An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  About three months after Sam’s death, in the raw snowy week around Passover and Easter, Muriel and Jewel came to Orkney’s front door. They both wore pink puffy ski jackets and gray caps bearing the name of Jennings’s company, Windsor Asbestos Solutions. Muriel’s old, temperamental Taurus was behind them, trembling as it idled, with exhaust pouring out of the tailpipe like water out of a fire hose.

  “Hey, gang, what’s up?” Thaddeus said. Though he was working on the outline for a new script, he did his best to sound welcoming.

  “We’ve come to wash your feet,” Muriel said. She was smiling radiantly. Her eyelashes glistened with melting snow. Jewel was holding a woven wicker basket like the one Muriel carried in the summer when she walked the property gathering wildflowers. Today the basket contained several individually wrapped baby wipes.

  “My feet?” Thaddeus said, embarrassed and laughing.

  Muriel glanced at Jewel, who took one of the baby wipes out of her basket and handed it to her mother while saying, “Jesus said I have washed your feet. . . .” She stopped for a moment and Muriel patted her arm. “So you should wash one another’s feet. I made—”

  “Set,” said Muriel.

  “I set an example—”

  “Set you an example,” said Muriel.

  “. . . that you should do as I have done for you.”

  “Perfect, sweet pea, perfect,” said Muriel. Then, to Thaddeus, “May we come in?”

  On the advice of one of Jennings’s old friends, a former prison guard and now a deputy sheriff, both Jennings and Muriel had been ordained as ministers in what seemed to me a somewhat dubious religious order called I, John Charismatic Church of the Redeemer, and now the two of them held services in the house on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. It was enough to have the yellow house classified as a place of worship and just that week it had been taken off Leyden’s tax rolls. Today they were making the rounds washing feet, as were the other fourteen members of their church. Jewel seemed a little embarrassed, but Muriel was serene. Now that she and Jennings no longer had the expense of real estate taxes to worry about, they had something that Thaddeus and Grace did not—they lived in a house they could easily afford.

  Chapter 26

  Fresh Deck, Same Hand, New Jury, Same Verdict

  On December 6, I came to work straight from Newark Airport, after having spent the weekend in Orlando. I’d had dinner Saturday night with one of our clients with whom I had a presumed friendship, and Sunday was storming everywhere and my flight was canceled and I couldn’t book another one. I ended up at the nearest Hilton, a quick shuttle from the Orlando airport, where I ate room service chicken, watched television, and ended up so lonely and grumpy that I called in for sex, choosing someone virtually at random by Googling “Orlando male escort.” The lad they sent over looked to be sixteen years old, though he insisted he was twenty-eight. Nevertheless, I was afraid it was some sort of sting operation and I paid him to go home, after which I ravaged the minibar and then myself.

  Monday, when I finally reached the office it was nearly noon. My assistant said that Ken had come by twice looking for me and wanted to see me as soon as I came in. She looked worried. I closed the door behind me and sat at my desk for a few moments, gathering myself. I could feel some unspecified danger, its closeness, its implacability, its mercilessness. It was like being in a dark woods and hearing the snap of a twig.

  “Oh, there you are,” Ken said, entering my office without knocking, closing the door behind him but without taking his eyes off me. Ken had barely aged. His wife grew stout, his parents died, his children went to college, Europe, rehab, and on to careers, but Ken’s face, round and untroubled, remained resistant to the passage of time and to the stresses of our profession. It was like an artist’s initial sketch, before the cross-hatching and the shadowing. His hair was an exuberant swirl of kinks, like a black sea with spumes rising from its surface. Today—as was increasingly his habit—he was dressed as if for a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, in faded jeans, loafers, and a souvenir sweatshirt from the High Sierra Music Festival. Ken rarely saw the public. As AA grew, Ken conducted most of his business over the phone or on his laptop. Over the past year or so, I had wondered if Ken’s disengagement from the day-to-day operations of the company was a sign that he was going to retire. I worried over the prospect of losing my connection to the man who valued what I turned out to be good at—writing concise, upbeat reports for our investors, maintaining my faux friendships, and spotting what was strong and what was weak in any company we might invest in. I worried that without Ken I might not be able to work at my profession, and as he sat opposite me, languidly scratching his belly underneath his sweatshirt, I felt an overpowering wave of sorrow, and regret over my foolishness.

  But Ken hadn’t come to fire me or even to warn me. Instead, he was offering me a chance to get out of New York for a while. He wondered if I would consider relocating to San Francisco for a year or two, and I agreed to do so before he could even fully explain the purpose of the move, which was actually occasioned by our taking a big loss on IBM and a smaller—but still significant—loss on AOL. Ken was still investing conservatively but it was starting to hurt us.

  Ken wasn’t beguiled by the dot-com bubble when everything connected to the internet or to wireless communication was treated as if it cured cancer or enabled time travel. Such was the finale of the twentieth century, and the end of that exuberance was not in sight. Ken was willing to put some of the firm’s money into a start-up, if the right opportunity came along. Nearly all of AA’s clients were based in New York, the Carolinas, or Florida, and they viewed the rise of Silicon Valley as if it were taking place in a foreign country. I was going to generate a bimonthly newsletter called “The View from the West,” which would be, in Ken’s words, “sent to our clients free of charge,” which nearly made me laugh since nothing we did was gratis. Everything was in the service of maximizing our take, which was fine with me—our clients only cared about maximizing their take.

  Other than business trips and an occasional holiday abroad, I had been living in New York City continuously since graduating college. I had dated about seventy women in that time, changed address five times. I had probably spent a million dollars on restaurant food, and if you were to categorize everything from theater tickets to hand jobs as entertainment, I had spent another million either entertaining myself or relieving myself of a loneliness so deep and so ferocious that I think I would have otherwise gone mad.

  In New York, I was known and not known by the same people. Some of the women I dated conversed among themselves and saw “remarkable similarities” in their experience with me. The best I could have hoped for out of those comparisons of notes was their coming to a collective conclusion that I was a Real Gentleman. I certainly wasn’t “handsy,” as I heard one of my co-workers described. I certainly didn’t act as if allowing me to take care of the check or buy the tickets entitled me to intimate contact. If any of the women had expected real physical pleasure or perhaps even a lasting relationship, they may have felt some disappointment and irritation. By and large the women with whom I shared dinners and day trips, visits to museums, botanical gardens, flea markets, street fairs, lectures, readings, plays, concerts, and cozy evenings at home trying out recipes and watching movies were themselves highly desirable, busy and very accomplished—writers, film editors, actresses, lawyers, bankers, journalists—with no pressing need for me or anyone to save or shape their lives. I was quite sure they were as content as I was to enjoy the time we spent together and part friends before anything romantic occurred. I suspected that a few of them had similar agendas to mine, were closeted or otherwise conflicted, and wanted someone of the opposite gender to be seen with at one of New York’s innumerable fund-raising dinners. I was a presentable escort to sit with at the table their company purchased to support some worthy cause, such as cancer research or the Central Park Conservancy. My company regularly bought two tables for ten to support t
he American Heart Association (Adler’s father had died at the age of forty-two of heart failure), as well as galas for The Paris Review, cystic fibrosis, the Alvin Ailey dance company, and Meals on Wheels, paying as much as $50,000 per table. We at Adler were expected to fill the twenty seats with our spouses or significant others. I have to admit that for those evenings—and there were many of them, many—I took pains to be seen with a woman who was not only accomplished and vivacious, but who had a shot of being the most beautiful woman in the room.

  The thing about New York is that when you first move there, it seems like an impossibly immense place with so many lives simultaneously unspooling, so many conflicting realities, that if you don’t do anything wildly strange and egregious you can live your life for the most part rather privately. And then one day New York doesn’t seem nearly so huge and complex and the thousands upon thousands who passed through your life, people you would in all likelihood never see again, start to appear a second time, and a third—the cabdriver seems familiar, the fellow delivering your take-out lunch calls you by your first name, and Sean Tee, whose ad you saw in The Village Voice, comes to your apartment and you both realize he’s been there before, the previous time as Billy McDougal.

  Wasn’t San Francisco the gayest city in the country, possibly the gayest in the world? Home of Harvey Milk, the Castro, a total bacchanal of a Halloween parade that made the one in New York seem discreet. Once, crossing Bleecker Street carrying home in an insulated sack a rotisserie chicken from Jefferson Market, I had to contend with the parade as it rainbowed and glittered by a mere block from my apartment. I waited for a break in the procession of leather and feather and cowboy hats, Tin Men, Glendas, Spocks, and throngs of happy homosexuals who had not bothered to don their gay apparel but just enjoyed strolling through the city streets with twenty thousand of their closest friends, all to the accompaniment of drums and police whistles, tambourines and cheers. Freedom was in the air, freedom and joy and sorrow and survival.

  History was passing me by.

  I kept my head down, but my face must have betrayed me. A tall parader made even taller in high heels, fishnet stockings, spangled miniskirt, and a headdress spewing feathers stepped out of the parade’s flow and touched me on the elbow. A giant, something out of the Bread and Puppet Theater.

  “Come on, honey,” he said. “Don’t be shy. Join the fun.”

  What drew him to me? I was not the only one watching the parade from the curbside. There were thousands of us along Bleecker Street, fathers with kids riding their shoulders, old gay men wiping away tears, tourists with their cameras. But this towering marcher in a spangled skirt touched me with his long blue fingernail.

  No thank you, I tried to say, but all I could do was shake my head no. He gave me a look—Really? Are you sure?—and on an impulse I stepped off the curb and fell in behind him, joining the weirdly holy procession, swinging my insulated bag of take-out chicken like a censer. I kept my eyes on my recruiter’s back. His dark skin glistened with sweat and glitter. My heart felt as if it were looking for a way out of my chest. I told myself I would take ten steps and then bail, cut through the marchers and go home, but ten steps turned into twenty, and twenty into thirty, and before I could peel away I had walked from Tenth Street to Perry on the gushing artery of Bleecker Street. At last, I said goodbye to the man in front of me with a quick light tap on his shoulder blade and cut a pathway through the parade, muttering my excuses as I made my way onto the sidewalk.

  * * *

  And so, I moved to San Francisco, into a lovely house in Pacific Heights, on Jackson Street, right across from Alta Plaza Park. The house was rented and furnished for me by a company called Exec-locate.

  It didn’t take me long to realize I would be no freer in California than I had been in Michigan, or New York.

  In fact, the crushing realization was almost immediate. I’d been met at my new place by two men from Exec-locate, two guys about ten years my junior, one of whom looked as if he was torn between becoming a pirate or a personal trainer, the other dressed like a banker, self-contained and opaque in his London tailoring and wire-rim glasses. They dropped by to see if everything was to my liking and to discuss changes I might want. It was mine for the asking, from furniture to artwork to yanking out the vinca ground cover in the back garden and replacing it with a medley of wild grasses. There was, however, nothing I cared to modify, not at that point; I felt about the place the way I felt about the nice hotels AA booked for me, content to relax and do my work in the posh anonymity of the Royal This or the Palace That. Failing to interest me in redecorating my news digs, the two men wanted to inform me about all the goods and services and events in my new neighborhood. I wasn’t sure if they were running a gaydar test, or if they flat-out assumed I was gay. Some of their welcome to the neighborhood suggestions were boilerplate—best place for smoothies, jogging paths, health clubs, sushi—but quite a few were pointedly on the lavender side of the street, such as the Harvey Milk Bar, which hosted the West Coast’s premiere karaoke nights every Sunday, a boutique specializing in cowboy attire called Sons of the Pioneers, which the pirate/personal trainer’s brother owned, and where I would be given a 20 percent discount, and an upcoming Fight for a Cure march convening at the Transamerica Pyramid the next evening at 6 P.M.

  “I’m afraid my marching days are behind me,” I said. “Not exactly my thing.” I believe my face was dead neutral, but it was as if a sudden wind had blown through my new rooms slamming shut every door. The two men did their best to keep the mood cheerful; they may have thought me a coward, but I was still a customer.

  “Well, I was going to say, if you decide to make that march, we’re having people over afterward,” said the suited one. Upton. His name was Upton Hayes. I wondered if he was named after Upton Sinclair, who had run for governor in California sixty years before. Thaddeus’s parents had once sold Upton Sinclair’s entire Lanny Budd series to Studs Terkel, who gave their store a nice mention on his radio show the next day. But I didn’t ask Upton about his name. I had lost the right to ask any questions by saying the AIDS march was “not really my thing.” I had surrendered my right to say anything. I wanted them both to leave. I wanted to be alone. And there, at last, we had some real reciprocity going. They, too, wanted me to be alone.

  Chapter 27

  California Street

  Time passed in San Francisco. Much happened, little changed. The team Adler had assembled to run the West Coast AA was a much more agreeable group than the New York office. If my San Francisco colleagues were into titty bars and coke, they kept it to themselves, or at least they kept it from me. We were on California Street, in the Bank of America building. Our office was spare and stylish. We all had computers, of course, and there were television sets in two of the corners, one playing CNN, the other tuned to CNBC, but if you wandered in you might think we were an architecture firm, or maybe a think tank. Bare floors, Stickley furniture. There were but eight of us, plus a steady stream of temps, and two interns. We were diverse, one guy from Singapore, one from Jaipur, a gay woman from Des Moines, a wheelchair-bound math genius from Bogotá. Average age thirty-two, average vibe arty. In fact, the only one of us who appeared to have stepped out of the past and fit the description of a finance guy from the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit 1950s was me, the gentile from Michigan, which I eventually found amusing, in a private, bitter way, since my self-presentation was at its core an impersonation. As it happened—I don’t know why I couldn’t have predicted this—the farther I lived from Thaddeus, the more he occupied my thoughts, and now added to the familiar obsessions over what is he doing, what is he wearing, eating, saying, laughing about, thinking, there was another litany, this one based purely on worry. I fretted over his actual safety, his health, his mental stability, as if by depriving him of my proximity I had somehow cast him into imminent danger of cracking up.

  Thaddeus and I emailed each other, and he told me he had been campaigning for his mother to move east, b
ut that so far she was showing only irritation at the suggestion. “I’m not going to be some little widow taking care of her grandchildren,” Libby had said, but Thaddeus persisted. I doubt he really wanted her to be nearer to him, much less live at Orkney, but he was duty bound to try. And then, of course, of course, a thousand times of course, there was his need to be admired, especially by Libby, the alpha and omega of his desire to please. And yet: everything he had ever done to make himself admirable to her had failed, often miserably. His whirling arms and legs as he danced for Libby and Sam at the dining table, leaving his food to grow cold on the plate, led not to the eventual laughter he had hoped for, nor to the lightening of the mood, and certainly not to applause. His performances elicited admonishment and lectures about trying too hard and making a fool of yourself. His declaration of devoting his life to literature was a bone to drop at Sam and Libby’s feet, and his sudden success was devalued in his own mind by the suspicion that his parents thought that a talent falling far short of being an author might be perfect for the smart-alecky skills of a movie guy. His hope that Orkney might impress them was soon reduced to a hope that they would limit the disparaging things they said about the house—its isolation, its upkeep, the snobby neighbors, the difficult stairs, the biting wind. Thaddeus’s attempt to honor their expired socialist values by giving Jennings’s father that yellow house and a few acres had been greeted with tut-tuts from Sam and unmasked fury from Libby. “I assume you know the difference between a big shot and a big idiot?” she declared. And now the truth, the undisclosed truth of Leyden had swallowed Libby’s husband whole, had left him to die like an animal on some millionaire’s cold floor while the local lumpen dragged their heels in an act of rebellion that was, in Libby’s view, as overt as the storming of the Bastille.