River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

“Well, maybe someday I will be worthy of it.”

  “You want to know a secret?” he said, his voice low.

  She knew what he was going to say. He was going to say he had fallen in love with her. No, that wouldn’t be it. He’d never say that. He might never have said anything like that his whole life. He was going to say something by which she could infer his feelings. He was going to say something along the lines of Sometimes I dream about you, too. He was going to say he’d never met anyone quite like her. He was going to ask her if she’d ever do a painting of him.

  “Promise not to tell anyone?” Jennings asked.

  “I promise,” she whispered.

  “I’m looking for extra work because Muriel’s going to have another baby,” he said.

  It was as if she had stepped off a ledge, felt nothing but air beneath her feet, and had one final second of consciousness before the fatal plunge. Grace gathered herself. Her strength was that she had never really expected to be happy. But still. She felt wounded, excluded. But why would she be wounded, and why excluded? Excluded from what? It made no sense, but there it was: the things you feel before you have a chance to think, and smooth everything over on a grinding wheel made of words.

  “Really? We might be having another kid, too,” she said, a lie not unlike one she’d told as an eleven-year-old girl in Eau Claire when her boyfriend confessed he had kissed Pamela Zeiring and she tried to preserve her dignity with an inscrutable smile, saying it was all right he’d kissed Pam, in fact it was sort of a relief because she’d been cheating, too.

  TO: LIAM CORNELL/NOSARA, COSTA RICA

  June 4, 1983

  Dearest Liam,

  Are you going to be there for a while? I want to see those monkeys, too. I want to get those fantastic massages. I want to swim in warm salty water. I think my problem is rich people. I know they’re everywhere, but up here in Brigadoon there’s not a lot of people so it just feels like rich bastards are EVERYWHERE. I like the poor ones. I think they might be the natural audience for the kind of art I make. Too bad they don’t go to galleries or even give a shit about the stupid art world.

  Liam, I am really unhappy. I hate money. I hate what it buys and what it can’t buy but thinks it can. I can feel myself turning into a hideous creature, the cold abandoned wife, the bored mother, the failed artist. Thaddeus is gone more than he’s here, which makes me insane and I end up wishing he was gone even more. Now he wants to buy an apartment in New York. He might not want to be here any more than I want him. I can sense his loneliness and restlessness. It’s like a smell, a bad smell. He’s going to leave me, or maybe I’ll leave him. But if I do, it’ll mainly be to get there first. I’m not going to be the one who gets dumped. Me as a single parent. Very scary indeed. T as a single parent, even on weekends? Terrifying. He’s more like his mother than he will ever know. Meanwhile, he’s wondering, Hey, I make all this money, I work all the time, how come no one appreciates me? He needs constant encouragement and applause. Last time he was home he wanted to do something I found a little distasteful and when I said, Hey, let’s not and say we did, he stormed out of our room, and I found him twenty minutes later in the west parlor sitting in the dark and crying his eyes out like someone just backed out of the driveway and ran over his cat.

  Liam! We’re trapped. If he stops working we’ll lose the house and be thrown into a little life with just each other for support, and we’ve already wrecked things so much we might not be able to survive that kind of change, but the longer we stay in this house and live this kind of life the more wrecked everything gets. Right now, if we had to give it up we’d have maybe a 50–50 chance of survival. So we hang on, because 50–50 is pretty scary if you’re talking about survival, but next year our odds of surviving a big downward swoop will be ever worse. Maybe this is all my fault. Maybe if I was as insanely busy as he was, and maybe if I made some money we’d be able to look each other in the eye. But I am making my art and he’s way across the house but I hear him anyhow, haw-hawing on the phone with his agent or pacing back and forth waiting for Robert Redford to call. Then he gets tired and I can feel his attention turning to me, like a mongoose that sees there’s still one chicken left, and he says in his weary woe-is-me voice, Let’s go to bed.

  When can David and I come down there? I’ll do all the cooking and it’s time for your nephew to get to know his cool uncle.

  Grace

  Chapter 9

  Raising Money for a Lost Cause

  AUGUST 13, 1984

  * * *

  NEW YORK CITY

  THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE NEW YORK ARTISTS’ COALITION

  A Cocktail Party for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro

  The next President and Vice President of the United States

  Donation 250 Dollars

  Cocktails, Nibbles

  And a Surprise Guest

  RSVP to the New York Artists’ Coalition 212–4______

  Hurry!

  * * *

  THADDEUS WONDERED IF THE GIRLS WERE OF DRINKING age. One thing seemed certain: they were Republicans. At least he thought they were. He’d overheard one of them saying something affectionate about Ronald Reagan. What had once been a punch line—that cipher becoming president—was about to become another four years. Whatever they were, the girls stirred his hunger for a human touch. They had peach lips and freckles, they wore black slacks and white button-down shirts. They had a way about them that made you think they were doing you a favor whenever they poured a drink. Maybe it was because they had to bartend a party in a sea of well-heeled liberals. Out there in the world, on the blazing-hot sex-drunk streets of New York, the girls might not be noticeable, but here in his seldom-used New York apartment, filled with media business types willing to spend two hundred bucks on gin and cheese, they were riveting in their pure insolent beauty.

  Thaddeus sidled next to his agent, Josh Zoller, who was being served an ironic gin and tonic. Zoller had just arrived from his summer house in Bridgehampton dressed in tennis shorts and a Polo shirt, with a pale blue sweater tied around his shoulders, though it was scorching hot outside. His thinning hair revealed a sunburned scalp, and his nose was peeling.

  “Rumor has it that you’re shopping around for a new agent,” Zoller said, wasting no time. Known for his directness, he took off like a helicopter, straight up and away.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Thaddeus asked.

  “You haven’t been talking to other agents?”

  “Hey, I don’t know who the fuck I’m talking to half the time.”

  “That’s weak, Thaddeus. It’s a small world. I hear things, you know.”

  “You hear rumors,” Thaddeus said.

  “Here’s the thing about rumors—most of the time they’re true. Don’t let your friendliness get you into trouble. You can’t like everybody and everyone can’t like you. Don’t be naive. These people are sniffing around because you’re currently making money. Sorry to be the voice of common sense here, but that’s how it is. Anyhow, where’s Grace?” Zoller frowned, contemplating the possibility that Thaddeus was not only a man who would deep-six his loyal agent, but who’d also ditch his own wife.

  “In dear old Leyden.” Thaddeus was going to elaborate about why—David was being difficult, or maybe David had a cold, or Grace was tired, or the nanny went back to El Salvador. But Grace simply didn’t feel like coming down to the city and didn’t give a damn about the election. She refused to see the importance of what was happening in the country, of how the Reagans had given greed a deviously benign face, of how unions were being crushed, and trees caused pollution. Even the Democrats nominating a woman for vice president failed to galvanize Grace. She could not get past her initial insight that Thaddeus offering their pied-à-terre for a Democratic fund-raiser was a career move on his part, or perhaps a way of proving to his parents and himself and to whoever else might be keeping score that all those absurd Hollywood paychecks hadn’t changed his values. He gave houses away and he ho
sted fund-raisers! What more could those scurrilous old Trots want of him?

  “I tried to interest her in a Mondale fund-raiser, but no such luck,” Thaddeus said. Oh Grace, Grace. Right now, even hearing someone say her name agitated Thaddeus. With every emotional inch she moved away from him, he longed for her more.

  “I think of this as a party for Geraldine Ferraro,” said a voice behind him, a woman’s voice. “I’m here for Gerry.”

  Thaddeus turned toward the voice, reminding himself to Stop smiling, goddamnit, for once in your life. The speaker was Ann Rosenzweig, who ran United Artists’ small New York office. Thaddeus was fond of her and didn’t know anyone who wasn’t, but she was, in terms of the movie business, strictly a dead letter, with authority to reject pitches and scripts, and none to accept them. She was dressed in a shimmering gray skirt and a white silk blouse. She had large, rather comical ears, which she emphasized with clunky, humorous earrings.

  “Honestly, Ann?” Thaddeus said. “I’m stoked about Ferraro. A woman vice president? It would be amazing.” He patted his chest, as if his heart was swelling. “If the money we make here tonight can help put a woman in the White House, then I will truly believe I have helped do something worthwhile in my lifetime.”

  He was surprised by how moved he was by his own expression of sentiment, since the Mondale candidacy was hopeless, and nominating a woman for vice president was a kind of Hail Mary pass. Mondale was a hack, but at least he was humane—a union guy who’d rather do the right thing than screw you over. The Reagan Republicans were different from the Republicans of Thaddeus’s childhood, the grocers and the small-town pharmacists, the biddies and the bigots and the Babbitts and the Buckleys. Though Reagan was elderly, the Republicans seemed suddenly young, a new breed who seemed to be working out, slimming down, catching up with the culture, having sex, getting high, while the Dems looked pudgy and exhausted, trudging around the convention center pumping their placards up and down like pistons in an engine running on fumes. One thing remained constant, though: the Republicans were the party of the rich. Yet wasn’t Thaddeus himself rather on the rich side of things? At least statistically? Didn’t he have a lot to show for himself, and a lot to lose? Did he really want inflation and higher taxes? Did he really want the government’s hand in his pocket? Did he want to start schlepping his own suitcase? Not out of liberal gallantry, but because there would be no one there to take it out of his hands.

  He ran his fingers through his hair. He was losing touch with what he believed about any given issue. Everything was confusing, verging on the freakish: on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and on the other other hand this and that. His life was a crash course in indeterminacy. Pages were written, pages were revised, pages were thrown away. You were hired, fired, promises made, promises broken. You were not supposed to complain, you were not even really supposed to notice.

  Ann was with a good-looking man with a Weimar haircut. He spoke languidly, his posture careless. “But Ferarro’s husband,” he said. “Isn’t everyone saying he’s mobbed up? John Zaccaro, aka Johnny Z?”

  “He’s a businessman,” Ann said. “And before that he was a Marine.”

  “Sounds like Michael Corleone,” Thaddeus said.

  Ann laughed and said, “You,” by which she could have meant You jerk or That was such a you thing to say.

  He was sorry he’d made the joke. “Don’t get me wrong.” It was a phrase he was using with increasing frequency. “I like her. She’s from Newburgh, not so far from where I live.”

  “Where you live?” Ann exclaimed. “Then what’s this?”

  “This is extra,” Thaddeus said.

  “Lucky you.” She gestured, encompassing the apartment—the second floor of a Federal town house on Horatio Street. With its whitewashed plaster, polished oak floors, practical furniture, and shallow hearth filled in the summer with eucalyptus branches.

  “Well, we’ll see how long it lasts.”

  A man in his forties, tall, balding, with seething eyebrows, a military posture, held a drink in one hand and a napkin filled with canapés in the other. He shoved the canapés into his jacket and extended his hand to Thaddeus.

  “This is your joint, right?” he said. “You’re Thaddeus Kaufman.”

  “Welcome. Thanks for coming.”

  “And you wrote Hostages, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I wrote it, yes.”

  “I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing a whole bunch of folks who worked on the set of your movie. Car parkers. Are you aware of any of this?”

  “Not really. It’s amazing how many jobs a movie can create, though. That’s sort of great.”

  “If the jobs are decent. If the jobs don’t strip a man of his most basic human dignity. My clients were hired to hold parking spots for production trailers. Their job was to sit in a car for five, ten, sometimes fifteen hours, so when the production needs the space it’s there for them. They just have to sit there. Pretty easy work, huh? Except they cannot leave the car. That’s the thing. Leave your car and you’re fired. So what happens when you’re holding a spot for a director or a movie star or some big shot? I’ll tell you. I have a client who lost three toes. Frostbite. I have clients who were relieving themselves in bottles and bags. And I’ve got two from El Salvador without papers and they are still waiting to be paid.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “So? Can you help us out?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you on set? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “And you didn’t know anything about it?”

  “How could I know?”

  “Yeah, how could you know? That’s what they all say.” The lawyer reached into his jacket and pulled out his card, handed it to Thaddeus. Thaddeus put it into his shirt pocket without looking at it.

  The five-room apartment normally looked neglected, but this evening it had an air of elegance, filled as it was with affluent Democrats. Curious to see if this party was going to be worth the effort, Thaddeus had called someone at the New York Artists’ Coalition, an organization for people in the local media business who wanted to pitch in on liberal causes, and under whose auspices this evening’s fund-raiser was being held, and asked how many people were expected. He’d been told that 105 people had RSVP’d yes, and at $250 a person that was a respectable haul, enough to pay for tens of thousands of leaflets, possibly enough to put one under every windshield wiper in the city. Who knew? Maybe Mondale could pull off a miracle . . .

  Suddenly a crash of cymbals, loud enough to be heard over the noise of the party. Startled, Thaddeus turned toward the noise. Kitchen. Kitchen? It took a few extra moments to realize what he had heard was the sound of many, many glasses shattering, to the accompanying rattle of a dropped tray.

  THE CRASH HAD MOMENTARILY CAST a haze of relative quiet over the party, but by the time Thaddeus reached the kitchen the cross talk and the laughter had resumed. Small, with only one window, the kitchen was separated from the rest of the apartment by a swinging door, and when Thaddeus pushed through, it hit the heel of Susan Fialkin from the New York Artists’ Coalition.

  “Sorry,” Thaddeus said.

  “Oh there you are,” Fialkin said. She was the Coalition’s sole staff member. Inefficient, harried, confrontational, and unkind, her employment was a mystery to Thaddeus.

  One of the bartenders was slouched against the sink. Her face was pale, and her eyes were bright red. Countless broken glasses were spread over the blue-and-white tiles—the wineglasses, bowl, stem, and foot, the cocktail glasses in great shards. Some of the broken glass had landed on the table, and possibly found its way onto the trays of hors d’oeuvres—they’d have to be disposed of. A stocky, impatient-looking looking man in his thirties, with a broad, Eastern European face and salt-and-pepper hair, was quietly berating the bartender, whose nerves were as shattered as the glasses she had dropped.r />
  “You can’t put too many on. How many times do I say this? Nine? Twenty?”

  “I didn’t,” the girl managed to say.

  “No?” her boss said, pointing to the floor.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?” Thaddeus asked. But she seemed not to have heard him. Her attention was completely in the grip of her boss, like an animal in a trap.

  “Okay,” Susan Fialkin said. “Let’s just get this cleaned up. We’ve got a lot of party to get through.” Turning toward Thaddeus, she asked, “Broom?”

  “Broom?” he asked.

  “And a dustpan. Something.”

  He thought for a moment. He was quite sure he had a broom and a dustpan, but he couldn’t say where they were. He noticed a narrow closet to the left of the refrigerator.

  “Did you look in there?” he asked.

  Evidently, the door had not been opened in some time; he had to give it a vigorous tug, and when it finally opened there was no broom inside, or anything else that would be of use. It was full of brown paper bags from D’Agostino, a nearby supermarket. Thaddeus remembered shopping at D’Agostino only a couple of times since purchasing the apartment. There was no way he could have accumulated so many shopping bags. They must have been left there by the previous owner, a U.N. translator named Lawrence Winnick, who was leaving New York after the death of his boyfriend from the “gay cancer.” Thaddeus had liked genial, soft-spoken Winnick, but now felt a twist of fury at him—what kind of person leaves a bunch of Dag bags stuffed in the closet?

  “No broom here,” Thaddeus said, closing the door, and then kneeing it shut even tighter.

  “We’re going to need something,” Fialkin said. She moved a chunk of glass with the toe of her tan shoe. She moved it an inch, and another inch, and then kicked it hard, sending it skittering across the floor.

  “What are you doing?” asked Thaddeus.

  “I’m standing in a kitchen with a man who doesn’t know where to find a broom in his own apartment.”