River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

“Last chance,” she said, ready to let the door close behind them. She could feel his desire for her. He was in a kind of agony. It made her want to torture him in a friendly sort of way.

  “The summer went so fast,” Thaddeus said.

  “Are you going to miss me, you terrible boy?”

  “I don’t even like to think about that.” He felt himself at last ready to pose the question: Why not come with me? But what if she said no? And what if she said yes? It was one thing to look at the astonishing view; it was another to leap off the side of the mountain, on the chance you might sprout wings.

  Into the long hotel corridor. Grace turned the Do Not Disturb sign around so whoever was working the floor would know the room could be made up. The sign showed a cartoon of a little maid with popsicle-stick legs and a black-and-white dress, pushing a vacuum cleaner. The bed would be stripped, the sheets and the towels tossed into the big hamper. The air would smell of furniture polish spritzed out of a can. The pillows would be punched and shaken until they swelled up like new. It took twenty-two minutes to bring the room up to Palmer House standards but Rosie could do it in fifteen and then crack a window and light up a Parliament.

  Lagging behind, Thaddeus listened for the sounds he had heard, the weeping. Where was it? All was silence, yet it was going on somewhere: he knew it. When he turned around he saw Grace was halfway down the long mauve corridor, heading for the elevators. Did she even know he wasn’t right behind her?

  “Grace,” he called out. “Wait for me.” He stood there until she turned around. The dull, even light of the corridor. The pink-and-green carpeting. Her Mona Lisa smile. The hollow deadish ding of an elevator arriving on the tenth floor. A moment later another ding, one going up and one going down.

  They necked in the ornate cube as it carried them to the lobby. When the filigreed doors opened, they were facing Mr. Hallenback himself, Grace’s boss, who, as luck would have it, was on his way up to the tenth floor with the intention of rousting Grace from the room she had been using in full and flagrant violation of company policy.

  “Oh there she is, there she is,” Hallenback said.

  Thaddeus could sense this was Grace’s supervisor. But what was he doing here on his day off? Someone must have ratted them out. He was younger than Thaddeus had imagined—in his late twenties, early thirties. He was not dressed for work, but in shorts, his legs massive, his bare feet in beat-up sneakers. He squeezed and cracked his knuckles as he spoke.

  Grace smiled brightly, as if nothing was wrong. “Hello there, Mr. Hallenback,” she said. “Working on Sundays?”

  “Get out of the elevator, both of you,” he said. “Right now.”

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s the big deal?”

  But there was a tremor in her voice, a crack of fear that went right through it, a place where it would break for good if any more pressure was applied.

  “Out of the elevator,” Hallenback said, clearly affronted that the order had to be repeated. He had picked up one of the eight-by-twelve-inch bicentennial flags and thwacked it into his open hand as if he were a drill sergeant about to dress down a shoddy recruit.

  “We are getting out of the elevator,” Thaddeus said. “There’s no reason to speak in such a harsh tone.”

  Hallenback pointed the flag stick at Thaddeus as a warning. The lobby was all but empty, with only a couple of bellmen and the desk clerks, all of whom were doing whatever they could to ignore what was taking place.

  “You were using room 1030, is that right?”

  Grace was silent. Her face was scarlet and she stared at her feet.

  “Right as in correct?” asked Thaddeus.

  “Who is this?” Hallenback asked Grace.

  “Yes, we were,” Grace said. “I was. Just for a while. It was vacant.”

  “It was vacant,” Hallenback repeated, as if what she had just said reached the heights of absurdity.

  “Well, it was,” Grace said.

  “Do you know what the rate is on room 1030?” Hallenback asked.

  “It’s Sunday,” Grace said softly.

  “Don’t you know the first thing about the hotel business? Friday, Saturday, that’s when we offer discounts. Sunday through Thursday nights—full tariff, twelve months a year. Those are the workdays, goddamnit, the workdays, and people are staying with us because they are doing business. You do know what business is, don’t you . . . Grace?” He pronounced her name as if there was something unclean about it.

  Grace forced herself to meet his gaze. Thaddeus moved closer to her. He realized he would only be making matters worse by speaking up again or putting his arm around her, but he moved his foot closer and closer to hers, until they were touching.

  “I am going to do you a favor, and I am going to give you the employee discount on that room, but as it stands now you owe the Palmer House $105, plus tax, which I will have deducted from your paycheck.”

  “You can’t, Mr. Hallenback,” Grace said. “You can’t do that.”

  “Come on, man,” Thaddeus said. “Let’s be fair about this.”

  “You can shut your trap,” Hallenback said.

  Thaddeus’s eyes opened wider, his head snapped back. “I’m just saying you should be fair.”

  “We will put a check in the mail,” Hallenback said to Grace. “You are not welcome to ever set foot in this hotel again. You no longer are employed here.” For a moment it looked as if he was going to jab her with the flag but he stopped short of her collarbone.

  Instinctively, Thaddeus grabbed for the flag, but Hallenback was quick. He hit Thaddeus across the hand with it.

  “How about I press charges?” Hallenback said to Grace. “Is that what you want?”

  “How about I press charges,” Thaddeus said, rubbing the back of his hand, which was already turning rather red. “You’re not allowed to hit people.”

  “Do you have any idea how the world works?” Hallenback asked. “You are, or were, an employee here. You know what employee means? You sell your labor—that is your relationship to the Palmer House. You don’t help yourself to rooms. You don’t help yourself to anything. You have a yearning to stay in nice hotels? Earn it. Go to college. Or better yet, get a high school diploma.” He smiled, seeing her reaction. “You didn’t think I knew that, did you? Well, I did, and I let you work here anyhow. Out. Of courtesy. To. Your. Mother.” With each pause he threatened her with the tip of the flag.

  “Come on, Carl,” Grace said. “I said I was sorry.” She reached out to touch his arm and he smacked her hand quite briskly with the rolled-up little flag.

  Thaddeus was astonished. His skin felt pinpricked and icy. Was he meant to do something now? Should he lunge at Hallenback? Would that only serve to make everything worse?

  Hallenback turned and walked toward the front desk, reaching behind himself and plucking at the fabric of his shorts.

  “What a crock,” Thaddeus said to Grace. “Are you okay?” He took her hand. A red welt was on the back of her hand, about the size of a centipede. He sensed the words I thought you said this place was like a family forming in his mind and he struggled not to say them.

  “Just get me out of here,” she murmured. “Let’s just go.”

  She shook her head as they headed for the doors. She shed tears, silently. Raymond the bellman was slouched deep in a club chair, reading the Herald-American, which he had expertly folded so it was no larger than a paperback book. This time he did not do them the honor of opening the door for them, nor did he touch the bill of his braided cap. His act of courtesy was to pretend not to notice Grace as she walked past him.

  “Some family,” Thaddeus said as he gestured for Grace to go first through the revolving doors. He took a last breath of refrigerated air as the two of them were about to be engulfed by the fetid evening that lay in wait for them.

  Why would you say something like that? she did not ask him, as she entered one of the pie-slice segments of the revolving door. Thaddeus entered the next segment and she fel
t him pushing at the door, making it go faster than she wanted. When they were out on Michigan Avenue, he put his arm around her and she pressed her forehead against his chin and said to him what she believed at the moment to be the absolute and unalterable truth: “I’m yours.”

  Dear Liam,

  How’s the Hotel d’Inghilterra? I trust, dear boy, that they are treating you in the manner to which you have become accustomed. I got sort of fired from the Palmer House but I got Mom to send a telex direct from the Palmer House to alert them that a VIP was on his way so I hope they rolled out the red carpet for you. Do you have your trusty Leica with you? I want you to take a hundred pictures of Rome. And if Genevieve is not too busy shopping she can take some of you in your room. I would love love love to see you in your custom-made hand-stitched, lemon yellow summer suit with the gauzy curtains of the giganto windows billowing behind you. One day I am going to get over there, too, so don’t cause any trouble because I would like the royal treatment when it’s my turn. Except I won’t have the trusty old Palmer House telex to pave the way, unless Mom cooperates, which I don’t think will be happening since she is royally pissed off at me right now. And why? you might ask. And why would our mother be pissed off at the dutiful daughter who has been more of a mother than a daughter? Well, my wandering brother, the answer to both these questions is the same. I am moving to New York City. Tomorrow. Via jet on American Airlines. Believe me you, I have been studying crash patterns and as far as I can see, no accidents have been recorded on Labor Day, ever. I am worried about Legionnaire’s Disease, though, everyone breathing the same air. Our mother is pretending she is pleased as punch, but the punch, dear boy, is poisoned. Since I told her my plans, she is drinking more and enjoying it less. She is making no attempt to clean up around this place or even pick up after herself, and somewhere along the way she has gotten the idea that Roses in the Snow looks good on teeth as well as lips. Don’t think I’m horrid. I’ve been doing this my whole life and for the last five years you’ve been free. Don’t get me wrong. I live vicariously through you and your amazing adventures. Because of you, I sometimes feel I am in Rome, or San Francisco, or Colombia, or Acapulco, though I’ve never even been on a plane or a boat. I went to Washington, D.C., when I wrote that embarrassing essay in sixth grade and came in third in the National Citizenship Contest, but that’s been about it for me in terms of exotic travel destinations. Because of you, you wicked boy, I can pretend I have partied hearty with the likes of Dr. John the Night Tripper and Stephen Stills. Don’t worry! I can see your eyes darting ahead in this aerogram, making sure I am not saying something you don’t want me to put out there. Anyhow, New York. Labor Day. I am going there because I am in love. (Ooops, there go your eyes again, only this time they’re rolling to the back of your head.) But the strange part is, I am in love with someone who loves me. Thought I’d give that approach a try, ha ha ha. He loves my art, and he doesn’t mind if I snore. So wish me luck. I’m off to New York, if the plane doesn’t crash. Give my regards to Genevieve, if you’re still keeping her around.

  Chapter 2

  French Style

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1976

  What’s with the answer machine? A man of your stature should have a secretary. Anyhow, Tony here. I was able to secure the item we’ve been talking about so we’ll see you at our place Friday. Seven o’clock? Or come earlier if you wish. And for God’s sake, erase this message.

  HAT, I HAVE TO ASK YOU FOR THE BIGGEST MOST DESPERATE last-minute favor I have ever asked another human being on the face on the earth for and if my back wasn’t acting up, I’d be begging down on my knees,” said Tony Boyett with his customary mock humility. Boyett was a drug-addicted lawyer in his late forties, and the man he called Hat was twenty years his senior. Boyett and his wife owned a house called Orkney, named after King Arthur’s birthplace, built on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River about a hundred miles from New York City, in the town of Leyden, New York.

  Tony and his wife, Parker, were having a hard time holding on to the property. The bills—taxes, repairs, gas, oil, electric—arrived like ransom notes. They did their best to take it in stride. They were not the first to lead irregular lives in the old house—Orkney had been the site of shootings, stabbings, and a century’s worth of scandalous copulations. Buried around the property were the bones of Indians and slaves, banknotes dating from the Royal British Bank scandal of 1856, Krugerrands, manuscripts and maps, and even the body parts of at least one inconvenient mistress. The house’s more mundane history was buried in two private dumps on the property, where staff disposed of garbage from the main house. Every now and then rising up from their shallow grave came discarded household items such as a candlestick with its socket stuffed with thick black wax, and countless opaque glass bottles, some clearly from the local apothecary, soda, rye, milk of magnesia, as well as one haunted baby doll, her little mouth a silent scream.

  It was a house that defied the standard categories of architectural style, fashioned out of wood, brick, and rough-hewn stone. It sprouted chimneys every which way. It had a steep outdoor staircase that was meant to lead to a third-story widow’s walk that never was built. The windows were scattered chaotically, and seemed to go up and down like musical notes on the lines of a staff. But now its ungainliness had been eclipsed by its historical noteworthiness, much as a fool can become a source of wonder and admiration if he lives to be one hundred. The architecture and the legend were not the whole story, either. It had an unobstructed view of the river, with no other houses or anything that suggested the twentieth century. It also came with nearly fifty acres of rolling fields and towering woods, where there lived owls and raccoons, herons, pileated woodpeckers, hawks, eagles, wild turkeys, foxes, weasels, deer, coyotes, and now and again a bobcat.

  Tony Boyett worked for Scattergood and Clark, an investment firm where his grandfather and father had worked, and where two days a week Tony sat at a small desk in an out-of-the-way little office, handling his family’s gradually diminishing holdings; cousins and grandnephews and other Boyetts had either gone broke or transferred their holdings to other, less moribund companies. Occasionally after work, before catching the train back to Leyden, Boyett went to a bare, boxy little apartment in a high-rise on West Fifteenth Street to buy a week’s worth of dope from a woman named Candace, enough for himself and Parker. He took good care of Parker, through whose family Orkney had come. Using the drug was never meant to be a nightly event, but an occasional reward for getting through another day on what the Boyetts called the Most Annoying Planet in the Universe. They had what they considered their own unique approach to drug use and their way of making sure that they did not descend into full-blown Man with a Golden Arm, Hatful of Rain addiction was to make most weekends dope free. Saturdays they took the edge off things with martinis and on Sunday it was cognac.

  This Saturday, however, opium was on the menu. Opium was rare in New York, but recently a few Iranians who believed their suave despotic ruler’s hold on power was starting to slip had moved to New York, and, just as refugees of yore had secreted diamonds on their person, some of the fleeing Iranians had brought with them black opium. Instability in Iran turned out to be a Boyett boon, since opium was something Tony and Parker had always wanted to try. Cocteau wrote that the smell of opium was the least stupid smell in the world. Julia Lee singing “Lotus Blossom” was one of their favorite songs. Not to mention Coleridge! And now, at long last, they had a ball of the stuff, black and gummy, round and yummy, and their reasoning was that you couldn’t really become addicted to it because where the hell were you going to find it again? In the past ten days, Tony and Parker had smoked some of it, brewed some as a tea, and, most efficiently and effectively, shoved a bit up their rectums—French style, in Tony’s words, since once in Paris he had been prescribed opium suppositories by a doctor who looked quite a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre, replete with smudged glasses and a face full of blackheads. Both Tony and Parker were looking forward to telling t
heir guests to shove something up their asses. In the meantime, the two of them had never been closer, never more in love. Dope in all its many manifestations, its pursuit, its ingestion, its taboo, its mortal dangers, and its financial obligation bound them as once sex, and then Orkney itself had bound them. They were going to lose the house one day—soon perhaps, and this was obvious to both of them—and all they could say about sex was that with the O around, it ceased to be a source of embarrassment since it turned chastity from a failure of the relationship into a side effect, with Parker dry as toast, and Tony soft as an oyster.

  “That lumbar of yours, along with the thoracic,” Hat was saying, frowning with what gave every appearance of sympathy—but as everyone along the river said, it was not easy to know what or even if Hat was thinking. Few people knew his real name. Even his son had to hesitate when asked what his father’s given name was—it was Philip. And though Hat Stratton was voluble verging on logorrhea, he never spoke personally, and if one were to presuppose that beneath all the verbiage and the weird erudition there was an inner life, it would also have to be said that this inner life was something Hat kept to himself. Here’s what the Boyetts knew: Hat’s wife had died at the age of forty. His daughter left home at sixteen. Hat’s son had slept with half the working-class girls in the county and a few girls who it might have been assumed were out of his reach, as well. “Myself, I favor the good old Canadian Air Force exercises,” Hat said. “First thing in the morning, before my Chase and Sanborn. I do it by muscle groups. The body is very orderly, if you don’t mind my saying. . . .”

  “Yes, well, the problem I’m faced with is this, Hat, my friend. We’re having people for drinks in about an hour,” Boyett said. “Old friends, we call them oil and water because her family owns some wells and his is in shipping, though not in a big way.” Boyett was a tall, dry man—everything about him was dry: his parchment skin, his nickel gray eyes, his oak brown hair, his colorless cracked lips, his voice. He was dressed in shapeless khaki trousers and a T-shirt. He thought that if people saw his unmarked arms, rumors about his drug use might blow over. “The plan is to serve them martinis and organize a stroll to the river and come back to the house and have dinner on the patio.”