I was sweltering in this Tomb of the Unknown Socialist while the person I cared for more than any other pillaged his mother’s bedroom looking for checkbooks, cash, or any other sign of money. At this point, I think he would have let out a whoop of triumph if he came upon a Mason jar filled with dimes.
Thaddeus emerged from the bedroom with a black three-ring binder under his arm. At first I thought it might hold the Kaufmans’ financial records but it was an expandable photo album, with five snapshots per plastic page. He walked with it to the front of the apartment and I followed after, and when he sat in a mustard yellow armchair more or less in front of their old console TV in its faux Mediterranean cabinet, I sat on a gray and black sofa, with its depleted pillows and stout legs. I folded my hands between my knees, and made as much eye contact with him as the feng shui of the room allowed.
I was by now sweating so profusely that my clothes felt as if they were made out of drool. Thaddeus was doing no better than I; in fact, he was probably worse. Those round rosy blushes of his that had always symbolized readiness for merriment, connection, and love, those two badges of persisting youth were now subsumed by a redness that had swept across his face like a tide, leaving only the orbits below his eyes deathly white, and making the eyes themselves look haunted, hopeless, and mad.
“Here,” he said. “This is what I found.”
He tossed the binder to me. My hands were sweaty and I muffed the catch. I retrieved it from the floor and opened it. The first pages were black and white three-by-five snapshots of Thaddeus from his very first days up to about his third birthday. He was a worried-looking child, with a beseeching smile that persisted to this day, although not right now. The snaps were standard: several of baby T in a crib asleep—it’s a certain kind of parent who can love their child the most when it is sleeping. But there were others: standing, holding the top of the crib for balance, a little Gandhi with his spindly legs and loose diaper. And there he was in the very chair in which he now sat, an infant in shorts and blue sneakers holding an upside-down copy of The Tawny Scrawny Lion. He might have been two years old in the picture, his hair was long and dark, swept back like a stylish Italian banker. The album held two more pages of Thaddeus before switching to Hannah, though these, of course, never recorded anything beyond infancy. She was serene, plump, with little wisps of dark hair growing every which way. Hannah in arms, Hannah swaddled. Hannah on Sam’s lap. Thaddeus on his toes peeking into her crib as she slept. Libby pushing Hannah down Fifty-Fifth Street in a gloomy funereal carriage such as the one that clattered down the Odessa steps in Potemkin. After four pages of Hannah there were no more pictures of children. The next page held but two photographs, both crooked in their plastic sleeves. The first was taken outside of Four Freedoms with the blurred images of passersby, as if they couldn’t get out of there fast enough. The second was of Sam and Libby standing at the counter of their store, unsmiling, in a pose that made Grant Wood’s farm couple seem like a pair of total goofballs. And after that there were no more pictures whatsoever. Nothing and no one. Birthdays, graduation, their son’s wedding, their grandchildren. Nothing they cared to record, nothing they cared to remember.
“This is sad,” I said.
“I know,” said Thaddeus.
I tried to hand the album back to him but he shook his head. I placed the album next to me on the sofa.
“Aren’t you going to take it with you?” I asked. “You must. You can’t leave it behind.” But even as I said it, I thought, Who would want these sad snapshots, these photographs of emptiness?
Thaddeus folded his arms across his chest and pressed his lips together. By now, he had expended his fury and right behind it was grief—it had been lingering there patiently like a parent waiting for a toddler’s tantrum to subside.
“I think this is where I was sitting when they came back from the hospital, after Hannah died,” Thaddeus said. He ran his hand over the arm of the chair, back and forth, back and forth. “I woke up that morning. Alone. I don’t think I was alarmed. I just assumed that everything was the same only different. I don’t remember feeling any alarm at all. I turned on the TV. I ate. I was enjoying myself. That was my big mistake. The unforgivable thing. When they got home from the hospital, they found me right here.”
“You were a little kid. They left you alone for hours. What were they thinking?”
“Maybe they expected they’d be able to get back home before I woke up. That’s probably what they expected.”
He shifted his gaze from me to the bookshelves that went floor to ceiling on the south wall of the room. “All these books here? I doubt they read more than twenty of them. And the books in Four Freedoms? Forget it. Zero. They had three semesters of college between them. But that didn’t stop them from giving me grief for not having the grades to get into the University of Chicago.” He went back to rubbing his hand against the fabric of the upholstered arm. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “I have no right to say these things. I’m sorry. I must really be trying your patience.”
“Not at all.”
“They were so unhappy, Kip. That’s what I can’t stand. I could never. I would have done anything to make them smile. But they were . . .” His voice splintered. “They were so unhappy.”
He covered his face with his hands and sobbed. A minute passed and the seconds carried their burden of meaning slowly, deliberately. It was like being in a car that has careened out of control, how in the moment before impact the world slows down and you see the finch bobbing at the end of a branch, and the frilly remains of a sticker that has been peeled off the stop sign and a squashed Coke can in the weeds along the side of the road. I listened to Thaddeus cry and heard his breath moving through him, saw the silvery whiteness of his scalp between the waves of his hair.
He lowered his hands and waited to compose himself. He seemed unaware of my presence, until he said, “Tell me something.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t care. Anything. Just tell me something.”
I had not imagined that my moment would arrive in this suffocating apartment. I had not factored in both of us reeking, both of us exhausted.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you something. But this is probably not the time or the place and you will almost certainly not want to hear it.”
He looked alarmed. “Perfect,” he said. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“I’m so glad we’re in each other’s lives, Thaddeus.”
It was as far as I could go, as close to what I wanted to say as bending one slat of the venetian blind to peek outside is to actually leaving the house. I couldn’t say now what I ought to have said twenty years before, or ten, or even five. Had the time ever been right? Timing is everything—isn’t that the truth? It’s what we believe, at any rate. It was too late for me to change the course of my life. I would need to accept who I was. A person who had chosen early on not to be known. I wasn’t brave. Most people are not. That’s why we have a word for the people who are. My life was already half over. It was probably too late for a new one. Probably. Too. Late. Hemingway boasted about telling his sad story in six words. I could do mine in three. Actually: two.
“Thanks, man,” he said. He rose from the yellow chair and walked down the hall to the back of the apartment. Like a dog, I followed him. Like a dog. He went to the kitchen to get a butter knife and then to the entrance where he lay the poster announcing the John Dewey lecture on the floor. Using the knife as a tool, he unfastened the clips on the back of the frame. He carefully removed Trotsky’s apocalyptic portrait and rolled it up tightly. Rising again, he was momentarily overcome with dizziness; he staggered and I caught him by the arm.
“I always thought you loved me,” he said. Sweat was pouring off him. “Wherever I was, whatever I was up to, I always kind of assumed you were out there, thinking about me. Was it just a story I was telling myself?”
I was lost. I didn’t know if he was trying to humiliate
me, or seduce me, or if he was so completely spent that he was just telling the plain truth, falling into it like a runner whose race is over.
“Oh, I love you all right,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “That’s never been in question, has it?”
We left the apartment. Thaddeus locked the door and I followed behind him as we descended the stairs to the ground floor. He drummed the rolled-up poster against his open hand as he walked, as if the thing was a bat he intended to use on somebody’s skull.
I was a few steps behind him and I said in a soft voice, not a whisper, but quietly—letting chance decide if my words would be heard—“I mean it. I do love you. If I spent the rest of my life with you, I’d consider myself the most fortunate person in the world.”
Maybe it was a whisper. He didn’t turn around. Maybe I never said it at all. I’d imagined saying those words to him or words to that effect so many times over so many years—maybe this was just more of the same. But maybe I said them. Maybe this was the time. And maybe he heard them. But he didn’t turn around and he continued to thwack that poster into his hand until we reached the oak and glass door in the little lobby, at which point he turned around and said, “Thanks for doing this with me, Kip. You’re true blue.”
“Aye aye, captain,” I said, saluting. “Wherever our journey takes us.”
Chapter 37
I Was Warned
We rode in relative silence from Hyde Park back to the Palmer House. Thaddeus drummed the rolled-up poster against his knee while he stared at the lake. The thwack of it kept time with my heart, and presumably with his. It was growing dark. The silvery lights of the city shone against the slate sky. In front of our hotel, I tried to pay the driver, but Thaddeus would have none of it. His manner was gruff, and his gestures were emphatic, impatient, as if by trying to pay for a goddamned twelve-dollar taxi ride I was trying to gain some advantage.
We made our way through the lobby. One of the ballrooms was being used for a quinceañera and the guests were milling around, the teenage girls like gauzy birds of paradise, beaming with panicked joy in their pink organza and yellow tulle dresses, and the boys self-serious in tight-fitting gray suits, white shirts, and bow ties. Parents, uncles and aunts, friends, leaned on one another, tipsy and loose, laughing, embracing, like revelers on a gently rocking party boat.
The sounds followed us into the elevator, but once the doors slid shut we were in silence, and we began our slow rise.
“I thought you loved me, Kip.”
“I do,” I quickly answered. “Of course. How can you even wonder?”
“Then save me, man. You called me ‘captain.’ You’re my captain, too. You said we’re on this journey together. Right? Didn’t you? Then why don’t you fucking save me?”
But from what? Did he want to be saved from a marriage to someone who had kept such a foundational secret from him? Or did he want to be saved from having to live the rest of his life without me? Yes, it’s what I wondered, because the body is a chemistry set and the element of ego is volatile, and a few drops of hope create a compound that can overwhelm the nervous system. Or was he merely hoping I would share privileged information with him about a stock? Was that going to be our arrangement? Me risking the loss of my job, and maybe my freedom, and he deigning to renew my season ticket for a ringside seat to the ongoing drama of Life at Orkney? Teeth clenched, Thaddeus shook his head, and in the awkward and painful silence I heard Jennings in the woods years ago saying money money money, the mockery in his voice, the despair, and the knowingness. As the elevator rose it vibrated slightly, and I thought I heard the metal frame of the car hit against something—brick or metal—ever so slightly. Perhaps the mechanics of the building were starting to slip. The river of fashion had changed direction and the money that had once poured into this business had gone elsewhere. Someone always has to lose, that’s the economic model, that’s our system, that’s the truth no one can hide. The money the money.
We arrived at our floor. We stepped out of the elevator and the doors slid closed and opened again, slid closed a second time and opened yet again, and did this a third time, too. When I think of that evening at the Palmer House, I remember those ominous stuttering doors so clearly. I stood there, unable to move for the moment, and realized that whatever became of what was left of our time in Chicago, I would never be able to return to my familiar spot at the edge of his life.
“Hey,” Thaddeus said, “at least let me buy you dinner.”
“Sounds good,” I murmured.
He plucked at his shirt. “I’m a mess,” he said. “I need a cold shower and then a hot shower. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
“As well,” I said.
“We can go to Bruna’s,” he said. “You know it? Oh, it’s good. Old-style red sauce, garlic bread, southern Italian. Comfort food for the weary.”
“Whatever you say. It’s your town.”
“If only. I never should have left. Chicago . . . I don’t know. Chicago is comfortable. I mean compared to New York. You can be yourself here. You don’t feel like you’re missing the point if you’re not rich.”
“You’re exhausted,” I said. “You don’t have to entertain me. You can just rest if you want to.”
“I don’t want to rest. I’ll clean up and call you in thirty minutes.” He looked at his watch, an old square-faced Longines. I’d been with him when he bought it from an antique watch dealer in the diamond district on Forty-Seventh Street. We joked about it over lunch. He said, This watch is an heirloom. It’s been in my family for more than an hour.
“I’m going to have to do a little work,” I said. “My phone has been buzzing all day and I’m going to have to deal with a few things. Is that okay, captain?”
“I like this ‘captain’ thing,” he said, smiling. “Okay. I’ve got calls, too. Mine will be quick, most likely. Come and collect me when you’re ready and I’ll be all yours.”
Hmm.
At the time my mobile phone was a BlackBerry, using technology developed by RIM, Research in Motion, a firm whose call letters were a source of compulsive riffing in both Adler offices. Maybe it was paranoia, but it was hard for me to believe that those jokes about rimming and rim jobs weren’t somehow meant to lure me into the open, a kind of duck call like my sporting grandfather used to entice the gorgeous mallards he wished to kill. Why someone would want to shoot or even annoy a beautiful care-free duck is beyond me, but at any rate Ken Adler loved BlackBerry and we’d done well buying shares in it, coming in fairly strongly at around two bucks a share and even after the panic following 9/11 we were still in the solid black on it. Adler eventually got out in 2004 at thirty dollars a share, a very substantial profit, but by that time someone else was doing my job. Some people made a great deal of money—the stock eventually went to over a hundred bucks a share. And some people got screwed, royally, as the stock went out of favor and tanked. That’s Capitalism 101—if somebody is throwing their hat up in the air and shouting yippee, someone else is crying in their beer. If everybody wins, the game’s over.
The messages waiting for me were PhoneClad related—Tischler’s insanely inessential and ridiculous company was really in play, and Ken, usually wary of getting involved with the tulip fever that more and more accompanied IPOs and takeover rumors, was keenly interested in getting involved. Beginning when my plane was nosing through the fog at SFO, and continuing throughout the day, Ken and our compliance officer, Dave Solomon, and a young woman named Laura Mills, who was so fresh out of Harvard that she was still getting her mail forwarded from Cambridge, had all kept a stream of emails coming my way, apparently undaunted by my not having replied to a single one of them. Their interest in PhoneClad seemed to grow like mushrooms in the cave of my silence, and by the time I skimmed through the nearly fifty emails coming out of the New York office their interest had grown into eagerness and I was starting to doubt my own low appraisal. Tischler was a smoke-and-mirrors man, and his product was essentially nonsense, on a par with the pe
t rock (I was wrong about this), and his ability to run a large company was severely compromised by his focus on making a quick killing (there I was quite right).
An Ocean Without a Shore Page 23
