An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “How’d you know I was even going to ask the question?” I asked him.

  “Childless people always ask that,” Thaddeus said. He gave the sauté pan a final shake and turned off the gas, and the blue chrysanthemum was sucked back into the cast iron burner grate. The dogs immediately stood up and began pacing, their claws clattering nervously on the wooden floor.

  “Those dogs totally suck,” said David.

  “Can one of the cats sleep in my room tonight?” Emma asked her brother.

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “Which one?”

  “Dullest likes me,” she said.

  “His name’s not Dullest,” David said, wearily. “I told you. It’s Dulles.”

  “Sorry,” Emma said.

  “John Foster Dulles?” David persisted, as if the confusion was a personal affront to him.

  “You guys know how long I’ve known Kip?” Thaddeus asked, seating himself next to me. “Longer than either of you have been on the planet.” He threw his arm over my shoulder, practically unseating me. “Right, Kip? Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” I said, resisting the impulse to squirm away. I felt overwhelmed, weirdly diminished. Somewhere along the way, Thaddeus had learned to turn his outgoing nature into a form of aggression, weaponizing the sweetness. Do we all of us become steadily shittier as we grow older? Thaddeus’s jokiness, his affectionate nature, his unending project to make you comfortable, now they all had an element of smoke screen to them. He wasn’t so much amusing as distracting. No matter how I enjoyed the infrequent occasions in which Thaddeus and I made physical contact, there was something manic and evasive in his touching me now that put me on guard. It didn’t seem like touch so much as a satire of touch, an imaginary bridge over a very real boundary.

  Chapter 18

  Aria

  Maybe he was wound up more tightly than usual, anticipating Coral Gables, his reunion with Grace, but as we ate dinner Thaddeus dominated the conversation, not bothering with his food, pouring himself glass after glass of last year’s beaujolais nouveau. When it was empty, I thought aha, he will either have to stop drinking or take the time to get another bottle, and maybe someone else can get in a word or two. But he had planned it out in advance, and all that was necessary was for him to reach down and grab the second bottle by the neck, like a gambler with a losing hand pulling a pistol out of his ankle holster. David, frowning, moved his food around his plate without eating it, while Emma, for the duration of Thaddeus’s aria, remained hunched over her dinner, obediently chewing each mouthful fifteen times. At one point, a spectacularly pregnant woman in her twenties waddled in and took a pitcher of ice water out of the refrigerator. She was tall, bare-legged, and wore a plaid robe. Her pale, frizzy hair was beaded with moisture. I learned later her name was Ruthie Horn and she was giving birth in one of the back bedrooms, which Thaddeus had offered to her after the midwife refused to do it where Ruthie and her husband lived because their A-frame in the woods was too far from the hospital, should complications arise. She huffed and puffed Lamaze-style, scarcely acknowledging our presence. David shook his head in disapproval.

  Also tucked away in one of Orkney’s rooms was the gear, and occasionally the sleeping body, of a photographer named Lee Garnett, whom Thaddeus had met years before on a movie set, and who was traipsing around wooded areas throughout Windsor County, setting up and collecting motion-sensitive cameras, in order to capture the secret life of bears, deer, fox, weasels, bobcats, raccoons, herons, swans, ducks, turtles, snakes, and teenage lovers.

  “You guys remember me telling you about my new agent, right?” Thaddeus asked, reaching over and patting my forearm, petitioning my forbearance. “I liked her from the start. My guess was either she’s too young to have even been in the business when I had that trouble or she thinks it’s such a huge ridiculous unjustifiable overreaction. And her name, she has a great name. Victoria Stern. A total don’t-fuck-with-me name.”

  “You said she wore that weird hat,” Emma said.

  “A pillbox hat, yes.”

  “With a feather in it, right?” Emma said, possibly without the knowledge that those would be the last words she would be able to interject for quite some time.

  “Yes, with a feather. Like a middle-class matron strolling around Vienna. She wears it everywhere, at lunch, at her desk. It’s like Tom Wolfe and his white suit, only worse. Anyhow, she was going to set up some meetings for me with producers and studio execs, and I sent her some pitches, including that one I told you kids about, about the early part of your mom’s and my relationship, moving to New York when the city was going crazy.”

  A movie about him and Grace? The idea struck me as absurd, but I counseled myself to maintain a neutral expression. And you never know. Long ago, I’d been at a party on Crosby Street after a show of Nam June Paik’s video installations at some unheated, cement-walled gallery on Houston Street. I tried to get Thaddeus and Grace to come with me, but they had no interest in avant-garde anything. They were against everything new and strange. And when they weren’t working their office jobs, they were either fucking or making dinner or she was doing a portrait of a pineapple and he was banging away at his fiction. I remember how furious I was. They were so insulated, they were missing everything. At any rate, at the party I found myself in conversation with this Englishman with a comb-over and a long scarlet scarf. He asked me what I was working on and when I told him I was working at a brokerage house, he didn’t seem surprised or disturbed. “Lucky you,” he said. This was Tim Rice. I had no idea. He smelled of pâté and expensive aftershave. I asked him what he was working on and he said he was preparing a musical about Evita Peron, and the idea was so preposterous to me, so doomed, I just assumed he was being satirical. I wanted to laugh in Tim Rice’s overtly ironic face. Lesson learned: shut the fuck up about other people’s projects.

  And yet. A movie about Thaddeus and Grace? Who did Thaddeus think he was? These kinds of projects might get financed if Ingmar Bergman or Francis Ford Coppola wanted to make them, but nil were the chances of someone paying the persona non grata getting sloshed at the table in Orkney’s kitchen so much as a dime to write something like that. They wouldn’t have paid him to do it even before that mimosa was tossed.

  But then it got worse. Here he was trying to find a way out of the briar patch of ignominy into which he had stupidly thrown himself, and once again talking about writing a modernized version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, an awful idea he had been trying to flog since the early days of his career. He had even gone to London on the delusionary hunch he might interest Stanley Kubrick in directing such a movie. While working on-set doing a rewrite for a Jeff Bridges movie, Thaddeus became convinced Bridges would make a perfect Oliver Mellors and he persisted in discussing the matter with Bridges to the point where Bridges felt compelled to take his meals in his trailer while the rest of the cast and crew enjoyed lovely alfresco lunches in the little Italian seaside village where the movie was being shot.

  The Lady Chatterley idea was not only misbegotten but, knowing what I knew about Grace and Jennings, or at least suspecting what I suspected, I could only believe that Thaddeus’s pursuit of this project suggested suppressed knowledge of the fact that he himself was something of a Lord Chatterley. While the Outer Thaddeus exhausted himself trying to dig his way back into the movie business, an Inner Thaddeus was also hard at work, patiently tunneling toward the surface to deliver some very bad news.

  Just then, Lee Garnett walked in, wearing camouflage pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, with the Rolleiflex on a strap, bouncing on his chest like an external heart. He was tall, though his spine was as curved as a scythe, and his hair was gray, worn in a ponytail. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out another pitcher of water. This one had little yellowish shreds of lemon peel floating in it.

  “What do you have there, Lee?” Thaddeus asked, as Lee tried to leave the kitchen as unobtrusively as he had entered it.

  “Oh,
it’s just my ginger infusion.”

  “Sounds amazing,” Thaddeus said. “You know how to live, Lee.”

  “Trying to learn how to die,” he said, and was gone.

  “The idea Victoria thought was going to work best,” Thaddeus said, “was my OPEC thriller. She thought it could be another Hostages.”

  He glanced at his wineglass and his eyes showed a flicker of surprise; he had refilled it to the brim and now he carefully sipped it down to a respectable level.

  “So I go out there, which means I have to miss the opening party for your mother’s show. And pay for my own flight. The Wilshire is out of the question, Four Seasons, ditto, even the creepy Chateau Marmont. I checked into this really bare-bones hotel, the Martin on Sunset, the kind of place hookers take their clients, but only if they plan to slit their throats.”

  One of the party boats that sailed the Hudson was drifting by, music blaring from its speakers. This one must have been carrying an older crowd because it was Jerry Lee Lewis singing “High School Confidential.” Most of the people with houses on the river raged about the profusion of sunset cruises for people without the means or skill to go onto the water on their own, denounced the assault on the river’s ancient peace. Thaddeus never seemed to mind those tubby pleasure boats owned by companies with names like Cap’n Hudson’s Floatin’ Groove, Booze & Blues Cruise, or Zowie River Tours. The more the merrier remained his motto. The music faded as the boat motored south.

  Thaddeus did not pause as he poured. He barely paused as he drank. A bottle and a half of the beaujolais was gone, of which I had had one glass. I had never seen him drink like this. He was never one to refuse a drink—or a toke or a sniff—but there had always been an air of moderation in his recreation, a sense that part of him was going to be kept in reserve in case someone might need a ride home or someone else was hungry and omelets were in order or if he wanted to keep himself together enough to make love to his wife at the end of the evening. But tonight he drank with a kind of fury, like someone trying to break a padlock with a hammer. He continually rearranged himself in his chair. His face softened, his handsomeness eroded by waves of alcohol.

  “Hey, Dad, tell the truth,” David said. “Are you going to lose this house?”

  Maybe Thaddeus hadn’t heard the question. More likely, it was not one he cared to answer, and still even more likely than that, it was not a question he knew the answer to.

  “My first pitch meeting is at Disney, where I’ve worked three times. Bubkes. Fine, I’m tough, I can take a punch. Next stop, I have a meeting at this newly minted, very well financed production company called Anastasia Pictures.”

  He paused to reach for the bottle. He kept his eyes on the glass this time to guard against overfilling. Movements very deliberate, his stab at precision.

  “So, yeah, on to Anastasia. Which is right in the middle of Beverly Hills, on Canon Drive, in a little office building, with no place to park, except a garage a block away, so there goes another twenty bucks. And the whole thing was an ambush.”

  His voice suddenly broke; his eyes filled with tears.

  “I walk in. Nice offices, you can tell some serious coin was spent. Beautifully framed movie posters, The Bad and the Beautiful, Sullivan’s Travels. The smell of espresso in the air. The receptionist a dead ringer for Nicole Kidman. And the main guy, Hap Wasserman, massive guy, a linebacker, Hap meets me in the reception area, he’s like a bouncer with a manicure. He’s giving me that awful two-handed sandwich handshake. And he’s flattering the hell out of me. Another so-called huge Hostages fan. Meanwhile, leading me into his lair, this huge office that was decorated like he had spent a weekend in Santa Fe and just grabbed whatever wasn’t nailed down. Hap orders coffee and while we’re waiting he tells me all about how great Anastasia’s business is doing, and all the great people they have deals with, and I’m getting that sinking feeling, the one you get when someone is telling you all about a party they had and—oops—they forgot to invite you.”

  Thaddeus suddenly stopped, cleared his throat, breathed deeply, raked a clawed hand through his hair.

  “I asked you a question, Dad,” David said. “Are we going to lose the house?”

  “Why is that so important to you, David?” Thaddeus said.

  “You always do that,” David said. “You never answer directly. Answering a question with a question is the height of sophistry.”

  “Is it? Well, it’s nice to be at the height of something.”

  “Dad, I am asking you a direct question, yes or no.”

  “Be here now, as Ram Dass tells us, David. Be here now.”

  “Thanks for the downward mobility,” David said, his voice splintering.

  Most of the color drained from Thaddeus’s face, except for those two rough blushes that were always there, and which now seemed to burn hellishly. His lips, whose resting point was normally a slight, bemused smile, twisted into a villainous sneer.

  “Do you even know what happened to me in that office?” he said. A bullying finger jab. Another.

  “Come on, Dad, you don’t have to be so upset,” Emma said, her eyes fixed on her empty plate. “It’s not a big deal.”

  He will destroy you. It was what Morris said one night. Where were we? Cafe des Artistes? No . . . it was at his place, his and Robbie’s. Robbie! I would never have a Robbie in my life.

  “Your father was set up,” Thaddeus said, after a couple of deep breaths. “A total ambush, a hit job. I think that’s something you could care about, both of you.”

  I glanced at the kids. They were poker-faced.

  “As if I haven’t had enough,” Thaddeus said.

  Ah, there it was! As if I haven’t had enough. The Magna Carta of self-pity. Another poor sap in the Job market.

  “No, apparently none of that constitutes enough,” Thaddeus said. “Someone picturesque brings the coffees. It’s probably the most delicious coffee I’ve ever had. But I feel something coming. It’s like you’re in the woods and you start feeling maybe there’s a bear out there. Hap picks up his phone—it’s an old-fashioned phone, like out of The Maltese Falcon, because everything has to be special, right? We’re ready to begin, he says. Hangs up, smiles, looks at his watch. And who in the whole miserable world walks in? Like two seconds later? Like he’s been waiting on the other side of the door, waiting for this moment? Craig Epstein!”

  I glanced again at David and Emma, not sure the name Craig Epstein would mean anything to them. Craig’s was the face into which years ago Thaddeus had thrown a mimosa. The scene of this career suicide was Arlene Epstein’s house in Los Angeles, at a birthday brunch for Craig himself, on the occasion of his twenty-seventh year to heaven. With the exception of Craig, no one was more surprised than Thaddeus when he threw his drink in the birthday boy’s face. Thaddeus was later to claim Craig had threatened to sock him in the face, but I never found that entirely believable. Factor 1: Thaddeus had been quarreling with Grace. Factor 2: Thaddeus had been wondering if his talents might be being wasted in the movie business. Factor 3: Craig was attending the party thrown in his honor wearing pajamas, a sloppy presumption of adorableness and worldwide acceptance that Thaddeus could not abide. Factor 4: Craig was wandering around his mother’s house eating peanut butter out of the jar. When I had mentioned to Thaddeus that the peanut butter might have been the real triggering factor—four-year-old Thaddeus, after all, had been scorned and scarred for spooning peanut butter into his mouth the morning his parents staggered back into the apartment after leaving the corpse of their baby daughter at the University of Chicago Hospital—he gaped at me as if I had suddenly developed an interest in phrenology.

  “My mind is racing around like a trapped rat,” Thaddeus was saying. “Was I being set up? Of course I was. But by whom? Was my agent in on it? Or did Hap, recognizing my name, do this as a favor to Craig? Craig is there, making himself comfortable. The years have been extremely kind to him. He’s slim, he’s fucking radiant, with beautiful curly hair. Smilin
g. This is just totally making his day. His year. Who knows how long he’s been waiting for this? Well, go on, Hap says. Vicky tells us you’ve got a terrific international thriller in mind. We here at Anastasia love international thrillers. Isn’t that right, Craig? Sure, Craig says. Done right? They’re money. And all I can think is the last time this guy saw me he was wiping orange juice and champagne off his face and I was being marched to the front door. I could hear him crying, My eyes, my eyes, like I’d thrown Drano at him and not a goddamned mimosa. So now he wants to hear my pitch? Like hell he does.

  “Me? I’m dumbstruck. Hap clears his throat. Craig cocks his head, raises his eyebrows. And I think, Wow, they’re actually going to make me go through my pitch. I’m going to be like one of those guys in a Western doing a little jig while they shoot bullets at his feet. Meanwhile, the seconds are ticking by and it’s like my body has figured out what to do before anything is clear in my mind. I just stand up and say, You know what? I’ve thought better of it. And I walk right out of that office. Right out of the building. Back to my car, back to my motel, back to the rental-car return, back to the airport. I pay more money to have my flight changed. And for a while I was actually quite happy. I stood up for myself. I didn’t allow the humiliation to continue. But now . . .” He took another deep breath, trying to steady himself. His eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “It’s back to the drawing board,” he said. “Right now, ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages, I got nothing.”

  You did this to yourself, I thought, but the bilious twist of impatience was subsumed by pity as tears began to stream down his face.

  Pity! I tried to smother it, thinking, as I had been told so often, that there was something base about it, that there was no more dehumanizing thing you could feel for another person. But I wondered: How did pity come to be so despised? Who came up with the idea that if you truly respected someone you could not pity them? It must have been a banker or a killer or a thief.