An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  “Grace, I should tell you—Jennings told me something about Emma.”

  She thought about this for a moment. I let the silence do what silence can do.

  “Really?” she said. “About Emma?”

  The sentence was formed in my mind—he has all but told me he is Emma’s father—and it rested there, as hard and snug as a bullet in its chamber. Yet something held me back. Friendship, loyalty, fear, cunning. But why? Grace and I had never formed a true friendship. She was a part of my life, as I was of hers. Could it have been as simple and sad as that? Maybe it was just good manners. Whatever the impediment, I hesitated.

  But I could not retreat.

  “He says—”

  “Jennings?”

  “Yes. He has all but said he’s Emma’s father.”

  She did not laugh. She did not wave her hand as if I’d said something absurd. She did not flash anger. She did not accuse me of a willingness to give credence to an obvious lie, to a veritable hallucination. And she did not suggest I was making the entire thing up. There were no histrionics. No shaking of the head or exasperated sighs. There was only a long, long, searching look. Her color had darkened when Jennings’s name came up, but now Grace settled down and became placid, the way a pond startled by a stone will gradually regain its glassy composure.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with you, Kip. I really don’t.”

  “I didn’t want to be a part of it,” I said. Yet as soon as the words left my mouth, their very insufficiency acted as a goad, and I began to recover some courage. “Our lives are mixed together, Grace, and they have been for a long time. You first came to New York, you stayed with me. You needed jobs, I got you interviews. You got married, I put the wedding together. And I bought those acres from you so you wouldn’t lose Orkney.”

  “Yes, I know, you’re a hero,” she said.

  “That’s not the point. I know I’m not a hero.”

  “All those things, those lovely gestures, so helpful—and don’t think I wasn’t grateful, I was and I am—but it was all for Thaddeus. Every bit of it.”

  “I’m asking you something very simple here, Grace,” I said. “It isn’t rocket science.”

  “What are you asking me, Kip? Be straight.”

  Hmm. But I let it pass.

  “I’m asking if you’re involved with Jennings.”

  “Now?”

  “Jesus, Grace. Really.”

  “It’s really none of your business, but I’m not.”

  “Okay, let me ask you this. Is Emma—”

  “Jennings dumped me. A long time ago.” She sat back with a look that suggested she’d just seen something humorous. “Oh, Kip, you poor thing, the expression on your face! This is a bit much for you, isn’t it?”

  “How can you be so awful to someone who loves you?” I asked.

  “Thaddeus and I understand each other. And I promise you he doesn’t want to talk about paternity tests or go snooping around anyone’s DNA. He adores Emma and he would do anything to protect her and keep her safe and happy and secure. And you know what? As far as I’m concerned, that makes him Emma’s father.”

  Andrew and Hunter, who lived on the first floor of my building, were in the courtyard sharing a late night cigarette, and the scent of it, acrid as burning dirt yet somehow pleasing, wafted through my open window. The couple—Andrew, my age, an intellectual property attorney, and Hunter, considerably younger, some kind of freelance graphic designer—had recently adopted a baby from China, and now they had to smoke outside. They waved the smoke away from the baby monitor between them, the sound of their murmurings like the wordless warbles of doves.

  “I don’t see how you could have done this,” I said. “And to sustain it for all these years.”

  “You know how it is,” Grace said, her tone causal and instructive. “You tell a lie and then you have to tell another lie to cover the first lie and oops here comes another one to shore up the first two, and before you know it you’re so wrapped up in your little stories and your evasions that it’s easier just to keep things as they are and not try to figure out how to undo all your cover stories. You’re stuck. Anyhow, my life was never really my own. I was sort of dragged along and tried to make the best of it. That’s going to change. It’s already changing.”

  She folded her hands, the hands of a woman many years older, dry and cracked, all those solvents, all that worry. I could feel her deciding what she would say and what she would keep to herself, and her thoughts were as present in the room as the whir of the fans.

  “Have you ever wanted someone to just beat the living shit out of you?” she asked. She tapped her finger against the side of her glass of vodka, moving it closer to her inch by inch.

  For a moment, I wondered if I’d heard her correctly. “Not really,” I murmured. “It sounds painful.”

  “Sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered,” Grace said.

  Maybe she was deliberately trying to shock me into subservience, her way of putting me in my place, her version of Lyndon Johnson calling his aides into the bathroom so he could give them orders while he emptied his bowels. How could she have said something so personal, so intimate to me? I had never even seen her in a bathing suit. I’d never heard her sneeze. And now she was telling me she needed pain to connect to her body? She had to be running a number on me. But I never knew for certain; this was really the last time we ever spoke.

  “Were you beaten as a child?” I asked. My voice was muddy and uncertain. “Spanked?”

  “No. Never. It’s not that. My father ditched us and Mom clung to me as if I were the adult who would protect her.” Grace looked at me appraisingly. “My family didn’t abuse me, unless you call embarrassment a form of abuse. If you want to know, I had bad experiences with men when I was a teenager. Not really men. Boys. College boys. Fraternity boys. I was in high school and I knew where all the parties were. And boy was I ever welcome. It wasn’t rape or anything. But it was kind of ugly. Sometimes I was drunk, and sometimes I was pretending to be a lot more drunk than I really was. No one forced me. I was into it. It wasn’t exactly fun but it was fascinating, and I felt powerful. But then something changed. I don’t know what it was, not really. Suddenly it all seemed so sad and disgusting. I hated men and I hated me. And I went dead inside. Not really dead. Hibernation. I could still feel something, that didn’t go away, but some other part of me was always separate and watching. Do you understand? Sometimes I feel separated from my own body. Things don’t link up the way they need to if you’re going to be happy, or even just okay. There’s a gap. There’s a missing piece and pain fills it in. Pain brings it all together.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. “Thaddeus knows this. He knew it from the beginning. But it was understood between us that he was always going to be gentle. And I was fine with that. No problem. I always felt secure with him because he loves me so much. And he’s safe. He’s totally safe. And gentle is good. Don’t you think so?” She looked at me inquisitively, as if truly soliciting my opinion, as if it mattered to her what I thought about her tastes and needs. But after a moment, she closed her eyes; she seemed to be summonsing a memory. “Yes. It can be so lovely, so, so lovely. But there are times when . . . when I need . . .” She made a fist and shook her head. “But Thaddeus is so gentle.”

  “You make it sound like a failing.” I kept clearing my throat.

  “It can be. He doesn’t understand how awful it is to feel separated from your body, and he doesn’t get it that the pain makes it better; it puts you in the moment and gets you out of your head.”

  “And Jennings is so accommodating, right?”

  “Oh, the look on your face, Kip. You think it’s so terrible? You think I’m so terrible? Or unusual? A lot of people are like I am. Not everyone wants vanilla ice cream for dessert.” She sniffed the air. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette around, would you?”

  I walked to the window and looked at my neighbors in the courtyard. Thin clouds covered the full moon like ba
rs over a window, and Andrew and Hunter were barely visible. The happy couple. Or so I imagined them to be. Free of shame, free of constraints, sharing so much more than that midnight Marlboro. Hunter dragged deeply on the cigarette and passed it to Andrew, who first tidied it up, flicking the ash, rotating it between his fingers to even out the burn. They had been tested, they were in the open, their brothers and sisters, their parents, their colleagues, everyone knew. They would be known as I would never be known. Known to the world, known to each other. I would die a stranger. The cigarette was smoked nearly down to the filter. Hunter snubbed it on the sole of his slipper and then offered his hand to Andrew, who allowed himself to be pulled out of his chair.

  When I finally turned around, Grace had already gone to bed.

  Chapter 24

  Harmonic Convergence

  Using the wisdom and technique of all the 12-step programs, I kept away from the Kaufman-Cornells one day at a time. They may have been steering clear of me, too, but more likely they were too busy with their fucked-up lives to give me much thought, while the nature of my fucked-up life was that I was always to one degree or another thinking about them—not just Thaddeus but the lot of them, even the dogs and cats.

  Largely on my recommendation, Adler Associates was completely divested of our Sears holdings, and as a reward for all the dull places I traveled to during the Sears investigation Ken dispatched me to Amsterdam toward the end of the year. He wanted me to talk to the principals of a company called Windmolen, which manufactured electricity-generating turbines, and sold them all over Europe, especially in France and Spain. We didn’t ordinarily invest in offshore companies. Our clients were satisfied with modest returns generated by companies like General Motors, Eastman Kodak, Xerox, and Alcoa—if they wanted to take a flier on something riskier, they made those investments elsewhere. I appreciated Ken’s generosity, his distracted, muted, but always affectionate treatment of me, and by the time Amsterdam was offered I no longer felt guilty or nervous in his presence—Thaddeus had tiptoed in and out of Johnson & Johnson and no one was hurt.

  The trip was poorly planned. Most of the Windmolen employees were off for the Christmas holidays, and the factory that assembled the gorgeous titanium windmills was down to a skeleton crew, which left me with the Windmolen president and several lesser executives, including a sister and brother duo who were the entire public relations department of the firm. My first night, they took me to dinner at a newly opened Tex-Mex restaurant, where the Indonesian waitstaff was dressed in blue jeans, checked shirts, and neckerchiefs, and where the food was just about as Tex-Mex as the people serving it. The next day, we visited the Windmolen offices on Prinsengracht, in one of those narrow, immemorial Amsterdam houses, tobacco-colored stone, tall windows, the glass cataracted with age. Later, the brother and sister drove me about fifty miles out of town, through a monotonous and flat landscape, where the frozen stubble of the tulip fields abruptly ended at the gray horizon, and where, suddenly, the factory sprang into view, looming over the landscape as if it had arrived from outer space.

  When we returned to Amsterdam they took me to a party for a tall, pretty woman and an even taller, prettier man, who were both on the Windmolen board and who were celebrating their engagement to be married. The party was in the boardroom and everyone there wore glasses with frames not yet available in the States, and spoke perfect BBC-inflected English. The guests drank as if there were some prize to be given to the first person to pass out, though the Dutch never really lose self-control. Amsterdam was a city rife with jazz, hash, and whores, but most people continue to live bewilderingly orderly lives. Tonight, the men wore bright, flowery, unserious ties. The women were more formal, and in the minority, maybe one for every three men. The few people I’d already met did their best to keep an eye on me, introducing me around—This is our American friend Christopher, from the Adler group—but I could tell no one knew what the Adler group meant. We were financial small fry and even if I were to recommend to Ken that we bet on Windmolen (which I did), our purchase of shares wouldn’t mean all that much. It wasn’t as if I were here representing Lehman Brothers or some other investment bank ready to plunk down $100 million. After an hour had passed, my handlers left me to my own devices. And between slight jet lag and my own Christmas-is-hell state of mind, I was soon floating in a wandering trance of loneliness, patrolling the party’s periphery until I found an inconspicuous place to stand, near a rented piano being played by an American jazz musician who was joined by a middle-aged singer named Anneke Gronloh. She was popular in Holland in the early sixties, probably a great favorite of the guests’ parents, and, impish and ample, she sang a Middle Eastern–inflected song while rotating her hips. The guests enjoyed her performance but in a way that exuded irony and the sense of superiority that is often at irony’s core, clapping their hands in rhythm and stomping their feet with such force that the room shook and the bulbs in the starburst chandelier flickered off and on as I slipped out of the party.

  The canal along Prinsengracht was the dark clay color of Grace’s Weimaraners; pale yellow lights from the huddled houseboats trembled in the rippling water. The air was cold, heavy, and damp, and the sidewalk was deserted. I thought of Amsterdam as a late late night city. Had they all forsaken the dicey nightlife to stay home and wrap presents? I glanced at my watch, feeling that horribly familiar panic—all the time that was being wasted, utterly wasted, the hours, the months, and finally the years.

  * * *

  It was eleven o’clock on Prinsengracht, and five in the afternoon in Leyden, and Thaddeus was with his family, including Sam and Libby, visiting for the first time since a year after Thaddeus and Grace bought Orkney. That first visit, they had been curious to see what their son’s new riches had brought him, probably expecting that it would prove to be closer to a cabin than the palace he burbled on about over the telephone.

  “Where did you find this place?” Libby had asked as Thaddeus showed them the rooms, the wide plank floors, the fireplaces, the stained glass. “I mean it, Thaddeus. Where in the world did you find this place?” He laughed and tried to rationalize her question, reminding himself that Libby and Sam were parochial, and the house must have seemed foreign to them, overwhelming. Nevertheless, he suspected that what Libby really meant was not how did he find the place but how did he come to buy it? How did a little schlepper who never had two nickels to rub together suddenly own eighteen rooms and a million trees? The suggestion that Orkney was out of his league ought to have insulted him, but at the time the money protected his feelings. He was flush, his confidence was soaring—that career-derailing mimosa was years from being handed to him, and the money was pouring in. My occasional reminders that the movie business was notoriously fickle did nothing more than annoy him.

  Years had gone by without the Kaufmans coming east again. They would have been virtual strangers to David and Emma had Thaddeus and Grace not brought them to Chicago every other year—Grace’s mother had quit the city and lived with Grace’s brother outside of San Diego, and regularly sent boxes of presents to the children. For Sam and Libby, however, doing the Grammy and Grampy thing was of little interest. Neither of them had met their own grandparents, and they assumed that children would have no interest in and possibly even shrink away from the elderly. Most of Sam and Libby’s extended family had perished in the European holocaust, and their own parents had died young, stateside, leaving both Sam and Libby to cobble together a life for themselves, relying on the short-lived support of comrades and the unshakable connection to each other.

  The Kaufmans hadn’t come east to see their son and their grandchildren. A man named Barry Horowitz, one of the small handful of ex-Trotskyists with whom the Kaufmans had remained in contact, had vanished about six months ago. His children and the police had searched for him, but to no avail, until his body was found in the weeds not more than a hundred yards from his house in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Apparently, he had been on his way to a nearby patch of woods
after having taken a lethal dose of sleeping pills, had stumbled, and died where he hit the ground. The memorial service had been in the city. Afterward, the Kaufmans rode up to Leyden with Thaddeus, who’d picked them up on the Upper West Side before they could flee.

  During their night at Orkney, the senior Kaufmans mainly stayed in their room, emerging only to ask if Thaddeus could possibly make it a bit warmer. He was able to lure them down for dinner, where David and Emma viewed them somewhat fearfully, and Thaddeus—over the silent veto of Grace’s frown—reverted to his childhood compulsion to raise their spirits, topping off their wineglasses as soon as they took the tiniest sip, urging them to eat, smiling adoringly at them, cracking jokes. In his childhood, he used to sing and dance for them—his stage was the two inches of wooden floor between the fringes of the red and purple Persian rug and the light brown baseboard, that little strip of naked wood upon which he could clatter his heels in an approximation of tap dancing, whirling his arms around as if he were fighting off a swarm of hornets. As a child, he was never successful in jollying them out of their crepuscular blahs, and now thirty years later his efforts fell just as flat.

  On the second day of the Kaufman visit, they were all invited to a pre-Christmas party at Sequana, a nearby estate, this one owned by a music producer named Pete Marino. Marino was waiting until spring to unload the property, convinced that, despite all of the opposition, the cement plant was going to be constructed on the river, forever despoiling the view from the mansion’s windows. Without that view, the value of Sequana would be cut in half, since the kind of buyer who would want such an estate, and who could absorb the expenses that came with the property, would surely not want to be anywhere near much less look at smokestacks and conveyor belts. Even the sight of another house was a deal breaker for the people who were estate shopping in Windsor County.

  Many of the people Marino had formed social relations with since buying Sequana were wintering in Palm Beach or St. Maarten or simply staying in the city, choosing to avoid the county’s ice and snow. Marino, dressed in a blazer and freshly pressed jeans, his wrists and fingers adorned with silver and turquoise, nevertheless held court from his favorite chair near the largest of Sequana’s hearths. He was boyish at fifty, with rosy lips and merry blue eyes.