Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

Fleming told Erin about it over the phone. This was the best way to defuse all prospects. Confess before it happens, then it won’t happen.

“It was so awkward. And on the first day! Right on the ship railing where everyone could see us.”

“What am I supposed to say?” asked Erin, sounding tired. “That it’s cool a student is attracted to you? Good for you?”

“No, of course not. I think it’s funny. I mean, me. She can’t really be attracted to me .”

Erin let that one go. Apparently she agreed.

“Okay,” she said, in the classic way she ended her phone calls. As in, Okay, I’ve had enough, this is over.

“Well, I miss you,” challenged Fleming. The phone was sweaty against his head. He wanted out of this conversation, too. But it seemed dimly important for them to exchange intimacy.

Nothing.

He broke. “You can’t say one nice thing?”

“I can say many nice things.”

Just not to you, being the implication.

“All right, well, I don’t know what I did, but I’m sorry.”

“How can you apologize if you don’t know what you did?”

Here we go.

“I’m not sure how, Erin. But I apologize, I really do.”

“We’ll talk when you get back.”

“Let’s talk now.”

“I really, really, really, really can’t.”

Really? he wanted to say. But he couldn’t honestly blame her, because he didn’t want to talk, either.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Fleming said. “I hope you feel better.”

Fleming was asleep when someone knocked on his door. He tried to ignore it. What time was it, anyway? The knocking persisted. It was a quiet knock, which he found sort of queer, because there was nothing polite about being woken up in your cabin . Ever since he’d boarded this ship he’d been systematically chased into a corner as he searched for privacy. Now they’d found his corner, too, and he was left with—and here he modulated his interior voice into something menacing— nowhere to hide . He laughed out loud. Clichés like this were perfectly acceptable when you thought them to yourself, particularly in theatrical voices.

The knocking continued. The knock of someone who knew he was in here. The knock of someone who wasn’t going away. The knock, no doubt, of a crazy if highly attractive person named Britt. A powerful, yet subtle knock. Tomorrow in class they should critique knocking styles. He hadn’t told Britt his room number, but it wouldn’t have been hard for her to figure out. Maybe when she saw him in his big-and-tall sleep shirt, a ring of hair puffing up from where his sleep mask was, maybe then her resolve to seduce a corpse would, as they say, wane .

It wasn’t Britt. At the door stood one of the ship people, a young man in a strange white suit holding a clipboard. The purser, perhaps.

“Mr. Fleming?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay, good,” and he checked off something on his pad. “Is there anyone else in there with you?”

Peering in, snooping, the little perv.

“No,” said Fleming, hesitating. Why did he feel nervous if it was true? Oh, because maybe it wasn’t ? Because maybe Fleming had been up to some evening blood sport without knowing it, partitioning his overdeveloped psyche in order to, uh, tolerate the unbearable moral strain of his secret passions: abduction, captivity, taking his pleasures from people wearing hoods. How amazing if it were true. How dull that it wasn’t. Fleming was fully, finally alone. If he had a secret life it was a complete secret.

“Do you want to come in and search?” Fleming offered. Come on in my cabin, smell my sleep.

The man looked at Fleming with alarm. “No, no, that’s fine, thank you.”

Fleming had behaved like a suspect when there obviously hadn’t been a crime. Maybe he wanted to get arrested. Maybe that was the only way off this boat.

As the purser left, Fleming asked what this was about. You don’t knock on someone’s door in the middle of the night without explaining yourself.

“Just a head count,” the man said.

“A head count.”

“Don’t worry. We’ve counted you. You’re here. We’ve got you.”

At breakfast the students were buzzing. Someone had gone overboard, they speculated. The ship’s crew had been to their cabins. They were trying to figure out who was missing. Perhaps, Fleming thought, this was the only good thing about the Midwest. You couldn’t go overboard. Except for the lakes. There were the lakes. The virtues of the Midwest shrank back to zero again.

Franklin was chiding Carl, who sat there grinning, looking otherwise like sheer hell, as if he hadn’t slept. Come to think of it, Carl had on the same outfit as yesterday.

“I saw you at the bar all covered in sex,” teased Franklin. “How many heads did they count in your cabin, you little faggot?”

Carl nodded proudly, gave a lazy thumbs-up.

Fleming must have looked pale, because Franklin grabbed his arm.

“I can call him that because he’s not one, and I am.”

Sort of like if I called you a writer, Fleming thought. Oh, except that wasn’t fair. Be nice to these people, he reminded himself. And he knew that his assessment of others had never borne out over the years, with the least likely of his students always, always, enjoying the most success. In fact, he had better be nicer to Franklin. Franklin would probably be hiring him someday.

Class went okay. Britt’s story was disappointingly good. Talented writers can also be sexy little nut jobs who play mind games on boats. Her story described seven or eight different houses, which the narrator had lived in from birth until her death as an old woman. The writing was cold and beautiful, executed with severe control, and Britt leaped through the years of her narrator’s life, changing continents, changing marriages, until the narrator was alone again, inside a house not so different from where she was born, thousands of miles away. It was effortless, formally original, and Fleming was a little bit jealous.

Rory didn’t get it. “I guess,” he said, uncomfortable, as if he had never said an unkind thing to anyone in the world, “it might have been more interesting if it was the same character who lived in these houses, rather than so many different people of different ages in these different places. I couldn’t keep track of them, and I wasn’t sure what held them together.”

Shay cracked up laughing.

“What?” said Rory, blushing.

“Nothing.” Shay smiled, drunk on schadenfreude. “That’s awesome.”

“It’s the same narrator,” sneered Carl, who still looked debauched and exhausted from whatever he’d done last night. Not too tired to trounce the dumb blond man across the table, apparently.

Fleming felt that this called for a vote. “Did anyone else think there were many different narrators throughout the story?”

No one else raised a hand.

“Anyone?”

At lunch, arranging his papers, Fleming found the class roster. There were indeed supposed to be ten students in his class rather than the nine who had been showing up. The missing student’s name was C. L. Levy. He e-mailed the university office from the ship’s public computer terminal, which was embedded in a wall of foam-colored naval ornaments, as if long ago pirates stood here and checked their Facebook pages, yelling to the next pirate in line to wait his fucking turn.

A reply popped into his inbox a few minutes later, saying that all ten students were paid in full. No one had canceled at the last minute. No one had written in for a refund.

That was a lot of money to be paid in full, only to not board the ship, or to board the ship and not attend class. In the afternoon workshop session he asked his students if anyone knew of this C. L. Levy, but none of them did. “Man or woman?” asked Helen, thoughtfully, as if that might determine her answer. He didn’t know. “Alive or dead?” she asked. And that he didn’t know, either. They seemed to think that C. L. Levy was just another writer he was recommending to them. Professor Fleming was stalling again.