River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  Thaddeus and Grace continued to wander the party, made shy by their own neediness. They helped themselves to drinks at a table in the garden, a cruddy old knocked-around wooden table, the kind of table only a rich person would feel okay about displaying in front of his guests, three and a half legs, the veneer stripped off the top. Vagabond ice cubes slid around bottles of Popov vodka and Sutter Home gin, and other cheap brands sharing the perch with pricey bottles of wine in a kind of democracy of booze.

  While helping themselves to glasses of Château Beychevelle, one of the guests, deciding that Grace was on her own, descended upon her. His name was James Nichols. He offset his tux with red tennis shoes. Pudgy, moist, with thinning hair and peeling lips, he nonetheless managed to exude self-confidence.

  “I’m the kind of person who,” he announced, “when he sees someone lovely he must go and introduce himself.”

  “Know thyself,” Grace said, good-naturedly.

  “That’s checkmate, right there,” James said. His voice was hoarse. He sounded like someone who had exhausted himself selling something, or trying to convince skeptics of one thing or another. His laugh was something like a cough. “Tell me your name and everything about yourself.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Okay, fair enough. My name is James, no one calls me Jim, though my mother called me Jimmy, before I murdered her. Editor at Dodd, Mead. A sleepy old place from which I am planning to decamp. I mainly acquire history but every now and then they allow me to buy a novel. I have a decent salary, and have absolutely no family money, unlike most of the little shits in this room. And if you’re one of them, I’m sorry.”

  Thaddeus was counting off the seconds this guy would stand there without acknowledging his presence. He had already reached 140.

  “All right. I’m Grace Cornell and I work in publishing, too. At Periodic. And this is my boyfriend, Thaddeus Kaufman.”

  “Ah. Thaddeus Kaufman,” Nichols said, as if a missing piece had been supplied. “Gene has talked to me about you.”

  “He has?” Thaddeus asked. He was going to answer Has he now, as a kind of push back, but an actual editor having a discussion about him was the main thing on his mind.

  “So tell me . . .” Did he just wink in Grace’s direction? “Briefly as possible: what’s your novel about? It is a novel, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “It’s a novel,” Grace said. “And it’s really good.”

  “Your accent,” Nichols said, pointing to Grace. His fingernail was chewed, his cuticle livid. “I’m the kind of person who can usually tell straightaway where someone was raised, but . . . I don’t know. Where are you from?”

  “I’m trying to keep away from the typical first-novel stuff,” Thaddeus said. “I don’t want to do a bildungsroman.” His heartbeat was beginning to accelerate. He had a vision of himself simply turning away and fleeing that was so vivid it seemed as if it had already happened, that it was not dread but an actual memory.

  “Free advice,” said Nichols. “It’s not good business to talk about what you’re not writing.”

  “My brother says that free advice is worth what it costs,” Grace said.

  “It’s about an old couple in a dying city,” Thaddeus said.

  “Like Updike’s first novel?” Nichols said. “To the Poorhouse?”

  Thaddeus did not bother to correct Nichols’s botch of the title. It was close enough. And, in fact, Updike had been on Thaddeus’s mind when he began his own book, so Nichols got some credit there. Nichols was probably brilliant, or close to it, like most of the gatekeepers between Thaddeus and the world. Sometimes in his despair he wondered how he would ever get past them, how he would ever be included. What did he have to offer? His main hope was that he would just simply be able to do it, just as he had hoped as a teenager that when it finally was time to have sex he would know what to do. The preparation for actual sex was two years of masturbation, and the preparation for starting a novel was two semesters of creative writing.

  “The saddest thing I see?” Nichols proposed. “And this is something I warn all young writers about.”

  “How old are you?” Grace interjected.

  “Older than I look. I take excellent care of myself. And . . .” He raised a finger, insisting on full attention. “The advice is, do not fall between two stools.”

  “Or two stool samples,” said Thaddeus, in spite of himself. Snap! went the mousetrap of social regret. Poof! went the disappearing promise to stop joking around.

  Nichols graciously pretended not to have heard. “There are the avowedly and consciously commercial fictions, the romances and the swashbucklers and mysteries and such, and most publishers can usually make them profitable. But I think it was Mr. Knopf who said the thing about publishing is that it’s gone today and here tomorrow.” He made a signifying smile. “Returns. They are our ruination. With reliably commercial fiction we tend not to over print and everyone comes out fine. But then there is literature. And what you must ask yourself is: am I writing straight commercial fiction or am I creating literature? Mailer, Styron, your friend Mr. Updike, and I’ll throw Kurt Vonnegut in there, too—they are clearly creating literature and they are even getting onto the bestseller lists. Listen, all those guys want to work with me. At Dodd, Mead? Or what I call Dead Meat? No way, Jose. I’ll probably end up at Random House and they will be with me there. Mailer, John Gardner, Joe Heller, the lot of them.

  “But anyhow: the all-important list. Do you study what’s on the list? You should. Right now, we’ve got old Irwin Shaw, that madman Tolkien, John Fowles—and others who I can stand before you and promise none of us will remember ten years from now, but they’re making a good living right now, not only for themselves but for their publishers. Which brings us back to you. Do you see yourself as becoming part of the inner circle? The next Mailer, the next Styron? Because I’ll tell you, that’s not the feeling I get standing with you. I can smell it.” He touched the side of his nose, and Thaddeus felt a swell of horror and shame.

  “You seem just like a regular middle-of-the-road person to me,” Nichols said, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s no place for that kind of writing in this world, not anymore.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Grace, drawing closer to Thaddeus. “You’re being a horrible bully.”

  “Well, I notice you’re listening,” Nichols said.

  “There’s a difference between listening and staring,” said Grace.

  George Eliot, thought Thaddeus. It did not take any great feat of memory for him to recognize the phrase from Middlemarch. He and Grace were reading it aloud to each other on the many nights they couldn’t afford to go out.

  “I am saving your lives is what I am doing. You are going to look back on this and say, Oh my God, that handsome devil from Dodd, Mead saved our lives. Here’s something I know. A friend of mine, his name is George Atkinson, a bit older than us, great guy. Smart. Talk about smelling something on someone? He’s got the smell of a winner.”

  “And what’s that smell like?” Grace asked.

  “Difficult to say, but one recognizes it. Anyhow, you know what George is doing next month, out there in Los Angeles? He’s opening a video rental store. Like a pay library, but for movies. Betamax, VHS, whatever you want. Right on Wilshire Boulevard. You walk in, pick a movie you want to see, and bring it home. Do you have any idea what that’s going to do to publishing? Bookstores? All of us? It’s a law of nature, all creatures great and small take the path of least resistance. Even electrons follow this universal law. Faced with the choice of reading a book or lazily watching The Way We Were, I think most people are going to opt for the latter. The only books that are going to get bought are the totally pandering, commercial, easy on the eyes, easy on the brainpan kind, or else some kind of event book. And if you’re not going to be the person who writes that book, and there’s one of them a year, maybe two, then I say get the hell out and fi
nd something else to do.”

  There was no telling how long this advice would have gone on had one of the guests not entered with a blazing birthday cake—a woman in extremely high heels and a strand of pearls that swayed at waist level as she walked. There were cheers, applause, and soon all the guests were singing “Happy Birthday” to Gene, the singing, even in its collectivity, humorous, as if the familiar lyrics were all in quotation marks. “Who me?” Gene silently mouthed, pointing to himself, turning this way and that so everyone could see how he was reacting to the cake and the song.

  “We should go,” Thaddeus whispered to Grace.

  “It’s still early. And there’s a lot of good wine still to be drunk. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe hang myself?”

  Now you know how I feel half the time, thought Grace, but instead of saying it, she kissed him.

  When they finally got out of there, a cold mist was falling. Or was it rain? Sleet? Was it snow? It was an undifferentiated stinging wetness. They flipped their collars up, put their heads down, and headed toward home.

  “If we see a taxi we’ll take it,” Thaddeus said.

  BUT THE NIGHT WAS NOT through with them yet. Every night is a mansion with countless rooms, and the door flew open to the next room. As they walked through the mist, they heard someone calling Thaddeus’s name, shredded by the dark wind and barely recognizable. It was Kip, his head out of the back window of a Checker cab gliding to a stop. One of the taxi’s headlights was out and it gave the boxy old cab a kind of winking, insouciant look.

  “Get in here, you serfs, and enjoy the warmth of my troika!” Kip shouted.

  They were relieved to be rescued from the weather and from the sense of failure that walking in bad weather can cause. Kip had already unfolded the jump seat that had been nestled into the floor of the taxi and now he sat facing the backseat, where Thaddeus slid in on one side of Anahita and Grace sat on the other. Anahita wore a floor-length quilted down coat. She had taken an orange from Gene’s party and was unpeeling it, releasing a bright citrusy scent and letting the peels fall to the floor. Kip slapped his hands against Thaddeus’s knees as if he were playing a bongo drum.

  “We’re going to drop Ana off at her hotel and then you guys come with me, and the fun will really begin once we get rid of sourpuss,” he announced.

  “Kip, I’m tired,” Anahita said. “Enough excitement for one night. And tomorrow morning there is a vigil outside the consulate.”

  “Oh sure,” Kip said. “Nothing changes history as reliably as a vigil. What about you two? You want to go back to your love cave or accompany old Uncle Kip on his nocturnal adventures?”

  Thaddeus looked at Grace, who shrugged, and Kip beat his palms even harder and faster against Thaddeus’s knees. “Oh mama mama mama, we are going to get so fucking high!” he sang in a falsetto.

  They dropped Anahita off at her hotel. Kip walked her to the front entrance of the Plaza; a liveried doorman met them halfway, holding a striped umbrella.

  “She must have money,” Grace said.

  “One day that’ll be us,” Thaddeus said.

  “Sure, why not,” said Grace.

  “As God is my witness, we’ll never go hungry again!” clowned Thaddeus. He slammed his open hand over his heart, and coughed. It was an old Jerry Lewis routine, the kind he used to do in front of Sam and Libby.

  Kip bounded back into the taxi, his hair bejeweled with raindrops. “She is one foxy lady,” he said. “But a very serious Muslim. Did you see how she kissed me good night? Completely without warmth or affection?”

  The taxi swung around Columbus Circle, and then onto Central Park West to Ninety-First Street, where it turned west. Kip paid the driver while Thaddeus and Grace stood in front of a shabby narrow brownstone between Amsterdam and Columbus. All but one of the windows were dark. Plastic flowerpots holding dead geraniums were scattered on the steps.

  “This will be fast,” Kip said, pressing the buzzer to apartment 4.

  “Mind telling us what we’re doing here?” Grace asked.

  “I think you know,” Kip said.

  A buzzer unlocked the door into a vestibule that was a riot of shopping carts and umbrellas. The odor of cat piss was overpowering. Lit by a flickering circular fluorescent light, the steps rose at an extreme angle, more like a ladder than a staircase.

  “Top floor, kids,” Kip said, his voice bright, manic.

  They were calling on a man named Luke, who was fresh out of the shower, draped in a Snoopy towel. He looked like an aging Roman senator from the age of the Caesars, though he hadn’t breached thirty. Narrow face, eyes deep-set and guarded. Water dripped from his thinning dark hair, his tufted narrow shoulders, his scrawny legs.

  “You’re early,” he said to Kip.

  “Actually, I’m late. Can we come in?”

  “Just you,” Luke said.

  But Kip ushered Thaddeus and Grace ahead of him and Luke offered only mild resistance. His apartment was the source of the cat-piss odor—he had fifteen, perhaps twenty, cats patrolling his apartment, all at different stages of the feline life cycle. He moved a few of them back with a sweep of his leg as he opened the door to Kip and Thaddeus and Grace. The apartment was just two rooms, only one of which had a window. Who do you have to fuck in this town to get a window? Thaddeus thought.

  There was a bewildering assortment of chairs, all of them in poor repair, as if every time Luke passed a discarded chair left at the curb for the trash collection he couldn’t resist bringing it home. His small sofa was covered by an Indian bedspread. The glass-topped coffee table was covered by a triple-beam scale, an empty Chablis bottle, and an open copy of Screw magazine, the weekly tabloid in which prostitutes were advertised. A TV set was showing the local access program Midnight Blue, with the sound extremely low.

  “Hey, look, it’s Al Goldstein,” Kip said. He took an envelope from the inside pocket of his overcoat and handed it to Luke. “That horny old bastard happens to be sort of a wizard when it comes to picking stocks. One of my buddies over at Cowen is on the phone with him six times a day.”

  Luke opened the envelope. “Three grams?”

  “Three? Five.”

  “Maybe in Bolivia, but not here,” Luke said.

  He tried to return the envelope to Kip, but Kip backed away from it, as if he were avoiding being served a summons. Luke kept the money and gave Kip three grams of cocaine, each in its own little origami-like packet. Cats of all colors and sizes paced the perimeter of the room, with sparkling eyes and flicking tails. Kip asked if it would be all right to sample “the item” before they left and Luke made a faux-elegant gesture, inviting them all to sit. There was certainly no lack of choices but it was difficult to tell which chairs were safe.

  Thaddeus and Grace rarely used cocaine—too expensive. And they preferred the slow soft languorous forgiving embracing qualities of wine. But Grace was up for it, and Thaddeus, too. He liked the Windex-y astringency in his nasal passages, how his blood charged through the sleeping city of his circulatory system like a Mongol horde, and he vaguely hoped for an extra few hours of wakefulness that he could spend in front of his Olivetti, writing. Night after night, he worked with the diligence of a prisoner trying to dig his way out of his cell with a spoon.

  As they were leaning over the dessert plate upon which Luke had portioned out Kip’s gram, Thaddeus became absorbed with the television, where Al Goldstein was interviewing a fleshy man in his late thirties with a drooping lower lip and hooded eyes. On the bottom of the screen was his name, Lou Levine. He wore a leather coat, cowboy hat, and long scarf. The conversation was about Levine’s sex club called Nero’s Fiddle, a mile or so away, at the Marlboro Hotel. The volume on the TV was low and Thaddeus had a hard time making out what they were saying, but it seemed mainly about the club’s strict no alcohol or drugs policy, and the wide array of foods available at the buffet—lasagna, meatballs, potato salad, chicken, ribs, macaroni, and cold cuts. “You coul
d come there just for the nosh,” Goldstein said, with an air of mild contempt.

  Luke noticed Thaddeus’s interest in the show. “I’ve been there once. Plenty of stars. I saw Melvin Van Peebles, Richard Dreyfuss. All kinds of people. Some bridge-and-tunnel types, but there’s some hot girls in Jersey.”

  “We should go,” Kip said. “It’s close by, right? It’s in that place that used to be a bathhouse for the gay boys, listening to Connie Francis and sitting around in their towels. Not unlike you, old buddy,” he added, patting Luke’s soup-bone knee. “But we could go, right? Like Roman emperors, enjoying pleasures of the flesh once unimaginable to the common man.”

  “No single men allowed,” Luke said. “But if you’re really into it, my friend Catherine lives a couple doors down and likes it.”

  “Would you do something like that?” Grace asked Thaddeus.

  “Would you?” Thaddeus said.

  “Go into a room with naked strangers and everyone fucking their brains out?” she asked.

  “Would you?” Thaddeus asked again.

  “You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” Luke said. “You have to take off your shoes, but that’s it. You can even leave your socks on.” He picked up his phone and started dialing.

  “Are you calling your friend?” Kip asked.

  “I’ll see if she’s home,” said Luke.

  Thaddeus and Grace could never agree on the exact sequence of events, and eventually that night’s second half entered into the realm of perpetual silence, beginning with the arrival of Luke’s friend and ending with their slipping wordlessly into their own bed at dawn. Thaddeus would have it that they had allowed themselves to be swept into Kip’s enthusiasm and taste for debauchery, while Grace would never relinquish her own sense of cause and effect and continued to insist that what had gotten Kip going in the first place was Thaddeus’s obvious fascination with Goldstein and Levine chatting away on Midnight Blue. What they both agreed on was that cocaine played a part in it, though it was not as if coke was an hallucinogen like LSD or mushrooms, which would allow them to experience (or at least imagine) a different dimension, a counter-reality. Coke was not a disinhibitor like booze. The most that could be blamed on the coke was that it gave them a kind of outlaw sense of rising above the normal world and diminished their sense of consequence, fostering a view of the world like you can have on an airplane, when cities are but twinkling grids, essentially devoid of meaning. I think I just figured out why people like conceptual art, Grace said at one point. It’s like coke, it’s all mind over matter.