An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “Where are you, Thaddeus? Right now.”

  “Home,” he said. “Grace is sleeping. Guests still sleeping. So are the kids. The cats and dogs. I can’t remember the last time I had a real night’s sleep.” He paused. I heard a long intake of breath. “I feel so alone,” he said, in barely a whisper.

  I couldn’t say it, but I thought it: You’ve got a houseful. You’ve been mounting your ceaseless charm offensive. So sweet to everyone, so solicitous. And by the way: you’ve also got a wife and two children. And oh yes, one other thing: your body probably carries the smell of sex from last night.

  Thaddeus asked, “Are you there?”

  “Yes, sure, always.” For a moment, my habitual and well-honed reserve was about to fail and I was close to saying, You need to come over here right now. Not that it would have thrown twenty years of laughs and denial into some suddenly revealing light, but it would have changed things. Lives are shaped by words and deeds, but what we don’t say might be just as powerful as what we do. Our silence works like a lathe, giving us our final form.

  “Is your mortgage being foreclosed?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Don’t worry, Kip, I am not asking you for a loan.”

  Really? There was a touch of formality in his tone, as if he was now getting to the part of the conversation he’d rehearsed. Thaddeus had always been so of the moment, off the cuff, captain of the Good Ship Spontaneous, and those things had served him well, until, of course, the very instincts that brought him success plunged him into ignominy. A shocking development, to be sure, as if your left hand had become your right foot, or your carriage had turned into a pumpkin. He’d derailed his movie career in a burst of perverse inspiration—a Sunday brunch at a producer’s Coldwater Canyon house at which he threw his drink in the face of the host’s twenty-seven-year-old son. Who knows why Thaddeus would do something so foolish? Trouble at home? Hating himself for auditioning for an assignment he didn’t even want? What an outburst! Thaddeus always maintained that he didn’t even quite remember tossing that glass of California orange juice and California champagne, even going so far as to wonder if a dybbuk or some other fanciful, malign spirit had momentarily taken control of his actions.

  But it was fatal, whatever the motivation, whatever the cause. One flick of the wrist and his career vaporized. Maybe he was already on the fade at that point, but after the Coldwater Canyon brunch he was poison. Of course, if he’d been on the top of the heap, the transgression would have eventually become an anecdote. But he was in the middle of the heap. Maybe low-middle.

  He continued to try, putting together pitches and spec scripts, waiting for the phone to ring, and working his charm as if he could quip and grin his way back into contention on those occasions when someone in the business agreed to meet him for a drink. As the weeks of unemployment turned into months and then a year, and when his savings were drained and his pension fund (not under Adler management, by the way) made that doomed pilgrimage from nest egg to piggy bank, he began to denounce all of the people with whom he had once happily worked, all those friends who turned out to be acquaintances, and who seemed to have stumbled into a kind of collective amnesia, forgetting all of the favors Thaddeus had so willingly bestowed when he was able to—the introductions to agents and producers, the encouraging readings, the pep talks, the Ritalin, the loans of money and Final Draft software. A small number of the people Thaddeus had hoped would rally around him when trouble came did in fact check in with calls, notes, invitations to parties. But even those semi-loyalists drifted off—the currents in the waters in which they all swam were swift and pitiless. People just went away. And what was the point of their loyalty anyhow, those decent few? All they could offer was sympathy. No one could help.

  Except for me. For this morning’s call to a rich friend, there had likely been a buildup, maybe over the course of a week. Notes scribbled. Grace might have had a hand in it, too, or she might have instigated the whole thing. “Ask Kip,” she might have said. “He’s got money and nothing to spend it on. He’s obviously in love with you and he’ll do whatever you ask.” It was something she could have said. From the moment we met, she was watching me, not sure enough to actually say anything, or maybe she had. Maybe the financial emergency had loosened her tongue. Maybe she said, Call your boyfriend and get him to buy some land from us. Grace was a scrapper; she’d never go down without a fight.

  “What would you think about buying some land from us?” Thaddeus said.

  He overestimated my income, my wealth. They both did. I was overpaid but I was not personally rich, just a handmaiden to the rich. The people I dealt with made donations to the Southampton SPCA that were larger than my yearly take, but to Thaddeus and Grace I was loaded. There was no getting around it: I was the rich friend.

  “You’ve got a price in mind?” I asked, in my sober, global-strategist voice. Orkney was not quite a white elephant, but the upkeep was ruinous. Thaddeus’s career was gone, and Grace was, strictly speaking, an expense, not an asset. Throw in two children, two tuitions, all those meals, all those teeth.

  “You mean that, Kip? Really. You would consider that?”

  “Can I pick my own spot? There’s some beautiful land up there.”

  “Of course. We can do a subdivision.” There was a catch in his throat. Was he tearing up?

  “Hey, we’ll be neighbors,” I said, in an offhand way, as if that added benefit had just occurred to me.

  Silence. I could hear him thinking: Oh no, don’t build on our beautiful pristine acres. Use this land for bird watching or picnics. Be prepared to sell it back to me when my ship comes in. Write it off your taxes. He knew nothing of the tax code, by the way.

  “Here’s what I can do,” I said. “Figure out what you need and that’s what I’ll pay for it. Within reason, though. Remember—I’m not as rich as the people I work for!”

  “Need? We need a lot, Kip. I won’t lie to you.”

  I felt a twinge of annoyance. I knew I didn’t really have the right to ask what I was about to ask, but really there was no getting around it.

  “How’s work going?” I asked, suppressing any hint of disapproval. He had gotten rich by a fluke and he was waiting for the next fluke. I couldn’t really blame him. And he was up there in Windsor County, surrounded by people who didn’t do normal days’ work—some painted, some took photos of wildlife and sunsets, some dabbled in botanical experiments, growing hybrid strains of cabbage and apples, some made occasional forays into the city to bring family heirlooms to auction, all of them living off the fumes of old fortunes. You could almost despise them, but really in the larger scheme of things they were just irrelevant. As most of us are.

  “I’m at my desk day and night, no days off, no holidays,” Thaddeus said. “I’m Scrooge to my own Bob Cratchit.”

  “That script you were talking about . . .”

  “Which one?” he asked. “Anyhow the answer was no, pass, Pasadena, which covers everything I’ve written in the past three years. I keep on thinking I should get a regular job somewhere. But you know what? I can’t afford to get a normal job. I need more than a regular job can pay me. And anyhow I know I’m close to writing my way back into the business. And if I walk away now and get some other kind of work—not that I’m qualified to do anything in particular—then my chances of writing myself back into the movie business are pretty much wrecked. For a while, I was hoping for something at the college but you know Avon College’s film department is a hundred percent experimental and the kind of movies I worked on are really of no interest. I know this guy at Random House who thinks there’s a chance I might find some ghostwriting gig that I might be able to do fairly quickly and make a few bucks, but for the most part I’m here in front of the slot machine yanking away at it and afraid to move on because maybe the next pull is going to be the jackpot. You’ve known me forever, Kip, and you know I’m not . . .”

  His voice was suddenly muffled, his hand over the mouthpiece. I heard other people
coming into the room. A man’s voice, another man’s voice, a woman’s, laughter.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “I can’t believe these people are up and around already. It’s barely light.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Look, man. I better get some breakfast going here. But I have to tell you. The money. We actually need . . . It’s a lot.”

  That unit of measurement—a lot—no longer had meaning to me, when it came to money. I knew too many rich people, and to them a lot could mean one hundred million dollars if they were talking about a profit shortfall, and a lot could also mean five dollars if they were talking about the tip they’d given the attendant at a parking garage.

  “I’m sorry, Kip,” he said.

  “No, no, it’s okay, it’s fine. These things happen.” He could be hard on himself, very hard, he could actually be brutal. I didn’t want him to suffer any further.

  “I plan to buy that land back from you. You’ll get your money back and more. You’ll see.”

  “Oh please. Stop.”

  “I feel ashamed.”

  “In front of me?”

  “In front of myself.”

  “It’s just money.”

  “Money’s just money when you have it. When you don’t, it’s everything.”

  Even over the phone, I felt the blunt physical fact of him. All the details that made him irreducibly himself. The almost-broken nose. The space between the front teeth. The shins worn bare and shiny by a lifetime of Levi’s. The thick black hair, which he still let grow long, now no longer floppy but combed back, like a Latin American diplomat. His skin was pale but his cheeks bloomed with a permanent blush. Indoors, outdoors, winter, summer, spring, and fall, he had the cheeks of a ten-year-old boy stomping snow off his boots after an hour of sledding. Everything about him pleased me and made me want to touch him. Maybe there is always one person who finds everything about one other person alluring. Maybe somewhere there is a person who feels that way about me, or you.

  Every morning I thought of him. Which often meant imagining him with his wife. The imagination must play some vital evolutionary role in the survival of the species, but the imagination can be cruel. When you imagine people waking together, you don’t picture discord, or icy stares; you don’t imagine boredom, anxiety, mistrust. No one needs to rinse their mouth, no one carries a secret within them like an unexploded bomb. You imagine two people enjoying everything you long for. The imagination can be merciless, and it’s shameless, as shameless as time.

  Once, in college, Thaddeus and I were in my apartment getting high and having a friendly argument about music—Rolling Stones versus Beatles. I was going on and on, my passion for winning the argument far outstripping my passion for Charlie Watts, who I insisted was ten times better than Ringo Starr. Thaddeus listened, which he was so good at. It was part of what people loved about him, his eloquent, gracious, encouraging silence. Henry James describes a woman as having a face that, in speech, was like a lighted window in the dark, but when you spoke to her the curtain was immediately drawn. Thaddeus was the opposite of that. He seemed more animated when he was listening, always leaning forward, nodding encouragingly. But as I went on about Charlie Watts, ratcheting up my admiration with each go-round, he finally said, “Oh, blow me,” not in a sexual way, but just as a way of expressing his disagreement.

  I don’t know where I got the courage. A once-in-a-lifetime thing. A lightning strike. A prison cell door the jailer forgot to lock. A staircase suddenly appearing on the side of a glass mountain. He said, “Oh, blow me” and I said, “All right, I will.” He laughed, but I didn’t back down. I looked at him with as much boldness as I could muster. At last Thaddeus shrugged and said, “Hey, if you want to, go for it. I’ve never turned down a blowjob in my life.” He started to undo his faded button-fly Levi’s and stopped, rather theatrically. “Is this more or less your thing? Like, you know, are you gay?” he asked. I looked at him as if half confused, half amused, and said, “Uh . . . no. What about you?” And Thaddeus said, “Well, if you’re not, then neither am I.”

  In Ann Arbor, he had a reputation and it had been earned. You wouldn’t call him needy because he generally got what he wanted, though he seemed always to want something more, something else. And you wouldn’t call him insatiable because, well, his manner was soft, considerate, he didn’t have that vulpine look in his eyes. He was carnal, perhaps even lustful; he trusted nothing more than human touch, which he believed to be more truthful than words, and who could argue with that? Mainly, he wanted to be loved, he wanted to be admired, and he metabolized love and admiration the way some people can metabolize food and remain thin. He ought to have been an actor or a singer—he needed the applause. A writer of ho-hum, derivative short stories could never garner the praise he craved.

  I’d seen him with so many different girls that once I asked him, Are you actually with anyone? To which he answered, “Any port in a storm, right?” But what did that mean? Men as well as women? Pansexuality? At the time we called it polymorphous perversity. Hands, feet, mouths, anuses, vaginas—the point was pleasure, the goal was the tingle, the surge, maybe even a kind of love, delicate, frail, with the life span of a moth.

  His jeans were unbuttoned and he fished himself out. I heard the scrape of something being dragged across the floor coming from the apartment above, lived in by a guy who we referred to as Professor Plum. His wife had died and the poor soul was always rearranging his furniture. Outside, the wind had picked up; a night storm was coming in and my windows shook in their frames. The walls of my room were painted white and I kept them bare, not wanting any images or posters or sayings or symbols to somehow define me in the eyes of others. The floors were bare, too. At one point I’d had a five-by-seven Persian carpet I’d bought from a thrift shop, but soon after bringing it home I rolled it up and stored it. I thought it said something about me, though I wasn’t sure what.

  I took him in. The world as I had known it began to give way and it was terrifying, like crossing a frozen lake and hearing the pings and groans of the ice. I had no idea what I was doing. I had but once been inside of someone’s mouth and I’d been too frozen with self-consciousness to feel pleasure. A sophomore girl I’d been dating grew restless and uncertain with our movie and study dates and thought she might change the nature of our chummy relationship via oral sex, perhaps in the same spirit that Professor Plum tried to lessen his grief by moving the sofa from the west wall to the east. We were in her dorm room and as she went at me I scanned the spines of her books—Spinoza, Kant, Russell, Schopenhauer. She told me not to finish in her mouth, and to tap her on the head when I was close. She had ground rules. It comforted me to know that someone in the room knew what we were doing. Soon, very very soon, I tapped. She continued to grip me but moved her head, as you would lean away from a sparkler to avoid the sulfuric spit. She gave me a considerate little tidying shake and then playfully plopped down beside me and said, “My turn?” And even though she said it as if it was a question, I was in a virtual panic. The idea of orally pleasuring her was deeply disturbing to me—and somewhat mysterious, too. Thanks to porn I knew what position to take and had a general idea of the choreography. She still had her clothes on but now she was wriggling out of them, gleefully, as if preparing to jump into a cool lake on a hot afternoon. Her nakedness was not a welcome sight, but I did not flinch, any more than you would allow yourself to recoil at the bedside of a badly injured friend. My technique was absurd. I kissed her opening as if it were her mouth, one faux-passionate kiss after another, in the general vicinity of her clitoris—or so I hoped. Youth, excitement, and trust carried the day and her orgasm came quickly, a kind of vaginal sneeze. She pulled my hair, beckoning me to lie beside, which I did, and we held each other and before I could stop myself or even become fully aware of the meteor shower of emotions going through me, I began to cry. “Shh,” she said, rubbing my shoulder. “I know, I know. . . .” And to this day I c
an’t say with any certainty what she meant, what she knew, or thought she knew. She could have meant I know how intense that was, how wonderful. She could have meant I know you never did that before. She could have meant I know that’s not what you wanted. I really don’t know. I do know that people see you a lot more clearly than you want them to.

  And here I was again, an unexpected visitor on Planet Sex. And the main thing I remembered from my first time was to ask him to tap me before he came. “Check,” Thaddeus said, which was rather flippant, but at the same time he traced my lips with the head of his penis, which I found quite romantic. I embraced him with my lips, my tongue, the roof of my mouth. But really it was my nerves, my blood, that ineffable mist that rolls silently through everyone, the thing some people call the self, and others say is the soul. I must have been gripping him too tightly; he said, Whoa. The fernlike curls of his secret hair, the brush of it against my nose, was more vivid than war and peace and the price of oil. It was somewhere between 10 P.M. and midnight. I have revisited and redone and reimagined that night countless times in my solitude. I have behaved in these imagined encounters in ways that my inexperience and shyness and fear would not permit at the time. In my imagination, I have ravished him. In my altered memories, I have made promises even a saint could not keep.

  He was good enough to give me the warning tap but I didn’t heed it. I drank him in as if knowing I would be walking across a desert for the next twenty years. When he stepped away, he looked at me with what I took to be admiration.

  “That was intense,” he said. “If I went over to the University Gay Freedom Alliance and let them know about your skills there’d be a line around the block.”