An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “Like that’s going to happen,” Jennings says, but luck is with him because either his wife doesn’t hear his remark or she chooses to ignore it.

  Grace sits alone, careful to keep her gaze away from Muriel, whose tears offend her. Grace is certain that Thaddeus will—at the very least—be grateful they have all showed up for him, and there is a good chance that seeing them all in Chicago, and knowing they have made an effort to remind him how much he is liked and loved might soften this brutal loss, the abandonment. Yet she cannot keep her eyes off Jennings, until her body suddenly has a memory of how it felt when he twisted and pushed his way into her, and she looks away.

  I was awake for a few minutes, well before they boarded the plane in Albany. I’d awakened to that quick grab of panic and confusion—the where am I moment I’d gone through innumerable times over the years of business travel, shifting time zones, unfamiliar beds. Thaddeus was asleep on his back, with his left arm flung and his hand resting on top of his head, while his right hand rested on his chest, like a school kid about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. That earthen, appley scent. Those deep breaths, just a notch below a snore. I was next to him. The sheets were heavy, like curtains that had been rained on. I marveled at the eucharistic intimacy of sex. To consume the fluids of another. To have the body of another within your own.

  I didn’t want to sleep. My life was three hours old. I fought sleep as one fights the sea. I squeezed my eyes shut and then opened them to their fullest aperture. I reached for my phone to check the time. It was 5:15 A.M. I lifted the sheet and used the light of the phone to see his body. Soft, its glory days well behind it. He was flaccid now, and there was something youthful and insouciant about his dick—collegiate, too—the ruffled skin of the circumcised foreskin encircling the head of it like a turtleneck sweater. He had drunk me, entered me, without fear of contagion. No questions asked, no precautions taken. Don’t leave me, I thought. But he was gone, a citizen now of the other world, the world of night, and phantoms. My eyelids were fluttering. I was losing my purchase on staying awake. I thought of Wallace Stevens . . . of the two dreams, what dreamer, what lover would choose the one obscured by sleep. But my body had its own agenda. I left the world in which I had finally found my rightful place and entered a dark one full of fantasy, stored memories, symbols, and nonsense. At one point, I was back on Hydrangea Court having just used the bathroom and I was flapping a towel to dispel my scent while my sisters rapped frantically on the door. Let us in, they shouted.

  I woke up.

  Alone. I swept my hand across the sheets.

  Thaddeus had slipped out of our bed. I felt a moment’s panic, but then I saw him. He had gone to the closet.

  He was on his haunches. He was undoing the clasps of my briefcase.

  I was so tired and so drunk on the afterburn of sex that my first thought was Oh good, he’s still here. He was being as quiet as possible. He opened the briefcase, its wide maw, exposing the accordion section within. All my PhoneClad notes were in there. The handwritten draft of my email to Ken. Yet that did not occur to me, not right away. What is he looking for? What is he doing? I wondered if perhaps Thaddeus was under the mistaken impression that I had Libby’s will in my briefcase. Yet my body knew the truth even as I proposed one lame and improbable excuse after another. My body knew. I put my hand over my mouth.

  To my sisters, to my friends, to the Court, and to every lonely, heartsick, memory-mad, desire-driven, sidelined person in the world: do not do as I have done. Give your unrequited love six months to make its way into reality; if it’s not there by then, it’s not going to happen. She does not feel what you feel, he can never reciprocate, and you are destroying yourself. Tell them the truth and move on, and if you can’t reveal your feelings then kill your feelings, and if they resist murder redirect them and give that love to someone else and if that’s not possible then march for peace or rescue animals or learn how to play the cello and if none of those things reduces the agony then toughen the fuck up and learn to live with agony. Don’t be afraid of agony. Human beings are designed to absorb vast quantities of agony. Just look around you! But stop believing, stop hoping for the moment when unrequited love is given its just rewards. If only someone had told me this, I might have had a different life. But, in all honesty, Morris said as much. He told me! Even I said as much. I told me! But I did not listen to Morris and I did not listen to me. And no one else will listen to me. Am I the only person in the world who carried a torch for so long, watched it burn slowly down to the nub, and the next thing that burned was the hand that carried it, and when that was scorched it was my arm that burned and then my torso, my face, my life. I can’t be the only one. We’re irrational creatures. Not all that smart about matters of love and desire. We’ll be traveling to other planets long before we have any real chance of self-control.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Here is what happened.

  It was ten in the morning, though the room was still for the most part dark. I got out of bed. I walked across the room. He was so engrossed in his snooping that even though I was walking toward him he didn’t know I was awake. He was reading my memo to Ken by the closet light.

  “Hey,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  He was startled, but not embarrassed. “I’m on a treasure hunt,” he said. He stood up. “So PhoneClad, huh. You could have told me. You know?” He put the memo back into the folder and the folder back into the briefcase, his movements very fastidious, especially for a naked man. He closed the clasps, but held on to the briefcase while looking up at me, the other naked man.

  “You really have no right to do that,” I said.

  “I guess,” he said, as if it were a matter of infinitesimal importance. When he saw my expression, however, he changed tack. “I think we’re a little past that, aren’t we? What happened to the love, man? You know? Where is it? Where’s the love? Everyone talks about love but no one lifts a fucking finger for me. I’m in a fix. And you can help me out and you won’t do it. Has working with money all these years hardened your heart, is that what happened?”

  I pointed to the bed. “What was that? A tactical move? So you could steal from me?” I took the briefcase away from him—he resisted a moment but relinquished it. He made a sound, a kind of puff, as if I were acting like a fool.

  “You’re so suspicious.”

  “Suspicious? I was watching you do it.”

  “Kip,” he said, in what was meant to be a calming voice, but which further enraged me, “you can’t make a big deal out of everything.”

  Had a life of grinning and bearing it led him to believe I could grin and bear it, too? His attempt to diminish the insult came out all wrong. Similarly, I had meant only to swat him with my briefcase, but that came out all wrong, too. My body told my mind: step aside and let us take it from here. I surrendered control. I hit him with such tremendous force. The leather, the brass, the weight of my private papers.

  He made a sound, half a cough and half a cry. He pressed his hand against his nose and checked it for blood. “Look what you did!” There was a wisp of pale red on his palm and a small dark red bubble trembled at the rim of his nostril.

  I swung the briefcase at him again. He put up his arms to protect his face, but he was too slow. He was lagging behind the events. I may have missed out on the radiant history of my time, but I was dead center in the moment right now. The world was different, the world inside this room, and Thaddeus had not caught up to it. My captain’s instincts were slack. Despite a dead sister, a dead father and mother, despite a ruined career, and despite raising another man’s child, he still operated on the assumption that people would love him, and that smiles and jokes and birthday cards and plenty of room for guests and giving away a few extra acres and being a friend to all would get him through. The brass clasp on my briefcase struck him in the mouth and the whomp of it obscured the damage being done—the porcelain, pulp, and nerves of his two front teeth, dazzling an
d white with a little hairline space between them, the crown jewels of his smile: ruined. In pain and its retinue of fear and confusion, he crossed his arms in front of his face. His nose was bleeding, and in the darkness of that room the flow was black. My briefcase struck his crossed arms and he stumbled and struck the back of his head against the steel rod from which hung a few clothes hangers kitted out in satin. The blow to his skull made a deep wet sound, like a melon hit with a baseball bat.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  The hand that was covering his mouth went to the back of his head. He made an agonized expression and I saw the emptiness where his teeth were once stationed. He closed his eyes, groaned, bent forward.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m going to be sick,” he said, and a moment later began to vomit—a foul, alcohol-infused flannel, the color of oatmeal. He pushed past me and staggered into the bathroom, and slammed the door.

  As I hurriedly dressed, the house phone rang—loud, raucous, demanding, and I picked it up before the second ring.

  “Mr. Woods. We have . . .” He paused.

  “Grace, David, and Emma,” Grace said, her voice cheerful and loud from the other side of the front desk. “And Jennings and Muriel, too!”

  “Have her wait a moment, if you would,” I said to the desk clerk. “I’ll call right back.”

  I rapped on the bathroom door. The water was running both in the sink and the tub. Thaddeus did not answer. I quickly made up the bed, swept the empty bottles into the trash basket. I checked the mirror over the desk. Why did I look so pleased?

  I rang the front desk back, and asked to speak to Grace. I’d only kept her waiting a couple of minutes but she sounded put out.

  “Kip? What’s going on?”

  “Welcome to Chicago,” I said nonsensically.

  “Where’s Thaddeus? We called his room over and over but there’s no answer.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s up here. Room fifteen twenty-two. He’s with me.”

  “He’s with you?”

  “Yes. He’s here.”

  “Okay, we’re coming up.”

  “Grace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t bring the kids. Okay? Come alone.”

  Chapter 40

  The Ransom

  If you have to be arrested, being an affluent Caucasian is the way to go. It wasn’t exactly valet parking, but no guns were drawn, no voices were raised. They waited patiently while I shut down my desktop and my laptop and locked the bottom drawer of my desk. The only iffy moment was when I reached for the jacket draped on the back of my chair. The younger cop, Hawaiian by the looks of him, quickly squeezed my Paul Stuart from hem to collar looking for a weapon before allowing me to put it on. I was not handcuffed, but simply read my rights and guided delicately through the Adler Associates open-concept California Street office with no more than a finger on my elbow, just to remind me that for the next while my life was not my own. Fine, take it, maybe you can do more with it that I’ve been able to. My co-workers looked on, making no attempt to hide their dismay.

  “It has nothing to do with my job,” I called out, though that wasn’t exactly true. It was felony assault and battery, yes, but if I hadn’t seen Thaddeus trying to read the PhoneClad notes, things would have probably gone in a different direction. My fellow Midwesterner Stephanie Buchsbaum called out in her husky alto to ask if I wanted her to call one of our lawyers and I said, “Good idea,” in a voice brimming with false bravado. She followed me out to the elevators. The elevators in that building were notoriously inefficient, though today the wait was not too bad. Stephanie got as close to me as the two officers would allow. She looked me up and down and made a rah-rah gesture with her fist and told me I was looking good and not to worry. “Thanks,” I said again, my eyes suddenly stinging. I realized at that moment just how terrified I was. But it was a strange, truncated fear, like a dud firework that smokes and fizzles and then it’s over. What did I care about this cop’s finger on my elbow, or the inquiring eyes of the people from work, or going to jail, or having a record. I’d told Thaddeus the truth. The thing I most dreaded was already behind me.

  Bail was easily taken care of. I was in the precinct for all of two hours and was home by the afternoon. No one—except, of course, for Thaddeus and Grace, and, a bit later, their lawyers—wanted to cause me any undo inconvenience. The San Francisco lawyers passed my case along to criminal attorneys in Chicago. I was not even required to appear in court, but I made the trip anyhow, behaving as much as possible like the innocent man I more or less felt myself to be. I wondered if Thaddeus was going to be there, too. I was quite sure he would be, but I was wrong.

  The case was before a judge named Sidney Orloff, elderly, dapper, and caustic, and with a reputation for speedy work. He had already seen Thaddeus’s videotaped deposition and he’d seen mine. There was no question in his mind as to who hit whom with what and where and when. The why really didn’t interest him.

  “You’re making my life very easy, gentlemen,” Orloff said, ignoring the fact that of the four attorneys two were women. Rather than pound his gavel against the sound block, he pinged it with his fingernail, and pronounced me guilty. “I’m going to cogitate on this before sentencing,” he said. “And I will look at all supporting materials, statements, and whatever other nonsense you want to bring to the Court’s attention. Is there anything you would like to add to my storehouse of knowledge before we adjourn?” He lifted his long chin and scanned the courtroom through the bottoms of his half-glasses. “Is either the plaintiff or the defendant present?”

  I was seated on the left side, two rows behind my lawyers. There were twenty or so other spectators scattered about, folks coming in from the cold, others who probably alternated between courtrooms, libraries, churches, and homeless shelters. I whispered to one of my lawyers, asking if I should say something here, and she shook her head emphatically, like a swimmer trying to dislodge water from her ear. I sat back, wised up to the fact that in most legal proceedings the actual defendant was peripheral, and justice was hammered out by the people getting paid.

  The lawyers on both sides gathered their papers, filled their briefcases, exchanged pleasantries. My team and I were going to meet in an hour at their offices on North LaSalle. I grabbed my topcoat and I hurried out. A few uniformed cops were standing on the steps in front of the criminal courthouse—an ugly, obdurate block of a building, a cross between a Roman ruin and a radiator.

  A light snow was drifting through the gray air. Off to one side—I almost missed seeing her—stood Emma, wearing a blue trench coat and dark glasses. Her hair was cut short and parted on the side. She held an unlit cigarette in one hand and her phone in the other.

  “Hi, Uncle Kip,” she said, her voice soft and effortful.

  “Emma! What are you doing here?”

  “Dad asked me to let him know what happened,” she said. “I’m in school at the University of Chicago.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you going to jail?”

  “I don’t think so, Emma. We’ll see. So . . . University of Chicago?”

  “I got early admittance.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  People streamed in and out of the courthouse. Mothers with children in tow, lawyers sipping take-away coffees, young guys on their way to prison, dressed defiantly. Emma glanced at her phone and tossed it in her shoulder bag. The snow fell with increasing force and the temperature seemed to drop.

  “I better get going,” Emma said.

  “It’s good to see you, Emma. You look great, by the way. I guess college really agrees with you.” I wished she wasn’t wearing dark glasses.

  We were silent for a few moments.

  “My dorm’s really close to Dad’s old apartment, you know, where Grandma and Grandpa lived.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I guess.”

  “Your dad’s a good guy, Emma. And boy,
does he ever adore you. I’m sorry I hit him.”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “Oh, honey, it’s never the right thing to do.”

  She took off her glasses. Her eyes were full of anguish. Maybe she wanted me to see that, to know. The wind was picking up and the snow was swirling. She must have been freezing in that trench coat.

  “Can I give you a hug, Uncle Kip?”

  “I would like that so much.”

  She put her arms around me and I lightly touched her shoulders.

  “You were always my favorite,” she said, and before I could say another word, she turned and stepped quickly away. A cluster of lawyers were just approaching the entrance, some in three-piece suits, some in high heels, a couple of them carrying tan and white boxes of documents. I wondered with a searing twist of grief if I would ever see her again.

  * * *

  I was sentenced to eighteen months’ parole, with mandatory anger management classes—will someone please look into what I suspect is the cozy relationship between courts and the scammers who run these worthless anger management classes? Though I hoped they were wrong, my lawyers warned me that the main reason Thaddeus filed assault and battery charges against me was to bolster a civil case. That he would want to sue me seemed unlikely, but I wasn’t able to put it completely out of my mind. In the meantime I could travel with permission between San Francisco and New York if my job required it. I could actually travel anywhere, for the job, even out of the country. The law treated my job at Adler Associates as if the fate of the nation were at stake, as if I were actually doing something necessary that could benefit others, like a surgeon or a teacher, instead of something with less social value than dog grooming, which a parole officer in New York told me was what she did to pay her way through Fordham.