An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  Thaddeus stayed at his parents’ side, introducing them, escorting them to the bar area, encouraging them to help themselves to the appetizers the catering staff was circulating. Sam and Libby had dressed for the party as they had for the memorial service, Libby in a floor-length green dress with long sleeves, Sam in a sober gray suit, white shirt, and gray tie. Hoping to strike an alliance with his parents by indicating that he was in but not of this party, Thaddeus said, “Look at this, a Christmas party with no kids. It’s just ridiculous.”

  “Oh, you and kids,” Libby said. “You make such a fetish of it. You wait on them hand and foot.”

  I’ll give you hand and foot, he thought. He was growing weary of explaining away his mother’s tepid feelings toward him. He was tired of telling himself the story of her bad luck, her suffering, tired of excusing his father. Losing that child. Coming home and finding their happy, clueless little boy watching TV and spooning peanut butter out of the jar. He was sick of doing the emotional arithmetic for them. The wan smiles, the benign neglect, the skepticism—these were their rituals of mourning, their offerings to poor little Hannah. They would not play favorites—if both children could not be adored equally, then neither would be adored.

  But at that moment, Thaddeus’s wrathful musings were cut short by something he noticed: his father was rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. His mouth was half open and he seemed confused, like a child waking in a strange bed. The eye he’d been worrying drooped like a deflated balloon. Nightmare image out of Francis Bacon.

  “Dad?” Thaddeus said.

  By way of an answer, Sam fell to the floor as if dropped from the jaws of a crane.

  * * *

  The snowflakes on Prinsengracht were large and fluffy and seemed to ride the breeze, hovering over the pavement for extra moments before dissolving upon landing. Of course I know that the fact that it was snowing as I stood outside the Windmolen office, and that it was also snowing in Leyden as Sam lay dying on the floor of Sequana had nothing to do with me or with love or fate or destiny. It’s all longitude and latitude and the earth chugging along on its appointed rounds. And yet. The heart, malnourished, fearful of dying of starvation, seizes whatever it can, knowing how to live on coincidences and trivialities, gathering and gobbling all the little morsels of meaning, and making a meal of them.

  Through the dark Amsterdam night a man emerged with his head down, wearing a watch cap, a long coat, boots. An unlit cigarette was in his mouth. As he drew closer to me I turned away, checked the roadway, pretending to look for a car that was on its way to pick me up. The stranger stopped and asked me if I had a light, and when I made a confused gesture he asked me again, in English.

  I decided it was no accident, his stopping to speak to me. He wanted something beyond a light for his cigarette. In a burst of daring, I said, “Oh, sorry, don’t smoke.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Filthy habit.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of those.”

  He laughed appreciatively.

  “You’re American, yeah?” he said.

  “Guilty,” I said. And then, with ten times the confidence I would ever have on native soil, I said, “Hey, you know what? There are matches in my hotel, which is about two minutes’ walk from here.”

  “In your hotel?”

  “Yes, it’s quite nice.” My heart raced and rumbled like wooden wheels over cobblestones. “I’m here on business and they’ve given me the Olivier Van Noort suite. Of course I have no idea who he is or was.”

  “He was an explorer. He sailed everywhere. Hundreds of years ago.”

  “I see. Well, that makes sense. At first I thought they’d given me the Oliver North suite. That would have been strange.”

  I began to walk and he walked with me. I turned up the collar of my overcoat and he turned up the collar of his. He told me his name was Mees, and he made sure I pronounced it correctly—May-es.

  I wondered what he was like. There was a time when I could not stop myself from wondering who was packing what in their shorts. I had developed my curiosity into a kind of horny science. Like so: using a combination of my paid-for personal experience, time in the locker rooms of various health clubs around the world, and pornography, I had accrued a database of genitals, cut and uncut, massive and modest, chunky and sleek, and I had correlated this knowledge with certain facts about the owners of the genitalia to the point where I believed I could form a fairly accurate picture of what a guy was keeping in his equipment shed not only by the size of his fingers and feet but by his posture, his height and weight, Adam’s apple, and voice. Some of my theories were quite theoretical. Even for theories they were theoretical, and I would have been the first to admit they might not stand up to rigorous testing. For example, I believed that blond guys often had stout, furious-looking penises, and that Slavs were never entirely flaccid and their members dangled in a kind of erotic indeterminacy, hanging midair like a wind sock in a faint breeze.

  I told him my name was Christopher but that most people who knew me called me Kip. My mood brightened. It was the first time I’d given my real name to someone with whom I was going to have sex.

  * * *

  David used his cell phone to call 911, but other than that everyone was useless. No one present knew any first aid. They didn’t know if they should pick Sam up or leave him undisturbed. “Is he breathing?” Thaddeus asked, his gaze going from one person to the next. His mother was glaring at him, furiously.

  “What’s the address here?” David called out.

  “Sequana!” yelled Marino.

  David told the emergency operator the name of the estate but she insisted upon an address.

  “We don’t have an address,” Marino said. “Will you give me . . .” He pulled the phone out of David’s hand. “We’re at Sequana on Riverview Road,” he growled into the phone. “And we’ve got an elderly man here who has lost consciousness. Okay? With all due respect, may I suggest you get an ambulance here immediately.”

  “I think we should call a New York hospital,” David said. “The places up here don’t know anything about anything. Remember when I got so sick in Italy and the guy at the embassy said the best thing would be to take me to Germany?”

  “But we didn’t do that, David,” Grace said.

  “You should have. It was just luck that I got better. I could have died.”

  “You had the flu,” said Thaddeus.

  “I had a temperature of one oh three!”

  “Is Grandpa dying?” Emma asked Grace.

  “He’ll be okay,” Thaddeus said, rising from his crouch. He staggered for a moment, almost stepping on his father. He looked at his watch; two minutes had gone by.

  * * *

  And by now I was back at the Hotel de l’Europe, accompanied by Mees. The clerks behind the check-in desk wore blue suits with boutonnieres. Mees and I made our way across the lobby beneath the gaze of giant faux Dutch master paintings of sixteenth-century burghers in various poses of self-possession, with their neck ruffles and arch little smiles. My key was waiting for me, saving me from having to say my name. Oh, the deep discretion of the Dutch! And the deep discretion of high-priced hotels. It’s that master-of-the-manor treatment you pay for, more important than the room itself. I scooped up the key, and the clerk and I gave that tight-lipped little nod men give to suggest the best of intentions.

  “Very nice,” Mees said, surveying my room. “Permission to smoke?”

  I tossed him the small box of matches that had been placed in a ceramic ashtray and I pulled a split of Piper-Heidsieck out of the minibar.

  “I love hotels,” I said.

  “Here my father-in-law rests when he comes for business,” Mees said.

  “Oh? You’re married?”

  “Not so much anymore.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “I know. I’m in the same boat. I’m recently divorced.” Even in front of a stranger, a man I would in all likelihood never see again after this night, I could not be
truthful. The elation I’d felt when I gave my real name was officially over. I opened the champagne. The festive pop, the cobra curl of vapor rising. We did not toast each other or clink the rims of our glasses. We just downed the Piper and when our glasses were empty I filled them again.

  “Shall we?” I said, gesturing to the bed in the adjoining room, with its salmon and silver bedspread and profusion of pillows. There is an assumption shared by luxury hotels that guests want as many pillows as possible, that if four pillows on a bed is comfortable, eight must be twice as comfortable, and sixteen a preview of heaven.

  “That’s what beds are for,” Mees said, in a singsong voice you’d use on a child. I think he was having a moment of shyness.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said.

  “I practice safe sex, if that’s your question,” he said.

  “Oh god, no. Of course. Me, too. Definitely. Very safe. What I want to ask you—please don’t be offended—is whether you are expecting money.” I pointed to myself, the bed, and myself again.

  “Money?”

  “That’s what they call it.”

  “If you have extra money you don’t want, then give it to me. By all means. Are you asking me if I work as a prostitute?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. This is more about me than about you. You understand?”

  “Do I seem like a prostitute? Because I was walking at night? If you want to know, I am a teacher. I am a full professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, which I am sure you must be familiar with because we have been in operation since four hundred fifty years.”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. Most of my experiences with men have been paid for,” I said. “As I said, it’s not anything about you.”

  “Well, if your money is burning holes in your wallet, I can always use some.” He stepped forward, put me on alert with a glance, and kissed me. His breath tasted of spearmint; without my seeing it, he must have slipped a lozenge into his mouth to dispel the taste of tobacco. The excitement of it made me whimper for a moment. I kissed him back, but really I was suddenly out of my depth and the ardency I meant to communicate came off more like wildness, violence.

  “This is going to be good,” Mees said. “I’d like to visit the W.C. To wash off.” He chucked me under the chin and winked, which was too bad, but nobody’s perfect.

  * * *

  Thaddeus was alone on the curved front porch, bundled against the cold, and staring furiously through the snow at the estate’s winding driveway, waiting to see the headlights of an approaching ambulance. His consciousness was fixed on the outer world, knowing that even a moment’s reflection would bring back the memory of Sam’s stunned, frightened expression, right before he fell. Yet there came a sharp stinging moment of remembrance, a gasp of memory, crushing and quotidian, devastating in its apparent lack of significance and demanding attention by its mere presence. Thaddeus, his fourteenth summer, having fallen asleep listening to The Midnight Special on the FM radio, stretched out on the sofa in the apartment’s front room. Etched into the darkness was a deeper darkness, his father’s form, standing over the radio, briefly illuminated by the light of the radio’s complicated dial, with its profusion of useless hash marks. The radio was silenced, the New Lost City Ramblers disappeared. “We don’t want to wake your mother,” Sam whispered. He was in boxer shorts that somehow looked government issued. “That’s the last thing we need, right?” He stood, waiting for Thaddeus to get off the sofa. “You like sleeping out here near the air conditioner?” Thaddeus made a little grunt of assent. “It ain’t such a bad deal in this outfit, isn’t that right? I mean, who’s got it better than us?” Thaddeus didn’t know what to say. All his life he had felt protective of his parents, protective of their moods. He wanted to reassure his father—but of what? Sam smelled of bed, and toothpaste, and the Mercurochrome he swabbed between his toes every night, a cure for athlete’s foot that never seemed to work. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Thaddeus said to himself, and Sam stumbled, as if pushed, as if he had read his son’s mind, or perhaps in his half-asleep state Thaddeus had accidentally said the words aloud. “I guess it can get kind of lonely here sometimes,” Sam said, before leaving the room. The floors were carpeted and from the front of the apartment, down the corridor to the bedrooms, the sad father’s footsteps were as silent as the stars. Thaddeus wasn’t even certain he had left until he heard the click of the bedroom door closing.

  Thaddeus had already checked twice with Marino to make sure the gate had been opened, but now he was thinking it might make sense to run the half mile to the gate and see for himself. Why trust the remote opening of the security gate when the ambulance might be waiting right there while Sam’s life slipped away? He trotted through the darkness and the cold air filled his lungs like broken glass. When Marino bought Sequana, the driveway was a bucolic slurry of dirt and pebbles; paving it had been his first order of business. But now a thin sheen of ice covered it, making it treacherous, and Thaddeus lost his footing for a moment, waved his arms for balance. The world was silent save for the creak of empty trees enduring the wind.

  The gate to Sequana’s driveway was wide open. The weather had not closed Riverview Road. A car streamed by, its headlights boring into the darkness, and music trailing behind it. We will we will rock you. He waited at the gate, thinking the rescue team would be there at any moment. And then suddenly it seemed to him that it was utter foolishness to be at the gate, that he should be at his father’s side, or his mother’s, his children’s, what was he doing? Shirking? Hiding? He felt the familiar flurries of self-doubt. He headed back to the house, walking quickly at first, and then running, running as fast as he could, the cold air stabbing into his lungs. The mansion emerged from the darkness like a sunken ship suddenly rising from the sea. Perhaps the EMTs had found another way onto the property? Was there another way in? Maybe there was, maybe there was. . . . His mind habitually searched for the benign explanation. He could almost see it: his father safely strapped onto the gurney, the EMT workers wheeling him to the open doors of their vehicle, Sam’s eyes slowly opening, smiling, giving everyone an embarrassed thumbs-up.

  But instead of that tableau of rescue, what Thaddeus found when he entered the house was a raging Pete Marino. “How hard is it?” he asked no one in particular. “You get in your little truck and you go where you are fucking needed, you dumb stupid motherfucking knuckle-dragging idiots. Jesus Christ. Where are they?”

  Libby was on the floor, her husband’s head in her lap. She stroked his hair. David and Emma stood next to her, their heads bowed. Grace stood at a window, peering out at the unyielding darkness.

  “They’re not here?” Thaddeus asked.

  “No, they’re not,” Marino said. “And don’t tell me it’s not deliberate. Who are these people? They’re the same ones who cause all the trouble here. They’re throwing their goddamned blocks of cement, and starting fires, and doing whatever the fuck they can to make life impossible. And now this? This? Deliberately dragging their asses because the call came in from a house they don’t approve of? That’s murder.”

  Thaddeus crouched near Libby, who was still on the floor with Sam’s head in her lap.

  “Not now,” Libby said.

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “Does he look like he wants to talk? Will you please grow up?”

  As she said those words, the sound of a siren emerged from the wintry night.

  “They’re here!” Emma said, racing to her mother’s side at the window.

  Thaddeus checked his watch. Eighteen minutes had passed since David had called for help. If you were eighteen minutes into a screenplay, you already had introduced all the major characters. If you were in a plane, eighteen minutes would take you from Albany to New York City, passing over a million rooftops, farms and condos, cows and crack dens, mansions, tenements, swimming pools, prisons—eighteen minutes and everything our country had to offer would glide by.

  Thaddeus and
Marino stood at the open front door, shoulder to shoulder, glaring, sighing, making gestures of impatience as the EMTs moved with what struck them both as pathological caution. They had brought two vehicles, an ambulance and a pickup truck. Their hazard lights throbbed in the darkness, illuminating the silver plumes of exhaust pouring out of the tailpipes.

  * * *

  Mees emerged from the bathroom nonchalantly naked. I had correctly anticipated what was going on underneath his clothes, his ruddy genitalia was what I had assumed, though the prominent ridge of flesh separating the ventricles of his scrotum was something of a curious surprise. He had powerful legs, covered in blond hair that grew in tight larval coils. He left the door open and urged me in with a wave of his arm. “You are next,” he said with great cheer. Sensing some resistance on my part, he added, “You’ll be glad you did, I promise you.”

  How do you not wash when someone directly asks you to? I closed the door behind me, locked it, got into the shower, and used the wand. As often occurred when I was about to have sex, my mind was slowly going blank. I soaped, rinsed, stood there staring at the tiles. Lust and revulsion did their familiar pas de deux.

  “Well, here we are,” I said, falling onto the bed. Mees had not bothered to pull the cover down and the bedspread’s harsh golden threads irritated my nakedness. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head. I did what was necessary to keep my body in good shape and showing it off was an agreeable experience. In America I was homely, but abroad that was not what people saw, not right away. Abroad, I was first and foremost an American.

  I rolled onto my side, pressed my hardness against him, kissed his cheek, forehead, right eye, left. For a moment, I loved him, frantically, insanely, it was like wandering through a dark house and suddenly opening a door to blinding sunlight.