River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  HE DRIFTED TOWARD THE FRONT windows and for no particular reason looked down at the street below. There was a man below; he seemed elderly, leaned on a cane and shifted his shoulders, as if trying to establish his balance. On closer inspection, however, Thaddeus saw the man was probably in his thirties—but in rough shape, terrible health. His brown hair was thin, his posture stooped. It was—it must be—Leslie. Leslie had somehow tracked Thaddeus’s movements from the phone booth back to Horatio Street and right to this building. As Thaddeus had this thought the man below looked up, seemingly at the window at which Thaddeus stood, half dressed. Quickly, he moved from view, pressing himself against the wall, like an escaping convict avoiding the searchlight. He admonished himself to calm down. What would the harm be of inviting Leslie up for a drink, and to hear more about his sister and brother-in-law and that squash court? The lives of the obscenely rich were generally interesting in one way or another; you got to see the human animal released from the constraints of economy. Maybe Leslie needed money. Of course he did. Shoved way under the mattress, Thaddeus kept an envelope with fifteen or twenty hundred-dollar bills, per diem leftovers from trips to L.A. Why not give it all to Leslie, who obviously needed the cash a lot more than Thaddeus? The gesture might be misconstrued—money often spoke with a forked tongue!—but Thaddeus could finesse it. He’d go to the window and wave him up. Or maybe go down to the street, in case Leslie needed help mounting the stairs.

  Choreographing his movements so that at no point could he be seen, Thaddeus shut off the Betamax, the TV, the lamp. He collected his vodka glass, took it to the kitchen, placed it in the sink, and ran the hot water into it until he was engulfed in steam. The longer he stood there breathing in the hot moist air, the more he doubted that the man down on the street was actually Leslie. He turned off the faucet, picked up the glass, and put it quickly down again. It was scalding to the touch. He drifted toward the front windows, thinking he might go downstairs just to see who it was out there, but he thought better of it.

  He turned off the last of his apartment’s lights and went to bed, lest he change his mind again. Yet shortly after going to bed he had changed his mind, or at least had allowed it to shift. Had he fallen asleep? He was quite sure he hadn’t even closed his eyes.

  Naked now, he wound through his apartment’s darkness, somewhat unfamiliar with its topography. But the city’s persistent ambient light was enough for him to navigate safely to the window.

  He parted the blinds and looked down. The man had his back to Thaddeus now and was speaking to another nocturnal walker. A slender woman in shorts the color of a radioactive lemon—it was the Asian woman he had passed on the street. When? An hour ago? Two? Three? She reached behind her and from somewhere produced what appeared to be a Korean-language newspaper, its front-page pictographs suggesting disaster. How could such skimpy terry-cloth shorts have a back pocket large enough to carry that paper? The question crossed his mind, but attending to it was another matter altogether—it was like a shooting star seen through the corner of his eye. A moment later the man who might be Leslie and the woman who might be the Asian woman in neon shorts were joined by the man Thaddeus had glimpsed for a moment walking the two Airedales, only now he was without the dogs and carried a grocery bag filled with yucca, thick, silver-brown-white, jutting this way and that. Thaddeus had seen that yucca before, on the playing cards in a village on the border of Turkey and Iran. Five men in a café on the town square engrossed in a game whose rules or purpose were incomprehensible to Thaddeus—the men threw down their cards one at a time and every few rounds one of them would excitedly grab for whatever had been discarded and gather them up.

  He wanted to go down to further investigate this extraordinary situation, as mysterious as the memory of a scent, the lingering memory of the perfume that came off Grace that afternoon in the purloined hotel room, that stale thrillingly human aroma, tuberose, gardenia, perspiration. He scrambled into his clothes—pants no underwear, shoes no socks, his shirt fastened by only two buttons. He felt unsteady as he descended the seashell swirl of the staircase, gripping the railing. The phrase So many fish in the sea floated across his mind and he followed it into a kind of oblivion, as his soul left his body. He realized he was on his way to meet his sister, to meet Hannah, but he could not forget that such a thing was impossible. It was that time, three o’clock in the morning. Not at all the dark night of the soul. It was the soul’s magic hour, when memory and grief and desire shrugged off the shackles of logic and reason. Hannah would be there even if strictly speaking she was not. But at three in the morning no one is strictly speaking. At three everything is everywhere and it’s all at once. Time and its wormholes, and its parallel universes. Coming from afar, Thaddeus heard the wail of a siren, the whooping cry of a suffering world, a crucifix made of sound.

  Chapter 10

  Sightlines

  APRIL 15, 1989

  * * *

  DIGGIN’ DEEP FOR BRANDON

  Calling All Neighbors and Friends

  Join Us for a “Fun-Raiser” to Help the Reynolds Family Pay for Eye Surgery for Their Amazing Son Brandon

  Sunday 1 P.M. Lord’s Fellowship Church

  12 Vanderbilt Drive

  * * *

  * * *

  SAVE OUR RIVER

  Cocktails and Art for the Hudson

  Sequana 3 P.M.

  Auction Preview 2 P.M.

  * * *

  HARD, UNYIELDING, AND GRAY, THE SKY WAS LIKE A PLASTER wall waiting for its color. Thaddeus and Grace drove away from their house, up the driveway, and as far as the eye could see, the pasture was covered in snow. But it was not a smooth cover; the snow had been perforated clear up to the horizon by the slender hooves of hungry foraging deer, ten thousand holes. The tops of the bare trees swayed back and forth, searching for spring.

  It felt very good to be home. The human presence of his family. The children with their sweet scalps and unclouded eyes, and weird little personalities. And Grace, even moody, even withdrawn, was still Grace. He was used to the idea that their courtship might never end and that the moment when she might have become unalterably his might never come or had already passed, and that he would always be in essence chasing after her, like a man who has missed his bus and now must trot behind it to the end of the route, which in his case was the end of time.

  Thaddeus had arrived from London the previous afternoon, and had tried to talk to Grace about his experience with Stanley Kubrick, but Grace seemed not to want to hear a thing about it. Her own attitude toward Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Kubrick had shown enough interest in to justify Thaddeus running off to London to discuss it with him, seemed to have soured, and now she thought his treatment was lurid, the source material overrated, Oliver Mellors a desk-bound asthmatic’s idea of a workingman. She wanted Thaddeus to abandon the project, and from time to time she urged him to do so. But Chatterley was a dying project anyhow. Whatever enthusiasm Kubrick himself had for the script had faded by the time Thaddeus was in London. The weekend together was consumed by Kubrick’s complaints about agents and executives, as if Thaddeus himself was an ambassador from Hollywood, rather than a fellow artist hoping to turn the system to his own advantage. That really had been the most painful part of the wasted trip—Kubrick’s treating him as if he were a hack, some kind of scavenger bird, a squawking hopping gull hoping only to get his beak wet in the rotting carcass of a once-noble art.

  When Thaddeus finally made it back to Orkney, all he wanted to do was fling himself into Grace’s arms and somehow be reassured by her. But it wasn’t to be. She was furious with both of the kids and he could deduce from her fleeting kiss that she had been drinking.

  He had hurried back, hoping to somehow please Grace with the promptness of his return. Last autumn, Grace said he was away from Orkney half the time, which Thaddeus suspected was an exaggeration, but when he went through his calendars for the past couple of years, he saw that he had been away an average of 135 days a yea
r. The majority of the days had been in Los Angeles, pitching ideas, meeting with producers and directors, sometimes living at the Four Seasons, or the Mondrian while working on a script, engorging himself on expense account meals and spending an hour or two on the treadmill trying not to get fat. There was also some time spent on what he called “refreshing relationships,” which meant sharing a meal with a useful person with whom he had worked in the past, though these exercises in faux friendliness (faux on both sides) were generally worked into trips to L.A. that were already ongoing. Also added into the number of days away from Orkney was time spent on-set, though when he went through his calendars there were not as many of those days as he would have guessed. The only significant amount of time he had left Grace and the children was for the filming of Bread and Wine, based on the Ignazio Silone novel. Despite the novel’s theme of resistance to the rise of fascism, the producers hoped Thaddeus could bring some humor to the story and turn it into a real movie, rather than a well-meaning slog, just as he was able to find the absurdity and laughter in Hostages. The filming was in Italy, and the three weeks turned out to be five, which supplied much-needed replenishment of the Orkney Household Account, out of which they paid property taxes, school taxes (for schools they did not use), heat, repairs, land management, and general maintenance. But the havoc his long absence created! As (bad) luck would have it, David was suspended from his twee little school for pushing another little kid down the stairs—the boy was basically unhurt, but that was hardly the point. And Emma was going through a cavalcade of digestive issues. At the time, their nanny was a local girl named Judy Briggs, but Judy was all but useless at night because she was fearful and felt isolated on the property, and of limited use in the daylight because her driver’s license had been suspended for a year.

  Hoping to make it up to Grace, Thaddeus suggested she come to Italy, but the invitation only made her more upset. She said she had work to do, and when Thaddeus asked her—this was all taking place on a feeble transatlantic phone connection, full of ghostly whispers—what kind of work did she have that was so goddamned pressing, Grace began to shout at him, accusing him of not taking her seriously as an artist, and of turning her into a fucking housewife. Thaddeus, surprised by her reaction, as he thought she would be thrilled at the prospect of a first-class Italian holiday, and sorely disappointed because he had mentally worked out a perfect itinerary for them, and even had a couple of leads for child care so the two of them could be alone in the amazing tavernas and out-of-the-way little churches he had found, also lost his temper and suggested to Grace that her portraying herself as some put-upon oppressed exploited chained-to-the-sink wife was far from the truth, since she had help and hours and hours of free time and hours and hours after that of more free time, not to mention the countless other luxuries and, really, she ought to be ashamed of herself for whining about a life that most people would die for. You’re an asshole, she’d said, and hung up the phone, forcing him to redial, which in his out-of-the-way location in Umbria was an annoying, time-consuming process. But of course Grace knew it was him calling and didn’t answer, so he left his wounded, belligerent retort on the machine: “You’re a joke,” he said, and she left it there so she could play it for him when he got home. There it was, his awful unstable voice, ten thousand miles away, forty-eight hours in the past, but as present in Orkney’s teal-and-cream entrance hall as a dead squirrel wedged in the walls, slowly rotting away. It was three in the afternoon, winter, the sun already sinking, the black-and-white world of icy river and snowy mountains suddenly bright orange and dark blue, and that’s when he said it, he finally said it: It was all for you, you know. All for you. The money, this house, the space and the time and all you do is complain. You think I want to do this bullshit work? I gave up my own work so you could be an artist. That was bad enough, but then she said it, too, the thing that should not have been said, the thing that could not easily be taken back, but could only be forgiven, and that would not be easy, either. Your own work? Your own work was too hard for you and you couldn’t take the rejection. So don’t pretend you gave up some great thriving career as a real writer so you could take care of your family. You had no career and you were fucking ecstatic when you lucked into movies.

  “I’m surprised you want to go to these parties,” Grace said, as she drove slowly along their driveway. She had struggled over what to wear; the parties they were about to attend were vastly different. She had settled on a turquoise wool coat, black jeans, and a dark wool sweater. She was letting her hair grow; it was gathered in back by an elastic band and swept back off her high forehead.

  “Why surprised?” said Thaddeus. “Why would I let a beautiful woman go out unescorted?”

  “Thanks. But honestly? Sorry for saying this, but after a while being charming just creates distance. Charm is just so damned bourgeois.”

  “Well, I guess that makes me bourgeois.”

  “I guess we both are,” Grace said in a soft, regretful tone. “Not exactly the life we had in mind.”

  Their marriage seemed stale, maybe it was dying. Grace’s eyes rarely met his. Sometimes she looked away, sometimes she gazed over his shoulder. When she heard Thaddeus’s voice, she sighed. Last night, during sex, she was looking up at him, with a frightened but also amused expression, as if he were carrying on like a madman. Lately, when they made love he was somehow in the position of emoting for the both of them, groaning and calling out, and even once crying at the end.

  They were in her car, a Subaru station wagon, more suitable for country living than the BMW, especially in rough weather. Half consciously, he was running his hand back and forth along the side pocket on the passenger door, looking for clues that might reveal what she did in this car, where she went all those days and nights when he was away. There were secrets she kept from him. He could see it in her eyes, feel it in her body when they made love. Oh well. He didn’t begrudge Grace her secrets, surely he was not without secrets himself. We need our privacies, the hidden rooms where we can be alone.

  “I HATE MY PAINTING,” GRACE said, as she made her way up Orkney’s drive. “I hate all paintings. I hate art.”

  The children in the backseat appeared not to be paying attention, but you never knew.

  “Your painting’s great,” Thaddeus said.

  “You don’t even know which one is up for auction.”

  “They’re all great. And art’s great, too. I like art. It’s arty-ness I don’t like. And don’t even start me on artsy-fartsy.”

  David and Emma tittered in the backseat. So they were listening after all . . .

  “This is where I am supposed to laugh, right?” Grace said.

  “Worse things have happened,” said Thaddeus.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to Horse and Candy’s thing,” Grace said. “You’re not going to know anyone there.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “It’s not really your thing. More of a redneck crowd. Your basic white trash.”

  “Grace. First of all, I like poor people as much as you do, if not more. And isn’t it sort of racist to call people white trash? Doesn’t it sort of mean that there are white people who don’t deserve to be grouped with the real supposedly excellent white people? White people who are so screwed up they may as well be black?”

  “Oh, now you’re going to lecture me? After flying first class and tooling around in limos?”

  “First of all, I just flew coach.”

  “Oh my God, you poor thing. I had no idea!”

  Thaddeus swatted the air, signifying his intention to let the matter drop. “I’m glad we can help Horse and Candy,” he said. “And I’m sure I’ll know people there. Jennings and Muriel? Aren’t they going?”

  Grace did not confirm or deny. The most excitable, and tormented part of herself wanted to say, Don’t say his name! She was out of her psychological depth and she knew it. There were people who could adjust rather easily to the double bookkeeping of infidelity, but she was
not one of them. Constant fear of detection coursed through her night and day like a horrible drug she had swallowed by accident. What did Jennings think about what they were doing? How did he reckon with it? She had no idea; they never spoke of it. The conspiratorial whispers that bind illicit lovers to each other were absent between them.

  She slowed the car where the driveway dipped and ice tended to gather.

  “I just assumed they’d be there,” Thaddeus persisted. “They’re close with the Reynoldses.”

  “Jennings and Horse are friends. Muriel and Candy don’t get along—Candy thinks Muriel is a hippie.”

  “And I suppose Jennings slept with her somewhere along the way.”

  A sudden silence came over the backseat. Grace checked the rearview mirror; the children were staring at the backs of their parents’ heads.

  “No. Candy’s really religious.” A trickle of sweat went down her side. She thought it would be best to smile.

  “We’ll never really be a part of it,” Thaddeus said. “The money is like barbed wire. And of course the local gentry hate us, too. We’re too . . . I don’t know. Too something. They can smell the difference.”

  “So do you wish you were poor?” Grace said. “Who are you kidding?” She heard the tone in her voice. “Sorry,” she said. Sometimes she was appalled by her own moods. Her temper was a little snappish dog dozing in her lap. The slightest provocation.