An Ocean Without a Shore

by Scott Spencer

  I couldn’t resign from Adler until my eighteen months suspended sentence was served. I went through the motions and did my best. Ken and the others were pretty damn decent and treated me no differently than they ever had. Perhaps they even treated me a bit better now that some of the blanks in my personality had been filled in. They all knew I’d struck a man with whom I was naked in a hotel room. I don’t know what they made of that; I did a decent job of not really caring. All that time fretting about what people would say, do, how they’d look at me. I’d been a fool. Not even getting to live in a fool’s paradise. Where had I been? A fool’s purgatory?

  Two months after the court date in Chicago, my lawyers heard from Thaddeus’s lawyers. They supplied us with an angry little inventory of the damage I’d done. The broken front teeth, which had to be removed, resulting in an infection that lasted for three weeks. The scarring of the philtrum. The fractured cheekbone. And a new addition, not mentioned in the criminal case, the partial loss of vision in the left eye. Meetings missed, opportunities slipping by, incalculable (well, almost) loss of income, and, naturally, pain and suffering. They were willing—that’s right, willing—to shake hands and call it a day for two million dollars.

  Never mind that I did not have two million dollars. What antagonized me the most was his willingness to dismantle me, his hunger for revenge. Yes, I had harmed him in a frenzy, and it was my bad luck that what had enraged me was not persuasive in a court of law. We could have argued that he was snooping in my briefcase, but in order to make that case we would have had to prove he was looking for privileged information about a business deal I was involved in, and in order to make that case I would have had to reveal that it was not the first time he had come to me for insider information, which was something I could not do, or at least I chose not to do. So, yes, I whomped him a good one, pow right in the kisser as they used to say, but I was not in my right mind. Thirty years of exclusion mixed with three hours of sex makes a potent cocktail and I’d drunk it down to the dregs. Thaddeus’s reprisal was another matter altogether. It was done calmly, with plenty of forethought and plenty of opportunities to change his mind. It was as far from a rash act as you can get. It was well thought out with charts and tables and calculations, and it was right there in black and white.

  I composed furious letters to him, in which I sunk into the toxicity of revenge. I threatened to sell my Orkney acres to ExxonMobil, or to the Windsor County Gun Club. I threatened to build a house on those acres myself, a monstrosity with a tall tower he would have to see whenever he gazed eastward. I even threatened to clear-cut the land. Sinking still lower, I wrote that I knew where Emma was living in Chicago and I was perfectly capable of letting her know who her real father was. It’s often been said that revenge is a dish best served cold. And maybe for some it is a kind of emotional delicacy, something to be savored by the psychologically refined. But like several of this life’s so-called delicacies—sadism, fertilized eggs—it was not really to my taste. I found revenge, in fact, repulsive. Before long, I deleted the whole cache of unsent letters, every last syllable.

  A year after the civil case was initiated, with a court date yet to be scheduled, I wrote him another letter, and this one I sent.

  Dear Thaddeus.

  I’m sorry I hit you with the briefcase. I am sorry I took it out of your hands and used it as a weapon against you. I am sorry your front teeth were ruined and you had to get implants. Sorry for the scar. Sorry most of all for the eye damage. You can bring this letter to your horrible lawyers and they can use it any way they like. However, I believe we can settle this matter without lawyers. Whatever lies were told and what buried truths remain unearthed, you and I have a long history. We both know that the two million dollars is never going to happen. Whether it was put out there as a bargaining tactic or if you were unconsciously aping our government’s wartime policy of shock and awe, I don’t know. But I don’t want to haggle, I won’t do that, and I’ve already had enough shock and awe to last a lifetime. So here is what I can do.

  I will sell you the Orkney acres that I purchased. The purchase price I am asking—nonnegotiable—is one U.S. dollar, which is, if memory serves, the price you asked from Jennings’s father after he fell out of one of your trees and you wanted to make it right by giving him the yellow house. Unlike that old transaction, this purchase will not cause you any trouble. The land will be yours again and I will not step foot upon it. Maybe this is what you wanted all along, to restore that missing piece of your property, which you can click into place like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Though you do know, I hope, Orkney will never be brought back to its original acreage. Now that the yellow house is off the tax rolls, they’ll never give it up. And when they’ve shuffled off their mortal coils, their children will have the place, and their children after them. At any rate, getting those ten acres I bought will be a partial restoration of the original property. I imagine you’ll take some comfort in that. You’re someone who believes half a loaf is better than none. I think your marriage to Grace reflects that, too, an admirable, self-preserving capacity to compromise and protect yourself from the worst possible outcomes. I myself don’t have that capacity for compromise, at least not in matters of the heart. And nowhere is that inability more apparent than in my feelings about you. What can I do about it? I’ve tried everything from analysis to Zoloft, which takes us from A to Z. We’re all of us just who we are, and the essence of us is as indelible as our thumbprints. You were my darling boy and when I first “fell in love” with you the impact was so stunning and so brilliant I knew nothing would ever match it and I held fast to it with very little thought of any ultimate reward. It was its own reward, and the longing was more satisfying than anything that could ever be achieved by moving on, and the pain was preferable to the emptiness of renouncing my feelings. That’s what I believed. And still do, alas. I put quotation marks around fell in love but I did that so as to not embarrass myself or you. In the privacy of my own being, those words are as real to me as hunger or thirst. I was fascinated and moved by everything and, frankly, anything about you. I loved to watch your fingers as you tied your shoes and waited for the moment when you gave the bow an extra tightening tug to make certain it was secure. I loved to watch you chew your food with that thoughtful expression on your face as if you were hearing distant music. I played the videotape of Hostages countless times, listening carefully to the actors say lines you had written.

  I knew you would never love me. But that didn’t stop me from coming up with all kinds of self-beguiling hypotheses that allowed me to carry on. And on and on. The main one was this: if I were keeping my sexual preferences a secret from you, there was a chance that you were keeping yours a secret, too. Yes you were married, yes you had children, but lots of gay people have done that, and continue to do so despite all the rainbow flags flapping in the breeze. And as long as I kept my secret I could imagine you were keeping yours, too. That night in Chicago, I struck you when it suddenly seemed you had gone to bed with me to create an opportunity to find out about that deal I was working on—by the way, if you’d put money into PhoneClad you would have lost eighty cents on the dollar. Now I no longer wonder what your motive was. Like a pearl pried loose from its sticky home, I possess that time in bed with you and it no longer matters to me if you were just after the payday or if you were curious or if you were moved by my ardor and drunk enough to get swept along or if you loved me, too, at least in that room.

  I’m seeing someone. The father of one of your uncle’s patients, by the way, which makes him a little too close to Planet Thaddeus for anything big to happen, but he’s a great guy and we enjoy our time together. One day I imagine I will partner up with someone. I want to. But it will be something that happened after. What I felt for you? I won’t feel that again, and I don’t think I want to. But someone to pass a section of the Sunday paper to over breakfast? I can do that, and I want to, and I will. The hell of loving you all those years, my dear Thad
deus, when every moment was spent in longing, and every disappointment had buried in its nucleus a kind of promise, that hell was also a kind of paradise, and you don’t get to live in paradise. It’s not fit for humans. We weren’t cast out of Eden by an angry God—we escaped. We don’t need Paradise. We’ll do better in New York, or Chicago, or Detroit, or London, or Rome, or Scarsdale. I’d rather live in Scarsdale than Paradise and I’d rather spend the rest of my life with someone who does not make me tremble with lust and longing, someone whose happiness and well-being does not mean twice as much to me as my own. Goodbye, Thaddeus. If you pull out of this spiral and become the good man I always felt you almost were, I won’t be there to see it. I won’t see you grow old. I won’t hear you laugh. I won’t feel your touch. I won’t hear your voice at the other end of the line. And you won’t hear mine. To make sure this happens, I can sweeten the pot. The land is yours and I will add $100,000 to the settlement. It’s the price of my freedom. Kidnapped Kip is paying his own ransom. Take the money, take the land, the trees, take the waiting and the yearning, take the hunger and the hope. Our fearful trip is done.

  About the Author

  SCOTT SPENCER is the author of twelve novels, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Willing. He has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, and the University of Virginia, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. Spencer lives in upstate New York.

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  Also by Scott Spencer

  Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975)

  Preservation Hall (1976)

  Endless Love (1979)

  Waking the Dead (1986)

  Secret Anniversaries (1990)

  Men in Black (1995)

  Rich Man’s Table (1998)

  A Ship Made of Paper (2003)

  Willing (2008)

  Man in the Woods (2010)

  River Under the Road (2017)

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AN OCEAN WITHOUT A SHORE. Copyright © 2020 by Scott Spencer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover art © Alyssa Monks

  FIRST EDITION

  Digital Edition JUNE 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-285163-5

  Version 04292020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-285162-8

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