An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “This place is lovely,” he said, “and the wine is delicious, but how dare they call it the Paris Commune? For a place where an actual worker can’t afford to have a meal?”

  I smiled neutrally. He had a point, of course, but the question remained—did he have a right to make it?

  We ordered our customary dinners—Thaddeus ordered some kind of chicken, thinking it was somehow slimming, and me the shrimp provençale because I liked seafood but never cooked it at home. While we ate he told me about meeting at the Carlyle for drinks with a producer named Curt something or other, a middle-aged man who’d made millions in Florida real estate and who now wanted to try his hand at movies—Warner Bros. would of course indulge his folly until his pockets were empty. “I thought I’d pitch him Mass Deception, but that’s sort of scorched earth for me since that disaster in L.A. And I have a new idea right now I’m tremendously excited about.” He may have caught something in my expression because he laughed. “Yeah, tremendously excited—you heard me. And yes, I’m still limber enough to blow a bit of blue sky up my own ass. Anyhow, I won’t bore either of us with recounting the story; suffice to say, he loved it and needed a little time to think about it—in other words, Pasadena, baby, sayonara, see you in hell.” He ended with an extravagant wave, like an acrobat acknowledging the audience after a perfect landing.

  Our waiter, mistaking Thaddeus’s gesture for a summons, appeared at our table. He refilled our glasses, relit the votive candle.

  “Are you still working on these?” the waiter asked, indicating my shrimp provençale and Thaddeus’s poulet aux olives.

  We told him we were and he poured the last of our Chablis into our glasses and left. Thaddeus said, “‘Working on these.’ As if we were working, and not just sitting on our asses, paying more for this bottle of wine than he’ll take home at the end of the night.”

  “Well, if we weren’t here, he might take home even less.”

  “I’ll give you that,” he said. “By the way, don’t even look at the check. Dinner is on me.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Because it’s my turn. Because you’re true blue. Because you’re my best friend and I love you.”

  “Ditto.”

  He carefully picked the linen napkin off his lap and folded it slowly but haphazardly, longing for order but having little talent for achieving it. He did his best to smooth it into a presentable shape and tucked it under the rim of his dinner plate, after which he placed his knife and fork on top of it.

  “Now it’s perfect,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood.

  Our bill was on the table and Thaddeus slipped his Visa into the folder and handed it to the waiter. A few moments later, the waiter came back to say the card had been declined, the news delivered casually, with no embarrassing deference or concern. More of an oops than an oh-no.

  Nevertheless, Thaddeus was crestfallen. “I’m sorry. I thought that one was still okay.” He stood up and pulled some money out of his pocket, but it was clearly not going to be enough.

  I had a cold feeling that all of this had been premeditated, but I pushed the thought away. Which I would do again. If love is a sinking ship, you do want to go down with it.

  “Sit,” I said. “Let me take care of it. I’ll expense it, if that makes it better.”

  I gave the waiter my card. The bill was nearly $200 and I was relieved that Thaddeus wasn’t paying.

  “Tell me a stock to buy,” Thaddeus said, as soon as the waiter was out of earshot. “I can’t stand this much longer.”

  “Any valuable information I have is called privileged information and I’m not allowed to use it. That’s called insider trading.”

  “I have a feeling it happens all the time.”

  “Some people probably get away with it, but it would be a tremendous risk. And that’s why they overpay—keep us happy and discourage us from taking big risks.”

  “There must be ways to do it,” Thaddeus said. “You wouldn’t be buying the stock yourself.”

  “Wow, what a great idea. No SEC investigator could ever figure that one out.”

  “I’ll bet it happens all the time. I’ll bet that for every one person who gets caught there are a thousand who get away with it. And what difference does it make? No one gets hurt. It’s the quintessential victimless crime.”

  “It’s not victimless.”

  “But it’s all fixed, top to bottom. Isn’t it? That’s certainly the impression I have. All those people who made a fortune on AOL? Don’t you think some of them were given a few very helpful hints about what was going on with that company? A brother, a neighbor, a best friend? You know as well as I do, every time they bust some guy on Wall Street there’s at least a thousand other people doing the same thing or worse.”

  “Do you read the newspapers?” I asked. “People go to jail.”

  “Okay. So every once in a while there’s a sacrificial lamb.”

  “I don’t want to be that lamb, Thaddeus. This is crazy. We shouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  He put up his hands, signaling surrender.

  “I’m sorry. If anything bad ever happened to you, I’d never forgive myself. I really thought . . . I don’t know. Probably not thinking that clearly. The money thing is really getting worse.”

  “But Grace.”

  “Grace is happy. She’s getting attention. But the money . . .” He shook his head. “Anyhow, I sell one script.” He raised one finger. “It gets made.” A second finger raised. “It does okay.” He held up three fingers. “Then I need never worry again. I will never be put in this position again. It’ll be fixed. I will be all set.”

  “Good. You’re the man to do it.”

  “But in the meanwhile, I don’t know what to do.”

  He was looking at me searchingly, and fury scorched a path across my thoughts.

  “You could live like a regular person.”

  “You don’t live like some regular person! You live in a beautiful apartment on a fantastic block in probably the most expensive city in the solar system.”

  “I have a job. One that I intend to keep. What about you?”

  “I do not at this moment have a job. Why would you ask me that? I am officially unemployed. But that doesn’t mean I’m not working. I work like a fucking dog. And things are starting to shift. For sure.”

  “What about in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime I am trying to get a job. I am writing outlines. Pitches. Spec scripts. None of which I would be able to do if I was bagging groceries somewhere.”

  “You could teach.”

  “Where? I’d do it if someone called me. That would be great. Columbia, NYU, I’m not choosy. I’ll do it. The money will basically suck, but I will do it.”

  “Sell the house, Thaddeus. Sell the house. You’d have money.”

  “What? If I sold Orkney?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “First of all, I can’t. It would destabilize everything. I’d lose Grace.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t even own the place anymore, Kip. I’ve mortgaged it up the wazoo. If I sold it now, I’d probably walk away with enough money to buy a one-bedroom apartment in New York.”

  “Then live somewhere else,” I snapped.

  He looked at me, his eyes full of injury.

  “Where would I live?” he finally said. “Kalamazoo, Oklahoma City? I need to be where I can take meetings. I can’t give up. I don’t have any other way. And I need that house to entertain in. People in the business, you know? They see me in that house and they know I’m viable, I’m a player. It’s my marker on the board. Without it, I’m a nonentity. I’m supposed to invite some producer up for the weekend to sleep in a mobile home? Can’t be done. I’m sorry. I really am. I love you, Kip. And you’ve been so generous. I wish . . . I don’t know what I wish. But I’m sorry. I know I’m putting you in a weird position. Please, please forgive me.”

  “Okay.
”

  He breathed out his relief. There was sweat on his brow and his philtrum glistened with moisture.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “I have to go. Train to catch. And I think it’s time to relieve you of the sight of me.”

  “Johnson and Johnson,” I said. “Buy it in the next few days. The stock’s been dormant but we think it’s undervalued, and I heard”—I looked around the restaurant, to make sure none of our fellow communards might be listening in—“I heard Bayer might be interested in a takeover. You won’t make a fortune but J and J is going to move—and when it does, sell it. Don’t wait for a double. Take twenty percent.”

  E. M. Forster wrote that given the choice of betraying a friend or betraying his country, he hoped he’d have the guts to betray his country. Understandably, he left out the part about betraying yourself.

  Chapter 23

  Grace Ascendant

  A few weeks after her great success, Grace called me in my office late on a Thursday afternoon to ask if she could spend the night at my apartment. She’d come to the city to show slides of her work to Justin Kent, a newly minted gallery owner with a space on Broome Street, and Grace thought the meeting had gone well. Kent had liked her work enough to invite her to a dinner he was having that night for a painter named Lou Trachtenberg. Perhaps he had realized that his guest list of forty people included only five women. Trachtenberg’s work involved smashing glass and pouring it artfully onto paint-spattered tarps, and though Grace’s narrow taste in art didn’t include smashing glass or paint-spattered tarps, she was excited to attend the dinner. After so many years feeling herself a non-being in the art world, any kind of inclusion encouraged Grace—who could blame her?

  The dinner was in Kent’s SoHo loft; and Grace had been seated in the semi-Siberia between a morose South American man with a tiny mustache and painted fingernails, and Kent’s mother, an ENT who practiced in Amagansett. But the placement did not dampen Grace’s spirits. Nothing could. Good food, great booze, and she arrived at my place around eleven glowing, like a girl coming home from her first real date.

  It was a warm early summer night. Parts of the city were already quieter than usual as people of means had left town to get a head start on the weekend, allowing me to open my windows and run a couple of portable fans rather than the air conditioning. I showed Grace to the second bedroom, which I had prepared for her, with Stargazer lilies and a bottle of cold Evian water, as well as one of my T-shirts, which she could wear as a nightgown. I wanted everything to be as swell as I could make it because my intention was to speak frankly with Grace about Jennings, and to bear down on her should she decide to be evasive. I have a single person’s understanding of marriage, which is that most are dressed in camouflage. Each marriage has its own Constitution, its own code of conduct, its own language, always with something distinct, and recondite, obscure, complicated, and private—when a marriage dissolves, it’s as if a little nation ceases to exist. Perhaps in some fit of passion or remorse Grace had already confessed to Thaddeus, or in some moment of rage, or some mood of wanting to know the worst, Thaddeus had pressured her to reveal her relationship to Jennings and Jennings’s relationship to Emma. It was all guesswork, like hearing your parents murmuring behind the bedroom wall and not being able to understand what they are saying.

  She admired my apartment, in some detail, while reminiscing about my old loft on Park Avenue South, where she and Thaddeus had tied the so-called knot one frantically snowy January afternoon. We reminisced about that day, the guests, the food, the Ethical Culture minister who had arrived on cross-country skis. Grace talked and talked in a way that seemed chemically induced. Her footsteps were heavy. She picked up the various little objects that caught her eye—the scrimshaw church, the framed pastel postcard of the GM plant in Flint, circa 1955, a dozen or so pricey knickknacks, until she settled on the green glass art deco diver. She continued to talk, asking what I thought a studio apartment in the Village would cost, even chiding me for not hanging any of the pieces I’d bought from her over the years. Had this voluble person been sullenly lurking within Grace all the while, furious over not being heard? I also wondered if she was talking to keep me from talking, if she had somehow deduced that I was going to come after her, and her defense was to build a wall between us made of words. She described Justin Kent’s expression while he looked at the slides of her new work (delight, amazement, etc.). She homophobed about his appearance. (“So handsome, and in perfect shape. I don’t know why we can’t get guys like that on our side of the street.”) She indulged in personal mythology (journey from rank basement apartment to dinner in perfect SoHo loft, parallel journey of artist who no one took seriously to artist on the cusp of renown). She asked for ice water. She wondered if I had something sweet to eat on hand—she’d been, she admitted, too nervous at the dinner to do more than pick at her food. She fiddled with her wedding ring, twisting it around and around. She did something odd with her eyes at the end of nearly every sentence, opening them wider than they were meant to go, a kind of ocular exclamation mark. And when she was running down a bit, she suddenly said, “The guest room has its own bath, right? I think I should shower. I feel like a tea bag that’s been left on the bottom of the cup. If you wait up for me, I wouldn’t say no to a nightcap.”

  I waited in my favorite leather chair for her to return, which she did, her dark hair wet and swept back. She was barefoot and immodestly cloaked in the pale green T-shirt, which extended barely to her knees. She seated herself in one of the Mandlebrod chairs I’d recently acquired.

  “I need to chill out. I am so excited. I am just so completely jazzed, I can hardly stand it.”

  “Yes, it’s very exciting. And long overdue. Hey, Grace? There’s a couple of things I want to talk to you about. Mainly about Jennings.”

  “You know,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me, “when no one paid the slightest attention to what I did in the studio, I thought of the pieces as having infinite value. No one was offering a hundred dollars for one of them, so I could imagine them being worth a million. But now they’re in the realm of reality, money reality. Do you understand? Of course you do, you of all people. Once the pieces have prices on them, you’re put into a slot. Selling a piece for five thousand dollars destroys the dream of selling it for a million. The money bullies you, it’s defining somehow, it tells you who you are. And you know what’s so strange? I’m sorry, I know I’m going on and on, but it’s so weird. Now that money is attached to the work, I don’t feel it’s really mine. The money’s nice, but it sort of wrecks everything, too.”

  “It shouldn’t,” I said.

  “I know. But money leaves a smell.”

  “I’m happy for you, Grace. You’ve worked long and hard and you deserve all these good things that are starting to happen.”

  She gave me a searching look. Grace Cornell of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was always capable of frisking you with her pale green eyes. “You had a front-row seat for the whole sad spectacle,” she said, her smile cold and candid. “I can still see the look on your face when we first came to New York, me and Thaddeus, and he showed you one of my drawings.”

  “I remember. It was of Franz Kafka. So. Back to Jennings, if we could.”

  “I could tell you weren’t exactly head over heels about that drawing. You held it between your thumb and your forefinger, like some dead thing you picked up off the side of the road.”

  “You might have read too much into that, Grace.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I was probably being . . .” She shook her head. “We came to New York so convinced we were going to be great artists but my good old reliable self-doubt kicked in as soon as the plane landed and on the ride in from the airport it got worse, and by the time we reached your apartment I felt this big.” She described an inch with her thumb and forefinger.

  “But look at what you’ve accomplished,” I said.

  She knitted her brows, tilted her head back, gave me one of those looks.<
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  “Beautiful house,” I persisted.

  She tonged fresh ice cubes out of the bucket and plunked them down into her glass, poured a ridiculous amount of vodka over them.

  “Thaddeus and I don’t exactly feel the same way about Orkney, but don’t get me wrong—I love it. I never had anything really nice until we bought that house. But there’s always something wrong with it, not just with the house, which is a constant money-suck, but the idea of the place. It was like Thaddeus’s castle and he put me there, like Rapunzel. Now he’s frantic about keeping Orkney as a way of keeping me.”

  “Why would he worry about that, Grace?”

  “Who knows?” she said. “But now you’re a part of it. Did you ever think of that? Your money is helping him keep Orkney, which is his way of keeping me.” She made a laugh that had as much to do with true merriment as falling down the stairs has to do with dancing.

  “Don’t you want the place?” I asked, wondering if she knew what I had given Thaddeus at the Paris Commune. But of course she did, she must have. And the ease with which she concealed her knowledge put me on alert.

  “I think we should sell it,” she was saying. “If things keep going for me like this, I want to move back here. I want to be where it’s happening. Jennings said there’s a place like ours about five miles south of Orkney that sold for a whole lot of money.”

  “Jennings is a real estate expert now?” I said.

  “You know what? Anyone who looks down on Jennings is making a huge mistake. I sure don’t. He believed in my work a hell of a lot more than anyone else, including my husband.”

  “You two drove your work to Florida, right? In a truck, the two of you.”

  “I couldn’t possibly have done that alone. All that loading, all that driving. A truck? Forget it. Why do you ask?”

  “That was generous of him.”

  “It certainly was.”