An Ocean Without a Shore by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Grace Ascendant

A few weeks after her great success, Grace called me in my office late on a Thursday afternoon to ask if she could spend the night at my apartment. She’d come to the city to show slides of her work to Justin Kent, a newly minted gallery owner with a space on Broome Street, and Grace thought the meeting had gone well. Kent had liked her work enough to invite her to a dinner he was having that night for a painter named Lou Trachtenberg. Perhaps he had realized that his guest list of forty people included only five women. Trachtenberg’s work involved smashing glass and pouring it artfully onto paint-spattered tarps, and though Grace’s narrow taste in art didn’t include smashing glass or paint-spattered tarps, she was excited to attend the dinner. After so many years feeling herself a non-being in the art world, any kind of inclusion encouraged Grace—who could blame her?

The dinner was in Kent’s SoHo loft; and Grace had been seated in the semi-Siberia between a morose South American man with a tiny mustache and painted fingernails, and Kent’s mother, an ENT who practiced in Amagansett. But the placement did not dampen Grace’s spirits. Nothing could. Good food, great booze, and she arrived at my place around eleven glowing, like a girl coming home from her first real date.

It was a warm early summer night. Parts of the city were already quieter than usual as people of means had left town to get a head start on the weekend, allowing me to open my windows and run a couple of portable fans rather than the air conditioning. I showed Grace to the second bedroom, which I had prepared for her, with Stargazer lilies and a bottle of cold Evian water, as well as one of my T-shirts, which she could wear as a nightgown. I wanted everything to be as swell as I could make it because my intention was to speak frankly with Grace about Jennings, and to bear down on her should she decide to be evasive. I have a single person’s understanding of marriage, which is that most are dressed in camouflage. Each marriage has its own Constitution, its own code of conduct, its own language, always with something distinct, and recondite, obscure, complicated, and private—when a marriage dissolves, it’s as if a little nation ceases to exist. Perhaps in some fit of passion or remorse Grace had already confessed to Thaddeus, or in some moment of rage, or some mood of wanting to know the worst, Thaddeus had pressured her to reveal her relationship to Jennings and Jennings’s relationship to Emma. It was all guesswork, like hearing your parents murmuring behind the bedroom wall and not being able to understand what they are saying.

She admired my apartment, in some detail, while reminiscing about my old loft on Park Avenue South, where she and Thaddeus had tied the so-called knot one frantically snowy January afternoon. We reminisced about that day, the guests, the food, the Ethical Culture minister who had arrived on cross-country skis.

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