Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

She fussed at Paul’s coat zipper, then adjusted her robe, but there was nothing to fix and no one to groom and they’d already hugged. She was panicked. She wheeled and hurried into the kitchen, calling, “Come, come, you must be starving,” then fled from sight.

Paul waited with his bags.

“Where do you want me?” he yelled. He needed a bathroom and he wanted to change his clothes. “Where am I, Mom? What room?”

His mother didn’t answer; his father was gone—resting, probably. Everyone in his family was constantly needing to rest, but never from physical exertion. Always from the other kind of exertion. Resting from him, Paul the difficult, who latched on to your energy center with his little red mouth and sucked it dry. You’d think that, given how long he’d steered clear of Cleveland, they’d be rested by now.

Alicia appeared at the top of the staircase, wearing a long T-shirt. She was disheveled and flushed. That hadn’t taken long.

“You’re up here, Paul,” she said, and he followed her, climbing the soft, carpeted stairs to his old bedroom.

His parents lacked Wi-Fi in the house, which figured, because old people hated the Internet. But they probably hated the Internet because they only had dial-up, and had to crawl through the USA Today Web site, which never fully loaded, with videos that never played, and click on e-mail attachments that took hours to download, so why even bother? The upshot was that Paul couldn’t really get on to any of his sites. He had a few JPEGs buried deep on his hard drive in a folder called “old budgets.” He brought the pictures up on the screen of his laptop. To be safe, he locked the door of his room, and then he settled in to try, sitting on the chair that his dad had painted red for him decades ago. He’d been back in his childhood house, what, all of ten minutes before his pants were at his ankles and his little person was out, lonely from the long flight, looking for friction. But the pictures on-screen reminded Paul, for no good reason, of people he knew. Civilians, instead of anonymous, Photoshopped nubiles. Civilians who had suddenly become naked, who were visibly uncomfortable in their poses, who seemed to want desperately to get dressed and head home to make pasta for someone. Paul’s sad man was cold and small in his hand, and nothing was working.

He had tricks for situations like this, a way to will himself into something passing for readiness, at least enough to travel to the other side, because stopping halfway through was tough to live down. He could have used a splint, Popsicle-sticked the little fucker until it stood, but that was when Alicia knocked and he jumped up and pulled on his pants, figuring there was about a 32 percent chance she’d know what he’d been doing.

“So,” she said, when he opened up, crossing her arms in the doorway. He guessed that this was the only cue he was going to get that they should have their little talk—brother and sister, adults now, believe it or not.

Alicia used to be forbidden to enter his room. In high school Paul had made a chart of those who couldn’t come in: Mom, Dad, and Alicia, their names in large block letters, plus, in smaller letters, Nana and that whole crowd. Fucking Nana and her skeletal friends, geriatric narcs who kept wandering upstairs to spy. Posted on his door as if he hadn’t also delivered the information verbally, numerous times, when admonitions were his preferred mode of rhetoric. What a man he’d once been, ordering everyone around. And they had obeyed! Never in his life would he command so much power again.

All signs of Paul were gone from the room now. Blush-colored paint reddened the walls, the punched-in holes spackled up and painted over. New floors—linoleum intended to look like wood—new furniture, sanitized air pumped in to cleanse the place of the errant son. It looked like a showroom for a home office dedicated to lace crafts and scrapbooking. It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they’d had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.

“How are you?” Alicia asked, and it seemed like she was really trying, for which bless her, because they had days to kill and might as well be friends.

They closed the door, sat on the bed. God, she looked old. Her face was slack and tired, and her eyes were muddy, as if she’d rubbed them all day and then poured red wine in them. But who was Paul to talk? He upsized his clothing almost every year and had moved on to the big-and-tall shop, which still carried some good brands. If his face remained smooth and babyish at forty, without the friendship-defeating beard he used to wear, with his shirt off he was shocking to behold, and he knew it. Shocking was maybe too strong a word. Actually, no, it was fitting. He had small, thin shoulders and from there his body spread hard and wide, into a belly that spilled around to his lower back. A second belly in the rear, which might be why he ate so much. Two mouths to feed.

Paul said that he was fine, and Alicia looked at him intently, asked if that was really true. Paul insisted that it was, it really was, but how was she, and how were things with Rick, and did they like Atlanta?

“We live in Charlotte,” Alicia said, stiffening. “We moved three years ago.”

Of course he knew that, had been told that, but it wasn’t like Alicia’s e-mail address had changed or anything, and you didn’t send things to people by mail anymore.

Paul assessed his sister and couldn’t really tell, because she wasn’t exactly a slender woman. Maybe she was technically showing. Some women hide it well. So he asked. He knew they wanted one, and what harm was there in asking?

“No,” she said, a bit too cheerfully, which was weird, given the thoroughly public way she and Rick had always demonstrated their urge for children of their own.

“It’s getting late, though, right?” This he knew. This was information he was quite familiar with. The sun starts to set at forty.

“We’re okay with it,” Alicia said. “We really are.”

Which was what you said when you weren’t okay, so he would drop it. But to himself he couldn’t quite drop it. Who was broken, his sister or Rick? Who was flawed and rotten on the inside? Or was it both of them, which was maybe what had attracted them to each other in the first place? Maybe there was a dating service for the barren. Sexually on fire, but fucking barren. Of course he knew how they’d met. He’d been there. In this very house. And Rick had been his friend. In high school they’d once almost gone camping together.

If Alicia’s childlessness troubled her, he knew she wasn’t going to show him. He was last on her list for candid disclosures, displays of vulnerability. Human feeling . Not for Paul. He was going to get a censored Alicia, and that was probably what he deserved.

“Can I ask,” she said, “if you have someone?”

She seemed genuinely hopeful, so earnest that Paul overlooked the strangeness of the phrase “have someone.” He admitted that there was someone, there was, and her name was Andrea, and we’ll see, won’t we? Isn’t that all you can ever say, even thirty years into a marriage, not that he would know? We’ll see how it goes?

“Oh, Paul!” Alicia cried. “Oh, that’s wonderful!”

It was pretty wonderful, he admitted, really wonderful. It was hard not to smile and sit there feeling crazily lucky. Maybe this would be easier than he had thought.

But when Alicia pressed him for details, including the precise occasion on which he had met this mysterious woman, the fucking GPS coordinates for this highly improbable event, not to mention a photo, a photo of the two of them together, it was clear that she didn’t believe him, not even remotely.