The Slippage: A Novel by Ben Greenman Read Free Book Online

founders and the nominal boss of the division, though he didn’t come in most days, and when he did, he mostly sat in his corner office watching a Japanese cable channel that none of the other TVs in the building seemed to get.
    Hollister was standing next to the last elevator, which worked only by pass card. He and William had a checkered history, in the sense that there were a limited number of moves in the game. Years before, Hollister had seen William out one evening at a performance of the Symphonie Liturgique , making use of subscription tickets Louisa had ordered. Hollister was alone, and possibly a little tipsy, and he had clasped Louisa’s hand and expressed surprise to see William. “I didn’t figure you for a music lover,” he said. A few weeks later, in the office, Hollister asked if he could expect William at Il Seraglio that weekend, and the time after that he wondered if William had any opinion on Dohnányi and laughed aloud. The whole thing began to shade into malice, and William kept to the outer circuit of the hallway in a largely successful effort to avoid Hollister. This time, he had failed.
    “Good afternoon,” Hollister said.
    “It’s not bad,” William said.
    “How have you been?” Hollister said. And then, without waiting for an answer: “I thought of you the other day. I was at a Lyatoshynsky event, the Mourning Prelude .” He held his fingers to his mouth and then opened them in a bloom of appreciation. “But I didn’t see you there. Is everything all right?”
    The elevator arrived in time to save George Hollister’s life.
    Tuesday came, rang its dampened bell. William rolled out of bed, shuffled to the bathroom, urinated, fished his toothbrush from the cup, brushed, showered, toweled dry, pulled comb through hair, pulled clothes onto body, breakfast table, cereal, car, road, parking space, elevator. Somewhere along the way he became himself.
    The morning passed without incident: he readied the presentation for O’Shea, reviewed the new brochure, visited the break room at regular intervals. At one, William walked over to the Red Barn, a dim, dingy restaurant on a small side street off Oakmont. Karla, a small forceful brunette who worked hard to seem relaxed, was waiting at a table. “Hi,” she said. “I already ordered. Iced tea, right?”
    “You’re too good to me,” he said.
    William had been with Karla before Louisa—or, as he liked to say, between Louisas. Karla was a part-time Realtor with a sideline in floristry. She approached both jobs indifferently; her father, an engineer who had discovered a new material for industrial packing, had left her with enough money that she never needed to mention the amount. It was a mountain whose top she couldn’t see. William had met her at work, when he was in advertising. They had been friends at first but had passed across the center of some odd chemical equation and become sporadic lovers. He had other girlfriends and she had other boyfriends. “We do this because we like it,” she said, in a voice that made him unsure whom she was comforting. Then one night at dinner she pointed at his smiling face and said, “I’m about to change that.” She was, she said, pregnant.
    He was thirty-two years old, never married. He knew there was, at best, a one-in-four chance that he was the father, but he felt that fraction settle into him with a mix of thrill and misgiving. She kissed him and put her hand in his hair. “I need a sample to know for sure,” she said, and pulled for science.
    The DNA tests let him off the hook, pointing instead to a South American businessman who had been in town for the summer only, and then Karla stopped answering William’s calls. When the baby was born, a boy named Christopher, she asked William out for coffee and apologized for cutting him off so abruptly. “For a little while I just couldn’t,” she said. Then Christopher’s father had been piloting a small plane from Miami to the Bahamas when