An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  As Thaddeus reached for his glass, I reached for him but was seated too far away to touch his arm. His hands were shaking and as he brought the wine to his lips it rose from the glass and seemed almost to leap onto him, creating a wet spot on his shirt between the top two buttons, and also a bit of transparency. I could see the hair hibernating in his chest’s concave. Unbidden, a memory came—a wet T-shirt contest in a gruesome little bar on Chambers Street, where I’d been dragged one day after work by my EF Hutton boss and his brother, a pair of demonic dunces in seersucker suits, slicked-back hair, who howled like cowards at a prizefight as the four women were drenched by a bartender wielding one of those old-style seltzer bottles. Breasts! They went mad at the sight of them as if they were babies starving for milk. Hey, heterosexuals, seriously: Get a fucking grip! And yet, seated at Thaddeus’s table, I stared. It was not his skin that arrested my attention. I saw a cross, the outline of a crucifix as stunning as any other intimacy.

  “Goddamn,” he said, brushing at his shirt as if it had gotten dusty. Now he plucked at the shirt and pulled the fabric up, shaking it dry, or trying to. With his free hand he made a resting place for his forehead and his tears continued to fall, hitting his empty plate with a barely audible plink, like time passing in another room.

  Emma did what I would have liked to have done. She got up from her chair and went to Thaddeus’s side and patted his shoulder. Of course it was much better, coming from her. Yet even Emma’s kindness seemed not to register on him. He seemed unaware of her, or of any of us.

  “You didn’t answer me,” David said, unmoved. “Are we going to lose the house now?”

  Chapter 19

  The Curtain Call

  “I went too far,” Thaddeus said, as soon as the kids were out of the room—David to the upper floor to feed his cats and gather his things before driving back to Saratoga, and Emma to the yellow house, to help Henry Stratton repaint the old Taurus Jennings and Muriel had given him for his sixteenth birthday. “I never saw my father cry. Or my mother. Maybe there’s something disgusting about too much emotion from a parent. Like seeing them naked.”

  “I think it’s okay. Anyhow, it’s not like you planned it.”

  “And I’m drunk.”

  “Well, yes, there’s that.”

  “Not as drunk as I’d like to be.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Kip . . . man.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just . . .” He made a face and shook his head.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Why are you wearing that crucifix?”

  He placed his hand over it, as if he had forgotten he was wearing it, or was surprised it could be seen through his shirt.

  “I’m not really sure,” he said. “It feels . . . I don’t know. Lucky? Not that it’s brought me any great luck.”

  “It’s kind of strange,” I said.

  “I always wanted to be Catholic. I need a rule book and someone to tell me what the hell to do. And an old friend gave it to me. Hey—you remember Bruce Grogan, don’t you? From Ann Arbor? Remember when you said the philosophy department at Michigan was really a front for the church? Maybe you were right because Bruce became a priest. He’s a total priest! He was up here for a while and we hung out. He’d bring a bunch of the other guys, too. I loved giving them the run of the place. One minute they’d be tossing a Frisbee around, the next minute they’d be debating Deuteronomy. He’s in Houston now. He’s second banana in this big church in Spring Branch.”

  He went on to relate some of Bruce’s impressions of Houston, but I was finding it difficult to pay attention. I was hearing his voice the way you can hear the muffled murmur of people talking poolside while you are underwater. Why oh why oh why had I so blithely told Bruce anything personal about myself? I must have been out of my mind. That they were still in contact with Bruce a thousand miles away filled me with dread.

  It had been years since I had felt such fear of exposure. In my thirties, I had a couple of dinners with an ascendant woman writer who normally lived in Alaska but who was in New York on a one-year appointment to teach writing at Columbia. We had a nice time and when I brought her to a Christmas party Kenny Adler was hosting in his apartment, she was a tremendous hit—funny, friendly, and she taught everyone how to make a lethal cocktail she called the Fairbanks. Based on a couple of remarks and her body language, I suspected she might want something more overt and romantic in our relationship, and my uneasiness was confirmed when I asked her out for the third or fourth time and she said, “Come on, let’s get real here. Okay? Can we do that? Kip.” It was the way she pronounced my name—as if it were a scarlet letter only she could see. But it was not the first time that I had dealt with friendly dating’s expiration date and her apparent pique didn’t bother me for more than a few minutes. A year later, however, she published a story about a closeted gay man with jug ears and an unfortunate face who worked on Wall Street, dated women right and left, and called himself Cap. It was titled “The Insider,” with its suggestion of unethical professional behavior, and its insipid assonance with “inside her,” that erotic Maginot Line that Cap could never cross. It came out in The Paris Review, not exactly required reading for everyone I knew, but hardly an obscure journal, and for weeks and weeks I was sick with anticipation that someone in my family, someone with whom I worked, or Thaddeus would read it and know for sure that Cap was Kip. People had seen me with her after all; the whole pitiful purpose of her was people seeing us together. And even though no one ever mentioned the story to me, I never did fully recover from the dread.

  Thaddeus and I walked out onto the front porch with the dogs, who immediately took off into the dark, with manic sidelong glances to each other as they ran, their tails whirling around like helicopter blades. The bamboo chairs with their deep seats and canvas covered cushions were gone—had they been sold?—and we stood, leaning on the railing, listening to the dogs whine and yip as they plunged into the spirea.

  “Now, may I ask you a question?” he said. “Mine’s a bit personal.”

  Are you gay? Do you want to kiss me? I tried to anticipate, I tried to prepare.

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “Ask away.” And why not? Perhaps it was time. My secret life had by now probably turned into Miss Havisham’s wedding banquet. Touch it and stand back. Yes, we could talk about the elephant in the room. Maybe elephant wasn’t how to say it. What? The candelabra in the room? The red red rose in the room? The little lilac love seat? The leather jacket? What the fuck was in that room? If there was a room at all.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “Happy?”

  “Yeah. I know. Who is? Who cares? But still. We’re here for . . .” He snapped his fingers. “What else can we hope for?”

  “Didn’t you once say happiness is for children?”

  “I don’t think my children are particularly happy,” he said. “And I think that’s . . .” He looked out into the darkness. “I’m dragging everybody down.” He shook his head, rather violently. “But you, what about you? Are you happy?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really think about it.”

  “I do. And I think about you. I think about you and your life,” he said. “You have this . . . job. And money, and you have this very full calendar, and travel, and all the things that people want. But I worry about you. I can’t even say why. But I do.”

  My heart was racing, pounding so loudly I wondered if it could be heard in the stillness of this Windsor County night. I know a heart beating like a drum has been said before but it happens, it’s true. It’s an old song and I was singing it. It was my turn.

  He was standing three feet away from me. Thirty-six inches. I was unraveling. Passion—untapped, untried, untested, and above all unsullied by compromise or even reality—surged through me with such force that I gripped the railing of the porch to keep my balance.

  “May
be I worry because you’re alone,” he said. “I know you don’t have to be. Anyone would feel lucky to be with you. You check all the boxes. Kind, cultured, great job, great apartment. You’re really a total prize. What are you waiting for? Is it the job? Is that it? Does it just take too much of you? You work so hard. Maybe you should take time off? Come up here. It’s nice up here. Or you know what? You know what we should do? Hike the Appalachian Trail. We wouldn’t even have to do the whole thing. That would be a bit much. But just to be two creatures in the great outdoors. I think that would be amazing.”

  The dogs were barking in the distance, and we listened to them.

  “It’s either a mouse or a vole,” Thaddeus said. “They feel about them the way people do about money.”

  “To each his own,” I said.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled with a sigh of pleasure. “The night air is sobering me up,” he said. “Don’t ever let me drink like that. And shut me the fuck up if I ever start boo-hooing about the goddamned movies again. The movie business is supposed to break your heart. That’s what it’s there for.”

  “I can’t control what you do,” I said with a small laugh.

  “I do follow your lead, you know that, don’t you? You tell me about music or a film, I always check it out. And when I don’t listen to you—you always thought Orkney was a bad idea—then I sort of end up wishing that I had.”

  “I didn’t want you to leave New York.”

  “Yeah, I know. I felt the same way. I always thought we looked out for each other and it was a little scary, the distance. I blame Woodward and Bernstein. That whole follow-the-money thing? I followed the money and went right off the side of a cliff.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Thaddeus,” I said.

  “Oh, you’ve already done so much. Too much. It should be my turn.” He rubbed his hands together. “What can we do for old Kip?”

  I knew he was being playful but the question provoked me. My face burned and I was grateful for the darkness.

  “I’d love to do that Appalachian Trail thing sometime,” I said.

  Had he even heard me? He was looking off into the distance—maybe he was listening for the dogs.

  “You always had the money thing figured out, Kip. You never let it get the best of you. Most people . . . Well, forget most people. Me. I let money get the best of me. Not that I was anything so special to begin with. But money just made everything worse. I was sort of stupid when I had it and now not having it doesn’t seem to be bringing out the best in me. Any advice? You know, tips. Whatever.”

  He put his arm over my shoulders. Nothing remotely romantic, total 100 percent palsy-walsy.

  “Just tell me what to buy,” he whispered.

  My future had been holding two cards and after teasing me with the possibility of laying down one of them it played the other one instead.

  My stock had crashed, the train had left the station, the blood test results were not too good, my house had been broken into, and vandals had shit in every drawer. I felt sick.

  “It’s chilly out here, isn’t it?” I said. “We should go in.”

  “I’m waiting for the dogs to come back.”

  “Call them.”

  “They don’t listen to me. It’s better if I don’t try.”

  But even as he was saying that, the dogs were approaching. The jangle of their collars, their deep chesty breaths, their paws in the scrub, and now the lawn, and now the paving stones—and an instant later they were on the porch, greeting Thaddeus, slinking their heaving massive torsos against his knees. They looked like seals swimming in circles.

  “Well,” I said, “they came back.”

  “They’re like what Bruce told me about Jesus—they may not come when you call them, but they’re right on time.”

  Chapter 20

  Emma

  Before dropping off for the night, I fiddled with the shades so they fit the windows as tightly as possible, but it was to no avail, and a few hours later the rising sun sent out its first probing rays, somehow able to get through not only the window shades but my eyelids as well. Ugh, those rosy fingers—rarely a welcome sight. However, this day, rather than my usual lustful mourning him, I woke wanting to strangle Thaddeus. A barrier had been breached and I understood that from this day on I would always have a degree of unease—I was not made for any activity that was even slightly criminal. I did not give tips; I did not do whatever. Maybe my extreme caution about my personal life had mutated into a generalized timidity. I had no stomach for the outlaw life. I could still turn my own stomach and make my hands shake by recalling the time I was caught shoplifting a first edition of a Djuna Barnes novel from Odyssey Books, oh and the nights of despair that followed, not to mention never daring to enter that store again, or any of the nearby used bookshops down on Fourth Avenue, relegating me to a lifetime of buying the first editions I like to collect via mail order or from overpriced antiquarians on the Upper East Side, used to selling their wares to interior decorators rather than real collectors.

  And now here I was, with the weekend before me during which I’d be Emma’s guardian and in charge of this house—this monster of brick and lumber, this trophy Thaddeus had given himself to celebrate his success and which now he was willing to ruin my life to hold on to.

  David’s bedroom was in decent repair—the paint was fresh, the plaster showed not a peel or a pucker, and the carpet carried not a whiff of mildew. There were scratching posts and the cat toys, but the cats themselves hadn’t joined me. They wandered the second floor of the house in the safety they presumed was theirs, though all that protected them were accordion gates at the tops and bottoms of the stairways. I went to the window and looked out just in time to see Thaddeus tossing his travel case into the backseat of his car. Mist rolled across the fields like an ocean of gauze. Thaddeus wiped the moisture from the windshield, using just his hand. He gave the house a farewell glance, and moments later he was on his way to Albany for the early morning flight to Miami.

  Back in bed I relieved my sexual tension and was fortunate to fall back to sleep. A weakling wasp ticked between the shade and the window, which I incorporated into a dream of standing in Orkney’s foyer next to a noisy grandfather clock, looking for someone and wondering if I’d come on the wrong day. The next sounds, however, were not so easily sublimated—Emma was screaming, Oh god, god, please no. No, no, no!, her voice pleading and frightened. I scrambled out of the bed; my legs failed me for a moment, but I righted myself.

  Emma was on her knees, her arms around the neck of one of Grace’s Weimaraners. It was either Marcel or Marceau. Grace said she had named them so to keep them from barking, but the dog barked, as well as whined and growled, as it tried to wriggle free from Emma. One of David’s cats, a huge black and silver tabby, was pressed into a corner, tail flicking, back hunched up like a Halloween cutout.

  Emma was in pajamas decorated with delicate little pink carnations like an English teacup. Her face was feverish, her hair plastered to her sweaty brow. I tried to help her hold the dog at bay, but I screwed up. When I grabbed the dog’s collar, Emma let go, probably thinking that now an adult was in charge and she was relieved of her responsibility. The dog, however, did not owe me the deference it showed Emma and it quickly turned its head, snarling and showing its shocking teeth, and I let go of the collar for a moment, plenty of time for the dog to realize it was free to go on its murderous errand. Emma, screaming, tried to catch it by the tail, but the dog was past her, its head down, its entire body close to the floor, like one of those swimmers who move like a torpedo just above the tiles on the pool’s bottom.

  From bad to good is a long journey, but going from bad to worse is generally a quick commute. Moments later, the second dog was with us and now the interchangeable Marcel and Marceau charged around the once forbidden, cat-rich territory of Orkney’s second story. The black and silver tabby lit out for a tall, freestanding bookshelf about forty feet down the hallway. It was stabl
e enough to withstand the impact of the cat scrambling to the top of it, but it couldn’t remain standing when the dogs leapt upon it. The entire bookcase tipped over, sending down a pounding sharp-edged rain of Sendak, Seuss, and Silverstein. The wall opposite the case prevented it from falling onto the dogs but they were nevertheless in a panic, and now the question of their own survival supplanted their desire to tear the cat to shreds. Marcel’s and Marceau’s claws clicked wildly against the bare floors and their legs whirled around cartoonlike as they scrambled to the top of one stairway, where the accordion gate was partly open. Thaddeus! It must have been him. What an idiot! He’d left it open. His mind already filled with visions of Grace. And now: you see? In the meantime, Marcel and Marceau were recovered from the shock of falling books and seemed to be planning a reengagement.

  While the dogs were still far enough away for her to risk it, Emma grabbed the terrorized cat, which looked electrified, its fur bristling, its claws extended, and ran back to her bedroom. I followed her in and she slammed the door shut. Her bed was bare, save for one pale blue fitted sheet, the walls displayed a couple of Bob Marley posters, and it smelled faintly of cat. Her windows offered a view of the back lawns sweeping down to the river. I remembered Thaddeus’s saying A kid raised with a beautiful view will always think the world is a good place.

  As for the cats, I didn’t know if they’d taken refuge in Emma’s room, or if she kept them there when David was away. One of them—another Siamese, taupe and mahogany—amused itself by batting around a candy wrapper. Emma glanced guiltily at me to see if I had noticed it. I think I was able to keep it from her. I felt so awful for the poor kid, but I wasn’t able to sustain that feeling for long because moments later Marcel and Marceau were hurtling themselves against the door. They were not exactly well versed on the art of persuasion. Somehow the cats maintained an air of indifference.

  “I hate those dogs,” Emma said, retrieving the candy wrapper and stuffing it in her pocket. “They love Mom but they’re not even friendly. They’re the worst.” She kicked furiously at the door with the side of her foot—even I knew better than to do that. The dogs revved up again, as if Emma had started a motorcycle, and now, at last, the cats began nervously milling around, inspecting the perimeter of Emma’s room and looking for avenues of escape.