Leaving the Sea: Stories
Page 25
It will feel especially good to remove his clothes and pull on his night shorts and sleep shirt. They are soft and always clean and this is an outfit he loves to wear.
Off with the lights downstairs and a story read aloud at the foot of the lad’s bed. A story about a horse who is lost for such an incredibly long time. The horse grows old and forgets it was ever lost and the girl who has lost the horse becomes a distracted adult, too busy to say anything nice to anyone. Until one day she is reminded of her horse and she weeps and thinks of the wonderful times she had as a girl. On the day the horse dies, thousands of miles away from her, the girl, a young woman now, stirs in her sleep and suffers a terrible dream.
After he reads the story, a last check of the house and a shush and a kiss to the boy before shutting out his light. His son’s eyes will shine for a moment in the darkness, and Thomas will, as is his habit, wait there in the silence of the doorway and listen for a softly whispered “Dad.”
And even if June is already in bed and plugged into her machine by the nurse when Thomas comes into the bedroom, well, he will still lower the bed guard, lift the wires, and crawl in next to her, if just for a moment.
When the streetlights sizzle out finally and the cries from his son’s room grow quiet, he will take the moment for himself, he will take it and hold it and try not to squeeze so hard that he kills everything that is beautiful about it. These are the most perfect seconds ever delivered to the world, aren’t they? It is like someone has packaged them in a soft bag that you can unwrap until they flow over you. Quiet, with cold air, and everyone else so wonderfully hushed, when all you can hear is the far-off singing that has always meant everyone around you, every last creature, is doing fine. What a perfect time it is to be alive, a great time to breathe in the sweet air.
He will hold himself perfectly still next to his sleeping wife and listen so hard it hurts, until all sounds but his own breathing are vanished from the air, and then Thomas will sit up and look at his Juney.
“I missed you today,” he will say.
And then Thomas will lean over to kiss his wife good night.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the editors and early readers of these stories: Heidi Julavits, Denise Shannon, Deborah Treisman, Jordan Pavlin, Andrew Carlson, Andrew Eisenman, Deb Olin Unferth, Matthew Derby, Rob Spillman, Ben Metcalf, Halimah Marcus, Sumanth Prabhaker, Marty Asher, John Freeman, Ellah Allfrey, and Bradford Morrow.
For insight, generosity, and friendship, thank you to Michael Chabon. Thank you to Sam Lipsyte, for everything. Thanks to Matthew Ritchie and Anne MacDonald, Artspace Books and Madras Press. To Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, thank you for the space and time. Thank you to Chris Doyle and Michael Sheahan for the most ideal space of all.
To Peter Mendelsund: Thank you for your beautiful work.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Flame Alphabet, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife and children.
Other titles by Ben Marcus available in eBook format
The Flame Alphabet • 978-0-307-95751-1
Notable American Women • 978-0-307-42705-2
Visit: www.benmarcus.com
Like: www.facebook.com/Ben.M.Marcus
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY BEN MARCUS
The Age of Wire and String
Notable American Women
The Father Costume
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (Editor)
The Flame Alphabet
Copyright
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Ben Marcus
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: “On Not Growing Up” (Spring 2008) in Conjunctions; “Fear the Morning” as “The Morning Tour” (Fall 2004) in The Denver Quarterly; “Watching Mysteries with My Mother” (May 2012) in Electric Literature; “First Love” in The Ex-File (Context Books, February 2000); “The Father Costume” as The Father Costume (Artspace Books, May 2002); “Origins of the Family” as “Bones” (February 2001) in Frieze; “The Loyalty Protocol” (January 2013) in Granta; “I Can Say Many Nice Things” (Summer 2013), “Against Attachment” as “Children Cover Your Eyes” (February 2005) and “My Views on the Darkness” (June 2009) in Harper’s; “Rollingwood” (March 2011), “What Have You Done?” (August 2011), and “The Dark Arts” as “Wouldn’t You Like to Join Me?” (May 2013) in The New Yorker; and “The Moors” (2009) and “Leaving the Sea” (September 2013) in Tin House. “The Moors” subsequently published as The Moors (Madras Press, December 2010).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marcus, Ben, 1967–
[Short stories. Selections]
Leaving the sea : stories / Ben Marcus. —First edition.
pages ; cm.
“This is a Borzoi Book.”
ISBN: 9780307379382
eBook ISBN: 9780385350433
I. Title.
PS3563.A6375L43 2014 813’.54—dc23 2013004576
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
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