“When did you visit?”
“Iran? Well, that’s the thing. Basically never. I mean I was there for an hour. On my honeymoon. The whole thing was made up?”
“You are a journalist?”
“Oh Jesus, no. Screenwriter. Maybe you saw it. Hostages?”
Mr. Hasseini gave no indication.
“I made up a country,” Thaddeus said. “But people took it for Iran. Because of the timing. I didn’t know much about it. I met this woman at a party. But maybe I did, you understand? Maybe we all know about what’s going on, a lot more than we realize. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Because: guess what? I fucked up at the party and now everyone is going to think I’m a maniac.”
Mr. Hasseini had the Sunday papers next to him, and he cautiously patted them, and pushed them farther back on the bench to guard against their flying off should he suddenly apply the brakes. Peeking out from below the papers was the handle of what looked like a billy club.
They were halfway to Sunset Boulevard now, and approaching a cleared lot where a house was under construction. The site was deserted, except for one large bulldozer, ochre and forlorn beneath the blazing sun.
“Can you stop?” Thaddeus cried out. “Please. I have to take a piss like a Tennessee racehorse.” He was sitting forward now and had his hand on the driver’s shoulder, which felt perfectly round and steely.
“You can’t do that here,” Mr. Hasseini said.
“I can do it outside or in the back of your cab.”
They were already past the construction site, but Mr. Hasseini pulled off to the side of the road. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on top of the newspapers, and stared straight ahead. He didn’t say okay, but he made no further objection, and Thaddeus scrambled out of the taxi, closed the door, and made a quick stiff walk back toward the empty lot. Okay okay okay, he counseled his bladder. Fifty feet to go, twenty-five. And when he was too far from Mr. Hasseini’s cab to catch up to it, the driver ditched him, a full-out, let-me-out-of-here, tire-squealing, dust-raising escape.
“Fine!” Thaddeus shouted. “You fucking idiot!”
He stood there for a few moments, amazed that someone was apparently afraid of him—fearful enough to forgo the fare. A car was approaching and Thaddeus thought about flagging it down and asking for a ride to Beverly Hills, though the act of hitchhiking to a luxury hotel seemed odd. There were a couple of women in their twenties in the car, the driver smoked and the passenger was brushing her hair. Neither gave the slightest indication of noticing Thaddeus’s presence. This is where the hero realizes he is dead, and has been for years. “Thank you for your compassion,” Thaddeus said to the bright red Mustang as it disappeared around the curve. Anyhow, he’d rather pee. He trudged through the building site. The ground had been ravaged, like a battlefield. It was all in huge weedy clumps, difficult to walk over. He stood behind the sad old bulldozer and at last began to relieve himself. At first, nothing came out. Maybe he’d held it in too long. Breathe. Breathe. At last: it came with a sudden hot twist, as if barbed. Okay, okay. Easy does it. He wanted his body to hear soft consoling words. His body had done nothing wrong. All it wanted was to be loved, and to have good food and wine, and a nice place to live, and—all right, there was this—enough on hand to be able to pay others to do the unpleasant work, someone to take the suitcase out of his hands after a long trip. Was that asking too much? Since when did wanting a bit of luxury constitute a fucking crime? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the goddamned country?
An old patch-eye bulldog was looking at him from across the lot, and as Thaddeus finished up the dog approached him. It seemed possible to Thaddeus that, given the day, he was now going to be bitten by a dog, but the dog stopped several feet away and stood there, its head down, its tail immobile, its ribs showing on the inhale and receding again when the dog breathed out. “You okay there, Spike?” Thaddeus said. The dog lifted its head and looked him over, but got no closer. It was not going to do him any harm, yet Thaddeus was of the distinct impression that the dog was telling him: you don’t belong here.
How many miles to the Four Seasons Hotel? Eight? Ten? The walk would do him good. Even in the pounding sun, the walk might clear his head. And it did. Around mile two he realized that in all likelihood he had ended his career. At mile three he decided that no matter what he would never tell Grace what he had done. Also around mile three he started to feel excited about what might be next for him—maybe journalism, as Mr. Hasseini had suggested, maybe that novel. Maybe something that wasn’t about writing. He wasn’t all that good at writing, it seemed to him, not when he compared what he was capable of to what he had studied in school, or the books his parents bought and sold. And he didn’t really enjoy writing. Well, maybe he enjoyed it, but he didn’t love it. Or maybe he did love it and it just didn’t love him back. Another unrequited love. One thing was certain and that was in the life to come he would be doing a great deal of walking because walking was amazing, walking focused the mind, walking was like meditation, only better, probably. Around mile four he was starting to see more cars on the road and suddenly without entirely meaning to he lifted his arm, whistled, and hailed a taxi to take him the rest of the way.
Chapter 12
What Was Buried
SEPTEMBER 30, 1990
* * *
YOU NAME IT!
Hat’s House, Sunday, 5:30
Help Us Name the New Business
* * *
PEEPS AROUND HERE LIKE PARTIES, THAT’S FOR SURE, BUT I’ll tell you this.” Thaddeus smacked his fist into his palm.
Grace winced a little at the forced folksiness of his tone, and especially his choice of words. Peeps? That’s for sure? Who was he pretending to be? The Farmer in the Fucking Dell? He’d been idle and underfoot for several weeks; they’d had more uninterrupted time with each other than they’d had in years. Even the spaciousness of Orkney had begun to feel cramped, and she wondered why he wasn’t working on anything. He seemed obsessed with the news—this week it was mainly the upcoming unification of Germany. There was also Mayor Dinkins asking for the hire of more cops in New York, and Thaddeus wondering if former East German secret policemen might be working in Penn Station next year. He was often on the phone with his parents, talking about the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, which he kept saying was unthinkable but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It seemed as if he really wanted Communism to be over with, but it also made him weirdly nostalgic. My whole life has been about the Cold War, he declared. That was a new one to her; she would have said his whole life had been about feathering his own nest. She didn’t mention anything about how he was spending his time; it was not as if he asked about her work. She hadn’t been in her studio for months, and she doubted Thaddeus had even noticed.
“This is one party I’ve been really looking forward to,” he was saying to Jennings. “I’m just so proud of you, man. Really.”
Oh no. What right did Thaddeus have to pride? What role had he played in Jennings’s new venture? It was how he spoke to David, crazily praising the most mundane accomplishments, from finishing his breakfast cereal to cleaning his room to building a robot out of Legos. It struck Grace as ill-conceived on so many levels. The boy was already showing signs of social maladaptation and all this so-called positive feedback would only take him further and further out of himself, training him like a dog to look for the little treats and tidbits of parental praise. And saying you were proud of someone put you in the mix, where you did not belong. What right did Thaddeus or anyone else have to be proud of a kid making a robot out of Legos? You were actually taking or at least sharing ownership of the accomplishment by saying you were proud, as if you had something to do with it, either by brilliant parenting or passing on good genes. Grace understood that Thaddeus’s own childhood, where compliments were as infrequent as rainbows, was at the core of his incessant cheerleading for David. He was determined to situate himself as far as humanly possible from Libby and Sam’s wintr
y outpost, and Grace’s gentle suggestion that overpraising a child can be as destabilizing as underpraising struck him as merely contentious, or worse. She could practically smell the unspoken words on his breath, that she, being raised by a mother treating her own depression with gin, and a father photographing soft-core porn, was hardly in a position to offer theories of child rearing.
“Glad you could make it,” Jennings said. He was in a good mood, with a kind of cowboy swing to his voice. “Where are the kids?”
“Home,” said Thaddeus, narrowing his eyes.
Jennings took the platter from Grace, breathing in the aroma of the chicken, though it was completely sealed off by plastic wrap.
“I didn’t cook it,” Grace said.
“Nor I,” chimed Thaddeus. “But look at it, so black from being charred and so red from their secret sauce. It looks like a Gorky painting.”
Oh no, no no no and no, thought Grace. First of all, Arshile Gorky paintings were about as far from appetizing as you could get. Second—actually she ought to have put this first—why was he dropping the name of some painter to Jennings? What was he trying to prove?
And to make everything just a little worse, Thaddeus had been in town earlier to pick up the chicken and was approached by a couple of teenagers collecting names for a Save Our River petition, and they’d given him a blue-and-white campaign button in exchange for his signature. Grace thought for a moment that she might simply reach over and take the thing off his lapel before anyone else saw it. There was not a person here who would not resent that button. She loved the river—perhaps not with the same heritage-mad sense of ownership that animated some of the other folks whose houses lined its banks—but opposing the construction of a factory that promised to bring hundreds (or even dozens) of jobs to Leyden was a tricky business in a town where most folks would gladly and gratefully trade a stirring view of a waterway or a healthy habitat for fish for the ability to pay off their credit card debts, fix their roof, pay for tae kwon do lessons for their kids.
“Hey,” Grace said, quietly, knowing Thaddeus would hear her. He always heard her. He was exquisitely attuned to her voice. She pointed.
He touched his lapel, felt the button. “Ooops,” he said, and quickly took it off and dropped it into his pocket.
THE YELLOW HOUSE WAS NOT yet in Jennings’s name, but Hat was fading and it was just a matter of time. It was already the official address of the new business, and Jennings didn’t think to clear it with his father before inviting about twenty-five people to the house to share a meal and help him choose a name for his new venture. Provisionally, Jennings was calling it J&M Solutions, but he was hopeful that collectively they could all come up with something even better, though he was fond of the “Solutions.” Everything else about the venture was in place. He had hired two people to help with the work—his old friend Larry Sassone and Horse Reynolds’s younger brother Walter, who everyone called Woo-Woo. But he had yet to take in a dollar. In the meantime, money was leaving his account like air from a punctured tire. Not only did he have to write checks for Larry’s and Woo-Woo’s wages but he had to put up and feed them both over at the Red Roof in Springfield, Massachusetts, for five days and nights while they took the mandatory course in handling asbestos. From eight in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon, Jennings, Larry, and Woo-Woo sat in a classroom in the summer heat while a cyclone of information whirled around them, everything from making a job cost-effective to making sure you didn’t end up with cancer.
The state had its hand in his pocket already and he hadn’t even started work. Jennings was well on his way to loathing the government, which seemed to him devilishly designed to keep the lid on your aspirations. Everywhere you looked some pencil neck was telling you no. And even if you got through the forest of no’s, there was all that insurance, the workmen’s compensation you had to pay for—thousands and thousands of dollars. It was as if the only people who could afford to start a business were people who didn’t need money. Maybe Horse was right—the government was like an occupying army. All he wanted to do was put some bread on his table, and the government was right there, elbowing everyone else out of the way, licking its chops, waiting to get fed.
In fact, only some of his contracts were going to be for putting in asbestos; the majority would be for asbestos abatement, now that some panel of government experts had decided the stuff was bad for you. Jennings himself did not believe there was anything particularly hazardous about asbestos, if you took care installing it and didn’t allow it to deteriorate. But the beautiful thing was, there was money to be made in removing the stuff, and hauling it to specially designated landfills, and there was serious coin to be made in burying it, though that part of the operation was more or less locked up by the big dogs.
Even without the government doing whatever was in its power to keep him down, getting started cost money. Jennings needed Teflon suits, gigantic rolls of double-wall plastic, cartons and cartons of duct tape, at least one HEPA vac, and machinery to create a negative air chamber, essential to keeping floating microspecks of asbestos out of the lungs of the homeowner, though it was a virtual certainty that traces of the stuff would adhere to the workers. The teacher at the training seminar liked to joke about “the little lady” needing to wear a Hazmat suit when she did her husband’s laundry.
JENNINGS MANEUVERED THE OTHER DISHES on the table—the three-bean salad; ham salad; a copper-colored crockpot brimming with chili; an immense cherry pie with a lattice crust; a lasagna, slightly scorched—making room for the chicken. September light, a mix of bright sun and cooling air, entered the kitchen through its many mullioned windows. Here and there, small crystal globes hung from fishing line and each cast trembling swaths of yellow orange red green blue onto the walls. The radiant prismatic glow on the walls made Grace look away, as if they were somehow emanating from Muriel’s wounded soul.
“Wait until you taste it,” Thaddeus said. “It’s from Johnny Cake Ho.”
“The new place?” Jennings asked, glancing at Grace.
She knew what the glance meant. La di fucking da. Johnny Cake Ho was owned by a black couple in their late twenties, he from New York, she from Baton Rouge. One of the three new shops that had recently opened in Leyden, it was mainly a take-out business, selling at hefty prices homogenized versions of traditional Southern fare. It had taken the place of Hoffman Hobbies, which had been there for forty years until hobbies themselves became a thing of the past. It was all said in just a flicker of the eye. Jennings and Grace had come to understand each other through a system of small gestures, undetectable except to each other.
Horse Reynolds came into the kitchen, fanning himself with his paper plate. He wore black trousers, sharply creased, and a tight black T-shirt, against which his shoulders and biceps strained. Streaks of gray shot through his close-cropped hair.
“Hey, I saw you were wearing one of those stop-the-cement-plant buttons,” he said. “What did you do? Take it off?”
“I didn’t even know I had it on,” Thaddeus said.
“So you’re with the bigs?”
“Who are they?”
“Your friends all up and down the river.”
“I took it off. I didn’t even know I was wearing it.”
“What does that prove?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I see both sides. I don’t want the river fucked up, but I get it—people need jobs. But how many jobs are there really going to be? Some people say two hundred, other people say it’s more like twenty.”
“Maybe it won’t be two hundred new jobs,” Horse said. “But it’ll be a lot more than twenty. And the politicians we got up there who are supposed to be looking after our best interests, they’re so worried about what the New York Times might say—they’re useless.”
“It’s all really complicated.”
“There’s nothing complicated about needing a job. There’s nothing complicated about taking care of your family. By the way—did you s
ee one of your river buddies got his place trashed last night?”
“Really?” He didn’t feel like saying so, but Thaddeus had in fact heard about it. Hal Marquette had returned from Boston after a hernia operation and found several windows broken in his house, smashed through by cement blocks. While the building of the plant on the river was still being debated, most of the vandalism in the past couple of years involved its commodity: wet cement poured over lawns in the middle of the night, mailboxes filled with cement rubble, cement blocks dropped onto the hoods of cars, windows smashed. The lawn signs advertising one side or the other of the controversy had by now faded to illegibility, but the tempers of those who wanted the plant were as vivid as ever. Signs saying Cement=Jobs, had been replaced by homemade signs, such as Take Your View & Shove It, Don’t Let Them Pull Our Plants Down, and Windsor County Bass-Lovers, with a line going through the B, and a drawing of a Richie Rich type in shorts and sunglasses going fishing. Using as bait a worker holding a lunch pail.
“You didn’t hear?” Horse said. It was his nature combined with the habits learned from working in a prison—he simply never quite believed anyone. He always detected a bit of bullshit, the smell of a lie.
“No, I haven’t,” Thaddeus said. “But these things happen.”
“Sure. Always have. Up here, a lot of the people aren’t full-timers, so it’s easy pickings, right? Kids go in, steal some booze, nice warm bed for some screwing. But this is different, don’t you think? I mean when you think about it.” He jabbed his finger in Thaddeus’s direction.
“Me?”
“You must feel kind of lucky no one’s tried anything on Orkney.”
“You want to talk about luck, Horse? Try some of this chicken.”
River Under the Road Page 33
