Read Online The Slide: A Novel by Kyle Beachy - Free Book Online

plate. “The goal is a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhood. Down town doesn’t have to die. We’re going to pump that place so full of life people aren’t going to know what to do about it. There will be people and life on every corner, there will be people bumping into one another. There will be life brimming from the streets, everyone watching each other live. People will wave and say hello. It will not die. It will not. ”
    The table was quiet. I tried to focus on knife in fowl, fowl in sauce, fowl and sauce coming on fork toward mouth.
    “What’s really neat is the level of control,” Carla explained. “With a loft you can say where you want the walls. Imagine that: wall here, please. Bathroom over here, if you don’t mind . One catalog I saw offered six different models of sliding glass doors.”
    I was eating and having a conversation with my parents, under whose roof I was once again living. They’d been married for thirty-some-odd years. Their anniversary, like all anniversaries, was in the summer. Look at the posture, the nonverbal cues, notice the tone of words. Consider the ramifications these variables imply. Take extensive notes.
     
     
    There was an entire family of squirrels living in the attic. I heard them up there, a cluttered, domestic scampering directly above my head. A family of squirrels, each one with its funny little character traits. Mom clad in apron, dad in bowler hat, little vest, daughter squeaking on tiny little squirrel cell phone, son pushing around on miniature skateboard.
    Sadly, this was all I had. Because if days were tough, these sleepless nights were a kind of Audrey multimedia carnival. I saw our past charted graphically, four years’ worth of colored bars and slices of pie. I saw emotions as historical artifacts, their genesis and evolution, eventual conflict and abatement. Initially I’d fallen for the farthest reaches of her extremities—tips of fingers, those half spheres of gentle skin behind forever unpainted nails—then worked my way inward. By the time I made it beyond her calves and forearms, thighs and shoulders, and reached her center, it was clear she felt the same. She ran fingers over my childish frame and smiled.
    You try to sleep, then try not to try to sleep, then try not to try to remember what you’re trying. You sweat and rage and fume over the fact of your sweating, raging, fuming.
    The incidentals came at me from all angles and with shocking resolution. A particular trip to the Ralphs on Indian Hill when Audrey stopped among the vegetables and reached down and wrapped her fingers around a rubber-banded bundle of asparagus and brought it up to her ear, listened, laid it right back down. As if trying to get a sense of where the asparagus was coming from. The trip to the twenty-four-hour Toys “R” Us by the outlet malls in Rancho Cucamonga when, during a frowned-upon race through the aisles on little pink girl bikes, I stopped briefly to check out a reissue of Optimus Prime, then had to pedal furiously to catch up to her. It was the pedaling furiously I remembered, how hard I had to work.
    And oh Jesus that noise . Even when the squirrels were at rest there was another sound, this awful like tap or pat from somewhere up there with the squirrels, in apparently the busiest goddamn attic this side of the Mississippi. Sex everywhere we could manage it, exploring campus nooks and crannies. Put your foot here. Hold this. The study lounge of her dormitory, carpeted. Later that week we lay naked in bed, fan blowing, Audrey pressing a finger against the twin rug burns on my knees. Pain and joy. Memories arrived with perfect lucidity and a fondness that worked like some inverse torture. Sharing a table in the library, studying, she reached across and pushed my copy of Franny and Zooey to the floor. I retaliated with her City of Quartz . One by one until all of our books stacked into a beautiful interdisciplinary pile. Our ridiculous laughter.
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