Leaving the Sea: Stories (2 page)

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.

Paul veered the conversation to their parents. The common, if chewed-up, ground they shared. How were they? et cetera.

“You know, Dad is Dad,” Alicia said, shrugging. “He had me washing dishes the second we got to the house yesterday. I’m his little slave.”

“You could say no, you know.”

Alicia looked at him coldly. “No, Paul,
you
can say no.”

“Yeah, I guess. But they don’t even
ask
me. I don’t
get
to say no.”

“Ha-ha.”

“And Mom?”

“She’s doing
so
great. She’s really amazing. She’s such a fighter.”

Paul squinted. What did this mean? Whom had she fought? Paul had never even seen his mom get mad. He tried to put the question in his face, because he felt odd asking—how could he not know if something had happened to his mother?—but Alicia moved on to the party, the stupid family reunion, which crouched like a nasty-faced animal on Paul’s horizon.

The reunion was tomorrow night. Cousins and uncles and grandparents and all the people they had bribed to love them. The whole family tree shaking its ass on the dance floor. A Berger family freak-out. Getting together to bury their faces in buffet pans and lie about their achievements.

“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.