The Slide: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

anything magnified Stuart’s wisdom it was proximity to his pool. I also wondered how much of his authority came from having only nine fingers. I did what I could to focus on my immediate surroundings. Here there was food and drink and music and magazines. There were cats, five tabbies that roamed the grounds in a miniature pride belonging to Deanna, Stuart’s stepmother, who was of indeterminate age and by all accounts alcoholic. I changed into a swimsuit and took a seat on the diving board. With water up to my ankles, I faced away from Stuart, into the sun, so if I wanted I could look down to where the starfish had come to rest in the deep end.
    “She is smart,” I said, and let this hover for a moment. “Not to mention beautiful. Not to mention funny, sometimes, when she chooses to be. Bonus credit awarded to the person who knows when and when not to be funny. I don’t. Plus soft, Stubes, and hard too, granite when the situation demands. All of this at once. But did I appreciate her adequately? Of course not. Not until the second after the second we said goodbye. What’s the word to describe the inability to appreciate what you have before it’s gone? Some ancient Germanic term to capture perfectly the nature of my idiocy. There’s a word, there has to be a word.”
    Stuart walked a lap around the pool, went inside briefly, then sat down at the deck table. He opened a small Tupperware container and dumped a pile of Relaxation onto the frosted glass. Even missing one finger, my friend was the best roller of Relaxation I’d ever seen. I assumed this was something he picked up at Brown, a skill handed down from a brilliant prodigal outcast son of Sudanese royalty, some moonlit Ivy League passage of sacred rite. In high school he and I bought five-dollar blunts from a guy on the basketball team, prerolled with the cheapest Relaxation you could imagine. The most they ever gave us was a kind of enhanced headache.
    “Here’s one,” he said. “Take your normal hammer with bright-orange rubber grip and top-of-the-line head. Heavy iron. Except the handle itself, in a development I’m sure is my own, is hollow . This allows me to introduce a heavy liquid, say mercury, that will slide along the chamber of the hollowed-out hammer, providing an extra kick when the hammer is dropped. Ka boom .”
    “The mercury,” I said, “provides leverage.”
    “That’s exactly right. The swing downward is augmented by the momentum of sliding mercury.”
    “Pretty fine, Stubes. Now can you help me sleep at night?”
    “That sounds like personal advice,” he said. “I work the technical side, yeses and nos.”
    A slight hill led from the pool to where the main house stood, huge and brick, beastly, almost, in its ratio of square footage to inhabitants. Up there John Hurst lived with his former secretary among polished hardwood floors and Oriental rugs and plaid wallpaper. After catching him with the secretary—a scenario we agreed was too well trodden to achieve any real heartbreak—Stuart’s mom took her divorce settlement and claimed a lake-front home in the Ozarks. He had a sister in DC and a brother in his second year of Peace Corps in Mongolia.
    Time here at the pool moved differently, slower or just less evenly than elsewhere. The automatic vacuum probed the depths, every so often spouting into the air when it strayed too close to the surface. I saw Deanna the stepmother’s form in a second-floor window of the main house, appearing to gaze out at us for a moment before moving onward. The shade migrated and we stayed at the table, getting at the pile of Relaxation. Deanna appeared and disappeared. Audrey sitting on her parents’ living-room floor, bags packed, tearing apart enough pieces of purple tissue paper to fill both of the boxes.
    “A job,” I said. “At least I could wait tables. Something.”
    Stuart said, “Let me tell you what happens at restaurants. No matter how hard you resist, your coworkers take over