An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “I am trying to get Kip to see him for who he is.”

  “I see him,” I said. “But you don’t add up a person’s qualities like something on a balance sheet. We don’t know why we love the people we love, not if we really love them. That’s the whole purpose of love, to take us out of the rational, binary, up or down, in or out, black or white, good or bad, profit or loss, to take us out of all those everyday things into something sacred.”

  “What nonsense,” Morris said. “Love isn’t some form of blind man’s bluff. And it’s not some cockeyed prayer. Ask me why I love Robbie.”

  “No. It’s fine.”

  “Go ahead, ask, I want you to.”

  “Well, I don’t really want to.”

  “I love him because he’s a brilliant doctor who would go to any lengths to relieve the suffering of his patients.”

  I shrugged. Robbie’s specialty was sports medicine—he did knees, rotator cuffs.

  “Secondly, he is a marvelous, attentive lover. Thirdly, he is protective of me. Four? I hear music more clearly, with more texture and detail, when he is in the room. Five? I find him insightful. He’s smart.”

  “Thaddeus is smart. And quick. His mind is so alive.”

  “Really? Don’t you think his focus is rather narrow? You two have known each other since college, isn’t that right?”

  “Proceed,” I said.

  “Well, then how is it that he doesn’t know you’re gay? What kind of attention has he been paying?”

  “He sees me with a lot of women. I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe he does.”

  “He’s colluding with you to keep everything secret and shameful. He is a drug you take to keep yourself stuck in whatever realm of protracted adolescence or self-hatred you were in when you met him.”

  “I don’t agree. I bonded with him. I can’t help it.”

  “You’re a gay man in love with a married man who has two children. Wake the fuck up.”

  “He’s many things, Morris. Not just a married father of two. And I’m many things, too, by the way. I don’t see myself as a category.”

  “Here’s what I know about my nephew. Who I love, by the way, don’t get me wrong.”

  “Oh, I can tell.”

  “I do. But”—he put up a heed-this finger—“his intelligence, all of his emotional energy, his desire for success, his friendliness, his jokiness—it’s all in the service of one thing, and one thing only. And that is his overwhelming, crippling desire to be liked.”

  “Worse things could be said about a person,” I said.

  “There’s always something worse,” Morris said. “Nevertheless, it makes him unreliable. And desperate. He will disappoint you. He will hurt you. And if you create enough space for him—he might not even mean to do this—but he will.”

  “Will what?”

  “He will destroy you, Kip. He will.”

  “Oh, come on. At the very least, we’re friends.”

  “He might not want to. But he will. He will destroy you.”

  Chapter 4

  Due Diligence

  I told Thaddeus I wanted to see the land I was buying before we went through with the transaction. Nothing more than due diligence, a formality, force of professional habit. “We can walk the acres together, that would be a manly thing,” said Thaddeus, cleverly or cluelessly. But a resurgence of winter intervened, storms that made the national news: I would have seemed like a lunatic coming up for a walk in the woods in that weather, or its aftermath.

  Ken Adler wanted me to do on-site research on a company called Tawk, which owned about four hundred stores across the country exclusively devoted to the sale of mobile phones. Adler was a very conservative stock picker, something of a tortoise in a world of hyped-up hares, and, just as he had been basically unmoved by the go-go, coke-snorting eighties, he worried about missing the entire tech boom as well. Normally, he was old-school at heart, content to continue investing in railroad bonds, tankers, and T-bills. He did not have nerves of steel, and he did not have that gambler’s appetite for risk. As a kid, he made pretend investments and was content to chart the slow growth of his fantasy account. When a couple of uncles got wind of this, they encouraged him to invest small amounts of their money, and before long—Ken was only twenty by this time—half of his large, extended family were following his advice. Ken dropped out of Penn State and started Adler Associates with thirty clients, all of them relatives. He treated their money as if it were his own. His successes were moderate, his failures were few and far between. Adler Associates was, by the time he hired me, larger than he had ever wanted it to be, and Ken was always nervous, slightly gloomy.

  Some of our investors were impatient, but most were content with their wealth increasing slowly and steadily. Nevertheless, in anticipation of the initial public offering of Tawk, underwritten by Paine Webber and SG Cowen, Ken wanted me on the road to gather firsthand information about the company. There was a Tawk outlet in New York, near Battery Park. It seemed well run and full of customers, and had a pleasant welcome-to-the-future atmosphere, but in fact the New York store was the very best of the four hundred Tawks, and had been opened so close to Wall Street in the hopes that brokers and bankers would travel no farther than that one anomalous outlet, walking distance from their offices and afterwork watering holes. It took me two weeks on the road, on the rails, and in the sky to visit forty Tawks and not one of them approached the attractiveness of the New York branch. Some Tawk outlets were in major cities, but most were in the Elkhart, Indianas, of the world, where commercial rents were reasonable. The Tawks were almost always dirty, some smelling of corn chips, others smelling of disinfectant, or what a teenager might use to cover up the smell of pot. Many Tawks featured brands of cell phones that few people wanted or had even heard of, and they were staffed by people working on commission, infusing the atmosphere with an air of anxiety and illegitimacy. My strong recommendation was to stay away from the IPO, no matter what the stock opened at, or how many others stampeded into it—tech IPOs were just about fail-safe at the time.

  Ken thanked me for my work and my insight and proceeded to take a position in Tawk anyhow, not a huge one, but about $12 million spread evenly through the portfolios of his investors. By the end of the first day of trading Tawk had gone from $25 a share to $37 a share; at the end of the first month Tawk was listed on the NASDAQ, sixty outlets were closed and the stock cratered at $8. But it was a measure of Adler’s decency that he didn’t forget I had tried to steer him away from Tawk and he didn’t want to punish me for being right. Instead, he hired someone else to take over my duties writing those long long long letters to our investors, gave me a larger office, and a raise, and now road work investigations of companies was my full-time job.

  After my Tawk road trip I was sick for a while—respiratory illness from all the regional jets, I suppose—and I wasn’t able to get upstate to look at the land until the end of April. I arrived at the train station in Leyden, New York, but Thaddeus was not there. Grace had come to pick me up, dressed in a brown leather jacket and tight corduroy pants, her hair closely cropped, lightly flecked with gray. She was standing rather far from me, but she didn’t move when she saw me. She waited for me to come to her.

  * * *

  Strange now to think of it, it all went by so quickly, but Grace and I met more than twenty years ago, when I was living on Jane Street, in an outlier building, a big, 1960s-style monstrosity, in an enclave of town houses and low-rise apartment buildings.

  The plan had been for Thaddeus to come to New York with the bit of money he had saved working for his parents and to live with me while he looked for a job. I took the day off and spent it cleaning the clean apartment, making up the bed in my second bedroom, and buying a dozen purple irises, and then throwing them away out of embarrassment. I resisted the impulse to wait outside for him, as the day hobbled along. The plane from Chicago was due to land in New York at 2:00 P.M., but it was 4:30 by the time Thaddeus was at my door,
and he was not alone. Without bothering to alert me, he had brought Grace. I’d heard he was seeing someone named Grace, but Thaddeus was always seeing someone, and it had never occurred to me, not even for a moment, that he would be bringing her along. And it wouldn’t have occurred to him to alert me. He would have assumed delight, or at least easy acceptance on my part. We were all of us still in the more-the-merrier time of life.

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” I said, with a buffoon’s bow.

  She was five foot ten inches, with broad shoulders, with one of those brutally beautiful Irish faces, long, narrow, with suspicious green eyes and heavy dark brown brows. She wore bright red lipstick, which I guessed she had reapplied while in the elevator, but other than the lipstick she was not going out of her way to be feminine. All of Thaddeus’s previous girlfriends had exuded estrogen. Maybe Grace having a bit of boy in her was part of the allure, the perfect choice for the guy who needs the social approbation of conventional coupling, while helping himself to some of the pleasures of same-sex sex. As Jiminy Cricket almost sang, Let your unconscious be your guide! Grace was watchful, poised between gaiety and stubbornness. Here was someone who did not assume she would be welcome—anywhere. What she had in the world was hard-won, including the man at her side. Her voice was pure and deep, but her pronunciations were bewildering. She sometimes gave words a weird British inflection—rilly for really, and a few others—an Audrey Hepburn–ish tone that climbed like ivy over her true speaking voice, and was meant to camouflage the enunciation of a girl born in Wisconsin, raised in Chicago, a girl without a high school diploma. (The GED was in the mail.) She was twenty-one years old and the flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia was her first time on an airplane.

  “We made it,” she announced. They dropped their suitcases to the floor, clunky maroon monstrosities upon which they had x’d masking tape, as if someone might actually steal them.

  “I see that,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, Thaddeus didn’t tell you I was coming, did he.”

  “Of course not!” I said, as if Thaddeus’s spontaneity, as exasperating as it might be, was also endearing, something she and I might appreciate together. “Come,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I’ll show you to your room.”

  It was a room that could just about accommodate a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, a small bookshelf. I could see their disappointment.

  They were tired from traveling, but nevertheless, Thaddeus wanted to walk around the neighborhood. I was relieved; I was worried they might close the door and fall into bed together.

  “The White Horse Tavern’s near here, right?” he asked. He explained it to Grace. “All these great writers used to go there. Delmore Schwartz and Dylan Thomas. I’ve always wanted to drink a beer there.”

  Before we left, Thaddeus insisted Grace show me the drawing she had brought for me as a house present. She lifted her suitcase, threw it onto the bed, and found what she was looking for at the bottom, a manila envelope, which she handed to me.

  It was a pencil drawing of Franz Kafka. I was familiar with this image, modeled on the photograph on the back of my copy of The Castle. Grace’s drawing was more or less an exact replica—I would soon learn that exact replica was her métier. Here was Kafka with his Ashkenazi bonnet of dark hair, the protuberant fairy tale ears, the deep-set eyes radiating inquisitiveness and dread.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Thaddeus said.

  “That’s Frankie K all right,” I said, on the off chance that a bit of jokiness might bring him to his senses.

  No possibility of that, however. “She can draw anything. Anything! It’s almost scary. And will you look at her?”

  “Thaddeus, come on, take it easy,” Grace said. To me: “I’m glad you like it.” She made a quick half smile. It was like one of those obligatory handshakes the winner of a tennis match makes, barely touching the sweaty hand of the vanquished opponent.

  Chapter 5

  Enter Jennings

  Meeting me at the train on the day of my pre-purchase due diligence, Grace was with Hat Stratton’s son, Jennings Stratton, who now lived in—and owned—the caretaker’s house with his wife, Muriel, and their two children. Jennings made himself essential around Orkney, but he had his own business to run—removing asbestos from homes, churches, schools, government buildings. Half his life was spent in a Hazmat suit. Years ago, Jennings had been the county’s Casanova, and even now, with silvery hair and a paunch, he retained the manner of a handsome man, with a quick, confident smile, a swaggering gait, and a way of looking at you that implied you two shared a funny, risqué secret—namely, your attraction to him. He was a hard-charging alpha male, tuned in to four channels: See, Want, Take, Defend. If he’d been born to a different family, he’d be raking in a fortune on Wall Street. As it was, all he had ever been able to accumulate was women, and now they were safely locked away in the memory bank.

  When I got into Grace’s car, Jennings was sprawled out in the backseat, swigging on a bottle of Dr Pepper. His hair was in a ponytail and smelled of coconut-scented conditioner. He wore a white shirt, the sleeves carefully rolled, and a pair of sharply creased gray trousers. I had nursed my share of suspicions about Jennings and Grace. I had seen him look at her with a little glint of ownership in his eyes. He’d built her a studio in an old shed, though there were plenty of places for her to work inside the big house. He had posed for her. He had driven her down to New York to buy paints and canvases.

  “Where’s that husband of yours?” I said, as soon as I fastened my seat belt.

  She smiled. She knew exactly what I meant by that question. Thaddeus was in Hollywood. He was pitching a movie idea and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days—he could get a cheaper ticket if he stayed over on a Saturday, and these days he was paying for those flights to L.A. out of his own pocket.

  “Any sense of how it went?” I asked. We hadn’t left the train station’s parking lot. People were tossing their suitcases into backseats and trunks, hugging their hellos.

  Jennings slid farther down in the backseat, quite obviously not wanting to be seen. Maybe there was actually someone he wanted to hide from, or it could have been muscle memory from years on the prowl.

  “Thaddeus tells his stories and it always goes well,” Grace said. “But nothing ever seems to come of it.” She put the car into gear while glancing at Jennings in the rearview mirror. “Do you have any idea how much sugar is in one bottle of that stuff?”

  “A lot!” he said.

  “Right. A disgusting amount. You should at least drink the Diet, which has zero calories.”

  “Those fake sweeteners are just chemicals, Grace. Rat poison. Way better off keeping things natural.”

  “This from Mr. Asbestos?”

  “Hey, if you want to pay me twenty-five dollars an hour to drink Diet Dr Pepper, I will.” Their repartee was easy and intimate. I looked down, feeling the shame that ought to have been theirs. We were passing a farm. A woman on a tractor was dumping bales of hay out of the front loader onto a stubbly field where six tan and white cows patiently waited, their tails flicking, presumably with no idea why they were being fattened.

  Grace poked me on the shoulder. “We have to make a quick stop. Sorry about that.”

  “Two minutes,” Jennings said.

  It was annoying that they hadn’t run their errand before picking me up, but I didn’t want to be a jerk about it. I think I sighed. And Jennings, preternaturally attuned to slights, looked sharply in my direction before sliding out of the backseat and slamming the door behind him.

  “Wow,” Grace said. “He’s so noisy!” She had her eyes on him as he walked toward Leyden Home and Garden, with its sidewalk display of paint cans, rolls of window screen, a backyard grill, and an old gumball machine with a card taped to it that read Ask at Register. When he was finally out of view, she took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I don’t know what I was supposed to make of it.

  “So, Kip,” she said. “Why the sudden interest in s
eeing the land?”

  At some other time, the abruptness of the question would probably have caught me off guard, but the combination of having Jennings with her and then stopping at the hardware store had already put me on alert. I figured three possible motivations for her question, which were, in descending order of awfulness: she was aware that I had simply created an excuse to come upstate and spend time with Thaddeus, or she was worried that despite my reassurances I did in fact have some vague plan to one day build something on that land, or it had dawned on her that bringing Jennings to the train station might have been an error and now she was nervously making conversation.

  “I’m paying a lot of money for that land, Grace. Of course I want to see it.”

  “You never saw it? All the many times you’ve come to visit?”

  “Well, if I saw it, I wasn’t paying proper attention.”

  “Anyhow, it’s a small investment. For you.”

  “I’m not nearly as rich as you think I am, Grace. And it’s not a small investment.”

  “I’m sorry. Sorry sorry. I’m in a shit mood. There’s nothing like running out of money to make a gal hate the rich.”

  “But I just told you: I’m not rich.”

  “You are to us, Kip.” She put her hand to her forehead, and was silent. “We’re lost. I don’t know what to do next. I can’t stand waiting for the ax to fall.”

  “Things could change. Maybe some rich collector will discover you. Maybe some rich producer will finance a movie for our favorite boy.”

  “Right. And what are we supposed to do in the meanwhile?”

  It was a moment to push back, if only slightly. “We could each and every one of us follow Henry James’s three rules for living,” I said. “Be kind, be kind, and be kind.”

  “And you think that will be enough?”

  “I think it’s a lot.”

  “Well, as Thaddeus says, isn’t it pretty to think so?”