An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  Chapter 34

  Four Freedoms

  It was almost dark and very hot inside the shop, an assaultive heat drenched with the smell of death. Thaddeus switched on the lights and stood there with his arms folded over his chest, surveying the place, an expression of pain twisting his face. Clearly, Libby had begun to decompose before her body was taken away. The store reeked like rotted meat upon which someone had frantically sprayed the most horrible perfume, a smell that even days after her removal plunged us into a kind of terror and revulsion. We shrank from it as from a raging fire and fought the impulse to flee.

  He was sweating through the back of his shirt, a straight line of darkness along his spine, and two round blotches of darkness around his nascent love handles. His hair glistened. How I wanted to stand close to him, and, yes, what an impulse to put my arms around him. As if I had the power to make him feel less awful. It was a kind of arrogance—desire can bleed into megalomania, of course it can. I know it now, but I knew it then, too. The mind presents a sobering fact, the body rejects it. I stood closer to him. Touched him lightly on the arm.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “Look at this place,” he said, gesturing with his right hand, while bringing his left wrist up to his face to cover his nose and mouth. Before us were a thousand square feet of inventory, books books books, old and new, shelved by category in eight-foot-high gray metal shelves. Each aisle was denoted by a five-by-seven card, which years before Libby had constructed using letters cut out of magazines, as if they were ransom notes. History, Economics, Music, Literature, Women’s Studies, Chicago. “Here is where books come to die,” Thaddeus said. His arm dropped to his side and he breathed deeply, forcing himself to consume the wretched reality of what had happened here days before.

  “I think we should get out of here.”

  “I need to look around.”

  “I’ll open the door, let some air in.”

  “No, don’t. People will come in.”

  “We wouldn’t want that.”

  “No books on the floor,” he said. “I take that to mean her dying was a smooth journey. She wasn’t clawing at anything or struggling. Just sort of went to sleep, nice and easy.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  “All these books are just garbage now. There’s no way to get the smell out of them. Or if there is, it would be so expensive, no way it would be worth it.” His voice wavered and he was silent for a moment. “So that’s that.”

  He walked through the rows of bookshelves, glancing at the spines, while I stood where I was, near the counter in front. I waited, and a minute or two later he walked behind the counter. He found the switch for the air-conditioning and the unit came on with a sound like tennis shoes tumbling around a dryer. There was a stack of books on the end of the counter, maybe twenty of them, all with yellow Post-its on them, noting for whom they’d been put aside—they were like remnants of a lost civilization. There was a six-pack of little cans of Sacramento tomato juice. A credit card reader, disconnected, with the cord neatly wrapped around it.

  Thaddeus tried to open the wooden cabinet under the counter, casually at first, jiggling it, and then with mounting irritation. But the door did not succumb to force, and soon he turned his attention to the cash register. “I never could figure out how to open this fucking thing,” he said. He pressed buttons, seemingly at random, until he hit the drawer with the heel of his hand, and the drawer popped open. His face lit up for a moment, but the register was completely empty, not a dollar, not a dime. “Fuck,” he said. He glanced at me, sheepishly, as if I’d witnessed him doing something gross, which I suppose I had, though it didn’t bother me. Reality is essentially gross. So, yes, show me, show me everything. The grosser the better, really. Show me what is unfiltered, accidental, and true.

  “Maybe we should go,” I said.

  He gave no indication of having heard me. He’d found a letter opener and he was using it, trying again to open that locked cabinet. He jammed the blade into the narrow space between the door and its frame and he worked it back and forth until the tip of the letter opener snapped off. Furious now, he kicked at the door, turning his back to it and ramming his feet into the wood like a donkey trying to escape its stall. At last, the wood gave way and Thaddeus started breaking off pieces of it and throwing them over his shoulder until he had created an opening large enough to reach through. He pulled out a gray metal box, which he slammed onto the counter. He rested his hands on the box and closed his eyes, and the relief he felt at that moment flowed into me.

  “Cash?” I asked.

  “Usually.”

  “Is it locked?”

  “Combination lock. But I think I remember it.” He took a deep breath, rubbed his hands together. On the first try, the box opened and there was money in it. His haul was maybe fifty dollars’ worth of ones and fives. He jammed the bills into his pants pocket. “I can’t believe you had to watch this,” he said.

  “It’s fine, it’s okay. I get it.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re going to get through this,” I said. “You will, I promise.”

  “If you’re a mother and your son is still alive and you have grandchildren? Who does that?”

  “Somebody so unhappy they can’t control themselves.”

  His face reddened and his eyes lost their focus.

  “Yeah,” he said, at last. “Thanks. I might need you to remind me of that from time to time. Right now I hate her. I don’t want to.”

  “Let’s get out of here, Thaddeus. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Okay. But one more thing.” He walked out from behind the counter. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”

  The bookcases in Four Freedoms were arranged with just enough space between them to make an aisle for customers to walk through and browse. The aisles were narrow, so narrow that two people could not stand in front of the same book. If Ken Adler had sent me here to evaluate the health of the business I’d say from the looks of it Four Freedoms was stagnating, taking in more inventory than they were moving out. Thaddeus walked to the aisle directly across from the checkout counter—Archaeology and the Ancient World. It ran two-thirds the width of the store—the other third was a carpeted area, with four upholstered chairs and small tables with lamps, a reading area for the customers. Thaddeus placed his hands against the books in the middle of the row that was about chest-high to him and gave them an exploratory push. The books slid away from him, but only by an inch or two. The shelves at Four Freedoms were deep enough to hold two rows of books, one south facing, the other north. Here Archaeology and the Ancient World faced south and Anthropology and Art History faced north. Thaddeus kept his hands on the five or six books he had pushed back, bent his elbows, curved his back, bared his teeth—he looked savage, mad, accountable to no one but himself—and quickly, vigorously straightened his arms. The shelf, holding hundreds of books, tottered. He shoved it again and again it tottered. Art history books on the other side were tumbling onto the floor, in twos and threes. Large and small, used and remaindered.

  “Fuck you!” he shouted, and shoved again, this time with such force that he almost landed on the bookcase himself. “Fuck books, fuck Four Freedoms, fuck everything.” The shelf fell away from him and he stepped back as it hit the next shelf, and that shelf, unable to resist the force of the blow, also fell, knocking over the next. The shrieking crash of the metal shelves toppling like dominoes, the thudding rain of books.

  Thaddeus’s hands curled into fists and he raised them above his head and pumped them triumphantly up and down as if he’d just won Olympic gold.

  Chapter 35

  Deeper Than Ever

  It was as hot on Fifty-Fifth Street as it was in the store, and nearly as foul. A road crew, all of them sweating profusely, was making rushed repairs to the street, slathering tar onto the surface like army medics patching up the wounded with Super Glue. The sky was filthy gray and trembling. University of Chicago stude
nts, slender and tan and seemingly oblivious to the threat of a storm, glided by on their bicycles. It was six in the evening and from somewhere nearby a church bell rang the hours, each peal reverberating in the heavy air.

  “I know it’s wrong to ask,” Thaddeus said. “But I do wonder for whom that bell is tolling.”

  I smiled but was not amused. From someone no longer an undergraduate and given the circumstances, the joke seemed pretentious and pathetic. Thaddeus shifted his gaze toward me and tried to ascertain whether my smile was genuine or forced. Oh, how he needed that little droplet of dopamine that came from human approval, his drug of choice. He had sweated through his shirt, his deodorant, and the last vestiges of his beautiful youth. He was as rank as an abandoned old man. I avoided his eyes and felt something odd and unprecedented. I don’t know how to describe it. It was fleeting. It was as if I were wandering around a house I knew as well as any place on earth and suddenly found myself in a cold, unfamiliar room. What was this room, who was this man? It was not just a mental sensation, it was physical, too. I could feel love wilting, crumbling, dying. I didn’t actually know if love was dying, or if it was me. I was not going toward the light, but toward darkness. I wondered if I had ever really loved Thaddeus at all, or if I had spent half my life caught in a lie I’d told myself.

  He sensed me slipping away. My failure to laugh at his joke? Or to meet his gaze? Something alerted him. His nervous system reacted to the tiniest titrations of human attention. And his need to be liked, loved, included, appreciated—oh my god, it was bottomless. He put his arm over my shoulders, like a ten-year-old boy nominating you to be his best friend. A smell like rust and onions emanated from within him, mixing with the smell of Libby’s decomposition on our clothes. My own fragrance was probably no less repellent, but we forgive it in ourselves.

  I shrugged away from his arm and walked as far from him as the width of the sidewalk would allow. He looked confused, hurt. Oh no, I thought. Oh no. And I reached for my old feelings like a sleeper who imagines he is falling grasps blindly for the edge of the bed.

  When Proust’s Swann finally realizes not only that Odette does not love him but that she is not, in truth, really his type, the reader feels relief, understanding that at last the fever has broken and Swann is to that extent a free man. My fever had broken, too, but it lurked within me. It was like what pharmacists say about taking the entire course of antibiotics and not being beguiled by the first signs of health—the contagion is still there and the symptoms will return if you don’t take all twenty-eight pills. By the time we reached Ellis Avenue and we stood there for a moment looking up at the Kaufmans’ darkened windows, and Thaddeus took a deep breath and let it out slowly, slowly, slowly, transmitting his emotions directly to me, and I felt his resentment, his loneliness, and his pain, and I knew he was wondering what it was going to feel like stepping foot in that sepulchral apartment, in what could not have been more than eight, maybe nine beats of the heart, I was more or less right back where I started.

  Chapter 36

  Here It Was

  The door to the Kaufmans’ apartment had a tricky lock, but Thaddeus remembered what it required. He put the key in, jiggled it back and forth, until the lock surrendered. He took a deep breath and opened the door. The entrance hall smelled of floor wax. Thaddeus flicked on the light, and the hallway gave a little jump, as if we were intruders.

  We were eye level with an old poster, tan and black, a woodcut image of Leon Trotsky, his icy beard and pitiless eyes that looked at you with what Sam and Libby believed held some hidden store of menschkeit—until they no longer believed in him, or socialism, or progress, or any other incarnation of the happy ending. The poster advertised a John Dewey lecture given in 1937 in the Town Hall in New York, sponsored by the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. I imagined it was the place to see and be seen if you were an anti-Soviet left intellectual with a couple of bucks to spare.

  “That poster is not a reproduction,” Thaddeus said.

  “I know.”

  “You’ve seen it before, right?”

  “Yes. It’s always been here. Same spot.”

  “They weren’t big on change.” The poster was about two feet wide and four feet high, and it was matted, framed, and placed under glass. Thaddeus took the frame from the bottom corners and lifted it off the makeshift hook, which was just a heavy black nail someone had hammered into one of the wall studs. The weight of the thing surprised him and he staggered back before he righted himself and leaned the poster against the wall.

  “It’s mine, I guess.”

  “I don’t know. Contents of the house. I suppose. Was it mentioned in the will?”

  “I bet this thing is worth money.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have an instinct. I bet this Trotsky at Town Hall poster is worth many many thousands of dollars.”

  “You may be right,” I said.

  “I’m kind of making you sick, aren’t I?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m behaving abominably.”

  “Well, we all have things inside of us we like to keep hidden.”

  He nodded and gazed at me with a frankness that was almost rude.

  “I’m going to sell this,” he said, turning back to the poster. “Some rich former Trot who’s probably now raking it in at some right-wing think tank will buy it. Those old Trots, man. They all hated Stalin so much that they were more anti-Communist than any conservative, which proves, I guess, that hate lasts, hate has real legs, and it’s a fuck of a lot more powerful than love. Love is like a little boy lost in the woods, and hate is the wolf.”

  I followed him into the dining room. He switched on the light, and the pale green walls, and the long Formica dining table emerged from the darkness. Next, he turned on the air conditioner, which years ago had been poorly installed, with pieces of foam and what appeared to be a pair of socks jammed into the gap between the machine and the window frame. The old GE sounded like a cement mixer as it slowly came to life. Thaddeus turned it off again.

  “I can’t stand that sound,” he said. “I’ve become phobic about noise. It’s so quiet at Orkney. You know, except for the sound of me going broke.”

  As the air conditioner slowly rumbled to a halt, the stillness in the room seemed to thicken.

  “Are you okay being here?” I asked.

  “Here? I’m always here.”

  I presumed he meant that these rooms were so much on his mind that he was occupying them emotionally, whether or not he was physically here, so I nodded, as if I understood, and pointed to the table.

  “That’s where your uncle Morris was sitting when I first met him.”

  “That’s where everyone sits who ever came here. You sat on one of these chairs and they fed you. They didn’t encourage you to go into any other room because then they might have to talk to you. They actually liked visitors but they didn’t want to talk to anyone. So, yeah, this is where he’d have been when you first met him. The start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “He’s a great guy. When do you think he’ll arrive?”

  “No idea. He and Mom weren’t close. No one in my family is close or ever has been. We’re all ships in the night. Except for me. I do closeness. I do extreme closeness—according to Grace, I do suffocating closeness.”

  So much of conversation is a kind of under-the-table tug-of-war, with one person hoping to pull the conversation in one direction while the other is trying to implement an entirely different agenda, and I suppose smooth relations depend upon our ability to wage this tug-of-war without it becoming overt. My courage was building to the extent I wanted to talk about meeting Morris, knowing full well that any careful examination of my relationship to the old pediatrician would eventually reveal all we had in common, but Thaddeus had redirected the conversation’s flow, and I lacked the stamina and the daring to insist we pursue a topic that might lead us to di
scuss things I had spent the better part of my life concealing.

  He paced through the apartment. I sensed he would not want me to follow him so I sat at the long dining table, waiting. The dining room was on one end of the apartment, adjacent to the gloomy, spotless kitchen. A long, minimally lit corridor led to the living room, with its two sofas and four chairs, each turned in such a way that you would have to crane your neck to make eye contact with whoever was sharing the room with you.

  Thaddeus’s first stop was what had once been his bedroom, but was now completely empty. Long stripes of different shades of blue had been rolled onto the pale brown walls, suggesting that Libby had at some point been contemplating having the room repainted but had not decided on a color. “Oh Jesus,” I heard him mutter.

  Sweat dripped down my spine, and the closeness of the room was getting to me. I was losing track of who I was, and with the next breath the whole concept of knowing who you are seemed dubious. Maybe there is no such thing as the real you, some essence that travels through a lifetime. Maybe who you are is just what you happen to be doing at any given moment. And I suppose what frightened me was not having any clear idea, or really any idea at all, what I would do next.

  He went to his parents’ bedroom, and I heard the sound of ransacking as he opened dresser drawers and tore through the contents. Could he really have been so deranged at this moment as to believe there would be treasures hidden among the neatly folded blouses and underthings? Libby didn’t have money, I was sure of it. She had been collecting Social Security and probably living on—what? Fifteen hundred bucks a month? Every day I was surrounded by people who made that much every hour. Those were the creatures in my neck of the woods, me of all people! What was I doing there among them? I was suddenly filled with a loathing for money and the hierarchies it creates and sustains, a loathing so sudden and fierce that it practically felt like panic. Libby and her thousand dollars a month. I tried to imagine how she budgeted that out. So much for rent, food, medicine, gauze, toothpicks, bathroom tissue, soap, sugarless gum, there she was, day after day, trapped in a world utterly ruled by money. But then so was I. Can you imagine a world without money? I couldn’t. I tried but it was beyond me. It was easier to imagine the end of the world, the polar caps melting, the rain forests barren and bald, the last surviving humans with totemic tattoos and Mohawk haircuts, slaughtering one another for the last bits of organic matter. These things seemed vaguely plausible. These were things I could envision. But a world without money? That was remote, that was a dream within a dream. How would a world without money work? What would that mean? A barter economy? A trust economy? No economy whatsoever, just a lot of hunting and gathering? The various hypotheses were invisible behind a blizzard of what-ifs, every possible escape route from money was blocked by theories of so-called human nature. Could it possibly be true that society without money as its governing principle is completely impossible? Were we created by God or, taking God out of the discussion, by millions of years of evolution so we could spend our moment on earth trying to accumulate money? Was there really no other way? Isn’t it largely accepted that there is no transaction or interaction that is not darkened and damaged once money is involved? What if we were all equal, and no one was better than anybody else? Was that kind of world truly impossible? Was disharmony as intrinsic to existence as night and day and gravitational force? I realized as I mused that I was having the thoughts of a fifteen-year-old, but that didn’t seem to refute the basic idea, which is that money ruins just about everything, and even as we acknowledge its poisonous nature we continue to pursue it and continue to celebrate and display it, like a wolf rolling in the rotting flesh of something dead, trying to slather its fur with the scent of decay.