River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  THE SHADOWS FROM THE LEAVES OF THE OVERHANGING willow trees and California sycamore descended upon the windshield, landing silently on the glass and disappearing at the next curve. The sunlight poured through the driver’s-side window, illuminating Neal Kosoff’s tangerine hair, his freckled scalp, the screw heads on the hinges of his eyeglasses, the bulbous tip of his nose, the crown of his Cartier watch. Somewhere along the way, in Kosoff’s journey from his childhood in Toronto as a sickly boy endlessly at play with his toy soldiers, to university in London, to a lucky entrance into the theater world, to his first film, his first Hollywood film, his first Hollywood hit, and his current position poised near the top of the B-list of directors, he had settled into a public persona almost entirely based on wit—or at least jocularity. Since picking Thaddeus up at the Four Seasons this morning, Kosoff had not stopped smiling—he smiled so much out here in California that the creases near his eyes were fish-belly white.

  “I guess you’ve heard this one,” Kosoff said to Thaddeus, stopping at a light on the all but deserted street. “A priest and a rabbi are sitting at a little café on Melrose and a boy walks by. Four years old, right? So the priest says, Ooh, I’d like to fuck that kid. Really? the rabbi says. Out of what?” Kosoff’s hand—pale and spotted like a freshwater fish—reached for the dark mahogany gear-shift nob. The hairs on his fingers bristled in the light, rigid red spears.

  “No, haven’t heard that one before,” said Thaddeus.

  “It’s not anti-Semitic,” Kosoff said.

  “Not particularly.”

  “I mean it sort of is, but the priest gets the worst of it. You can’t be anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. Quite a few Nazis managed.”

  For the first time this morning, Kosoff allowed his smile to disappear. It was a relief to see it go, like watching the owner finally take charge of his little yappy dog. “Aren’t you in a shit mood today.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Jet-lagged.”

  “I don’t get jet-lagged going east to west. It’s when I go home that I get sort of fucked up.”

  “That’s home for you,” Kosoff said, his smile restored.

  Coincidentally, Neal and Thaddeus were dressed similarly, as if they were a team, which, for today’s purposes, they more or less were. In blue blazers and light-colored trousers, and stiffly tasseled loafers, they were on their way to a birthday brunch that Arlene Epstein was having to celebrate her son’s twenty-seventh birthday. Arlene had secured the rights to The Strike, a novel by a young writer called Gary Shaiken about workers occupying the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1937, and for the past few weeks she had been holding court, talking to directors and writers, and by all accounts thoroughly enjoying her position as one who controlled a project whose fervency and good old-fashioned heart-on-the-sleeve progressive politics dozens of Hollywood players gravitated toward, as if the story of young workers risking life and limb to form the United Auto Workers had within it something decent and purifying and all those who participated in the telling would have their former idealism restored. Heretofore, Arlene had only coproduced a handful of cheap, rather broad comedies, and Kosoff barely knew her. Thaddeus had yet to meet Arlene and neither of them had met Craig, her son.

  “I get it,” Kosoff said, navigating the car around the sun-blasted curves of Coldwater Canyon Drive. “The connection between The Strike and Hostages. And I think she’s going to bring me on to direct. Gut feeling.”

  “Then what the fuck am I doing here?”

  “She brings me in, I bring you. But it’ll be easier if she meets you, maybe thinks it’s her idea.”

  “Wow, that’s some amazing reverse psychology you’ve got going, Neal.”

  “You are really in a mood.”

  “I’m too old to be charming.”

  “Never! Anyhow, she’s going to like you. Her family is like yours.”

  “Oh?”

  “Old Commies.”

  “My parents weren’t Communists. Trotskyists. Big difference.”

  Kosoff laughed merrily. “It’s like Munchkins.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean they’re both so famous.”

  As they approached Arlene’s house, Thaddeus powered his window down, suddenly desperate to breathe some actual air. The smell of the outdoors was sharp, piney, with something combustible in the weave of it, some stray element, or rogue compound turning the air into fuel for the apocalypse. Everything in L.A. felt unstable. It was a wonder the trees could stay rooted in the parched, sloping ground; one good shake and the whole expensive mess would go sliding down into the Los Angeles basin. The news was full of stories about environmental catastrophe by which the state’s ultimate end could be surmised. Weird objects washed up on the beaches. Just two nights ago a hundred swollen black tuxedos filled with water were spotted near Catalina, looking like the bodies of obese men, bobbing ten feet from the shore—and no one could say where they’d come from. Sudden tidal surges washed away fifty million dollars of real estate in less time than it took to say May I put you on hold? Yes, by all means, put everything on hold. Put that hole in the ozone on hold. Put those geologic squeaks and twitters along the shit-eating grin of the San Andreas fault on hold. Put those wildfires in the hills of Santa Monica on hold—was it there or Malibu that temperatures soared so that horses grazing in the pastures exploded from the heat? And by all means put on hold the sense of impending doom that seized Thaddeus the moment his plane touched the runway at LAX, the sense that here was a place that one day was going to blow up or burn down or be swallowed whole, and when it happened no one in all the world would be terribly surprised—sad, yes, horrified, naturally, but there would not be the slightest element of surprise. The city would become a vast screaming ward of suffering survivors and the great unanswerable question would follow them to their mass grave: What did they expect? How could they have built those multimillion-dollar houses where they could not stand? The city was like a display of Fabergé eggs set up on an escalator! Was it really worth all this for three hundred days of sunshine?

  As Neal guided the Benz into the circular driveway on Briarcrest, the sun beat against the long brown hood like a fiery hammer. A ring of vehicles lined the driveway—most of the guests for Arlene’s Sunday brunch had already arrived. There was a sporty red MG, a dune buggy painted Creamsicle orange, a white Rolls, a Vincent Black Shadow, and an old Mustang with a copperish filigree of rust all over the back bumper. Wearing baggy shorts and a sweat-stained maroon tank top, a slightly built Mexican yard worker was cleaning the dead matter out of the yew bushes with a rake in one hand and the nozzle of a leaf blower in the other.

  The house itself was modern, simple and white, and looked like a box from an expensive shoe store. Five broad cement steps led to the entrance. A glass double door offered a view straight through the foyer and out the back to the brick veranda and a view of the distant city, which today looked particularly foreboding beneath a motionless ring of pale brown pollution.

  Currently, Craig Epstein was living with his mother and her second husband, Bruce Hollander, the owner of a sports memorabilia shop in the Glendale Galleria. Now that Craig had bought (with his mother’s money) a controlling interest in a minor league baseball team out of Concord, New Hampshire, Hollander insisted upon relating to him as if they both were in the “sportsatainment business.” Upon rising that morning in his room at the Four Seasons, Thaddeus had wondered how attending a birthday brunch for Craig Epstein would be of any real use to him. True, transactions in the movie business were often a matter of relationships, but attending a birthday party for Craig Epstein was a bridge too far. And now, milling around Arlene and Hollander’s living room, with its expensive, uncomfortable modernist furniture, its white vases filled with Casablanca lilies, its white carpeting, its white tiles around a white brick hearth in which were stacked three picturesque white birch logs that would never be burned, Thaddeus
was certain he should be back in Leyden doing whatever could be done to spackle over the fissures that had destabilized his home. Or reading. Saul Bellow, maybe Seize the Day, one of the short ones. Or poetry! To his great surprise, it turned out Thaddeus was mad for poetry. He ought to have listened to his own internally murmured misgivings and refused Kosoff’s request to come out here and help woo Arlene. Thaddeus’s first thought had been his best thought (as Allen Ginsberg would have it). Allen Ginsberg! Now that would be a way to spend a Sunday, reading “Howl” or “Sunflower Sutra,” not here sipping on a mimosa that promised a splitting headache by midafternoon, and looking at the panoramic view of the ongoing catastrophe below. Where was Ginsberg anyhow? Probably in his walk-up on the Lower East Side. His tea brewing in the old kitchen, stacks of books everywhere like a poetry Stonehenge. His lover staring out the window, his fingers laced around the metal bars of the burglar gates, a square of sunlight on his cowboy shirt. Yes, yes, where was Ginsberg? But more to the point: where was Grace? Thaddeus checked his watch. One o’clock here in L.A., four back home. (Home!)

  “I notice you looking at your watch,” a voice said.

  Thaddeus looked up and the birthday boy was there in all his Weekend-with-Mom glory. Craig’s thick wavy brown hair was matted, he was unshaven, and he wore maroon-and-white-striped pajamas. He was wandering around while holding a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a spoon in the other. His pajama top had been misbuttoned and curls of his body hair were visible, like insulation in a house under construction, or demolition. Craig’s green eyes were far apart and sleepy, his nose was oily, and he smiled unpleasantly, as if he had heard something compromising about Thaddeus and was deciding whether or not to use it against him.

  “Thinking of my wife, figuring out what she might be doing,” Thaddeus said, staring at the peanut butter jar.

  “Aw,” Craig said, as if Thaddeus’s statement was an adorable photo of a kitten.

  “Well, happy birthday, Craig.”

  “Oh, fuck this,” Craig said. “Really. Fuck this with a chainsaw.”

  “The big two seven?”

  “Everything.” He widened his stance a bit, rotated his hip, trying to rearrange his genitals without actually reaching in.

  “Well, you don’t look a day over twenty-six,” Thaddeus said.

  The table was being prepared in the dining room and Arlene could be heard scolding one of her maids. The maid fortunate enough not to be in direct contact with Arlene circulated a tray filled with mini-quiches, moving clockwise, while a young Mexican male servant moved counterclockwise, with a pitcher of ice water in one hand and a pitcher of mimosas in the other.

  Even with the rights to The Strike to bait the trap, it wasn’t easy for Arlene to attract core Hollywood types to her son’s birthday party. Two of the guests were real estate agents, one was head of marketing for the Lakers and was clearly Hollander’s friend. A couple of lawyers, a couple of studio executives, an abnormally tall man in a Hawaiian shirt who had recently launched a self-help foundation called Yes, Indeed!, and Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, who lived nearby, and breezed in to wish Craig happy birthday, drop off a present, and depart.

  Standing to one side, dressed in a short black leather skirt, her bare legs emerging from lavender cowboy boots, her skin pale and dense as the meat of an apple, was Christine McNally, a fellow screenwriter. When Thaddeus’s gaze passed over her, she pointed at him, a gesture which of late had taken the place of the wave. She looked amused, as if she had caught him at something. She was Stanford educated, and in Hollywood she had assumed the role of resident intellectual, recommending books to actresses, escorting young directors to obscure performance spaces. Christine seemed out of her element in the daylight, and Thaddeus wondered what she was doing at Arlene’s. Perhaps she had come with another director or producer who hoped to get in on The Strike.

  “Why, of all the gin joints,” Christine said, sidling up to him. She was free with her hands, flirtatious but remote. Her bangs were cut Lulu style and her lipstick was dark brown. Christine seemed like one of those people born to be alone, self-sufficient, wary, cerebral, distant. Anyone who spent so much as a weekend with her would end up cramping her style.

  “Well, look at you,” he said.

  “What are you doing here anyhow, Mr. Thaddeus,” Christine said. She was from St. Louis; it was anyone’s guess whether her slight drawl was an affectation.

  “Fishing expedition. And thank you.”

  “For finding your presence here curious?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know how any of us got here,” Christine said. “Look at us, a thousand points of blight drinking mimosas on the San Andreas Fault. It’s all very mysterious.”

  “That’s funny,” Thaddeus said.

  “The thousand points of blight? I’ve been doing that joke since Bush first said it. Most people react the way you just did. They don’t laugh, they just say, That’s funny. Hollywood, right? Ever wonder how we got here?”

  “The original Hollywood guys came out here to avoid patent attorneys because they ripped something or other off Thomas Edison.”

  “Oh, Thomas Edison was such a pill.”

  “Was he?”

  “Sprockets,” Christine said.

  “Really?”

  “That’s what the early moguls pilfered from Edison. The little holes that ran along the edges of the negative? That allow a camera or a projector to advance the film along at an even clip? That was Edison’s and the movie guys stole it from him. Or so the story goes.”

  “And now our job,” Thaddeus said, “is to supply content for the sprockets to move along.”

  “Our main job is to not get kicked out of the Sun King’s court. To just keep milling around listening to what’s said and what’s not said and who’s up and who’s down, always hoping a little something comes our way. Courtiers, it’s one of my favorite words. It also means flatterer.”

  “I leave that to my director,” Thaddeus said.

  “Well then.”

  “He’s good at it.”

  “I think you could be good at it, too,” Christine said. She raised her eyebrows, smiled innocently.

  Thaddeus was momentarily stunned, but decided to overlook the insult, if indeed one had been intended. That was the trouble with quips and snappy dialogue. You never really knew what was intended. And it seemed everyone everywhere was just getting funnier and funnier—was it because people were consuming such massive doses of entertainment? One day, you wouldn’t be able to tell what anybody meant. Every conversation would be served with a side of canned laughter.

  “Who are you here with?” Thaddeus asked Christine.

  “I was supposed to meet Duncan Lee. He wanted to pick me up but I don’t much care for riding with someone else. And now he’s gone and stood me up.” She batted her long, heavily mascaraed eyelashes, the damsel in distress.

  The man with the mimosas approached them and they both held their glasses out while he filled them.

  “Hello, you two genius writers,” Arlene said, appearing it seemed from out of nowhere. “No fair keeping your brilliance all to yourselves. Circulate!” She had a young body, well-moistened and exercised. Today was for turquoise leggings and a Brooks Brothers white shirt and silver jewelry—she looked as if she might at any moment hoist herself up onto the lid of a baby grand and sing a Stephen Sondheim number.

  “I meant to ask you,” she said. “Are you still trying to get that Lady Chatterley thing set up?”

  “That’s on a back back burner,” Thaddeus said. “Basically not even in the kitchen.”

  Had she heard? The sight of her beloved son saying something to Hollander captured her attention. “Craig,” she called. “Get over here, okay?”

  “I’m going to show you something,” Arlene said to Thaddeus and Christine, as they waited for Craig to wind his way across the room. “Craig is a one-man focus group. My baby just knows what’s what.”

  “Wher
e’s your peanut butter, Craig?” Thaddeus asked, doing his best to sound good-natured.

  “I was talking to your husband,” Craig said, ignoring Thaddeus. “We were talking about baseball and then we were on Bull Durham.”

  “Ron Shelton,” Arlene said. “I love Ron. Ron makes me wet.”

  The remark, crude and shocking, hung in the air for a moment or two. Until Christine said, “Ron.”

  “Ron Shelton?” Craig exclaimed. “Wrong. It’s Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.”

  “Ronnie directed, baby, he’s the filmmaker,” Arlene said, with a delighted smile, as if Craig praising a movie without knowing who wrote and directed it was somehow endearing, like an eight-year-old who still cannot pronounce banana.

  “Yeah, but people pay to see Costner. And Sarandon,” Craig said.

  Arlene laughed and patted Craig’s face. “Look at this. Craig has his finger on the pulse.” She pointed at Thaddeus. “You should write something for Sarandon. A strong woman’s role.”

  “With a topless scene,” added Craig. He saw the look of consternation on Thaddeus’s face and said, “I’m kidding.”

  “Here’s my question,” Arlene said. She touched the corner of her mouth and Craig, like a base runner who knows the coach’s signals, cleaned the corners of his own mouth with the back of his hand. “What do you make of D. H. Lawrence?”

  “The real one or the movie?” Craig asked.

  “Either or both.” Her eyes shone with pure pleasure. She clasped her hands and the multitude of bracelets on her wrists tinkled like wind chimes.

  Thaddeus felt his nerves tightening, like a watch being wound too tightly. As a graduation present, his parents had given him a Swiss Army watch. It was a sturdy red-and-black thing, with a pleasantly pugnacious little face. It was a wind-up watch—neither of the Kaufmans approved of battery-run watches, believing they were a way of selling you a bunch of batteries. They also abhorred digital watches, feeling that the abandonment of the circular movement and its connection to the earth’s journey around the sun was an implied refutation of Copernicus, a capitulation to the dark churchy forces of reaction. However, the watch was not to be overwound, Sam Kaufman warned. You can’t wind it and wind it and think it’s going to last for the whole week. It needs to be wound moderately once every day. But, sure enough, the next day Thaddeus was caught overwinding the watch and the watch was frozen. What did I say to you when I gave this to you, Sam said, his voice not so much peeved as weary. I think you said congratulations, Thaddeus answered. Sam shook his head. I don’t know what to make of you, he said. That was more like it, the admission filled Thaddeus with a sour post-adolescent pride—until the age of posturing gave way to the age of pondering, and he realized that not understanding was a parental euphemism for not accepting. And not accepting was itself a euphemism for not particularly liking.