Leaving the Sea: Stories (5 page)

Relying on experience, Fleming waited. It was about the only trick he had when he was in the gladiator pit. Ride out the silence. Stare the fuckers down. Someone else in the room was likely to find the pause unbearable before he did. And, sure enough, up stepped Timothy’s defender, Rory. Cheerful, permissive, simple, friendly, handsome, healthy, well adjusted, insane: someone who should never have become a writer.

Rory thought the story was great. So great! That man, on that bed. Wow. Rory could just see and feel him there. The whole thing was
so real
and he wouldn’t change a thing. This was perfect stuff. It almost could have been a movie! Rory smiled, and it was clear that no one had ever disagreed with him, ever. Or, more likely, people
had
disagreed with Rory but he wasn’t aware of it. The bliss it must be to be Rory.

So the poles had been set, approval and dismissal of Timothy’s story, and now it was Fleming’s duty to string critical latticework between them, ricocheting between praise and criticism until everyone had gotten their money’s worth. Later, Timothy could pick from this web of provocative suggestion as he got going with his revision.

Slowly the workshop roles emerged. There were the miniaturists, who wanted to look at a certain line on page 5 and wonder if maybe it shouldn’t be airlifted earlier, which might seismically alter the story and bring the whole thing scarily to life. Mightn’t it? There was the person who said that the story really began halfway down page 2. Apparently these people were everywhere, even on boats. The
your story starts here
people. What about saying that the story begins right after it ends, right here, on a page you haven’t written yet, and then throw a balled-up piece of paper at the writer? There was a young woman named Britt who felt the story should be switched from first person to third. First person, to her, at least in
this
story, allowed confessional overtones that seemed to let too much self-pity creep into the story, which defeated a reader’s ability to care for this man. If he feels sorry for himself, she explained, it makes it harder for us to. Not bad, Britt, Fleming thought, keeping his face neutral. A strange dose of reason on the high seas. But her comment was ignored and then there was the person who confessed that this story really wasn’t his thing so it wasn’t even fair for him to try to evaluate it. He’d better pass. He wanted to pose this response as an apology, like saying he was sorry, he didn’t read French, so what could he do? I’m sorry, man, your shit isn’t my thing.

Ah, one of those guys. The one from last semester had been named Sean. This one, the cruise version, was Carl. Exempted from value exchanges because of his immensely idiosyncratic place in this world. Not really
his
world, just a world he is grumpily visiting. That’s what Carl should have said: I’m sorry, I have to pass, I’m not actually a human being. Whatever Carl’s real
thing
was would be a closely guarded secret until he turned in his own story, and everyone—or so it usually went—once they saw it, would strain to detect the slightest difference between Carl’s writing and the work of the peers he’d spent so much effort distancing himself from.

Fleming jumped into the discussion and said that Timothy was brave to write about something so distant from his life, and for this he should be commended. Brave or silly, though, he wondered? Often it was hard to know the difference. To the students he said this was powerful material. A man who will die soon, wondering what went wrong in his life. And he’s alone. His mistakes have left him alone. He’s done this to himself, it’s his fault, there’s no one else to blame, and yet we somehow,
potentially,
feel for him. It’s really tragic. Cheers, really, to Timothy, because this stuff is big. But could the story maybe, who knows, use a scene? Sometimes an actual scene carries feeling really well, at least if that’s the goal here? Possibly not. Possibly not. Expository narrative can be really, important pause, interesting. Can anyone think of examples of this?

Of course they couldn’t, and he panicked, because suddenly he couldn’t, either, even though he’d once taught a whole class on the subject, “Tell Don’t Show,” one of those kill-the-father courses that resulted in a literary body count of zero. But no one seemed to care. They didn’t want examples. The era of illustrating a point was long gone, which made teaching easier, if lonelier. Years ago Fleming would tackle a discussion to a halt, to recommend books, even while his students would look suddenly unplugged, drained of life, because Fleming hadn’t just changed the subject, he’d made them forget their names and why they were there. He would describe the plots of these books, their styles, their techniques, why they were important, and no one ever made a note, even to write down an author’s name. They would blink at him, waiting for his seizure to flare out. In his evaluations, Fleming would learn that students viewed these endorsements not as the kind of resource sharing that universities were meant to enable, but as digressions, beside the point.
Stalling,
one student called it. And so instead he talked and talked and talked about Timothy’s story itself, devoting more language to it than it contained, a body of criticism outweighing a work that would never be published, trying to praise Timothy without alienating his classmates, most of whom sensed that the story was muted and unreal, an exercise. But Timothy couldn’t be shut down here, Fleming knew. He needed to be encouraged. Get the young man on his back, lift up his shirt, and rub that fucking belly. And yet at the same time Timothy’s classmates could not think their teacher was an idiot pushover who simply praised whatever he read, particularly writing like this, because then what was his praise worth if it ever actually came their way?

Fleming danced the tightrope, throwing coins to each side of the line. If Timothy did not actually purr out loud, at least he seemed content. Fleming’s neutrality in the end must have only made him seem spineless. A politician of the classroom, pleasing precisely fucking no one.

There was time at the end for Timothy to ask questions, and he just thanked everyone. He really appreciated it, nodding through that wondrous beard, rubbing his hands together.

“No questions? That’s it?” Fleming asked.

“I mean, yeah,” said Timothy, sitting back, pleased. “I wrote that story in like two hours so I’m surprised anyone liked it at all.”

Lunch was a buffet. Fleming loaded his plate with pasta, rolls, salad. What he wished was that he could take the food to his room. The walk would be long, the elevator ride conspicuous. He’d have to carry his plate through telescoping dining rooms, up carpeted stairs, then out across the sun-blasted pool deck and along the railing, where you had to practically tiptoe single file or else go overboard. By then his shame would be complete, his food cold. The package he was on didn’t include room service, which meant eating above decks, and that risked eating with students. Or being seen eating alone by students. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

They found him at the kiddie pool, on dessert. There was pretty good-looking pie here, so he’d gone with a piece of chocolate cream. The kiddie pool had a shaded canopy so he could eat without getting reamed by the sun, which was on a tear today. Large men his own age with very different lives stood shin-deep in the pool holding barrel-sized drinks, their shoulders boiling and blistering like the surface of a distant planet.

“Hey, Professor Fleming.” There were maybe five of them, hovering awkwardly. Writers in the sun. Just asking to get shot.

“Hey, guys, sit.” He welcomed them as if this were his own little porch.

They pulled up chairs and sat and looked at him, waiting again. He couldn’t really eat chocolate pie under that kind of scrutiny. Jesus, he thought, did he have to keep entertaining these monsters, even though class was over? This was break time, which meant he needed to replenish his stores of fraudulence for the next round. How else could he summon his artillery of deceit without some pretty serious alone time? He needed a different body to wear around when he wasn’t in the workshop. Or, at the very least, a T-shirt that read:
I’M OFF THE CLOCK, BITCHES!

“So what do you think of class?” one of them asked. This would be Franklin, the quiet one with translucent skin. Franklin was a thin, pink person who was either a genius or, well, not one. Chances weren’t.

“I should ask you guys that, right?” Fleming tried to smile through a mouthful of chocolate.

He knew he shouldn’t do this, but he couldn’t help it. It was like asking Erin if she loved him, the conversational sugar he sought out like an addict. What was she going to say? It looked so desperate, so helpless. Maybe because it was. Class had hardly started and here he was groveling for student approval.

“Seriously,” he said. “Does class seem okay?”

They burst out laughing and looked at one another. A merry laughter, he supposed, but still. Already with the knowing looks! They’d hardly even met and here they were being conspiratorial at the fucking kiddie pool.

“We never know when you’re joking,” explained Helen, as if they had discussed this issue at some length. Maybe Helen was the spokesperson.

He smiled. As in
when
did they not know? What was the phrase that was either funny or serious? Let’s get out the transcript and take a goddamn look. He had yet to joke with them a single time that he could remember.

Here’s a clue, he should have said: I haven’t been genuinely funny in a very long time.

They were back at it in the afternoon. The story was a pastoral, with a nameless man walking through the landscape—the powerful, moody landscape—thinking. The writer, George, was older than the others. He had a large, sad face and he was bald. These men were everywhere. The cattle in our lives we hardly even see. Slowly they are herded into the dark shed to be killed. Fleming hoped he didn’t look like George, but he suspected he looked far worse. Older, sadder, balder, one of the cattle who’d gotten out alive, survived the air gun to the head. A little bit soft of brain, but holding his own. To look like George would be lucky, probably. If he went home looking like George maybe Erin would be intrigued. She’d smile and throw her arms around him, yelling, “Sylvie, your handsome father is home!” The force field around Erin would lift. Love would surge through the house, and people in the surrounding neighborhood would fall to the floor in sympathetic orgasm. Just because Fleming was slightly less fat.

On the first page of his story George had written a note for the workshop:

“Hey everyone! I can’t wait to meet you. Thanks so much in advance for reading my story. Your time means a lot to me. I’d love to hear what you think. Best, George.”

“I don’t know,” said Franklin, cautiously. “It doesn’t seem like anything happens.”

“Can that be okay?” Fleming asked, eyeing the room for a taker. “Do things need to happen?”

Franklin blinked little crumbs from his eyes. He seemed to decide the question was not for him but for the group at large. He retreated in his chair, started to doodle. He must have been exhausted from that amazing opening comment.

Timothy jumped in. “It’s landscape porn.”

Everybody laughed, except George, who seemed bewildered. Was this a compliment?

“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.”