River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “We should go,” Thaddeus said to Grace.

  “Let’s see what he finds.”

  The man continued to try and get the leash hooked onto Atlantis’s collar, but after a couple of feints in the dog’s direction he decided to wait, and now the three of them stood in the snow waiting and waiting and waiting still more for the dog to finish its dig, and the longer they waited, with the temperature dropping and the gray in the sky steadily darkening, the more their own speculations about what scent might be driving Atlantis to such great effort steadily darkened as well, until they were all hoping that what the dog was after was merely garbage, and not some urban archaeology of a sterner sort—a severed head, a hand, an ear. At last, with a couple of violent shakes of his head, Atlantis yanked his prey out of the thick icy core of the mound.

  A leather glove. It was partially turned in on itself, but surmising from the color—maroon—and its smallness, it was a woman’s. Thaddeus laughed with relief and touched Grace’s elbow. “We should boogie on, reggae woman,” he said.

  She nodded, her face grave, her eyes fixed on the glove in the dog’s mouth. Atlantis shook it back and forth as if it were a small animal whose neck he was snapping.

  “I hate this city,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  They walked slowly, looking in front of them and on the other side of the street, hoping to spot Maureen.

  “I didn’t even have a chance to give you your wedding present,” Grace said, in a voice that suggested all was lost.

  Thaddeus was silent. No one had told him they were supposed to give each other something, as well.

  “You want to know what it is?”

  “Okay.”

  “A picture.”

  “A drawing?”

  “Yes. Remember that ring? The emerald? I found a photo of one just like it and I made a drawing.”

  “Meaning we’ll never be able to afford the real thing?”

  “Meaning that art is the real thing, or better. And that I am very very very very very very happy with what we have and who we are.”

  “I am, too, baby.”

  “But you wish we had the ring, too, right?”

  “All I want is to be happy, and for us to be happy. It’s the whole purpose of life.”

  “Happy.”

  “Yeah. A simple word. But it’s not so easily done. You have to seize it from the jaws of the Shit Monster. And once you have it you have to protect it.”

  “You want to give me happy?”

  “Of course.”

  “You want to give me the best present I could ever get? Give me your word. This is what I want, and it’s what I’ve always wanted. I want us to be each other’s main thing, and to know that whatever you say to me in the privacy of our marriage is fine. You’re always on my side, and I am always on yours. You will always keep my secrets and I will keep yours. I get it why married people can’t be called on to testify against each other in court. What we know about each other no one else knows. And we stand with each other against all others.”

  “Are the ‘others’ coming after us?”

  “I’m serious, Thaddeus.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m with you.”

  “So do you agree? Is that how you see it?”

  “I do.” He placed his hand over his heart. “I really do.”

  “I do, too,” Grace said.

  “So . . . are we married? May I kiss the bride?”

  Someone was calling out to Grace, a wind-raked call that turned her middle vowel into triplets. They both looked up and saw Lisa Kaplan, one of the women from the shared studio. Lisa wore a fuchsia wool coat, and her dark curly hair bubbled from her wool cap, like espresso boiling out of the pot. Of all of them in the studio, Lisa was the most forceful in her opinions on everything from art to diet.

  “Can I join your search party?” she said when she caught up to Grace and Thaddeus. “Either Jenny and Octavia ditched me or they went home.” She placed herself between them and linked her arms through theirs, though the sidewalk, where it had been shoveled at all, was still a narrow path and they could certainly not walk three abreast, or even two abreast. She unhooked herself from them and noticed the distraught expression on Grace’s face.

  “You okay, little Gracey?”

  Thaddeus knitted his brows. He did not much care for that “little Gracey,” the diminishment of it, turning his wife into something adorable and unserious, a tchotchke.

  “I’m okay,” Grace said. “Worried.”

  “Weddings,” said Lisa, rolling her abnormally large eyes, as if snowstorms and disappearing mothers were part of the tedious typicality of people getting married.

  More taxis were starting to brave their way north and south, and another snowplow was in sight, its front blade churning up waves of snow and salt. A slow-moving police car appeared, siren silent, flashers on.

  On Twenty-Third Street, they found a pay phone on the corner, bolted to the wall of a drugstore. The pharmacist was out, pouring rock salt from a bag, though the pavement had not yet been cleared and the pellets merely disappeared into the snow.

  “Is the phone working?” Thaddeus asked.

  The pharmacist said, “How in the living breathing motherfucking hell should I know?” before stomping back into his empty store.

  “What a pig,” said Lisa. “Pig!” she shouted at the closed door.

  Grace closed her eyes. This was the world her mother was wandering around in, lost and alone.

  Thaddeus dropped two dimes into the slot, ignoring the residue of some mysterious goo. He waited breathlessly for a moment—and there it was: a dial tone. He wished he had something other than his finger to put into the holes of the rotary dial, and as he was having the thought, Grace was already rummaging around in her purse and finding an eyebrow pencil, which she handed to him. “Oh my God,” he said, “how am I ever going to live without you?”

  Moments later, Kip answered the phone. “Wood here.”

  “Kip, it’s me.”

  “Hello, Me. Nice to hear your voice.”

  “Any word?”

  “She’s here.”

  “She is? Is she okay?”

  Grace covered her mouth with her icy hand.

  “She’s fine,” Kip said. “She’s getting relaxed. You better get back and close the deal.”

  “She’s fine,” Thaddeus said to Grace.

  “She’s with someone,” Kip said. “Wait. I’m seeing if this cord stretches into the bathroom.”

  “You can—”

  “Just wait, all right?” The sound of a door closing. “There. She’s with someone. This woman who found her on Thirtieth and Fifth and walked her over here.”

  “Thank God.”

  “What do you want me to do? Should we invite her to stay?”

  “Of course. She probably saved her life.”

  “She’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s actually pretty. Grace will age well.”

  Grace made an impatient gesture.

  “What’s going on?” Lisa asked.

  “The thing is,” Kip said, his voice lowering. “This woman. I think she might be homeless.”

  “All the more reason to let her stay.”

  “Yeah. Marry the girl, and do a good deed. Gives you the daily double, you lucky dog.”

  When Thaddeus hung up the phone, he put his arm around Grace.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “Kip says she looks beautiful.”

  On the way back to Kip’s apartment, Lisa said, “I never even asked you if you were going to keep your name.”

  “No, she’s changing her name to Linda,” Thaddeus said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Funny man,” said Lisa. “But are you?” She leaned closer to Grace, and her expression was serious, expectant.

  “Of course I am,” Grace said.

  “Well, I’m proud of you,” Lisa said.

  “I keep forgetting,” Thaddeus said to Lisa, “that you actually invented women’s liberation.�
��

  Now that Maureen had arrived, the fear Grace had been holding in check began to flood. Her breath was shallow, and smelled like pennies steeped in malt vinegar. Thaddeus pulled her close.

  A snarl of taxis moved slowly behind the snowplow that was clearing Park Avenue. The plow’s yellow lights were spinning. The cascades of snow arcing away from the blade looked like waves coming to shore in the moonlight.

  “Are you going to keep your share in the studio after this?” Lisa asked, when they reached Kip’s block.

  “Why wouldn’t she?” Thaddeus said, surprising even himself with the vehemence of his question.

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said, unperturbed by Thaddeus’s anger. “She might not need it, or want it. How would I know?”

  “Her work is amazing. It’s radical traditionalism. It makes you love the world. You might not get it, it’s out of step with all the mountains of bullshit out there. A bunch of little crappy things pasted onto cardboard. Sorry, Lisa, but you don’t even know how to paste right. Didn’t you learn that in third grade?”

  “I went to Yale, asshole.”

  “Get a refund.”

  Grace gave his hand a small secret squeeze. Thaddeus had been moaning for weeks about not being able to get her that old emerald ring from Gina’s Gems. For a while, she’d wondered if this was a cover story of some kind, and he had found a way to get it for her after all. But that was clearly impossible. She was prepared to give him something without receiving anything in return. But now she understood that right out here in the snow with their shoes soaked and their eyelashes frozen and their guests waiting for them and getting drunk, he’d come up with a wedding present for her after all.

  TO LIAM CORNELL/POSTE RESTANTE/CUERNAVACA, MEXICO

  March 19, 1979

  Dear Liam,

  If this letter reaches you it will give me new faith in the world. Me in Turkey, you in Mexico, all the eyes and hands and cars and planes that will have to pitch in and get this to you. I realize I am a provincial girl after all. This supersonic world doesn’t make sense to me. Thaddeus tells me I came up a bit short on the thank-yous when you gave us this trip, but you know I was scared shitless flying from Chicago to New York. And then you’re telling me I’m supposed to fly from New York all the way to Istanbul? With all that ocean, with sharks licking their chops waiting for me to fall in? But as soon as we sat in first class all my bad thoughts trotted off to the phobia graveyard. I felt so safe up there with all the vodka and the French wines. I had one terrifying moment during takeoff—the wheels made a noise when they folded up into the belly of the jet—but after that it was perfect. I firmly believe that if anything happens on one of those planes the first-class passengers are spared. I think that part of the cabin breaks off and has its own parachute. T kept singing this song from 1950, Istanbul, no longer Constantinople, but other than that it was all so perfect.

  I slept for twenty-one hours once we got here. Thaddeus was off sightseeing, kebabbing, and Grand Bazaaring his ass off, but the flight and the time change and the culture shock was too much for me. I totally conked out. The Pera Palace is totally out of sight. So dignified and judicious on the outside, like the Federal Reserve building in New York. As soon as the taxi dropped us here, I felt safe. Inside is amazing. Sort of a dusty old museum of past glories, sort of churchy, sort of mosquey, sort of gentleman’s club out of Sherlock Holmes. Our suite is huge and decorated like a really hip grandmother used to live here. But the best part is this: the day manager is this great guy named Galip. He’s over forty, frizzy black hair, except where he’s bald. Just for the hell of it I did a sketch of him, and when I showed it to him, it blew his mind, if I do say so myself. Next thing I know he’s insisting I show him more of my work, and it just so happens I have that Fabriano sketchbook you gave me, already half filled with drawings. Galip spends about five minutes on each drawing, I swear to God, sitting there in his linen suit, frowning like he’s trying to memorize the drawings. T walks in in the middle of all this, but I give him the shush sign and he gets it. When Galip finally looks up, the first thing he says is, “I see you use the best paper. That shows me you are a very serious artist.” I don’t tell him that most of my drawings were done on notebook paper. He thinks we’re rich, since we’re occupying a suite at his hotel and our baggage claim tickets say first class and we kept them on the handles of our suitcases—we are never taking those little beauties off! And the next thing he says is he wants to show them to his boss, who is the nephew of one of the owners, because they are looking for artwork to go in their lounge area and the lobby, too. He didn’t even care that none of the drawings were of Istanbul or anything about Turkey. He really just flipped out over the work. My work! T and I spend so much time talking about his work that it’s easy for me to sort of forget my own art. But this thing inside, this little tender invisible but always present thing that is the self that is me, I can feel it coming forward when I make my art and I can feel it disappearing when all the other shit takes over, stuff like the job, and relationships, even washing my hands or brushing my hair. And when someone—even a stranger with a voice that sounds like a bunch of flies buzzing in an empty jar, and whose English starts to wobble when he gets excited and he says things like one drawing makes him hear “vague music,” and another is “most happily laconic”—when that someone actually SEES what I am doing, and gives me positive vibes about it. Liam my dearer than dear wandering pirate brother—there is nothing like it in all the universe. My art is my soul, for what it’s worth. It’s my blood and my breath. The fact is, I have been given a lot of shit about my work—by those phony bastards at the Art Institute who couldn’t even draw so naturally they HAD to insist that drawing was passé, and Caroline Kovac, that girl who was such a careerist and made me feel like a dope, but whose voice haunts me even though she’s in California and I’m in New York, where the artists I meet think art is pasting a pubic hair onto an old copy of TV Guide. “This one is very erotic,” Galip said about my newest egg drawing—the one with the little crack on the side. T cleared his throat when he heard that. I felt the rivalry. Galip courting my innermost being and T trying to keep his grip on my shell. I know I sound terrible and like the bitch of all bitches, but the thought that my work might be hanging in this amazing hotel all the way in Istanbul is making me completely trip out with excitement. For the first time since meeting Thaddeus my life feels as if it’s about Me. And we all know how long that lasts! Maybe six hours. That night after dinner, T says to me, “Let’s have a kid!”

  Chapter 6

  Lights in the Trees

  JULY 19, 1980

  * * *

  HELP US TURN OUR NEW HOUSE IN TO A HOME

  Where:

  200 Riverview Road

  “Orkney”

  Leyden, New York

  6 P.M.–Midnight

  * * *

  JENNINGS WAS PLANNING TO QUIT HIS JOB AT WINDSOR Wheels. The cap he was required to wear was reason enough, but mainly the job was a waste of time—he was making more money cutting firewood, doing lawns, and helping his father around Orkney. And working for tips was against his nature, in his view just a step up from charity, a kind of begging, or being one of those street-corner kids down in the city who danced like crazy, doing leaps and splits and handstands and headstands and grinning like jack-o’-lanterns so some chump will drop a few coins in their cigar box. Before the Boyetts sold Orkney and limped off to Mexico, they emptied the place of their furniture and had a party to which they invited virtually everyone they knew. Jennings, Larry, and a couple of their friends had parked cars, and an old woman, one of the last to leave, pressed a quarter into Jennings’s hand when he delivered her car to her. “Here’s a little something for you, dear,” she said, rubbing her fingers against his hands, plucking at the lines of his palm as if they were zither strings, and Jennings let the quarter drop onto the stones of the driveway, and just walked away.

  This evening’s run was going to be his last. H
e drove to Windsor County Airport and idled the stretch limo at the curb. He was a little early and the plane from Chicago was a few minutes late. The old Lincoln was not in the best condition and he had to turn off the engine, or risk overheating. The car was stifling without the AC and Jennings waited outside, half-sitting on the hood, and chewing a stick of Big Red.

  His fare was Orkney’s new owner. Jennings had driven him down to the airport early this morning and the guy had tipped generously. Fifty percent, in fact. Jennings was glad for the money but it was weird—the guy was roughly Jennings’s age, a Jewish guy up from the city, without the slightest idea of what to do with his new acquired property. Could not mow a lawn decently, could barely change a lightbulb. He and his wife excited over the sight of a jackrabbit and transported to a virtual state of wonder over the deer—hint number one that Orkney’s long tradition of allowing certain select locals to hunt on the land was going to be a thing of the past. Maybe Hat knew, but Jennings had no idea where the new owners’ money came from. As best he could tell, it had come all at once, and there seemed to be a lot of it. Enough for a furniture-buying spree, enough for a BMW, and for a 50 percent tip. The wife was pregnant, and looked as far along as Muriel. Muriel had yet to say a word to the wife, to either of them. When she walked down to the river, she kept as far away as possible from the big house, wading through tall fields of purple loosestrife, her hands raised as if she were under arrest, the stalks chattering on either side of her like shuffled cards. You don’t have to be afraid of them, Jennings said to her. They’re no better than anyone else.

  Suddenly, Jennings noticed his fare coming out of the small airport lounge, and despite himself he quickly slid off the hood and stood soldier straight. He was required to wear an eight-point chauffeur’s cap, with a linty crown and scratched patent leather bill, but aside from that he was on his own—faded plaid shorts and salmon-colored flip-flops. The fare was carrying a small leather valise, and he looked tired, in some kind of disarray. He seemed to be looking for someone, though Jennings was standing right in front of him.