River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  Kip kept odd hours. He would never firmly state where he would be or when. Work, he said, work work work as if it were a kind of rain, the rain that made the crops grow but soaked you through and through, the rain that could make you or could ruin you, depending on where you pitched your tent. But there seemed something secret, too, something desperate in his dogged, expensive pursuit of altered consciousness, a kind of internal jet-setting. Those amazing wines, that bottomless jar of gnarled marijuana buds, the kind they used as centerfolds in High Times. A jaunty little vial seemed to generate its own coke. Grace found a spent popper in the silverware drawer, along with a postcard from a friend in London showing one of those resplendent Beefeater guards, with the message on the back: He’s mine! “Kip’s a queer,” Grace said. “I’ll bet you a dollar.” Thaddeus did not believe it to be true. He managed to resist giving Grace a lecture on tolerance. Kip made the rounds accompanied by one standard-issue beautiful woman after another, from every aspect of ascendant Manhattan life, bankers and real estate brokers, and all manner of artists. In college, Kip had worn a beret, hair down to his shoulders, had a taste for Stockhausen, Breton, Tristan Tzara. He had worked on his own translations of Mayakovsky, he named his Siamese cat The Cloud in Trousers. He edited the campus literary magazine called My Heart Belongs to Dada. Now in New York, despite his long hours on Wall Street, Kip seemed to know hundreds of people in the arts, his “punk pals.” The Village Voice and the Soho News covered the Wall Street Journal on his coffee table. He hinted at a love affair with Deborah Harry. He introduced Joey Ramone to an investment advisor and when he had the flu Patti Smith brought him soup. The emaciated singer took one look at Thaddeus and Grace and asked, “What are you two doing here?” And for weeks they wondered if she had meant why were they in Kip’s apartment or in New York City. (They finally got themselves some peace of mind by deciding she had meant nothing at all.)

  Kip often urged Thaddeus and Grace to accompany him to a performance at some ad hoc gallery in the far West Village, an installation, a concert, a night at the Palladium, a chance to meet Richard Brautigan, a birthday party for Viva at the Chelsea. But the disheveled, slapdash, angry art of New York just then did not appeal to either Grace or Thaddeus. Grace stubbornly admired skill and couldn’t understand why any artist would not want to make beautiful drawings like Ingres, or paint like Lippi, with every detail as perfectly placed as jewels in a crown. Thaddeus, though barely writing, was reading Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cain, and Chandler, and his idea of an avant-garde publication was the Partisan Review. Both of them felt inadequate and superior, defensive, confused. They only felt safe and successful in each other’s company.

  Every generation gets its own New York and Thaddeus and Grace’s New York was a city that was loud and dangerous, discouraged and falling apart. It was not a place Fred Astaire would set foot in. It was not a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara or Mary McCarthy or James Thurber, or anyone else with a light touch and a taste for glamor would feel at home. There was a kind of coarseness to the place: whatever became of savoir faire? Yes, there were still people who drank lovely cocktails and had twinkling views of the skyline, but Thaddeus and Grace could no sooner mix socially with them than they could with Jimmy and Rosalynn.

  Thaddeus wanted to write, Grace wanted to make art, but they needed to sleep, shower, shop for food, clean the apartment, and earn a living. What time was left they wanted to spend with each other. To be private, to be enraptured, to feel the drug of it, the exhilaration and the security. So there were a great many things they missed, and people they did not meet. Those their age seemed angry, raw, unprotected, nihilistic, lacking in polish, suspicious of polish, militantly and perhaps somewhat conveniently staked out against polish. Here’s what I think of your well-made sentence and here’s what I make of your lovingly rendered pear, these new artists seemed to say, grabbing their crotch, sneering. Grace thought these so-called punks were just a pack of talentless temper-tossing suburban refugees. Thaddeus thought that all those difficult often indecipherable downtown writers, so full of errors and perversity, were attempting to cover up their own emptiness with a flurry of experimentation and theory. In truth they were both more than a little afraid of the artists their own age, and exhausted and bewildered by New York. But what were they supposed to do? Go back to Chicago with their tails between their legs?

  Where was the middle path? How could you live a moral and creative life and still have extremely nice things, plenty of room, those beautiful towels from the Palmer House?

  Thaddeus started working on a story about a young girl who dies and comes back to life the next day, but in Shanghai instead of Chicago, and she surprises everyone with her first word: Elvis. Grace asked him if it was sort of about his sister and they had their first fight.

  “It’s like me taking your drawing of an orange and trying to squeeze orange juice out of it,” Thaddeus had said.

  “Well, I’d be flattered,” Grace answered. They had to whisper; Kip was in the next room, doing his Jane Fonda exercises in front of the Trinitron.

  “Well, you’re not supposed to read like that,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, no longer whispering, “I didn’t go to college and no one gave me the rule book about how to fucking read.”

  They found an apartment in an old four-story building, on Twenty-Third Street just west of Madison Avenue. The ground floor of the squat, white brick building was occupied by the Health Nuts, where six days a week cashews, pistachios, pecans, and Virginia Old Style peanuts languished beneath heat lamps, and were sold by the eighth of a pound in waxy little white bags. Business was slow at the Health Nuts and the infrequent customers were an odd lot. They seemed emissaries from a different world, pale, thoughtful men in topcoats and fedoras, women who wore snazzy little capes and pillbox hats with veils.

  “I think there’s some sort of weird door between dimensions,” Grace said while looking out of their apartment’s only window that didn’t open onto an air shaft. “And I think it opens up right in front of the Health Nuts, and weirdos from the 1940s go in and buy nuts.”

  “Why don’t they just buy nuts in the 1940s?” Thaddeus once asked. “Why do they have to come all the way over to 1977 to buy nuts?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Grace answered. And the laughter that ensued, the frenzy of amusement and arousal left them breathless. They couldn’t say what was so funny about her remark, but it was, it was hilarious, another in-joke, another gateway to the mad gasping joy between them.

  They were each other’s refuge in a city that overwhelmed them. Thaddeus called it “New Yorkitis.” If they stood at their window, at a certain angle, on certain nights, they could see the swirl of mist around the Metropolitan Life Headquarters, and if they moved a little to the left they could see the lighted tower of the Empire State Building and the moon at the same time, and the thing that was most amazing was that, when it came to glamour, the moon came in second—and seemed to know it. It was Grace who noticed that the moon seemed more confident when it was over Chicago.

  They often felt as if they’d been cast into a great production but had not been given an opportunity to learn their lines. The anxiety was epic, especially for Grace. She was used to feeling at odds with her environment, ignored, undiscovered, powerless. It was how she had felt in Eau Claire, and Chicago. But in New York it was worse. She was full of symptoms. The accelerated heart rate, the sweaty palms, the sudden staggering fear of death—not from gunshot or stabbing or botulism or poison or heart attack or cancer or through the criminal carelessness of a drunken driver, or a madman’s rage, but death for death’s sake. It fell to Thaddeus to protect her from her own thoughts. You’re going to be fine, he promised her. Her heart was strong, her body was doing its job, front and center, every corpuscle accounted for. Never mind the tingling scalp, the racing heart. It was merely anxiety. Paranoia. Agoraphobia. He was back to dancing, his arms waving, singing his little tunes.

&nbs
p; Kip had helped both of them get jobs. Kip could navigate the waters of Manhattan like a native scout. He pointed Thaddeus in the direction of B. Altman, where he was hired as a junior member of the in-house advertising staff. Able to write about anything the department store sold—suits and ties, books and records, pots and pans, perfume, framed autographs, jewelry—he was praised for his versatility. His own longing for the many things he could not afford gave his copy an extra animation.

  For Thaddeus, Manhattan was a crash course in failure, his Ph.D. in pauperhood. He was used to being without money, but he was not accustomed to being around people who seemed to have so much. That afternoon at the Palmer House had affected him like the first drink can seal the fate of a born alcoholic. Those towels! Those sheets! There were people who could enjoy these things and took them for granted. It made what he had seem so sad, depleted, and utilitarian. What was the point of life without access to all the pleasures on earth? Read your Epicurus. Look around you. People were sleeping in better beds, eating tastier food, traveling the world as if the world was theirs, while you and your beloved were holed up like losers in an apartment with virtually no light, drying yourself with towels that just moved the moisture around rather than absorbing it. He experienced his penury as a kind of apartheid, a daily injustice. It might have been easier had they stayed in Chicago, but here in New York all the things he craved were on full display. All you had to do was look through the storefront windows at the cheese wrapped in actual cheesecloth, jackets that made ordinary men look mysterious, and stacks of pastel shirts to make Daisy Buchanan swoon.

  If only he could afford just one of those shirts! If only. New York was the world headquarters of If Only. If only you had a couple of thousand dollars. If only you had a closet in your apartment. If only your bedroom got even fifteen minutes of sunlight. Everybody knew you came to New York to go up the ladder, not down. To be celebrated, not ignored. And certainly not to be stuck in a subway car stalled between stations, eyeing your fellow passengers in the flickering light, wondering which one was getting ready to vomit on your shoes. Which happened to him.

  Kip’s helpfulness extended to Grace, whom he helped get a job at Periodic Books, which specialized in scientific books. She was trained to work in the production department, where she earned $10,500 a year. It was more than the Palmer House, though the opportunities to engage in a bit of judicious pilfering were more numerous at the hotel. All she could swipe at Periodic were envelopes, pens, paper clips, bottles of Wite-Out, a couple of metal rulers, and, of course, books. But what the job at Periodic gave to her was a kind of proxy association with educated, upwardly mobile people. She now had a marginal membership in the New York media intelligentsia and when asked what she did, Grace could say, “Oh, I’m a book designer over on Forty-First Street.” She thought it was sort of chic to signify her employer through its address, like the Harvard grads who said they’d gone to college in Boston—such noblesse oblige obfuscation!

  At work, Grace feared detection and expulsion—not for theft but for lying. She knew it was crazy to worry so much about it, but she had gotten her job under false pretenses, and every day she expected to be called into her boss’s cubicle and informed that they’d checked on her so-called degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the only record the school had of her was two summer classes, one of which had taken an incomplete. And this was New York. This wasn’t the Palmer House, where they just told you to get the heck out. Here she might be forcibly escorted from the office, here she might be frog-walked through the lobby and tossed out onto the street as if into an open grave.

  Thaddeus and Grace met after work and walked back to their apartment if the weather was half decent. They liked to stop at a bar called Dugan’s on their way home, and after a few months the bartender and the regulars—a shaky bunch, to be sure—recognized them and even seemed pleased to see them, though from a business point of view it would be hard to think of worse customers. They ordered a Dewar’s on ice with a twist of lemon, and a glass of Guinness and traded their drinks back and forth over the course of half an hour, at which point they left a seventy-five-cent tip and were on their way.

  It did not seem exactly like a New York thing to do, but they held hands as they strolled home. “Every time I touch you, I know we are meant to be,” Thaddeus said, and Grace squeezed his fingers and smiled. The more they were together the more she let him do the talking. His declarations were hyperbolic, and though they were touching and sweet they had a way of silencing her. She simply could not think of anything to say that would match his ardor. And what about my art? What do you think of that? Do you worry that I hardly have any time left to draw? I worry all the time about your writing. Do you worry about me in that way? Do you? Do you? Of course she could not say these things. They seemed so small and churlish and needy and lame. But the more she suppressed saying it, the more it was felt.

  New York had fallen on such hard times. A cop car was going against traffic, the driver’s-side door badly dented, its windshield cracked. The new centurions bombing around in jalopies!

  “Your hand in mine,” Thaddeus said. “It’s everything to me.”

  “Thank you,” said Grace.

  “Are you okay?” he asked after a while.

  “Mary Ellen? Who I guess is my boss? She asked me if I kept up with my school friends.”

  “As if it were her business,” said Thaddeus.

  “And she just stared at me. I think she knows I didn’t graduate.”

  You didn’t even attend, thought Thaddeus. You took a couple of summer courses. He hated himself when he had such thoughts.

  “She’s just waiting for me to make a mistake,” Grace said. “It makes me so nervous I can hardly even think straight.”

  They passed a wine shop called Park Spirits, where they once went to a pre-auction tasting of some legendary Bordeaux. They had sipped little dark purple splashes of Haut-Brion and Cheval Blanc, parsimoniously poured from bottles that cost as much as either of them earned in a week, and now whenever they passed Park Spirits, Grace said, “They’re in there.”

  Near Park Spirits was a jewelry shop called Gina’s Gems. In all the times they had walked past, they’d only entered once. In the chaos of the display window, with its encrusted bracelets and hammered brass pendants and little beige pouches brimming with Mexican and Indian rings, one thing had caught Grace’s eye, and she wanted to try it on—a simple emerald ring. There was not the remotest possibility of their buying such a piece, now or anytime in the foreseeable future, but she wanted to see it on her hand, if only for a minute.

  Gina herself had been behind the counter, dressed in a gold-and-black caftan, a large, middle-aged woman, with girlish freckles and curly hair a curious shade of red. She lumbered to the display window, unlocked it with her small, stout hands, slid the store-side panel, and reached in, toppling a display of brightly beaded African earrings in the process. The ring itself was not new and Gina watched with her arms folded over her bosom as Grace held it up to the light and then slipped it onto her finger.

  “It’s so green,” Grace said, in an awestruck whisper.

  Gina explained that she was handling this emerald ring on consignment from her sister-in-law, who was planning to return to Brooklyn College, where she hoped to get certified to teach in the public schools. “I told her, ‘Doris, schools are closing, belts are tightening, no one’s hiring,’ but Doris wants what Doris wants. And for this she wants four thousand. I don’t know if you know very much about jewelry . . .”

  “A bit,” said Grace.

  “Well then, you see I mainly deal with jewelry of an artistic sort, from native peoples all over the world. A ring like this would normally go for twice what she is asking. Emeralds! This one comes from Zambia. Four and three-quarter carats, nice cut, and you see the color. Deep, but clear.” She pointed to Grace. “Like your eyes, sweetheart.”

  “Thank you,” Grace said, taking the ring off and handing it bac
k to Gina. “It’s out of our range.”

  “She can always pick out the one thing,” Thaddeus said. “And it’s always the best.”

  “Well, she chose you, right?” Gina said.

  “The exception that proves the rule,” said Thaddeus.

  “I have some beautiful jade,” Gina said. “Which frankly I prefer. I could put it in the exact same setting.”

  When they were out on the street again, Grace noticed Thaddeus had a grim expression, and she asked him what was bothering him, though she half-knew.

  “You didn’t have to tell her I was too poor to get you the ring you want,” he said.

  “You’re too poor? What happened to we’re too poor? Anyhow: we’re young!”

  Over the next few weeks, she continued to glance at the window when they walked past, until one day the emerald ring was gone. She wasn’t sure Thaddeus had noticed, but he put his arm around her as they passed the shop, knocked his hip into hers, so she supposed he had.

  Lately, knowing that if she and Thaddeus were not careful they would begin to devour each other—Liam had said as much to her in a letter—Grace was pushing herself to meet other artists. But those she managed to meet had little interest in or respect for what she was trying to accomplish, and what had begun as a cheerful, hopeful openness was beginning to turn guarded and even a little sour. Going to galleries she did her best to keep hidden her sense of alarm about the work on display, but the grainy videos of people moping around some filthy apartment seemed incompetent to her. And the physically demanding (and, she thought, demeaning) performance pieces that they would sometimes hear about and be able to attend embarrassed and basically horrified her—she was particularly bothered by a piece called Failure in which the naked artist attempted to climb a wall using a rope and her own negligible strength, and the artist, if that’s what she was, kept falling to the ground, injuring and reinjuring herself, and grabbing on to the rope and trying it again and again, her legs bruised, her shaggy crotch taking on the appearance of the suffering face of an agonized Christ on the cross. Was that the point? Was it about suffering? It was surely about failure—but whose failure? The artist’s? Or the onlookers’ failure to discern that they were nothing more than voyeurs? Or was it Society’s failure? Maybe Art had failed? Most likely the failure had been Shaggy’s parents, who had either underfed or overfed her ego. The entire production made Grace sick with disapproval. She supposed she was a conservative, at least in this.