River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “Come on, bro,” Andy said. “You’re getting us to come up with all these names for you. How about giving us the secret of your success?”

  “More than one way to skin a cat, Andy,” Jennings said.

  “Uncle Buddy has an idea!” Klein called out. He was in a neck brace and wore loose-fitting clothes. He’d put on twenty pounds during the convalescence after falling off his roof, where he’d been sunning himself and had the bad luck to fall asleep and the good luck to land in the forsythia. “Why don’t we all mind our own fucking business?”

  After a smatter of polite cheers, Todd pointed at Buddy. “Listen up, Big Star, there’s kids here.”

  “He can kick the shit out of prisoners but he don’t like no dirty words,” Thaddeus whispered to Grace.

  “Everyone can see you,” she said without moving her lips.

  Jennings explained what he was going to do, sounding large and strong and full of joy, a man whose life was taking shape. He would read off the suggestion and if more than ten people thought it was a halfway decent name for his business, he’d hold on to it, and if less than ten people thought it was good, he’d just drop it on the floor, no hard feelings.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Thaddeus whispered.

  Grace pursed her lips, slowly shook her head.

  “Peace of Mind,” Jennings said, reading the first suggestion. He looked around the room expectantly. “So?” He waited. “Anyone like it?” More silence. “No one?”

  “Not even the person who wrote it?” Thaddeus called out.

  The scrap of paper floated to the floor. Jennings continued to read off the suggestions. Windsor Insulation. Done-Right. Tight and Tidy. The Money-Savers. Windsor Environmental Solutions. The room was still after each, except Tight and Tidy, which got a couple of snickers.

  “You know what?” Todd said. “The only one in the whole lot that’s any good is Money-Savers, and I’m not saying it just because it was mine.”

  “Because it wasn’t, it was mine,” said Maggie Coolidge, her hair the color of cranberry juice, overdressed for the occasion in a skirt, high heels, madcap earrings. She was a home health-care worker, new to Leyden, imported from Florida to tend to Gene Woodard, who’d run his Austin-Healey into an oak tree. She and Larry Sassone had been spending time with each other for less than a month but Larry was optimistic about their chances. Maggie was not only familiar with Nietzsche but had a parrot named Zarathustra. In his maze of paint fumes, pot, and exhaustion, Larry still remembered believing Nietzsche was important, though now he’d be hard-pressed to say why.

  THADDEUS HELD ON TO GRACE for balance and closed his eyes. His heart seemed to suddenly kick into overdrive. Anxiety, the distant coppery taste of doom on the roof of his mouth—it was like being in New York, in the old days, when often he had pictured himself crumpling to the sidewalk and people simply stepping over him.

  “Are you okay?” Grace asked.

  “I think I’ll go home,” Thaddeus whispered.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded his head yes but said no.

  “You want me to walk with you? I can leave.”

  “No. Stay. I’m all right. Nerves. I’ll see you when you get home.”

  Thaddeus walked through the kitchen on his way out. Robert Altman once told him that he had saved his own life by drinking a glass of water and preventing a heart attack. Thaddeus knew he was not about to have a heart attack, but something was happening to him. As he stood at the sink and let the water get colder, he saw that someone had stubbed out a cigarette on the otherwise untouched platter of chicken from Johnny Cake Ho.

  Who would do such a thing? And it occurred to him that just about anyone in the front of the house could have done it. He did his best to freshen up the chicken, the cost of which he was suddenly acutely aware, and as he looked around the kitchen for the garbage receptacle so he could get rid of the cigarette butt, an unwelcome memory was suddenly delivered: the look on Susan Fialkin’s face when all those wineglasses got broken at the Mondale fund-raiser and Thaddeus didn’t know where the broom was kept in his own apartment. The shattered glass, the pregnant pauses, the contempt. Oh fuck them all, he thought. I fucking earned the right not to know where some ridiculous broom is.

  He deserved what he had, if not all of it then at least most of it. And if not most of it then some of it. And if not some of it . . . well, that was as far as he could go. It was not inherited wealth, it was his. He was not a thief, he didn’t push people around, he was just trying to live in the world as he found it, the world of haves and have-nots, the lifters and the lifted. May I take that suitcase off your hands, sir? You most certainly can. So, yes, he no longer had to entirely fend for himself, but he was not some Craig Epstein pattering around Mommy’s house in his pj’s. Yet thoughts of Craig in his insolent informality only further destabilized Thaddeus. It could very well be that his days of expensive take-out food were drawing to a close. That tossed drink may have extinguished the little flicker of heat that had up to that point been his career.

  And speaking of his film career: Where the hell was the garbage can? Under the sink? In some corner? He just wanted to get out of there. The Trotskyists used to talk about the dustbin of history—well, he couldn’t find that, either. He dropped the cigarette butt into his pocket and walked quickly to the back door, and into what minutes ago was evening and now was night, pure dark cold night, nothing but night.

  The dogs materialized, as if conjured up by the darkness, panting, wagging, gyrating with excitement. But a few moments of that was all they had in them, after which they trotted off to points unknown.

  “ARE THE DOGS BACK?” GRACE asked, as soon as she returned home, her face bright from the night air and the exertion of crisscrossing the property in search of them.

  There’s my princess.

  Thaddeus was in the library, reading a novel, trying to get back into the groove of it, just reading for the sake of reading, nourishment for the soul. He looked up at Grace with his features carefully arranged, as close to neutral as he could manage. He had been hearing people leaving the party at the yellow house for some time and though he was in no particular hurry for Grace to return home he could not help but note she was staying out late, which he could also not help taking somewhat personally. And now here she was, flushed, and the first thing out of her mouth was an inquiry about the fucking dogs?

  “No dogs here,” he said, placing the book down on the side table. “I tried to round them up on my way home. But you know they don’t really listen to me.”

  “So where are the kids?” Grace asked. She checked her watch. Nine forty-five. “Asleep?” She noticed the down on her arm could no longer reasonably be called down. She wondered if Thaddeus was going to say anything about it.

  “I think so. Vicky said they were fighting. Do you worry that maybe they hate each other?”

  “You’re an only child, but take it from me, Emma will one day adore David and he at the very least will adore being adored.”

  “I’m not technically an only child.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s find those dogs of yours,” he said, rising from his chair, rubbing his hands together.

  “Aren’t they your dogs, too?”

  “Yes. I suppose so.”

  “You suppose so?”

  “Would you feel better if I said let’s find those dogs of ours?”

  “It’s okay. I can do it. You’re feeling a little iffy anyhow, right? But I appreciate the offer.”

  Because they were all but impossible to see in the darkness, the dogs had reflecting tape on their collars, but the orange material needed street lamps or moonlight or something else to spark it to life. Out on the porch, Grace put her fingers in her mouth and whistled, the way Liam had taught her to five million dollars ago in Eau Claire.

  She walked toward the glow of the yellow house. The dogs regularly found their way to Jennings and Muriel’s porch. Grace suspected that Muriel f
ed them. Molly and Finn were friendly and adorable and gorgeous, but basically they were in it for the protein.

  Shivering, Grace followed the curve of the driveway, veering right five hundred feet from the house, and walking to a rise in the land from which she could look down into the slight hollow where cars were still leaving the yellow house, their headlights crisscrossing in the darkness, silver clouds of exhaust pouring from their tailpipes. She saw Jennings standing on the porch, illuminated by the porch light. His hands were clasped and his chin was raised. He looked pleased with himself in a way that made her furious.

  The cars left the property in single file, the beams of their headlights bouncing up and down.

  Grace stepped out of the trees and waved. An expression of something crossed Jennings’s face—was it curiosity, concern, or perhaps disapproval? Disapproval! As if she were trespassing. He slowly unclasped his hands, and raised one in greeting. Grace started down the hill, as if beckoned, making her way carefully toward him. The last thing she needed was to slip and fall.

  “Looking for those damn dogs,” she said. She had decided to be casual, good-humored, but her voice was curdled with irritation.

  “I asked Mur not to feed them,” Jennings said. “You want some help finding them?”

  Mur? When did that begin?

  “They often hang out at the orchard,” Grace said. “I’ll go over.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Want some company?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  The grassy ground had been coarsened by the early frost, its sponginess seeping through the soles of her brown-and-white pumps. She wondered what the effect would be were she to even momentarily take his arm for balance. It was what she had come to know about illicit affections: every gesture was measured, everything had to be titrated just so. The structure of a secret romance was so complex and so flimsy that everything you did either added to or subtracted from its ability to survive. She decided against taking his arm. No casual contact. No appetizers before dinner; it was the main course or nothing. They followed the curve of the land, the slight downward slope. The yellow house disappeared but the light coming through its windows created an arc of brightness in the night. One of the party boats passed, unseen by Grace and Jennings from where they stood, but clearly audible. The owners of the estates along the river had complained about Rock the Hudson, saying that the noise pollution was insupportable, and it seemed that since then the throb of the passing boats had become all the more pronounced. The band Foreigner singing “I Want to Know What Love Is” blasted from the boat’s sound system, the urgent, indefatigable voice of the lead singer echoing against the Catskills.

  “Hideous,” Grace said. “They really have no right.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Jennings said. “Mur likes that song.”

  “Since when is it Mur?”

  “I’ve always called her that,” Jennings said.

  “Really? Have you? I never heard it, not once.”

  “What can I tell you?”

  They were at the edge of the orchard now, and Grace sensed the dogs weren’t there. She would have at least heard the jingle of their collars. The music from the party boat grew distant—when the music was close it annoyed her but as it drifted away it all seemed so sad.

  “I wonder how many people are on that boat on a night like this,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Jennings. “But the boats make good money.”

  “I miss you so much,” she said, emboldened by his indifference. “Don’t you even think about me?”

  “Sure. You’re Grace. There’s only one of you in the whole world.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I care about you, Grace.”

  “Oh come on. Really? You’re saying this to me?”

  “Don’t you want me to care about you?” he asked.

  “I was thinking you might love me.”

  “I do. Of course I do.”

  “Oh God.”

  She could not see but heard him shrug, the rustle of his shirt.

  “I mean for real,” Grace said. “Physically. Desperately. I want you to be thinking about me while you are trying to go to sleep.”

  “I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. Like nine thirty. It’s already past my bedtime.”

  “Oh fuck you.” The words hung there, violent as the smell of cordite. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, at last. She wondered if he was telling her about the early bedtime as a way of indicating he and Muriel were no longer having sex.

  “You’re unhappy,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be if you kissed me.”

  “As simple as that?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He took her in his arms, and kissed her hard, with a little throb of brutality. When she increased the intimacy of the kiss—opened herself, let him feel her tongue—he stepped back.

  “There,” he said.

  There? As if it were a little chore he’d just completed.

  “How dare you?” she said, in her old Audrey Hepburn voice, long unused. It felt somehow centering to bring it back. Surprising them both, she slapped Jennings hard across the face. She felt the flesh and stubble of him on her open palm. She hadn’t slapped someone’s face since high school, when all the girls in her set were doing it. It was kind of a fad to make out with a boy, and smack him one if he touched you beyond the prescribed areas.

  “Don’t put a mark on me,” he said. “That would not be cool.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I did that.”

  “We do things. It’s okay. We just have to . . .”

  “Have to what?” she asked.

  “We have to be cool.”

  “When was the last time we fucked?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Do you love me, Jennings? Seriously. What’s happening here, what are we to each other?”

  “I’m going to tell you something. Something only one other person knows.”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, but who?” she asked. “Who else knows?”

  “Buddy.”

  “Buddy? You’re putting me on the same level as Buddy Klein?”

  “It’s about the money I got to start the business.”

  “That’s all anyone at the party could talk about.”

  “I could be in trouble.”

  “We’re all in trouble.”

  “You don’t understand, Grace,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder, not in a particularly loving way, but as you would check a child about to cross a busy street. Nonetheless, the feel of his touch created a kind of churning within her, alive, luminous, sickening and thrilling at once. “I stole a really valuable ring,” he said.

  “From me?” she asked. She wouldn’t have said that if she’d given herself one extra moment to consider it.

  “From you?”

  “Well, you’re telling me.”

  “Before you came here. There was this woman.”

  “There always was, always is, and always will be,” she said.

  He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and got it going with his lighter. The little lick of flame illuminated his face for a moment.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” she said.

  “Yeah, I heard.” His laugh had something bitter in it, self-pitying.

  You’re the one who wanted to get involved with asbestos, she thought. But how many things could she quarrel with him about? You had to choose. “So this woman?” she asked.

  “She was a friend of the Boyetts.”

  “By the time we bought Orkney they were in Mexico.”

  “They should fucking stay in Mexico,” Jennings said.

  “Isn’t ‘Mur’ Mexican?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. So what about this woman? Was i
t Boyett? I don’t remember her first name. Gene Woodard always refers to her as the Lady Boyett.”

  “It wasn’t her. One of her friends. She got high and killed her dogs. Little yappers, but still.”

  “She killed her dogs? You slept with a woman who killed her dogs?”

  “Who said I slept with her? She passed out and it was up to me to lug her upstairs.”

  “And then what?”

  “I took a ring off her. I didn’t know what it was worth but I figured it was a lot.”

  “You took it off her?”

  “And I buried it right over there, by the Italian plum tree. I figured I got myself a plum, so I wouldn’t forget.”

  “Where you buried it.”

  “Right. I wasn’t going to forget that I buried it, just where. I can tell you this—I was nervous.”

  I can tell you this. Grace noted it: wasn’t that a classic standby Hat-ism? Thaddeus did a funny imitation of Hat, the way he wagged his finger as if conducting an orchestra of assorted facts and figures, rubber plantations in Congo, the countless varieties of apple, the best way to lure bluebirds, which were, after all, the official state bird—and interspersed with this deluge of information were the foundational phrases, including I can tell you this. Slowly, inexorably, Jennings was coming to resemble his father. His ears were growing larger, his nose a bit longer. Father and son both had a bit of Lyndon Johnson in them. The belly must have come through his mother. If Jennings had once hoped to fuck and snarl his way into eternal youth, if he had in any way imagined that he could fold his arms over his chest and stand to one side as time rushed past him, the nose, those ears, that belly, and the way he was starting to talk would prove him wrong, if not this year then the next.