An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “You’re a lucky man.”

  He nodded, but with a look of sorrow.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Sure. How about you, Kip?”

  “I worry about you,” I said.

  “I’m okay, considering. Unemployment is a nightmare, so there’s that.”

  “How’s the marriage holding up?”

  “The marriage?”

  “Yes. You are married, aren’t you? I hope I didn’t get that wrong.”

  “The marriage is okay. Like life, up and down. I don’t understand people who get divorced. Maybe they were never so much in love in the first place? I don’t believe it when people say—what is it they say? We grew apart. What the fuck does that even mean? Our lives are short, we don’t actually have time to grow apart. Divorce is a panic move. Quitting on the person you loved is like rejecting God because your prayers weren’t answered.”

  “And Grace?” I said. “Is this how she feels?” I was appalled that I had asked such a thing but to take it back would make it worse.

  But Thaddeus didn’t seem to have heard it. He seemed for a moment lost in thought. He tapped his finger against his lower lip, and then, suddenly, seemed to revive. “Remember when we saw Notorious during the Film Society’s Hitchcock festival?” he asked.

  Yes, I did. I was living in a grungy group house a couple of miles off campus and because there was always something going on and nothing was in place and it was never really quiet, it was a house people liked to congregate in. After the movie Thaddeus and six or seven others came back there and we talked about the movie and smoked pot and drank tequila, and around midnight Thaddeus was in a stupor, falling asleep, waking, dozing off again. I managed to steer him into my bed. Otherwise he would have slept on the sofa in the common room, with its unending human and feline traffic. Falling leaf silent, I got into bed with him. “This okay?” I whispered. But he was unconscious as soon as his head hit the pillow, whereas I was up until daybreak listening to him breathe. Wondering if I would have a second chance. I was half insane from the temptation to touch him, to caress his skin or feel his hair or even kiss him. I understood it would be a wrong thing to do. Beneath me, really, but not so far beneath me that I could stop from thinking about it. This is where the Jews have it all over us so-called Christians. The Jews say all that matters is what you do and don’t do, and your thoughts are your own private business.

  “Yes, Notorious, great movie,” I said. Perhaps he’d only been feigning sleep. “Who wrote it?”

  “Ben Hecht. My parents had a copy of his autobiography at Four Freedoms.”

  “Right,” I said. “Ben Hecht. Great two-fisted name.”

  “So do you remember like at about the halfway point, when Claude Rains comes into his mother’s big Nazi bedroom and she’s there in her fussy Nazi nightgown and he says, ‘Mother, I think I married an American agent.’”

  “Yes,” I said. “Amazing moment. We almost feel sorry for him. Like his mother is going to completely humiliate him.”

  “Well, do you want to hear my version?”

  “Something you’re working on? An update?”

  “Unfortunately not. Real life.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s about Emma,” he said.

  “What? Is she okay?”

  “Well, it’s like this, old bean,” he said, taking a swipe at a British accent. “I think I may be raising another man’s child.”

  Chapter 11

  The Spurned Artist

  Why would Thaddeus say such a thing? On the train going back to the city, gazing out at the lingering light of early summer, a light so golden and soft it almost seemed tangible, I wondered if what Thaddeus was stating was a verified fact or a theory. Was his suspicion the side effect of marital malaise, the dulling of desire? Was their marriage in trouble? I had often asked myself that, wanting it to be true, which is not very nice, I know, but people like me, the unchosen ones, we’re not always very nice, though some of us may appear so. At any rate, it was a ridiculous question, a child’s question. Of course their marriage was in trouble. All marriages are in trouble.

  But what treachery, what deceit on her part! Not confined to the infidelity, but the toxic spillover—letting Thaddeus believe Emma was biologically his. Could Grace have been capable of this, a lie that would have to be sustained and protected day after day, year after year?

  I dealt with some pretty tough and nasty characters in my job, men terrified they might have to give up one of their beach houses, or fuck someone their own age, or make less money than their cousin, but I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered indignation that equals that of the spurned artist. Even the spurned lover has only been rejected by one, maybe two people. The spurned artist has been rejected by the world. Grace came to look at each of her hundreds of unsold paintings and drawings as love letters that came back with Return to Sender stamped on the unopened envelope. And as her own art became a source of pain and humiliation, she turned sour regarding the art of others. What the galleries showed was repulsive to her—she saw more art that she approved of in antiques stores than in galleries. She had expended so much of her effort on learning how to draw and paint with perfect verisimilitude that anything abstract, expressionistic, conceptual, or minimalist was an affront to her sensibilities. She went on making art for as long as she could, until finally her energy ran out and she could no longer protect herself from feeling rejected. For all her outward toughness, she didn’t have the self-confidence to promote her own work. She was turned down by three or possibly four galleries in New York, and the experience was so painful, and shaming, that she chose the strategy of waiting for the world to beat a path to her door. And every year that this failed to occur was further proof to Grace of the art world’s idiocy, until her anger turned to shame.

  Please take everything I say about her with a grain of salt, which Pliny counsels will protect you from certain mild poisons. And bear in mind that not only did Grace lie nightly (both definitions) with the man I loved, she abused the privilege.

  Here is what I believe. Without a career to strive for, Grace needed some other kind of adventure in her life. She needed drama, consequence, suspense, something to obsess about, something to hope for, something to dread, something to give her life shape and meaning—and what easier way to achieve all that than to have an affair? Infidelity is an avenue to adventure available to all, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, the pious and the unbelievers, anyone who feels crushed by the dailiness of settled life, anyone who needs a window in a life that suddenly seems all walls.

  So, yes, I did believe that Grace was not only capable of betraying Thaddeus, but in all probability had done so. I was prepared to be wrong about this, wrong on all counts, but my guess was that the most likely candidate for Emma’s biological father was Jennings Stratton.

  Strange now to think of it, but when Thaddeus first talked to me about Grace back in 1976, my feelings were generous. He told me about her over the telephone. Long-distance phone conversations were an expensive rarity for most people our age, but from my desk at EF Hutton, I could make discreet calls without fretting about cost, though I did worry someone at a nearby desk would overhear my conversation and know I wasn’t doing business. Thaddeus, too, was at work, sitting on a three-legged stool near the cash register at his parents’ store, while they were at lunch.

  This new girl, Grace! Her artistic genius, her fierceness, her almost feral determination to survive, her pot-dealing older brother, her unhappy, well-marinated mother. And then Thaddeus waxed on about her tenderness, her honesty, her absolute and total inability to lie or even shade the truth. I knew I was listening to someone who was completely under the spell of new love. It was as unmistakable as the slurred speech of someone who has called you after slugging down half a bottle of vodka, and embarrassing as seeing a friend, having volunteered to be hypnotized at a party, quack like a duck or bark like a dog or twirl like a ballerina. But it was Thaddeus,
and he was dear, and he needed to be loved, and I was happy for him, and happy for myself, as well: to picture him as fully ensnared, fully engaged, fully committed, would hasten to end my mooning obsession with him. I would be free to stop worrying what he was up to, if he was all right, if he was thinking about me, if he was laughing or making love or driving drunk, and I would be free to find love of my own, free to face forward and get on with the great adventure of making a life for myself, a better life, a real life. “I love her so much, man, so much,” he said, not even trying to make it interesting and adult and unique. But the unadorned ardency moved me, it truly did, and for a moment a better me rose from the ashes of ego.

  Alas, those rare moments of satori are not self-sustaining. They fade quickly unless you work at it, daily work, hourly. They need prayer, sacrifice, you have to devote your life to keeping them alive. That initial response to Thaddeus telling me about Grace, the feeling of peace and happiness that it gave me? It could only point me in the direction I must go, but it could not and did not take me there. Before long, I was again pacing up and down that hall of mirrors, the corridor called self-interest. I can tell you what you already know: ego is the sworn enemy of happiness.

  Chapter 12

  Bruce

  On that train going back to New York, satori may have already been out of reach, but at least happiness lingered. At first I was too busy with Sears to realize it, but then it struck me as the train lurched out of Yonkers and began its final run to New York City. I was happy. My internal landscape had been altered. At last, at long last, I had something new to worry about, new information, new possibilities.

  The man sitting next to me looked in my direction, nodded his head, and smiled.

  “Was I chortling just now?” I asked.

  “You were,” he said. “Please, don’t let me stop you.”

  He had gotten on the train the first stop south of Leyden. The car was by no means full, but as chance would have it, he chose to sit next to me. He was about my age, a kind of standard-issue, old-style American man, with neatly combed brown hair, the beginnings of a double chin, sloped shoulders, small hands, well-polished shoes. I could smell his spearmint chewing gum. He was reading an old hardcover edition of The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton. He had marked his place with a tasseled bookmark.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m in a good mood.”

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said.

  My heart sank—I did not recognize him, not even faintly. It wasn’t one of those names on the tip of the tongue situations. His face meant no more to me than that of anyone else on the train, and I replied with something I must have seen in a movie. “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” I said, in a voice that was a blend of Ray Milland and Frank Langella.

  “It’s Bruce,” he said. “Bruce Grogan.”

  As soon as he said his name, I did, in fact, remember him. He used to live near me in Ann Arbor and he didn’t look all that different than he had in college. He used to affect the look of a college student circa 1930, in sweater vests and pleated pants, his hair carefully parted on the left side. We hadn’t been close friends, but every now and then he’d come to my apartment, and we’d get high together and listen to Glenn Gould over earphones, making little aahs and mmms of potted appreciation. I was dating a girl named Daphne Holt, who sometimes spent the night with me, and whenever she did, Bruce dropped by the next morning—he might have been keeping track of her. He was a philosophy major and tried to work his education into his approach to Daphne, saying once to her, “Hey, Daph, you’ve got hair like Hannah Arendt’s,” as if that might win her over. On the other hand, who knew what Daphne liked. She was, after all, with me.

  “Bruce, my god. What the fuck? What a great surprise.” I gestured to the book. “Still philosophical, I see.”

  He turned the Merton over in his hand, looked down on it. “Ah, the Trappists, don’t start me on the Trappists.”

  Don’t worry, I won’t, I thought. “So what’s happening, Bruce? You look great. Are you living up there or are you in the city?” I reached over, patted his shoulder vigorously; seeing someone from college had increased my good mood. The jolly cup runneth over! “What the fuck, man? This is such a treat!”

  “I’m going to Yankee Stadium. The Tigers are in town. I’ll probably be the only one in the whole place rooting for them. Anyhow, I live upstate, sort of. It’s temporary. Finishing up my studies at St. Philip’s and waiting to be assigned.”

  “So fucking great to see you. Assigned to what?”

  He smiled, a little bashful, a little pleased. “I’m a priest,” he said. “Well, not quite. Ordination in September.”

  “Wow. You’re a priest on your way to a baseball game and I’m a gay guy on his way home,” I said, much to my own immense surprise—and horror. I thought it was the funniest thought that had ever passed through my mind, but it was not meant to be said aloud and actually heard by another person, and like many neuronal bursts of ersatz inspiration, it lost a great deal in translation. “Of course, I’m kidding,” I said. “And sorry for all the foul language.”

  “Couldn’t care less about cussing,” said Bruce. “We learn to let all the petty stuff go by.” I wondered if my being gay was also petty stuff in his view, or if he’d even heard me, or if I’d actually said it out loud. “And what about you?” he continued. “Still doing that master of the universe stuff on Wall Street?” He shook his finger at me in mock admonishment. “I hope you know there is only one true master of the universe.”

  “And he’s doing such a bang-up job,” I said. “How did you know I was working in finance?”

  “Oh, Thaddeus mentioned it to me.”

  My brief flight of unencumbered joy was over and now I was in the weeds for good—Bruce and Thaddeus were in conversation? Did that mean I had just blithely blurted a secret about myself that would be revealed, or at least alluded to, the next time they spoke? Was this protected conversation? Was what passed between you and a priest sacred and secret, even though Bruce was not quite a priest and I wasn’t Catholic?

  “So you and Thaddeus hang out?” As far as I could tell, my voice was steady.

  “Oh, a little. We met at a party at his . . . What does he call that place?”

  “Orkney. The name wasn’t his doing. It came that way.”

  “Right. Orkney. One of the deacons was invited to a lawn party there, and he took a bunch of us along with him. All I knew was it was a party at someone’s big old estate and the owner was very easygoing. I was worried about being a gate-crasher. But then I heard we were going to a home owned by Thaddeus Kaufman and I thought, Holy Moly, it’s got to be one and the same. I had heard about his movie career, but I had no idea he was living so close. It wasn’t like we were best friends in school, but I always thought he was a good guy. Everybody did, right? So friendly.”

  Bruce was distracted for a moment as we moved into the outer reaches of the city. Several public-housing towers were going up. Idled for the evening, candy-striped cement trucks were parked in a semi-circle and immense cranes like dinosaurs were etched against the darkening sky.

  “Anyhow,” he continued, “it was about a forty-minute drive. We were all sort of jammed into this little Renault. I called it God’s Clown Car. There were seven of us, seven is the number of spiritual perfection, though we were getting pretty sweaty and crabby by the time we got to Orkney. Before we knew it, a huge thunderstorm came in—it was out of nowhere—and we were wondering if there was even going to be a party, since it was supposed to be a lawn party, one of those August things. And if it was going to be moved indoors, having the one person who was invited bring six others was going to pose quite a dilemma. But we persevered. There were about twenty other cars, maybe forty. We couldn’t park that close to the house and the seven of us ran with our hands over our heads. We must have been quite a sight, seven seminarians running around the circular driveway and up the stairs and onto the porch—it’s not so
mething you see every day. And it was Thaddeus himself who opened the door for us. Even in the rain with all those dripping seminarians around me, he recognized me—like that!” Bruce snapped his fingers. “He threw his arms around me, dragged me into the foyer of his mansion like I’d just returned home from the Third Crusade.”

  “Ah,” I said, a little squeamishly. How could I not take this description of Thaddeus’s ebullient hello to Bruce as a critique of my own?

  “Thaddeus walked me through the place. I assume you’ve seen it.”

  “Many, many times,” I said.

  “Well, then you know. Lordy, what a spread. I asked him, What’s the occasion, what’s this party about? And he says, This crazy old house needs people in it. And there were people everywhere, all ages, all colors. Someone was making a fire in one of the fireplaces and folks were draping their wet socks and things on the fire screen to dry them out. And this guy, this singer . . .” Bruce screwed his eyes shut and tapped his forehead. “I can’t remember his name. Had his moment in the late sixties? Well, there you have it, the fleeting nature of worldly accomplishments. Anyhow, he was there with his guitar in one room, and a lot of people were listening to him. And Thaddeus’s little girl was playing along with him on her guitar.”

  “Emma,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “His daughter’s name. Emma.” There must have been some unintended grit in my tone, an unwashed leaf or two in the salad.

  Bruce gave me a quizzical look. “Anyhow, it was quite a shindig. I met the beautiful wife. Grace. That’s not a name I can forget, obviously. And his son . . . David? And Thaddeus introduced us. . . .” Now it was Bruce’s turn to chortle—my chortling days seemed suddenly far behind me. “He introduced us to everyone as the Seven Samurai.”

  “He loves that movie,” I said.

  “Oh, is that it? Everything he tells me about Hollywood and the people out there . . .” Bruce shook his head. “Worse than the Vatican, in terms of infighting.”