Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

“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.