An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  After showering and putting on a change of clothes, I wrote to Ken and the others. My response to their wanting to bet on PhoneClad was too nuanced (okay: equivocal) to peck out on my BlackBerry. I wanted to register my hesitations without getting in the way of Ken’s enthusiasm, and I also wanted to touch on some of the perils I perceived—mainly having to do with Tischler’s character. I suspected he was a maestro of the faux leak. When I had breakfast with him, he had bragged about Nokia wanting to buy PhoneClad, and when I saw him again at an Amnesty International fund-raiser in Tiburon he took me aside as if we were buddies and had some quid pro quo relationship, telling me that not only Nokia but Motorola and Circuit City were expressing keen interest in acquiring the company.

  Who knew? The stock market had already recovered from the sell-off after 9/11 and an appetite for big paydays was rampant. It was possible that Tischler was not completely full of crap and would be able to unload PhoneClad, with its six hundred outlets and its three-year deal with Costco, at some staggering multiple of earnings. I indicated this in my email to Ken and company, after writing it out by hand on a legal pad whose pale yellow surface and twenty sea green lines still exists in my memory as a warning flag waving urgently as I sped around the most perilous turn in the roadway.

  It was how I was spending my one and only life, and as I wrote out my memo, the words the money the money chugged like an old-fashioned steam engine through my mind. Everybody wanted money and now that communism was dead, the Russians and the Chinese were also in on the hunt. The money the money the money. The world was going mad over money. We were choking on it, burning from it, drowning in it, killing each other and ourselves.

  Moments after I finally sent my long email, Thaddeus was at my door, dressed in clean clothes—gray slacks and a blue shirt, both wrinkled. He never really could do a decent job packing a suitcase. He was showered, shaved, and wearing his woodsy scent—Pino Silvestre, which I also kept on hand back home.

  He noticed my phone and the legal pad on the desk. “I shouldn’t be bothering you. Looks like you’re still working.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. I just pressed send.”

  He watched with an interest that I found disturbingly keen as I put my phone and my legal pad into my briefcase. I closed the bronze clasp and it made a loud, unpleasant sound, sickening and final, like the snapped spine of a small animal. I put the briefcase on the upholstered bench at the end of the bed. Beyond the window, the darkness was obdurate, as if the building had been covered by a tarp. There was not a star, not a flickering light. The world beyond this room seemed to have disappeared.

  “I called home,” Thaddeus said. “No answer.” He sat and he seemed to be looking at the briefcase more than he was looking at me. “Maybe there was a complication? I called the hospital. It just rang and rang. Rinky-dink little hospital. We should have taken Emma to New York, even for something routine. As if cutting someone open could ever be routine.”

  “Maybe try again.” Stop looking at that briefcase, I thought. Stop it right now.

  “I left a message. Grace is awful about phone calls. Phobic.” He lifted his chin, indicating my briefcase on the bench. “Very impressive, Kip. All your top secrets, secure in your satchel like the nuclear codes.” Laughing, he made a move, as if to dash over and grab the briefcase, though he did not get out of his chair.

  Where were we seated exactly? Was I here, was he there, how close, how far? I would have to navigate through all those forensic inquiries, as if how we got from where we were to where we were going could be measured, or mapped out. In court, what I could have said, should have said, was We were seated on the edge of an abyss.

  What I did say was this: Thaddeus sat on the hard chair near the room’s desk and I sat in the bergère chair. He shifted his position so we were facing each other, with about four feet of pale jade carpeting between us. I was clenching my hands together so tightly that when I relaxed them they ached.

  “You know what?” he said. “You’ve gotten handsomer as you’ve aged.”

  “Hmm. Maybe you’ve just gotten more tolerant as you’ve aged.”

  “Well, that could be. But the years have been good to you. You’ve definitely improved.”

  “I could take that as a bit of a knock,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Well, what does it say about how I used to look back in the day?”

  “I don’t mean it that way.”

  “Really?”

  He laughed. “No, darling, you were stunning, simply gorgeous.” In the voice of a wrecked southern belle. Limp-wristed, he touched his chest with his fingertips, rolled his eyes. Total camp.

  I felt sick.

  The TV was on. “Is that C-SPAN? You actually watch that? I thought cable companies had to carry C-SPAN because the law requires it.”

  “The Senate is voting on the Iraq thing.” For a moment I couldn’t look at him. I forced myself. He’d meant no harm. He had only been trying to be amusing. It was humor, good old-fashioned straight down the middle of Main Street humor.

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars they authorize,” he was saying. “And I’ll bet you another million Saddam doesn’t have those weapons of mass destruction.”

  “I don’t have a million dollars.”

  “Maybe they’ll bring back the draft.”

  “I doubt it. There’s enough poor kids out there; they won’t need to.”

  “I can’t even imagine my kids going into the military. It would never cross their minds. It would be like deciding to be a rodeo clown or allowing their bodies to be used in some medical experiment.”

  “I’m glad. They’re not poor. You were able to give them that. They’re privileged. I know, it sort of stinks, but it also means they won’t have to kill anyone or get killed.”

  Thaddeus nodded. I could feel him weighing what he was going to say next. “Do you remember after the closing on that land we went for drinks and I was talking about Emma—”

  “Yes, of course. I remember.” I didn’t want him to have to say it again.

  “Well, here’s the thing—I shouldn’t have said that. Whatever the truth is—and I don’t know the truth, I don’t think anyone does—but Emma’s mine. There’s no question about that. It’s not up for debate. The child becomes your own as you raise it. It took me a while to understand that. What I should have said then and what I can say now is that Emma is my daughter. And my love for her is unconditional and forever.”

  “I know. She’s yours.” My legs were cramping. I had to stand. Out of some instinctual caution, I grabbed my briefcase off the bench at the end of the bed and put it on the floor of the closet. I could feel Thaddeus’s eyes on me.

  “Wow,” he said. “Must be top top secret.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Really. Please. I need my job. It’s all I’ve got right now.”

  I walked to the window and stood staring at my own reflection superimposed on the glass.

  “I need a drink,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Thaddeus. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  I grabbed several little bottles from the minibar and removed the fluted paper covers from the tops of two glasses.

  “We don’t need to bother with ice,” said Thaddeus.

  “Grace had no right to treat you that way,” I said.

  “We never speak of it. That was the agreement without an actual agreement. Those are the ones that really stick. And once that was in place we couldn’t undo it without everything falling apart. And we were never sure, neither of us. But before we more or less agreed to just let the whole thing go, she admitted it happened once between her and Jennings. Once. That seems a bit unlikely to me. Sleeping with someone just once isn’t how things normally go. Once that line is crossed, people tend to let things play out. Don’t you think? But I’m not going to argue numbers with her.”

  “At least she admitted it,” I said.

  “She had all that artwork just piling up and piling up in her studio
. And Jennings flattered the hell out of her. Maybe it wasn’t flattery. Maybe he was a huge fan of her work, which is very seductive. And he was around. Let’s not forget that unlike some of us he was there every day and every night. Front and center. Working the property, fixing this or that, turning that old piggery into a studio—like she really needed a studio with all those empty rooms inside of Orkney. But I went along with it.” He mimed writing a check, ending with a flourish that left his hand high in the air. “I think I felt guilty because a part of me didn’t believe in Grace—a rather large part, if you want to know the truth. I think I wanted her to put the brushes away and just . . . I don’t know. Enjoy life?”

  “So where is it now?” I asked.

  “With Jennings?” Thaddeus looked stricken for a moment, old and alone. He tried to cover it with a smile, making matters so much worse.

  I could not protect him. All I could do was say, “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “She slept with him. Fucked him, or he fucked her. They fucked. I have conjugated that copulating verb many times, believe me. At least they had the goodness to do it in her studio, and not inside the house. He probably built the studio with that in mind. Who knows? I don’t need or want the whole truth. What would it do for me? Would I leave her if I knew for sure? No, I would not. I don’t want that. This is bad enough. Being without her and breaking up my family? That would make everything much much worse.”

  “I never understood why you didn’t get a DNA test,” I said, with my back to him.

  “I’ve thought about it. Often.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t want to know things just for the sake of knowing them. And I don’t want Grace to leave me.”

  “You’d be leaving her.”

  “What’s the difference? Everything would still be wrecked. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. She’s making money now, not money money, but money. Maybe there’s more coming. I don’t understand the art world. It seems insane to me. But I think if she ever really hit it big, she might leave me. I don’t know.”

  “Because of money?”

  “Grace does whatever she wants. She’s selfish, if you want to know. But to me there’s something so magical and true about her selfishness, and I like to be around it. She grew up feeling disliked and she got used to it. It doesn’t really bother her. She might not even be that nice. You understand? I mean, the way nice people care what other people think and feel and kind of work around it. She really doesn’t care. It’s one of the things that draws me to her. I find it . . . thrilling, to be honest with you. I realize this all sounds rather abject. But it’s not really love unless there’s something abject in it. Don’t you think?”

  “Me? I guess so. I don’t really know. Maybe. But wait. I have a question. Where’s Jennings in all this?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks.”

  “He thinks he’s Emma’s father. That I can tell you.”

  “Obviously, it’s not something we discuss.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I have to get along with him. I used to think that maybe I’d buy the place back from him. But with what money? Anyhow, he’s dug in. He was raised in that house. And now that they’ve taken it off the tax rolls by saying it’s some kind of church—which it’s not, by the way—they can stay there stress-free. I think that was Muriel’s scheme. She walks around with her basket of flowers and she says very little, but she’s actually very clever.”

  I turned to face him, but he was already standing just inches away from me. Remember this, I urged myself. Remember every moment of it.

  “What are you looking at out there?” he asked, peering past me.

  “And what about Emma,” I said. “Does she know anything about any of this?”

  “It’s just darkness, isn’t it. You’re staring out at the darkness.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Please. The way you feel about Grace? That’s how I feel about you.”

  Chapter 38

  Second Half

  And so began the second half of my life. How did I feel as it commenced? Just as a survivor of a suicidal jump off the George Washington Bridge reported in a story I’d read the week previous: Oh shit, he said, I think this was a big mistake. The jumper was about my age, a jazz saxophonist living alone in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He was about to be evicted from his apartment, he was unable to afford his many medications, and now that he was hospitalized with a multitude of broken bones, a swollen brain, two crushed feet, an eye that burst like a soap bubble, an exploded bladder, and a ruptured spleen it was doubtful his financial problems were going to get better anytime soon. You know when you fall two hundred feet, the water is like a cement floor, he said.

  Did his life flash before him? the writer wanted to know. Did he have what scientists call the LRE—the Life Review Experience? The jumper said he was overcome with memories of his mother and father, and of his first day at school, his first saxophone, the magical time he wandered into a late night jam session at Small’s and got to play “Angel Eyes” with Tommy Flanagan at the piano and Cecil McBee on the double bass.

  For me, the leap off the bridge of lies and silence was different. It’s wrong—it may even be grotesque—to compare my confession and the terror it struck in me to the annihilating despair that the saxophonist from Fort Lee must have been feeling, but in the long interval of silence separating my declaration from Thaddeus’s response, or reaction, or whatever one can call what happened next, in that looping Einsteinian eternity I could only wonder what the fuck I had just done.

  And yet, as if to cushion the blow when the free fall was complete and I hit the ground naked and unmasked, memories did flood in. It was like an infusion of an anesthetic, lessening the terror—maybe that’s why we are deluged with scenes from our life as it ends, to distract us from contemplating what is coming next. Whatever the cause, there I was, sobbing in Dr. Wessler’s office, grabbing tissue after tissue. And there I was, leaving Morris and Robbie’s apartment and lingering at the door after they closed it behind me and hearing Robbie call out to Morris, “Honey, can you come here for a sec?” Soothing myself in bed, with the scent of Pino Silvestre rising up from the sheets. Like so many of the things we do when we are unobserved, there was something small and embarrassing in pretending that bottled scent was somehow Thaddeus, hoping only to drain desire out of myself as if it were an infection. But I knew I was but one of many. I knew as the day broke there were millions more or less like me, waking up alone or next to the wrong person. I have learned one of the lessons of loneliness, one of its shocking side effects: when you are in a state of longing, desire goes on and on and on, like an ocean without a shore. So there I was, on a flight to Denver, sitting two rows behind a man who from the back looked quite a bit like Thaddeus—his height, his build, the slope of his skull—and spending four airborne hours convinced it was Thaddeus yet not once getting up to make sure because I wanted to preserve the fantasy. Don’t awaken me, let me dream. Love like mine is really just a dream, and here is what Aristotle says: in dreams the element of judgment is absent. But the morning always arrives, here it comes step by step, the pitiless jailer coming closer to inspect your cell. The horrible mornings. All of them compressed into one scented pillow flung blindly across one room, whether it was in Ann Arbor or New York or Denver or San Francisco, or Athens, or Key Biscayne. Okay, important to note what I did not allow myself to do. I did not subject another human being to my obsession. I knew I was unavailable and I never allowed anyone to think otherwise. No one wasted their love on me, or their time. No human placebo for me. I did not want one person to stand in for the person I really wanted. I did not stoop to convenience. And as for Thaddeus, I restrained myself, even if it meant breaking my own spirit. I did not stalk, I did not peek and hide, I did not beg, I did not dial the phone just to hear his voice. When we dined together, I did not order the second bottle of wine so he’d miss the train to Leyden. I di
d not bury my face in the sheets of the bed he slept in. When I was alone in his house I did not scour the premises looking for secrets, and I did not try to sow discord in his married life—in fact, I tried to help him shore things up. I only wanted what was best for him.

  Thaddeus cleared his throat, and after that took a deep breath. I could feel his center of gravity moving infinitesimally toward me. Which brings me, Your Honor, to Emily Dickinson. Hope is that thing with feathers? Perhaps for her hope chirped bravely through life’s storms and never asked for even a crumb, but if my hope was a bird it was a bird that flapped wildly, a bird that devoured common sense, which it would tear to shreds.

  But my hope wasn’t a bird. It was a moon rock or some other alien element with a magnetism that completely subverted my internal compass, spinning the needle like a helicopter blade.

  Or would you accept hope was dope, and I was addicted?

  No. Hope was a prison. Here’s a proposal, Your Honor. Time served?

  “Sorry,” I said to Thaddeus, not because I was sorry I had finally declared myself but to get him to say something, anything. And as the silence continued, I added, “Not the most opportune time to bring them up. My feelings and all.”

  “Yeah,” he said. His hand was still touching my shoulder, weightless, a lost glove.

  “Did you know all along?”

  “It’s . . .” He shook his head. “It’s very flattering.”

  I thought about hitting him. “I’m not trying to fucking flatter you,” I managed to say.

  “I know, I know,” he said, quick as always to make amends. He was the handyman of his own life, patching it up here, patching it up there, never a moment’s rest.

  “Do you even understand what I’m saying?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think I do. I do. Of course I do.”

  The heavy air that had blocked the view from my window began to dissipate, and as we spoke I could gradually make out little pinpricks of starlight in the sky and the diffuse smudge of the streetlights around Grant Park. The change disturbed me, I’m not sure why. I think it suggested we were moving through space, through time, just as you can be sitting on an airplane and trying to relax in your seat with a drink and a bowl of microwaved mixed nuts, and then suddenly something happens and you notice the clouds are streaming madly by and it strikes you in the most disquieting way that you are in a machine hurtling through the sky at six hundred miles an hour.