River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “You have to guard against depression,” Grace said, sitting in the one chair available, with her hands folded in her lap. She wore a loose-fitting dress against the hot summer night. Her arms were bare and the swirling-fingerprint dark hairs on it looked especially prominent in the dingy hospital light.

  “Yeah?” Jerry sounded as if he’d already had enough of her. “You think so.”

  “Yes. Between the hypothermia and the anesthetic. Also, little pieces of plaque kind of bombard your brain. People have as much trouble with the depression as any other part of the recovery after the kind of surgery you had.”

  “So you’re what? A doctor?”

  “Better than that,” Thaddeus interjected. “She’s a children’s book designer.” He knew it was a mistake as soon as he’d said it. He’d thrown Grace to the wolves for a little joke. He saw her flash red and he knew it was something she was going to remember.

  On the way out of the hospital, Grace said, “He kept staring at my arms.” They were at the front entrance. A security guard was posted nearby, half asleep, his long legs stretched out before him. He opened his eyes for a moment to look at them, decided they weren’t worth the bother.

  “Was he?” Thaddeus answered. It was a subject he avoided. He wasn’t certain why it was so, but dark hair on a woman’s arms seemed somehow wrong to him.

  Grace lifted her left arm, turned it just so. “I love my little monkey arms. I think they’re amazing.”

  “I do, too,” Thaddeus said, uncertainly.

  “Good. Because I’ve been getting shit about this my whole life. I’ve broken up with people over these little monkey arms.”

  “Good!” Thaddeus had said, light-headed. It was as if he had luckily stepped back onto the curb as a bus whizzed by.

  “I just can’t let anyone tell me I’m not good enough.”

  “Me either. Or neither? Either, neither?” They were outside now. An ambulance was slowly turning toward the ER entrance, as if the patient inside was already lost.

  Somehow, the issue of her arms remained unsettled, and they were not mentioned again until on the day of the wedding Thaddeus noticed they had been denuded, and were as smooth as the ring of fat around a steak, though reddened after two burning, buzzing hours of electrolysis, recommended to her by someone at work, a woman named Sophia Krafchek, a good-natured Polish woman with a gold tooth and two grown sons. “I was shaggy like coconut,” Sophia said, presenting Grace with a pre-wedding present of a gift certificate to Sonya of Seventy-Ninth Street, where women went to be bleached, plucked, waxed, and zapped.

  Sophia turned out to be one of the first arrivals. She had come up on the elevator with Bruce Abernathy. The Ethical Culture minister was a young and hale man; he’d traveled on cross-country skis from his church on Central Park West to Kip’s loft, and he entered with his jolly-looking cheeks glowing red. And as it turned out, the guests for the most part braved the elements, and soon they were arriving in waves of icy good cheer, giddy from their adventures, collars and eyelashes wet and sparkling. Some had taken certified taxis, some had settled for so-called gypsy cabs, some had walked, kicking their way through snowbanks. Here were a lawyer, a social worker, a window dresser, a fireman, the guys with whom Thaddeus played basketball at the YMCA, where the hierarchy was based on conditioning and skills—a trust fund couldn’t buy you a layup, and if you picked up the ball while dribbling and then dribbled again, even if you were Robert Motherwell it was still a double dribble and you surrendered the ball.

  And then came three women with whom Grace shared a painting studio above a pork and lamb wholesaler on Little West Twelfth Street. The studio, redolent of slaughtered flesh and the fumes of the West Side Highway, cost thirty-five dollars a month for each of them; Liam had paid a year’s rent as a birthday present for Grace. She admired the other women artists, their energy, their wiry hair, their eyeglasses (either small as silver dollars, or large as grapefruit), the complicated alluring things they could achieve with a scarf, their booming, ribald back-and-forth on the rare occasions when they were all in the studio at the same time. But it was just her luck to find herself with artists who saw no value in her work. These were people who believed verisimilitude was a kind of failure of the imagination. They themselves were proudly incapable of it. They asked her strained, vaguely insulting questions, such as “Is this from a photograph?” and “Are you hoping to sell these?”

  STILL NO SIGN OF MAUREEN Cornell. And with the bride’s mother missing and the ceremony put on hold, Kip insisted that Thaddeus and Grace absent themselves from the general throng and wait it out in his bedroom.

  “You’re the stars so you have to act like stars,” Kip said, escorting them into his room. Since the night at Nero’s, his tone with Thaddeus and Grace had become more and more artificial, careening between the solicitous and the sarcastic, the tender and the teasing. Today, he was wearing an Armani suit in a shade of gray that looked somehow European, a white shirt, and a black bow tie that he had already undone, like a lounge singer at the end of a long set. “We’ll give Mom another twenty minutes and then I think you two little bunnies ought to do the deed.”

  “We can’t do it without Grace’s mother here,” said Thaddeus.

  “One of the fat girls from Periodic Books has already damaged the cake,” Kip said. “She ran her finger over the icing.” He pointed at Grace. “One of your friends.”

  “I hope everyone here is my friend,” said Grace.

  “Sorry for the delay, man,” Thaddeus said.

  “It’s not like my mother wants to be wandering around in the snow. I’m actually pretty worried about her,” Grace said.

  “Oh, we’ll survive. My date’s not here anyhow,” Kip said.

  “Who’s your date?” Thaddeus asked. His face lit up, like a child about to open a present.

  “Linda Ronstadt.”

  “You’re dating Linda Ronstadt?”

  “Well, that might be pushing things. She said she’ll try and make it.” There was a burst of laughter from the front of the loft. “I’d better see to our guests. I’m going to close you two in here. Sit tight and no snooping around my stuff.”

  There was a desk pushed against the wall opposite the bed, covered by a light blue bedsheet. The desk chair was piled high with neatly folded T-shirts. The room itself had been carved out of the loft’s once-open space, and the walls did not reach all the way to the high ceiling. An old oak wardrobe was his closet. His bookshelves were filled with first editions—Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, H.D.

  “What do you think is under the sheet?” asked Grace.

  Thaddeus lifted a corner of the sheet. A pile of continuous computer printout paper, each sheet with holes running down the left and right side.

  “Maybe we can find out a tip on some hot stock,” Grace said.

  Thaddeus sat next to her on the end of the bed. “You look beautiful,” he said. He took her hand, patted it.

  “I feel about as sexy as saddle shoes,” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be here.”

  “Your parents got here on time.”

  “I’ve never questioned their punctuality.”

  Grace’s brother walked in without knocking, holding a plate of Swedish meatballs, each impaled by a frilly toothpick. “You guys hungry?” Liam asked, using his foot to close the door behind him. He had a good-natured, boyish appearance, a conservative haircut, and wore a drab blue suit made even drabber by very wide lapels and fabric-covered buttons. To Thaddeus, Liam always looked more like someone who taught PE at a Catholic school than someone moving kilos of Mexican pot.

  “You know,” Liam said, “whenever I enter into any kind of transaction I always take the time to go through the variables. I know everything that could possibly go wrong in any situation. I don’t care if it’s personal or business, ordering a meal or buying ten ki’s of product. I don’t like surprises. Surprises don’t happen to me. But I let this one get away from me. I should h
ave never put her in that shitty hotel.” Liam paid his mother’s rent and her utilities, and made certain there was cash on hand for extras—beauty parlor appointments, nice clothes, the depression-fighting little luxuries. He had had tickets to New York waiting for her at the American Airlines desk at O’Hare, and a car and driver waiting for her at LaGuardia, whisking her to the Hotel Edison near Times Square. It was not a hotel Liam would have chosen. He was staying at the St. Regis, but Maureen had a sentimental attachment to the Edison. She had stayed there for a week when she was seventeen, when she daringly ran off to New York with a Midwestern boy who played saxophone and was on a mission to meet Louis Jordan.

  “Maybe we should look for her,” Thaddeus said.

  “Where?” Grace asked. “I knew she would do this. We shouldn’t have even invited her.”

  “Grace, come on,” Liam said. “She’s fine.”

  “She’s not fine, Liam. She’s never been fine. She’s like a snail crawling around leaving her ooze on everything she touches.”

  There was a brief knock on the door and Libby walked in. “I think we should proceed with the ceremony,” she said, in a nervous whisper. “I don’t know what you think is going on out there. But those two waiters? They’re very, very angry. They’re sitting around watching sports on the TV and making rude remarks about the guests.”

  “Great. We still have to wait for her mother,” Thaddeus said.

  “It’s almost an hour already. People are getting restless.” She looked at her watch, and then her gaze locked onto Thaddeus. Sometimes when his mother looked at him, it felt like the captain from an enemy vessel had just boarded his ship to dictate the terms of surrender.

  Liam contrived to leave the bedroom as quickly as possible, as if he was visiting Grace and Thaddeus in a hospital and did not want to overwhelm them. “I’ll keep an eye out for Maureen,” he said, over his shoulder.

  “It’s a wedding,” Libby said. “It can’t wait forever.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Thaddeus said. “There’s food out there, drink, and let’s not forget the joy of good friends being together for an afternoon of unparalleled conviviality.” He put his hand over his heart and smiled with no small measure of desperation.

  “You joke around too much,” Libby said. “You really do.”

  “Do I? Nietzsche said a joke is the death of an emotion.”

  “Since when did Nietzsche know his ass from a hole in the ground?” asked Libby.

  “He had insights,” Thaddeus said. “Anyhow, maybe he didn’t say joke. Maybe he said wit. At any rate, I have plenty of emotions. I can afford to kill a few. It’s like thinning out a row of lettuce.”

  “Who told you about lettuce? What are you now? A kulak?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the death of an emotion,” Thaddeus said. “Maybe Nietzsche said epitaph. In which case, I am like one big obituary page.”

  “I’m going to look for her,” Grace said.

  “Have you called the police?” Libby asked.

  “What are the cops going to do?” Grace asked, hoping her tone wasn’t conveying the annoyance she felt.

  “Find her, it’s their job,” answered Libby.

  “Let’s go, let’s just fucking find her,” said Thaddeus. He rose from the end of the bed, put his hand out to Grace, but she rose without accepting his assistance, or moral support, or ironic chivalry, or whatever it was he had offered her.

  Grace and Thaddeus announced their intentions to the guests, and it touched them that everyone wanted to help. They watched with gratitude as people shrugged back into wet coats, pulled on boots. Even under cover of snow, Manhattan was essentially a grid, and searchers were sent in pairs north and south on the avenues, while other pairs went east and west on the narrower, less traveled streets. The north-south searchers were to cover the territory from Forty-Seventh Street to Houston Street, while the east-west crew was to cover from Eighth Avenue to Second Avenue, except for Abernathy, who would zip around on skis, guided by instinct. Kip was to stay home, in case Maureen arrived on her own or Linda Ronstadt showed up. The two E.F. Hutton waiters were in the section of the loft where Kip had set up his largest Sony Trinitron, watching a soccer match, Costa Rica versus Argentina. Kip had a jar filled with change and he gave each person several dimes, with the instruction to call in every fifteen minutes or so to see if Maureen had been found or had strolled in on her own. No one dared worry aloud. A kind of antic spirit prevailed, as if this was all a part of the wedding day, a game they might all play, a scavenger hunt—the first one to find Maureen Cornell wins!

  In the lobby, Grace and Thaddeus stood for an extra few moments at the door leading to the street, like uncertain swimmers at the lip of a diving board. The street before them had been plowed, but the sidewalks were matters of conjecture.

  The wind swirled the snow from the ground up.

  “Well, there goes my new dress,” Grace said.

  “We can still put it in one of those plastic garment bags and save it for our daughter to be married in,” said Thaddeus.

  Grace was so far from being amused, she didn’t bother punching his arm. She made a little squeak of distress each time she took another step in the snow. Their quadrant was Park Avenue South from Nineteenth Street to Thirtieth, east to Lexington, and Lexington back to Nineteenth Street. What had once been a kind of soft, magical snowfall was sterner now, sparser but swifter, with a stinging, depressing quality to it. It was just past two in the afternoon but the sky was the gray of discarded machinery. Some of the shopkeepers were out, trying to clear portions of the sidewalk. A well-built, Indian man in his fifties, wearing a ski jacket and earmuffs, shoveled a narrow path to his shoe store, perspiring mightily. He seemed on his way to heart failure, and when Thaddeus and Grace availed themselves of the cleared pavement only to walk past his store he glared at them, as if they had taken advantage of him.

  “I’m not surprised that my mother is wrecking this,” Grace said. “You see now why I could never be a mother? The word, honestly, the very word makes me crazy.”

  They stood on the corner of Twentieth and Park Avenue South. A massive mound of snow had accumulated and a middle-aged woman in a long coat and a brightly colored Peruvian wool cap watched with pleasure as her long-haired dachshund cavorted at the top of the drift, as if it had just scaled Everest.

  “I can carry you across the street, if you want,” Thaddeus said.

  “Why do we live here?” Grace wailed. She could feel slush packing itself into her instep. “This whole thing is fucked.”

  “This isn’t the only place it snows,” Thaddeus said. Since Nero’s, hardly a day went by without Grace expressing her unhappiness about their life in the city. His own feelings about New York weren’t all that different from hers, yet he often felt compelled to counter her arguments. True, they lived near the theaters and concert halls they couldn’t afford to attend, and near the publishers and art galleries who were all completely uninterested in them, and near the avant-garde bohemians whose sexual liberties and iffy grooming were far from the Astaire-like sophistication that Thaddeus thought was going to be the city’s dominant style, but for now they were stuck here and he wished she would make the best of it.

  “This fucking place,” she said. “I wish I was anywhere else.”

  “Come on, Grace, it’s our wedding day.”

  “Our wedding day,” she said, as if the three words described the height of absurdity. She took his arm. “I’m sorry. I’m in a horrible mood. She could be stoned somewhere. She could be with some fat, bald man she met at a bar.”

  “Why does everyone speak poorly about heavyset men who have experienced hair loss?”

  “Fuck you, Thaddeus, I’m serious.”

  “I know you are. But she’s not drunk, and she’s not having sex with Chef Boyardee.”

  “Rilly,” she said, forcing herself not to smile.

  A few determined taxi drivers made their way up and down the avenue, rear ends fishtailing, hands
clenched at two o’clock and ten on the steering wheel. You could see the whites of their eyes, their willingness to risk it all for another hour or two on the meter. Directly ahead of them, a man in a leather jacket and bright yellow boots stood holding a leash while his German shepherd diligently dug at a mound of snow that had been built up around a parking meter. The mound looked like one of those gigantic columns full of termites you see in pictures of Africa. The dog clawed the snow with his forepaws and shot it out under his shaggy gray-and-black torso and through his back legs. He seemed like a dog in a cartoon.

  “Busy boy, huh,” the man said, soliciting their goodwill. He had a dark narrow face, etched in suffering. Wiry dark hairs stood up from his eyebrows like antennae.

  “I can’t wait to see what he finds,” said Thaddeus.

  “He gets like this sometimes,” the man said. “Once he dug up a crucifix in Madison Square Park. It blew my mind. I almost converted.”

  “We’re looking for my mother,” Grace said. “And we’re very worried. It all seems so hopeless.”

  Thaddeus turned to look at her straight on. This called for more than just a sideways glance because he had never heard her voice so plain and uninflected, except in moments of the most exquisite intimacy, the times the words rose up from a place deep within her and managed to elude all the little baffles and spurs and roundabouts of personality, motive, and agenda.

  The man seemed not to have heard her—his attentions were occupied by the dog’s vocalizing, the highs and lows of it, from whines that were almost whistles to barks that were almost sonic booms, all accompanied by an ever more frantic digging.

  “Atlantis, take it easy, take it easy,” the man said. He approached the dog with the leash, ready to snap it onto its collar, but when he touched the dog it turned quickly, snarling, and the man snatched his hand away, almost losing his footing.

  “He must really be on the scent of something,” the man said, like the mother of a child having a tantrum in a food shop.