River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  No property had more directly a stake in this fight than Marino’s: the cement factory would be exactly across the river from Sequana. If its view was spoiled, the property could lose half its value. The curving driveway to Sequana was lined on either side by white birch that gleamed like swords in the angled afternoon sunlight. The house itself was modeled after Aspey House in London, with scrolled Roman columns, ochre stonework, and a melancholy air of officialdom. Arriving guests were directed by a couple of ruddy-faced teenagers to an adjacent field, where they were ferried back to the house four at a time in a golf cart driven by a local teen hired for the afternoon.

  “This is how we get around on studio lots, when I’m in California,” Thaddeus said. He said it mainly to amuse David and, possibly, Emma, but neither reacted. David was sensitive to the cold and his hands covered his face against the wind. Emma was on Grace’s lap, with her eyes closed.

  “Sounds like fun,” Grace said. “Zooming around in the nice weather.”

  “It’s the very best part of it,” Thaddeus said. But I’m always alone, he did not dare to add.

  When they were delivered to the front entrance, the driver gave each of them a blue-and-white campaign button that read Save Our River. Emma was asleep so Grace was carrying her, and David had been reabsorbed by the strange bright flat heartless world of the Game Boy. Thaddeus kept his hand on the boy’s shoulder as they entered the house, to remind David that he was part of humanity, and to demonstrate to Grace that he was not leaving child care solely to her.

  “I think the food will be a lot better here,” Thaddeus said as they mounted the stone steps and approached the tall, freshly painted front door. “Poor people have shitty food.” He’d meant it ironically, but his delivery was off and he wished he hadn’t said it.

  “I’m thinking drinks,” Grace said.

  “Nervous? Why?”

  She scowled, as if once again he had forgotten something they had been over and over. Marriage had a way of becoming a test you’d forgotten to study for.

  “One of my pieces?” she said, finding it unbearable to supply more information than that.

  “Oh, it’ll be fine. It’ll be great.”

  “Not to be cavalier about it or anything. Right?”

  “Grace. Your work is amazing. Truly amazing.” He was starting not to quite believe it—or was he losing all belief in himself and everything he said? Who was he seeing through: Grace the Artist, or Thaddeus the Good Man?

  In the foyer was a large print of an Annie Leibovitz photograph of Whoopi Goldberg soaking in a bathtub filled with milk. The party was already well under way. The sound of merry, well-lubricated voices, the smell of wood smoke, perfume, and gin. David managed to keep his eye on the electronic game even as he offered his arms one at a time to his father, who took off his outerwear. Emma’s face was slack, her lips parted.

  “Maybe we should take her home,” Grace said.

  “We’re here. It’ll be fine. We don’t want to miss the auction.”

  Hoisting Emma up so as to get a firmer purchase on her, Grace took Thaddeus’s arm with her free hand.

  “If everyone goes silent when my painting comes up, get the thing started. Okay?”

  It was the most vulnerable thing she’d said to him in months. Thaddeus felt a rush of tenderness, a gust of blind urgent humble abject love and in its wake Muriel’s hinting about Emma’s paternity was revealed as either a piece of insanity or sheer wickedness. That Grace and Jennings were fucking was beyond belief to him—how could people he cared so much about behave in such a hurtful way? And that his daughter was not biologically his was not only unlikely, it was patently absurd.

  “I keep meaning to ask you,” he said, taking Emma out of Grace’s arms. The little girl clicked into his contours like a Lego. “Do you spend time with Jennings and Muriel when I’m not around?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “She says she wishes we never gave the house to them.”

  “We didn’t. You did. And anyhow you gave it to Hat. Because of the accident.”

  He wasn’t sure why she said accident in such a bitter, mocking tone.

  “Well, Muriel wishes they weren’t there. I’ll tell you one thing. She loves her husband. She’s really devoted.”

  “I have dogs for that.”

  “Well, maybe devoted isn’t the right word.”

  “She’s such an idiot,” said Grace, in a tone that implied this was an issue that had been settled long ago.

  “Apparently the walls have lead . . .”

  “I know, I know. But isn’t that Muriel’s responsibility? Excuse me for being just a little fed up with Little Miss Yoga but all she does is complain.”

  “I never hear her complain,” Thaddeus said.

  “Yes, well, you’re never here, are you?”

  He laughed. “Well, I stepped right into that one, didn’t I?”

  THE APPETIZERS WERE MEDITERRANEAN, AND the drinks were like shortcuts to oblivion—pink ladies, made with particularly potent Dutch gin, and an extra-sweet brand of grenadine. Whoever mixed them must have been given instructions to get everyone attending the Greenwatch benefit loaded, as a way of stimulating reckless, extravagant, price-is-no-object bidding. It was not an idea without flaws. Some of the guests were rendered practically immobile by the drinks and others remained animated but distracted. In the ballroom where the auction was taking place, the guests seemed to be listing to one side, as if on a ferry crossing a stretch of rough water. The imaginative canapés were no match for the pink ladies. The pink ladies were not only strong, they were delicious. The catering-service workers, in their coal black trousers and ice white shirts, tiptoed devilishly around the room, refilling glasses. When Hal Marquette tried to cover his glass to prevent a refill, the waiter ended up sloshing pink lady on his ruddy knuckles and Longines watch.

  While Grace was putting Emma down in a guest bedroom on the second floor, Thaddeus wandered over to stand with Buddy Klein, Gene Woodard, and Pete Marino.

  “You look good, Buddy,” Thaddeus said. The old rocker had had a cardiac scare of some sort. He wouldn’t say exactly what had happened, but he was able to drive himself down to Columbia-Presbyterian, where he stayed for three days, attended to by his ex-wife and their daughter.

  “I feel good,” Buddy said, a little bit the way James Brown sang it.

  “Good. You really do. You look good.”

  “What about me?” said Marino.

  “You look good, too,” Thaddeus said. “Stunning. Hey there, Gene. I don’t want to leave you out of this. You, too, look ravishing.” In the end, their friendship had not survived Thaddeus and Grace buying Orkney. As far as he could figure it, Gene felt that their moving to Leyden was a kind of invasion. He can go fuck himself, was Grace’s final word on the subject of Gene Woodard. But I really like him, Thaddeus said, to which she only shook her head, as if he had confessed to being completely devoid of pride.

  “Hello there, Kaufman,” Gene said. He made a small smile that could have been friendly but could just as well have reflected some private thought or musing. Thaddeus could not help but admire the manners of the rich, their placid, basically easygoing way of dealing with friend and foe. Before moving to Leyden—well, actually, before meeting Gene Woodard—Thaddeus had a totally different sense of how people acted at the top of the food chain, a misconception based on the political and moral disapproval of those who had gotten more than their share. His family’s idea of a rich person was a dentist. In college, Thaddeus might have been casually acquainted with one or two people from privileged backgrounds, but on campus everyone seemed pretty much the same. And in all likelihood, really rich kids tended to avoid the University of Michigan, even if they themselves were from Michigan.

  “We should hang out sometime,” Thaddeus said to Gene. “I miss seeing you around.”

  “Good idea,” Woodard said. “We always think of you as being . . . away somewhere.” He gestured, a little wave into the unknown
. “Or perhaps donating a house to someone.”

  “Oh, you’re the one who did that?” Marino said.

  “A Whistler etching went for $9,200,” Buddy said, changing the subject.

  “I think it was a lithograph,” Marino said. “It was very small,” he added, as if to reassure.

  “I recently learned that that painting Whistler’s Mother wasn’t painted by Whistler, it was like by some friend of the family,” Thaddeus said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Gene Woodard said. “Who told you that?”

  Thaddeus shrugged. “Some fucking idiot in Hollywood, I guess.”

  “God, Kaufman,” Woodard said, shaking his head. “This calls for another drink.”

  “I used to see him all the time,” Thaddeus said, watching Gene wind his way through the crowd. “I don’t think he’s forgiven us for buying up here. I think he’s a gatekeeper.”

  “Don’t tell his gatekeeper that,” Buddy replied.

  The rows of red-and-black folding chairs were mainly empty. Most of the guests milled about the ballroom, their Sunday shoes clacking on the parquet floor, the tops of their heads lit by the chandelier that loomed so ponderously. Standing at the front of the room, on a platform originally built as a small stage for musicians, Burton Patty was conducting the auction, just as he did the first Saturday of every month from his barn on the edge of town, where he disposed of the worldly goods of people either on their way up or down. Patty’s face was as colorless and unlined as a bar of soap. His expression was impatient, rather unpleasant, and his movements were brusque. Not one for conversation, he seemed practically aphasic, except when running the numbers, when the words came out like bullets from a Gatling gun. His sleepy, frowning son, in his forties now, lumpy and unmarried, and serving a life sentence as his father’s assistant, was holding a painting of an unsaddled chestnut horse standing in front of a plowed field.

  Charles Vengris, standing behind Thaddeus, exclaimed, “Oh, that’s mine and it’s worth a great deal of money, everyone!” Thaddeus wondered what mine meant—had Vengris painted it himself or just donated something he owned? His mother had made a wise second marriage and was able to leave him some good furniture and a few interesting paintings, though not any cash money. Vengris was slight, not emphatically gendered, and did not own a house on or near the river. He taught dressage to the local girls and in the evenings he was available even at the very last minute for any decent dinner invitation.

  “I was supposed to be on at that great No-Nukes Concert at the Garden,” Buddy was saying. His cocktail glass was nearly empty, and he scanned the room looking for the girl with the pitcher of fresh fuel. “I was backstage, me, the whole band. But Springsteen ran long.”

  “I remember that,” Marino said.

  “And the Doobie Brothers wouldn’t get their asses off the stage.”

  “That I don’t remember,” Marino said. “But I never remember the Doobie Brothers.”

  “And now we’re here,” Buddy said. He wagged his empty glass over his head, as if ringing a bell.

  “It’s a bit different, I guess,” Thaddeus said. “Nuclear power plants that could kill a million people. And a cement factory that’s basically an eyesore.”

  “It’s a lot more than that,” Marino said. “The river is part of the American heritage. Do you really want to live in a world without natural beauty? And who are these assholes pushing for this thing—without a real environmental study? Do they even care about killing the Hudson?”

  “Supposedly the plant will mean four hundred new jobs,” Buddy said.

  “First of all,” Marino said, “who the fuck wants to work in a cement plant?”

  “I was asked to rewrite a remake of Lady in Cement,” Thaddeus interjected. Who the fuck wants to work in a cement plant? Had it really come to this? Was this the way the people in his life thought about the world?

  The bidding was anemic on Vengris’s bay horse, and it went for $130 to Lydia Bishop. Once that was disposed of, Burton Patty’s son Marshall made his way to the wall where the remaining artworks were on display. His movements were bearlike, his shoulders sloped down, his head swung back and forth. Yet as stunned and without will as he seemed, he did not hesitate to take down Grace’s painting, somehow knowing that it was next to go.

  Thaddeus was surprised she’d chosen the small oil she’d made of their son last year, a Renaissance-style portrait of David, frail and shirtless, his skin golden and lit from within. He was posed in front of Orkney like a Florentine princelet in front of a villa, and he held a shining chrome toy airplane—a sly reference to an old Blind Faith record jacket. Thaddeus thought this portrait of their son was somehow a family possession. Grace had countless paintings and drawings stored in her studio—why had she chosen to auction off one with such sentimental value? He wondered if he had somehow failed to sufficiently appreciate the painting, failed to communicate how beautiful it was, how fine the brushwork, how saturated the palette—fucking hell, it was awfully difficult for him to discuss painting.

  “What if nobody bids,” Grace whispered to him.

  “Then I will,” he said.

  “No! Please. Don’t. That would be worse.”

  “But you said . . .”

  “I don’t care what I said. Just don’t.”

  “Hey, Grace,” Buddy said, his grin crooked. “Where’d you come from?”

  “We were at the benefit for Horse and Candy’s little boy,” Grace said. “I thought we might see you there.”

  “That Redneck Festival at the Fellowship Hall?” Buddy said. “Man, when those monkeys get going, watch out.”

  “This I believe is an oil,” Burton Patty announced, pushing his rimless spectacles high onto his forehead, frowning elaborately. “Contemporary. Signed. Canvas, roughly eight inches by five inches. Ready-made frame—included.” He tapped the frame admiringly, as if at least that had some discernible value. “We’ll start at two hundred.” Patty’s son whispered to him. “Thank you. This is a local artist. Grace Cornwall.”

  “Cornell,” Thaddeus corrected, in a fairly strong voice, though Patty gave no sign of having heard.

  “Don’t,” Grace whispered.

  “Fuck him,” Thaddeus mouthed.

  “Two hundred, two hundred, bidding here bidding here two hundred two hundred. One fifty get up and go, one fifty.”

  “Seventy-five,” a wavering voice said from near the front of the room.

  “This is really unpleasant,” Grace said through clenched teeth.

  “Two hundred here,” said Buddy Klein. “Actually, make it three.”

  Thaddeus and Grace both knew that Klein had very little money on hand. In the past few months he had had the electricity turned off at his house for an entire week, and he’d sold a precious Martin guitar in order to pay his oil bill.

  Marino bid next, perhaps wanting Grace’s painting, though more likely in recognition of Buddy’s financial straits—it had been Marino who’d taken the Martin off Buddy’s hands.

  “Four hundred, four, four, four,” Patty nasally half-sang. Patty’s personal touch to the art of auctioneering was to point at the bidders with his left hand, moving his finger back and forth as if searching for the right person, the person who understood the value of what was being sold, and then moving his finger in a tight, rapid 360 degrees, to draw a circle around the bidder.

  Most of the people seemed not to be paying attention to the painting. They were visiting with one another, concentrating on the ancient Sunday business of getting ginned to the gills.

  “Four is standing, looking for four fifty, four fifty, four fifty, who’s going to get up, who’s going to go,” Patty chanted. He glanced at his son, who now paced left to right holding Grace’s canvas aloft.

  “Four once,” Patty said.

  “Four fifty,” Thaddeus called out.

  “Thaddeus!” Grace said in a furious whisper.

  “I can bid five hundred.” The voice came from one of the few people who were s
eated, Pierpont Davis, whose family was once prominent in Windsor County but who had lost his estate going short on Xerox shares. He lived now in New Jersey, in a split-level with aluminum siding and a riotous front yard overrun with valerian. He remained a frequent visitor to Leyden, prevailing upon old friends and pretending to be in the market for a place in the area, using up hours of Sawyer Halliday’s time, as the real estate agent had no recourse but to take Davis at his word. For today’s benefit he’d arrived half-crocked and the pink ladies were the coup de grace. He wore heavy charcoal and burgundy wool trousers, and a matching jacket with big leather buttons, and a bright white hairpiece that rested on his head like frosting on a cupcake. It was a toupee that was not expected to be taken very seriously. He was seated a couple of chairs away from David, who was hypnotized by his Game Boy and seemed to have no awareness of the existence of anything else, including himself.

  “Five hundred over here,” Patty said, pointing at Davis, and twirling his finger as if to circle a name.

  “Let him have it,” Grace whispered, grasping Thaddeus’s arm.

  “For five hundred dollars?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “These people are so cheap. And they talk about the Jews. The Jews are drunken sailors next to these tight-asses.”

  “Just let it go, okay?”

  Thaddeus drew in a deep breath. To silence himself he took a long swallow of his drink. “Motherfucker,” he muttered, holding the glass before him and gazing at it with the respect you afford a worthy opponent.