outside, under trees whose names he did not know, listening to birds whose names he did not know. In the fall, he distinguished the place further by filling the yard with a trio of vintage claw-foot tubs: an eagle, a lion, a tiger. Before it got too cold, he put on shorts and got himself a beer and stretched out in the center tub, the lion, the largest. Sometime between that winter and the next summer, the television started to run an advertisement that showed older people in tubs as an illustration of romance, and Louisa asked William if he felt silly sitting in the tub after seeing something like that. “Why?” William said. “Am I the kind of person who gets scared off by what’s on television?” She held up her hands in surrender, but the damage was done. After that the tubs filled up with leaves and he cleaned them out only for parties.