River Under the Road

by Scott Spencer

  Thaddeus and Grace were at the opening of Failure not through Kip, but through a work friend of Thaddeus’s, a fellow named Gene Woodard, who worked in men’s furnishings, selling tie clips, cuff links, and shaving sets. Gene was poorly paid and worked long hours on his feet, but he often said, “This suits me to a T.” Thaddeus thought men’s furnishings was perhaps the most depressing part of the store—all those ties, belts, rows and rows, it was like a morgue. And if you wanted to push it a bit, you could even say it was like Bergen-Belsen.

  Gene was fanatically devoted to the job. He never missed a day. He twice reported fellow workers for theft. He referred to anyone in a supervisory capacity as Mr. or Miss. He was painfully deferential whenever he came to meet Thaddeus in the room off the mezzanine where the advertising copywriters worked, knocking on the door with one timid knuckle, coming in with an obsequious shuffle and looking around with a sense of wonder at the grim little shared cubicle where Thaddeus worked—two desks, an armchair, and yet another useless window.

  Gene was not particularly forthcoming about himself, but even so Thaddeus was able to deduce a history of strife and unhappiness—struggles with alcohol, psychiatric issues serious enough to warrant two brief stays at a hospital called Austen Riggs up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

  Thaddeus and Grace were invited to Gene’s twenty-eighth birthday party. Gene’s apartment was on West Twenty-First Street, and that evening the weather was warm, so they could walk from their apartment. The darkness seemed to contain an extra layer. They talked about what would be the best way to describe that shade of blue. Could something so dark even be blue? A wind blew west to east; the last of the fallen leaves, the ghosts of summer, swirled from curb to curb. West of Fifth Avenue the neighborhood looked poorer, mainly tenement-style apartment houses, the windows negated by burglar gates, the bricks crisscrossed with fire escapes.

  Grace clasped Thaddeus’s hand and lifted it to her lips and kissed each knuckle.

  “Are you happy?” she asked him.

  “Right now?” He made a thinking-about-it face. “I guess.”

  “I am so insanely happy,” she said. “People settle for so much less than we have. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do.” Less was very vivid to him. “And I wish you were wearing that ring.”

  After a silence, Grace said, “Yeah, me too, I guess.”

  “You know what else I wish? That we had a kid.” He didn’t look at her when he said it.

  “How would I ever be an artist?”

  “I don’t know. You just would.”

  “Oh my God, Thaddeus. How can you even think about it? We are so lost. Do you really want to pass that on?”

  “I’m tired of being a son,” Thaddeus said. “Time to be a father.”

  “It would destroy me,” Grace said. “I’d be my mother in no time.”

  As they neared Gene’s place, Twenty-First Street turned suddenly lovely, with half of it given over to a Gothic seminary. The bare trees surrounding the red brick building were spaced as neatly as a pattern on a shawl. Gene occupied the garden and first floors of a town house near Tenth Avenue, with a steep fourteen-step porch. Beneath the porch, a homeless man was preparing to go to sleep in a cardboard shelter filled with rags. He wore fingerless gloves and a World War II pilot’s cap. Thaddeus and Grace glanced at him through the spaces between the steps.

  “Beneath,” Thaddeus whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. There’s always something.” Something elusive but powerful, and impossible to hold on to swept through him like a sudden rain, and then it was gone, leaving nothing in its wake but a kind of confusion.

  So it turned out that Gene was rich. The job at Altman’s for a measly hourly wage was a form of penance, the time he spent there a kind of masquerade. Working in tandem, his father and his uncle had sold Gene on the notion that the (supposed) stability of a salesclerk’s existence and a steady diet of quotidian reality, including an alarm clock, a boss, a budget, and a reason to get up in the morning would offer some respite from his alcoholic episodes. “Better than singing the blues to some headshrinker,” his father had said. “And instead of spending ours, you’ll be making yours.”

  The door to Gene’s place was painted dark red, with a Hand of Fatima brass knocker. Grace lifted it and let it fall, and a few moments later Gene opened the door. Reeking of irony and mothballs, he wore a tuxedo, a starched shirt, a black bow tie. His trousers were dusty at the knees. He was handsome, with even features, sandy hair, blue eyes; his smile radiated mischievous joy and he was thoroughly drunk.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said, attempting to glare at Thaddeus while reaching for Grace, grabbing her arm to pull her into the house. “You can stay right there,” he said to Thaddeus. “We’re stealing all the women and there’s no bastards allowed!”

  “You didn’t tell me it was formal,” Thaddeus said, indicating with a gesture his own casual garb.

  “I didn’t? It doesn’t matter, you’re not the only ones. Some of us were just thinking that with a president in blue jeans and ratty old cardigans it might be time to bring back a bit of tradition.”

  “You should have told us,” Grace said.

  “Oh nonsense,” Gene said. “You look lovely. You’ll be the loveliest woman here. And this one.” He draped his arm over Thaddeus’s shoulder. “In evening wear this little genius might come off as a headwaiter.”

  Thaddeus and Grace followed him into a dark foyer, where several bicycles were haphazardly stored, and into his parlor, with its high ceiling and simple brick hearth, its bare wide-board floors and a Queen Anne sofa upholstered in red. A young man in a kilt playing something mournful on the bagpipes wandered through the parlor on his way somewhere.

  “A leftover from the Silver Jubilee,” Gene said, in a confiding, slightly derisive tone. “I believe Elizabeth dispatched him to Singapore and now he’s here.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Thaddeus said.

  “You don’t?” Gene clapped Thaddeus’s shoulder. “Well, good for you! We need more of that around here.”

  Thaddeus and Grace traded looks as they followed Gene down a metal spiral staircase leading to the garden level.

  “I’m twenty-eight years old and completely alone in the world,” Gene called out to them, over his shoulder. He said it as if he had just discovered a hidden hilarity in his situation.

  Watching his friend descend the staircase, Thaddeus had the sense of watching someone going down the drain. The lower half of the duplex was filled with guests and books. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were so overloaded that the boards sagged in the middle. At no point in their many conversations at work did Gene indicate he possessed such an extensive personal library. He spoke of current events, and various intrigues in the men’s furnishings department and throughout the entire store, and now, looking at those hundreds of volumes, Thaddeus was beset by stinging memories of how confidently he himself had held forth about novels and short stories to Gene, giving this personable yet slightly less fortunate man the benefit of his U of M education.

  “Nice,” Thaddeus said, waving weakly at the shelves.

  “Mainly my uncle’s,” Gene said. “I’ve squeezed a couple of my own in there, but those are his books. This is his place and everything in it. Luckily for me, he’s in Thailand, and if you ask me, he’s never coming back. He’s been eaten alive by Buddhism.” He smiled and held up the wine bottle he’d been carrying, two fingers around its dark neck. “I’ve been a bad boy.”

  “Who do I see about being a bad girl?” Grace asked.

  Gene grinned delightedly and his eyes glittered. “Where did you find this marvelous girl?” he exclaimed.

  “Nobody finds me, birthday boy. I find them.” Somehow Gene’s antic nature, his mixture of superiority and sheer goofiness appealed to Grace and made her more forthcoming than Thaddeus had expected.

  “I am the birthday boy, a
ren’t I?” Gene said, grinning, rubbing his hands together. “And there’s something rather marvelous in that, don’t you think?”

  There wasn’t much furniture and most of the guests stood, drinking from wineglasses, tumblers, and beer bottles, talking with great animation and volume. Sliding glass doors led to a yard enclosed by an eight-foot wooden fence. The yard was paved in flagstones; terracotta planters held frost-blackened ferns. Japanese paper lanterns swung haphazardly in the breeze.

  “What a place,” Thaddeus said.

  “You should buy it,” Gene said, with absurd enthusiasm. “Real estate is an excellent investment and I know Uncle Cary would be glad to unload it. The problem is the upstairs tenants, of which there are three. The redoubtable Craig Levitz, a poet, Jeanette Doubleday, no relation to anyone you’d care to be related to, and the inevitable Russian lady with her little dog.”

  “Like in Chekhov,” Thaddeus said, instantly embarrassing himself.

  “Anyhow,” Gene continued, “New York City housing law makes it difficult to evict tenants. You have to resort to extracurricular methods, such as freezing them out and dressing up as a ghost and jumping out at them when they come home at night. You don’t strike me as the type. Or is he?” This directed at Grace.

  “Thaddeus is a gentleman,” Grace said.

  “Sure he is,” Gene said. “A gentle man.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be buying a brownstone anytime soon,” Thaddeus said.

  “Well, up to you. But the city’s going belly-up and that’s always a good time to buy. Say, you know what you two need?” Gene said, pointing at them, first one, then the other. “A trip up the river to Eastwood.”

  “Eastwood?” said Thaddeus. “As in Dirty Harry?”

  “Not that Eastwood. It’s my family’s place in Leyden, which I call Brigadoon. My sisters have banned me from the place. They accuse me of stealing some soup spoons and putting them up for auction at Doyle.”

  “Are your spoons that valuable?” Thaddeus asked.

  “God. They’re old and tarnished and taste like a mouth full of dimes. But anything ancestral makes my family extremely tense.”

  “Where’s Leyden?” Grace asked. “We’re from Chicago.”

  “Ninety-nine point nine miles north of here. Straight up the river.”

  “That’s in Windsor County, right?” Thaddeus said. “Where a lot of writers used to be.”

  “Oh, it’s the snoozy-boozy land of used-to-be,” Gene said. “I’m sure I’ll be reinstated to everyone’s good graces by Christmas. Ice boating, Pimm’s cup, bridge, and unspeakable food. You have to visit. You must. Come watch the death throes of a way of life. And bring this marvelous girl.”

  “I don’t get brung,” Grace said.

  Gene made a barking laugh. Loud laughter was everywhere, from the men in tuxedos, and the bare-shouldered women in form-fitting dresses. Laughter! Gaiety! Joy! It had never occurred to Thaddeus that rich people could be so goddamned funny. Gene—who until fifteen minutes ago had seemed like such a lost soul, a hardship case—had somehow inherited all these people along with the key to these luxurious rooms. And a house up the Hudson, like something out of Evelyn Waugh. It would be amazing and illuminating to go—a country weekend with enough witty repartee to choke a horse. With Grace, of course, the two of them getting loaded on those legendary wines, dining on beef Wellington and devils-on-horseback, allowing themselves to be bullied into skating on a pond or shooting skeet, and then repairing to one of a multitude of guest rooms, where they would dissect their hosts’ manners and morals, décor, speech, opinions, and dress, and have to place pillows over their own mouths to muffle their laughter.

  Thaddeus worried that at any moment Gene was going to abandon them, but instead he stayed at their elbow, steering them through the crush, making introductions, impossible to keep track of, but okay, because just as they would not remember the names that went with all the new faces, the faces would not remember them. Bryan Noy, Patricia Hubbard, Constantine Covey, Mian Jan, Rip Gallin, Xavier Mendoza, Sanjay Ghosh, one after the next, with the preferred mode of greeting a slight shift of the weight backward, a firm handshake, head tilted, a bemused smile, a furrowed brow—as if each person was almost remembering you. It was as if they had all learned a dance at the same studio.

  And lo and behold in the mix of all the unfamiliarity, Kip Woods emerged, also not in formal wear, but looking lithe and stylish in Burberry suit and tie, his five o’clock shadow darker than usual.

  “What are you doing here?” Kip said to Thaddeus.

  “That’s not very friendly,” Grace said, laughing—but Thaddeus knew she meant it.

  “Old friends?” Gene inquired.

  “Best friends,” said Kip. He put his arm around Thaddeus. His breath was cold and smelled metallic. Some drug.

  He kissed Grace’s hand. “Mmm,” he said. “You always smell so good.”

  More often than not, Kip’s evenings were spent with a procession of stunning, long-legged women, most of them with something machine-tooled in their glamour, some promise of heartless, hydraulic sex—but tonight he was accompanied by a small woman in a dark blue pants suit, a frilly white blouse, olive skin, no makeup.

  “This is my friend Anahita,” Kip said. “Anahita is from Tehran. Tell them what you were telling me, Ana. I know they’ll be interested. Thaddeus, as you know, comes from a long line of political people.”

  If Anahita objected to being prompted, she gave no indication. She wasn’t more than five feet tall and might have relished the extra height afforded by a soapbox. Grace looked at her with open curiosity, as she always did when meeting one of Kip’s women.

  “Right now in my home,” Anahita said, “many students and others are on the street making their protest against the criminal Pahlavi.”

  “The shah of Iran,” said Kip.

  “We are not children playing in the nursery with kings and queens and little fairy princesses,” said Anahita. “Pahlavi and the horrible Farah Diba were given to us by the United States. We were democratic before our country was forcibly taken away. Your country wants us to live like children, but we are an advanced country. The most advanced and historical country in the Middle East. And such beauty. Our markets bursting, the burlap bags filled with bright green vegetables. We have scientists, poets, surgeons, and great thinkers. We do not want to be ruled by the crazy mullahs who are waiting in the shadows, or the so-called shah and his whore.”

  “Whoa,” said Thaddeus, out of surprise. She seemed so proper, an emissary from a distant, straitlaced time, and to hear her call her queen a whore startled him.

  Anahita smiled. Her teeth were white, but with a pinkish sheen, like freshwater pearls, and her gums were dark, almost purple. She wore a serpent ring on her thumb. “The shah will either abdicate or hang. That much we know. His secret police have exhausted themselves hunting down the Communists. And the students in Azadi Square are only the beginning. We also know this. It will grow. The kingdom of lies will crumble. And the United States will have placed a very costly wager on the wrong person. What will happen in my country will haunt you for years to come. You do not stage a coup d’état, and murder innocent people, and install a tyrant, and plunder a nation and simply walk away as if nothing has happened. Your own Dr. King tried to teach you this lesson. The arc of time bends toward justice. My country will find its way, and we could have been friends—”

  “We are friends!” exclaimed Kip.

  “I mean our nations,” Anahita said. She shook her head. “This is such a humorous country. It’s what the world loves and despises in you. Your incessant laughter. Why are you laughing? That’s what the brave young people in the square are asking you.”

  “We’re brave young people, too,” said Kip.

  “Come on, man, stop,” Thaddeus said. His heart was pounding. He wanted to memorize every word Anahita said. She was telling a story he knew was for him, and he didn’t want Kip to annoy her. But she wasn’t annoyed, as
it turned out. She shoved Kip playfully.

  “What am I going to do with you?” she said, shaking her head like an easygoing aunt. Kip brought that out in people. You had to indulge him. There was no other way to be in his company.

  “You’re going to drink with me, my Persian delight,” Kip said, spiriting her away.

  Thaddeus and Grace wandered through scraps of other conversations. There was an interest in hotels, most of them abroad. La Mamounia in Marrakech. Browns in London. After that, Thaddeus lost the thread. The whole point of travel it seemed was to either visit a well-off relation or stay at a proper hotel or get into some insane scrape—break a leg climbing a ruin, come down with malaria in Samoa. The bagpiper was slumped in the corner, his chanter drooping, his plaid bag wrinkled and deflated. Oliver Onions on the stereo singing “Dune Buggy,” the sound track to someone’s fond Italian memory.

  “Oh my God,” Grace whispered to him, “these people. And that music.”

  “It’s what they listen to in Europe,” Thaddeus said, irritated with her for a moment, as if she were being obstinate, stubborn in the face of new pleasures.

  Thaddeus felt amazed and squashed, almost obliterated by the people in this room, but the destruction struck him as somehow necessary—and encouraging. He was being shunned by the right people, by the people who embodied the New York he had long dreamed of, full of ease and privilege and high spirits. He would keep his head high, and learn from these citizens of the city within the city.