River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  Luke was feeling generous and the next lines were gratis. Two young calico cats got into it, yowling and hissing and clawing at the air, and occasionally each other, which was frightening at first and then hilarious. What made it particularly strange was that all the other cats just sat quietly and watched. Luke’s friend Catherine arrived wearing a burgundy pants suit and a gaudy silver belt. She imported sheepskin jackets from Afghanistan, going to Kabul several times a year and buying dozens of coats for a few dollars each and selling them to boutiques for a 500 percent profit. She was barely five feet tall, but wore platform shoes that brought her up to five three or so. She had a playful voice, and seemed like a person who had gotten herself into and out of numerous predicaments. “I like men and I love sex, but boyfriends . . .” She held out her hand and wobbled it back and forth. “Them I could do without.”

  “Are we really going to do this?” Grace asked.

  “It’s fun,” Catherine said. “You’ll see. It’s sort of like a dream.”

  “No one’s asking you to adopt a new lifestyle,” Kip said. There was something harsh in his voice, as if they had all agreed on something and Grace was going to wreck it.

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Catherine said. “It’s all very respectful and easy.”

  “Let’s get going,” Kip said. “This is going to be fun. This is what living in New York is all about. Let’s just do it!”

  “Here,” said Luke, laying out more lines. “May as well.”

  “It’s going to be like Rapestock,” Grace said.

  “No way, Jose,” said Catherine. “It’s safer for chicks than the subway. The place is women’s lib all the way. Girls approach the guys, they don’t hit on us. They’re not allowed to. Rule. You have to be extremely respectful. But the thing is, you don’t even need the rules. The people there are so friendly, and gentle. No one wants to ruin it.”

  “You up for this?” Grace asked Thaddeus again.

  “One more snort and I’m up for anything,” he said. And they both knew that he wasn’t being completely honest. It was more curiosity than cocaine. The thought of going into a world where everyone was fucking everyone else . . .

  Kip ordered a limo from Haifa Transportation. The driver’s name was Shlomo. One of his ears looked chewed in half. Mahler’s Second Symphony played on the radio, very softly. It reminded Thaddeus of how the music sounded back at his parents’ apartment on Kimbark, shrouded and funereal, always out of pleasure’s grasp. He took Grace’s hand. It was clammy, or his was. The city was still enshrouded in cold mist. Lights from the tall buildings made the fog look like silvery gauze, the buildings themselves all but invisible.

  They stood for a moment at the entrance. Across the street was a McDonald’s. A woman in a long black woolen coat and a scarf tied under her chin to cover her hair walked by with a Scottie dog on a leash. Thaddeus’s heart danced, and the dog walker was swallowed by the fog. Hannah Hannah Hannah Hannah, and then she was gone.

  “You okay?” Grace asked.

  “As well as can be expected,” said Thaddeus, grinning.

  Admission was twenty-five dollars a couple and Kip paid. A squared-off man in a ski jacket took Kip’s money and shoved it into his pocket. “You do work here, don’t you?” Kip asked. His normal bantering tone had returned. The harshness that had set in for a few moments when it seemed that Grace might be an impediment was gone, and the aural mask was back in place. He linked his arm through Catherine’s, a legitimate couple descending the steep flight of steps that led to the club.

  The first thing: the smell of chlorine and some other odor, sweet and unnatural. A spray? Incense? The darkness that slowly receded into dimness. The music too loud, the speakers full of distortion. Wild Cherry singing “Hot to Trot.” The dance floor, some people fully dressed, men in vests, women in pants suits, people in their underwear, and some wearing nothing, breasts flopping, genitals bobbing up and down like rodents trying to leap out of a cage. Spears of light shot down from the crystal disco ball like thunderbolts. I might be too much for you honey / Do you know what I mean? / I’m just a dancin’ fool / And I’m lookin’ for a struttin’ queen . . .

  Grace said, “This is just like some terrible disco but with a few crazy people who’ve taken off their clothes.” Catherine said they should check out the swimming pool, and above all, the mattress room. Thaddeus said the people weren’t very good looking and Kip laughed and told him he was a snob, and then said they would all follow Catherine, who was heading for the buffet. There were people sitting at small tables, eating meatballs and lasagna off paper plates, drinking ginger ale. Mustaches. Big hair.

  “‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” Thaddeus said into Grace’s ear. She didn’t respond. “Dante,” he said. “The Inferno.”

  “Wow,” she shouted over the pounding music. “You’re so literary.”

  He failed to heed the warning and pressed on. “This is crazy. Like Paul Newman said, why would I go out for a hamburger when I can have steak at home?”

  “That’s so beautiful, Thaddeus,” she yelled. “Unbelievably touching.”

  Okay, now he got it. “Hey, none of this is my idea,” he said.

  She kissed him, biting his lip, grabbing his hips. There was something weirdly erotic about being here, as unpleasant as it was. The arousal was involuntary. It was like being tickled. Someone can dig their fingertips into your rib cage and you might laugh but that doesn’t mean you’re happy.

  “You people are ridiculous,” Catherine mouthed. She grabbed Kip’s hand and led him deeper into the club’s interior.

  “There’s got to be better orgies than this,” Thaddeus said to Grace. “For people who are really doing well.”

  “Poor us,” said Grace, “invited to the wrong orgy.”

  The swimming pool was not quite so deafening. The water blue as antifreeze. Thirty, forty people floating around, penises sticking up like periscopes. Bellies like the shells of Galapagos tortoises. Tits of all nations. A balding guy who looked like a high school teacher was sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water while a woman (who wore a bathing cap to protect her hairdo) treaded water and fellated him.

  Kip and Catherine emerged from the locker room, naked. Thaddeus tried not to notice Kip’s body. He was slim and graceful as a greyhound. Catherine was bosomy, thick. She stretched voluptuously, as if here at Nero’s she could finally relax. Kip kept his hands in front of his genitals as he and Catherine approached the pool and the two of them jumped in.

  “Still think he’s queer?” Thaddeus asked.

  “More than ever,” said Grace. “Are you going to take off your clothes?”

  “Are you?”

  “Not at the moment.” She looked around. “It’s sort of boring to just stand around.”

  “Then you are going to get naked?”

  “Did I say that?”

  Someone was having an ostentatious orgasm, an almost Alpine yodel, genderless, followed by cheers from bystanders, or byfuckers. Who knew, who cared? Thaddeus heard someone say that Sammy Davis Jr. was here. A man with a high, plaintive voice was looking for someone named Andrea, he called her name over and over as he wandered from the pool to the pool table to the Ping-Pong table to the buffet, where he helped himself to pastrami, but continued to call for her as he chewed.

  In college, Thaddeus had been a formidable Ping-Pong player. He was mediocre at every other sport, from basketball to Frisbee, but he was a terror with a paddle, to his own surprise. He hadn’t played since Ann Arbor, but he drifted toward the club’s Ping-Pong table, where a woman in her late thirties wearing skimpy lace underwear was playing an older woman with one breast, who was naked. They were both good players, standing far from the table. The woman with the mastectomy was more of a power player, while the younger woman played a more modest game, based on placement and English. She was, on second glance, more appealing to Thaddeus than she had been at first. His mind was racing, if o
nly to keep up with his heart, which had been in a state of great alertness since the first line of coke and in a state of utter alarm from the moment they had all agreed to come here.

  “Can I play the winner?” he asked.

  “We’re not keeping score,” the woman in panties said.

  “Let’s,” said the older woman. She caught the ball out of the air. She suggested that she serve first and the game would be to twenty-one. The younger woman looked tense and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. It seemed weird to Thaddeus to be nervous about losing a Ping-Pong match while you were all but naked in a sex club. That might make for a good short story. First line: She’d already been laid seven times but all that faded from memory once the Ping-Pong match began. God. Was that the best he had in him? He was starting to think that maybe it was. The world was more interested in the guy who had amassed a gigantic ball of aluminum foil than it was in him and his writing! It galled him to have his nose pressed up against the glass of the culture. Even here in this supposed erotic paradise he was on the outside looking in. Fully clothed, hoping the younger of the two women won the game, though he would have been hard-pressed to explain why which one he played made much of a difference, or any difference at all.

  As it happened, the younger woman did not win. She was trounced, twenty-one to eight. But the woman with the mastectomy was joined by her boyfriend (who, for a panicky moment, Thaddeus thought was Frank Zappa) and the two of them headed off to the mattress room, where presumably countless couples were squirming like a bucket full of worms, though at this point Thaddeus had not brought himself to even glance in that direction. The vanquished woman agreed to play with him. She seemed not to mind that he was fully clothed. She told him her name was Becky.

  “Are you outrageous?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said.

  Becky slapped herself in the rear with her paddle and offered to let him serve first. Back in Ann Arbor he had a tricky serve, but he couldn’t manage it tonight. He kept netting it and was forced to serve up lollipops, which put a look of pure delight on Becky’s face before she sent the ball flying back at Thaddeus at what seemed like 100 miles per hour. Finally, one of her smashes resulted in a lost ball and after a futile search they tried to figure out who to ask for a new one. The guy Thaddeus approached wore a pale blue Speedo and had a silver police whistle nestled into his abundant chest hair. “There’s a hobby shop on Eighty-Sixth Street,” he said. “But they’re closed now.” Thaddeus tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy Ping-Pong balls, but the man interrupted and said, “You’d be a lot happier if you got out of your street clothes, man.” Thaddeus said he thought the club policy was no pressure, and the man said, “I’m not pressuring. I’m inviting you to paradise.” At which point, he wiggled out of his little bathing suit—his genitals were priapic and to see them spilling out was like watching the emptying of a clown car.

  “Whoa,” said Becky, backing away. She linked her arm through Thaddeus’s. The gesture was more than intimate, it was tender. “You’re a handsome one,” she said. Thaddeus glanced away, wondering where Grace was, and if she was watching him. She was nowhere in sight and when he turned back toward Becky she kissed him full on the mouth, and his mouth cooperated, softened, opened. He was kissing her back and she took his hand and placed it on her breast and said, “Pinch.” He moved away from the kiss so he could see her face when he pinched her, which he did gently, as if snuffing out a candle. “Are you going to keep your clothes on?” she asked.

  It seemed stupid to him, and contrary to the spirit of curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the spirit of self-confidence, the spirit of irony, the spirit of daring, and the spirit of pleasure, to be one of the few clothed people at a swing club. Fuck it! If Emily Dickinson had found herself in Nero’s Fiddle (presupposing that the Belle of Amherst had snorted up several lines of cocaine) she might have decided to go with the flow and stuff her dress and high-collared blouse into one of the club’s little lockers, which was where he was heading.

  Past the pool, with its multicolored periscopes. A few conscientious swingers were swimming laps. The Jacuzzi accommodated the several customers who were unconcerned about dipping their bodies into a warm bath with twenty strangers who had just either ejaculated or had been ejaculated into. And now the Mattress Room, which was the size of a cozy restaurant, with dim lighting and wall-to-wall mattresses, where some languidly embraced in postcoital peace, while others frantically fucked. Adios and farewell, you thousands of years of religion and law.

  Catherine was on one of the mattresses with a young guy who looked like a cop or a soldier on top of her. She had one arm raised and snapped her fingers in time with his thrusts. Kip was watching, propped on one elbow, pleasing himself with his free hand. And that was when he saw Grace, standing in the corner, naked, as if she had awakened from a dream and found herself there. As Thaddeus watched, a middle-aged couple, the man fussy looking with a bristly mustache and small eyes, the woman like a wrestler, were having sex, and the man reached out to Grace and took her hand. Either he yanked her onto the mattress or she put up very little resistance. But when the bristling mustache tried to mount her, she quickly scrambled to her feet, and saw Thaddeus. She stepped over the writhing bodies, the potbellies and pendulous breasts, the hairy backsides and pink soles, over pageboys and crew cuts, braids and curls, over mouths and cunts and socks and armpits and jugular veins, over the moaners, the laughers, the squealers, and the grunters, until she and Thaddeus were face-to-face.

  “What the fuck were you doing?” he asked her.

  “Am I doing? What about you?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  She gestured toward his state of undress.

  “Were you about to have sex with that guy?”

  “Thaddeus. Come on. You’re in no position.”

  “Can we go?”

  “I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

  “Well, you’ve sure made the most of it.”

  She made a small gasp after which they were silent on the cab ride home. The streets were still dark, the sky was black and silver, like the back of a mirror.

  “The sun’s never going to rise,” Grace said, staring out.

  Once in the apartment, Grace hurried into the shower. A few minutes later, Thaddeus joined her, but she rinsed quickly and left him alone. By the time he dried himself off, she was in bed, with their extra pillow over her head.

  He wasn’t even close to being able to sleep. He went to the front room, rolled a piece of paper into the carriage of his typewriter. He wrote: This is not the city I thought it was. I had it all wrong. The Olivetti was quiet but it wasn’t silent. He found a pen and a legal pad and began to write a story about Americans in a Gulf state country, embassy people, soldiers, journalists. He called the country Tigris; he called the screenplay Hostages. What would make it interesting? What would make it real, and not just a polemic based on the ten minutes he’d spent with Anahita? The answer came quickly: they’d all be trapped in the embassy, hostages to a young generation of Tigrians who hated the U.S. for supporting their mad despotic sultan. He quickly composed nine pages until exhaustion overcame him. He turned off the lamp. Dawn broke gray and dim, like something oozing out of a container. He hated it here. Crime and filth and crazy people. He took off his clothes but getting into bed naked seemed a bad idea. Had nakedness been ruined? Why did Grace flee as soon as he got into the shower? He put on a pair of pajamas, the same pair he’d brought to Ann Arbor when he entered as a freshman. He slipped into bed as quietly as possible, but his presence awakened her. She pulled the pillow off her head and sat up. Their bed was on a metal frame, without a headboard. “We should go to church,” she said. “The one next door.”

  “I’m Jewish,” he whispered.

  “I don’t care and God doesn’t care, either.”

  “Okay. I can do that,” he said.

  She rolled closer to him, draped her leg over his. “That fe
els nice,” he said, and he thought, How did this happen to me? How did I become one of the lucky ones?

  Dear Liam,

  Yes, you’re right, it would be totally out of sight if I could have a place to make art. I really appreciate your offer, but right now I think it would be a waste of money. But to have a little work space somewhere that I could call my own? A dream come true.

  How great would it be if I found a dealer, a gallery, and sold a bunch of stuff and got us out of here? That’s my dream, anyhow. There are so many creepy people here. And I don’t want to turn into one of them. I want out! Out!

  But we’re stuck here and in the meanwhile I’m thinking of taking a drawing class at the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh Street, which costs very little, so when I screw up and miss a class I won’t feel guilty. All these cool modernists went there but so did one of my secret art crushes, Charles Dana Gibson. (First time I saw his drawing of a Gibson Girl I thought, That’s me!!!) And Isabel Bishop went there, too. Her studio used to be less than ten blocks from where I sit now. That’s the only good thing about NY, just about everyone was here one time or another. But man is it dirty, and is it loud, and is it scary. I don’t tell Thaddeus but every Saturday I buy a lottery ticket. Irish sweepstakes, right? And when I win we’re going to buy an island somewhere just like old Charlie Gibson did. His was off the coast of Maine. I’ve never even been to Maine. We went to a party at this rich guy’s apartment (you should see it, it was amazing) and he invited us up to his family’s mansion just about 100 miles from here. I’d take that just as much as our own island. We could all live there and do our thing and you could maybe stop taking so many chances. I worry about you every day.