River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “I’m not even sure I have a broom, Susan. What is the big deal?”

  “Sweeping. How do things get swept?”

  “The housekeeper,” he said. He moved a little closer to her, wanting her to know that he was getting angrier. “Obviously.” He had donated the use of his apartment out of the goodness of his heart, and suddenly this mieskeit is treating him like a sociopath because he can’t locate a broom?

  “I’m sure you have a broom somewhere in this very beautiful apartment,” Fialkin said, holding her ground. “Or a mop? A mop would do.”

  “Susan, I’m sorry. I’m helpless, okay? I’m pathetic. I’ll look around. It’s not that big a place.”

  The other young bartender clattered through the door, carrying a broom; it seemed to Thaddeus that the dark green shaft and bright yellow head were much larger than what you’d find on an ordinary broom. In her other hand she carried a gleaming copper dustpan, also oversize.

  “Wow, those are some high-end cleaning implements,” Thaddeus said.

  The supervisor, who had, while Thaddeus and Susan discussed the broom, gone from berating the girl who’d dropped the glasses to discussing upcoming jobs with her, stepped forward and immediately began berating the second girl, even though she had somehow come up with the mysterious broom.

  “Well, I guess this is under control,” Thaddeus said to no one in particular, backing out of the kitchen, and resisting the temptation to ask a stranger where his broom closet was.

  But wasn’t that the whole purpose of success? he counseled himself. To not know these things?

  THE CATERING STAFF CONTINUED TO circulate hors d’oeuvres, but the bar was now self-serve. Thaddeus looked around his apartment. For the most part these were agents and assistants, producers, publicists. There were a few familiar faces. Jerzy Kosiński was there, thin and impeccable. Every few minutes, like a soldier blindly firing his rifle over the top of his foxhole, he raised a small camera over his head and snapped a picture.

  A woman from Governor Cuomo’s office addressed the guests, making a couple of jokes about the governor’s famous reluctance to spend a night away from Albany, and reminding them that “this upcoming election is perhaps the most important election of our lifetime.” She was an imposing dark woman in a sleeveless green dress. When she was finished she introduced Ed Asner. Stocky, balding, he had recently fallen; he had a black eye and a large bandage on his chin, and he leaned on a dark red cane.

  “I saw Michael Jackson doing that moonwalking thing of his and wanted to try it myself,” Asner explained, and glowed with pleasure when the line got a laugh, as if an old dear friend had wandered into the room. In his brief remarks, he seemed less interested in talking about Mondale than in going after Lee Iacocca, the auto exec whose book had been a bestseller all that year. “When auto execs get treated like rock and roll stars, you know a country is in trouble.” He went on to defend actors and other people in the creative community who got involved in politics, thumping the black rubber tip of his cane against the floor as he demolished a series of straw men who would want to deny entertainers their constitutional right to affect national policy. It was an odd argument, Thaddeus thought, since Mondale was in fact running against an actor.

  “Question?” a voice from the crowd called out, managing to pack that one word with an overflow of irony.

  It was Kip. Oh shit.

  “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” Kip asked.

  There were a few laughs, but mainly the room was uncomfortably quiet.

  “Who in God’s fuck are you?” Asner rumbled. His small dark eyes scanned the room, squinting as though he were looking past stage lights.

  “And I’m also curious about this whole taking a nothing day and making it all seem worthwhile,” Kip added. “Curious how that is achieved. What with all that’s going on.”

  Asner’s face reddened, making his fringe of cottony hair look all the whiter. There was something joyful and Christmassy about his coloring, though his expression was murderous. “We’re here because we care about our country,” Asner said. “We’re not here to fuck around like a bunch of children. This is a very important election and we’re here because we are tired—and ashamed of!—having thieves and murderers run our government. You want to play little piss-pot games? Go to the playground. You understand me?”

  Thaddeus wound his way through the tightly packed room and took Kip by the elbow. He hadn’t seen him in months—Kip had suddenly left E.F. Hutton and moved to Bangkok without saying good-bye, returning just that week to begin work at Paine Webber.

  “Kip, what are you doing? Are you drunk?”

  “I don’t think so. Why? Are you?” Kip asked, genially. He placed his hand gently on Thaddeus’s cheek.

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe I am.” He held a glass with a look that seemed to say, What are we going to do about this incorrigible troublemaker of an empty glass?

  “You need to be quiet,” Thaddeus said, momentarily destabilized by Kip’s touch, the warmth of it, the suddenness.

  “You’re so out of it, my friend,” Kip said. “Both of you in that stupid house in that ridiculous little town. You live in your own world and you have no fucking idea what’s going on.”

  Several of the guests standing closest to Thaddeus and Kip needed to register their disapproval of Kip’s remarks. One young man was practically shaking with rage. “Do you want four more years of Reagan?” he asked in a furious whisper. “Is that what you want?”

  “I think my question to Mr. Asner was legitimate,” Kip said, drawing himself up to his full height.

  “We’re trying to do some good here, Kip,” Thaddeus said, his teeth clenched. Asner had gone back to his speech, but the people close by seemed more interested in what Kip and Thaddeus were saying.

  “Oh please. It’s hopeless. It’s all hopeless. You’re such a . . .” Kip searched for a word to convey his contempt. “Do-gooder. And like all do-gooders, you’re selfish. But here’s a bulletin for you, old pal. The meek do not and will not inherit the earth. The meek are going to do what the meek have always done, which is eat shit and die.”

  “Kip. Please. What’s happening here?”

  Kip shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t mean to spoil the party.” He fixed Thaddeus with a furious stare. “A friend of mine is dying.”

  “Oh God. Who?”

  “No one you know.” For a moment, it looked as if he might touch Thaddeus’s face again, but instead he patted his shoulder dismissively. “Ergo, not your problem.”

  Meanwhile, Ed Asner concluded his remarks with a request that everyone join together for a verse of “Solidarity Forever.” The old union anthem borrowed the melody from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but few people present knew the words, so basically it was Asner singing by himself. He didn’t seem to mind, and when it was over he thrust his fist into the air. “Viva La Raza!”

  “Viva La Raza!” the crowd replied, and when Thaddeus looked around, Kip was gone.

  EVENTUALLY, EVERYONE LEFT, EXCEPT FOR the caterers. The two bartenders walked through carrying crates of steaming clean glasses down to the van. The girls looked tired and unself-conscious, shirts out, covering their sweet Republican derrieres. Thaddeus felt his heart beating despicably in his throat.

  The second girl out, the one who had dropped the tray of glasses, might have felt his gaze upon her, sensed his dubious intentions, and turned to glance at him, mainly as a way of confirming her instincts—she was still learning to protect herself from men. She hurried to catch up with her coworker and Thaddeus heard her say, I feel horrible. I forgot to take my medicine. A feeling of desolation washed over him.

  He went to the kitchen. The leftover booze was apparently for him. He poured a large dose of Stolichnaya. He raised his glass to commemorate the years he had been consigned to drink vodka with names like Prince Igor or Dudley’s. He had read an annoying piece in a magazine, claiming that in blind tastings a panel of experts rated
some of the cheap vodkas higher than the pricey ones, but Thaddeus did not believe it. Such findings contradicted his experience and his faith.

  How was he ever going to get through the rest of this night on his own?

  The phone rang, and he hurried to answer it. He had a premonition, which was really no more than a wish, that it was Grace. Grace to the rescue, calling to assume her rightful place at the center of his universe. She would be calling to convince him to drive home and promising to wait up for him. Hint, hint. Or perhaps she was about to tell him that Doris had agreed to spend the night with David and that Grace herself was just packing a bag and would be walking up the steps to the Horatio Street apartment in under two hours. Or perhaps she was just going to speak loads of lovely filth to him while he got himself off and she pretended to do the same.

  But the call was from Neal Kosoff. Thaddeus supposed the director was a friend, but was always aware that it’s called the movie business not the movie friendship, so you couldn’t be beguiled by the flattery, humor, and abundant charms of these people. Helping in this unsentimental education was his being replaced on Hostages by other writers (finally six of them, in rapid succession), while Kosoff, who he had originally thought of as an ally, and a kind of partner, sat idly by. Thaddeus assumed he would never hear from Kosoff after that, but these guys had no shame and Kosoff’s friendliness never abated. Not only was there that elaborate housewarming present in the person of Buddy Klein, but there were numerous requests for Thaddeus’s opinions and suggestions while Kosoff went through the dozen or so drafts that inexorably buried the work Thaddeus himself had done. When production on Hostages commenced, Kosoff occasionally called Thaddeus from the set, and when production was completed, Thaddeus was invited to Austin, Texas, for the wrap party. Then the film’s premiere at the Ziegfeld on Fifty-Fourth Street, where Thaddeus and Grace were seated in the row reserved for the writers and their plus ones, which Thaddeus feared was going to be a nightmarishly uncomfortable situation, assuming, as he did, that most of the other writers harbored the same resentments that burned within him. But the mood in the Writers’ Row was one of dark hilarity and cynical solidarity, in which their shared insignificance was a catalyst for camaraderie. When the character of the ambivalent Islamacist said, “I love many things about your country,” one of the writers called out from the darkness, “Hey, that’s my line,” which began a continual volley of tomfoolery from the writers, as if they were all rowdies in a high school auditorium. One writer called out her ownership of the line, “There’s not much time,” and another claimed “Step on it,” and even Thaddeus got into the act, calling out Mine! after Elliott Gould said, “Thanks a lot,” though Thaddeus worried that they were all committing career suicide, racing like lemmings off the edge of a riff.

  Kosoff was calling from his car, which added some drama. His calls from the car had a way of ending abruptly, and waves of static rolled through the connection as Kosoff free-associated about a script he and Thaddeus were working on about the bombing of the Marine headquarters in Beirut. He offered various names of actors who could play the young Marines, speculating, spit-balling, bullshitting. That was the key to success in the business—you had to continually tell yourself that your dreams were about to come true and that what you thought and said actually mattered. “What do you think of Steve Guttenberg?” Kosoff wanted to know.

  “As a Marine?” Thaddeus asked.

  “I like Kevin Bacon in this, too. Ellen Barkin as the girlfriend.”

  “What girlfriend?”

  “Terrible idea,” Kosoff said, laughing. “Just a thought. I mean if we have a stateside component. It could be good. What’s your availability look like right now?”

  “I’m working and I need work. I haven’t paid last year’s taxes yet. I’ve managed to become rich and broke.” He knew you weren’t supposed to say you needed work, but he had a theory that by admitting to weakness he might be suggesting hidden strength.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the feeling.”

  “Hey, Neal, this lawyer was here tonight and he’s running a case dealing with stuff that happened on the set of Hostages.”

  “Really? I’m not aware of anything. . . .” He might have been going into a canyon. Thaddeus waited for the crackling to stop.

  “A bunch of drivers? Apparently some of them got treated really badly.”

  “Wow. Good luck to them.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “How would I?”

  And with that he was gone, Kosoff vaporized without a word of warning. Thaddeus was sure that the affable director almost certainly made his important calls from a real telephone in his office, and filled the time of the commute between Pico Boulevard and Benedict Canyon with his second-tier calls.

  Why did Grace not call? And why was he sure that if he were to call her, all he would hear was his own voice on the answering machine? He understood that his success, for all the pleasures it had brought them, had separated them. He was suddenly celebrated, not by the people he had hoped to impress when coming to New York, not this imaginary tribunal of clever, basically progressive literary types, but by the movie folks, who were so good at flattery, who sent rock legends to your house to entertain at your party, who signed such big juicy checks and had them delivered to you by Federal Express. And in the meantime, there was Grace, making her exacting drawings with the unflagging devotion of a monk illuminating manuscripts, day after day, month after month, year after year.

  Had he become so absorbed in the titillating terrors of his unexpected life that he had forgotten to encourage her? What was he supposed to say? How do you discuss drawings and paintings? It did not come naturally; you had to study it. The conversation about visual art was generally conducted in a language he did not know, and to the extent that he was aware of it, it was a language he found pretentious and ridiculous, some weird mix of political jargon and obdurate philosophy. He did not know how to articulate what persuasive theory of art or reality Grace’s work illustrated, or if she was a formalist or an experimentalist. Well, no, he knew she was not an experimentalist, that much he knew—but could he say it? Was it a positive thing to say, or was it a knock? Or did it have no particular value, just like those all-white canvases he had seen on one or another of their gallery crawls, big white canvases he stared at to be polite and to appear engaged, and which in time began to strobe with colors, as his own mind, starved for something to do, projected prismatic flashes into the void. It wasn’t only Grace’s work that he lacked the vocabulary to discuss, and now he wished he had made the effort to learn the lingo. Yet he had resisted it, just as he resisted his parents’ arcane patois, refused to learn the difference between Communism, State Capitalism, and Bureaucratic Collectivism, or to admit that there even was a difference, or, frankly, to care. Even without the vocabulary, he ought to have been more vigilant about expressing how beautiful he found her work, how the verisimilitude of it, its photographic qualities, impressed the hell out of him, and how indifferent he was to the fact that the style she worked in tended to exclude her from the conversation among contemporary artists and gatekeepers. The last time he and Grace had been to a gallery—a freezing little box of a place on Prince Street, with a skunky smell in the air and a crack the went from one end of the concrete floor to the other—the work had seemed deliberately incompetent, stick figures with childish faces, and cutouts of the Jetsons and the Flintstones. What shit, Thaddeus whispered to Grace, resorting to layman’s terms because that’s how a man gets laid. When his lips touched her ear it was flaming hot, and when he stepped back to have a better look at her she seemed to be fighting back tears. It recalled to him how she had looked when he went after one of her studio mates on their wedding day—the look of adoration and trust in Grace, how it seemed as if the gate behind her eyes had swung open, and for a short while he was in her world. He had come to wonder if, as far as Grace was concerned, that was it, the finest moment of their entire relationship, and everythi
ng else, money, house, children, the thousand nights in each other’s arms, had all been basically placeholders while she waited for the return of the feeling she had in the snow on Park Avenue South, the feeling of being believed in.

  HE RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN to pour himself another Mondale-benefit vodka. The kitchen was cleaner than it was before the party. It was as if something was being covered up, a crime scene wiped down. He opened the refrigerator, and saw the caterers had left him two trays of leftovers, tightly sealed. He unwrapped one and ate a couple of dabs of curried chicken salad on water biscuits while waiting for Kosoff to call back.

  The malarial fevers of desire were proving resistant to distraction. He tried to think of someone to call. The night was young! Surely, there had to be someone out there who would want to meet him somewhere for a drink. Yet everyone seemed wrong—either too much time had passed since the last meeting, or there was too much disparity between their incomes. He hadn’t made that many friends in New York (or anywhere else, come to think of it). The friendships formed at B. Altman had not survived his leaving the job. His friendships with the Collective had not survived Hostages.

  He watched the end of a ball game on TV, feeling like a heel cheering for the Yankees after having spent his childhood despising them. But he was in New York now and part of survival was loving what was near you. Wasn’t it? And who was near him now? The guests gone, Grace a hundred miles north. He allowed his thoughts to drift toward the woman living directly above him on the third floor. Occasionally, while alone, he could hear her light little footsteps clicking out their Morse code: I’m here, I’m busy, I’m happy, I’m nervous, I’m sad, I’m here, I’m here.

  Her name was Jeelu Ramachandran. She was born in India, in Delhi. Her family moved to Troy, Michigan, when Jeelu was three years old; her father had a corporate job at X-Ray Industries. Like Thaddeus, Jeelu went to the University of Michigan and now she worked at Chemical Bank in New York, and that was about 50 percent of what he knew about her. The other half was comprised of little scraps of information he had gathered during their brief interactions—she liked baseball, she was allergic to cats, she was mad for John Travolta. She was not beautiful, or maybe she was, he kept changing his mind about that. Nor was she particularly friendly, but there were moments when a desire to simply touch her was so intense that it muddled his mind and made it difficult to believe she didn’t feel something like that, too.