Leaving the Sea: Stories Read online

  “What are you going to wear?” she asked.

  Paul said that he might not go.

  “What do you mean you might not go? Isn’t that why you’re here? You can’t not go—everyone’s going to be there. What are you going to do, stay home and beat off?”

  So she knew.

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see? Jesus, Paul, you are such an asshole.”

  There was a time when she’d have been afraid to say even this, the obvious truth. Paul might have responded with heirloom breakage, a dervish whirl through his sister’s valuables. The truth was he was too tired to break anything. You needed to be in shape. So chalk that up to some improvement between them. By the time they were eighty, there was no telling how evolved they’d be.

  “I know,” he admitted. “I’ll probably go. I’ll try to go.”

  “Goddamn. Don’t do us any favors.”

  At dinner that night, the questions came, and Paul tried to suck it up.

  “How’s business, Paul?” Rick boomed. Everyone else at the table shrank, as if someone had thrown up and they didn’t want to get splashed. Probably Rick hadn’t been at the family meeting where they’d decided to go easy on Paul, lay off the hard stuff. Like, uh, questions.

  “Let’s not set him off,” his father had probably advised. “Let’s nobody get him going. It’s not worth it.”

  His mom and Alicia must have nodded in agreement, and now Rick had steered them off the plan, going for the jugular, the crotch, the fat lower back.

  “I don’t know, Rick,” Paul answered. “Business is fine. You mean world business? The stock market? Big question. I could talk all night, or we could gather around my calculator and do this thing numerically. Huddle up and go binary.”

  He wished for a moment that he belonged to the population of men who asked and answered questions like this, who securely knew that these questions were the gateway for nonsexual statistical intercourse between underachieving men.

  Rick was confused, so Alicia jumped in.

  “You know what he means, Paul. What do you do for work? What’s your job?”

  “I cash Dad’s checks and spend the money on child sex laborers down at the shipyard.”

  His mother put her hand to her mouth.

  Perhaps there was something about sitting at this table that had made him take the low road so hard and fast. The table, his room, that red chair, the house, the whole city of Cleveland. The blame could be shared.

  “Paul,” Alicia warned.

  “Yeah, I know. Fine. I haven’t taken Dad’s money in years, Alicia, if you must know.”

  He stopped to eat and everyone else was quiet, looking at him. He’d promised himself that he’d try harder, and already he wasn’t. He took a breath and looked at Rick, and Rick blinked, waiting.

  “I work at a cabinet shop, Rick. We make custom kitchen cabinets. I operate the tenoning jig.”

  That wasn’t so bad.

  Rick, alone, burst out laughing, because cabinetmaking was one of the funniest things in the world, maybe, or because he was one retort behind and he wanted to be sure he got the joke this time. He looked around for company, but no one else was laughing.

  “You do what?” he said.

  Suddenly, Paul’s father leaned in, intensely curious. Mr. Tuned Out had gotten his little button pushed. He stared at Paul, and Paul couldn’t tell if he was excited or angry. “You’re a carpenter?” he asked, in absolute wonder.

  “Woodworker, actually, Dad, is what it’s called. Fine joinery and that sort of thing. Huge difference. Carpenters, well, you know. I don’t have to tell you.”

  Paul stopped himself. What a thing to say to a man who used to build houses, a carpenter before he became a big contractor. But fuck it. His dad had been retired forever. Didn’t even work in his own shop anymore, probably. And there was a big difference between a woodworker and a carpenter. That wasn’t his fault.

  “Shit, though, Paul,” Rick said. “Pretty good money in that, I bet, with so many people redoing their kitchens. Is it union?”

  Paul admitted that it was, and Rick whistled with a show—slightly false, Paul felt—of admiration.

  “Nice. Nice. Right? You could support a family with that, am I right? If you wanted to?”

  Rick winked for everyone to see, and what a person to wink, with his failed seed. Why would he be turning the screws on Paul when he had nothing to show for himself?

  “I do, actually, Rick,” Paul whispered, looking down at his food. He couldn’t believe he was telling them. “I do support a family.”

  He smiled and wanted to say more, to fill in the blanks, but they looked at him as if he were the strangest creature they’d ever seen. And maybe he was, but did that mean he couldn’t have a family?

  It was his mother, though, who did it. Such concern in her face, such pity, as if to say, Poor, poor Paul, who still needs to lie to us, and what did we ever do to create this man? He’d hardly begun to tell them, and yet she seemed so sorrowful looking at him like that. So he asked about dessert, and she brightened, jumped up, crowing from the kitchen about the best blackberry pie in the world. You had to try it. And who wanted ice cream, and, Alicia, could you help clear?

  Paul’s cell phone rang while they were watching television. He took the call outside, as if the reception were better in the yard. They were probably relieved that he’d left the house.

  “Hey,” Andrea said.

  “Oh, my God, hey.”

  It was so good to hear her voice.

  “So how is it?” she asked.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” He took some deep breaths. He just needed to talk to her and get grounded.

  “You’re lying.” She laughed.

  “No, no,” Paul insisted. “It’s fine, everyone’s fine. I mean, it’s weird to be here. The city is different.”

  “Yeah? Different how?”

  She was so good. She really wanted to know. She wanted him to tell her everything, and he wanted to, and if he had more time he would, but who cared what was different about Cleveland? It didn’t matter. He missed her is all and he told her that and she sounded happy.

  “How’s Jack?” he asked.

  “I just put him down. He’s such a sweetie. He actually asked to go to bed. He stood and waited by his crib for me to lift him in.”

  “Oh, my God,” Paul said. “The little dude.”

  “I know.”

  “Give him a huge hug for me.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Andrea said. “At five thirty in the morning when he wakes up I’ll hug him and tell him Daddy misses him. Then I’ll make coffee and wait for the sun to come up and wonder how the hell I’m going to get through the day.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll do the morning shift all next week.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter, Paul.”

  They talked, but not about Cleveland, or the Berger psychosis, as he referred to it when he was home with her. They talked about little stuff that didn’t matter, but soon Andrea’s voice drifted off in a way that meant something was wrong, and of course he knew what it was, because it had been wrong for a while now, and it was his fault.

  “And,” he said, which is what he called her. When they were good, he called her “And How,” which wasn’t very funny, but as far as he could tell she liked it. Or at least she didn’t seem to hate it.

  “And, honey, I wish you were here with me.”

  She breathed into the phone, and Paul stood on his childhood lawn in Moreland Hills waiting for his wife to speak. Even when she wasn’t speaking, even over the phone, he loved her desperately.

  In cold tones she finally said, “I wish I were there, too, Paul. Me and Jack, to meet your family. Did you tell them?”

  “I did,” Paul said. “I mean I told my sister about you and then at dinner I did. I tried to.”

  “You tried to.”

  “I just got here. I landed a few hours ago. It’s been intense.
I’ll tell them more. I want to. How could I not tell them about something so great?”

  “Because maybe you don’t think it’s great? Because you’re ashamed of us. Because you didn’t tell them when you met me, and you didn’t tell them when Jack was born, and now you still haven’t told them.”

  “And.”

  “I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I don’t mean it. You know I don’t.”

  They made up, saying the reparative things, but it went only so far. Andrea assured him that everything was forgiven, except when he hung up and went inside it didn’t feel as if everything, or even anything, had been forgiven.

  Inside, from the hallway, he watched his family watching TV, until his mother looked up and saw him. “Paul, come,” she called. “Come sit.” She opened her arms to him.

  The Berger family reunion was being thrown in the conference room of the Holiday Inn downtown. Paul put on his nice shirt but left it untucked because his belly showed too much. There was a lot of grooming in the house, hectic and nervous, as if they were all going on dates.

  When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Paul went to wait in the car.

  They parked downtown. The long black towers were lit up, so they did have windows after all. What amazed Paul was that the windows were round, like portholes on a ship. From a high floor in one of the towers, looking out your window, he imagined, would be like looking out from a cruise liner and seeing only air. Air and tiny buildings, tiny people below.

  When they walked into the reunion, Billy Idol was on the stereo. The song “White Wedding.”

  “Seriously?” Paul said to Alicia, looking around at the few other Bergers who had also arrived on time. The very old Bergers, wearing woolen suits and standing in a circle, whom he wouldn’t be talking to tonight. They held fishbowl-sized cocktails and soon it would be their bedtime.

  “Seriously what, Paul?”

  “Can we do something about the playlist?”

  He tapped his foot, scanned the room. Would his cousin Carla be here? Not just a kissing cousin but a third-base cousin. Third base on more than a few occasions.

  “Do whatever you want. There’s the DJ. But please remember that people have been planning this party for months while you’ve been, what was it, down at the docks having sex with children. Right?”

  It was so stupid to fight about it, and as the song thumped and shook the room with its black acoustics, hysterical and threatening, Paul had to admit that he’d really always liked it. Kind of totally loved the song, even though he had never admitted this to anyone. It was possibly a great song.

  It’s a nice day for a… white wedding-uh.

  The Berger cousins arrived, and with them came their spit-polished children, ready to destroy the world and have someone clean up after them. Soon packs of kids ran wild, sweating and flushed in their fancy clothes, following some ancient order of clan logic that baffled Paul. Occasionally one of them would be yanked from the pack and forced to run a gauntlet of ogling older Bergers, who poked and kissed and hugged him until he broke free and returned to his friends, half-raped and traumatized.

  The kids made the whole thing okay, Paul thought, because you could stand alone and watch them without being seen as a pathetic wallflower, unable to navigate a party and make conversation with your own miserable flesh and blood.

  Paul set up shop at the drinks table, sucking down glass after glass of sparkling water. He was chewing on ice when he heard his name.

  “No way,” some enormous man was saying. “You are fucking kidding me! Paul, you bastard.”

  Through the fat and flesh and alcohol-swollen skin Paul saw Carl, his father’s brother’s son. Carla’s brother, actually, which begged questions about naming strategy. Or, really, about basic mental competence.

  “Dude!” Carl yelled. “I thought you’d written everyone off. What’s up?” And he threw open his arms for a hug.

  Paul leaned into Carl’s heat and musk. He would hold his breath and do it, because maybe Carl had hugged Carla today and Paul could get a contact high.

  A scrum of kids crashed into them, then tore off laughing. An intentional attack on the overweight forty-year-olds at the drinks table? Paul and Carl watched them go, hug deferred.

  “You got some of those?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Carl said. “Afraid so.”

  They caught up, if that’s what you called crunching twenty years into a reunion sound bite, and Paul found it easy to tell Carl about Andrea and little Jack. Carl blinked and maybe he was listening to Paul or maybe he didn’t care. Soon Carl was scanning the room, looking behind Paul as he spoke, raising his chin now and then at someone going by. Little smirks of hello from Cousin Carl, working the room while standing still.

  “It was hard going for a while there,” Paul said, and Carl smiled and fist-pumped to someone across the room, doing a little bit of air guitar, then grabbed Paul by his shoulders.

  “Dude, it was amazing to see you. I’ve got to go feed Louis or I’m going to catch serious hell.” And then Carl was gone and Paul went to the back of the drinks line, which was now very long, to get himself another glass of water.

  Paul danced. He danced with his mother, who was beautiful in an emerald-green dress. When his mother tired, halfway through the first song, he walked her to their table and grabbed Alicia, who looked okay, too, and they danced to Marvin Gaye and Def Leppard and Poison and then, with Rick joining them, to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”

  It wasn’t bad to dance. Dancing was better than not dancing. He was tired and sweaty and he felt good. Finally he collapsed at the family table, where his parents were already eating, along with some relatives he must have met before. They stared at Paul as if he were bleeding from the face.

  “What do you say, Dad?” Paul shouted. “Are you going to dance?”

  His father studied him. They all did.

  “Paul here is doing quite well,” his father said to everyone at the table. “He’s become a professional woodworker, doing joinery at a high-end cabinet shop.”

  “It’s not really a big deal,” Paul mumbled.

  “It is, though,” his father said. “It takes years of training and a whole hell of a lot of skill to be a real woodworker.”

  “It’s kind of automated now,” Paul said quietly. “They have jigs.”

  “It’s great that they hired you,” some old man said, getting in his dig. Meaning he’d have never hired Paul.

  “Used to be you had to cut twenty sets of dovetails to even get asked on a crew,” his father said.

  “Wow,” Paul said.

  “Twenty sets. By hand. Using a Jap saw.”

  “I could never do that,” Paul admitted.

  “No?” his father asked.

  Was he leering at Paul? His own father?

  “You’re a mortise-and-tenon man. My word. Those are even harder, though, right? Makes dovetails look easy. Or do I have my information wrong?”

  “I do those, but, like I said, there’s a jig.”

  “So not by hand?”

  “God, no, Dad. No way.”

  “I’d like to see one of these jugs sometime. You’ll have to show me. Show me how the whole thing works now that everything’s changed.”

  Paul looked at his father, and at his mother, who was chewing her dinner with the care of a professional taster, and he looked at the other relatives around the table, who carried with them a narrative of Paul that he could never, no matter what, revise. A narrative that favored the outcome, a father with unexplained bruises after an argument gone really wrong, rather than the supporting architecture that fucking deeply informs single events—accidents!—that somehow get out of control. These people would have to die for Paul to be free. Which was bullshit, he knew. It was Paul who would have to die.

  “I’d love to do that, Dad,” Paul said.

  His father regarded him across the dinner table with a face that no longer showed any fear. Who are you? Who are you, really? his father’s face se
emed to ask.

  Paul excused himself to get another drink. He asked if he could get anything for anyone while he was up, drinks or food, but they were fine, they said, and waved him off.

  From across the room, he saw his cousin Carla. She was circling a table of kids like a waitress, and she was still utterly lovely. What a girl she had been, and now she looked the same. Exactly the same. He watched her, amazed, wondering which kids were hers, or if, fuck, they all were, but he couldn’t stand not saying hello right away, so he ran up to her.

  Carla beamed. Paul beamed. They said holy shit and hugged tight. She was small in his arms, so little and warm against his body, whereas Andrea was big, and taller than him, and incredible, of course, in her own way. This wasn’t knocking Andrea. He loved her. But Carla was tiny! Oh, my God. It felt good to hold her.

  Paul wanted to get her alone, but that was ridiculous. They held hands down at their waists. Carla talked fast, smiling, radiant. She said that things were great and she lived in the Twin Cities. Just one of them! She assistant-nursed part-time at the children’s hospital and she had three kids and she’d finally gotten her master’s in something that Paul didn’t make out. It was hard to hear. It was loud and horrible and dark in there, and it was so hot that everyone stank. Plus he wanted her to himself.

  “Let’s go have a cigarette,” Paul suggested. “We can sit on the steps out front.”

  He didn’t usually smoke, didn’t even have cigarettes, but Carla followed.

  Together they sat in front of the Holiday Inn, watching the valet wait for cars to pull up.

  Carla laughed out of nowhere.

  “What?” Paul said quietly. A voice inside him, very far away, was telling him, unpersuasively, not to seem so engrossed. It was unbecoming to fawn.

  Carla covered her mouth, shook her head. A gesture of amused disbelief.

  “I’ll never forget something you said to me, Paul. I still remember it.”

  “What did I say?” He was proud in advance of this terribly clever thing he’d said as a kid. So clever that Carla had never forgotten it!