Free The Slippage: A Novel by Ben Greenman Page B

where Louisa had kissed him roughly. There was a canal where William had, half in jest, thrown a pebble he pretended was his wedding ring. There was the pig on a pole, presiding over discount retail. The theater on Loomis and Bell contained a longer story. A few months after their second first date, he had taken Louisa to see an old film about a young woman from a small town in the Upper Midwest. She took training as a singer, made a striking entrance in a big-city nightclub, fell in love with both a waiter and a captain of industry. Two of the sides of the triangle were shot to death.
    Afterward, out on the sidewalk, William seized Louisa’s hand. She wore gloves, which he mocked as an affectation but secretly admired. “What?” she said.
    “I have a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer right away.”
    “What is it?”
    “Well, you know how you start life alongside everyone else and then, when you’re young, detach from the mainland? You drift out on your little floe. At first it’s exciting. Then it’s scary. Then you look and see that all around you there are other people on floes of their own. They look close to each other, because they’re far from you. If you could get close enough, you would see that they’re all feeling the same terror. But you can’t get close enough.”
    “I wish your mouth would shut sometimes,” Louisa said, but when she covered it with hers she made sure it stayed wide open. He woke in the morning to find her sitting on a chair beside his bed, already fully dressed, even down to the gloves, and the morning breeze slowly ballooning the curtains in the bedroom.
    “I can’t believe you remembered all that,” Louisa said. She had coaxed him out onto the deck with a bottle of red left over from the party. The sun had just disappeared behind the rear fence, but she had lined up the wrought-iron lanterns on the railing. A big-band song, clarinet in prominence, sailed in from a radio in a neighboring yard. “Who would pick a girl who wears gloves?”
    “I would,” he said. “I did.”
    “Come here,” she said, but she pulled her chair closer to him. She hid her head in the space beneath his chin and he smelled her hair, now a sugary vanilla, and when she sighed and blew hot breath against his neck he understood that he had miscalculated by telling her about the drive through town. He had wanted it to ignite the same fire in her, but it lit the wrong wick. It had put her in mind of his love for her, not for the neighborhood.
    She kissed him on the side of the face, and then on the lips. “I’m heading off.”
    William went from deck to garage, tried to exercise a little, stood with barbells in his hands and his full weight pressing down on the soles of his feet. He picked up his guitar, ran his fingers over the body and the neck. There was a scar near the bridge that he wished he had the story for, but it had been there when he bought the thing. So much in the world had happened before he arrived.
    Coming through the kitchen, he was stopped by a flicker in the corner of his eye. It was another white plastic bag, handles tied, belly full, in the center of the counter. He dumped the contents out. The first bag, the one in the junk room, had contained June’s mail; the bag in the garage had been May. This had everything they had and then some: notices from professional associations, postcards announcing special offers at local stores, catch-up chronicles from friends they hadn’t seen in years. The invitation to the Kenners’ cocktail party was in there. There were no bills or checks or even subscription renewals—anything of consequence had been removed—but along with the mail there was a strange assortment of objects: a spare key for his car; a baseball cap he had thought was lost forever; a bottle cap that, upon closer inspection, appeared to have been saved from the party they’d thrown for Tom. The collection was at once curated and entirely haphazard.
    He