An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “I don’t know what to say, Kip. Everything seems to be in the wrong place. But maybe everything is right where it belongs.”

  “Really, everything?” I said. “Isn’t that like saying God doesn’t give you any problems bigger than you can handle?”

  “When a door closes, a window opens?” offered Thaddeus.

  “If God opens this window, I think I’ll jump out of it.”

  “I’m sorry, Kip.”

  “It’s not your fault. All you ever did was be yourself. I was in hiding before we ever met. It was actually better once I met you. I could imagine a happy ending.”

  He took his hand off my shoulder. And ran that same hand through his hair and put it back on my shoulder, and—because it was my nature, because I could not stop from wondering, could not wriggle free from the cat’s cradle of absurd interpretations that had bound me all these years—I wondered if what he was doing was putting a part of himself on me, a DNA transfer, as if the hand that had touched his hair and was now on my shoulder was a kind of kiss, or a pre-kiss, or something else for which I had no name but was meant to bring us closer. Though I did understand that if something has no word to describe it, that probably means it doesn’t exist.

  Chapter 39

  To My Great Surprise, He Pressed Charges

  “We’d better eat something or we’re going to get drunk,” I said. “Maybe some Pringles.”

  We had finished our drinks and refilled our glasses.

  “I’m not eating Pringles,” he said.

  “I forgot how elegant you are.”

  “Yeah, it’s one of the things about me that people forget. We’re going to miss our reservation at Bruna’s. Do you care?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Good. We’ll stay here. Do you have more work to do?”

  “There’s always more. But I’m done.”

  We clinked glasses.

  “That thing in the elevator, Kip. About saving me. I’m sorry. That was a wrong thing to say. You’ve done so much and I know if you could help me here you would.”

  “Well, we’ve both said inappropriate things. I called you ‘captain,’ so we can call it even.”

  “‘Captain’ works for me,” said Thaddeus. “I like it. As in O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done.”

  We clinked glasses again. We stood in the middle of the room. This chair, that chair, everything seemed wrong.

  “Can I ask you something?” Thaddeus said.

  “No.”

  He smiled. “You go out with all these amazing women.”

  “Oh my god, Thaddeus. Are you really asking me this?”

  “So have you always really been into men?”

  “I’ve always really been into you.”

  “Grace always said you were gay.”

  “It sickens me to even think I’m being discussed like that.”

  “It must have been awful, Kip. So many lies. You lied, Kip. You lied to everyone. Or was it just to us?”

  Us. He was an us. I didn’t much care for the us-es of the world, with their you-wash-and-I’ll-dry lives, their horrible little hikes through the Cinque Terre, their depressing codependency, the constant phoning—I’m at the grocery store, I’m at the hardware store, I’m stuck in traffic, I’m at the gynecologist, I’m at the urologist, I’m having a colonoscopy and there’s a camera up my ass.

  “No,” I said. “Not just to you. I’m very private.”

  “But you lied. I mean . . . people come out all the time. Why didn’t you?”

  “What do you think? That just because gay pride becomes a thing, then every closet in the world is emptied? It doesn’t work like that. For every person who decides to go public with their private life, there’s another person who decides not to. I didn’t want to be a minority. It never felt right to me, or safe. I didn’t want people to think about what I did with my body, or what I wanted or what brought me pleasure. It was personal, and I wanted it to stay that way. People can be so cruel. And in my business, believe me . . . it’s not like Hollywood or something. It’s brutal.”

  “But I’m not brutal. What did you think? That I would judge you? That I was some kind of prejudiced small-minded . . .” He drew a long breath, momentarily overcome by the thought of me—or anyone—thinking so poorly of him.

  But what had happened to the “everyone” in his question? Even the “us” was gone. He wanted to know why I thought he wasn’t trustworthy. He wanted to know why his impeccable liberal credentials were being questioned. It was about him, as was so much of what passed between us. It didn’t bother me but it didn’t escape me, either.

  “You could have figured it out, if you’d wanted to,” I said. “It was pretty much hidden in plain sight.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Okay. Then it wasn’t. Whatever. I was stuck in it.”

  He retrieved the last of the little bottles of booze. A gin for himself and vodka for me.

  “I’m sorry I lied,” I said. “But the truth is I love you. I didn’t know how to say one without the other.”

  “I love you, too, Kip,” he said, far too quickly for it to have much meaning.

  “No, you’re not hearing me. I love you. I want to be with you all the time. Forsaking all others. It’s overwhelming. It’s always been there and it doesn’t go away. I love you and I love you and I love you.” I was making the fatal mistake of repeating and restating, deluding myself into believing he didn’t quite understand, or that he needed to be convinced of my sincerity.

  He let out a breath, slowly. “Jesus.”

  “I really am sorry. I was always waiting for the right moment and now I’ve chosen the worst possible time.”

  “I get it,” he said. “I know how it is. I mean with lies. Don’t worry. Really. I don’t want you to worry. Okay? You look so worried. You know what? Listen. It’s like a writing problem.” His eyes brightened. “You come to a crossroads here, does the baby live or die, do the brakes fail or do they hold, do they move to France or stay in Tuxedo Junction, does the guy buy a house he can’t afford. You make the choice, you go left instead of right, the brakes fail, the house is bought, and before you know it you’re here and you’re completely lost because you made the wrong choice and you’ve just piled one mistake on top of another mistake trying to make things right, but everything you’ve done to make things right has just made everything worse.”

  “In life, it’s hard to get back to page five,” I said.

  He filled his glass and waited for me to fill mine.

  “Next year here,” he said, holding his glass aloft.

  There was something else he wanted to say. He tilted his glass back and forth and the little bit of booze at the bottom coated one side and then the other.

  “I have to ask you . . .” He finished his drink, glanced at the dresser, and saw all that had survived were two bottles, one of Campari, the other of Harveys Bristol Cream. “What did you see? I mean—in me? What did you see in me? All that time. What was it?”

  Oh, the vanity, the vanity, and the infinite emptiness that could never be filled. How many times had I seen it? How many warnings did I need to gather up what was left of my pride and my life and head for the hills? Yet I did not and I could not. My attachment to Thaddeus was not in spite of his weaknesses. I could not separate his weaknesses from the whole of him—they were as much him as his breath, his shadow, the sound of his voice, the scent of his scalp. His weaknesses were evidence that he was here, true and alive, like a curl of hair left at the bottom of the bathtub. His weaknesses were a secret revealed, and to perceive them brought you closer to him. And here is what I know. When you love what is most flawed and most troubling in someone there is no getting out. You are wrapped up. You are sunk. You are in for the duration. You have not only faced the worst, you have embraced it. It may be why stories about the gods are so filled with thunderbolt behavior, wrathful score settlings, pitiless punishments, perverse suggestions, irresistible temptations.
We see the displays of indifference and animosity, and we sing songs of praise through floods and famine, through Hiroshima and the Holocaust, louder and louder, our faith a point of no return.

  “How can these things be known?” I said. “What draws one person to another? There’s no checklist.”

  “You didn’t even think I was a good writer,” he said. “Even in college you had your doubts. I think you could at least admit that.”

  “What did I care if you were a good writer or not? I knew what it felt like to be you. I knew when your laughter was real and when you were hiding behind it. I knew what your fingers felt like when you drummed them on the table. And year after year I watched you hold it together. . . .”

  “Wait, wait,” he said, laughing. “You’re admitting that you don’t think I’m a good writer.”

  “How could I know?” I said. “You never really had a chance.”

  His eyes moistened for a moment and he looked away, before turning toward me again with a smile as bright and tight as a brand-new zipper. “I don’t even care any longer. At this point . . .” He raised his right hand and rubbed his pointer and middle finger against his thumb, the universal sign of surrender masquerading as common sense. “You know what?” he said. “I fucking hate gin. I’m going to raid the minibar back in my room and bring stuff over here.”

  I nodded, quite sure he only wanted to get away from me. In the countless times I had imagined telling Thaddeus how I felt about him, I had nearly as often imagined him dismissing me, not only as a lover but as a friend. He turned. He left. He didn’t leave the door ajar. I pressed my ear to the wall separating his room from mine. What did I expect to hear? A desperate phone call to Grace? Peals of laughter? What I in fact heard was nothing, save my pulse pounding in my ears.

  I went to the window and rested my forehead against the cool glass. My reflection was obscured by the warmth of my exhalations, and then the mist would disappear and there I was again only to be enshrouded by my next breath. The moment I had so often imagined and hoped for had already passed but I had still not caught up to it. I felt harmed, unmasked and small. How in the world was the next day or the next hour or even the next minute supposed to occur? I had said and done what I had wanted to do for so long, but wanting something and having it are very different matters. Desire fulfilled becomes a referendum on itself. Was this really what I had wanted and if it was: now what?

  But the truth was in the end not really what I had longed for. Not really. The truth had no particular value. The truth was a means to an end. What I wanted was for him to choose me and for that to happen the truth was the only way in. What I had wanted was to make love to him, to travel together, to waste time with each other, to pass sections of the Sunday paper over the breakfast table, to push a cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket, or maybe to run away from this country and every wrong turn I’d ever made and every wrong turn he’d ever made and everyone we knew who it turned out didn’t really know us at all and to take my money and buy a house in Crete or Tuscany or somewhere else bright and healthy and we would hammer a nail into the thick stone wall and hang a calendar from that nail and circle in red the day of our move-in and declare, This is when time begins, here, now, today, nothing else mattered before today, and nothing will be ordinary after. We would leave our former lives behind. People would be appalled. They would note that we were not exactly good for each other, as if that mattered, as if love was ever sensible. Sensible was a pose, moderate was a huge mistake. We would devour each other. We would be horrible company, you’d be making a mistake to share a meal with us, you’d end up either hating us or regretting your own life.

  At the sound of the doorbell—a stately little two-note chime—joy and terror erupted in me like thousands of birds taking flight at once. St. Mark’s Square, Venice. I can testify to this: I was not in my so-called right mind. And once that happens it takes a long while to get back.

  “You all right?” he asked, as I opened the door. He carried a wastebasket filled with what he had taken out of his minibar. Without waiting for a reply, he stepped past me and began setting up our refreshment area on the dresser, first the booze, then the fruit juices, the nuts, the candy bars, even a deck of cards. Clearly, he wanted to be absorbed in a task. Clearly, he was as nervous and lost as I was.

  I stood behind him. I put my hands on his shoulders. Disguised my intentions for a moment by massaging his muscles.

  “That feels good,” he said. He fussed with the little dollhouse bottles, putting them in a neat row, as if a great deal depended upon their looking a certain way. And also shifting that ever important center of gravity, giving me easier access to his trapezius, the aptly named trap muscle.

  A word about self-control. If you are over and done with the self you have carefully constructed over the years, if you have mercy-killed it in its own bed of nails and are now some nascent, untested person, blinking, dizzy, and afraid, and up for grabs, then what chance is there for self-control? You can rely on some core values, some innate sense of right and wrong, some instinct for decorum, some hand-me-down checklist of dos and don’ts—but these sign posts of self-governance can be suspect and unpersuasive once you consider that they have been there all along, guiding your actions while your old self was cowering and making all the wrong decisions, that they were, in fact, collaborating with the enemy.

  So here’s what I did. I tightened my grip on his shoulders. He said Ah and I turned him around and kissed him more or less on the mouth. In my state of mind, I couldn’t really gauge if he was accepting this kiss passively, if he was frozen with surprise and embarrassment, or if he was kind of kissing me back.

  “Is this okay?” I asked.

  “No one has ever felt that way about me,” he answered. “The way you feel. The way you say you feel. I guess it’s real.”

  “I think everyone has someone who feels that way about him. I think some people die without knowing how much they were loved.”

  “It’s just that I’ve never had that,” he said.

  “But is it okay?”

  He nodded. Silence. Then: “It’s amazing,” he said.

  “You don’t think I’m . . .”

  “I think you’re amazing,” he said. “All these years. Did you really honestly feel this way about me the whole time?”

  “‘True love is a durable fire,’” I said. “‘In the mind ever burning; never sick, never old, never dead, from itself never turning.’”

  “Hey, Sir Walter Scott. Mr. Orkney himself.”

  “Close. Sir Walter Raleigh.”

  “Oh. At least I got the Sir right. I’m a solid B student.”

  “You’re okay. You’ve come far, you’ve done more than you were built to do.”

  He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it and nodded.

  “Let’s have one more drink,” I said.

  “Are we really going to do this?” he said. “Is this really going to happen?”

  “Is it up to me?”

  “I’ve had kind-of sex with guys,” he said. “A long time ago. Just horny . . . nothing. But I’ve never actually gone to bed with a man.”

  “In most ways, we’re in the same boat,” I said.

  “I’ll probably bore the hell out of you,” he said. “In the sack. I’ve become a bit vanilla.”

  Ah, of course: Grace’s complaint. And he was a bit vanilla, I suppose. And a bit further along, he wasn’t. He was spirited, game, but would ask me for encouragement, instruction. Ever auditioning, ever accommodating, ever eager to please: I could not shake him loose of that.

  Yet for all of that, being with him was very close to what I had always envisioned. A kind of innocent, old-fashioned honeymoon, with a soupçon of porn. We were awkward, we were elbows knees foreheads toenails, were oops and Is this okay, we were wait wait that hurts, we were trying to slow things down and we were heedlessly charging forward. Had something gone awry with the air conditioning? We were coated in sweat like
racehorses.

  * * *

  Alas, I fell asleep. I hadn’t meant to even close my eyes—I knew sleep was a risk. But the day, the drink, and then the sex had finished me off and as my eyelids fluttered and closed, Thaddeus whispered into my ear, “Sleep, sleep, yeah . . .”

  And so I did. And the world went on without me, as it always did and always will. In the meantime—how could I know this and, yet, how could I not have guessed?—Thaddeus’s family was rallying, getting ready to be at his side.

  Not only Grace, but David and Emma, too. And not only them, but Jennings as well, and not only Jennings, but Muriel, too. The five of them had driven up to Albany and taken the first flight to O’Hare. It was Grace who had organized it, chosen the flight, bought the tickets, but all of them wanted to be there for Thaddeus. Husband, father, benefactor: he was all these things but in their minds he was mainly a grieving son, and they were sure he needed them, and they wanted to show him what he meant to them.

  I imagine them on the plane, a regional jet. They are half the passengers. Emma sits alone in the second row, with her knees drawn up, dozing with her head against the window. David is a nervous flier, which he tries to hide, making matters worse for himself. David, if you ever read this: what you keep hidden inside devours you. Of the five of them flying to Chicago, Muriel is the most outwardly emotional. It may be her gentle nature but it’s possible that the initial wonder she felt when Thaddeus gave them all the yellow house for a dollar will never fade. In her mind, he had parted the waters. She does not forget. Nothing is lost on Muriel. The things she cares about do not get buried in the cluttering onrush of events—daily life rarely intrudes on her. She is next to Jennings with her arms folded over her chest, staring straight ahead, silently crying. When Jennings takes her hand, she leans her head against him and says, “All he ever wanted was for everyone to be happy.”