The Slippage: A Novel by Ben Greenman Page A

desired. It was a dull steady heartbeat that trailed off over time. In Chicago, he had put the paddles to this slowly dying heart. He had clobbered his expectations of himself and then convinced himself not to think about the consequences. But now the past had surfaced, and there was movement in water he needed to be placid.
    Louisa cleared his bowl and glass from in front of him and then started in on the counter: she folded up a newspaper, rolled up catalogs she didn’t want, dumped them all into the garbage. “I hope there was nothing in there for me,” he said. He hadn’t brought up the issue of the mail since she had left the bag on the counter, and things seemed back in swing, with a steady stream of publications they didn’t need.
    She leaned across him to get the pitcher of water. She had missed a button on her nightshirt and he widened the opening. “Hey.” Louisa gripped him at his wrist. “Got to go,” she said. “I’ve got bales of my own to lift.” The museum was opening an exhibit on the history of local signage. Louisa had written the wall text and had to proof the plaques before they were placed. One night, Tom had come by to help her out with what he called “the intentionally dead language of museum writing.” He pretended to be cynical, took on a tone, but William heard something else instead: Tom’s pride in his sister.
    “Ready to go,” William said. “I need to be at the office fifteen minutes ago.” He had Loomis work to do. It was piled up on his desk, heating up the place. “So we’re not going to get any coffee from this UFO?”
    “I’ll return it,” Louisa said. “But I’m very disappointed. I thought Swiss engineering was the best in the world.”
    “I don’t see how,” William said. “Even their cheese has holes.”
    Louisa untangled her purse strap from the back of the kitchen chair. “You want to walk out with me?”
    “I’m not quite ready.” He figured he could take a few minutes to watch the house across the street, maybe catch sight of Emma. He’d seen her the night before, coming in from a supermarket trip. She was wearing a tank top and he got the curve of her shoulder into his mind and couldn’t get it out.
    William went to the den, took a magazine from the table. He noticed, maybe for the first time, that the design on the wallpaper was a four-blade pinwheel cornered by a quartet of birds. He surveyed the rest of the room. There was the shallow blue ceramic vase on the windowsill, the strange broken-neck lamp over the recliner. How could he fairly move to a new house when he knew so little about this one?
    He lay down on the couch and balanced his phone on his chest. Suddenly it buzzed, a tiny heart attack. William flipped the phone open. It was a text from Louisa. “Make sure water bowl before you go,” it said. “Dog thirsty.”
    William gazed out his office window into the park across the street and wondered what it had all looked like a thousand years before, and whether the change had been for the better. To his left was a legal pad on which he had block-printed the name O’SHEA , then crossed it out and written LOOMIS . He turned to his computer, opened up the brochure file, and got to it. He needed to create the impression that any TenPak investor, but especially a principal, was in for the ride of his life. He moved words from one sentence to another, shifted punctuation. He polished the paragraph until he could almost see himself in it.
    Through lunch, beyond lunch, into afternoon, conversation came to him as if through water. The reason was simple. The reason was Emma. He still hadn’t called her back, hadn’t even dialed a single digit of the number. She had called him again, this time leaving a message. It wasn’t much—a slow hello , then a quick call me back —but he snapped the phone shut without deleting her voice mail and tried to make sense of the hectic jazz in his chest.
    An alert blinked on William’s screen for a meeting