The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  She let out a sudden kind of snort. “Well, you can’t say that,” she said, pointing at the first sentence in the fifth paragraph.

  “Why not?”

  She just leaned back and gaped at me. “Because it’s sexist.”

  I turned to Simone with a look that said, How did you miss that one?

  So we all pitched in then. We did — revising sentences, crafting new ones, arguing points with each other. It all unfurled in a great collaborative swirl. If you were there, reader, you would have heard things like, “Well, if you’re going to put that example there then you have to put it down here, too,” and “Philip, this is a YouTube video, okay — nobody’s going to know what ‘eusebeia’ means.” All the while I typed and typed and typed.

  Soon Grace’s brow furrowed. “Okay, there are a lot of concepts here. We need a better way to display them.” She got an idea. “Simone, do you still have —”

  “I do!” she replied. “I’ll go get them!” She went dashing out of the kitchen and up the stairs. A minute later she came dashing back down again, holding four sheets of bristol board — two pink, two fuchsia — left over from a school project a month ago. She and Grace set them up on the table. Out came the Magic Markers and Sharpies. I logged on to Grace’s wireless printer, and we printed off family photos, pictures of women’s lib icons, and a headshot of Cheryl Sneed. I typed and typed while they drew and coloured and pasted.

  “Hey, Naomi,” said Grace, “do you know what this sign really needs?”

  “Elbow macaroni!” the child screamed in delight.

  “And glitter,” Simone added. “Get some glitter, too.”

  Okay, okay.

  I typed and typed, and then we were done. Word count, reader: 1,513. Oh my.

  I printed the script off so I could do a dry run. We all stood up. I held the pages in my fist while my daughters took up the bristol boards — one in each hand — and raised them aloft in great swaying animation, as if they were at a pop singer’s concert. I started to read.

  Nine minutes later, I finished. I turned to my wife. “What do you think?”

  She stood there with arms doubled tight over her breasts. Once more, I could not parse the expression on her face. She said nothing for the longest time.

  “Well,” she began finally, “it’s either the most adorable hara-kiri in the history of civilization, or …” And here gave a light shrug. “… or the most condescending. I don’t know which. I mean, you can never be sure how people — women — are going to react to things. We’re not exactly a monolith, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I replied. “But it’s still the right thing to do.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she replied.

  I wanted, reader, to linger on that moment of simpatico between us. It felt so rare, so fleeting, like the most beautifully improvised set of trills on a piano. A gorgeous melody you just wish you could lock up inside your brain before it vanished forever.

  Grace turned to Simone. “Okay, you can put those very carefully in the hall closet for Philip, and then take your sister up for her bath. And please, be extremely …”

  “I know, I know,” Simone said with a roll of her eyes. “The tub.”

  When they were gone, Grace and I just sort of floated before each other, there on the kitchen tile.

  “I called a plumber,” I ventured. “He’ll be here Friday.”

  This news caused no discernible reaction for a moment. But then Grace lowered her eyes, as if embarrassed by something. “So while you were having your revelations over the last two days, I was having some revelations of my own,” she said — very slowly, very deliberately. This was difficult for her. “This is difficult for me,” she confirmed. “It’s difficult to say that I was wrong. It’s a hard thing to admit, because I’m usually right about things. But I shouldn’t have accused you of not being a plugged-in dad before you left for the show last week. I realize that now. You are, Philip, a plugged-in dad, a lot of the time. You are. It happens right under my nose and I don’t see it, or I refuse to. My parents, actually, pointed it out to me over the last couple days. They said, ‘Now, Grace, Philip does a lot for you and those girls. You just don’t see it, but he does.’” She lowered her eyes again. “They’re always taking your side of things,” she repeated with a sniff.

  “Grace …”

  “But I know now that I refuse to see it a lot of the time. And the reason I refuse to see it, is because …” And she turned her gaze to her little alcove, her little writing nook. “Because things aren’t going well for me, over there,” she said, nodding at her desk. “I mean, writing comes so easily for you — just boom-boom-boom and it’s out. And it should be easy for me, too. I mean, in a lot of ways I live under the ideal conditions to be a writer. But every sentence is an agony. I … I just … I guess I just convince myself that the reason my books aren’t a success is because I don’t have a husband who’s plugged in, who supports me. Even if … even if, I see now, that isn’t really true.” She grit her teeth for a bit. “So I’ve decided that I need a change. I think we both do.”

  My heart tumbled. Tumbled and shrank.

  But then she said: “I put a CV together yesterday. Dad knows a guy at a children’s charity right around the corner, at Carlton and Parliament. He said they’re looking for a new newsletter editor, so I put a resumé together and submitted an application.”

  “Oh, Grace,” I said, with both relief and a not small amount of shame. “I … I … You don’t have to do that. I, I … You shouldn’t feel like you have to do that.” A job like that also wouldn’t pay very well, I thought but did not say aloud.

  “It’s already done. And Dad’s friend called me this morning. I have an interview with them on Thursday.” She seemed to grow angry at the thought. “If I get the job, Mom says she can come here and look after the kids on the days you’re on campus.”

  “Grace, you don’t have to do that.”

  “But I do,” she replied. “I can’t have you resenting me, Philip. I can’t have you thinking that there’s this great imbalance around here in terms of what you contribute versus what I don’t. So I’m doing it. It’s done.” She inhaled deeply then, flaring her nostrils. “But you’re going to do something for me. Okay?”

  “Okay …?”

  “You need to cut back on your drinking. I’m serious, Philip. This is non-negotiable. I know you’re a ‘philosopher’ and all, but you’re also a fifty-year-old dad. You need to start showing some restraint.”

  “Consider it done,” I replied, soberly. “You’re right, Grace. You’re absolutely right. I know … I mean, I realize I get a few into me and then say some pretty hurtful things. I do it all the time to people, but … but especially to you.” And here, I thought of our disastrous brunch. “I don’t want to do that anymore. It’s not who I really am.” Grace nodded, very slightly. A very slight agreement. “And thank you,” I went on, “about the job thing. It … it is going to help us out a bit, financially.”

  She lowered her head then, and that’s when I realized she wasn’t angry about the job thing. Just sad. Just incredibly sad that this chapter of her life was coming to an end. “I’m still going to write,” she said without looking up. “And I’m still going to be a great mum to those girls. But … but things will be harder for me now. I really hate cubicle life. I really,” and here she plunged into a hitherto unchartered depth of honesty, of disclosure, with herself, “hate working.”

  Boy, I felt like a complete heel after that. I tell you. The only thing worse than losing a game-changing argument with the person you love is winning one.

  Then she did look up at me, and we sort of glared at each other for a while. What to do with all these gaps, these cracks, these fissures between us? We just have to keep tamping them down, I suppose. Grace and I were very different people, but we didn’t hate each other. We didn’t. We just sometimes
hated the fact that we loved each other. I mean, what a bloody fucking inconvenience.

  We heard water rush through the pipes in the walls.

  “Oh fuck!” Simone screamed above us.

  Naomi howled like an animal.

  And Grace and I, we bolted in unison. We bolted toward our children, together. We tore around each other as we ascended the stairs to get to our kids, like it was some kind of race.

  Wednesday, November 11

  I hate being late. I am always late.

  I came wheezing and burping out of Donlands Station, trench coat over tweed, satchel over shoulder, decrepit umbrella in one fist and my bristol-board signs, tied up in black garbage bags to protect against the afternoon’s threatening rain, in the other. The street shone slickly from an earlier downpour and the air seemed thick from the drizzle that still loomed. I blossomed the umbrella above my comb-over as I came out of the station, turned left, and headed northward with the blundering, lumbering air of a man already several minutes behind schedule.

  It had been a frenzied morning at 4 Metcalfe Street. I had awoken to the realization that, thanks to the events of the last two days, I had done nothing, absolutely no prep at all, for either tomorrow’s survey course or Friday’s graduate seminar. So while Grace brought a level of normalization back to our breakfast-time routines (feeding the kids, checking Simone’s homework, con­vincing her to wear a raincoat today and getting her out the door, stopping Naomi from drawing a giraffe on the living-room wall with one of the Sharpies left out from yesterday, et cetera), I slunk upstairs to my office earlier than usual and closed the door behind me. I soon became a veritable piazza of busyness myself, preparing lecture notes and Socratic queries and discussion topics for Thursday, then rereading a chunk of The Social Contract in the event that my grad students returned to Friday’s class after I posted my Proper Apology on YouTube. After that, I got a hankering to work on “Christianity and Its Dissidents,” so I hacked out a half chapter as morning turned to afternoon. Just as I finished that up, Grace was on the landing calling to me. “Sorry, Philip, what time are you going to Raj’s?”

  Oh shit.

  By now, reader, you know what to expect. I made a jumpy, curse-laden sprint down the stairs. In the kitchen, I snuffled up a quick lunch while Grace rolled and garbage-bagged the bristol-board signs for me. As Simone had once again taken our only functional umbrella for her walk to school, I traipsed down to the dungeon of our unfinished basement on the rumour that there was another, older one down there somewhere. I eventually found it: black, faded, dusty, and with dislodged arms like broken bat wings. It would have to do. Meanwhile, Grace dug both my tweed and trench coat out of the closet to prepare me for the chill and rain of the day. Sensing my haste, she sort of dressed me there in the front entry, manoeuvring one jacket and then the other over my doughy, narrow shoulders as I shoved the printout of my YouTube script into my satchel. Then I turned to face her and dipped in for a kiss, but she leaned away with a look that said, Nope, nope, Philip, we’re not quite there yet. But she did wish me luck as she pushed me out the door. Behind her, Naomi was just emerging from a much-needed nap.

  Now, a couple minutes free of the subway station, I realized that — no, it wasn’t actually raining. The air was cool but empty. I lowered my dilapidated umbrella and found myself, as if at the threshold of fate, standing outside the place I had been before, that white-bricked old hovel, that same hole-in-the-wall barbershop that I had encountered on Friday. It sat like a squat, blanched toadstool there on Donlands Avenue. I turned to face it and, oh, reader, got a good gawk at myself in the reflection of the shop’s window. Jesus. Jesus Murphy. It was as if a ghost, or at least another of life’s little elisions or near-misses, floated there in the space just to the left of the stencilled barber’s pole. I think I saw my hair, my comb-over, as it was, as it really, truly was, for the first time. Jesus. Jesus Murphy. I was going to go on YouTube looking like … that?

  I pushed my way into the shop.

  “Haircut, sir?” asked the grey-smocked codger as he stood up from his barber’s chair.

  “Yes, please,” I replied, all businesslike. “But let’s make it snappy. I’m in a rush.”

  I turned away from his mirrors and gingerly set my garbage-bagged signs, satchel, and umbrella onto one of the waiting-area chairs. Then I sort of pinwheeled out of my trench coat, evaginating the sleeves, and flopping the whole thing down over my stuff. Then I dunked out of my tweed and tossed it onto the pile without even a look, as I was already turning back toward the barber. I took one brave step forward, like a man facing his execution, and climbed into his chair.

  “So, so,” he said in a kind of old-man singsongy voice. He fastened a paper strip around my throat before draping me in his nylon cape and securing it at the back of my neck. “What are we doing today?”

  “Everything.”

  His wrinkled face sort of dippy-dooped in surprise. “Sorry?”

  “Take it off,” I said. “Just, just take the whole thing off.”

  “You mean, like, with the clippers?”

  “Sure … sure …”

  “Well, okay. How short would you like it? The number two guard, the number three?”

  “Which is shorter?”

  “The number two.”

  “Then let’s do that.”

  “Okay, but …” And here he raised one of the limp, carrot-coloured tentacles off my skull, “once I do this, you can’t ever really go back.”

  “It’s fine, it’s fine. Just do it.” I closed my eyes. “Hurry up, before I change my mind.”

  So buuuuuu-zzzzzz went the clipper as he made long, looping half-orbits around my cranium. I felt/heard my hair fall away in soft, feathery tuffs over the cape and onto the floor. Buuuuuu-zzzzzz … buuuuuu-zzzzzz.

  “And the beard, too,” I said with eyes still shut, as if talking in my sleep. “Give it a nice, good trim.”

  Bzz-bzz-bzz went the clipper as he stroked it along my furry face in short, quick snaps of his wrist.

  I knew he was finished when he undid the Velcro fasten at the back of my neck. I opened my eyes just as he swept the cape away. There, in the mirror, I got my first gander at the new me.

  Huh. Wow. My head, reader, now looked taut, sleek, aerodynamic — but also tough, like you might want to think twice before picking a fight with me. The beard was neat, neater than it had been in fifteen years. It molded itself attractively along the contours of my jawline.

  “Excellent,” I said to the barber. “How much?”

  So I paid him, and tipped him well, and then returned to my piled belongings in the waiting-area chair. As I absently donned my tweed, I looked out his large window and up at the sky. Not only was it not raining, but the sun was peeping between the clouds a bit. As a result, I decided not to put my trench coat back on, but rather drape it over my arm. I gathered up the rest of my stuff and then headed out his door.

  I felt so light, so free, so new as I headed north on Donlands and then turned left onto Raj’s street. It was as if there had been a change in the very chemistry of the world, a sweetness added to the air. The ground’s damp, gutter-choking foliage did not reek of death — it reeked of life, of vitality, of endless possibilities. I swelled with a great sense of renewal. I felt capable of just about anything.

  As I approached Raj’s place, I saw him out on his open front porch, smoking a cigarette. He looked deep in thought, a bit perturbed, a bit taxed by whatever anxieties dangled in his brain.

  He turned to see me coming, and I waved at him with one of my garbage bags of rolled-up bristol board. “Hello there!”

  “Sharpe, you douchebag,” he said, and pointed at my chest with his cigarette. “You were supposed to leave that thing on the cenotaph at eleven o’clock.”

  “What …?”

  I halted on the sidewalk and looked down at my tweed. There, high up on
its left lapel, beyond the periphery of my peripheral vision, sat an expertly fastened poppy. It was parked there, planted there, looking permanent and immovable, a crimson kiss over my collarbone. What the …? How the …? Somehow it had survived all my fumbling on the subway and at the barbershop as it hid under my trench coat. It lay unnoticed as I hiked my way up this street. But how? I mean, in the first place. How the hell did it … did it … end up on … me?

  Grace.

  Grace.

  I imagined her then, from earlier, preparing my jackets in the front entry as I searched our basement for the umbrella.

  And I glowed, reader. I glowed with an indescribable gratitude.

  I climbed onto Raj’s porch, and he sized me up.

  “Holy haircuts, Batman,” he said. “Fuck, Sharpe, you look fantastic. You look, like, ten years younger.”

  “I’ve had a Come to Jesus moment,” I told him.

  “That’s hilarious — especially coming from you.”

  “How was Barrie?”

  “Don’t ask,” he said darkly, and flicked his cigarette into the street. Then he nodded toward the door. “Come on. You’re late. The boys are waiting for you.”

  We entered his apartment and I took in the living room’s immediate, noticeable transformation. The furniture had been shoved to the sidelines, and in the space the move created stood two angled video cameras on tripods and, about six feet in front of them, a director’s chair. Behind the cameras, large, expensive-looking lights hovered on tall, thin stands. Behind the director’s chair, a soft, sepia-coloured backdrop had been erected. Black cords crawled all around the floor. Through the doorway that led to Raj’s large, galley-style kitchen, I could see the ingredients for the Bloody Joseph — bottle of Jameson, bottle of tomato juice, light-bright lemons, a verdant, esculent stalk of celery — lined up on his countertop.

  Walter and Jerome were sitting on the pushed-aside couch, smoking marijuana and reading motorcycle magazines. Next to them, on the couch’s arm, I could see a printout of my Proper Apology, which I had emailed to Raj the night before. The boys greeted me as they set aside their dope and their mags, and stood up to get to work. I watched as they went around turning on the cameras and the lights. Jerome lowered his face to one of the viewfinders while Walter fiddled with a monitor set up on a kitchen chair. I must admit it was heartening to see these boys in professional mode, doing what they had trained to do. They were just so matter of fact about it all, this technology and what it was capable of. I really hope somebody gives them a job, I thought.