River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “You need some help with that?” Jennings asked, reaching for the suitcase.

  “Oh, it’s okay. I got it.”

  “Windsor Wheels at your service.” Merrily, Jennings rotated his hand away from his forehead. Motherfucker, he thought, but without rancor. He would never let another man carry his burden.

  Thaddeus opened and closed his hand, wiggled his fingers, as if to justify what he was about to do by implying he had been carrying the suitcase for miles.

  Okay, it had been only a few steps, and he was young and surely did not require any help carrying his own suitcase. But it had been a hellish day—up at 5:30 A.M., early flight to Chicago, taxi to the hospital, four hours in the land of the sick, the land of the moaning, the land of the overgrateful, the land of stink and the even worse smell to cover the stink. His father had had a heart attack, but it turned out to be basically okay (as heart attacks go) and as soon as the doctors said Sam was out of danger, Thaddeus got a taxi back to O’Hare. Had he eaten all day? Had he smiled? Had he moved his bowels? Memory failed.

  Thaddeus struggled to remember the driver’s name. Ah! Jennings. Jennings Stratton, Hat’s son. Son of Hat. Their inherited caretaker. In the giddy chaos of closing on the property, it hadn’t been clear that Orkney came with Hat, and Son of Hat as well, and Son of Hat’s lovely post-hippie girlfriend, who Thaddeus referred to as the Translucent One.

  “Hey, Jennings, do you mind if I run back in there and make a phone call?”

  Again that Ed McMahon gesture, the one in which he tells Johnny Carson, Your wish is my command. It reeked of carefree spirits, with a dash of contempt.

  There were three pay phones built into the wall near the baggage carousel. Thaddeus was starting to mourn phone booths. They’d had them at Michael Reese Hospital, where Sam Kaufman had been rushed after collapsing in the shower. The University of Chicago hospital was much closer but Libby would not hear of it—they had not set foot in the place since Hannah. Once he was installed, she called Thaddeus and less than twelve hours later he was there. There was no thought of the expense—those last-minute airline tickets! It was gratifying to Thaddeus to give this demonstration of his new reality—now that he had sold Hostages to Hollywood he was a man with a house, a man with land, a man who could be here or there or anywhere else he chose to be without fretting over money. He was, to himself, almost unrecognizable, and he hoped the same would hold true for his parents.

  The hospital had good old traditional Clark-Kent-changes-into-Superman phone booths with accordion doors, but here at the airport the phones were hung on the wall like urinals. Now, if only Grace would answer. She had become less responsive. In many ways. But with his child inside her how could he decently complain? He glanced at his watch. Seven o’clock. Grace was probably outside with their guests in the yard, or the garden, or the promontory, he wasn’t sure what to call it. The great outdoors. If the situation were reversed, and she had been suddenly called to Chicago, he would have known what time her plane was landing and he’d pick the phone up on the first ring.

  But the voice Thaddeus heard at the other end of the phone line was his own, intoning the outgoing message on their PhoneMate. It had taken him a while to become bored with clever greetings to callers, there were no more trumpet fanfares, Coltrane riffs, or five seconds of the Soul Stirrers; gone, too, were his funny, side-splitting Russian accent and his Walter Cronkite imitation. Now it was short and sweet: “You’re in Beep City.”

  “Hi. You there?” He gave her an extra moment. “Anyhow, I’m back. Everything’s under control at the hospital. I’m glad I went. He actually held my hand. And it was good for Mom, too. Having me there. Okay. It’s exactly seven minutes after seven. I will see your face by seven forty-five. Sorry you’re alone with all those people.”

  The other passengers on his flight had already left the airport, but the baggage carousel continued its creaky go-rounds. Back outside there was a smell of gasoline in the air, and the insect whine of a small plane racing down the runway, its engines torqued for takeoff. The driver—Jennings, Jennings, Jennings—stood outside the absurdly and unnecessarily voluminous limo, still holding the suitcase.

  “Home, James,” Thaddeus said, lifting his chin and brushing back his hair. The intention was to satirize some archetypal rich asshole, but he could feel the thud of it.

  Who the fuck is James? Jennings wondered.

  There were four rows of doors on either side of the limo; Jennings opened the second-to-last one for Thaddeus. Thaddeus sank into the oddly uncomfortable seat. The car smelled like a funeral parlor. An unpleasant buzzing noise came from the miniature fridge tucked between the door and the back of the next row of seats. It contained a bottle of white wine, a bowl of hard-cooked eggs, a pair of sunglasses, and a set of keys—the refrigerator apparently also served as a lost and found.

  The awkward limo made its way toward the bridge leading to the eastern, more affluent side of the river, as the first layer of darkness slowly mixed with the day’s blue sky. Suddenly, colors: peach and tan, purple and gold. In the river, swans paddled back and forth, back and forth, like tin targets in a shooting gallery. A rusted container ship sluiced toward the city, pulling a chevron of foam in its wake. A freight train moved slowly north, carrying its secret cargo of combustibles.

  “Hey, man, how’s your father doing?” Thaddeus called out.

  “He’s good, thanks.” Jennings looked for the reflection in the rearview mirror. “How about yours?”

  Thaddeus wondered if Jennings knew that Sam was ailing, or was he asking to be polite? Or—money created its own hypotheses—was the question posed to prove that the man at the wheel wearing the stupid little cap and the man in the backseat were on an equal footing? Thaddeus looked at his hand, curled in his lap, and replayed the moment he gave up his suitcase to the driver. He wondered if he would ever get used to it, or if he should. Wouldn’t getting used to it be the death of something? The severing of his connection to humanity? What was the cost of getting used to someone carrying your suitcase? Did your arm die a little? Or was it your heart?

  Jennings steered the car through a sudden turn, taken way too fast. The tires made their fugitive shriek, and Thaddeus struggled to regain his balance.

  Thaddeus had made the money and it was like winning the lottery, but to keep matters feeling somehow equal, he demurred to Grace’s wishes on how to spend it. She did not want to live in the city. She saw in Orkney a life of beauty. Subliminally, she felt a house with many rooms and extensive grounds was in her lineage. Liam kept promising her a full report on their ancestry, but it had yet to come. Perhaps he was withholding it, having searched in vain for anything grander than a clerk or a local magistrate dangling from a branch of the family tree. Nevertheless, Grace felt magically at home in the house the moment the real estate agent Sawyer Halliday led them in, sporting a walking stick, a tweed suit. Halliday advised them to move fast, and they surprised him with an all-cash offer. Following that, there were a couple of months dashing between Twenty-Third Street and Leyden, hauling books and papers, drawings, and whatever else was too fragile to entrust to the movers, particularly Grace’s drawings and the ultrasound picture of Little Nameless floating like a cashew in the amniotic sea.

  Tonight was their housewarming party, thrown on the advice of Gene Woodard. “We love parties around here,” he said. “And I truthfully do not believe it’s because people here have nothing better to do with their time. There’s a belief in celebration here, and hospitality. We may not be hip, but we’re hip hip hooray.”

  In a way, Orkney was theirs because of Gene. They had never really thought of (or heard of) Windsor County until Gene told Thaddeus stories about his family up in Leyden. Gene’s birthday party was where Thaddeus met Anahita, whose passionate story turned out to be his ticket to the dance. He’d banged out a script that circulated at the height of the hostage crisis in Tehran. It went out on a Friday, and the following Monday, Grace and Thaddeus spent an afternoon th
at turned into an evening that turned into a night sitting by the phone while Thaddeus’s newly acquired agent, originally thrilled and surprised that even one studio was interested in Hostages, took offers from four different studios, before a deal was struck at ten in the evening, New York time. Delirious, frightened, Thaddeus and Grace could not decide who to call. Certainly no one at the Collective, no one with whom Thaddeus played basketball, no one at Altman’s or Periodic. They knew what envy felt like, and they were free of their own now—why inflict it on someone else? Kip! Of course, Kip. But all they reached was his answering machine.

  They pondered the difference between success and money. Money gave you time enough to explore the limitations of money. And money reminded you that life is full of luck, both good and bad. Thaddeus did not want to become one of those people who believe they deserve everything they have gotten. Luck ruled, the dice were always rolling. Luck may be another word for God or Fate, signifying all we can’t otherwise explain. Even being born is a matter of luck, which Grace and Thaddeus had learned the hard way, Grace when she was curled next to him sobbing in a taxi on their way to Roosevelt Hospital, blood in her jeans and on her fingertips. Luck was a little Hannah devoured by fever. Luck was four-year-old Thaddeus keeping himself intact with a jar of peanut butter and sitcoms on the TV. And as luck would again have it, he wrote Hostages before Iranian students locked nearly a hundred American diplomats and soldiers into the U.S. embassy in Tehran, imprisoning them in an effort to prove the embassy was also an American spy outpost.

  Hostages had been begun in a post-Nero’s frenzy, a month after Thaddeus finished a comic thriller he called The Kindness of Stranglers, and the month before he wrote an adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, without legal authority or interest from anyone in the movie business, not even Josh Zoller, his agent, who was really an assistant who had been given the right to take on a few clients in lieu of a raise. The D. H. Lawrence adaptation updated the action to present-day Malibu, California. At first he’d made the crippling war Vietnam, but after Hostages sold he changed it to the conflict in the Persian Gulf, figuring the Middle East was now his sweet spot. Thaddeus had never been to Malibu, though he had been in Iran for several hours, thanks to Liam’s wedding gift of a trip to Turkey. It was their one honeymoon quarrel, when he and Grace took a day trip from Dogubayazit, Turkey, which Grace kept calling Dog Biscuit, and were driven in a taxi into Iran, where the women were covered from head to foot, and the men smiled at them with easygoing contempt, as if they were circus chimps, amusing and unclean.

  How could something so terrible as America’s humiliation by a cadre of fundamentalist Muslims bring them such excitement, such joy, such large amounts of money? As the contracts were signed, as the checks arrived and as they were deposited, and as Thaddeus and Grace quit their jobs, looked at real estate in the city and, at Grace’s insistence, looked at real estate along points north, the torment of the Americans continued in Tehran. Negotiations proved useless, a mere occasion for insult and mockery. International pressure put on the Iranians had fallen on ears presumably stuffed with scraps of the Koran, and, most shockingly, an attempt to rescue the hostages had led to a catastrophe of sand-wrecked helicopters and death, an announcement that the era of American supremacy was waning. By the time the U.S. helicopters were smoldering in the desert, Thaddeus was at work on the third draft of Hostages, this time under the twinkly tutelage of a jovial Canadian director whom the studio had chosen to supervise the rewrites. The Canadian, Neal Kosoff, sleek, evasive, with a half dozen irons in the fire, assured Thaddeus that he needn’t concern himself with the actual hostage crisis. Hostages was a political thriller, and, if it were to succeed, it would have no closer connection to the actual unfolding of events inside Iran than The Manchurian Candidate had to the actual Korean War. He was not to worry about news events, statements from the relatives of the captives, Republican attempts to gain an electoral advantage from the situation, or whatever Hail Mary passes President Carter might attempt as he watched his own political demise.

  “This is about a bunch of bad guys holding Dustin Hoffman captive,” the director had instructed Thaddeus. “Just think Dustin Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, and never mind about what’s going on in the real world.”

  GRACE TOOK A MOMENT TO stand by herself, her face aching from smiling. The guests were spread out over the grounds. So many people. Sawyer Halliday, the real estate agent who’d brokered their purchase of Orkney, was in a seersucker suit and a Panama hat. His mother, once a great beauty and now Sawyer’s constant companion, leaned heavily on her cane, and looked as if she had just tasted an iffy oyster. Grace and Thaddeus’s insurance agents were here, ginger-haired cousins bereft of eyebrows, smiley, liberally cologned (the only thing liberal about them), and so polite that it often seemed they might be kidding. The president of the local bank, who could not handle strong drink, was already in a daze, and stood with his arms folded over his chest, fingertips drumming on his biceps. Dave and Greg were there, the perpetually stoned housepainters, with their beautiful girlfriends who were their assistants. Who else? The owner of the health food store, her quipster husband; the owner of the bakery and her Down’s syndrome daughter; the girl from the cheese shop, who exuded a blissful dairyness; the nervous Polish woman who worked at the hardware store, dressed this evening as if for a polka contest, all were there, as were the owners of Leyden Liquors and Windsor Wines, bitter rivals who glared at each other like feuding brothers, while checking bottles of booze to see from whose store they had come. Oh, and not to forget the antique store owners, eight, nine, maybe ten of them—antique stores were where Thaddeus and Grace had done most of their shopping, once they realized the entirety of their own furniture would fill about 3 percent of their new house. “This will look as if it’s been there forever,” all of the antique store owners had said, no matter if the it was a Queen Anne sofa, a pair of painted andirons, or a Persian runner.

  The one person they actually knew in Leyden at first pretended that they did not exist. When Gene Woodard learned they had purchased Orkney he turned icy at the encroachment. Did he feel they did not deserve to be brushing their teeth and scratching their behinds in such a historic spot? Did he mourn the fact that now anyone with a sudden windfall could buy one of those river houses? Maybe Gene was simply busy, absorbed by other matters and could not find the time or the energy to invite them to dinner or to tea or even for a walk along the Hudson. It was painful for Thaddeus—he felt the rejection as a judgment that went straight to the core of him. Grace was merely offended. Not only was Woodard a snob but he was a jerk. Yet all was forgiven as soon as Gene arrived one afternoon, and when he suggested the party, both Thaddeus and Grace agreed to it at once. It was irresistible. And, besides that, if they were going to have a convivial life along the river, this was the price of admission.

  And since the party was basically his idea, Gene helped them with their invitations to the neighbors. What Gene considered the neighborhood was anything along the river, ten miles north, and ten miles south. Each house was formidable and some of great historical significance. Some sat at the top of long gated drives, where the grounds were tended like a park or cemetery, while others were merely large, with grounds seedy and overgrown. Gene, of course, knew everyone who lived along that watery corridor, and knew their family trees like a woodsman knows the forest. Here the wealthy begat biblically, every marriage had its round of births involving transfers of property and influence. And, oh, the stories, the scandals and the heartbreak, the ironies and the acts of sheer foolishness, the cruelty and the charity and the gradual slipping down as the cross-pollination of the powerful families followed a predictable course, from hybrid vigor to all manner of misfortune. And what was not undone by misfortune was undermined by the rise of new money and the prices that new money was prepared to pay. It had become a matter of honor to hold on to old family estates, and those who caved and sold out to people with no history in the area and no sense of stewardship
of the land or to the Windsor County way of life were considered weaklings, traitors—including the drug-addled Boyetts, who dumped Orkney on the market and decamped to Mexico as soon as those nobodies from nowhere plunked down the asking price.

  There was another category of human at the party—the people who were paid to be there. And here, too, Grace was out of her depth. Except for a housecleaner who started coming to their apartment after Hostages sold, she hadn’t any experience in hiring people. Even engaging a housecleaner in New York had something larky and self-effacing about it, since the cleaner was an actor who arrived on a unicycle, and who seemed to feel culturally and morally superior to them—she once heard him speaking on the telephone, saying something about the Sell-Out and the Sunday Painter, and was damn sure he was referring to them.

  When Thaddeus arrived at the party, Grace was standing by herself at the crest of their lawn, gazing west as the evening’s last burnt orange light hovered over the river. The crack in the Liberty Bell showed more mirth than her smile, a stop sign made of teeth. Thaddeus put his arm around her anyway and they stood on the patio, looking out at the crepuscular lawn sloping down to the river. Hat Stratton had mowed the lawns and patterned them with a roller, so the grass looked as if it was striped.

  “Sorry to have left you with all this,” Thaddeus murmured.

  “Couldn’t be helped. How’s your father?”

  “He’s okay. It’s good I went out there. Just to let them know that I am still clinging and obsequious, and will do anything for their love.”

  “Funny boy.”

  “And? You?”

  “Weird. Our first party in our first house,” Grace said, leaning her head on her husband’s shoulder.

  “I just hope no one goes inside and sees how unworthy we are to live in it,” Thaddeus said.