Leaving the Sea: Stories Page 5

  “What’s landscape porn, Timothy?” Fleming asked.

  “It’s just masturbatory images of mountains and lanes and creeks and desert and there’s no drama to any of it. It’s not a story,” said the young bearded man who himself had not written a story.

  “Like, what if I described a teacup for five pages? Would anyone care?”

  More laughs. George was scribbling notes, as if this was the most helpful critique he’d ever had. But what could he possibly be writing? Fleming wondered. Story is no better than description of a teacup?

  “Okay,” said Fleming, looking at George across the table, determined not to mention the French New Novel, which by now had grown quite forgotten and old, and perhaps should be renamed the French Old Novel, or the French novel that recently died but that once mattered to a few people he knew, themselves also old. “But maybe instead of diagnosing what it is and isn’t, let’s try to talk about the experience of reading it, and maybe see if that discussion might be of use to George.”

  This the class didn’t much want to do, and Fleming carried the weight of the thing. Frankly it was George’s fault. He had written some passable description, at least sort of, and he’d made the whole thing pretty moody, but, it was true, nothing happened. Could this, Fleming ventured, be the descriptive intermission in a story that hasn’t been written yet? Perhaps we are only looking at the thigh of the beast. We can say nice thigh, but beyond that we are in the dark. His metaphor was out of hand, running amok. Maybe they hadn’t noticed.

  Britt alone picked up on Fleming’s desperation, while George transcribed the discussion ever more furiously, and she tried to help, reminding everyone of the inherent drama of landscapes and how charged they could be, how story resides in the land—had she really just said that?—and our best stories come from our relationship to nature.

  “That’s your opinion,” snapped Shay, suddenly bothered.

  Britt didn’t flinch. “Right,” she agreed, cheerfully. “Am I meant to be representing someone else’s opinion?”

  “Do what you want,” said Shay, apparently not sure if Britt’s response was an insult.

  Carl made a cat sound, clawing the air, hissing.

  “Oh, shit,” said Rory, and he suddenly seemed at a loss with no friends around to high-five.

  George raised his hand, usually taboo for the writer, but Fleming seized on it. Saved by the sad sack.

  “This is really incredible,” said George. “Thank you, everyone. I really appreciate it.”

  So this was George’s shtick, thought Fleming. He was a professional thanker.

  “I guess,” said George, “I have one question for you all, given the remarks.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “If this was set in a city, instead of out west,” asked George, hopefully, “do people think that would make it better?”

  Britt followed Fleming out after class. He wanted to stand in the sunshine, look at the sea, maybe let the salty air purge his face from the worrisome things he’d said, and lash him for the helpful things he hadn’t.

  They were at the railing and the boat was really hauling ass. But when he didn’t look at the water they suddenly seemed not to be moving. Behind them a terrific whooping arose from the pool, where kids had lined up at the slide, zooming down the bright chute into the water. How amazing if he could get an hour alone with that pool, guarded from spectators, streaking down the slide, exploding against the water, only to pull himself back up the ladder to do it again.

  “Why’d you start with two men today?” Britt asked.

  “What do you mean?” Dear God, what did she mean?

  “The class is half women and you could have discussed one of each today, a man and a woman. Wouldn’t that have been more fair?”

  He had no answer. He’d given no thought to this.

  “It’ll balance out,” he said, trying not to look at her.

  Britt struck a puzzled look. “It seems to indicate clear bias on your part, to let two men go first, and I don’t see how that won’t disrupt the balance of the class going forward, if the women collectively feel that you do not think highly of their work. So much so that you’ve delayed its discussion in favor of the work of two men who hardly seem—in my opinion—talented enough to have gone first. I just wanted to pick your brain about that.”

  Very crafty, little Britt. Let’s solve the problem of your bias together, you old, sexless fossil. I care about you and want to help. Now drink this poison and lie back while I chop at your expired genitalia. That’s good. Even though you’re going to jail, I still care for you.

  Britt had pale hair, wore no makeup, and seemed so at ease with him it was disturbing, like one of those precocious children who is only friends with adults. Even Erin adopted a more formal tone than this, seemed a stranger to him sometimes when they spoke. He liked Britt. Clearly the feeling wasn’t mutual.

  “Look,” he tried to explain, though he had no explanation. “Going first, as you call it, is no big deal. Certainly it’s not a privilege. I’d say it sucks to go first, actually, because no one knows each other, we have no rapport, and we’re not at our best, critically, yet. We haven’t vibed as a group. People who go first are at a disadvantage, actually.”

  This sort of sounded half-believable to him as he said it.

  Britt took this in, winching her eyebrows as she formulated her rebuttal. He braced himself.

  “So today, if I’m hearing you correctly, you were punishing Timothy and George by making them go first? You deliberately put them at a disadvantage? Perhaps I misread your bias. Maybe it’s men you have a problem with. I will say reverse discrimination is no less worrisome. It is, arguably, more hidden, more sinister.”

  “Sinister?” He sighed, starting to protest, but Britt bent over, laughing.

  “Oh my God, I totally had you!” she shrieked. “You totally believed me! I wish you could see your face!”

  Fleming had seen his own face enough times, in this life and the next one.

  Britt threw herself into him, spasming with laughter, claiming she really had him going.

  “What?” he said, quietly, trying to push her away, even though the contact felt good. “Which part was a joke?”

  Britt grabbed his arm, tugging down on him while she recovered from her fit of laughter. “You are hilarious,” she shouted. “Oh my God, you are so funny!”

  She kept crashing into him as if she couldn’t stand on her own. Was he meant to hold her up? People would be watching. This no longer felt good.

  “You thought I was one of those insane feminists,” she gasped. “You actually thought that!”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” he snapped. “Not insane. Maybe it was a reasonable point. Am I not supposed to believe what you say?”

  Just then Helen found them, walking up with a sly smile on her face.

  “Hey, you two,” she said. “What are you guys up to?”

  You two? You two? And here was Britt pulling on him and laughing as if they were together. He extricated himself, again, but Britt threw an arm around him and told Helen it was nothing, a silly joke, and they were just hanging out watching the ocean go by. Wasn’t the ocean amazing?

  Helen looked out at the water, frowned, and carefully agreed that it was. It seemed she was on the fence about it. This ocean, she told them, reminded her of a story, in fact, a very long story, slowly told, that got hung up in a complicated preamble about the first time she had told the story and who was there and why it had been a sort of hard story to tell. Apparently it still was. The old story about a story trick. An act of sheer violence to its audience. Fleming wanted to turn to dust.

  He begged off, saying that he needed to go work, which wasn’t true. He had no intention of doing any writing on this boat, but maybe there was something good on cable. Or something bad on cable. Or maybe the wall in his room was doing some interesting shit that he could stare at while he held his balls. Anyway it was clear that if he wanted to escape his students—yes,
yes, he wanted to—about the only place he could do that was in his room. But as he left the pool area he heard Britt shouting his name. She caught up, breathless. It was just that she was curious what room he was in, on what level, because such-and-such was her room number, on the such-and-such level, you know, just in case, and was he going to be around at the bar later?

  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 atten
d 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.

  After dinner Fleming went to the front desk to see if C. L. Levy was on board. Of course they couldn’t give out that information.

  “Isn’t there a passenger manifest?”

  Yes, there was a passenger manifest, but it wasn’t for passengers.

  Back in his cabin, Fleming told Erin about it on the phone. The missing student, the possibility that someone had gone overboard last night, and the ensuing head count that woke him up.

  “Huh,” she said.

  “Weird, right?”

  “I guess. I mean it’s not really that weird. It’s normal for them to do a head count. Is that what you said was weird? Or was something else weird?”

  Dear Jesus, what was going on between them?

  He took on the overly patient tone she hated. Explained it slowly. Offered a short course on the uncanny for his wife. Theories and origins of strangeness. And then, when he was done, Erin had been proved right, again without speaking. None of it seemed particularly weird. When you put it that way.

  “I feel concerned, that’s all.”

  This surprised Erin. Had he never expressed concern before? “I don’t know why you’re telling me. If you were really worried, wouldn’t you have done something about it instead of calling me?”

  “Okay, I won’t talk about this to you anymore, I promise.”

  “Oh, you’re going to pout now?”

  “Gosh, Erin, I still haven’t stopped pouting from last time. But I have more pouting saved up after this pouting is finished. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when the new pouting starts.”

  She hung up.

  On the way out of his room, Britt was waiting for him in the hallway, waving a black glove.

  The little stalker had found his room.

  “How come you’re not writing?” he asked, as if he’d run into her in public somewhere. Some cheerful patter, instead of screaming his head off in fright.