River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  “You got us a room?” Thaddeus whispered, as the elevator rose with the chains clanking.

  She linked a finger through his belt loop and yanked him closer. “I’m sort of a favorite here, if you must know, you terrible boy,” she said. “I can do what I want.”

  He was still trying to decide if she was beautiful, though it didn’t matter. There was something hard about her. She was thin, but not the way models are. A pioneer thinness, the scrawn of deprivation. He could imagine her in a gingham dress, in a rocking chair, on a porch, with a shotgun on her lap.

  The room was on the tenth floor and it was as stately and full of promise as a box from an expensive shop, everything in it just so, the gleaming bath fixtures, the spotless carpet, the tall mahogany dresser with its double rows of brass handles. Room 1030—they would never forget it—with its triple-glazed windows and view of Grant Park and Lake Michigan, where a ceaseless progression of little waves made their way to the shore, each one showing its frill of white foam like cancan dancers shaking their petticoats.

  Next door, however, someone was weeping. Or was it above them, or below them? It sounded like a woman, but it could have been a man. Grief can blur the distinction. They heard the sobs through the plaster. Silence, and then more sobs. Grace turned on the little bedside KLH radio. It was as easy as that.

  “So? What do you think of the room?”

  “Your boss doesn’t mind?”

  “I’ve got my boss wrapped around . . .” She raised a pinkie, grinned.

  “Try working for my mother,” Thaddeus said.

  “Mothers,” said Grace. “I can hardly wait not to be one.”

  “You’re already not one.”

  “I’m too young not to be a mother. You’re only not a mother when people start to ask you why you don’t have children.”

  “I still haven’t met your mother,” said Thaddeus. “I haven’t even seen where you live.”

  “Think of me as living here,” said Grace. “In a lovely place with a beautiful view. And all my friends are beautiful artists and we all live for art, and nothing is stupid or boring.”

  It was art that had brought them together, initially. In the beginning of the summer, Thaddeus had accompanied Libby to the Hyde Park Art Fair, where every year hundreds of local painters displayed their paintings and sculptures and weaving and carving and photographs in a vast outdoor democracy of effort and ambition, yearning and love. Libby wasn’t there to buy anything. One simply attended the fair; it was part of living in the neighborhood. Some of the locals exhibiting their work were Four Freedoms customers, and Libby and Sam made it a point for one or the other of them to show their face at the fair. Somewhere along the way Libby and Thaddeus came upon a ratty little card table that, in disregard of the rules of the fair, Grace had wedged between two officially sanctioned booths: one displaying paintings done in the style of Maurice Utrillo, and the other, manned by a thin elderly lithographer in a heavy sweater, showing a multiracial group of children playing on an Anywhere USA street. On Grace’s renegade little table were propped a number of her drawings, hyperrealistic renderings of eggs, apples, and artichokes, each done in overwhelming detail, each exuding a kind of mania for verisimilitude.

  Libby bought an egg drawing for thirty dollars, and later that day Thaddeus returned to the fair, hoping to buy another of Grace’s drawings, perhaps the artichoke, and to strike up a conversation with her. But by the time he made it back, she had already been asked to leave—forcibly escorted out by a pair of furious fair organizers, women in short capes and darkly hemmed nylon hose, and shoes that clacked like castanets across the asphalt playground.

  Yet the very next day Grace came into Four Freedoms. The egg drawing had been paid for by a check drawn on the store account, so it was possible she had come looking for Thaddeus just as he had gone looking for her, but if that was the case she never admitted it. She continued to say she was there hoping to find a book of Ingres drawings, which Liam had told her about, having seen an exhibition of the work at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge.

  Though she was aware the Kaufmans were not fond of her, it was nevertheless bizarre to Grace that Thaddeus could ever complain about his parents or suggest that staying with them over the summer represented some kind of sacrifice on his part, a trial by fire. Grace would have been more than happy to live as the Kaufmans lived. They had Persian carpets, beautiful pale green glass vases from Hungary in which stood indestructible pussy willows. They had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They owned a gigantic Magnavox stereo console, and they owned their own business.

  And now summer was almost over, and despite the weeks of physical intimacy, Thaddeus and Grace were still a bit strange to each other. What would become of them once Thaddeus was in New York? “You’ve got to visit me there, promise me you will” was as close as he’d come to asking her to go with him. “I already miss you” was as close as she came to saying she wanted to go with him.

  They fell into the big Palmer House bed. The headboard knocked against the wall and they had to pull the bed away from the wall by an inch or two, but it turned out not to be enough. The banging continued and they let it. . . .

  When they were quiet for a while, Grace pressed herself against him. The tidal smell of sex and the sweat of exertion came off her. His feelings were too strong to confidently name—desire? tenderness? worshipful love? lust? “I’m in over my head here,” he whispered to her. “It’s like I never slept with anyone before, ever in my life.”

  “I think my father was the first man my mother ever slept with,” said Grace. “She squandered her virginity. I shouldn’t say that, but she’s such a pushover. Always settles for less.”

  “But she loved him. Maybe?” he asked. He could feel melancholy moving through her like weather. It drew him toward her, the knowledge of it. It wasn’t pity, it was simply knowing her, being able to feel what she felt. It created in him an intensity of feeling that was almost like a mania. He wanted to cheer her up. To lift her spirits, lead her out of her own darkness. He would have sung for her and danced, had he dared.

  “He was good looking,” Grace said. “Even with that missing finger. I was obsessed with that finger when I was young. Sometimes he caught me staring at it, the little stump. And he’d press it against my forehead. I’d scream. Like how the teenyboppers screamed for the Beatles. That’s how I screamed for that jerk.”

  “Maybe we can go see him one day. Would you like that?”

  “I love that you always want to make things nice, but I don’t need to be rejected again. He’s not interested. His interests lie elsewhere.”

  “I’ll bet he loves you.”

  “I don’t even think he likes me. Or hates me. I’m just like . . . I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “People aren’t really drawn to me. I might not be all that likeable.”

  “You have to stop thinking that way. I liked you so much, from the very beginning.”

  “Well, that’s why you get to make love to me in this beautiful room.”

  A bar of light, reflected from somewhere unknown, glided across the smooth white ceiling. The music on the radio was Beethoven. Neither of them cared for it, but neither was willing to say so. Thaddeus turned the volume down and the suffering next door could be heard again, but very faintly. Thaddeus stretched, made a sound like a creaking door. The bed seemed larger than a normal bed, more comfortable, too. The exquisite sheets, the goose-down pillows. This is what life could be. He felt himself heading toward it, like someone who has been lost at sea and suddenly sees the first hopeful signs of land.

  “What we have here, my dear,” she said.

  “Yes?” he said. She often paused in the middle of a sentence. When they spoke on the phone, these silences irritated him, but in person they sometimes seemed profound.

  “What we have here is so incredibly beautiful and unexpected. I feel like we have both sleep-wandered into something beyond imagination. I jus
t don’t know how it happened, what connects us. Because as soon as we saw each other—we knew. When I think of all the ways we could have missed each other, I feel such blind terror.”

  She saw the blood rush to his face and she smiled, knowing she had overwhelmed him. It was what she had, it was something she could do. Most of the standard advantages were his—college degree, plans for the future, a thousand books read, and a few he planned to write. But intensity was hers, and she could level him with it. Candor, emotional fierceness, a willingness to risk being hurt, these were all with her. She was not exactly pretty but she was beautiful. Her arms were slender and strong, with dark hair that grew in whorls, like fingerprints. At first the dark hair alarmed him but soon it was part of her allure—everything about her seemed real, the truth of life at last revealed. Her imperfections were perfect themselves, her mild perversities in bed were proof of purity, her aloneness in the world was really a manifestation of her oneness with the universe.

  “I agree,” he finally managed to say. “A preordained accident. So glad.” For a moment, his mind was blank. Words were failing him.

  Grace rolled out of bed and stood there for a moment, enjoying the way Thaddeus looked at her. Would he ever be free of her, a boy who looked at her with such helpless longing? Was he hers forever? She’d always known that eventually her fate would be tied to a man. Was this that man? She was so young. And she was wary of early alliances. Her mother had forged an early alliance and it had been disastrous. Grace’s father, more absent than present, more crooked than honest, more false than truthful, self-pitying and useless. His name was Terrence Cornell, Terry to his friends, of which there were many. He was a fleshy, wheezing, cheerful, and energetic man. Terry had been in the navy during the Korean War; he was a seaman first class on the USS Iowa and had lost half of the pointer finger on his right hand, caught in a hatch door halfway through his hitch. There was a suspicion that he had done it on purpose. “And what about this cough and my gunked-up lungs?” he often said. “I suppose I did that on purpose, too!” His theory was that there was something in all that on-board fireproofing that didn’t agree with his respiratory system, but he could not find anyone to give his theory credence—no doctor, no lawyer, no one but some old anarchist who worked in a health food store, a scrawny little yapper who wore a beret and sandals, and whose breath was yeasty from B vitamins. While his marriage was still going forward, Cornell supported his family as a portrait photographer in a little studio he rented on State Street. He specialized in children, and eventually there were rumors. Grace never knew if they were true or not and she did not want to know. Rumors about boys, rumors about girls—it seemed Cornell was more focused on age than gender. But that he would actually do such a thing was so very hard to believe; if anything, he’d been a bit distant with his own children. A bit of a touch-me-not. All Grace and her older brother Liam knew was that stupid people were saying their father was doing something wrong at his job. One day two policemen came to the house, like Joe Friday and Officer Frank What-the-Fuck, and asked Terry a bunch of questions, while Grace and Liam stayed in the kitchen with Maureen. “You know,” Maureen said (holding beneath the table the bottle of Gilbey’s with which she was lacing her lemonade, keeping the gin hidden as if her children were not in full awareness of it), “there’s a saying that where there’s smoke there’s fire and I guess whoever made it up was a real stick-in-the-mud, but you have to ask yourself where’s the smoke coming from if there’s no fire.”

  The cops left twenty minutes later and Terry was all smiles because as far as he was concerned, they’d been able to see him as the war veteran father husband workingman that he was. But the next day there were four cops at the apartment and they tore the place apart, never saying what they were looking for. Closets, drawers, upholstery, the fridge, even the little bedroom Grace and Liam bunked in, with the butterscotch walls and the red-and-blue hooked rug, every corner of the apartment torn up, ransacked. The next day Terry was gone. His flight from Eau Claire could have been said to speak volumes, but you never knew. At an early age Grace believed that we are privy only to the appearance of other people, rarely their reality. Now her father plied his trade in Akron, Ohio. No talk of extradition, no more talk about what he did or did not do with the children who came to be photographed. There was vindication in that, wasn’t there? Grace wrote him a letter to tell him it was safe to come home, but he didn’t answer. She decided to never write him, or speak to him, again. Liam was more forgiving and made his own money. He didn’t need a handout to see his own father, but he came back from Ohio shaken. It took weeks for him to finally report that their father was now very fat, with a whole new array of symptoms and diagnoses—asthma, diabetes, varicose veins, arthritis. There was reason to believe he was involved in more questionable kinds of photography as well. Liam had seen a check for two hundred dollars from Sir Knight, a skin magazine.

  “Come back to bed,” Thaddeus said.

  “I’m going to pee,” Grace said.

  “Can I watch you?” He had never watched anyone relieve themselves before. He was raised to believe urination and defecation were basically awful things that one had to endure, the body’s bad news. (The only truly good news was the mind.) His mother had taught him to urinate on the side of the bowl to avoid the telltale splash.

  “Of course. But let me ask you something, buddy boy. How are you going to survive the real separation?” She traipsed across the carpet and opened the heavy door to the bathroom. He did not follow her in. He was more talk than action. She turned on the lights and the immaculate bathroom sprang into view. There was a fresh roll of toilet paper in the holder, the lead sheet folded into a kind of teepee shape.

  “Maybe I’ll take a shower,” Thaddeus said when Grace came back to bed.

  “No. Don’t you dare.” The more she cared about him, the bossier she became. Having been left to her own governance most of her life, she thought telling someone what to do was a form of affection. She thought that saying Absolutely not was sweet and the words Watch out, buddy meant basically the same thing as I’ll never let you go.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the implication: she wanted more of him. More! Desire was like a bird flapping its wings inside his head. Love buzzed within him like a neon marquee on a street where every other business had called it a night. This was happiness as he had always imagined it. The pleasure was frightening. He was in a drugged state in which he did not completely recognize himself.

  “This room is amazing,” Thaddeus said. “I feel rich here. I wish we didn’t have to go back to real life.”

  “We don’t. We have it all day and all night. I could probably get Jerry to send up food. Maybe even wine. Or champagne.”

  “Don’t you worry about being fired?”

  “No. It’s like family here. At least for me it is. I can basically do whatever I want.”

  “My parents would hate it here. Especially my father. He doesn’t like to go into places where ordinary working people aren’t welcome. To him, class privilege is like the smell of shit. It actually makes him sick.”

  “Should I get champagne?” she asked.

  “My parents announced we were having champagne when I graduated,” Thaddeus said. “So they brought out this bottle of Cold Duck. In an actual bucket. It was a yellow plastic bucket, like for a mop, but with lots of ice in it.”

  “At least you graduated,” Grace said. She straddled him, kissed his eyes, not wanting him to see the look on her face.

  They made love again. At first it was languid, lovely and friendly, easy and slow. But finally Thaddeus started to bear down, the look on his face serious, almost fierce, concentrating on her orgasm as if trying to decipher ancient text. He could not have cared less about his own. He was empty. But hers. Hers. That was the thrill of it anyhow. What happened to her face, her eyes, her breath. Finally, out of pity, she stopped him.

  “It ain’t gonna happen,” she said, smiling.

  Re
lieved, he rolled off her. He lay on his back, breathing in the expensive, perfectly cooled air. They were silent for a while until Thaddeus again announced he had best wash.

  “Well, if you must,” she said. “The showers here are great. All the guests comment on the showers. Great water pressure. And amazing towels.”

  “Did you ever read—”

  But Grace cut him off. She had not read widely and she was already uneasy with how many times he asked her if she had read this or that. She was tired of saying no. Tired of being the person who knew not. Books were his thing, not hers. She did not constantly drop the names of obscure painters (not that she knew many, but still) and she was waiting for him to take the hint and stop asking her what she had read. She was waiting for him to realize you could not impress someone without depressing them, too.

  He showered. All that shampoo. Conditioner, too. From France, no less. The perfume of it was amazing. Ooh la fucking la! The soft and thirsty towels. They made the towels at home seem like waxed paper. He forced himself to leave a couple of dry ones for Grace. This is how I want to live! I never want to run out of these towels.

  RELUCTANTLY, THEY DRESSED. THE ROOM was cool, but when you touched the windows you felt the heat of the blazing afternoon. Thaddeus lingered before they left the room for good, committing it all to memory. Grace. The feeling of entering her, like a firm welcoming handshake. And the room itself, the bed, the immense, luxurious bed. The long drapes glittering with gold thread. The cool whisper of invisible vents. Oh, to live like this. It wasn’t just the coarse, mindless desire to be rich, it was wanting life itself to be rich. To be surrounded by beauty, to be beautiful yourself. And to have this girl, this kind of sex, to wander forever in an orchard of pleasure. Once she said, “I can make myself come just by looking at you.” What could ever compare to that?

  He dug into his pocket, where there were three carefully folded five-dollar bills. He placed one as a tip on the nightstand before he left.